Fic: Under the Twinkle of a Fading Star (My Chem/Sandman xover)
Title: Under the Twinkle of a Fading Star
Summary: In certain parts of Paramour, Gerard sometimes feels as though he’s stepped out of the known universe. (Sandman crossover)
Pairings: Gen
Word count: 2321
Rating: PG-13
AN: For chmclfairytales, who wanted My Chem in Sandman verse. Quotes are from the Black Parade Limited Edition. Thanks to rainpuddle13 for looking this over!
when all hope seemed to be lost, i had terrible trouble sleeping
In certain parts of Paramour, he sometimes feels as though he’s stepped out of the known universe. There’s nothing different about the walls or the sound of his footsteps echoing in the vaulted ceilings, but there is the incessant feeling of strangeness.
As though unimaginable things are possible here.
Uneasy, Gerard shies from those areas.
we looked like ghosts and we haunted the house
The dreams don’t creep up on him like phantoms; rather, they take hold of him like a possession.
The first night he thinks he’s not dreaming at all, but that he’s found strange new rooms in the mansion, has discovered pathways leading to beautiful places: a garden, a parlor, a mirrored room.
It’s in the mirrored room that he begins to see that this is not reality. The mirrors gleam black in the shadows, and the figures in them smile more menacingly than Gerard has ever managed.
He catches glimmers of motion out of the corner of his eye when he’s standing still as death, and then he turns and steps through what he initially thinks is a doorway and then realizes as a mirror, tarnished and wavy with age.
On the other side it is dark as midnight, and Gerard cannot see his reflection anywhere.
When he wakes, he covers the mirror in his own room, so that he does not have to see the figure on the other side.
say the things that hurt you the most
In the daylight Paramour is glamourous and the sunlight sparkles on the marble pool and the windows let in lots of light, but there is still a strange feeling in the air, as though the mansion, despite the number of people who wander its halls on a regular basis, does not welcome intruders.
Nighttime is the worst; then, it’s as though the veil between reality and nightmare is paper thin.
Gerard stays awake in feverish fits, drawing and writing down the strange thoughts and twisted images that haunt his mind. Scrawling on paper until his hand cramps up, clawlike, smeared with ink, and he sometimes falls into restless sleep.
Then, the fragile veil rips and nightmares spiral out around him. He wakes with the feel of invisible hands wrapped around his throat and sleeping, he sees things that horrify him, sharp teeth and fire and screaming familiar faces.
In the morning he can never quite tell what was dream and what was real, and squinting at the things that fill his sketchbooks he thinks he might be going mad.
i would see people that i loved dying
The terrible excitement is what draws him closer.
He knows on some deep level that he is no longer in Paramour house, and that the sky here is massive and endless in a way he’s never seen before, as though new levels have opened up and spilled out and filled the air with wondrous, horrible things, but curiosity drives him nearer.
There are so many people here, and when he’s part of the crowd he can see that they are not all human. Some are animals, some creatures he itches to turn into cartoony sketches in the pages of his idea book, the worst appear human but look at him with the sharp eyes of monsters.
Gerard is used to crowds, knows how to judge the feel of them, whether it’s good or bad energy, but this crowd is foreign and all he can think is that something immense has happened.
He sees a girl, head bowed and body sagging under the weight of her armor, leading a horse.
"Wait," he calls, and she turns, looking at up at him with direct and sorrowful eyes. “What’s happened?”
She shakes her head, and says, “Can you not feel it?”
She turns and continues walking, the horse’s hooves leaving light furrows in the soft ground.
In the distance, she climbs on the horse. Gerard doesn’t want to look away; there was something about her. Something...
Familiar, as though hers was a face he’d seen carefully described in a book a long time ago.
Creatures continue to walk past like a parade and Gerard backs away, unwilling to join them.
A fat twisted... thing, naked and scraping its nails down its face leaving bloody furrows like tears, catches his eye.
Gerard blinks, and it’s as though the world beneath him shifts, and the scene around him fades away, and all he can see are his loved ones, his brother and his band and his family, twisting and writhing as flames lick at their feet, creep up their legs and engulf the stakes they’re bound to.
He screams and he can’t move, he can’t do anything to stop it from happening, and he thinks again of the woman on horseback, head hung low and shoulders proud even under the weight of her armor.
