If there was one thing that Janie loved about life as much as she loved Damen, it was the fact that sights of Winter withered away and left a fresh clean Spring underneath. As the months had grown warmer, Janie had bathed in her last few months of senior year, it lightweight and without worry, for it did not matter whether or not she did well in school, for she had already been accepted into college no matter what her grades were. She glided through the last few weeks, with the weather growing warmer as it swelled with high temperatures and warmed up the few lakes that they were surrounded by, the heat even slipping into Maine’s oceans, which Janie did not spend much time in but appreciated anyway. Even better, Janie had already graduated from high school, cap and gown and all and had been freed for the summer. It was a nice one, the kind where you would just lay around some days and be held by the most loving of roommates, who would take you out on other days to make sure that your last real summer wasn’t wasted.

Janie loved spending time with Damen. The two of them had growing irrevocably close during the past couple years, the two becoming sort of like a lock and key, one useless without the other. Even more than that, the two of them fit with the same smooth slip, her spaces filled with his protection and strength, his with her ability to calm and that sweet feeling he felt overcome him once he found himself staring into her blue eyes. Neither of them took to wasting their summer and would be up, driving to different cities and going out for walks around the city, spending a day or two at the beach and eating ice cream by the bay. The only problem with that was the fact that such excursions often tired the two of them out and as soon as they got home, Janie found herself collapsing onto the bed, Damen falling next to her a few minutes after, arm naturally curled around he waist. After having spent a day in the city, Janie had fallen asleep last night almost once her head hit the pillow and had been sleeping soundly since, her breathing deep and relaxed.

Damen had been waiting for this for quite some time, him growing more and more impatient as the days passed, getting closer to summer. Closer to the days when Janie would be home all day and he could keep her in bed with him for as long as he wanted. Where he wouldn’t have to wait for her to come home, only to have to wait for her to get homework done. He had been acting a bit like a puppy, to be honest, always trailing behind her when she wandered around, trying to spend as much time as possible with her. Needless to say, without school, Damen didn’t have very much to do on his own, so every second Janie was home was something he tried to cherish, to make the most of. But now it was summer and every second of the day was filled with her beautiful eyes and her vanilla sent, and Damen couldn’t be happier. He still followed her around like a lost puppy, but without so much need for attention now. He could deal without her for a few moments, and her leaving didn’t leave him with so much sorrow anymore, because he knew that she’d be back soon and maybe the next day she wouldn’t leave at all. So, essentially, life was good. 

Damen couldn’t say the same for his dreams. Now Damen, he was used to having nightmares, because the boy was afraid of a fair amount of things, but lately he’d had a long stretch without them, and once one hit him, it hit him with full force. He was hurting Janie. He could see himself, standing over her form, eyes wild with anger and muscles tense as ever, standing over her quivering form. She was crying, screaming, bleeding. And it was his fault. He was hurting her, and he wasn’t stopping now. He grabbed her by her arms and flung her against the wall, a screech escaping her trembling lips at contact.

He wanted to stop it. He wanted to stand between her and this part of him that was out of control and protect her, but he couldn’t. All he could do was watch and wait, powerless like he always seemed to be in this type of horrific nightmare. So he did, he watched her, an ache flaring in his heart every time she screamed as he beat her to the ground, crushing her, inside and out, words flowing freely from this other Damen’s lips like this wasn’t Janie at all. He told her she was worthless, a weakling he didn’t need, but he knew those were lies. He watched and waited for what felt like hours, years, centuries, until she lie limp on the floor, eyes open but vacant, and then he was in his body again, staring down at her with fists covered in her blood. And she was dead. 

And he was screaming in his bed. 

Janie’s dreams were always so pleasant, sweet and soft in taste and comforting as she woke up to find that reality was honestly no worse than whatever she had been dreaming of. Sometimes she had no dream at all but instead a restful night that had her spine relaxed and had her waking up in such a nice manor, Damen’s arms curled around her as she awoke. Today was terribly different. While Janie had slept through a comforting dream in which she went to see a movie and happened to stumble across Andrew Garfield on her way, her wake was not a nice and restful but instead jarring as the jagged sound of Damen’s scream struck through her dream without the slickness of a knife but instead the rugged edge of a chainsaw. Her eyes opened almost immediately as she heard the sound and she found herself turning over on her bed, pulling herself up to a sitting position. The room was dark, it was the middle of the night.

The sound made her think that there was in fact a real danger in here for a moment, though she soon realized that there was nothing and Damen was not the kind who would get scared anyway. Looking over at him now, Janie could only see a black silhouette against blacker night, his back rigid as the sound of the scream faded from his voice, but not from her ears. She sat there still for a moment, the early wake seeming strange as the two of them had not gone through this in a long, long time. And Damen had never awoke her up with such a scream, but more like that of a twist and a twitch or heavier breathing ash e struggled to regain himself. His dream had been bad. She could tell because she tell that his hands were over his face and his breathing was harder as though he couldn’t remember just how to get air to push in and out of his lungs at a good pace. And in a moment, that seemed to spread to her and her breathing grew heavier as she shard his panic a little bit.

Janie reached out a hand to his terrified form, her not pausing for a moment to be afraid and hesitant of what he wanted her to do. He had a nightmare and like always, it would be her job to comfort him and her job to make sure that he was alright. Not that she had woken up after every bad dream but she liked to think she had caught all t he terrible ones and could find a way to pull him back into reality. “Damen…” she began, her voice breathy and soft in the way that she hoped she would not scare him or freak him out in the night. Perhaps his dream had actually left him a physical thing to be scared of, after all, so it was best she avoided what she believed could be wrong at all costs. “Damen, look at me. What’s wrong?” Her voice was very very careful as she spoke, her hand moving up and down on his arm as though that were a small way to comfort him. Seeing no change, she figured that she’d thought wrong.

At feeling her hand against his arm, two parts of him started battling. One part of hi told him to get away, to get as far away from her as he could because he would only hurt her like he did in the dream, that he would beat her to death and she would be gone and it would be his fault. So he had to get up, get out. This was all complete and utter nonsense, but in this state, Damen could think of a million reasons to get up and go, even if it had only just been a dream. (He was still trying to grasp that very idea, that this was reality now, and that had been a dream.) The second part of him wanted to give in to her gentle touch and her pleading words and hold her because she was alive and safe and because he hadn’t killed her. Because it had been a dream. A terrible, terrible dream. 

The second part of him won out, but only because he felt like he couldn’t breathe, because he could feel tears starting to spill because it had felt so real. Because he could still hear her screams, still see her broken body in flashes and still see her vacant blue eyes. So carefully, he pulled his hands from his face and turned to her,  accepting her comfort because he needed to slow his heart, needed to make the images in his mind stop. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.” He said, or rather, repeated as he face her, though her image was blurred y the wetness of his tears, which were now slowly starting to trickle down his cheeks. He should have been ashamed, and he would have, had he not just witnessed himself killing her. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” Was all he said, his breath catching in his throat as the images flashed in front of his eyes again, and he was forced into silence once more, the horror still running through him. 

There had been very few times in the history of Damen and Janie’s relationship that Damen had pushed her away, and each time only ended in more of a disaster. She was a little scared of that once he seemed to hear her, as though she were afraid that the situation would get worse, she wouldn’t get out of him and he’d end up doing something like pushing her and then the two of them would force another fracture through their relationship and one would be forced to leave. The fact that he was moving away from that fact and had instead settled upon allowing himself to succumb to her touch relaxed her. At least, she was relaxed until it hit her that Damen was crying, soft tears slipping down the sides of his face and catching the moonlight from the open window. “Are you crying?” she asked in a soft voice without expecting much of an answer, instead reaching to wipe the tears from his face with the pad of her thumb. 

She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, the lack of light not allowing much more than a shine off his pupils, but she knew that they were filled with horror. It was the fact that tears slid down his face though she had never really seen him cry, and how his voice sounded so apologetic and scared, paralyzed with each word. He was sorry. She had to wonder what he was apologizing about, having no more than the fact that he had said that he was sorry for hurting her. A part of her didn’t want to know what hurting he was talking about, especially if he was reacting this way toward her. “Please don’t cry,” she said quietly, moving a little closer to him to hold him in her arms. Most of time, it was the other way as she was broken down much more easily by daily life, though she couldn’t really say she was happy because of that fact. She’d rather she’d be the one who was upset, not him. He didn’t deserve to be so scared. “It was just a dream. You didn’t hurt me at all, no bruises, no tears.” She held his head to herself, not a bit of tiredness seeping from her eyes. “It was only a dream.”

But there were tears, his own trailing down his cheeks slowly. It was so strange to him. He hadn’t cried in a long time, because Damen always felt he was supposed to be the strong one. She knew it to. Everyone knew it. Damen was the fearless one, the one who held her up right and fixed her when she fell down. And now she was holding him up, holding him when he felt so broken. There weren’t many things that could tear him down like this. But just the thought of him being the one to hurt Janie, let along kill her, was tearing him apart. Once she brought her arms around him, he clung to her, clung to her soft scent and the sound of her beating heart against her chest. She was alive. She was okay.

But in his mind. She was dead. She was still on the floor in a pool of blood, eye open and terrified, but forever frozen. And his hands were the things that had done this to her. He fought back the urge to scream again and instead tried to calm his breathing, which was heavy and unsteady against her warm body. “I’m sorry. I’m a monster.” He said, and though his instincts told him to push her away and run, the amount of fear racing through him was enough for hi to ignore that. He needed her calming touch to soothe him. He hoped it worked with fear the same way it did anger, because he felt like this was suffocating him. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.” He said, tears starting to flow again. “I couldn’t stop.” 

Damen’s expectations of himself were, despite the fact she would never admit it, the same exact expectations that Janie held for him. She expected for Damen to be the strong one who could protect her on any physical or emotional level and that he would never be the one to break down. In all honesty, she knew that he felt the same way about himself and most of the time, it was true. Of course he was allowed to break down a little bit now and again and it wasn’t like she was angry, but instead a little scared because she knew that him doing this meant that things were very, very wrong. Whatever had happened in his dream had scared him to no ends and forced tears out of his eyes as he struggled with the fact that he was no longer in his dream but in reality. Or rather, that his dream had not been reality. Knowing how hard this was just by the way his breath seemed to catch and how he was suddenly helpless in her arms, Janie ran a hand over his hair soothingly and emitted a soft ‘shhhh’ from her lips. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she told him, her voice careful though she was even a little jarred from this. The fact that he was so upset was scary to her but she did her best to hide it, because at this moment, it was not about her. For a seventeen year old, her ability to handle this the right was pretty impressive. “You’re not a monster out here. You haven’t hurt me, you haven’t touched me, you haven’t done anything to cry about.” Holding him a little closer, Janie’s mussed curls brushed against the skin of his cheek. After having slept, they weren’t as orderly as usual and neither was his hair which was soft yet tangled under her palm. “Whatever happened in your dream,” Janie began, a hint of a question in her voice. She wanted to know what it was that had him crying so hard and what was so terrible that it could bring him down so quickly and so dramatically. But she would not press. Perhaps saying it out loud would only cost more and tear him apart further and Janie, Janie didn’t want to see that happen to him. “It doesn’t matter now. You can’t control your dreams.” She felt as though Damen might need a reminder of that.

Listening to her carefully, Damen felt himself returning from his hysteria. Dreams. Yes, it was only just a dream. Janie was here, alive and safe and holding him together like she always was. It was nothing but a nightmare. Nothing but his worst fear playing out before him. He tried to keep that in mind as he worked to slow his breathing back to normal, though he stayed firmly in place, his arms still clinging to the fabric of her pajamas. He needed her. She was his anchor here, keeping him from slipping back into that horrible world, the one where she was dead and he was at fault. The one where her screams bounced off the walls, ignored as another fist came down on her fragile form. The fist belonged to him. He was a monster. The images replayed in his mind once more. 

“I’m so sorry.” He repeated once more, burying his face in the crook of her neck. He was sure that by now she’d be getting frustrated with him for apologizing for what she said was a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It all felt real. The cool feeling of her arm when he’d reached for her, the warm blood on his hands, the pang in his heart every time she screamed in pain. If anything this was the dream. This, this calm feeling of her arms and her soothing words, he didn’t deserve either of them. He was a monster and he’d beaten her to death. He’d killed her. “Please don’t stop talking.” He pleaded, his voice muffled against her skin. Her words were the only things helping him out of this mess. He wanted to believe that this was the reality he lived in, honestly, he did. It had all just felt a little too real, and he just needed a little more time to recover from it all. 

Janie would never be able to guess what it was that Damen had woke up screaming about. She had no idea what went on in his head during times like that, only that whatever he saw was horrid to him and sent an icy fear through his eyes. She wasn’t sure what would make him cry, other than that it was definitely about her and that it definitely hurt him, scared him to no ends. It was bad, that was all she knew and seeing that he didn’t seem to react very much toward the question part of the response, she assumed that she would never get to know. All she could do was help him as much as she could right now and make sure that the tears stopped their flow. Scared to hurt him more than he already was and more concerned than frustrated, she ran her hand over the back of his head again and again, holding him closer.

“It’s alright, Damen. You don’t have to be sorry,” she replied, her voice soft and careful but always there, just as he had wanted from her. Janie wasn’t sure how she was supposed to go about this, if she was supposed to keep reminding him of reality or get his mind off whatever it was that had scared him so that his eyes would soften and they could get back to sleep. Or maybe they wouldn’t get back to sleep because of what had happened, but they could do something else. If there was no other thing to do at whatever early hour this was, she would sit with him on the couch as he played Dead Space, either keeping quiet despite her fear toward the game, or whimpering in reaction so that he’d feel a need to protect her.  Which was better for the situation, she was unsure. “Do you want to go do something else, Damen? Would it calm you down a little bit? Nothing happened, but if you’d rather get your mind off your dream, we can go to the living room. I can make you coffee, or an early breakfast.”

“No.” He replied almost immediately, pulling her closer and holding her tighter, scared that she’d leave, that the beating of her heart wouldn’t be against this ears anymore, and well, he’d have no evidence that he hadn’t killed her. “Stay. I want to stay here with you. Don’t go.” He was sure he sounded a little more than insane, his sentences breaking up a little. He had meant to keep the last part to himself, because he was trying his best to act like he understood it had been a dream, and begging her not to go made it sound like he was still clinging to the idea that she would disappear and be gone like she was in his dream. Which, he was, but she didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to tell her that he wasn’t quite sure he believed her when she said it was only a dream.

The tears picked up again, and he pressed face against her skin, stifling a sob from deep within his throat. “Please don’t go.” He was losing it again, his heart convincing him he’d just seen her dead on the floor, and that this was the dream now, despite what his brain told him. He couldn’t make sense of anything. All he knew was that it hurt, and either he’d killed Janie or it had all been some twisted nightmare, and she was holding him now. Either way, he didn’t want her to leave. He couldn’t hold himself together right now. Not without her. She was what was tying him together at the moment and without her, well, he didn’t even want to think about it. Now it was his turn to whimper, his eyes wide open in fear of slipping back into the place where she was gone. 

What Janie wanted desperately now was for her boyfriend to stop crying. She wanted his sobs to be over and for her to be able to let go with knowing that he would be alright (not that she didn’t want to hold him, she did) and to have him stop feeling so dependent in her arms because it made her world feel strange and off. She wanted him to be happy, happy as she always seemed to make him, though he was looking at her for more of a comfort than anything else right now. She was not going anyway. She would hold onto him if he asked and she would do whatever he wanted her to do because she was too scared to let him fall harder. She loved him. Nodding with a bit more urgency as she felt him begin to cry again, Janie moved her hand from her hair to his back, soft circles as she tried to get him to calm down. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” she claimed quickly. “I’m right here, I’m not leaving. I won’t ever leave you.”

That was something that was very, very true. Neither Damen nor Janie could ever leave each other for even the smallest period of time, because while it seemed like he was the one who was most fragile right now, she was usually just as frail, very easily broken. Him walking out the door without intents to be home at least by the end of the day would drive her mad, especially if she couldn’t communicate with him. She would cry. Hell, she was almost crying right now because of the way Damen was helpless and sad. She wanted to cry because he was crying and because it hurt her that he was this way, but she didn’t. Janie was never very strong but right now, she would be as strong as she possibly could be. She kissed him on the top of the head and moved a little bit closer. “I’m right here, holding you. This isn’t something you can make up, Damen. I’m right here. Believe me, this is real, right here.” She closed her eyes and kissed the top of his head again. “Right here.”

“But you’re not.” He said, shaking his head against her warm skin, and pulling away a little so that he could look at her. “You’re not here.” He said, shaking his head again, his eyes looking for hers in the darkness as he tried to make her understand. “You’re dead because I killed you. You’re on the floor and you’re broken because I hit you. You’re gone because I’m a monster.” By now he was shaking, and though he was doing his best to wipe the tears with the back of his hand, they kept coming and he felt so stupid for crying. Because he was supposed to be the strong. But perhaps he was too strong. Too strong for his own good, and with a temper like his, his strength was a curse.

After a short moment, Damen pulled his hands back over his eyes. He was ashamed. Ashamed because of what he had done, whether it had been real or not. Ashamed because he had been crying in front of her and she was hurting too. He could hear it in her voice as she tried to calm him down. But how do you calm someone who had just seem them self murder the one they loved? How do you make the pain go away after seeing them lifeless on the floor. It was his worst fear. That he’d hurt Janie, hurt her beyond repair. “I’m sorry, baby girl.” 

Janie’s spine grew rigid and she froze, froze as he revealed just what it was that he had dreamed about, what had seemingly driven him to insanity and instability today. Her eyes closed and she bit her lip, trying to process what he had said. In his dream, he had killed her. In his dream, he had beat her until she was dead and had images of her murder in his mind and by his own hand, nonetheless. She could understand why he was so horrified with himself earlier. It made sense to her why he had been crying so heavily and so hopelessly, holding onto her as though she weren’t real at all. She was supposed to be dead, at least in his mind and she tried to suck that away and remember herself that such was just Damen’s dream and move to remind him of that. 

“You haven’t killed me, Damen,” she whispered, her voice a little weakened with Damen’s confession and hushed as she thought about it again. He had killed her in her dream and that had been what shook him so badly that he seemed to have lost quite a bit of himself in no more than a few minutes. She knew that he was terrified that he would hurt her like that. She knew that ever since they had first started dating, he’d felt as though he were a loose cannon that could explode at any minute and that he was terrified of hurting her. She remembered when he shoved her, that one time. She remembered how she had tripped over her own feet and how he declared himself a monster, breaking every dish and mirror in his home in her absence. She remembered crying and finally, she remembered how he was so scared of himself for a while, just being around her. Damen was scared to hurt, scared that he himself would do it to his lovely girlfriend. Janie was not scared of him, though. “I may have been dead then, but I’m alive right now. Right here with you.” Janie stared at him, her having not have reached toward him to pull him back. “Looking at you right now. It doesn’t matter what happened in your dream, Damen. Your mind’s tricking you, that’s all.”

