Sleep

[Jane]

That was one thing. She didn't dream.

Jane was sometimes aware of her surroundings while she slept. This was because Jane did not sleep as most things slept after she used her power for too long or too much. It was more of a dormancy - not even a hibernation, really, but an absence of movement and most thought. Slowly, facts or ideas would rise to the surface of what little consciousness was left and pop gently on the surface like bubbles, things like cold or warm or room. But she didn't dream, not really. It wasn't that kind of sleep.

She could remember having dreams. She could definitely remember having nightmares. 'Remember,' of course, being different than real remembrance; it was more that she knew all the truths in her brain at the same time and had a very clear, if far-off, knowledge of her life - she knew that she'd had dreams, and that this was Not One.

She smelled the flowers in the room and felt the ache dissipate in her wrist as she slowly healed, her breathing steady but bare, her pores open to accept oxygen as well as her lungs. Somewhere in the depths of an unconscious brain, she felt herself photosynthesize, felt the energy and nutrition from the meal she'd eaten before Baltimore combine and bond and store themselves in her immobile form. She felt the movement of air currents in the room, felt moisture gather and dissipate on her skin. She felt vibrations travel up through the metallic structure to her room, jostling her bed fractions of nanometers as people spoke or moved. She did neither.

It wasn't really sleep. But her eyes were closed and she didn't move, and she was neither conscious nor dead; sleep was the closest approximation.

So Jane slept.

(Quick note to lazy souls like me who don't read bios: Jane sleeps for a long-ass time after strain. She may be out for as much as a 'week' of game time, and she will under no circumstances wake up for at least three days, just because of the way she works. If anyone needs her, bug me, but bug me via the Kitty account, because I never check this one.)

[Jane]

Somewhere past the fifty-hour mark, Jane slipped smoothly into real sleep. This would be noticeable only as a deepening of the breath and a tiny shift in position; she rolled over, disturbing the fine layer of dust that had collected on the parts of her not covered by her sheets, her nose wrinkling slightly at the little cloud, before she was motionless again.

This time, the pain in her wrist gone and no scar left behind it, dreams came, her sleep deepening quickly and her eyes flickering behind their lids.

She was eight; she walked through the forest behind her house, on the path she'd beaten herself towards the river, knowing that the path didn't appear until she was nearly ten, but not caring.

The Presidents Song from Animaniacs played in the trees around her. Follows next a period spannin' four long years with James Buchanan, then the South starts shootin' cannon, and we've got a civil war - a war, a war down South in Dixie!

(She knew the whole song, and was rather proud of herself for that.)

But the path she walked did not reach the river. Where the trees should have opened and given way to the muddy bank and the treacherous bit of pebble that you could slide right down into the water if you stepped on wrong, she found a field of scrub, and beyond it, an interstate.

She turned behind her, and the forest was gone, along with the Animaniacs song, but she repeated it in her head as she walked to the deserted stretch of road. It wasn't the road from home, the one she'd walked when she left before diving through the surrounding forest instead; there were only occasional trees, and the road itself was three lanes wide on both sides. The one at home shrunk to two for most of rural Kansas.

On the other side of the road a birthday party was set up. She realized, abruptly, that she wasn't eight; she was seventeen, and it was fall, her first birthday. She must be in Tennessee, at the house of a boy named Cooter and his wife who hated her, a place where she'd worked the first autumn of her free life polishing the leather straps and joints and fittings that went on horses. Cooter was there, even, at the table, hat pulled over his dark eyes and a lazy smile and his pregnant wife looking unhappy by his side while he picked at a six-string and she stared enviously at the open beer by his side.

She started across the road to them, arms stretched out and a rich gold, a movie pose she'd never have adopted in true life, but the second she stepped onto the highway a semi appeared in the distance, puffing steam out of a stack like a train and blowing its horn at her, gathering speed at an impossible pace and there before she knew it - but it veered sharply to one side, kicking up on two wheels and curving in a hairpin curve around her, neatly missing her and slamming down on its side just past her, scraping down the highway with a shriek like fingernails on chalkboard magnified by four.

She was twenty-six, now, green as ever, and she thought she could smell char and death and avocados. She picked her way through the scraps of metal that had shaved off and the smoking torn tire to the square box that housed - someone.

Instead of going in, she climbed up on top of it, and she felt the metal siding beneath her turn a rich green, and added to the char and rubber and avocado and death was the smell of rotting trash.

She tapped the shoulder of the man who sat next to her on the dumpster, a man in a suit. Or she meant to. Instead, she shoved him off the dumpster altogether, and before she knew what she was doing, she held up a cane she'd kept somewhere concealed inside her clothing and felt a blast of power rip through the air and strike the metal pole, charging her entire being and making her scream like a child, high and endlessly.

She woke coughing up dust, upright in a bed, a metal bed, wrapped tightly in white sheets and surrounded in the not-even-half-light of two in the morning, the room faintly unblack from all directions at once.