This can’t be true, this can’t be happening. Despair takes hold of him - old familiar terrible despair - and he wakes, thrashing and screaming in his bed.
it felt as if someone or something was gripping my throat
When the night seems to wrap around his throat like a hangman’s noose, he walks through the labyrinthine halls of Paramour.
He turns left down a hall - I don’t remember this one - and his fingertips trace down the wall to make sure it doesn’t vanish and in the darkness he can just make out...
Mikey, standing alone at the end of the hall.
He runs towards him, and when he gets there he shakes Mikey’s shoulders. “Mikey, I’ve been looking for you.”
The words are not lies; as soon as they come out of his mouth they are true.
“Did you see him?” Mikey asks, watching the wall warily. The wallpaper is intricately detailed, patterns within patterns, and Gerard thinks if he stares at it long enough he might be able to see what Mikey is seeing.
He looks away.
“Did you see him?” Mikey’s voice is fervent and quiet and does not echo in the high ceilings.
“Not yet,” Gerard replies, and a shiver runs down his spine.
the fall of the damned
Gerard thought it was a good night when he fell asleep the first time he climbed into bed, but now knows that sleep was the last thing he wanted.
He’s back at the place that feels as though it’s shifting beneath his feet, and the figures are still marching along, trodding sorrowfully and a few celebrating though they are dressed in black. Tonight they flicker and shimmer, and he thinks maybe he’s stuck in a memory of a dream.
He turns quickly away when he sees the fat, twisted one, unwilling to let that unbearable despair grip him again. He pushes through the crowd to try and figure out where he is. What he’s doing here.
He catches sight of someone in the crowd, and follows them unthinkingly. He can see a crisp black uniform sleeve, a confident set of shoulders.
He pushes past clusters of mourners, and he finally realizes what the sense of finality in the air means.
The figure turns, and it’s a (familiar, so familiar) man in a black marching band uniform, mouth pursed in a straight line and chin tilted confidently upwards. “Not yet,” he says, and Gerard wakes, pen clutched in his hand.
like we were burning and drowning at the same time
Though they spend their days together, none of them speak of the nights.
Gerard knows his band well enough to see they’re exhausted, and he sometimes wants to ask, “Do you see them too?”
“Are the nightmares real for you, too?”
He doesn’t want to hear their answers, and he doesn’t want to know what nightmares confine them to their own rooms.
Doesn’t want to know if they dream the same terrible nightmares as he, if they see themselves as he sees them, if they can feel the dream-flames licking at their bodies as they watch him watch them die.
Sometimes someone will clear their throat, look around as if they’re about to make a confession, and Gerard will leave the room. Goes and stands on the edge of the marble pool and wonders if tonight the terrors will be different.
He isn’t sure that this isn’t a dream. That maybe everything that’s happened in this house has been a long, terrible nightmare he only thinks he keeps waking from.
Sometimes out of the corner of his eye he sees the man dressed in white with the terrible knowledge in his eyes. Or he thinks he sees him.
Or he’s imagined it all.
and stand at the bottom until i couldn't breathe
He is almost unsurprised when he turns a corner, thinking he was near Bob’s room in Paramour but finds himself at the wake under the endless night sky.
Gerard tries to speak to one of the mourners, but they do not respond.
He’s like a ghost, he realizes, as he yells and waves his hands and tries to shove at mourners to no avail. He’s a ghost.
He sits heavily down on a staircase made of bones that leads nowhere and watches fairies converse with demons, and hopes he wakes up eventually.
“These are echoes.”
Gerard turns, and a stranger is standing on the bone staircase. The stranger sits beside him, white robes blending in with the bleached whiteness of the bones they rest upon.
His hair is impossibly white and his face is young and his eyes reflect eternity.
“Echoes?” Gerard says dumbly, thinking, I know you, I’ve seen your face before.
Except only in dreams.
“Of the greatest events that have happened in the Dreaming,” the stranger says. “Of terrible things, of inevitable things, of things that are forever in the past. Mortals do not come here willingly.”
“I’m having nightmares,” Gerard says. “Only they’re more like night terrors. It’s this... I mean, that horrible house.”
He thinks he’s still in Paramour, somehow.
His hand drifts up to his throat, and he wonders if one morning he’s going to wake with a necklace of bruises proving what he knows has happened to him. If one morning he isn’t going to wake at all.
“Some places are closer to the nightmare places of the Dreaming than others,” the stranger says.
“Are they real?” Gerard asks.
“Everything here is real, even if it can never occur in reality,” explains the stranger. “That’s the power stories and dreams hold over all things.”
