closer than a cat to the child that she'll smother
It's late. Light is sleeping.
Since he got the note, he doesn't nightmare - and, unconscious, his face is relaxed and, perhaps, smiling. As if, for once, he's got one over on the mansion. It's been a week since he got the paper: a week since he entered into that peculiar arrangement with his alternate, the one with the tricks, the power, the place outside creation: the one Light wants to gut of his secrets, spilling them into the palm of his hand. The one he wants to see ruined, defeated. The one who, so far, has shown up again twice, when Light was least expecting it - once to greet him with that infuriating quiet assurance that nothing Light was planning to do that evening could possibly be important, and once - just to talk. To chat, even.
Which had been even worse.
So he's still adjusting to that constant, destabilising whisper in his mind. That suspicion that his time is not his own. As if he's being broken to some restraint: a chilled steel chain, warming against his skin to the point of being unnoticeable. A choke chain: that knowledge of how it feels to be at the beck and call of another (not a higher power: Light refuses to think of it in those terms). This is getting harder to control. Forcing the issue too soon would be a mistake - and if I'm to end up bluffing him, I can't waste that on a test. Why did I get into this in the first place?
He never completes that thought with the obvious, intolerable answer: because I had no choice. Or with the one that's even worse: because I wanted to.
Light's always laughed, behind his face, at people who say you can't feel anything in your dreams, or that pinching should wake you up. Good and bad, heat and cold, it's all in place for him, just as it should be. And at present, his overwhelming perception of the mansion is one of cold: a damp that sinks into his bones, and a musty smell like an old shroud. The walls of his room - his cell? - are dull grey, like an old asylum: the corners dark, and dingy, and possibly occupied by who-knows-what. And he still wakes each morning thinking, Perhaps this will be it: perhaps today is the day they'll finally send me back.
It never is. He doesn't want to sleep, and he doesn't particularly want to languish in his room. The kitchen, for all that it's overrun with pests - Ls and Nears and other trivialities - is warmer. Straightening himself in the mirror with a tweak here and there, he turns to go-
-right into his alternate, who's got through the locked door and into his room without making a sound, turning a hair, or appearing in the mirror. And who's wearing an alarmingly subtle smirk - and is much too close.
Light opens his mouth to snap out an automatic response - don't you knock? slow day, is it? - and then, suddenly, his other-self is kissing him. Light is frozen at first, wide-eyed and astonished - then finds himself returning it - slow, but not uncertain. The kiss is deep, and open, and yet it's strangely dry and detached and experimental. Light's stomach turns over: he ought to push himself away, he should fight, he should die before letting this happen. Instead, he's drawn to his twin like a pin to a magnet. Pressed against his alternate like this, he's finally warm: a hand at the back of his neck, gentle under his hair, and a voice - his voice - whispering against his ear: you're mine, you're mine.
After that, it's all so vague, with the shifting timesense and perspective of the dream: impressions of gliding hands, and bruising, grasping fingers, and pushing, and pain, and God, pleasure: of hands knotting in his hair, and skin against skin, in a way that should be wrong, but instead is perfect: of his alternate arching away from him, of faint, hissing sighs, and whispered denials and accusations that he can't quite hear; of two red fireflies dancing over him, just bright enough to see by. Emergency lights: panic lights, in the dark.
His shadow is pinning him tighter, moving faster, and then - Light wakes, predictably, painfully aroused - and he leaps upwards, and screams, and screams, and screams. And it's ear-piercing, screeching: louder and higher and more sheerly terrified than he's ever known. It isn't just the ideas themselves, but another possibility: a likelihood, even. That, creeping, malevolent, scattering images and impulses and embarrassments like discarded paper, the other Light might reach in and see what's just been created. Just to amuse himself.
By the time Light's stopped screaming, he's forgotten the dream. It's for the best, because the worst thing about that nightmare was that ... before he woke, before the feelings and the memories and the images flashed through his conscious mind, with all the force of an asteroid impact...
It hadn't been a bad dream at all.
[[OOC: Oh God, don't judge me, etc. It was bound to happen, sooner or later. This is backdated to some time around Hallowe'en.]]
