This is to ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt to this January card for origfic_bingo.

Sleep falls. It’s not been something I greet as a friend in quite some time, but even out here, once in a while a body needs to sleep. So I give in to it – no drugs, the drugs only make it worse.

(The things back home helped more, but the things back home lost me my job and the house and got me on this ship. So now I do without.)

I let sleep overtake me, not fighting it, not trying to steer it. There was a guy here for a while, tried to teach me lucid dreaming. It just made it worse.

Seems like almost everything makes it worse. Wonder what that says about me.

The nightmares come first; they almost always do. The train is on fire again, and the Beasts are coming one way and the soldiers are coming the other way and I know, just know, that there are still people on the train, but I can’t move.

I struggle and fight against it but I know it won’t do any good. There’s this sense of horrible finality as I watch the face press against the glass of the train and then, only then, does whatever is holding me (not whatever I know what but dreams work in allegory, not memory) release me and I go running for the train, just in time for it to explode in my face.

And that is both allegory and real, I can still feel the scars.

I don’t wake. If I woke then I could stare at the ceiling until my heart stopped but instead, damnit, damn it by whatever gods still care, blast it into space, I fall into the other one.

The one where you’re alive, holding my hand. Where you sit with me in the hospital and tell me it’s okay.

I had that dream so many times, so long, while I was healing that when I woke up for real and they told me you were dead…

…well, that’s when the pills started.

But it won’t let me go. You won’t let me go. You’re there every night, tracing my scars and telling me it’s all right, it’s going to be okay.

And I wake, damnit, blast it out the airlock, once again I wake, alone in my bunk in this fragging ship and you’re dead again.

I’d rather have the nightmares.

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