If that were true at all, his mind was doing a pretty good job, because he was still very much convinced that he’d murdered her. He still felt like he’d lost her, like he’d lost himself. He felt empty and destroyed and like he could explode at any second, just like she’d said. Janie always knew him too well. Janie always knew what was going on in Damen’s head before it actually happened. He wondered if she knew what his next question was. “Are you mad at me?” He asked, peaking out of the shield he’d made from his fingers with glistening eyes. She had to be mad at him. He’d hurt her, he’d broken her skin and ripped her apart, painting the room around them with her scarlet colored blood. 

“I didn’t want to. I swear, I wanted to stop. I couldn’t. I tried and I tried and I tried but I couldn’t. I watched you die. I watched and waited until you stopped moving. Until you stopped breathing and then I tried to help.” He explained shakily, though he knew he didn’t deserve her mercy. She should be mad, even if it was just a dream. What kind of sick person dreams of killing their girlfriend? “But you were gone and I was too late and…and.” He didn’t know what else to say but he felt he had to tell her, had to explain because she at least deserved that much. “And it hurts, Janie. It hurts so much. Please make it better. Make the pain stop.” He begged, his hands making their way back up to his head and his fingers snaking into fists in his hair. “Make the monster go away.” 

Damen spoke like a child, scared out of his mind by his own wrongdoing as he stared at her pleadingly. She hated it, hated what his own mind had done to him and how scared and upset he was because of it. She hated that she knew his eyes still shined with that of tears and hated that she was sitting in the dark, trying to find a way to get it into his head that he had not killed her. He had not murdered her nor had he hit her nor had he stood by whenever she needed him. Shaking her head quickly, disregarding of quite a few of his questions and instead taking the moment to reach to the far left and click on one of the lamps. They needed light. She needed to be able to see him in the cruel night and make sure that she could get the words into his head. She grabbed him by the shoulders.

His eyes were red, glistening with tears that refused to stop pouring from them. They were dark and scared, terrified in a way that she had never seen him before and never wanted to see him again. Damen deserved to be happy and alright, not on the edge of another sob because he seemed to truly believe that this was not reality, but a dream that had taken him over cruelly after forcing him to murder the same girl. She would not let him believe that anymore. Staring into his eyes, hers blue and his brown, Janie said her words very clearly and carefully. “I’m not mad at you. I have no reason to be. You may not have been able to do anything about what was happening, but that doesn’t matter now. I know it hurts, I know you think you’re the enemy here but you haven’t done anything. Look into my eyes, look at how alive I am—you haven’t done anything. Please stop crying, please.” Her voice was a little weaker there. “I don’t want to have to watch you cry, Damen. That hurts too.” She exhaled heavily and bit her lip.

That seemed to help, seemed to pull him a little bit from this bout of insanity. It was hurting her. And now he could help. He could make things better this time. Protecting Janie was something Damen knew how to do, and if he could, he would help her in any way. He would do anything for her, anything. Especially after the whole disaster in his mind. Squinting a bit in the sudden light, Damen locked eyes with her and nodded, his fingers losing grip on his hair as he listened to her. Just hearing how weak she sounded reminded him of how she needed him, how he couldn’t be weak. She needed him to be the strong one. “I’ll stop.” Was all he said. And with that, he wiped his tears and put on a brave face. Janie needed him to be strong. Crying was only hurting her more. He would do anything if it meant keeping Janie happy.

That was why Damen and Janie were so good together. They were so willing to sacrifice everything, even their emotions, just to see that the other was okay. Janie was holding herself together for him, and now he would return the favor. “I’m sorry, baby. Are you alright?” He was sure he must have scared her, just by the shake in her voice that had started to break through. But he couldn’t hold it back, and he knew she understood that, but it didn’t make it any easier for him to see her looking so upset about him. She didn’t deserve to worry so much. She didn’t deserve to be woken up at this hour to the crying form of the one person who was meant to protect her. She deserved better, and so that was what he would be for her. Better. Stronger. 

It wasn’t necessarily as though Damen really needed to be that much of a rock for Janie, because it wasn’t as though she had a real reason to be crying. Her sobs only sprung from his, sadness meeting her in a quiet empathy and bleeding into her veins as she realized just what it was that had forced such restless tears out of his eyes. She was necessarily sad but neutral, calming down a little as he put on that brave face and wiped the last of the tears from his eyes. It didn’t cure his image completely, for not everything had faded out of his eyes and they were still reddened with the bouts of tears, but he looked a little better and a little more familiar. Nodding her head, Janie leaned forward to kiss him in reply.

The action was very quick and very simple. Her lips met his and she pressed them with a little more persistence than usual, though she was fairly normal and calm. She let their breath mingle for no more than a few seconds before she pulled away to look at him. “You worry about me too much.” She let out a soft breath and leaned forward to tidy his hair, which had been mussed out of place. She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t done so, for she had always fixed his hair. They could have even just had the hottest and most lustful sex in the world, and she would still reach over toward the end and fix his dampened hair, wet from his sweat. “I’m fine. I just want to make sure you are as well.” There was no tiredness in her eyes anymore, for such had been stolen away with the night’s events and Janie knew that she’d settle with just laying with him, or going out to the living room until the both of them needed to rest again. “Are you… are you going to be alright?”

Honestly, Damen didn’t know. He didn’t know how long it would take for him to feel completely assured that this was now reality and that she was alive, but he would wait for as long as it took, because hearing her sound so weak scared him, worried him to no ends, and well, he wasn’t okay with letting his baby girl feel so scared. He didn’t want to be the thing that scared her, even if he scared himself a fair amount. Janie was the only person who never treated him any different because of his anger. To her he was just the boy she loved, and not the one who punched mirrors and broke things and said hurtful things to the most fragile of people. To her he was just Damen, the boy her protected her when she needed it, and even when she thought she didn’t. And that was why he loved her. 

“I’m okay, as long as you are.” Or rather, he was fine as long as she was here. That was at least what he had meant to say, but with the fearful look in her eyes, he thought it would be best to steer the conversation to something a little less oriented to his dreams of murdering her. Yes, a lot of Damen’s happiness revolved around Janie’s, but right now it was just a lot more focused on the fact that she was alive and okay and that all of that had been a nightmare. “You are okay, aren’t you?” He asked hesitantly, his head tilting to the side a little as he stared at her, afraid he’d scared her off with his crying and his murderous dreams. Though, upon feeling her fingers in his hair, Damen knew she was fine, because this was what Janie did. She smoothed back your hair and made you look presentable for no one, even if you would mess it up moments later. 

Janie was perfectly alright. At least, she would be in a few moments when this became a memory and she concerned herself with something else that wasn’t Damen’s murderous dreams. They didn’t necessarily scare her. It wasn’t like she thought that just because he had a dream where he had beaten her to death meant that he was definitely going to do it in real life. In fact, she knew that there was not even the smallest of chances that he would, but instead he would simply take that as more reason to take care of her. He would protect her even more now, though if he would be trying to protect her from himself she was unsure. But he would, he would keep her alright. Leaning her head slightly to the side at his question, Janie nodded her head. “I’m alright, Damen. This has just been one of the   most emotional wake ups that I’ve ever gone through.” 

It was true, most of the time their wake ups were peaceful and resistant, him trying to hold her to keep her from getting up and getting ready. Most of the time the light was bright as it poured through their window, not dark with only a bit of the moonlight giving her the chance to see him. Janie did not like these sort of wake ups but instead preferred the nice, lovely ones. Then again, while the other ones were lovely, this one reminded her more of how in love she was. “I’m assuming that you don’t want to go back to sleep.” She smiled a little bit, though there wasn’t anything to smile about. It still felt nice in that it made her feel like herself, perhaps. “So what do you want to do until morning?” She was trying very hard to be lighthearted, so that the two of them would actually and honestly cool down, but she found that there wasn’t much to do at such an early hour. What time was it, again? She glanced at the clock, which read 3:48. The two of them had managed only four or so hours of sleep. 

Following her gaze, Damen sighed at the hour on the clock. Not only had he probably terrified her with his crying and shaking and confessions of dreaming of killing her, but he had also managed to rob her of a good night’s rest. He could tell just y the way that she was talking that she didn’t intend to go back to bed, but he wanted to make sure she knew she had the option. “You don’t have to stay up, baby. Go ahead and get back to bed. I’ll be okay on my own for a little.” He tried his best to smile, but he was still feeling a little distraught, and it came out as more of a grimace. Of course, Damen knew well enough how to take care of himself without her by at his side. The question was, did he want to?

At the moment? No. In fact, no, Damen never wanted to be without Janie, but sometimes you have to give up what you want for the person you love, this, Damen knew. He was more than ready to have a few hours to himself while the memory of his dreams haunted him, if it meant that Janie would be getting a good night’s rest. No matter what, Janie always came first. That was Damen’s number one rule. With a gently shove, Damen pushed the blanket away from him. He didn’t want it’s warm comfort, because he knew it would only pull him back in to sleep. Back in to the world where Janie was dead. He nearly shuddered at the thought. 

Even Janie was a little jarred by what had happened; going back to bed with the memory of Damen’s sobs and his revelations echoing in her own dreams was not her best option. Instead, she had already inwardly decided that she would be staying up with him until the day wound on and they would just get to bed a little earlier the next night to make up for it. The two of them would make sure that the other’s dreams were not as harsh as tonight’s and everything would fix itself once they got past today. She was going to stay up. “You know, you don’t have to say things because they’re what’s best,” Janie remarked, her obviously hinting at how his voice made it pretty clear that he did not want her to leave him, not now. “It’s not always about what’s best for me. I want what’s going to make you happy. At least for tonight, if nothing else.”

Her eyes trailed over his hand movements as he pushed the blanket off of himself and biting at her lip, the young girl repeated the same pattern. Though she had been stunned away, sleep would still come easily to her so, without a doubt, she would not be able to cushion herself with such comforts. The young girl was too easily soothed to sleep, what with the slight drop into warm temperature and her eyes falling closed for no more than a few minutes at a time. It would be too much, though, for the both of them. Moving a little closer to him, knowing that he was still feeling very evidently off, she snaked her arms around his torso and held herself against him in a comfortable manor. 

fakeliving:

def3nd:

HI NOAH

this movie, omg. 

damenevahlast:

l00se-change:

damenevahlast:

l00se-change:

If there was one thing that Janie loved about life as much as she loved Damen, it was the fact that sights of Winter withered away and left a fresh clean Spring underneath. As the months had grown warmer, Janie had bathed in her last few months of senior year, it lightweight and without worry, for it did not matter whether or not she did well in school, for she had already been accepted into college no matter what her grades were. She glided through the last few weeks, with the weather growing warmer as it swelled with high temperatures and warmed up the few lakes that they were surrounded by, the heat even slipping into Maine’s oceans, which Janie did not spend much time in but appreciated anyway. Even better, Janie had already graduated from high school, cap and gown and all and had been freed for the summer. It was a nice one, the kind where you would just lay around some days and be held by the most loving of roommates, who would take you out on other days to make sure that your last real summer wasn’t wasted.

Janie loved spending time with Damen. The two of them had growing irrevocably close during the past couple years, the two becoming sort of like a lock and key, one useless without the other. Even more than that, the two of them fit with the same smooth slip, her spaces filled with his protection and strength, his with her ability to calm and that sweet feeling he felt overcome him once he found himself staring into her blue eyes. Neither of them took to wasting their summer and would be up, driving to different cities and going out for walks around the city, spending a day or two at the beach and eating ice cream by the bay. The only problem with that was the fact that such excursions often tired the two of them out and as soon as they got home, Janie found herself collapsing onto the bed, Damen falling next to her a few minutes after, arm naturally curled around he waist. After having spent a day in the city, Janie had fallen asleep last night almost once her head hit the pillow and had been sleeping soundly since, her breathing deep and relaxed.

Damen had been waiting for this for quite some time, him growing more and more impatient as the days passed, getting closer to summer. Closer to the days when Janie would be home all day and he could keep her in bed with him for as long as he wanted. Where he wouldn’t have to wait for her to come home, only to have to wait for her to get homework done. He had been acting a bit like a puppy, to be honest, always trailing behind her when she wandered around, trying to spend as much time as possible with her. Needless to say, without school, Damen didn’t have very much to do on his own, so every second Janie was home was something he tried to cherish, to make the most of. But now it was summer and every second of the day was filled with her beautiful eyes and her vanilla sent, and Damen couldn’t be happier. He still followed her around like a lost puppy, but without so much need for attention now. He could deal without her for a few moments, and her leaving didn’t leave him with so much sorrow anymore, because he knew that she’d be back soon and maybe the next day she wouldn’t leave at all. So, essentially, life was good. 

Damen couldn’t say the same for his dreams. Now Damen, he was used to having nightmares, because the boy was afraid of a fair amount of things, but lately he’d had a long stretch without them, and once one hit him, it hit him with full force. He was hurting Janie. He could see himself, standing over her form, eyes wild with anger and muscles tense as ever, standing over her quivering form. She was crying, screaming, bleeding. And it was his fault. He was hurting her, and he wasn’t stopping now. He grabbed her by her arms and flung her against the wall, a screech escaping her trembling lips at contact.

He wanted to stop it. He wanted to stand between her and this part of him that was out of control and protect her, but he couldn’t. All he could do was watch and wait, powerless like he always seemed to be in this type of horrific nightmare. So he did, he watched her, an ache flaring in his heart every time she screamed as he beat her to the ground, crushing her, inside and out, words flowing freely from this other Damen’s lips like this wasn’t Janie at all. He told her she was worthless, a weakling he didn’t need, but he knew those were lies. He watched and waited for what felt like hours, years, centuries, until she lie limp on the floor, eyes open but vacant, and then he was in his body again, staring down at her with fists covered in her blood. And she was dead. 

And he was screaming in his bed. 

Janie’s dreams were always so pleasant, sweet and soft in taste and comforting as she woke up to find that reality was honestly no worse than whatever she had been dreaming of. Sometimes she had no dream at all but instead a restful night that had her spine relaxed and had her waking up in such a nice manor, Damen’s arms curled around her as she awoke. Today was terribly different. While Janie had slept through a comforting dream in which she went to see a movie and happened to stumble across Andrew Garfield on her way, her wake was not a nice and restful but instead jarring as the jagged sound of Damen’s scream struck through her dream without the slickness of a knife but instead the rugged edge of a chainsaw. Her eyes opened almost immediately as she heard the sound and she found herself turning over on her bed, pulling herself up to a sitting position. The room was dark, it was the middle of the night.

The sound made her think that there was in fact a real danger in here for a moment, though she soon realized that there was nothing and Damen was not the kind who would get scared anyway. Looking over at him now, Janie could only see a black silhouette against blacker night, his back rigid as the sound of the scream faded from his voice, but not from her ears. She sat there still for a moment, the early wake seeming strange as the two of them had not gone through this in a long, long time. And Damen had never awoke her up with such a scream, but more like that of a twist and a twitch or heavier breathing ash e struggled to regain himself. His dream had been bad. She could tell because she tell that his hands were over his face and his breathing was harder as though he couldn’t remember just how to get air to push in and out of his lungs at a good pace. And in a moment, that seemed to spread to her and her breathing grew heavier as she shard his panic a little bit.

Janie reached out a hand to his terrified form, her not pausing for a moment to be afraid and hesitant of what he wanted her to do. He had a nightmare and like always, it would be her job to comfort him and her job to make sure that he was alright. Not that she had woken up after every bad dream but she liked to think she had caught all t he terrible ones and could find a way to pull him back into reality. “Damen…” she began, her voice breathy and soft in the way that she hoped she would not scare him or freak him out in the night. Perhaps his dream had actually left him a physical thing to be scared of, after all, so it was best she avoided what she believed could be wrong at all costs. “Damen, look at me. What’s wrong?” Her voice was very very careful as she spoke, her hand moving up and down on his arm as though that were a small way to comfort him. Seeing no change, she figured that she’d thought wrong.

At feeling her hand against his arm, two parts of him started battling. One part of hi told him to get away, to get as far away from her as he could because he would only hurt her like he did in the dream, that he would beat her to death and she would be gone and it would be his fault. So he had to get up, get out. This was all complete and utter nonsense, but in this state, Damen could think of a million reasons to get up and go, even if it had only just been a dream. (He was still trying to grasp that very idea, that this was reality now, and that had been a dream.) The second part of him wanted to give in to her gentle touch and her pleading words and hold her because she was alive and safe and because he hadn’t killed her. Because it had been a dream. A terrible, terrible dream. 

The second part of him won out, but only because he felt like he couldn’t breathe, because he could feel tears starting to spill because it had felt so real. Because he could still hear her screams, still see her broken body in flashes and still see her vacant blue eyes. So carefully, he pulled his hands from his face and turned to her,  accepting her comfort because he needed to slow his heart, needed to make the images in his mind stop. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.” He said, or rather, repeated as he face her, though her image was blurred y the wetness of his tears, which were now slowly starting to trickle down his cheeks. He should have been ashamed, and he would have, had he not just witnessed himself killing her. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” Was all he said, his breath catching in his throat as the images flashed in front of his eyes again, and he was forced into silence once more, the horror still running through him. 

There had been very few times in the history of Damen and Janie’s relationship that Damen had pushed her away, and each time only ended in more of a disaster. She was a little scared of that once he seemed to hear her, as though she were afraid that the situation would get worse, she wouldn’t get out of him and he’d end up doing something like pushing her and then the two of them would force another fracture through their relationship and one would be forced to leave. The fact that he was moving away from that fact and had instead settled upon allowing himself to succumb to her touch relaxed her. At least, she was relaxed until it hit her that Damen was crying, soft tears slipping down the sides of his face and catching the moonlight from the open window. “Are you crying?” she asked in a soft voice without expecting much of an answer, instead reaching to wipe the tears from his face with the pad of her thumb. 

She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, the lack of light not allowing much more than a shine off his pupils, but she knew that they were filled with horror. It was the fact that tears slid down his face though she had never really seen him cry, and how his voice sounded so apologetic and scared, paralyzed with each word. He was sorry. She had to wonder what he was apologizing about, having no more than the fact that he had said that he was sorry for hurting her. A part of her didn’t want to know what hurting he was talking about, especially if he was reacting this way toward her. “Please don’t cry,” she said quietly, moving a little closer to him to hold him in her arms. Most of time, it was the other way as she was broken down much more easily by daily life, though she couldn’t really say she was happy because of that fact. She’d rather she’d be the one who was upset, not him. He didn’t deserve to be so scared. “It was just a dream. You didn’t hurt me at all, no bruises, no tears.” She held his head to herself, not a bit of tiredness seeping from her eyes. “It was only a dream.”

