2019-07-11 - Sweet Gravity

When August settles in for bed this evening he might feel surprisingly on edge. Like something is around the corner.

When he does finally manage to get to sleep, he’d find himself in the living room of the Murray House. Something that’s not foreign to him. There are some things that he’d notice. There’s small blooming trees that are starting to punch up through the hole that Izthak put in the floor the last time you guys were in.

The trees have tiny white flowers with black spots on them. The closer that that August goes, the better he can look. What he’d find is that these ‘flowers’ are actually tiny little skulls. They start to shriek when he’s too close, blood trickling from their eyes and coating the floor.

The shrieking sounds like that of a small child.

Then a hand that snakes up from the shadows of the pit, grabbing his ankle and jerking him violently. The blood makes it easy to drag him down into the darkness. There’s a painful grip and a heaviness that settles on his chest. He can see the outline of something stalking the darkness as blood trickles down on his face. His eyes starting to focus on what it is in the darkness, but then vision starts to fade.

He can probably taste the copper of his own blood on his tongue as he jerks himself awake...

...but first, before he wakes up with the taste of blood in his mouth, he half-wakens to a memory. A similar darkness, a similar weight. Concrete pinning him down, rebar in his shoulder and his leg. Distant thunderclaps that he can feel in his gut shake the ground as shells continue to fall nearby. His mouth is full of blood, his ears are ringing with a high pitched whine.

And he's surrounded by people in pain and dying. Their injuries scream at him almost as loudly as their fear and agony. Some of them he knows, some of them he doesn't. All of this in a darkness that he can't see through. But he can feel through it just fine, and what he feels is hell. This was a hospital before it was hit; now it's a tomb.

And as always, he jerks awake right before he starts trying to save anyone, before he finds a way to rally himself to stay alive, with the taste of blood in his mouth.

It's not the first time he's dreamed of the hospital, it won't be the last. Not by a long shot. It is the first time August's woken up this abruptly in a while, though, and he just about falls out of the bed and onto the loft's wood floor. He sits in the darkness of the cabin, perched on the edge of the bed, swallowing back bile and waiting for his ear to stop ringing. He swears he can feel the various pins and screws in his bones twinging. Dreams about the collapse are sometimes like that.

Before the hospital, though...

He picks his way back through the rubble of the hospital to the darkness under the Murray House. To the trees, with their screaming, bleeding, child skull flowers. He swallows, remembers what Eleanor said to him just that morning.

"You realize this isn't over, right?"

But as he'd told her then, he hadn't expected it to be. This was just proof it wasn't. Had the others seen anything as well? Finch, Itzhak, Ignacio?

He picks up his phone off the bedside table, punches out a text to each of them. The same handful of words each time, send, send, send. Sweat cools and dries on his skin while he does this, leaving him clammy.

He sighs, runs a hand over his face. There's no way he's sleeping again tonight. He heads downstairs to shower and maybe work on his book. It's going to be a long day.