Out of the crowd, five figures appear, wearing uniforms - each slightly different, like distorted images of each other - and march slowly along, heads high and eyes hidden in shadow. Gerard knows them, knows them better than anyone here, and their name is at the front of his mind, just hidden in the fogginess of sleep.
“How do I leave?” Gerard asks. “Will I still come here every night once I’ve left Paramour behind?”
He can almost hear Mikey whispering to him in the dark (disenchanted, disenchanted), but does not look away from the Shaper of Nightmares.
“You will find your way,” was the only response he got, and the briefest touch of the Dream King’s hand against his hair, matted and falling over his eye.
When Gerard wakes, he’s drawn the Black Parade, only its leader (that strange, familiar figure) has shock-white hair and eyes that hold the endless stars within them.
we would tear off our skin and expose our bones
When Mikey comes creeping into his room like a ghost, Gerard is sitting in a chair by the window, blowing smoke lazily into the cool night air and watching the trees dance against the sky.
His sketchbook is abandoned on the floor beside him, open wide to reveal a hurried drawing of a woman on horseback, and he pushes it out of sight when he hears his door softly click closed.
“I can’t sleep,” Mikey explains, shoulders hunched under the blanket wrapped tightly around him like a cloak.
“I don’t want to sleep,” Gerard confesses, and makes room for his brother.
these 'waking dreams'. visions, but most likely nightmares
“These are the soft places,” the Dream-King tells him. “This is as real as anything in the waking world.”
He doesn’t know if he is dreaming of the encounter or simply reliving it waking visions or if each is a new moment that he is only just becoming aware of. He doesn’t know if he remembers those endless eyes in the daylight.
Gerard only knows this moment in this dream, which is perhaps a nightmare.
He is in Paramour, and he is in a strange else-world, and they both feed off each other. He is trapped, hopeless and dreaming.
Gerard thinks of the things he sees here, the Black Parade and the funeral procession echoing through reality and dream and time, and invisible hands gripping his throat.
It’s merely a tale, he thinks, and laughs. It’s true in the ever-shifting way of stories, but his notebooks are filled with tales he feels the itching need to share, to create, to transform.
Everything here at the blurred edge of reality and dream is real.
it was our story we were telling
Summary: In certain parts of Paramour, Gerard sometimes feels as though he’s stepped out of the known universe. (Sandman crossover)
Pairings: Gen
Word count: 2321
Rating: PG-13
AN: For chmclfairytales, who wanted My Chem in Sandman verse. Quotes are from the Black Parade Limited Edition. Thanks to rainpuddle13 for looking this over!
when all hope seemed to be lost, i had terrible trouble sleeping
In certain parts of Paramour, he sometimes feels as though he’s stepped out of the known universe. There’s nothing different about the walls or the sound of his footsteps echoing in the vaulted ceilings, but there is the incessant feeling of strangeness.
As though unimaginable things are possible here.
Uneasy, Gerard shies from those areas.
we looked like ghosts and we haunted the house
The dreams don’t creep up on him like phantoms; rather, they take hold of him like a possession.
The first night he thinks he’s not dreaming at all, but that he’s found strange new rooms in the mansion, has discovered pathways leading to beautiful places: a garden, a parlor, a mirrored room.
It’s in the mirrored room that he begins to see that this is not reality. The mirrors gleam black in the shadows, and the figures in them smile more menacingly than Gerard has ever managed.
He catches glimmers of motion out of the corner of his eye when he’s standing still as death, and then he turns and steps through what he initially thinks is a doorway and then realizes as a mirror, tarnished and wavy with age.
On the other side it is dark as midnight, and Gerard cannot see his reflection anywhere.
When he wakes, he covers the mirror in his own room, so that he does not have to see the figure on the other side.
say the things that hurt you the most
In the daylight Paramour is glamourous and the sunlight sparkles on the marble pool and the windows let in lots of light, but there is still a strange feeling in the air, as though the mansion, despite the number of people who wander its halls on a regular basis, does not welcome intruders.
Nighttime is the worst; then, it’s as though the veil between reality and nightmare is paper thin.
Gerard stays awake in feverish fits, drawing and writing down the strange thoughts and twisted images that haunt his mind. Scrawling on paper until his hand cramps up, clawlike, smeared with ink, and he sometimes falls into restless sleep.