But there were tears, his own trailing down his cheeks slowly. It was so strange to him. He hadn’t cried in a long time, because Damen always felt he was supposed to be the strong one. She knew it to. Everyone knew it. Damen was the fearless one, the one who held her up right and fixed her when she fell down. And now she was holding him up, holding him when he felt so broken. There weren’t many things that could tear him down like this. But just the thought of him being the one to hurt Janie, let along kill her, was tearing him apart. Once she brought her arms around him, he clung to her, clung to her soft scent and the sound of her beating heart against her chest. She was alive. She was okay.

But in his mind. She was dead. She was still on the floor in a pool of blood, eye open and terrified, but forever frozen. And his hands were the things that had done this to her. He fought back the urge to scream again and instead tried to calm his breathing, which was heavy and unsteady against her warm body. “I’m sorry. I’m a monster.” He said, and though his instincts told him to push her away and run, the amount of fear racing through him was enough for hi to ignore that. He needed her calming touch to soothe him. He hoped it worked with fear the same way it did anger, because he felt like this was suffocating him. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.” He said, tears starting to flow again. “I couldn’t stop.” 

Damen’s expectations of himself were, despite the fact she would never admit it, the same exact expectations that Janie held for him. She expected for Damen to be the strong one who could protect her on any physical or emotional level and that he would never be the one to break down. In all honesty, she knew that he felt the same way about himself and most of the time, it was true. Of course he was allowed to break down a little bit now and again and it wasn’t like she was angry, but instead a little scared because she knew that him doing this meant that things were very, very wrong. Whatever had happened in his dream had scared him to no ends and forced tears out of his eyes as he struggled with the fact that he was no longer in his dream but in reality. Or rather, that his dream had not been reality. Knowing how hard this was just by the way his breath seemed to catch and how he was suddenly helpless in her arms, Janie ran a hand over his hair soothingly and emitted a soft ‘shhhh’ from her lips. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she told him, her voice careful though she was even a little jarred from this. The fact that he was so upset was scary to her but she did her best to hide it, because at this moment, it was not about her. For a seventeen year old, her ability to handle this the right was pretty impressive. “You’re not a monster out here. You haven’t hurt me, you haven’t touched me, you haven’t done anything to cry about.” Holding him a little closer, Janie’s mussed curls brushed against the skin of his cheek. After having slept, they weren’t as orderly as usual and neither was his hair which was soft yet tangled under her palm. “Whatever happened in your dream,” Janie began, a hint of a question in her voice. She wanted to know what it was that had him crying so hard and what was so terrible that it could bring him down so quickly and so dramatically. But she would not press. Perhaps saying it out loud would only cost more and tear him apart further and Janie, Janie didn’t want to see that happen to him. “It doesn’t matter now. You can’t control your dreams.” She felt as though Damen might need a reminder of that.

Listening to her carefully, Damen felt himself returning from his hysteria. Dreams. Yes, it was only just a dream. Janie was here, alive and safe and holding him together like she always was. It was nothing but a nightmare. Nothing but his worst fear playing out before him. He tried to keep that in mind as he worked to slow his breathing back to normal, though he stayed firmly in place, his arms still clinging to the fabric of her pajamas. He needed her. She was his anchor here, keeping him from slipping back into that horrible world, the one where she was dead and he was at fault. The one where her screams bounced off the walls, ignored as another fist came down on her fragile form. The fist belonged to him. He was a monster. The images replayed in his mind once more. 

“I’m so sorry.” He repeated once more, burying his face in the crook of her neck. He was sure that by now she’d be getting frustrated with him for apologizing for what she said was a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It all felt real. The cool feeling of her arm when he’d reached for her, the warm blood on his hands, the pang in his heart every time she screamed in pain. If anything this was the dream. This, this calm feeling of her arms and her soothing words, he didn’t deserve either of them. He was a monster and he’d beaten her to death. He’d killed her. “Please don’t stop talking.” He pleaded, his voice muffled against her skin. Her words were the only things helping him out of this mess. He wanted to believe that this was the reality he lived in, honestly, he did. It had all just felt a little too real, and he just needed a little more time to recover from it all. 

Janie would never be able to guess what it was that Damen had woke up screaming about. She had no idea what went on in his head during times like that, only that whatever he saw was horrid to him and sent an icy fear through his eyes. She wasn’t sure what would make him cry, other than that it was definitely about her and that it definitely hurt him, scared him to no ends. It was bad, that was all she knew and seeing that he didn’t seem to react very much toward the question part of the response, she assumed that she would never get to know. All she could do was help him as much as she could right now and make sure that the tears stopped their flow. Scared to hurt him more than he already was and more concerned than frustrated, she ran her hand over the back of his head again and again, holding him closer.

“It’s alright, Damen. You don’t have to be sorry,” she replied, her voice soft and careful but always there, just as he had wanted from her. Janie wasn’t sure how she was supposed to go about this, if she was supposed to keep reminding him of reality or get his mind off whatever it was that had scared him so that his eyes would soften and they could get back to sleep. Or maybe they wouldn’t get back to sleep because of what had happened, but they could do something else. If there was no other thing to do at whatever early hour this was, she would sit with him on the couch as he played Dead Space, either keeping quiet despite her fear toward the game, or whimpering in reaction so that he’d feel a need to protect her.  Which was better for the situation, she was unsure. “Do you want to go do something else, Damen? Would it calm you down a little bit? Nothing happened, but if you’d rather get your mind off your dream, we can go to the living room. I can make you coffee, or an early breakfast.”

“No.” He replied almost immediately, pulling her closer and holding her tighter, scared that she’d leave, that the beating of her heart wouldn’t be against this ears anymore, and well, he’d have no evidence that he hadn’t killed her. “Stay. I want to stay here with you. Don’t go.” He was sure he sounded a little more than insane, his sentences breaking up a little. He had meant to keep the last part to himself, because he was trying his best to act like he understood it had been a dream, and begging her not to go made it sound like he was still clinging to the idea that she would disappear and be gone like she was in his dream. Which, he was, but she didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to tell her that he wasn’t quite sure he believed her when she said it was only a dream.

The tears picked up again, and he pressed face against her skin, stifling a sob from deep within his throat. “Please don’t go.” He was losing it again, his heart convincing him he’d just seen her dead on the floor, and that this was the dream now, despite what his brain told him. He couldn’t make sense of anything. All he knew was that it hurt, and either he’d killed Janie or it had all been some twisted nightmare, and she was holding him now. Either way, he didn’t want her to leave. He couldn’t hold himself together right now. Not without her. She was what was tying him together at the moment and without her, well, he didn’t even want to think about it. Now it was his turn to whimper, his eyes wide open in fear of slipping back into the place where she was gone. 

What Janie wanted desperately now was for her boyfriend to stop crying. She wanted his sobs to be over and for her to be able to let go with knowing that he would be alright (not that she didn’t want to hold him, she did) and to have him stop feeling so dependent in her arms because it made her world feel strange and off. She wanted him to be happy, happy as she always seemed to make him, though he was looking at her for more of a comfort than anything else right now. She was not going anyway. She would hold onto him if he asked and she would do whatever he wanted her to do because she was too scared to let him fall harder. She loved him. Nodding with a bit more urgency as she felt him begin to cry again, Janie moved her hand from her hair to his back, soft circles as she tried to get him to calm down. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” she claimed quickly. “I’m right here, I’m not leaving. I won’t ever leave you.”

That was something that was very, very true. Neither Damen nor Janie could ever leave each other for even the smallest period of time, because while it seemed like he was the one who was most fragile right now, she was usually just as frail, very easily broken. Him walking out the door without intents to be home at least by the end of the day would drive her mad, especially if she couldn’t communicate with him. She would cry. Hell, she was almost crying right now because of the way Damen was helpless and sad. She wanted to cry because he was crying and because it hurt her that he was this way, but she didn’t. Janie was never very strong but right now, she would be as strong as she possibly could be. She kissed him on the top of the head and moved a little bit closer. “I’m right here, holding you. This isn’t something you can make up, Damen. I’m right here. Believe me, this is real, right here.” She closed her eyes and kissed the top of his head again. “Right here.”

“But you’re not.” He said, shaking his head against her warm skin, and pulling away a little so that he could look at her. “You’re not here.” He said, shaking his head again, his eyes looking for hers in the darkness as he tried to make her understand. “You’re dead because I killed you. You’re on the floor and you’re broken because I hit you. You’re gone because I’m a monster.” By now he was shaking, and though he was doing his best to wipe the tears with the back of his hand, they kept coming and he felt so stupid for crying. Because he was supposed to be the strong. But perhaps he was too strong. Too strong for his own good, and with a temper like his, his strength was a curse.

After a short moment, Damen pulled his hands back over his eyes. He was ashamed. Ashamed because of what he had done, whether it had been real or not. Ashamed because he had been crying in front of her and she was hurting too. He could hear it in her voice as she tried to calm him down. But how do you calm someone who had just seem them self murder the one they loved? How do you make the pain go away after seeing them lifeless on the floor. It was his worst fear. That he’d hurt Janie, hurt her beyond repair. “I’m sorry, baby girl.” 

Janie’s spine grew rigid and she froze, froze as he revealed just what it was that he had dreamed about, what had seemingly driven him to insanity and instability today. Her eyes closed and she bit her lip, trying to process what he had said. In his dream, he had killed her. In his dream, he had beat her until she was dead and had images of her murder in his mind and by his own hand, nonetheless. She could understand why he was so horrified with himself earlier. It made sense to her why he had been crying so heavily and so hopelessly, holding onto her as though she weren’t real at all. She was supposed to be dead, at least in his mind and she tried to suck that away and remember herself that such was just Damen’s dream and move to remind him of that. 

“You haven’t killed me, Damen,” she whispered, her voice a little weakened with Damen’s confession and hushed as she thought about it again. He had killed her in her dream and that had been what shook him so badly that he seemed to have lost quite a bit of himself in no more than a few minutes. She knew that he was terrified that he would hurt her like that. She knew that ever since they had first started dating, he’d felt as though he were a loose cannon that could explode at any minute and that he was terrified of hurting her. She remembered when he shoved her, that one time. She remembered how she had tripped over her own feet and how he declared himself a monster, breaking every dish and mirror in his home in her absence. She remembered crying and finally, she remembered how he was so scared of himself for a while, just being around her. Damen was scared to hurt, scared that he himself would do it to his lovely girlfriend. Janie was not scared of him, though. “I may have been dead then, but I’m alive right now. Right here with you.” Janie stared at him, her having not have reached toward him to pull him back. “Looking at you right now. It doesn’t matter what happened in your dream, Damen. Your mind’s tricking you, that’s all.”

If that were true at all, his mind was doing a pretty good job, because he was still very much convinced that he’d murdered her. He still felt like he’d lost her, like he’d lost himself. He felt empty and destroyed and like he could explode at any second, just like she’d said. Janie always knew him too well. Janie always knew what was going on in Damen’s head before it actually happened. He wondered if she knew what his next question was. “Are you mad at me?” He asked, peaking out of the shield he’d made from his fingers with glistening eyes. She had to be mad at him. He’d hurt her, he’d broken her skin and ripped her apart, painting the room around them with her scarlet colored blood. 

“I didn’t want to. I swear, I wanted to stop. I couldn’t. I tried and I tried and I tried but I couldn’t. I watched you die. I watched and waited until you stopped moving. Until you stopped breathing and then I tried to help.” He explained shakily, though he knew he didn’t deserve her mercy. She should be mad, even if it was just a dream. What kind of sick person dreams of killing their girlfriend? “But you were gone and I was too late and…and.” He didn’t know what else to say but he felt he had to tell her, had to explain because she at least deserved that much. “And it hurts, Janie. It hurts so much. Please make it better. Make the pain stop.” He begged, his hands making their way back up to his head and his fingers snaking into fists in his hair. “Make the monster go away.” 

Damen spoke like a child, scared out of his mind by his own wrongdoing as he stared at her pleadingly. She hated it, hated what his own mind had done to him and how scared and upset he was because of it. She hated that she knew his eyes still shined with that of tears and hated that she was sitting in the dark, trying to find a way to get it into his head that he had not killed her. He had not murdered her nor had he hit her nor had he stood by whenever she needed him. Shaking her head quickly, disregarding of quite a few of his questions and instead taking the moment to reach to the far left and click on one of the lamps. They needed light. She needed to be able to see him in the cruel night and make sure that she could get the words into his head. She grabbed him by the shoulders.

His eyes were red, glistening with tears that refused to stop pouring from them. They were dark and scared, terrified in a way that she had never seen him before and never wanted to see him again. Damen deserved to be happy and alright, not on the edge of another sob because he seemed to truly believe that this was not reality, but a dream that had taken him over cruelly after forcing him to murder the same girl. She would not let him believe that anymore. Staring into his eyes, hers blue and his brown, Janie said her words very clearly and carefully. “I’m not mad at you. I have no reason to be. You may not have been able to do anything about what was happening, but that doesn’t matter now. I know it hurts, I know you think you’re the enemy here but you haven’t done anything. Look into my eyes, look at how alive I am—you haven’t done anything. Please stop crying, please.” Her voice was a little weaker there. “I don’t want to have to watch you cry, Damen. That hurts too.” She exhaled heavily and bit her lip.

That seemed to help, seemed to pull him a little bit from this bout of insanity. It was hurting her. And now he could help. He could make things better this time. Protecting Janie was something Damen knew how to do, and if he could, he would help her in any way. He would do anything for her, anything. Especially after the whole disaster in his mind. Squinting a bit in the sudden light, Damen locked eyes with her and nodded, his fingers losing grip on his hair as he listened to her. Just hearing how weak she sounded reminded him of how she needed him, how he couldn’t be weak. She needed him to be the strong one. “I’ll stop.” Was all he said. And with that, he wiped his tears and put on a brave face. Janie needed him to be strong. Crying was only hurting her more. He would do anything if it meant keeping Janie happy.

That was why Damen and Janie were so good together. They were so willing to sacrifice everything, even their emotions, just to see that the other was okay. Janie was holding herself together for him, and now he would return the favor. “I’m sorry, baby. Are you alright?” He was sure he must have scared her, just by the shake in her voice that had started to break through. But he couldn’t hold it back, and he knew she understood that, but it didn’t make it any easier for him to see her looking so upset about him. She didn’t deserve to worry so much. She didn’t deserve to be woken up at this hour to the crying form of the one person who was meant to protect her. She deserved better, and so that was what he would be for her. Better. Stronger. 

It wasn’t necessarily as though Damen really needed to be that much of a rock for Janie, because it wasn’t as though she had a real reason to be crying. Her sobs only sprung from his, sadness meeting her in a quiet empathy and bleeding into her veins as she realized just what it was that had forced such restless tears out of his eyes. She was necessarily sad but neutral, calming down a little as he put on that brave face and wiped the last of the tears from his eyes. It didn’t cure his image completely, for not everything had faded out of his eyes and they were still reddened with the bouts of tears, but he looked a little better and a little more familiar. Nodding her head, Janie leaned forward to kiss him in reply.

The action was very quick and very simple. Her lips met his and she pressed them with a little more persistence than usual, though she was fairly normal and calm. She let their breath mingle for no more than a few seconds before she pulled away to look at him. “You worry about me too much.” She let out a soft breath and leaned forward to tidy his hair, which had been mussed out of place. She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t done so, for she had always fixed his hair. They could have even just had the hottest and most lustful sex in the world, and she would still reach over toward the end and fix his dampened hair, wet from his sweat. “I’m fine. I just want to make sure you are as well.” There was no tiredness in her eyes anymore, for such had been stolen away with the night’s events and Janie knew that she’d settle with just laying with him, or going out to the living room until the both of them needed to rest again. “Are you… are you going to be alright?”

Honestly, Damen didn’t know. He didn’t know how long it would take for him to feel completely assured that this was now reality and that she was alive, but he would wait for as long as it took, because hearing her sound so weak scared him, worried him to no ends, and well, he wasn’t okay with letting his baby girl feel so scared. He didn’t want to be the thing that scared her, even if he scared himself a fair amount. Janie was the only person who never treated him any different because of his anger. To her he was just the boy she loved, and not the one who punched mirrors and broke things and said hurtful things to the most fragile of people. To her he was just Damen, the boy her protected her when she needed it, and even when she thought she didn’t. And that was why he loved her. 

“I’m okay, as long as you are.” Or rather, he was fine as long as she was here. That was at least what he had meant to say, but with the fearful look in her eyes, he thought it would be best to steer the conversation to something a little less oriented to his dreams of murdering her. Yes, a lot of Damen’s happiness revolved around Janie’s, but right now it was just a lot more focused on the fact that she was alive and okay and that all of that had been a nightmare. “You are okay, aren’t you?” He asked hesitantly, his head tilting to the side a little as he stared at her, afraid he’d scared her off with his crying and his murderous dreams. Though, upon feeling her fingers in his hair, Damen knew she was fine, because this was what Janie did. She smoothed back your hair and made you look presentable for no one, even if you would mess it up moments later. 

Janie was perfectly alright. At least, she would be in a few moments when this became a memory and she concerned herself with something else that wasn’t Damen’s murderous dreams. They didn’t necessarily scare her. It wasn’t like she thought that just because he had a dream where he had beaten her to death meant that he was definitely going to do it in real life. In fact, she knew that there was not even the smallest of chances that he would, but instead he would simply take that as more reason to take care of her. He would protect her even more now, though if he would be trying to protect her from himself she was unsure. But he would, he would keep her alright. Leaning her head slightly to the side at his question, Janie nodded her head. “I’m alright, Damen. This has just been one of the   most emotional wake ups that I’ve ever gone through.” 

It was true, most of the time their wake ups were peaceful and resistant, him trying to hold her to keep her from getting up and getting ready. Most of the time the light was bright as it poured through their window, not dark with only a bit of the moonlight giving her the chance to see him. Janie did not like these sort of wake ups but instead preferred the nice, lovely ones. Then again, while the other ones were lovely, this one reminded her more of how in love she was. “I’m assuming that you don’t want to go back to sleep.” She smiled a little bit, though there wasn’t anything to smile about. It still felt nice in that it made her feel like herself, perhaps. “So what do you want to do until morning?” She was trying very hard to be lighthearted, so that the two of them would actually and honestly cool down, but she found that there wasn’t much to do at such an early hour. What time was it, again? She glanced at the clock, which read 3:48. The two of them had managed only four or so hours of sleep. 

damenevahlast:

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If there was one thing that Janie loved about life as much as she loved Damen, it was the fact that sights of Winter withered away and left a fresh clean Spring underneath. As the months had grown warmer, Janie had bathed in her last few months of senior year, it lightweight and without worry, for it did not matter whether or not she did well in school, for she had already been accepted into college no matter what her grades were. She glided through the last few weeks, with the weather growing warmer as it swelled with high temperatures and warmed up the few lakes that they were surrounded by, the heat even slipping into Maine’s oceans, which Janie did not spend much time in but appreciated anyway. Even better, Janie had already graduated from high school, cap and gown and all and had been freed for the summer. It was a nice one, the kind where you would just lay around some days and be held by the most loving of roommates, who would take you out on other days to make sure that your last real summer wasn’t wasted.

