Chapter Text
There was someone screaming. Full on heaving sobs. That was the first thing Claude noticed. High pitched, cracking in irregular intervals, outraged and unfamiliar. Claude couldn't see who it was. It was hard to tell when every bone in his body cried in protest when he tried to turn his head.
Oh, it was this dream again.
The thought scattered and reformed in his mind in loops as his other senses slowly began to come back to him. Something metallic and rusted stung his nose. The grass below him was wet, dewy with drops of morning. It had to be early morning. There was no reason for it to be so dark otherwise.
He was injured, or well, dream him was injured. Everything about the ache and the stings and the exhaustion in his body told him that much. Like he had pushed himself too hard in his training.
Petra had shook him once for that. Grabbed his ponytail with her gloved hands and knocked him on the forehead twice when he stumbled into the med bay ready to drop on the nearest cushioned surface. She had threatened to withhold soda from him for a month. She did refuse to give him caffeine pills.
But dream him clearly hadn't listened to her. Dream him had gone past his body's limits, and then pushed further. He'd scraped out the energy in his arms and in his claws and the only thing left was the buzzing emptiness.
Who the fuck was screaming? Holy shit, can she breathe?
He tried to turn his head to see the offender, but the dream had other plans. It took him a moment to realize that his eyes were closed. The dream pried them open, and Claude wondered why it took so much effort just to do that. Had he really hollowed himself out that much?
Light, so mid morning then, blinded him for a moment. He blinked away the fog, traces of pink and violet wisping away like smoke, and from the traces he was greeted by a hazy blur.
Slowly, so terrifyingly slowly, the blur took the shape of a man. The man was bleeding holy shit he's bleeding so much.
Claude reached out, panic closing his throat as he surged forward. His body vehemently protested, and he stumbled the last few steps, collapsing by the man's side just as he fell too. His hands, free from his claws, when did he take those off? pressed desperately against the gaping hole in the fallen's chest.
"Hey, hey, ------- don't do this to me-" Dream Claude pleaded, his own voice a distant and muffled echo in his ears. "You can't do this -----!"
His hands sparked, power refusing to return to him in time to save a life. This was his fault. This was on him. He was going to fail again.
His vision blurred again, the colors began to swirl. He was waking up.
The face sharpened suddenly.
Claude sat up from his bed, sheets tossed to the side in tangled knots. His throat felt tight, and his bones ached from the dream that was slowly fading from his memory.
It wouldn't do any good to journal the dream. He knew that. But still, he reached out with a shaky hand to grab the tablet off his bedside table. The blue light from the screen made him wince for a second, a stark contrast to the quiet dark around him.
Quick fingers tapped against the glass, pulling up his sleep log. Graphs and numbers popped up in flashing white. Claude swiped past them to enter a new entry.
The cursor blinked as he hesitated. As hard as he tried, his mind failed to recall all the details of the dream. He groaned in frustration and exited out. There would only be one thing that he could write about it. It wasn't as if he remembered his dreams much. Nightmares, mostly, and this one in particular was particularly elusive. If he pulled up the history of all his logged dreams, the record would be much the same.
It was my fault. His eyes were red.
It was my fault. His eyes were red.
It was my fault.
His eyes were red.
His eyes were red.
His eyes were red. red.
red. red. RE D RED RED RED.