Chapter Text
Letter by letter, then page by page, and chapter by chapter, interweaving, bleeding into each other in muddy watercolour fugue, they flowed. Not words, not thoughts, not memories - or maybe yes. Maybe some of those. Maybe all of those at once. A distant image in the back of her mind, one that made her recall that particular feeling of splintering. That feeling you get when you watch an image of yourself form beside you and for a moment - despite, of course, never having ingested it, like any sane person - seem to sense the taste of ink on the back of your tongue.
If she could hazard a a guess on what to name that experience, she would call it dreaming.
So, through nights darker than a witch’s sabbath cloak and more dreadful than that through the overwhelming loneliness that stifled all manmade sound, Han Sooyoung too dreamed - if half awake by the power of caffeine addling her mind and the lateness of the hour that numbed every sense in order to remind her to rest, which unfortunately only served to give her that begged for, long awaited fraction of a moment away from the sickening realness of reality.
I should be cut some slack for not being good at dreaming, a half lucid thought surfaced, gasping for air and still recovering from pressure sickness. After all, I haven’t dreamed in the traditional sense of the word as long as I can remember.
The newfound lucidity would not last long, she knew, and did nothing to aid it in its battle against the tentacled beasts attempting to drag it down to the depths below, parts of a mind no psychologist Terran or otherwordly had dared take a dive to, as her fingers continued their mechanical movements across smooth keycaps in a mismatched rhythm that only served as a descent weight. It reminded her of the flavour of a cigarette she had never held in her mouth, another thing her other self stole from her - or maybe she did from her other self.
This chapter will need a lot of editing in the morning, a last sentence slipped past, and as Sooyoung’s vision blackened, she could, even if so softly she would not remember it later, hear the faint sound of a passing subway train.
When she jolted awake just a few seconds later, she didn’t even need to recall her final thoughts before falling asleep as she found her finger rested on the backspace button, the void eating away greedily at her work. If she had thought to check the auto-backup feature of her editing program, she might have found a couple of sentences not exactly aligned with the rest of the text.
hellor kirm dojnka,. I am dreeming., did you know I coulddo that?L sin`t it crazy?
Get BACJ HERE YOUG BASTARD
YSOU PROMISED YOU!S BA BACK.
we miaa you
imiss you
you§re the o;dest dream rihjt? So you also drean a loat huh
i winder, rigjt now
are youalso dreaming?