Janie loved spending time with Damen. The two of them had growing irrevocably close during the past couple years, the two becoming sort of like a lock and key, one useless without the other. Even more than that, the two of them fit with the same smooth slip, her spaces filled with his protection and strength, his with her ability to calm and that sweet feeling he felt overcome him once he found himself staring into her blue eyes. Neither of them took to wasting their summer and would be up, driving to different cities and going out for walks around the city, spending a day or two at the beach and eating ice cream by the bay. The only problem with that was the fact that such excursions often tired the two of them out and as soon as they got home, Janie found herself collapsing onto the bed, Damen falling next to her a few minutes after, arm naturally curled around he waist. After having spent a day in the city, Janie had fallen asleep last night almost once her head hit the pillow and had been sleeping soundly since, her breathing deep and relaxed.

Damen had been waiting for this for quite some time, him growing more and more impatient as the days passed, getting closer to summer. Closer to the days when Janie would be home all day and he could keep her in bed with him for as long as he wanted. Where he wouldn’t have to wait for her to come home, only to have to wait for her to get homework done. He had been acting a bit like a puppy, to be honest, always trailing behind her when she wandered around, trying to spend as much time as possible with her. Needless to say, without school, Damen didn’t have very much to do on his own, so every second Janie was home was something he tried to cherish, to make the most of. But now it was summer and every second of the day was filled with her beautiful eyes and her vanilla sent, and Damen couldn’t be happier. He still followed her around like a lost puppy, but without so much need for attention now. He could deal without her for a few moments, and her leaving didn’t leave him with so much sorrow anymore, because he knew that she’d be back soon and maybe the next day she wouldn’t leave at all. So, essentially, life was good. 

Damen couldn’t say the same for his dreams. Now Damen, he was used to having nightmares, because the boy was afraid of a fair amount of things, but lately he’d had a long stretch without them, and once one hit him, it hit him with full force. He was hurting Janie. He could see himself, standing over her form, eyes wild with anger and muscles tense as ever, standing over her quivering form. She was crying, screaming, bleeding. And it was his fault. He was hurting her, and he wasn’t stopping now. He grabbed her by her arms and flung her against the wall, a screech escaping her trembling lips at contact.

He wanted to stop it. He wanted to stand between her and this part of him that was out of control and protect her, but he couldn’t. All he could do was watch and wait, powerless like he always seemed to be in this type of horrific nightmare. So he did, he watched her, an ache flaring in his heart every time she screamed as he beat her to the ground, crushing her, inside and out, words flowing freely from this other Damen’s lips like this wasn’t Janie at all. He told her she was worthless, a weakling he didn’t need, but he knew those were lies. He watched and waited for what felt like hours, years, centuries, until she lie limp on the floor, eyes open but vacant, and then he was in his body again, staring down at her with fists covered in her blood. And she was dead. 

And he was screaming in his bed. 

Janie’s dreams were always so pleasant, sweet and soft in taste and comforting as she woke up to find that reality was honestly no worse than whatever she had been dreaming of. Sometimes she had no dream at all but instead a restful night that had her spine relaxed and had her waking up in such a nice manor, Damen’s arms curled around her as she awoke. Today was terribly different. While Janie had slept through a comforting dream in which she went to see a movie and happened to stumble across Andrew Garfield on her way, her wake was not a nice and restful but instead jarring as the jagged sound of Damen’s scream struck through her dream without the slickness of a knife but instead the rugged edge of a chainsaw. Her eyes opened almost immediately as she heard the sound and she found herself turning over on her bed, pulling herself up to a sitting position. The room was dark, it was the middle of the night.

The sound made her think that there was in fact a real danger in here for a moment, though she soon realized that there was nothing and Damen was not the kind who would get scared anyway. Looking over at him now, Janie could only see a black silhouette against blacker night, his back rigid as the sound of the scream faded from his voice, but not from her ears. She sat there still for a moment, the early wake seeming strange as the two of them had not gone through this in a long, long time. And Damen had never awoke her up with such a scream, but more like that of a twist and a twitch or heavier breathing ash e struggled to regain himself. His dream had been bad. She could tell because she tell that his hands were over his face and his breathing was harder as though he couldn’t remember just how to get air to push in and out of his lungs at a good pace. And in a moment, that seemed to spread to her and her breathing grew heavier as she shard his panic a little bit.

Janie reached out a hand to his terrified form, her not pausing for a moment to be afraid and hesitant of what he wanted her to do. He had a nightmare and like always, it would be her job to comfort him and her job to make sure that he was alright. Not that she had woken up after every bad dream but she liked to think she had caught all t he terrible ones and could find a way to pull him back into reality. “Damen…” she began, her voice breathy and soft in the way that she hoped she would not scare him or freak him out in the night. Perhaps his dream had actually left him a physical thing to be scared of, after all, so it was best she avoided what she believed could be wrong at all costs. “Damen, look at me. What’s wrong?” Her voice was very very careful as she spoke, her hand moving up and down on his arm as though that were a small way to comfort him. Seeing no change, she figured that she’d thought wrong.

At feeling her hand against his arm, two parts of him started battling. One part of hi told him to get away, to get as far away from her as he could because he would only hurt her like he did in the dream, that he would beat her to death and she would be gone and it would be his fault. So he had to get up, get out. This was all complete and utter nonsense, but in this state, Damen could think of a million reasons to get up and go, even if it had only just been a dream. (He was still trying to grasp that very idea, that this was reality now, and that had been a dream.) The second part of him wanted to give in to her gentle touch and her pleading words and hold her because she was alive and safe and because he hadn’t killed her. Because it had been a dream. A terrible, terrible dream. 

The second part of him won out, but only because he felt like he couldn’t breathe, because he could feel tears starting to spill because it had felt so real. Because he could still hear her screams, still see her broken body in flashes and still see her vacant blue eyes. So carefully, he pulled his hands from his face and turned to her,  accepting her comfort because he needed to slow his heart, needed to make the images in his mind stop. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.” He said, or rather, repeated as he face her, though her image was blurred y the wetness of his tears, which were now slowly starting to trickle down his cheeks. He should have been ashamed, and he would have, had he not just witnessed himself killing her. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” Was all he said, his breath catching in his throat as the images flashed in front of his eyes again, and he was forced into silence once more, the horror still running through him. 

There had been very few times in the history of Damen and Janie’s relationship that Damen had pushed her away, and each time only ended in more of a disaster. She was a little scared of that once he seemed to hear her, as though she were afraid that the situation would get worse, she wouldn’t get out of him and he’d end up doing something like pushing her and then the two of them would force another fracture through their relationship and one would be forced to leave. The fact that he was moving away from that fact and had instead settled upon allowing himself to succumb to her touch relaxed her. At least, she was relaxed until it hit her that Damen was crying, soft tears slipping down the sides of his face and catching the moonlight from the open window. “Are you crying?” she asked in a soft voice without expecting much of an answer, instead reaching to wipe the tears from his face with the pad of her thumb. 

She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, the lack of light not allowing much more than a shine off his pupils, but she knew that they were filled with horror. It was the fact that tears slid down his face though she had never really seen him cry, and how his voice sounded so apologetic and scared, paralyzed with each word. He was sorry. She had to wonder what he was apologizing about, having no more than the fact that he had said that he was sorry for hurting her. A part of her didn’t want to know what hurting he was talking about, especially if he was reacting this way toward her. “Please don’t cry,” she said quietly, moving a little closer to him to hold him in her arms. Most of time, it was the other way as she was broken down much more easily by daily life, though she couldn’t really say she was happy because of that fact. She’d rather she’d be the one who was upset, not him. He didn’t deserve to be so scared. “It was just a dream. You didn’t hurt me at all, no bruises, no tears.” She held his head to herself, not a bit of tiredness seeping from her eyes. “It was only a dream.”

But there were tears, his own trailing down his cheeks slowly. It was so strange to him. He hadn’t cried in a long time, because Damen always felt he was supposed to be the strong one. She knew it to. Everyone knew it. Damen was the fearless one, the one who held her up right and fixed her when she fell down. And now she was holding him up, holding him when he felt so broken. There weren’t many things that could tear him down like this. But just the thought of him being the one to hurt Janie, let along kill her, was tearing him apart. Once she brought her arms around him, he clung to her, clung to her soft scent and the sound of her beating heart against her chest. She was alive. She was okay.

But in his mind. She was dead. She was still on the floor in a pool of blood, eye open and terrified, but forever frozen. And his hands were the things that had done this to her. He fought back the urge to scream again and instead tried to calm his breathing, which was heavy and unsteady against her warm body. “I’m sorry. I’m a monster.” He said, and though his instincts told him to push her away and run, the amount of fear racing through him was enough for hi to ignore that. He needed her calming touch to soothe him. He hoped it worked with fear the same way it did anger, because he felt like this was suffocating him. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.” He said, tears starting to flow again. “I couldn’t stop.” 

Damen’s expectations of himself were, despite the fact she would never admit it, the same exact expectations that Janie held for him. She expected for Damen to be the strong one who could protect her on any physical or emotional level and that he would never be the one to break down. In all honesty, she knew that he felt the same way about himself and most of the time, it was true. Of course he was allowed to break down a little bit now and again and it wasn’t like she was angry, but instead a little scared because she knew that him doing this meant that things were very, very wrong. Whatever had happened in his dream had scared him to no ends and forced tears out of his eyes as he struggled with the fact that he was no longer in his dream but in reality. Or rather, that his dream had not been reality. Knowing how hard this was just by the way his breath seemed to catch and how he was suddenly helpless in her arms, Janie ran a hand over his hair soothingly and emitted a soft ‘shhhh’ from her lips. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she told him, her voice careful though she was even a little jarred from this. The fact that he was so upset was scary to her but she did her best to hide it, because at this moment, it was not about her. For a seventeen year old, her ability to handle this the right was pretty impressive. “You’re not a monster out here. You haven’t hurt me, you haven’t touched me, you haven’t done anything to cry about.” Holding him a little closer, Janie’s mussed curls brushed against the skin of his cheek. After having slept, they weren’t as orderly as usual and neither was his hair which was soft yet tangled under her palm. “Whatever happened in your dream,” Janie began, a hint of a question in her voice. She wanted to know what it was that had him crying so hard and what was so terrible that it could bring him down so quickly and so dramatically. But she would not press. Perhaps saying it out loud would only cost more and tear him apart further and Janie, Janie didn’t want to see that happen to him. “It doesn’t matter now. You can’t control your dreams.” She felt as though Damen might need a reminder of that.

Listening to her carefully, Damen felt himself returning from his hysteria. Dreams. Yes, it was only just a dream. Janie was here, alive and safe and holding him together like she always was. It was nothing but a nightmare. Nothing but his worst fear playing out before him. He tried to keep that in mind as he worked to slow his breathing back to normal, though he stayed firmly in place, his arms still clinging to the fabric of her pajamas. He needed her. She was his anchor here, keeping him from slipping back into that horrible world, the one where she was dead and he was at fault. The one where her screams bounced off the walls, ignored as another fist came down on her fragile form. The fist belonged to him. He was a monster. The images replayed in his mind once more. 

“I’m so sorry.” He repeated once more, burying his face in the crook of her neck. He was sure that by now she’d be getting frustrated with him for apologizing for what she said was a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It all felt real. The cool feeling of her arm when he’d reached for her, the warm blood on his hands, the pang in his heart every time she screamed in pain. If anything this was the dream. This, this calm feeling of her arms and her soothing words, he didn’t deserve either of them. He was a monster and he’d beaten her to death. He’d killed her. “Please don’t stop talking.” He pleaded, his voice muffled against her skin. Her words were the only things helping him out of this mess. He wanted to believe that this was the reality he lived in, honestly, he did. It had all just felt a little too real, and he just needed a little more time to recover from it all. 

Janie would never be able to guess what it was that Damen had woke up screaming about. She had no idea what went on in his head during times like that, only that whatever he saw was horrid to him and sent an icy fear through his eyes. She wasn’t sure what would make him cry, other than that it was definitely about her and that it definitely hurt him, scared him to no ends. It was bad, that was all she knew and seeing that he didn’t seem to react very much toward the question part of the response, she assumed that she would never get to know. All she could do was help him as much as she could right now and make sure that the tears stopped their flow. Scared to hurt him more than he already was and more concerned than frustrated, she ran her hand over the back of his head again and again, holding him closer.

“It’s alright, Damen. You don’t have to be sorry,” she replied, her voice soft and careful but always there, just as he had wanted from her. Janie wasn’t sure how she was supposed to go about this, if she was supposed to keep reminding him of reality or get his mind off whatever it was that had scared him so that his eyes would soften and they could get back to sleep. Or maybe they wouldn’t get back to sleep because of what had happened, but they could do something else. If there was no other thing to do at whatever early hour this was, she would sit with him on the couch as he played Dead Space, either keeping quiet despite her fear toward the game, or whimpering in reaction so that he’d feel a need to protect her.  Which was better for the situation, she was unsure. “Do you want to go do something else, Damen? Would it calm you down a little bit? Nothing happened, but if you’d rather get your mind off your dream, we can go to the living room. I can make you coffee, or an early breakfast.”

“No.” He replied almost immediately, pulling her closer and holding her tighter, scared that she’d leave, that the beating of her heart wouldn’t be against this ears anymore, and well, he’d have no evidence that he hadn’t killed her. “Stay. I want to stay here with you. Don’t go.” He was sure he sounded a little more than insane, his sentences breaking up a little. He had meant to keep the last part to himself, because he was trying his best to act like he understood it had been a dream, and begging her not to go made it sound like he was still clinging to the idea that she would disappear and be gone like she was in his dream. Which, he was, but she didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to tell her that he wasn’t quite sure he believed her when she said it was only a dream.

The tears picked up again, and he pressed face against her skin, stifling a sob from deep within his throat. “Please don’t go.” He was losing it again, his heart convincing him he’d just seen her dead on the floor, and that this was the dream now, despite what his brain told him. He couldn’t make sense of anything. All he knew was that it hurt, and either he’d killed Janie or it had all been some twisted nightmare, and she was holding him now. Either way, he didn’t want her to leave. He couldn’t hold himself together right now. Not without her. She was what was tying him together at the moment and without her, well, he didn’t even want to think about it. Now it was his turn to whimper, his eyes wide open in fear of slipping back into the place where she was gone. 

What Janie wanted desperately now was for her boyfriend to stop crying. She wanted his sobs to be over and for her to be able to let go with knowing that he would be alright (not that she didn’t want to hold him, she did) and to have him stop feeling so dependent in her arms because it made her world feel strange and off. She wanted him to be happy, happy as she always seemed to make him, though he was looking at her for more of a comfort than anything else right now. She was not going anyway. She would hold onto him if he asked and she would do whatever he wanted her to do because she was too scared to let him fall harder. She loved him. Nodding with a bit more urgency as she felt him begin to cry again, Janie moved her hand from her hair to his back, soft circles as she tried to get him to calm down. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” she claimed quickly. “I’m right here, I’m not leaving. I won’t ever leave you.”

That was something that was very, very true. Neither Damen nor Janie could ever leave each other for even the smallest period of time, because while it seemed like he was the one who was most fragile right now, she was usually just as frail, very easily broken. Him walking out the door without intents to be home at least by the end of the day would drive her mad, especially if she couldn’t communicate with him. She would cry. Hell, she was almost crying right now because of the way Damen was helpless and sad. She wanted to cry because he was crying and because it hurt her that he was this way, but she didn’t. Janie was never very strong but right now, she would be as strong as she possibly could be. She kissed him on the top of the head and moved a little bit closer. “I’m right here, holding you. This isn’t something you can make up, Damen. I’m right here. Believe me, this is real, right here.” She closed her eyes and kissed the top of his head again. “Right here.”

“But you’re not.” He said, shaking his head against her warm skin, and pulling away a little so that he could look at her. “You’re not here.” He said, shaking his head again, his eyes looking for hers in the darkness as he tried to make her understand. “You’re dead because I killed you. You’re on the floor and you’re broken because I hit you. You’re gone because I’m a monster.” By now he was shaking, and though he was doing his best to wipe the tears with the back of his hand, they kept coming and he felt so stupid for crying. Because he was supposed to be the strong. But perhaps he was too strong. Too strong for his own good, and with a temper like his, his strength was a curse.

After a short moment, Damen pulled his hands back over his eyes. He was ashamed. Ashamed because of what he had done, whether it had been real or not. Ashamed because he had been crying in front of her and she was hurting too. He could hear it in her voice as she tried to calm him down. But how do you calm someone who had just seem them self murder the one they loved? How do you make the pain go away after seeing them lifeless on the floor. It was his worst fear. That he’d hurt Janie, hurt her beyond repair. “I’m sorry, baby girl.” 

Janie’s spine grew rigid and she froze, froze as he revealed just what it was that he had dreamed about, what had seemingly driven him to insanity and instability today. Her eyes closed and she bit her lip, trying to process what he had said. In his dream, he had killed her. In his dream, he had beat her until she was dead and had images of her murder in his mind and by his own hand, nonetheless. She could understand why he was so horrified with himself earlier. It made sense to her why he had been crying so heavily and so hopelessly, holding onto her as though she weren’t real at all. She was supposed to be dead, at least in his mind and she tried to suck that away and remember herself that such was just Damen’s dream and move to remind him of that. 

“You haven’t killed me, Damen,” she whispered, her voice a little weakened with Damen’s confession and hushed as she thought about it again. He had killed her in her dream and that had been what shook him so badly that he seemed to have lost quite a bit of himself in no more than a few minutes. She knew that he was terrified that he would hurt her like that. She knew that ever since they had first started dating, he’d felt as though he were a loose cannon that could explode at any minute and that he was terrified of hurting her. She remembered when he shoved her, that one time. She remembered how she had tripped over her own feet and how he declared himself a monster, breaking every dish and mirror in his home in her absence. She remembered crying and finally, she remembered how he was so scared of himself for a while, just being around her. Damen was scared to hurt, scared that he himself would do it to his lovely girlfriend. Janie was not scared of him, though. “I may have been dead then, but I’m alive right now. Right here with you.” Janie stared at him, her having not have reached toward him to pull him back. “Looking at you right now. It doesn’t matter what happened in your dream, Damen. Your mind’s tricking you, that’s all.”

If that were true at all, his mind was doing a pretty good job, because he was still very much convinced that he’d murdered her. He still felt like he’d lost her, like he’d lost himself. He felt empty and destroyed and like he could explode at any second, just like she’d said. Janie always knew him too well. Janie always knew what was going on in Damen’s head before it actually happened. He wondered if she knew what his next question was. “Are you mad at me?” He asked, peaking out of the shield he’d made from his fingers with glistening eyes. She had to be mad at him. He’d hurt her, he’d broken her skin and ripped her apart, painting the room around them with her scarlet colored blood. 

