Dream DO NOT FAV

Mello’s warm breath.  Soft lips sliding against his.  Golden hair tickling his face, that reassuring weight above him, touching, laughing, melting together.  Bliss.

That was the dream.  Matt was brought out of it by a touch on his shoulder.  He sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat, heart pounding.  The dream collapsed, shattered into a thousand pieces by reality.  The world hit him like a punch to the gut and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.  Real life was this, gray dimness, cold air, half of a twin mattress, dirty blanket.  Katie.  

They were both in his mind now, his past life and this life, so easy to compare.  It was agonizing.  He remembered what it was like to be held, to feel his whole being meld with someone else’s, that dizzying spiral of ecstasy that had devoured his whole being.  He remembered the bright, vibrant colors of his time with Mello, the vivid scarlet of whispering deep secrets into each others’ ears, the dazzling sun-gilded yellow of exploring each others’ bodies, the deep green of following him contentedly through the hallways and listening to him talk.  They highlighted the grays of his current existence in stark, exquisite detail, forcing him to see it for what it was.  Katie, whose touch felt like a distant ghost of a copy of Mello’s.  His day-to-day existence, unchanging and monotonous and bleak, living only to live to the next day.  It tasted like ashes in his mouth.  His life was nothing, empty, pointless, and promised only more of the same in the future.

“Fuck!”  He never thought about those old memories, they were sealed off, but today the dream had blown the protective casing around them wide open.  They poured forth against his wishes, beyond his control.  They were his happiest memories, the best moments of his life, but somehow they had transformed into daggers that sliced him open, shredded him.  He couldn’t face them, couldn’t.  He gasped at the pain, and a part of himself that had fragmented off stared in numb surprise at the rest of him, marveling at how much agony he was feeling.  Then it arced through him again, white-hot acid down his spine, the pernicious burn of his own thoughts eating him from within, and he jerked into a ball and buried his hands in his hair.  “Fuck, fuck!” he moaned.  It wasn’t going away, he couldn’t force that door shut again.  His eyes flew wide open and he tightened his fingers in his hair so hard it pulled painfully on either side of his head.  

“Matt, what’s wrong?  Matt!”  Katie had been talking, but he’d been ignoring her.  Now she was touching him and he couldn’t ignore her anymore.  Her hand up and down his back, the other one on his upper arm.  “What is it?”

“Leave me alone, Katie!”  Panic rising.  He couldn’t make it go away, couldn’t stop the blood that was gushing in the ruins of his mind.  Breath shortening.

Her hands tighter now.  “What’s a ‘Mello?’  You said it in your sleep.”  

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