"Oh my God," she said between coughs. "Oh my God, oh my God..."

There would be no more sleep tonight.

What there would be was a shower and coffee.

She stumbled out of the bed inelegantly, untangling herself from her sheets slowly and only with much effort, and into the shower, stripping off two and a half days' and a battle's worth of grime and dust and the faint tinge of blood and death.

Fifteen minutes of hardy scrubbing found her with wet hair in the kitchen, sucking down her second cup, heavily sugared, with wide frightened eyes and a leg that wouldn't stop jittering. At this point, she'd be fine if she never slept again.

[Jane]

You couldn't subsist on coffee forever. This was a fact with which Jane was currently all too acquainted. She didn't want to sleep; when she slept, crazy dreams came and electrocuted her. Or was it even her, really -?

Not thinking about it.

It was just a bad dream, she told herself. A horrible, awful dream brought on by the trauma of witnessing her own mass murder at Baltimore. Tonight would be different, and even if it wasn't, it wouldn't be that unhealthy.

Probably.

It was midnight on Genosha before Jane finally persuaded herself to sleep. She'd been awake twenty-two hours. Even with the worry that flooded her mind and the lingering what-if whispers, she fell asleep bare minutes after she hit her pillow, not bothering to crawl under the covers in the hot summer night.

Jane opened her eyes again suffused by the scent of growing things. She sat up on her bed, running a hand through her messy hair, which was waving thicker with the oncoming summer already. Around her was a walled garden; vines climbed the walls and blossomed raucously, five different colors springing from the same branch. The air was almost too thick with the smell of wisteria, hanging from a canopy above her, to be breathed; but when she did draw thick breaths, the sweetness cast a warm wash over her mind, tinting the edges of the dream pink and gold, sunlight on an old photograph.

Still in her pajamas, she wandered the path that drew itself through the old garden, flat stones grown through with grass and wildflowers. It felt vaguely English, but it was too warm; she pushed up her sleeves to bring them to the cooler air, unafraid of thorns and the scrape of rough stonework. Where was she, then? Where - Kentucky. Of course Kentucky. The fine house, the fat cook who wanted help and promised not to tell the family, the boy who found out anyway - the boy who wanted to be a senator. How old had he been? How old had she been? But he wasn't here; no one was here. Of that she was sure. She was alone.

Alone except for one thing. A shadow followed her. Jane folded her arms against her chest; grasping her wrist; but the shadow wouldn't follow.

But the air smelled of wisteria and books and heat, and she could hardly bring herself to worry.



What the shadow did instead was get closer... and closer, until it's familiar stink of cinnamon sweetness- the stench of touched-up death- took the place of nostalgia. It was close enough to whisper as a lover now.

Yet it passed. The shadow passed in a dark gray-black suit, metal cane sinking in the soft earth. It half turned back, pallid face regarding her with unblinking red eyes... though at second glance, it appeared they did not regard her at all, merely sought out for her, but did not see her.

Dead Man looked in multiple directions, then turned completely around studying the surroundings.

He looked confused, but definitely not cooked.

Suddenly he stood stock still, head cocked to the side. A palpable wave of cold rippled through the garden, chilling the air crisply. From it's source direction another figured stepped from seemingly no-where... sort of materialized, unexplained, the way dreams often are.

This was a second incarnation of the Dead Man. This one much worse off... dead flesh now looking more like an actual corpse, and less like a movie-version of one. It's skin seemed charred in a areas, flaky in others. In an oddly creepy fashion, the well groomed hair seemed to remain, as with the perfectly inanimate eyes.

The two Dead Men regarded each other carefully.



She almost missed the encroach of the scent under the cover of the flowers, but eventually it won out - and Jane recognized it instantly, though she might not have had she been awake. Her whole memory was hers now, not just the bits of it that could be called up, and she knew who her shadow was, as he came closer and closer and -

Passed...

He looked ridiculously in-context in the fine garden. She felt ridiculously out of it. Could he even see her? But why could she see him, if the reverse wasn't true? Was it her dream at all? Was Kentucky even real?

Little consolation was the fact that he looked as lost as did she.

Cold overtook the little path and Jane pulled her sleeves down, hiding her hands in them, transfixed by the Dead Man who was not, apparently, very aptly named.

A soft crisp of crushed grass came from behind her, and another Dead Man materialized even as she turned to see him. This one, however, was very aptly named.

Jane wondered ridiculously whether he was wearing a hairpiece.

"Hello?" she tried. Could they see her? Was she invisible in her own mind? How depressing, if it was true, because she wasn't in the usual intangible narrator's seat; she was a part of this dream, a definite part. Just, maybe, not a very important one. "Is... can you understand me? Can you see me?"



The Deader Man took a few steps forward, taking a closer look at his less-dead counterpart. The latter actually spun around, looking directly at Jane, seeing her there for the first time. He looked from her to the burnt version of himself repeatedly, as if unsure who to address first.