Since he got the note, he doesn't nightmare - and, unconscious, his face is relaxed and, perhaps, smiling. As if, for once, he's got one over on the mansion. It's been a week since he got the paper: a week since he entered into that peculiar arrangement with his alternate, the one with the tricks, the power, the place outside creation: the one Light wants to gut of his secrets, spilling them into the palm of his hand. The one he wants to see ruined, defeated. The one who, so far, has shown up again twice, when Light was least expecting it - once to greet him with that infuriating quiet assurance that nothing Light was planning to do that evening could possibly be important, and once - just to talk. To chat, even.
Which had been even worse.
So he's still adjusting to that constant, destabilising whisper in his mind. That suspicion that his time is not his own. As if he's being broken to some restraint: a chilled steel chain, warming against his skin to the point of being unnoticeable. A choke chain: that knowledge of how it feels to be at the beck and call of another (not a higher power: Light refuses to think of it in those terms). This is getting harder to control. Forcing the issue too soon would be a mistake - and if I'm to end up bluffing him, I can't waste that on a test. Why did I get into this in the first place?
He never completes that thought with the obvious, intolerable answer: because I had no choice. Or with the one that's even worse: because I wanted to.
Light's always laughed, behind his face, at people who say you can't feel anything in your dreams, or that pinching should wake you up. Good and bad, heat and cold, it's all in place for him, just as it should be. And at present, his overwhelming perception of the mansion is one of cold: a damp that sinks into his bones, and a musty smell like an old shroud. The walls of his room - his cell? - are dull grey, like an old asylum: the corners dark, and dingy, and possibly occupied by who-knows-what. And he still wakes each morning thinking, Perhaps this will be it: perhaps today is the day they'll finally send me back.
It never is. He doesn't want to sleep, and he doesn't particularly want to languish in his room. The kitchen, for all that it's overrun with pests - Ls and Nears and other trivialities - is warmer. Straightening himself in the mirror with a tweak here and there, he turns to go-
-right into his alternate, who's got through the locked door and into his room without making a sound, turning a hair, or appearing in the mirror. And who's wearing an alarmingly subtle smirk - and is much too close.
Light opens his mouth to snap out an automatic response - don't you knock? slow day, is it? - and then, suddenly, his other-self is kissing him. Light is frozen at first, wide-eyed and astonished - then finds himself returning it - slow, but not uncertain. The kiss is deep, and open, and yet it's strangely dry and detached and experimental. Light's stomach turns over: he ought to push himself away, he should fight, he should die before letting this happen. Instead, he's drawn to his twin like a pin to a magnet. Pressed against his alternate like this, he's finally warm: a hand at the back of his neck, gentle under his hair, and a voice - his voice - whispering against his ear: you're mine, you're mine.
After that, it's all so vague, with the shifting timesense and perspective of the dream: impressions of gliding hands, and bruising, grasping fingers, and pushing, and pain, and God, pleasure: of hands knotting in his hair, and skin against skin, in a way that should be wrong, but instead is perfect: of his alternate arching away from him, of faint, hissing sighs, and whispered denials and accusations that he can't quite hear; of two red fireflies dancing over him, just bright enough to see by. Emergency lights: panic lights, in the dark.
His shadow is pinning him tighter, moving faster, and then - Light wakes, predictably, painfully aroused - and he leaps upwards, and screams, and screams, and screams. And it's ear-piercing, screeching: louder and higher and more sheerly terrified than he's ever known. It isn't just the ideas themselves, but another possibility: a likelihood, even. That, creeping, malevolent, scattering images and impulses and embarrassments like discarded paper, the other Light might reach in and see what's just been created. Just to amuse himself.
By the time Light's stopped screaming, he's forgotten the dream. It's for the best, because the worst thing about that nightmare was that ... before he woke, before the feelings and the memories and the images flashed through his conscious mind, with all the force of an asteroid impact...
It hadn't been a bad dream at all.
[[OOC: Oh God, don't judge me, etc. It was bound to happen, sooner or later. This is backdated to some time around Hallowe'en.]]