The Bedside We Seek in the Night [closed]

[fucking_ebay]

Since the last big mess of shared dreams, the memories dredged up and exposed for Gabriel to see have plagued Peter. It's not unusual for him to have nightmares or to dream of vampires, but it's been a while since he last had the kind of dreams he's had the last few nights.

He's hiding under his bed, cringing and crying as quietly as he can as shots ring out a few rooms away. His mother screams and he claps his hands over his ears, expecting the exact moment when she stops screaming because he's relived this memory too many times to count. The setting is achingly familiar yet completely out of his control, his sleeping mind unable to grasp just why he knows what's going to happen, why his gut is twisting itself in knots as the gun goes off again and it's his father's turn to scream.

Usually at this point the dream dissolves into some other terrible memory, or loops around and starts again with him sitting up watching telly with his parents before the monster comes. Tonight's a little different, though. In the way of dreams, time foreshortens itself. Peter trembles and stares at the pair of feet just in front of him, trying to breathe as quietly as he can. It knows he's here. The figure bends down, a smiling face dipping into view, eyes locked onto Peter. "Hey, guy," says Jerry.

Peter's heart seizes and he leaps. Then, suddenly, there's a burst of red light before he's falling into darkness. He hits something soft that seems to reach up and grab him to entangle him and panics, screaming and thrashing against it.

Comments

[essentiallyharmless]

Lucy's doing one of the two things she usually does on any given night: reading a book, wearing pyjamas, with a cup of tea beside her. The other option is that she's drinking, either with Peter, or out in a bar somewhere. Most nights, though, it's just nice to distract herself from the real world with some nice fiction. It's relaxing.

Of course, it would've been more relaxing if there wasn't a great flash of fire and smoke right in front of her, and a body falling on top of her, screaming and flailing. She doesn't have time to scream herself, her whole body immediately tensing up, her blood boiling, and then there's nothing.

Her heart is suddenly pounding as she sits there, looking at her book. She realises she's two pages earlier than she remembers being.

Cottoning on pretty quickly, she tosses the book aside and jumps from her bed, running over to the kitchen. She pulls open a drawer and pulls out the biggest and sharpest knife she can find, before she stepa quickly back towards the bed, holding it as a weapon. She steels herself for what she knows is coming.

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The first time it happens, there's something living moving underneath him when he lands. The second time, the time he will remember as much as he can remember anything that happens between sleeping and waking, there are only the bedclothes swallowing him up, tangling between his bare, kicking legs. His eyes fly open and he suddenly stills, breathing hard as his gaze darts about the room. Everything is just barely familiar enough to make the fact that he doesn't know where he is all the more disconcerting.

His eyes light on a figure holding up a knife and he yelps, reflexively teleporting again even as he tries to get his hands under him and flee in a more conventional fashion. He reappears about a foot further away, on the edge of the bed, where he immediately becomes wedged in the little gap formed by the windowsill.

[essentiallyharmless]

Lucy has just enough time to recognise Peter and his bare arse, before she flinches as he disappears in another flash of light. Well. Not so much disappears as moves slightly to her right.

After a few moments of slightly panicking breathing, she lowers the knife stiffly. "Peter!" she says accusingly, angrily. While she no longer really thinks there's much danger (she hopes), she's not happy.

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Peter returns her look of panic, blood roaring in his ears. He has enough mental acuity now to recognize Lucy and to stop himself from teleporting a third time, though his sleep-fogged brain still can't work out how he came to be here. The room feels unreal to him, Lucy's presence disconcerting.

"The fuck?!" he squawks in return.

[essentiallyharmless]

Well, at least it's definitely him, and not the Doctor. She angrily puts the knife down on her dresser and crosses her arms. She's fairly certain now that he didn't do this on purpose, given his disorientation.

"You just teleported into my bedroom," she informs him sternly, waiting for him to calm down.

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"No." Peter shakes his head, not wanting to believe it. He couldn't have -- he doesn't do that. The last thing he can remember, though, is going to sleep and having a nightmare, and this definitely isn't his own bedroom. "Shit. No."

[essentiallyharmless]

"Yes, shit, yes," she answers firmly. Her anger and fright is starting to ease into sympathy, though, with his continued panic. "Unless I have suddenly gained the power of unintentional summoning, which I highly doubt, given I already know you are capable of teleporting."

She had been reluctant to accept anything happening in dreams as truth, but now it seems she has to. She won't bring it up quite yet, though.