" I see you, Jane... but how am I here?" his whispering voice said, even shallower than the last she'd heard from him.

" I am not Jane." The Deader Man said, speaking directly to his counterpart, seeming oblivious to Jane's presence. "I am you... or rather, you are me. A fraction of me, I'm sure." His voice was strong, though still a hoarse whisper. It was in every way as she recalled.

Dead Man turned away from Jane, to the other. "I wasn't speaking to you, me. I am a fraction of you, you say? Could it not be you who is my fraction?"

" As I am currently heading up a highway in Maryland, I would doubt it... where are you?"

The Dead Man had no reply. He looked back at Jane thoughtfully. "Good question." He finally said.



Jane folded and unfolded her fingers nervously, twisting her hands and pulling at her sleeves every few seconds. His voice sounded different; farther away, maybe. Less real.

It was a dream, after all. At least that made sense.

"I don't know," she said, but was cut off by... himself. The burned one. Maybe - could he see her?

Then they got into fractions and Jane got lost. She'd never been terribly good at math.

"Where are you?"

"You're in a dream," she said desperately. " My dream. Figments of my imagination or my subconscious rising to the surface or whatever. Right?"



"Say you so?" The Dead Man asked.

The Deader Man took a quick series of strides forward, and Jane could see black blood dried on his chin and down his chest. He stank, not in the sickly sweet manner, but in the truly dead manner. Worse, due to the expelled blood. "Who are you talking to, me?" He asked his counterpart.

"No." the one she remembered said, turning to look at Deader Man. "Jane is here. I believe this is her dream... yet somehow, here I am."

The burnt Deader Man strained his red eyes to see her, looking into her area and concentrating. "I think I see... something... Yet it's a vague outline."

The prior Dead Man turned to her, looking her up and down. "I'm unsure how I came to be here, in your subconscious, but I suspect that I am a very real incarnation of myself. Not just a dream... though if it calms you, maybe you should simply consider me such."

The Deader took a few strides closer, and the two incarnations of the creepy thin man stared at one another for a minute, both with one hand tucked under the other elbow, and with the other hand thoughtfully stroking the chin. They looked like funhouse mirror versions of one another.



"Um," Jane said. Why did everyone have to talk like they were in a bad Gothic romance? "Yes? Yes."

The other one - the one who couldn't see her, christened Deader Man in her head, spoke to the Less Dead Man. At least they'd apparently accepted that this was a dream, yes, a DREAM, nonreality. There was some sanity left in her head, anyway.

"I'm solid," she said, vaguely offended by the claim that she was a vague outline. Even in the bad days, she'd never got quite THAT thin. She waved a hand at Deader Man. "Why can't he see me if he's in my dream?"

She addressed Dead Man, since obviously if he couldn't SEE her, he probably couldn't hear her either. This was just great. She was stuck in her own head and had no way to wake up - she'd never been able to do that - with two different versions of quite possibly her second-least-favorite person of all time.

Well, to be fair, maybe third.

"I'm unsure how I came to be here, in your subconscious, but I suspect that I am a very real incarnation of myself. Not just a dream... though if it calms you, maybe you should simply consider me such."

"A 'very real incarnation?'" Jane parroted. "I'm dreaming. That's all. You can't just wander around through people's heads or get stuck in them for no reason, can you? Your whole thing is the... the zombie thing. You're not a telepath or anything. I mean, are you?"

The Dead Men walked closer to each other - or at least one walked closer to his less-dead counterpart and they considered each other. Jane felt the creepout meter escalate. She was reminded, violently, of just how much she disliked the Dead Man by himself. Two was twice as bad and then some.



Without warning Deader Man grasped his other by the face and bit into his forehead. Blackish blood immediately burst forth, splashing across the cheeks and chest of the aggressor. Dead Man hissed, and grasped fruitlessly at his counterpart, twitching and spasming as his face was continuously bitten into… in fact, it was being eaten as if some fetid fruit. The Deader one bit and chewed, chomping and gnashing at bone and flesh with an unnatural speed and strength. It looked like a fast forward of someone eating a blood-filled melon.

Then it got even stranger. Dead Man's jerking stopped, and his whole body was being pulled into the mouth of his deader incarnation… like a paper being sucked into a vacuum cleaner. In a completely unrealistic fashion, he was there one moment, and the next he was jerked into the orifice with a popping, crunching noise.

Then he was gone, and only Deader Man remained. He turned and looked directly at Jane, red eyes burning potently. The black blood stained the lower half of his face, and glistened on the front of his nice suit – but otherwise, there was no trace of the regular Dead Man.

"There…" he whispered, "Much better. Now I can see you."

She woke up screaming.

This time, at least, it was near morning. Five thirty. Early enough.

Sweet Christ.

As she pulled on a shirt with shaking hands, Jane wondered whether, somehow, she was still dreaming - dreaming about nightmares. And whether she'd ever wake up.