Work Text:
Bianca is dreaming again. She's kneeling, hard earth pressing into her skin. Folds of cloth pooled at her legs like blood.
Her hands are fisted in her lap. Whatever she's clutching jabs into her palms, dream-pain like a pinch from far away, an echo of an ache. She unfurls her fingers, presses the pad of her thumb to a sharp point. Pins, metal pins, one in each hand. A matching pair, cold to the touch.
She rubs her fingers together. A distinct wrongness to the motion. A lack of friction. Wetness coating her fingertips, a distant sensation like a rising tide. She raises her head—
—and Vic stands before her. Head tilted unnaturally, crick in the slender neck like something rent from the inside, eyes glassy and still. Their eyes have never looked like that. Blue or grey or green in strange lighting, but never so dull. Bianca’s heartbeat roars in her ears, timbre of whalesong, miles beneath the surface.
Vic in her mind’s eye, fast fading to darkness. Bianca is still dreaming, but she can’t see. Why can’t she see?
Moisture drips onto her hands. She reaches up to wipe the tears. She reaches up— up— into the empty sockets where her eyes once were.
Oh God, oh God. The pins fall to the ground, thin clink of metal that the blackness swallows. The scent of iron snakes up her nostrils. She grasps at her forearms, feels the slick glide of her palms against them, vellus hairs and all. Is that wetness tears or blood?
“Bianca,” Vic says in the voice of a dead man’s dead wife. “Bianca, wake up.”
Bianca sits up, a gasp caught in her throat. The room is awash with the grey light of early dawn. Her door is ajar.
Vic sits at the foot of her mattress, hair falling straight and loose, bare legs furled beneath them. Their hand rests atop Bianca’s ankle over the sheets. They’re pale in the cold, faint light, eyes like twin flecks of flint.
“Bianca,” they say. “What’s wrong?”
The shapeless terror of the dream continues to climb up Bianca’s throat, threatens to spill out, seeping pulses of black sludge. She swallows against the rapid gallop of her pulse. Swallows the image of Vic before her, drinks them in, tracks the slow rise and fall of their chest.
“Bad dream,” she mutters hoarsely. “Why’re you here?”
Vic strokes her ankle. “Don’t worry, you’re safe now.”
It’s a non-answer. Bianca is too tired to push it. When Vic tilts their head, she flinches despite herself, remembering the cleft angle of their neck in the dream, the unseeing eyes. But no, they’re alive. The weight of their hand tightens into a vice as if to remind her of it.
She eases herself back down onto the mattress. Vic’s grip relaxes but only slightly. They remain where they are, on her bed and not in it, toeing the border stretched membrane-thin between them.
“Get out of my room,” Bianca tries weakly.
“You were being loud,” Vic returns. There’s a petulant edge to their voice. Bianca’s half-laugh strangles into a cough. She inhales deeply, staring at the white ceiling above her as Vic’s thumb rubs steady circles around the jut of her anklebone.
“You were dead,” she confesses, her voice dredged from somewhere deep inside her.
“Hm?”
“In the dream. You were dead and I couldn’t see you. I couldn’t see at all.” She sighs, eyes sliding shut. “Wonder if it means anything.”
A pause. “Go back to sleep,” Vic whispers.
The backside of Bianca’s eyelids is dark as a womb. When she reawakens, the room is bright and empty.