Then, the fragile veil rips and nightmares spiral out around him. He wakes with the feel of invisible hands wrapped around his throat and sleeping, he sees things that horrify him, sharp teeth and fire and screaming familiar faces.
In the morning he can never quite tell what was dream and what was real, and squinting at the things that fill his sketchbooks he thinks he might be going mad.
i would see people that i loved dying
The terrible excitement is what draws him closer.
He knows on some deep level that he is no longer in Paramour house, and that the sky here is massive and endless in a way he’s never seen before, as though new levels have opened up and spilled out and filled the air with wondrous, horrible things, but curiosity drives him nearer.
There are so many people here, and when he’s part of the crowd he can see that they are not all human. Some are animals, some creatures he itches to turn into cartoony sketches in the pages of his idea book, the worst appear human but look at him with the sharp eyes of monsters.
Gerard is used to crowds, knows how to judge the feel of them, whether it’s good or bad energy, but this crowd is foreign and all he can think is that something immense has happened.
He sees a girl, head bowed and body sagging under the weight of her armor, leading a horse.
"Wait," he calls, and she turns, looking at up at him with direct and sorrowful eyes. “What’s happened?”
She shakes her head, and says, “Can you not feel it?”
She turns and continues walking, the horse’s hooves leaving light furrows in the soft ground.
In the distance, she climbs on the horse. Gerard doesn’t want to look away; there was something about her. Something...
Familiar, as though hers was a face he’d seen carefully described in a book a long time ago.
Creatures continue to walk past like a parade and Gerard backs away, unwilling to join them.
A fat twisted... thing, naked and scraping its nails down its face leaving bloody furrows like tears, catches his eye.
Gerard blinks, and it’s as though the world beneath him shifts, and the scene around him fades away, and all he can see are his loved ones, his brother and his band and his family, twisting and writhing as flames lick at their feet, creep up their legs and engulf the stakes they’re bound to.
He screams and he can’t move, he can’t do anything to stop it from happening, and he thinks again of the woman on horseback, head hung low and shoulders proud even under the weight of her armor.
This can’t be true, this can’t be happening. Despair takes hold of him - old familiar terrible despair - and he wakes, thrashing and screaming in his bed.
it felt as if someone or something was gripping my throat
When the night seems to wrap around his throat like a hangman’s noose, he walks through the labyrinthine halls of Paramour.
He turns left down a hall - I don’t remember this one - and his fingertips trace down the wall to make sure it doesn’t vanish and in the darkness he can just make out...
Mikey, standing alone at the end of the hall.
He runs towards him, and when he gets there he shakes Mikey’s shoulders. “Mikey, I’ve been looking for you.”
The words are not lies; as soon as they come out of his mouth they are true.
“Did you see him?” Mikey asks, watching the wall warily. The wallpaper is intricately detailed, patterns within patterns, and Gerard thinks if he stares at it long enough he might be able to see what Mikey is seeing.
He looks away.
“Did you see him?” Mikey’s voice is fervent and quiet and does not echo in the high ceilings.
“Not yet,” Gerard replies, and a shiver runs down his spine.
the fall of the damned
Gerard thought it was a good night when he fell asleep the first time he climbed into bed, but now knows that sleep was the last thing he wanted.
He’s back at the place that feels as though it’s shifting beneath his feet, and the figures are still marching along, trodding sorrowfully and a few celebrating though they are dressed in black. Tonight they flicker and shimmer, and he thinks maybe he’s stuck in a memory of a dream.
He turns quickly away when he sees the fat, twisted one, unwilling to let that unbearable despair grip him again. He pushes through the crowd to try and figure out where he is. What he’s doing here.
He catches sight of someone in the crowd, and follows them unthinkingly. He can see a crisp black uniform sleeve, a confident set of shoulders.
He pushes past clusters of mourners, and he finally realizes what the sense of finality in the air means.
The figure turns, and it’s a (familiar, so familiar) man in a black marching band uniform, mouth pursed in a straight line and chin tilted confidently upwards. “Not yet,” he says, and Gerard wakes, pen clutched in his hand.
like we were burning and drowning at the same time
Though they spend their days together, none of them speak of the nights.
Gerard knows his band well enough to see they’re exhausted, and he sometimes wants to ask, “Do you see them too?”
“Are the nightmares real for you, too?”
He doesn’t want to hear their answers, and he doesn’t want to know what nightmares confine them to their own rooms.