“I didn’t want to. I swear, I wanted to stop. I couldn’t. I tried and I tried and I tried but I couldn’t. I watched you die. I watched and waited until you stopped moving. Until you stopped breathing and then I tried to help.” He explained shakily, though he knew he didn’t deserve her mercy. She should be mad, even if it was just a dream. What kind of sick person dreams of killing their girlfriend? “But you were gone and I was too late and…and.” He didn’t know what else to say but he felt he had to tell her, had to explain because she at least deserved that much. “And it hurts, Janie. It hurts so much. Please make it better. Make the pain stop.” He begged, his hands making their way back up to his head and his fingers snaking into fists in his hair. “Make the monster go away.” 

Damen spoke like a child, scared out of his mind by his own wrongdoing as he stared at her pleadingly. She hated it, hated what his own mind had done to him and how scared and upset he was because of it. She hated that she knew his eyes still shined with that of tears and hated that she was sitting in the dark, trying to find a way to get it into his head that he had not killed her. He had not murdered her nor had he hit her nor had he stood by whenever she needed him. Shaking her head quickly, disregarding of quite a few of his questions and instead taking the moment to reach to the far left and click on one of the lamps. They needed light. She needed to be able to see him in the cruel night and make sure that she could get the words into his head. She grabbed him by the shoulders.

His eyes were red, glistening with tears that refused to stop pouring from them. They were dark and scared, terrified in a way that she had never seen him before and never wanted to see him again. Damen deserved to be happy and alright, not on the edge of another sob because he seemed to truly believe that this was not reality, but a dream that had taken him over cruelly after forcing him to murder the same girl. She would not let him believe that anymore. Staring into his eyes, hers blue and his brown, Janie said her words very clearly and carefully. “I’m not mad at you. I have no reason to be. You may not have been able to do anything about what was happening, but that doesn’t matter now. I know it hurts, I know you think you’re the enemy here but you haven’t done anything. Look into my eyes, look at how alive I am—you haven’t done anything. Please stop crying, please.” Her voice was a little weaker there. “I don’t want to have to watch you cry, Damen. That hurts too.” She exhaled heavily and bit her lip.

That seemed to help, seemed to pull him a little bit from this bout of insanity. It was hurting her. And now he could help. He could make things better this time. Protecting Janie was something Damen knew how to do, and if he could, he would help her in any way. He would do anything for her, anything. Especially after the whole disaster in his mind. Squinting a bit in the sudden light, Damen locked eyes with her and nodded, his fingers losing grip on his hair as he listened to her. Just hearing how weak she sounded reminded him of how she needed him, how he couldn’t be weak. She needed him to be the strong one. “I’ll stop.” Was all he said. And with that, he wiped his tears and put on a brave face. Janie needed him to be strong. Crying was only hurting her more. He would do anything if it meant keeping Janie happy.

That was why Damen and Janie were so good together. They were so willing to sacrifice everything, even their emotions, just to see that the other was okay. Janie was holding herself together for him, and now he would return the favor. “I’m sorry, baby. Are you alright?” He was sure he must have scared her, just by the shake in her voice that had started to break through. But he couldn’t hold it back, and he knew she understood that, but it didn’t make it any easier for him to see her looking so upset about him. She didn’t deserve to worry so much. She didn’t deserve to be woken up at this hour to the crying form of the one person who was meant to protect her. She deserved better, and so that was what he would be for her. Better. Stronger. 

It wasn’t necessarily as though Damen really needed to be that much of a rock for Janie, because it wasn’t as though she had a real reason to be crying. Her sobs only sprung from his, sadness meeting her in a quiet empathy and bleeding into her veins as she realized just what it was that had forced such restless tears out of his eyes. She was necessarily sad but neutral, calming down a little as he put on that brave face and wiped the last of the tears from his eyes. It didn’t cure his image completely, for not everything had faded out of his eyes and they were still reddened with the bouts of tears, but he looked a little better and a little more familiar. Nodding her head, Janie leaned forward to kiss him in reply.

The action was very quick and very simple. Her lips met his and she pressed them with a little more persistence than usual, though she was fairly normal and calm. She let their breath mingle for no more than a few seconds before she pulled away to look at him. “You worry about me too much.” She let out a soft breath and leaned forward to tidy his hair, which had been mussed out of place. She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t done so, for she had always fixed his hair. They could have even just had the hottest and most lustful sex in the world, and she would still reach over toward the end and fix his dampened hair, wet from his sweat. “I’m fine. I just want to make sure you are as well.” There was no tiredness in her eyes anymore, for such had been stolen away with the night’s events and Janie knew that she’d settle with just laying with him, or going out to the living room until the both of them needed to rest again. “Are you… are you going to be alright?”

If there was one thing that Janie loved about life as much as she loved Damen, it was the fact that sights of Winter withered away and left a fresh clean Spring underneath. As the months had grown warmer, Janie had bathed in her last few months of senior year, it lightweight and without worry, for it did not matter whether or not she did well in school, for she had already been accepted into college no matter what her grades were. She glided through the last few weeks, with the weather growing warmer as it swelled with high temperatures and warmed up the few lakes that they were surrounded by, the heat even slipping into Maine’s oceans, which Janie did not spend much time in but appreciated anyway. Even better, Janie had already graduated from high school, cap and gown and all and had been freed for the summer. It was a nice one, the kind where you would just lay around some days and be held by the most loving of roommates, who would take you out on other days to make sure that your last real summer wasn’t wasted.

Janie loved spending time with Damen. The two of them had growing irrevocably close during the past couple years, the two becoming sort of like a lock and key, one useless without the other. Even more than that, the two of them fit with the same smooth slip, her spaces filled with his protection and strength, his with her ability to calm and that sweet feeling he felt overcome him once he found himself staring into her blue eyes. Neither of them took to wasting their summer and would be up, driving to different cities and going out for walks around the city, spending a day or two at the beach and eating ice cream by the bay. The only problem with that was the fact that such excursions often tired the two of them out and as soon as they got home, Janie found herself collapsing onto the bed, Damen falling next to her a few minutes after, arm naturally curled around he waist. After having spent a day in the city, Janie had fallen asleep last night almost once her head hit the pillow and had been sleeping soundly since, her breathing deep and relaxed.

Damen had been waiting for this for quite some time, him growing more and more impatient as the days passed, getting closer to summer. Closer to the days when Janie would be home all day and he could keep her in bed with him for as long as he wanted. Where he wouldn’t have to wait for her to come home, only to have to wait for her to get homework done. He had been acting a bit like a puppy, to be honest, always trailing behind her when she wandered around, trying to spend as much time as possible with her. Needless to say, without school, Damen didn’t have very much to do on his own, so every second Janie was home was something he tried to cherish, to make the most of. But now it was summer and every second of the day was filled with her beautiful eyes and her vanilla sent, and Damen couldn’t be happier. He still followed her around like a lost puppy, but without so much need for attention now. He could deal without her for a few moments, and her leaving didn’t leave him with so much sorrow anymore, because he knew that she’d be back soon and maybe the next day she wouldn’t leave at all. So, essentially, life was good. 

Damen couldn’t say the same for his dreams. Now Damen, he was used to having nightmares, because the boy was afraid of a fair amount of things, but lately he’d had a long stretch without them, and once one hit him, it hit him with full force. He was hurting Janie. He could see himself, standing over her form, eyes wild with anger and muscles tense as ever, standing over her quivering form. She was crying, screaming, bleeding. And it was his fault. He was hurting her, and he wasn’t stopping now. He grabbed her by her arms and flung her against the wall, a screech escaping her trembling lips at contact.

He wanted to stop it. He wanted to stand between her and this part of him that was out of control and protect her, but he couldn’t. All he could do was watch and wait, powerless like he always seemed to be in this type of horrific nightmare. So he did, he watched her, an ache flaring in his heart every time she screamed as he beat her to the ground, crushing her, inside and out, words flowing freely from this other Damen’s lips like this wasn’t Janie at all. He told her she was worthless, a weakling he didn’t need, but he knew those were lies. He watched and waited for what felt like hours, years, centuries, until she lie limp on the floor, eyes open but vacant, and then he was in his body again, staring down at her with fists covered in her blood. And she was dead. 

And he was screaming in his bed. 

Janie’s dreams were always so pleasant, sweet and soft in taste and comforting as she woke up to find that reality was honestly no worse than whatever she had been dreaming of. Sometimes she had no dream at all but instead a restful night that had her spine relaxed and had her waking up in such a nice manor, Damen’s arms curled around her as she awoke. Today was terribly different. While Janie had slept through a comforting dream in which she went to see a movie and happened to stumble across Andrew Garfield on her way, her wake was not a nice and restful but instead jarring as the jagged sound of Damen’s scream struck through her dream without the slickness of a knife but instead the rugged edge of a chainsaw. Her eyes opened almost immediately as she heard the sound and she found herself turning over on her bed, pulling herself up to a sitting position. The room was dark, it was the middle of the night.

The sound made her think that there was in fact a real danger in here for a moment, though she soon realized that there was nothing and Damen was not the kind who would get scared anyway. Looking over at him now, Janie could only see a black silhouette against blacker night, his back rigid as the sound of the scream faded from his voice, but not from her ears. She sat there still for a moment, the early wake seeming strange as the two of them had not gone through this in a long, long time. And Damen had never awoke her up with such a scream, but more like that of a twist and a twitch or heavier breathing ash e struggled to regain himself. His dream had been bad. She could tell because she tell that his hands were over his face and his breathing was harder as though he couldn’t remember just how to get air to push in and out of his lungs at a good pace. And in a moment, that seemed to spread to her and her breathing grew heavier as she shard his panic a little bit.

Janie reached out a hand to his terrified form, her not pausing for a moment to be afraid and hesitant of what he wanted her to do. He had a nightmare and like always, it would be her job to comfort him and her job to make sure that he was alright. Not that she had woken up after every bad dream but she liked to think she had caught all t he terrible ones and could find a way to pull him back into reality. “Damen…” she began, her voice breathy and soft in the way that she hoped she would not scare him or freak him out in the night. Perhaps his dream had actually left him a physical thing to be scared of, after all, so it was best she avoided what she believed could be wrong at all costs. “Damen, look at me. What’s wrong?” Her voice was very very careful as she spoke, her hand moving up and down on his arm as though that were a small way to comfort him. Seeing no change, she figured that she’d thought wrong.

At feeling her hand against his arm, two parts of him started battling. One part of hi told him to get away, to get as far away from her as he could because he would only hurt her like he did in the dream, that he would beat her to death and she would be gone and it would be his fault. So he had to get up, get out. This was all complete and utter nonsense, but in this state, Damen could think of a million reasons to get up and go, even if it had only just been a dream. (He was still trying to grasp that very idea, that this was reality now, and that had been a dream.) The second part of him wanted to give in to her gentle touch and her pleading words and hold her because she was alive and safe and because he hadn’t killed her. Because it had been a dream. A terrible, terrible dream. 

The second part of him won out, but only because he felt like he couldn’t breathe, because he could feel tears starting to spill because it had felt so real. Because he could still hear her screams, still see her broken body in flashes and still see her vacant blue eyes. So carefully, he pulled his hands from his face and turned to her,  accepting her comfort because he needed to slow his heart, needed to make the images in his mind stop. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.” He said, or rather, repeated as he face her, though her image was blurred y the wetness of his tears, which were now slowly starting to trickle down his cheeks. He should have been ashamed, and he would have, had he not just witnessed himself killing her. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” Was all he said, his breath catching in his throat as the images flashed in front of his eyes again, and he was forced into silence once more, the horror still running through him. 

There had been very few times in the history of Damen and Janie’s relationship that Damen had pushed her away, and each time only ended in more of a disaster. She was a little scared of that once he seemed to hear her, as though she were afraid that the situation would get worse, she wouldn’t get out of him and he’d end up doing something like pushing her and then the two of them would force another fracture through their relationship and one would be forced to leave. The fact that he was moving away from that fact and had instead settled upon allowing himself to succumb to her touch relaxed her. At least, she was relaxed until it hit her that Damen was crying, soft tears slipping down the sides of his face and catching the moonlight from the open window. “Are you crying?” she asked in a soft voice without expecting much of an answer, instead reaching to wipe the tears from his face with the pad of her thumb. 

She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, the lack of light not allowing much more than a shine off his pupils, but she knew that they were filled with horror. It was the fact that tears slid down his face though she had never really seen him cry, and how his voice sounded so apologetic and scared, paralyzed with each word. He was sorry. She had to wonder what he was apologizing about, having no more than the fact that he had said that he was sorry for hurting her. A part of her didn’t want to know what hurting he was talking about, especially if he was reacting this way toward her. “Please don’t cry,” she said quietly, moving a little closer to him to hold him in her arms. Most of time, it was the other way as she was broken down much more easily by daily life, though she couldn’t really say she was happy because of that fact. She’d rather she’d be the one who was upset, not him. He didn’t deserve to be so scared. “It was just a dream. You didn’t hurt me at all, no bruises, no tears.” She held his head to herself, not a bit of tiredness seeping from her eyes. “It was only a dream.”

But there were tears, his own trailing down his cheeks slowly. It was so strange to him. He hadn’t cried in a long time, because Damen always felt he was supposed to be the strong one. She knew it to. Everyone knew it. Damen was the fearless one, the one who held her up right and fixed her when she fell down. And now she was holding him up, holding him when he felt so broken. There weren’t many things that could tear him down like this. But just the thought of him being the one to hurt Janie, let along kill her, was tearing him apart. Once she brought her arms around him, he clung to her, clung to her soft scent and the sound of her beating heart against her chest. She was alive. She was okay.

But in his mind. She was dead. She was still on the floor in a pool of blood, eye open and terrified, but forever frozen. And his hands were the things that had done this to her. He fought back the urge to scream again and instead tried to calm his breathing, which was heavy and unsteady against her warm body. “I’m sorry. I’m a monster.” He said, and though his instincts told him to push her away and run, the amount of fear racing through him was enough for hi to ignore that. He needed her calming touch to soothe him. He hoped it worked with fear the same way it did anger, because he felt like this was suffocating him. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.” He said, tears starting to flow again. “I couldn’t stop.” 

Damen’s expectations of himself were, despite the fact she would never admit it, the same exact expectations that Janie held for him. She expected for Damen to be the strong one who could protect her on any physical or emotional level and that he would never be the one to break down. In all honesty, she knew that he felt the same way about himself and most of the time, it was true. Of course he was allowed to break down a little bit now and again and it wasn’t like she was angry, but instead a little scared because she knew that him doing this meant that things were very, very wrong. Whatever had happened in his dream had scared him to no ends and forced tears out of his eyes as he struggled with the fact that he was no longer in his dream but in reality. Or rather, that his dream had not been reality. Knowing how hard this was just by the way his breath seemed to catch and how he was suddenly helpless in her arms, Janie ran a hand over his hair soothingly and emitted a soft ‘shhhh’ from her lips. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she told him, her voice careful though she was even a little jarred from this. The fact that he was so upset was scary to her but she did her best to hide it, because at this moment, it was not about her. For a seventeen year old, her ability to handle this the right was pretty impressive. “You’re not a monster out here. You haven’t hurt me, you haven’t touched me, you haven’t done anything to cry about.” Holding him a little closer, Janie’s mussed curls brushed against the skin of his cheek. After having slept, they weren’t as orderly as usual and neither was his hair which was soft yet tangled under her palm. “Whatever happened in your dream,” Janie began, a hint of a question in her voice. She wanted to know what it was that had him crying so hard and what was so terrible that it could bring him down so quickly and so dramatically. But she would not press. Perhaps saying it out loud would only cost more and tear him apart further and Janie, Janie didn’t want to see that happen to him. “It doesn’t matter now. You can’t control your dreams.” She felt as though Damen might need a reminder of that.

Listening to her carefully, Damen felt himself returning from his hysteria. Dreams. Yes, it was only just a dream. Janie was here, alive and safe and holding him together like she always was. It was nothing but a nightmare. Nothing but his worst fear playing out before him. He tried to keep that in mind as he worked to slow his breathing back to normal, though he stayed firmly in place, his arms still clinging to the fabric of her pajamas. He needed her. She was his anchor here, keeping him from slipping back into that horrible world, the one where she was dead and he was at fault. The one where her screams bounced off the walls, ignored as another fist came down on her fragile form. The fist belonged to him. He was a monster. The images replayed in his mind once more. 

“I’m so sorry.” He repeated once more, burying his face in the crook of her neck. He was sure that by now she’d be getting frustrated with him for apologizing for what she said was a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It all felt real. The cool feeling of her arm when he’d reached for her, the warm blood on his hands, the pang in his heart every time she screamed in pain. If anything this was the dream. This, this calm feeling of her arms and her soothing words, he didn’t deserve either of them. He was a monster and he’d beaten her to death. He’d killed her. “Please don’t stop talking.” He pleaded, his voice muffled against her skin. Her words were the only things helping him out of this mess. He wanted to believe that this was the reality he lived in, honestly, he did. It had all just felt a little too real, and he just needed a little more time to recover from it all. 

Janie would never be able to guess what it was that Damen had woke up screaming about. She had no idea what went on in his head during times like that, only that whatever he saw was horrid to him and sent an icy fear through his eyes. She wasn’t sure what would make him cry, other than that it was definitely about her and that it definitely hurt him, scared him to no ends. It was bad, that was all she knew and seeing that he didn’t seem to react very much toward the question part of the response, she assumed that she would never get to know. All she could do was help him as much as she could right now and make sure that the tears stopped their flow. Scared to hurt him more than he already was and more concerned than frustrated, she ran her hand over the back of his head again and again, holding him closer.

“It’s alright, Damen. You don’t have to be sorry,” she replied, her voice soft and careful but always there, just as he had wanted from her. Janie wasn’t sure how she was supposed to go about this, if she was supposed to keep reminding him of reality or get his mind off whatever it was that had scared him so that his eyes would soften and they could get back to sleep. Or maybe they wouldn’t get back to sleep because of what had happened, but they could do something else. If there was no other thing to do at whatever early hour this was, she would sit with him on the couch as he played Dead Space, either keeping quiet despite her fear toward the game, or whimpering in reaction so that he’d feel a need to protect her.  Which was better for the situation, she was unsure. “Do you want to go do something else, Damen? Would it calm you down a little bit? Nothing happened, but if you’d rather get your mind off your dream, we can go to the living room. I can make you coffee, or an early breakfast.”

“No.” He replied almost immediately, pulling her closer and holding her tighter, scared that she’d leave, that the beating of her heart wouldn’t be against this ears anymore, and well, he’d have no evidence that he hadn’t killed her. “Stay. I want to stay here with you. Don’t go.” He was sure he sounded a little more than insane, his sentences breaking up a little. He had meant to keep the last part to himself, because he was trying his best to act like he understood it had been a dream, and begging her not to go made it sound like he was still clinging to the idea that she would disappear and be gone like she was in his dream. Which, he was, but she didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to tell her that he wasn’t quite sure he believed her when she said it was only a dream.

