===============================================================
TITLE:          My Dark Life
AUTHOR:         Perelandra (pen_phile@hotmail.com)
CATEGORY:       V/A/R(?)
RATING:         Strong R
SPOILERS:       none, really
ARCHIVE:        Nah, don't put this one on Gossamer.  Anywhere else,
                just tell me.
SUMMARY:        Night terrors.

DISCLAIMER:     Nope, not mine, unfortunately.  Imagine how *exciting*
Sunday nights would be if fanfic authors got ahold of air time...
<<Big Dr. Evil grin, complete with pinky>>

AUTHOR'S NOTE:  Just a little late-night rambling. :-)

======================

I have this dream every night, and it's always the same.

There is a blackness -- not a simple blackness, like the dark of a
power-outed room on a new moon, but a complex darkness, more profound
than any I've ever known.  It is alive.  It reaches out to me in a
million succubus whispers, plying me with seductive invitations,
drawing me into itself until I pass my own event horizon and am lost.

Then I live not in the darkness -- I am the darkness itself.

It swallows me whole, sending me far away from my spartan room and
down an esophagus of dim antiseptic hallways and shadowed tunnels,
a peristalsis of purpose and ambition pushing me past.

Smoke assaults my senses, stinging my eyes and insinuating my
nostrils.  Morleys -- not my brand.

I round a bend, and my world turns to white, brilliant white, floors
and ceiling tiles and walls and pipes augmenting the glare of the
bare bulbs swinging in the whiteness.

It should have made me feel better, but it doesn't.  It is darkness,
still darkness, and it merely taunts me with the promise of light.
It is otherworldly, inhuman, and it mocks me.

I am alone.

Somehow I can perceive her, somewhere in these sick halls, and I
break into a run, these all-too-gangly limbs attempting to compact
into trained combat position.  They fail.

That's when I stop and look down at myself and realize I am a child.

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I can hear something snapping.
The brightness sears into my brain, and my world shatters into shards
of red and blue.  I fling myself through the dark intestines of these
white halls, screaming her name, feeling her so close, remembering her.
She is so close.

I push myself past inner sanctums, deeper into the darkness, and I
feel myself grow -- teens, twenties, thirties.  I am plunging
headlong into the all-consuming darkness, and I cannot see ahead.

I scream her name, and it echoes off tile.  I scream for her as I
propel myself through empty hallways and around dead ends.  Over
and over again until my screams are unintelligible and I am shouting
just for the hell of it, my voice hoarse and my throat dry.

She is so far away.  She has no face.  I have forgotten her.

Demons, shedevils come and try to take her place.  One born of fire
comes, grabs my cock and rips out my heart.  One comes with two faces,
straddles me and sucks out my brain.  They leave me addled and bloody
on the linoleum floor, broken.  I am still screaming.

I drag myself round another corner and I see her.

She is light, pure light; luminous and red.  I find myself articulate
again and I speak her name -- different this time, two clipped syllables
instead of three rolling ones, and quietly; the words massaging my
wounded trachea.  She is a completely different person, grasping my adult
hand that no longer remembers the Her my child-self longed for.  She
speaks my name in burgundy waves, and I push past her back into the
darkness.  I am afraid.  Afraid she is another demon, another she-devil
sent by Them to swallow me whole.

I run into the darkness, and she follows me.

I run past monsters and horrors and clouds of smoke, and she follows
me.  I run through rains of crud and acid and bullets, dodging some,
some cutting into my leathered skin, and she follows me through it
all.  I run into the whorls of insanity, and she takes my hand and
leads me roughly out of their clutches.

Her light fades during our journey, growing duller and tarnished as
she follows me through the darkness, and I want her to stay behind,
stay safe, it is too much.  Tenacious, she matches me step for step,
her tiny hand gripping mine like iron.

I run into the gaping maw of Death, and she is there beside me.

She heals me.

She stops running when I can go no further, and embraces me.  I am
full of blood, full of pain, and tired, and she kisses me.  Her
touch is like an opiate, like divine Providence, not only numbing me
but truly healing, kisses like scar tissue over ancient wounds.

Somehow my clothes are elsewhere, but it is of no consequence.

We are two veteran warriors, dulled, covered with scars, and tired --
but her soft open-mouthed kisses are like angels on my humbled chest.
She covers me, and my world condenses into nothing more than her lips
and her breasts and, oh God, her skin.

Her tongue is cool on my overheated skin, to taste but not consume.

Her taste is sweet in my mouth, not to guile but to give.

I am engorged with want and with arousal, and I am filled.  Every sense
is filled with the sense of her; her unique smell, her divine taste, low
velvet moans in my ear, her warrior strength and Delilah-esque caresses.

She takes me into her and we begin a rhythm out of time, out of mind.
I chant her name in harsh whispers, a mantra of the needy, while she
sings so richly the tune of my awkward nomen.

I am the darkness.  I was the darkness.  No more.  I bred the darkness
to find, and she does nothing but give -- in staying by me, in healing
me, in every thrust of her exquisite body against mine.  Her wetness,
her sweetness, and oh, her skin...

I was the darkness, and now all I want is light.  Her.

I am the light, oh God, I am the light, I am the light --

I come into her and the world becomes a million points of light.

She looks into my eyes, a thousand emotions parading across the blue
of her eyes' sky.  Love, camaraderie, healing, pain, sadness.

Fear.  Panic.

I tear myself away from her gaze, and I find the darkness all around
us, dark suits and beings with huge black eyes.  A cloud of smoke.

We have not won.

Hands spring out of the shadows, and they grab her, kicking and
screaming my name, back into the blackness.

The separation is a pain, and it hits me like a thousand million
knives.

We have not won, and I plunge back into the darkness, calling her
name.

Every night I wake up screaming.

When I breathe, I feel the air shooting all the way down my throat.

Every night I reach for the phone next to my couch, resolving to call
her, needing to call her and hear her sleepy alto massage my spirit.

Every night I hang up before I finish dialing.

Each morning when I see her, I want to tell her about the dreams.
I need for her to assuage me, to take me in her arms and make me
forget the darkness.  I want to tell her.

I never do.

------------------

She came on like a light
and so softly she spoke
you don't know you don't know
about my dark life

                -elvis costello/brian eno, "my dark life"

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END!
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....what you want to believe: X-Files Fan Fiction by Perelandra
http://spookynet.simplenet.com/Perelandra/
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