Doesn’t want to know if they dream the same terrible nightmares as he, if they see themselves as he sees them, if they can feel the dream-flames licking at their bodies as they watch him watch them die.
Sometimes someone will clear their throat, look around as if they’re about to make a confession, and Gerard will leave the room. Goes and stands on the edge of the marble pool and wonders if tonight the terrors will be different.
He isn’t sure that this isn’t a dream. That maybe everything that’s happened in this house has been a long, terrible nightmare he only thinks he keeps waking from.
Sometimes out of the corner of his eye he sees the man dressed in white with the terrible knowledge in his eyes. Or he thinks he sees him.
Or he’s imagined it all.
and stand at the bottom until i couldn't breathe
He is almost unsurprised when he turns a corner, thinking he was near Bob’s room in Paramour but finds himself at the wake under the endless night sky.
Gerard tries to speak to one of the mourners, but they do not respond.
He’s like a ghost, he realizes, as he yells and waves his hands and tries to shove at mourners to no avail. He’s a ghost.
He sits heavily down on a staircase made of bones that leads nowhere and watches fairies converse with demons, and hopes he wakes up eventually.
“These are echoes.”
Gerard turns, and a stranger is standing on the bone staircase. The stranger sits beside him, white robes blending in with the bleached whiteness of the bones they rest upon.
His hair is impossibly white and his face is young and his eyes reflect eternity.
“Echoes?” Gerard says dumbly, thinking, I know you, I’ve seen your face before.
Except only in dreams.
“Of the greatest events that have happened in the Dreaming,” the stranger says. “Of terrible things, of inevitable things, of things that are forever in the past. Mortals do not come here willingly.”
“I’m having nightmares,” Gerard says. “Only they’re more like night terrors. It’s this... I mean, that horrible house.”
He thinks he’s still in Paramour, somehow.
His hand drifts up to his throat, and he wonders if one morning he’s going to wake with a necklace of bruises proving what he knows has happened to him. If one morning he isn’t going to wake at all.
“Some places are closer to the nightmare places of the Dreaming than others,” the stranger says.
“Are they real?” Gerard asks.
“Everything here is real, even if it can never occur in reality,” explains the stranger. “That’s the power stories and dreams hold over all things.”
Out of the crowd, five figures appear, wearing uniforms - each slightly different, like distorted images of each other - and march slowly along, heads high and eyes hidden in shadow. Gerard knows them, knows them better than anyone here, and their name is at the front of his mind, just hidden in the fogginess of sleep.
“How do I leave?” Gerard asks. “Will I still come here every night once I’ve left Paramour behind?”
He can almost hear Mikey whispering to him in the dark (disenchanted, disenchanted), but does not look away from the Shaper of Nightmares.
“You will find your way,” was the only response he got, and the briefest touch of the Dream King’s hand against his hair, matted and falling over his eye.
When Gerard wakes, he’s drawn the Black Parade, only its leader (that strange, familiar figure) has shock-white hair and eyes that hold the endless stars within them.
we would tear off our skin and expose our bones
When Mikey comes creeping into his room like a ghost, Gerard is sitting in a chair by the window, blowing smoke lazily into the cool night air and watching the trees dance against the sky.
His sketchbook is abandoned on the floor beside him, open wide to reveal a hurried drawing of a woman on horseback, and he pushes it out of sight when he hears his door softly click closed.
“I can’t sleep,” Mikey explains, shoulders hunched under the blanket wrapped tightly around him like a cloak.
“I don’t want to sleep,” Gerard confesses, and makes room for his brother.
these 'waking dreams'. visions, but most likely nightmares
“These are the soft places,” the Dream-King tells him. “This is as real as anything in the waking world.”
He doesn’t know if he is dreaming of the encounter or simply reliving it waking visions or if each is a new moment that he is only just becoming aware of. He doesn’t know if he remembers those endless eyes in the daylight.
Gerard only knows this moment in this dream, which is perhaps a nightmare.
He is in Paramour, and he is in a strange else-world, and they both feed off each other. He is trapped, hopeless and dreaming.
Gerard thinks of the things he sees here, the Black Parade and the funeral procession echoing through reality and dream and time, and invisible hands gripping his throat.
It’s merely a tale, he thinks, and laughs. It’s true in the ever-shifting way of stories, but his notebooks are filled with tales he feels the itching need to share, to create, to transform.
Everything here at the blurred edge of reality and dream is real.
it was our story we were telling