The tears picked up again, and he pressed face against her skin, stifling a sob from deep within his throat. “Please don’t go.” He was losing it again, his heart convincing him he’d just seen her dead on the floor, and that this was the dream now, despite what his brain told him. He couldn’t make sense of anything. All he knew was that it hurt, and either he’d killed Janie or it had all been some twisted nightmare, and she was holding him now. Either way, he didn’t want her to leave. He couldn’t hold himself together right now. Not without her. She was what was tying him together at the moment and without her, well, he didn’t even want to think about it. Now it was his turn to whimper, his eyes wide open in fear of slipping back into the place where she was gone. 

What Janie wanted desperately now was for her boyfriend to stop crying. She wanted his sobs to be over and for her to be able to let go with knowing that he would be alright (not that she didn’t want to hold him, she did) and to have him stop feeling so dependent in her arms because it made her world feel strange and off. She wanted him to be happy, happy as she always seemed to make him, though he was looking at her for more of a comfort than anything else right now. She was not going anyway. She would hold onto him if he asked and she would do whatever he wanted her to do because she was too scared to let him fall harder. She loved him. Nodding with a bit more urgency as she felt him begin to cry again, Janie moved her hand from her hair to his back, soft circles as she tried to get him to calm down. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” she claimed quickly. “I’m right here, I’m not leaving. I won’t ever leave you.”

That was something that was very, very true. Neither Damen nor Janie could ever leave each other for even the smallest period of time, because while it seemed like he was the one who was most fragile right now, she was usually just as frail, very easily broken. Him walking out the door without intents to be home at least by the end of the day would drive her mad, especially if she couldn’t communicate with him. She would cry. Hell, she was almost crying right now because of the way Damen was helpless and sad. She wanted to cry because he was crying and because it hurt her that he was this way, but she didn’t. Janie was never very strong but right now, she would be as strong as she possibly could be. She kissed him on the top of the head and moved a little bit closer. “I’m right here, holding you. This isn’t something you can make up, Damen. I’m right here. Believe me, this is real, right here.” She closed her eyes and kissed the top of his head again. “Right here.”

“But you’re not.” He said, shaking his head against her warm skin, and pulling away a little so that he could look at her. “You’re not here.” He said, shaking his head again, his eyes looking for hers in the darkness as he tried to make her understand. “You’re dead because I killed you. You’re on the floor and you’re broken because I hit you. You’re gone because I’m a monster.” By now he was shaking, and though he was doing his best to wipe the tears with the back of his hand, they kept coming and he felt so stupid for crying. Because he was supposed to be the strong. But perhaps he was too strong. Too strong for his own good, and with a temper like his, his strength was a curse.

After a short moment, Damen pulled his hands back over his eyes. He was ashamed. Ashamed because of what he had done, whether it had been real or not. Ashamed because he had been crying in front of her and she was hurting too. He could hear it in her voice as she tried to calm him down. But how do you calm someone who had just seem them self murder the one they loved? How do you make the pain go away after seeing them lifeless on the floor. It was his worst fear. That he’d hurt Janie, hurt her beyond repair. “I’m sorry, baby girl.” 

Janie’s spine grew rigid and she froze, froze as he revealed just what it was that he had dreamed about, what had seemingly driven him to insanity and instability today. Her eyes closed and she bit her lip, trying to process what he had said. In his dream, he had killed her. In his dream, he had beat her until she was dead and had images of her murder in his mind and by his own hand, nonetheless. She could understand why he was so horrified with himself earlier. It made sense to her why he had been crying so heavily and so hopelessly, holding onto her as though she weren’t real at all. She was supposed to be dead, at least in his mind and she tried to suck that away and remember herself that such was just Damen’s dream and move to remind him of that. 

“You haven’t killed me, Damen,” she whispered, her voice a little weakened with Damen’s confession and hushed as she thought about it again. He had killed her in her dream and that had been what shook him so badly that he seemed to have lost quite a bit of himself in no more than a few minutes. She knew that he was terrified that he would hurt her like that. She knew that ever since they had first started dating, he’d felt as though he were a loose cannon that could explode at any minute and that he was terrified of hurting her. She remembered when he shoved her, that one time. She remembered how she had tripped over her own feet and how he declared himself a monster, breaking every dish and mirror in his home in her absence. She remembered crying and finally, she remembered how he was so scared of himself for a while, just being around her. Damen was scared to hurt, scared that he himself would do it to his lovely girlfriend. Janie was not scared of him, though. “I may have been dead then, but I’m alive right now. Right here with you.” Janie stared at him, her having not have reached toward him to pull him back. “Looking at you right now. It doesn’t matter what happened in your dream, Damen. Your mind’s tricking you, that’s all.”

If that were true at all, his mind was doing a pretty good job, because he was still very much convinced that he’d murdered her. He still felt like he’d lost her, like he’d lost himself. He felt empty and destroyed and like he could explode at any second, just like she’d said. Janie always knew him too well. Janie always knew what was going on in Damen’s head before it actually happened. He wondered if she knew what his next question was. “Are you mad at me?” He asked, peaking out of the shield he’d made from his fingers with glistening eyes. She had to be mad at him. He’d hurt her, he’d broken her skin and ripped her apart, painting the room around them with her scarlet colored blood. 

“I didn’t want to. I swear, I wanted to stop. I couldn’t. I tried and I tried and I tried but I couldn’t. I watched you die. I watched and waited until you stopped moving. Until you stopped breathing and then I tried to help.” He explained shakily, though he knew he didn’t deserve her mercy. She should be mad, even if it was just a dream. What kind of sick person dreams of killing their girlfriend? “But you were gone and I was too late and…and.” He didn’t know what else to say but he felt he had to tell her, had to explain because she at least deserved that much. “And it hurts, Janie. It hurts so much. Please make it better. Make the pain stop.” He begged, his hands making their way back up to his head and his fingers snaking into fists in his hair. “Make the monster go away.” 

Damen spoke like a child, scared out of his mind by his own wrongdoing as he stared at her pleadingly. She hated it, hated what his own mind had done to him and how scared and upset he was because of it. She hated that she knew his eyes still shined with that of tears and hated that she was sitting in the dark, trying to find a way to get it into his head that he had not killed her. He had not murdered her nor had he hit her nor had he stood by whenever she needed him. Shaking her head quickly, disregarding of quite a few of his questions and instead taking the moment to reach to the far left and click on one of the lamps. They needed light. She needed to be able to see him in the cruel night and make sure that she could get the words into his head. She grabbed him by the shoulders.

His eyes were red, glistening with tears that refused to stop pouring from them. They were dark and scared, terrified in a way that she had never seen him before and never wanted to see him again. Damen deserved to be happy and alright, not on the edge of another sob because he seemed to truly believe that this was not reality, but a dream that had taken him over cruelly after forcing him to murder the same girl. She would not let him believe that anymore. Staring into his eyes, hers blue and his brown, Janie said her words very clearly and carefully. “I’m not mad at you. I have no reason to be. You may not have been able to do anything about what was happening, but that doesn’t matter now. I know it hurts, I know you think you’re the enemy here but you haven’t done anything. Look into my eyes, look at how alive I am—you haven’t done anything. Please stop crying, please.” Her voice was a little weaker there. “I don’t want to have to watch you cry, Damen. That hurts too.” She exhaled heavily and bit her lip.

damenevahlast:

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damenevahlast:

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If there was one thing that Janie loved about life as much as she loved Damen, it was the fact that sights of Winter withered away and left a fresh clean Spring underneath. As the months had grown warmer, Janie had bathed in her last few months of senior year, it lightweight and without worry, for it did not matter whether or not she did well in school, for she had already been accepted into college no matter what her grades were. She glided through the last few weeks, with the weather growing warmer as it swelled with high temperatures and warmed up the few lakes that they were surrounded by, the heat even slipping into Maine’s oceans, which Janie did not spend much time in but appreciated anyway. Even better, Janie had already graduated from high school, cap and gown and all and had been freed for the summer. It was a nice one, the kind where you would just lay around some days and be held by the most loving of roommates, who would take you out on other days to make sure that your last real summer wasn’t wasted.

Janie loved spending time with Damen. The two of them had growing irrevocably close during the past couple years, the two becoming sort of like a lock and key, one useless without the other. Even more than that, the two of them fit with the same smooth slip, her spaces filled with his protection and strength, his with her ability to calm and that sweet feeling he felt overcome him once he found himself staring into her blue eyes. Neither of them took to wasting their summer and would be up, driving to different cities and going out for walks around the city, spending a day or two at the beach and eating ice cream by the bay. The only problem with that was the fact that such excursions often tired the two of them out and as soon as they got home, Janie found herself collapsing onto the bed, Damen falling next to her a few minutes after, arm naturally curled around he waist. After having spent a day in the city, Janie had fallen asleep last night almost once her head hit the pillow and had been sleeping soundly since, her breathing deep and relaxed.

Damen had been waiting for this for quite some time, him growing more and more impatient as the days passed, getting closer to summer. Closer to the days when Janie would be home all day and he could keep her in bed with him for as long as he wanted. Where he wouldn’t have to wait for her to come home, only to have to wait for her to get homework done. He had been acting a bit like a puppy, to be honest, always trailing behind her when she wandered around, trying to spend as much time as possible with her. Needless to say, without school, Damen didn’t have very much to do on his own, so every second Janie was home was something he tried to cherish, to make the most of. But now it was summer and every second of the day was filled with her beautiful eyes and her vanilla sent, and Damen couldn’t be happier. He still followed her around like a lost puppy, but without so much need for attention now. He could deal without her for a few moments, and her leaving didn’t leave him with so much sorrow anymore, because he knew that she’d be back soon and maybe the next day she wouldn’t leave at all. So, essentially, life was good. 

Damen couldn’t say the same for his dreams. Now Damen, he was used to having nightmares, because the boy was afraid of a fair amount of things, but lately he’d had a long stretch without them, and once one hit him, it hit him with full force. He was hurting Janie. He could see himself, standing over her form, eyes wild with anger and muscles tense as ever, standing over her quivering form. She was crying, screaming, bleeding. And it was his fault. He was hurting her, and he wasn’t stopping now. He grabbed her by her arms and flung her against the wall, a screech escaping her trembling lips at contact.

He wanted to stop it. He wanted to stand between her and this part of him that was out of control and protect her, but he couldn’t. All he could do was watch and wait, powerless like he always seemed to be in this type of horrific nightmare. So he did, he watched her, an ache flaring in his heart every time she screamed as he beat her to the ground, crushing her, inside and out, words flowing freely from this other Damen’s lips like this wasn’t Janie at all. He told her she was worthless, a weakling he didn’t need, but he knew those were lies. He watched and waited for what felt like hours, years, centuries, until she lie limp on the floor, eyes open but vacant, and then he was in his body again, staring down at her with fists covered in her blood. And she was dead. 

And he was screaming in his bed. 

Janie’s dreams were always so pleasant, sweet and soft in taste and comforting as she woke up to find that reality was honestly no worse than whatever she had been dreaming of. Sometimes she had no dream at all but instead a restful night that had her spine relaxed and had her waking up in such a nice manor, Damen’s arms curled around her as she awoke. Today was terribly different. While Janie had slept through a comforting dream in which she went to see a movie and happened to stumble across Andrew Garfield on her way, her wake was not a nice and restful but instead jarring as the jagged sound of Damen’s scream struck through her dream without the slickness of a knife but instead the rugged edge of a chainsaw. Her eyes opened almost immediately as she heard the sound and she found herself turning over on her bed, pulling herself up to a sitting position. The room was dark, it was the middle of the night.

The sound made her think that there was in fact a real danger in here for a moment, though she soon realized that there was nothing and Damen was not the kind who would get scared anyway. Looking over at him now, Janie could only see a black silhouette against blacker night, his back rigid as the sound of the scream faded from his voice, but not from her ears. She sat there still for a moment, the early wake seeming strange as the two of them had not gone through this in a long, long time. And Damen had never awoke her up with such a scream, but more like that of a twist and a twitch or heavier breathing ash e struggled to regain himself. His dream had been bad. She could tell because she tell that his hands were over his face and his breathing was harder as though he couldn’t remember just how to get air to push in and out of his lungs at a good pace. And in a moment, that seemed to spread to her and her breathing grew heavier as she shard his panic a little bit.

Janie reached out a hand to his terrified form, her not pausing for a moment to be afraid and hesitant of what he wanted her to do. He had a nightmare and like always, it would be her job to comfort him and her job to make sure that he was alright. Not that she had woken up after every bad dream but she liked to think she had caught all t he terrible ones and could find a way to pull him back into reality. “Damen…” she began, her voice breathy and soft in the way that she hoped she would not scare him or freak him out in the night. Perhaps his dream had actually left him a physical thing to be scared of, after all, so it was best she avoided what she believed could be wrong at all costs. “Damen, look at me. What’s wrong?” Her voice was very very careful as she spoke, her hand moving up and down on his arm as though that were a small way to comfort him. Seeing no change, she figured that she’d thought wrong.

At feeling her hand against his arm, two parts of him started battling. One part of hi told him to get away, to get as far away from her as he could because he would only hurt her like he did in the dream, that he would beat her to death and she would be gone and it would be his fault. So he had to get up, get out. This was all complete and utter nonsense, but in this state, Damen could think of a million reasons to get up and go, even if it had only just been a dream. (He was still trying to grasp that very idea, that this was reality now, and that had been a dream.) The second part of him wanted to give in to her gentle touch and her pleading words and hold her because she was alive and safe and because he hadn’t killed her. Because it had been a dream. A terrible, terrible dream. 

The second part of him won out, but only because he felt like he couldn’t breathe, because he could feel tears starting to spill because it had felt so real. Because he could still hear her screams, still see her broken body in flashes and still see her vacant blue eyes. So carefully, he pulled his hands from his face and turned to her,  accepting her comfort because he needed to slow his heart, needed to make the images in his mind stop. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.” He said, or rather, repeated as he face her, though her image was blurred y the wetness of his tears, which were now slowly starting to trickle down his cheeks. He should have been ashamed, and he would have, had he not just witnessed himself killing her. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” Was all he said, his breath catching in his throat as the images flashed in front of his eyes again, and he was forced into silence once more, the horror still running through him. 

There had been very few times in the history of Damen and Janie’s relationship that Damen had pushed her away, and each time only ended in more of a disaster. She was a little scared of that once he seemed to hear her, as though she were afraid that the situation would get worse, she wouldn’t get out of him and he’d end up doing something like pushing her and then the two of them would force another fracture through their relationship and one would be forced to leave. The fact that he was moving away from that fact and had instead settled upon allowing himself to succumb to her touch relaxed her. At least, she was relaxed until it hit her that Damen was crying, soft tears slipping down the sides of his face and catching the moonlight from the open window. “Are you crying?” she asked in a soft voice without expecting much of an answer, instead reaching to wipe the tears from his face with the pad of her thumb. 

She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, the lack of light not allowing much more than a shine off his pupils, but she knew that they were filled with horror. It was the fact that tears slid down his face though she had never really seen him cry, and how his voice sounded so apologetic and scared, paralyzed with each word. He was sorry. She had to wonder what he was apologizing about, having no more than the fact that he had said that he was sorry for hurting her. A part of her didn’t want to know what hurting he was talking about, especially if he was reacting this way toward her. “Please don’t cry,” she said quietly, moving a little closer to him to hold him in her arms. Most of time, it was the other way as she was broken down much more easily by daily life, though she couldn’t really say she was happy because of that fact. She’d rather she’d be the one who was upset, not him. He didn’t deserve to be so scared. “It was just a dream. You didn’t hurt me at all, no bruises, no tears.” She held his head to herself, not a bit of tiredness seeping from her eyes. “It was only a dream.”

But there were tears, his own trailing down his cheeks slowly. It was so strange to him. He hadn’t cried in a long time, because Damen always felt he was supposed to be the strong one. She knew it to. Everyone knew it. Damen was the fearless one, the one who held her up right and fixed her when she fell down. And now she was holding him up, holding him when he felt so broken. There weren’t many things that could tear him down like this. But just the thought of him being the one to hurt Janie, let along kill her, was tearing him apart. Once she brought her arms around him, he clung to her, clung to her soft scent and the sound of her beating heart against her chest. She was alive. She was okay.

But in his mind. She was dead. She was still on the floor in a pool of blood, eye open and terrified, but forever frozen. And his hands were the things that had done this to her. He fought back the urge to scream again and instead tried to calm his breathing, which was heavy and unsteady against her warm body. “I’m sorry. I’m a monster.” He said, and though his instincts told him to push her away and run, the amount of fear racing through him was enough for hi to ignore that. He needed her calming touch to soothe him. He hoped it worked with fear the same way it did anger, because he felt like this was suffocating him. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.” He said, tears starting to flow again. “I couldn’t stop.” 

Damen’s expectations of himself were, despite the fact she would never admit it, the same exact expectations that Janie held for him. She expected for Damen to be the strong one who could protect her on any physical or emotional level and that he would never be the one to break down. In all honesty, she knew that he felt the same way about himself and most of the time, it was true. Of course he was allowed to break down a little bit now and again and it wasn’t like she was angry, but instead a little scared because she knew that him doing this meant that things were very, very wrong. Whatever had happened in his dream had scared him to no ends and forced tears out of his eyes as he struggled with the fact that he was no longer in his dream but in reality. Or rather, that his dream had not been reality. Knowing how hard this was just by the way his breath seemed to catch and how he was suddenly helpless in her arms, Janie ran a hand over his hair soothingly and emitted a soft ‘shhhh’ from her lips. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she told him, her voice careful though she was even a little jarred from this. The fact that he was so upset was scary to her but she did her best to hide it, because at this moment, it was not about her. For a seventeen year old, her ability to handle this the right was pretty impressive. “You’re not a monster out here. You haven’t hurt me, you haven’t touched me, you haven’t done anything to cry about.” Holding him a little closer, Janie’s mussed curls brushed against the skin of his cheek. After having slept, they weren’t as orderly as usual and neither was his hair which was soft yet tangled under her palm. “Whatever happened in your dream,” Janie began, a hint of a question in her voice. She wanted to know what it was that had him crying so hard and what was so terrible that it could bring him down so quickly and so dramatically. But she would not press. Perhaps saying it out loud would only cost more and tear him apart further and Janie, Janie didn’t want to see that happen to him. “It doesn’t matter now. You can’t control your dreams.” She felt as though Damen might need a reminder of that.

Listening to her carefully, Damen felt himself returning from his hysteria. Dreams. Yes, it was only just a dream. Janie was here, alive and safe and holding him together like she always was. It was nothing but a nightmare. Nothing but his worst fear playing out before him. He tried to keep that in mind as he worked to slow his breathing back to normal, though he stayed firmly in place, his arms still clinging to the fabric of her pajamas. He needed her. She was his anchor here, keeping him from slipping back into that horrible world, the one where she was dead and he was at fault. The one where her screams bounced off the walls, ignored as another fist came down on her fragile form. The fist belonged to him. He was a monster. The images replayed in his mind once more. 

“I’m so sorry.” He repeated once more, burying his face in the crook of her neck. He was sure that by now she’d be getting frustrated with him for apologizing for what she said was a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It all felt real. The cool feeling of her arm when he’d reached for her, the warm blood on his hands, the pang in his heart every time she screamed in pain. If anything this was the dream. This, this calm feeling of her arms and her soothing words, he didn’t deserve either of them. He was a monster and he’d beaten her to death. He’d killed her. “Please don’t stop talking.” He pleaded, his voice muffled against her skin. Her words were the only things helping him out of this mess. He wanted to believe that this was the reality he lived in, honestly, he did. It had all just felt a little too real, and he just needed a little more time to recover from it all. 

Janie would never be able to guess what it was that Damen had woke up screaming about. She had no idea what went on in his head during times like that, only that whatever he saw was horrid to him and sent an icy fear through his eyes. She wasn’t sure what would make him cry, other than that it was definitely about her and that it definitely hurt him, scared him to no ends. It was bad, that was all she knew and seeing that he didn’t seem to react very much toward the question part of the response, she assumed that she would never get to know. All she could do was help him as much as she could right now and make sure that the tears stopped their flow. Scared to hurt him more than he already was and more concerned than frustrated, she ran her hand over the back of his head again and again, holding him closer.

“It’s alright, Damen. You don’t have to be sorry,” she replied, her voice soft and careful but always there, just as he had wanted from her. Janie wasn’t sure how she was supposed to go about this, if she was supposed to keep reminding him of reality or get his mind off whatever it was that had scared him so that his eyes would soften and they could get back to sleep. Or maybe they wouldn’t get back to sleep because of what had happened, but they could do something else. If there was no other thing to do at whatever early hour this was, she would sit with him on the couch as he played Dead Space, either keeping quiet despite her fear toward the game, or whimpering in reaction so that he’d feel a need to protect her.  Which was better for the situation, she was unsure. “Do you want to go do something else, Damen? Would it calm you down a little bit? Nothing happened, but if you’d rather get your mind off your dream, we can go to the living room. I can make you coffee, or an early breakfast.”

“No.” He replied almost immediately, pulling her closer and holding her tighter, scared that she’d leave, that the beating of her heart wouldn’t be against this ears anymore, and well, he’d have no evidence that he hadn’t killed her. “Stay. I want to stay here with you. Don’t go.” He was sure he sounded a little more than insane, his sentences breaking up a little. He had meant to keep the last part to himself, because he was trying his best to act like he understood it had been a dream, and begging her not to go made it sound like he was still clinging to the idea that she would disappear and be gone like she was in his dream. Which, he was, but she didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to tell her that he wasn’t quite sure he believed her when she said it was only a dream.

The tears picked up again, and he pressed face against her skin, stifling a sob from deep within his throat. “Please don’t go.” He was losing it again, his heart convincing him he’d just seen her dead on the floor, and that this was the dream now, despite what his brain told him. He couldn’t make sense of anything. All he knew was that it hurt, and either he’d killed Janie or it had all been some twisted nightmare, and she was holding him now. Either way, he didn’t want her to leave. He couldn’t hold himself together right now. Not without her. She was what was tying him together at the moment and without her, well, he didn’t even want to think about it. Now it was his turn to whimper, his eyes wide open in fear of slipping back into the place where she was gone. 

What Janie wanted desperately now was for her boyfriend to stop crying. She wanted his sobs to be over and for her to be able to let go with knowing that he would be alright (not that she didn’t want to hold him, she did) and to have him stop feeling so dependent in her arms because it made her world feel strange and off. She wanted him to be happy, happy as she always seemed to make him, though he was looking at her for more of a comfort than anything else right now. She was not going anyway. She would hold onto him if he asked and she would do whatever he wanted her to do because she was too scared to let him fall harder. She loved him. Nodding with a bit more urgency as she felt him begin to cry again, Janie moved her hand from her hair to his back, soft circles as she tried to get him to calm down. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” she claimed quickly. “I’m right here, I’m not leaving. I won’t ever leave you.”

That was something that was very, very true. Neither Damen nor Janie could ever leave each other for even the smallest period of time, because while it seemed like he was the one who was most fragile right now, she was usually just as frail, very easily broken. Him walking out the door without intents to be home at least by the end of the day would drive her mad, especially if she couldn’t communicate with him. She would cry. Hell, she was almost crying right now because of the way Damen was helpless and sad. She wanted to cry because he was crying and because it hurt her that he was this way, but she didn’t. Janie was never very strong but right now, she would be as strong as she possibly could be. She kissed him on the top of the head and moved a little bit closer. “I’m right here, holding you. This isn’t something you can make up, Damen. I’m right here. Believe me, this is real, right here.” She closed her eyes and kissed the top of his head again. “Right here.”

“But you’re not.” He said, shaking his head against her warm skin, and pulling away a little so that he could look at her. “You’re not here.” He said, shaking his head again, his eyes looking for hers in the darkness as he tried to make her understand. “You’re dead because I killed you. You’re on the floor and you’re broken because I hit you. You’re gone because I’m a monster.” By now he was shaking, and though he was doing his best to wipe the tears with the back of his hand, they kept coming and he felt so stupid for crying. Because he was supposed to be the strong. But perhaps he was too strong. Too strong for his own good, and with a temper like his, his strength was a curse.

After a short moment, Damen pulled his hands back over his eyes. He was ashamed. Ashamed because of what he had done, whether it had been real or not. Ashamed because he had been crying in front of her and she was hurting too. He could hear it in her voice as she tried to calm him down. But how do you calm someone who had just seem them self murder the one they loved? How do you make the pain go away after seeing them lifeless on the floor. It was his worst fear. That he’d hurt Janie, hurt her beyond repair. “I’m sorry, baby girl.” 

Janie’s spine grew rigid and she froze, froze as he revealed just what it was that he had dreamed about, what had seemingly driven him to insanity and instability today. Her eyes closed and she bit her lip, trying to process what he had said. In his dream, he had killed her. In his dream, he had beat her until she was dead and had images of her murder in his mind and by his own hand, nonetheless. She could understand why he was so horrified with himself earlier. It made sense to her why he had been crying so heavily and so hopelessly, holding onto her as though she weren’t real at all. She was supposed to be dead, at least in his mind and she tried to suck that away and remember herself that such was just Damen’s dream and move to remind him of that. 

“You haven’t killed me, Damen,” she whispered, her voice a little weakened with Damen’s confession and hushed as she thought about it again. He had killed her in her dream and that had been what shook him so badly that he seemed to have lost quite a bit of himself in no more than a few minutes. She knew that he was terrified that he would hurt her like that. She knew that ever since they had first started dating, he’d felt as though he were a loose cannon that could explode at any minute and that he was terrified of hurting her. She remembered when he shoved her, that one time. She remembered how she had tripped over her own feet and how he declared himself a monster, breaking every dish and mirror in his home in her absence. She remembered crying and finally, she remembered how he was so scared of himself for a while, just being around her. Damen was scared to hurt, scared that he himself would do it to his lovely girlfriend. Janie was not scared of him, though. “I may have been dead then, but I’m alive right now. Right here with you.” Janie stared at him, her having not have reached toward him to pull him back. “Looking at you right now. It doesn’t matter what happened in your dream, Damen. Your mind’s tricking you, that’s all.”

(Source: missingpage5)

damenevahlast:

l00se-change:

If there was one thing that Janie loved about life as much as she loved Damen, it was the fact that sights of Winter withered away and left a fresh clean Spring underneath. As the months had grown warmer, Janie had bathed in her last few months of senior year, it lightweight and without worry, for it did not matter whether or not she did well in school, for she had already been accepted into college no matter what her grades were. She glided through the last few weeks, with the weather growing warmer as it swelled with high temperatures and warmed up the few lakes that they were surrounded by, the heat even slipping into Maine’s oceans, which Janie did not spend much time in but appreciated anyway. Even better, Janie had already graduated from high school, cap and gown and all and had been freed for the summer. It was a nice one, the kind where you would just lay around some days and be held by the most loving of roommates, who would take you out on other days to make sure that your last real summer wasn’t wasted.

Janie loved spending time with Damen. The two of them had growing irrevocably close during the past couple years, the two becoming sort of like a lock and key, one useless without the other. Even more than that, the two of them fit with the same smooth slip, her spaces filled with his protection and strength, his with her ability to calm and that sweet feeling he felt overcome him once he found himself staring into her blue eyes. Neither of them took to wasting their summer and would be up, driving to different cities and going out for walks around the city, spending a day or two at the beach and eating ice cream by the bay. The only problem with that was the fact that such excursions often tired the two of them out and as soon as they got home, Janie found herself collapsing onto the bed, Damen falling next to her a few minutes after, arm naturally curled around he waist. After having spent a day in the city, Janie had fallen asleep last night almost once her head hit the pillow and had been sleeping soundly since, her breathing deep and relaxed.

Damen had been waiting for this for quite some time, him growing more and more impatient as the days passed, getting closer to summer. Closer to the days when Janie would be home all day and he could keep her in bed with him for as long as he wanted. Where he wouldn’t have to wait for her to come home, only to have to wait for her to get homework done. He had been acting a bit like a puppy, to be honest, always trailing behind her when she wandered around, trying to spend as much time as possible with her. Needless to say, without school, Damen didn’t have very much to do on his own, so every second Janie was home was something he tried to cherish, to make the most of. But now it was summer and every second of the day was filled with her beautiful eyes and her vanilla sent, and Damen couldn’t be happier. He still followed her around like a lost puppy, but without so much need for attention now. He could deal without her for a few moments, and her leaving didn’t leave him with so much sorrow anymore, because he knew that she’d be back soon and maybe the next day she wouldn’t leave at all. So, essentially, life was good. 

Damen couldn’t say the same for his dreams. Now Damen, he was used to having nightmares, because the boy was afraid of a fair amount of things, but lately he’d had a long stretch without them, and once one hit him, it hit him with full force. He was hurting Janie. He could see himself, standing over her form, eyes wild with anger and muscles tense as ever, standing over her quivering form. She was crying, screaming, bleeding. And it was his fault. He was hurting her, and he wasn’t stopping now. He grabbed her by her arms and flung her against the wall, a screech escaping her trembling lips at contact.

He wanted to stop it. He wanted to stand between her and this part of him that was out of control and protect her, but he couldn’t. All he could do was watch and wait, powerless like he always seemed to be in this type of horrific nightmare. So he did, he watched her, an ache flaring in his heart every time she screamed as he beat her to the ground, crushing her, inside and out, words flowing freely from this other Damen’s lips like this wasn’t Janie at all. He told her she was worthless, a weakling he didn’t need, but he knew those were lies. He watched and waited for what felt like hours, years, centuries, until she lie limp on the floor, eyes open but vacant, and then he was in his body again, staring down at her with fists covered in her blood. And she was dead. 

And he was screaming in his bed. 

Janie’s dreams were always so pleasant, sweet and soft in taste and comforting as she woke up to find that reality was honestly no worse than whatever she had been dreaming of. Sometimes she had no dream at all but instead a restful night that had her spine relaxed and had her waking up in such a nice manor, Damen’s arms curled around her as she awoke. Today was terribly different. While Janie had slept through a comforting dream in which she went to see a movie and happened to stumble across Andrew Garfield on her way, her wake was not a nice and restful but instead jarring as the jagged sound of Damen’s scream struck through her dream without the slickness of a knife but instead the rugged edge of a chainsaw. Her eyes opened almost immediately as she heard the sound and she found herself turning over on her bed, pulling herself up to a sitting position. The room was dark, it was the middle of the night.

The sound made her think that there was in fact a real danger in here for a moment, though she soon realized that there was nothing and Damen was not the kind who would get scared anyway. Looking over at him now, Janie could only see a black silhouette against blacker night, his back rigid as the sound of the scream faded from his voice, but not from her ears. She sat there still for a moment, the early wake seeming strange as the two of them had not gone through this in a long, long time. And Damen had never awoke her up with such a scream, but more like that of a twist and a twitch or heavier breathing ash e struggled to regain himself. His dream had been bad. She could tell because she tell that his hands were over his face and his breathing was harder as though he couldn’t remember just how to get air to push in and out of his lungs at a good pace. And in a moment, that seemed to spread to her and her breathing grew heavier as she shard his panic a little bit.

Janie reached out a hand to his terrified form, her not pausing for a moment to be afraid and hesitant of what he wanted her to do. He had a nightmare and like always, it would be her job to comfort him and her job to make sure that he was alright. Not that she had woken up after every bad dream but she liked to think she had caught all t he terrible ones and could find a way to pull him back into reality. “Damen…” she began, her voice breathy and soft in the way that she hoped she would not scare him or freak him out in the night. Perhaps his dream had actually left him a physical thing to be scared of, after all, so it was best she avoided what she believed could be wrong at all costs. “Damen, look at me. What’s wrong?” Her voice was very very careful as she spoke, her hand moving up and down on his arm as though that were a small way to comfort him. Seeing no change, she figured that she’d thought wrong.

At feeling her hand against his arm, two parts of him started battling. One part of hi told him to get away, to get as far away from her as he could because he would only hurt her like he did in the dream, that he would beat her to death and she would be gone and it would be his fault. So he had to get up, get out. This was all complete and utter nonsense, but in this state, Damen could think of a million reasons to get up and go, even if it had only just been a dream. (He was still trying to grasp that very idea, that this was reality now, and that had been a dream.) The second part of him wanted to give in to her gentle touch and her pleading words and hold her because she was alive and safe and because he hadn’t killed her. Because it had been a dream. A terrible, terrible dream. 

The second part of him won out, but only because he felt like he couldn’t breathe, because he could feel tears starting to spill because it had felt so real. Because he could still hear her screams, still see her broken body in flashes and still see her vacant blue eyes. So carefully, he pulled his hands from his face and turned to her,  accepting her comfort because he needed to slow his heart, needed to make the images in his mind stop. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.” He said, or rather, repeated as he face her, though her image was blurred y the wetness of his tears, which were now slowly starting to trickle down his cheeks. He should have been ashamed, and he would have, had he not just witnessed himself killing her. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” Was all he said, his breath catching in his throat as the images flashed in front of his eyes again, and he was forced into silence once more, the horror still running through him. 

There had been very few times in the history of Damen and Janie’s relationship that Damen had pushed her away, and each time only ended in more of a disaster. She was a little scared of that once he seemed to hear her, as though she were afraid that the situation would get worse, she wouldn’t get out of him and he’d end up doing something like pushing her and then the two of them would force another fracture through their relationship and one would be forced to leave. The fact that he was moving away from that fact and had instead settled upon allowing himself to succumb to her touch relaxed her. At least, she was relaxed until it hit her that Damen was crying, soft tears slipping down the sides of his face and catching the moonlight from the open window. “Are you crying?” she asked in a soft voice without expecting much of an answer, instead reaching to wipe the tears from his face with the pad of her thumb. 

She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, the lack of light not allowing much more than a shine off his pupils, but she knew that they were filled with horror. It was the fact that tears slid down his face though she had never really seen him cry, and how his voice sounded so apologetic and scared, paralyzed with each word. He was sorry. She had to wonder what he was apologizing about, having no more than the fact that he had said that he was sorry for hurting her. A part of her didn’t want to know what hurting he was talking about, especially if he was reacting this way toward her. “Please don’t cry,” she said quietly, moving a little closer to him to hold him in her arms. Most of time, it was the other way as she was broken down much more easily by daily life, though she couldn’t really say she was happy because of that fact. She’d rather she’d be the one who was upset, not him. He didn’t deserve to be so scared. “It was just a dream. You didn’t hurt me at all, no bruises, no tears.” She held his head to herself, not a bit of tiredness seeping from her eyes. “It was only a dream.”

But there were tears, his own trailing down his cheeks slowly. It was so strange to him. He hadn’t cried in a long time, because Damen always felt he was supposed to be the strong one. She knew it to. Everyone knew it. Damen was the fearless one, the one who held her up right and fixed her when she fell down. And now she was holding him up, holding him when he felt so broken. There weren’t many things that could tear him down like this. But just the thought of him being the one to hurt Janie, let along kill her, was tearing him apart. Once she brought her arms around him, he clung to her, clung to her soft scent and the sound of her beating heart against her chest. She was alive. She was okay.

But in his mind. She was dead. She was still on the floor in a pool of blood, eye open and terrified, but forever frozen. And his hands were the things that had done this to her. He fought back the urge to scream again and instead tried to calm his breathing, which was heavy and unsteady against her warm body. “I’m sorry. I’m a monster.” He said, and though his instincts told him to push her away and run, the amount of fear racing through him was enough for hi to ignore that. He needed her calming touch to soothe him. He hoped it worked with fear the same way it did anger, because he felt like this was suffocating him. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.” He said, tears starting to flow again. “I couldn’t stop.” 

Damen’s expectations of himself were, despite the fact she would never admit it, the same exact expectations that Janie held for him. She expected for Damen to be the strong one who could protect her on any physical or emotional level and that he would never be the one to break down. In all honesty, she knew that he felt the same way about himself and most of the time, it was true. Of course he was allowed to break down a little bit now and again and it wasn’t like she was angry, but instead a little scared because she knew that him doing this meant that things were very, very wrong. Whatever had happened in his dream had scared him to no ends and forced tears out of his eyes as he struggled with the fact that he was no longer in his dream but in reality. Or rather, that his dream had not been reality. Knowing how hard this was just by the way his breath seemed to catch and how he was suddenly helpless in her arms, Janie ran a hand over his hair soothingly and emitted a soft ‘shhhh’ from her lips. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she told him, her voice careful though she was even a little jarred from this. The fact that he was so upset was scary to her but she did her best to hide it, because at this moment, it was not about her. For a seventeen year old, her ability to handle this the right was pretty impressive. “You’re not a monster out here. You haven’t hurt me, you haven’t touched me, you haven’t done anything to cry about.” Holding him a little closer, Janie’s mussed curls brushed against the skin of his cheek. After having slept, they weren’t as orderly as usual and neither was his hair which was soft yet tangled under her palm. “Whatever happened in your dream,” Janie began, a hint of a question in her voice. She wanted to know what it was that had him crying so hard and what was so terrible that it could bring him down so quickly and so dramatically. But she would not press. Perhaps saying it out loud would only cost more and tear him apart further and Janie, Janie didn’t want to see that happen to him. “It doesn’t matter now. You can’t control your dreams.” She felt as though Damen might need a reminder of that.

Listening to her carefully, Damen felt himself returning from his hysteria. Dreams. Yes, it was only just a dream. Janie was here, alive and safe and holding him together like she always was. It was nothing but a nightmare. Nothing but his worst fear playing out before him. He tried to keep that in mind as he worked to slow his breathing back to normal, though he stayed firmly in place, his arms still clinging to the fabric of her pajamas. He needed her. She was his anchor here, keeping him from slipping back into that horrible world, the one where she was dead and he was at fault. The one where her screams bounced off the walls, ignored as another fist came down on her fragile form. The fist belonged to him. He was a monster. The images replayed in his mind once more. 

“I’m so sorry.” He repeated once more, burying his face in the crook of her neck. He was sure that by now she’d be getting frustrated with him for apologizing for what she said was a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It all felt real. The cool feeling of her arm when he’d reached for her, the warm blood on his hands, the pang in his heart every time she screamed in pain. If anything this was the dream. This, this calm feeling of her arms and her soothing words, he didn’t deserve either of them. He was a monster and he’d beaten her to death. He’d killed her. “Please don’t stop talking.” He pleaded, his voice muffled against her skin. Her words were the only things helping him out of this mess. He wanted to believe that this was the reality he lived in, honestly, he did. It had all just felt a little too real, and he just needed a little more time to recover from it all. 

Janie would never be able to guess what it was that Damen had woke up screaming about. She had no idea what went on in his head during times like that, only that whatever he saw was horrid to him and sent an icy fear through his eyes. She wasn’t sure what would make him cry, other than that it was definitely about her and that it definitely hurt him, scared him to no ends. It was bad, that was all she knew and seeing that he didn’t seem to react very much toward the question part of the response, she assumed that she would never get to know. All she could do was help him as much as she could right now and make sure that the tears stopped their flow. Scared to hurt him more than he already was and more concerned than frustrated, she ran her hand over the back of his head again and again, holding him closer.

“It’s alright, Damen. You don’t have to be sorry,” she replied, her voice soft and careful but always there, just as he had wanted from her. Janie wasn’t sure how she was supposed to go about this, if she was supposed to keep reminding him of reality or get his mind off whatever it was that had scared him so that his eyes would soften and they could get back to sleep. Or maybe they wouldn’t get back to sleep because of what had happened, but they could do something else. If there was no other thing to do at whatever early hour this was, she would sit with him on the couch as he played Dead Space, either keeping quiet despite her fear toward the game, or whimpering in reaction so that he’d feel a need to protect her.  Which was better for the situation, she was unsure. “Do you want to go do something else, Damen? Would it calm you down a little bit? Nothing happened, but if you’d rather get your mind off your dream, we can go to the living room. I can make you coffee, or an early breakfast.”

“No.” He replied almost immediately, pulling her closer and holding her tighter, scared that she’d leave, that the beating of her heart wouldn’t be against this ears anymore, and well, he’d have no evidence that he hadn’t killed her. “Stay. I want to stay here with you. Don’t go.” He was sure he sounded a little more than insane, his sentences breaking up a little. He had meant to keep the last part to himself, because he was trying his best to act like he understood it had been a dream, and begging her not to go made it sound like he was still clinging to the idea that she would disappear and be gone like she was in his dream. Which, he was, but she didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to tell her that he wasn’t quite sure he believed her when she said it was only a dream.

The tears picked up again, and he pressed face against her skin, stifling a sob from deep within his throat. “Please don’t go.” He was losing it again, his heart convincing him he’d just seen her dead on the floor, and that this was the dream now, despite what his brain told him. He couldn’t make sense of anything. All he knew was that it hurt, and either he’d killed Janie or it had all been some twisted nightmare, and she was holding him now. Either way, he didn’t want her to leave. He couldn’t hold himself together right now. Not without her. She was what was tying him together at the moment and without her, well, he didn’t even want to think about it. Now it was his turn to whimper, his eyes wide open in fear of slipping back into the place where she was gone. 

What Janie wanted desperately now was for her boyfriend to stop crying. She wanted his sobs to be over and for her to be able to let go with knowing that he would be alright (not that she didn’t want to hold him, she did) and to have him stop feeling so dependent in her arms because it made her world feel strange and off. She wanted him to be happy, happy as she always seemed to make him, though he was looking at her for more of a comfort than anything else right now. She was not going anyway. She would hold onto him if he asked and she would do whatever he wanted her to do because she was too scared to let him fall harder. She loved him. Nodding with a bit more urgency as she felt him begin to cry again, Janie moved her hand from her hair to his back, soft circles as she tried to get him to calm down. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” she claimed quickly. “I’m right here, I’m not leaving. I won’t ever leave you.”

That was something that was very, very true. Neither Damen nor Janie could ever leave each other for even the smallest period of time, because while it seemed like he was the one who was most fragile right now, she was usually just as frail, very easily broken. Him walking out the door without intents to be home at least by the end of the day would drive her mad, especially if she couldn’t communicate with him. She would cry. Hell, she was almost crying right now because of the way Damen was helpless and sad. She wanted to cry because he was crying and because it hurt her that he was this way, but she didn’t. Janie was never very strong but right now, she would be as strong as she possibly could be. She kissed him on the top of the head and moved a little bit closer. “I’m right here, holding you. This isn’t something you can make up, Damen. I’m right here. Believe me, this is real, right here.” She closed her eyes and kissed the top of his head again. “Right here.”

If there was one thing that Janie loved about life as much as she loved Damen, it was the fact that sights of Winter withered away and left a fresh clean Spring underneath. As the months had grown warmer, Janie had bathed in her last few months of senior year, it lightweight and without worry, for it did not matter whether or not she did well in school, for she had already been accepted into college no matter what her grades were. She glided through the last few weeks, with the weather growing warmer as it swelled with high temperatures and warmed up the few lakes that they were surrounded by, the heat even slipping into Maine’s oceans, which Janie did not spend much time in but appreciated anyway. Even better, Janie had already graduated from high school, cap and gown and all and had been freed for the summer. It was a nice one, the kind where you would just lay around some days and be held by the most loving of roommates, who would take you out on other days to make sure that your last real summer wasn’t wasted.

Janie loved spending time with Damen. The two of them had growing irrevocably close during the past couple years, the two becoming sort of like a lock and key, one useless without the other. Even more than that, the two of them fit with the same smooth slip, her spaces filled with his protection and strength, his with her ability to calm and that sweet feeling he felt overcome him once he found himself staring into her blue eyes. Neither of them took to wasting their summer and would be up, driving to different cities and going out for walks around the city, spending a day or two at the beach and eating ice cream by the bay. The only problem with that was the fact that such excursions often tired the two of them out and as soon as they got home, Janie found herself collapsing onto the bed, Damen falling next to her a few minutes after, arm naturally curled around he waist. After having spent a day in the city, Janie had fallen asleep last night almost once her head hit the pillow and had been sleeping soundly since, her breathing deep and relaxed.

Damen had been waiting for this for quite some time, him growing more and more impatient as the days passed, getting closer to summer. Closer to the days when Janie would be home all day and he could keep her in bed with him for as long as he wanted. Where he wouldn’t have to wait for her to come home, only to have to wait for her to get homework done. He had been acting a bit like a puppy, to be honest, always trailing behind her when she wandered around, trying to spend as much time as possible with her. Needless to say, without school, Damen didn’t have very much to do on his own, so every second Janie was home was something he tried to cherish, to make the most of. But now it was summer and every second of the day was filled with her beautiful eyes and her vanilla sent, and Damen couldn’t be happier. He still followed her around like a lost puppy, but without so much need for attention now. He could deal without her for a few moments, and her leaving didn’t leave him with so much sorrow anymore, because he knew that she’d be back soon and maybe the next day she wouldn’t leave at all. So, essentially, life was good. 

Damen couldn’t say the same for his dreams. Now Damen, he was used to having nightmares, because the boy was afraid of a fair amount of things, but lately he’d had a long stretch without them, and once one hit him, it hit him with full force. He was hurting Janie. He could see himself, standing over her form, eyes wild with anger and muscles tense as ever, standing over her quivering form. She was crying, screaming, bleeding. And it was his fault. He was hurting her, and he wasn’t stopping now. He grabbed her by her arms and flung her against the wall, a screech escaping her trembling lips at contact.

He wanted to stop it. He wanted to stand between her and this part of him that was out of control and protect her, but he couldn’t. All he could do was watch and wait, powerless like he always seemed to be in this type of horrific nightmare. So he did, he watched her, an ache flaring in his heart every time she screamed as he beat her to the ground, crushing her, inside and out, words flowing freely from this other Damen’s lips like this wasn’t Janie at all. He told her she was worthless, a weakling he didn’t need, but he knew those were lies. He watched and waited for what felt like hours, years, centuries, until she lie limp on the floor, eyes open but vacant, and then he was in his body again, staring down at her with fists covered in her blood. And she was dead. 

And he was screaming in his bed. 

Janie’s dreams were always so pleasant, sweet and soft in taste and comforting as she woke up to find that reality was honestly no worse than whatever she had been dreaming of. Sometimes she had no dream at all but instead a restful night that had her spine relaxed and had her waking up in such a nice manor, Damen’s arms curled around her as she awoke. Today was terribly different. While Janie had slept through a comforting dream in which she went to see a movie and happened to stumble across Andrew Garfield on her way, her wake was not a nice and restful but instead jarring as the jagged sound of Damen’s scream struck through her dream without the slickness of a knife but instead the rugged edge of a chainsaw. Her eyes opened almost immediately as she heard the sound and she found herself turning over on her bed, pulling herself up to a sitting position. The room was dark, it was the middle of the night.

The sound made her think that there was in fact a real danger in here for a moment, though she soon realized that there was nothing and Damen was not the kind who would get scared anyway. Looking over at him now, Janie could only see a black silhouette against blacker night, his back rigid as the sound of the scream faded from his voice, but not from her ears. She sat there still for a moment, the early wake seeming strange as the two of them had not gone through this in a long, long time. And Damen had never awoke her up with such a scream, but more like that of a twist and a twitch or heavier breathing ash e struggled to regain himself. His dream had been bad. She could tell because she tell that his hands were over his face and his breathing was harder as though he couldn’t remember just how to get air to push in and out of his lungs at a good pace. And in a moment, that seemed to spread to her and her breathing grew heavier as she shard his panic a little bit.

Janie reached out a hand to his terrified form, her not pausing for a moment to be afraid and hesitant of what he wanted her to do. He had a nightmare and like always, it would be her job to comfort him and her job to make sure that he was alright. Not that she had woken up after every bad dream but she liked to think she had caught all t he terrible ones and could find a way to pull him back into reality. “Damen…” she began, her voice breathy and soft in the way that she hoped she would not scare him or freak him out in the night. Perhaps his dream had actually left him a physical thing to be scared of, after all, so it was best she avoided what she believed could be wrong at all costs. “Damen, look at me. What’s wrong?” Her voice was very very careful as she spoke, her hand moving up and down on his arm as though that were a small way to comfort him. Seeing no change, she figured that she’d thought wrong.

At feeling her hand against his arm, two parts of him started battling. One part of hi told him to get away, to get as far away from her as he could because he would only hurt her like he did in the dream, that he would beat her to death and she would be gone and it would be his fault. So he had to get up, get out. This was all complete and utter nonsense, but in this state, Damen could think of a million reasons to get up and go, even if it had only just been a dream. (He was still trying to grasp that very idea, that this was reality now, and that had been a dream.) The second part of him wanted to give in to her gentle touch and her pleading words and hold her because she was alive and safe and because he hadn’t killed her. Because it had been a dream. A terrible, terrible dream. 

The second part of him won out, but only because he felt like he couldn’t breathe, because he could feel tears starting to spill because it had felt so real. Because he could still hear her screams, still see her broken body in flashes and still see her vacant blue eyes. So carefully, he pulled his hands from his face and turned to her,  accepting her comfort because he needed to slow his heart, needed to make the images in his mind stop. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.” He said, or rather, repeated as he face her, though her image was blurred y the wetness of his tears, which were now slowly starting to trickle down his cheeks. He should have been ashamed, and he would have, had he not just witnessed himself killing her. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” Was all he said, his breath catching in his throat as the images flashed in front of his eyes again, and he was forced into silence once more, the horror still running through him. 

There had been very few times in the history of Damen and Janie’s relationship that Damen had pushed her away, and each time only ended in more of a disaster. She was a little scared of that once he seemed to hear her, as though she were afraid that the situation would get worse, she wouldn’t get out of him and he’d end up doing something like pushing her and then the two of them would force another fracture through their relationship and one would be forced to leave. The fact that he was moving away from that fact and had instead settled upon allowing himself to succumb to her touch relaxed her. At least, she was relaxed until it hit her that Damen was crying, soft tears slipping down the sides of his face and catching the moonlight from the open window. “Are you crying?” she asked in a soft voice without expecting much of an answer, instead reaching to wipe the tears from his face with the pad of her thumb. 

She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, the lack of light not allowing much more than a shine off his pupils, but she knew that they were filled with horror. It was the fact that tears slid down his face though she had never really seen him cry, and how his voice sounded so apologetic and scared, paralyzed with each word. He was sorry. She had to wonder what he was apologizing about, having no more than the fact that he had said that he was sorry for hurting her. A part of her didn’t want to know what hurting he was talking about, especially if he was reacting this way toward her. “Please don’t cry,” she said quietly, moving a little closer to him to hold him in her arms. Most of time, it was the other way as she was broken down much more easily by daily life, though she couldn’t really say she was happy because of that fact. She’d rather she’d be the one who was upset, not him. He didn’t deserve to be so scared. “It was just a dream. You didn’t hurt me at all, no bruises, no tears.” She held his head to herself, not a bit of tiredness seeping from her eyes. “It was only a dream.”

But there were tears, his own trailing down his cheeks slowly. It was so strange to him. He hadn’t cried in a long time, because Damen always felt he was supposed to be the strong one. She knew it to. Everyone knew it. Damen was the fearless one, the one who held her up right and fixed her when she fell down. And now she was holding him up, holding him when he felt so broken. There weren’t many things that could tear him down like this. But just the thought of him being the one to hurt Janie, let along kill her, was tearing him apart. Once she brought her arms around him, he clung to her, clung to her soft scent and the sound of her beating heart against her chest. She was alive. She was okay.

But in his mind. She was dead. She was still on the floor in a pool of blood, eye open and terrified, but forever frozen. And his hands were the things that had done this to her. He fought back the urge to scream again and instead tried to calm his breathing, which was heavy and unsteady against her warm body. “I’m sorry. I’m a monster.” He said, and though his instincts told him to push her away and run, the amount of fear racing through him was enough for hi to ignore that. He needed her calming touch to soothe him. He hoped it worked with fear the same way it did anger, because he felt like this was suffocating him. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.” He said, tears starting to flow again. “I couldn’t stop.” 

Damen’s expectations of himself were, despite the fact she would never admit it, the same exact expectations that Janie held for him. She expected for Damen to be the strong one who could protect her on any physical or emotional level and that he would never be the one to break down. In all honesty, she knew that he felt the same way about himself and most of the time, it was true. Of course he was allowed to break down a little bit now and again and it wasn’t like she was angry, but instead a little scared because she knew that him doing this meant that things were very, very wrong. Whatever had happened in his dream had scared him to no ends and forced tears out of his eyes as he struggled with the fact that he was no longer in his dream but in reality. Or rather, that his dream had not been reality. Knowing how hard this was just by the way his breath seemed to catch and how he was suddenly helpless in her arms, Janie ran a hand over his hair soothingly and emitted a soft ‘shhhh’ from her lips. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she told him, her voice careful though she was even a little jarred from this. The fact that he was so upset was scary to her but she did her best to hide it, because at this moment, it was not about her. For a seventeen year old, her ability to handle this the right was pretty impressive. “You’re not a monster out here. You haven’t hurt me, you haven’t touched me, you haven’t done anything to cry about.” Holding him a little closer, Janie’s mussed curls brushed against the skin of his cheek. After having slept, they weren’t as orderly as usual and neither was his hair which was soft yet tangled under her palm. “Whatever happened in your dream,” Janie began, a hint of a question in her voice. She wanted to know what it was that had him crying so hard and what was so terrible that it could bring him down so quickly and so dramatically. But she would not press. Perhaps saying it out loud would only cost more and tear him apart further and Janie, Janie didn’t want to see that happen to him. “It doesn’t matter now. You can’t control your dreams.” She felt as though Damen might need a reminder of that.

Listening to her carefully, Damen felt himself returning from his hysteria. Dreams. Yes, it was only just a dream. Janie was here, alive and safe and holding him together like she always was. It was nothing but a nightmare. Nothing but his worst fear playing out before him. He tried to keep that in mind as he worked to slow his breathing back to normal, though he stayed firmly in place, his arms still clinging to the fabric of her pajamas. He needed her. She was his anchor here, keeping him from slipping back into that horrible world, the one where she was dead and he was at fault. The one where her screams bounced off the walls, ignored as another fist came down on her fragile form. The fist belonged to him. He was a monster. The images replayed in his mind once more. 

“I’m so sorry.” He repeated once more, burying his face in the crook of her neck. He was sure that by now she’d be getting frustrated with him for apologizing for what she said was a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It all felt real. The cool feeling of her arm when he’d reached for her, the warm blood on his hands, the pang in his heart every time she screamed in pain. If anything this was the dream. This, this calm feeling of her arms and her soothing words, he didn’t deserve either of them. He was a monster and he’d beaten her to death. He’d killed her. “Please don’t stop talking.” He pleaded, his voice muffled against her skin. Her words were the only things helping him out of this mess. He wanted to believe that this was the reality he lived in, honestly, he did. It had all just felt a little too real, and he just needed a little more time to recover from it all. 

Janie would never be able to guess what it was that Damen had woke up screaming about. She had no idea what went on in his head during times like that, only that whatever he saw was horrid to him and sent an icy fear through his eyes. She wasn’t sure what would make him cry, other than that it was definitely about her and that it definitely hurt him, scared him to no ends. It was bad, that was all she knew and seeing that he didn’t seem to react very much toward the question part of the response, she assumed that she would never get to know. All she could do was help him as much as she could right now and make sure that the tears stopped their flow. Scared to hurt him more than he already was and more concerned than frustrated, she ran her hand over the back of his head again and again, holding him closer.

“It’s alright, Damen. You don’t have to be sorry,” she replied, her voice soft and careful but always there, just as he had wanted from her. Janie wasn’t sure how she was supposed to go about this, if she was supposed to keep reminding him of reality or get his mind off whatever it was that had scared him so that his eyes would soften and they could get back to sleep. Or maybe they wouldn’t get back to sleep because of what had happened, but they could do something else. If there was no other thing to do at whatever early hour this was, she would sit with him on the couch as he played Dead Space, either keeping quiet despite her fear toward the game, or whimpering in reaction so that he’d feel a need to protect her.  Which was better for the situation, she was unsure. “Do you want to go do something else, Damen? Would it calm you down a little bit? Nothing happened, but if you’d rather get your mind off your dream, we can go to the living room. I can make you coffee, or an early breakfast.”