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"No, I'm not," lies Peter, kicking a little as he finds a position in which he can brace himself and pull his rear out of the windowsill. "Do I look like someone who can fucking teleport?" he asks stridently.

[essentiallyharmless]

"Given you have just appeared naked in my room without warning, yes, very much so," she answers, with just a hint of amusement at him actually trying to deny it. And so very poorly, too. "Gabriel told me," she adds, to explain how she knows.

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Hey, give him a break, he just woke up. Peter scowls, wishing he were back in his own bed but not daring to try to go back the way he came. "Of course he did," he says with the air of a martyr. "Do you always keep it this cold in here?"

[essentiallyharmless]

She'll take that as him admitting to it, then. She rolls her eyes and opens the door to her closet, and pulls out a robe, tossing it to him. "There's tea in the windowsill," she offers him, then picks up the knife and carries it back to the kitchen. While there, she takes out another mug, and pours hot water in it from the kettle, and drops a teabag into it. Returning to the bed, she sets the mug in the bookcase next to her bed, before joining Peter in bed. She has a feeling he might need some calming company right now. And she happens to have a few questions, too.

[fucking_ebay]

Peter extends a hand to catch the robe, but succeeds mostly in just deflecting it from hitting his face. He kneels up and pulls it on while she's busy, and tries not to think about why he's here. The leering face of the vampire still looms in front of him when he stops concentrating on arguing with Lucy.

He scoots up against the headboard, putting the reassuring solidity of its bars and the wall behind him before he reaches for the tea he miraculously failed to knock over with his arse.

[essentiallyharmless]

Lucy settles in next to him, her shoulder touching his, to be a comforting, physical presence, without being too invasive. She tugs the covers over them both, before picking up her own tea. Perhaps he'd prefer alcohol, but it's the day before allowance, so she's been saving her money.

"I take it you don't really want to deal with your new ability," she says after a few moments.

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Peter can't help the bark of bitter laughter that comes out of him. He'd been worried she'd ask why he had teleported into her bed -- for once, the power itself isn't the worst thing she could want to talk about. "What gave you that idea?" he asks.

[essentiallyharmless]

Oh she still might, but she didn't think he'd answer it if she opened with it. Anyway, it's all connected. "Why?" she asks, even though she has an inkling. "Seems like it could be quite a useful thing, once you gain some more control over it." She takes a tentative sip of tea.

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"Or it could kill me before I can learn how," he points out, getting serious again. He's never actually teleported into anything that would, but every time he thinks about it, he has visions of appearing inside a wall or at the bottom of a lake. He still doesn't know how it works, either, and is unlikely to figure it out. Magic tricks are all fun and games until they stop being tricks.

[essentiallyharmless]

"Which is why you have to deal with it," she answers reasonably. "Surely it's better if you gain some control over it. Not come barging into people's bedrooms and frighten the shit out of them." Despite her words, she doesn't sound particularly angry about it right now. "What brought that on, by the way?" See, there it is.

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"Get the shit frightened out of me, you mean," he corrects her gruffly, sidestepping the question. "I was here for what, five seconds before you pulled a knife on me?"

[essentiallyharmless]

She doesn't correct him, that thank you, she had the knife before he got here, because she doesn't really want to explain her power. She thinks the reason WHY she pulled a knife was obvious.

And given his nudity, the time of day, and his disorientation, she'd say he was asleep. It's either that, or having sex with someone, but again, given his nudity, she'd probably be able to tell. And he's not drunk. And he was frightened before she pulled the knife.

"Were you having a nightmare about your parents?" she asks astutely. It might be about something else, of course, but this is also a way to bring up the whole dream thing. He hasn't told her in waking moments, after all.

[fucking_ebay]

Were he aware, Peter would think Lucy is being incredibly unfair. Being unaware, he still thinks she's being incredibly unfair by demanding answers of him when he's obviously not in the mood to give them.

He flinches and nearly spills his tea down his lap. "No," he says, back to the strident tone from before. "Why would I have nightmares about my parents? I'm not twelve, Lucy."

[essentiallyharmless]

And Peter continues to prove himself a terrible liar. She puts a hand on his, partly to stop him from spilling tea in her bed. "Your parents were killed when you were nine, that's not something you stop dreaming about just because you become a teenager, or an adult for that matter," she says, her softness contrasting his tone, looking at him sympathetically.

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"You shouldn't know that," says Peter, refusing to look at her. He remembers at least the gist of the dreams, though, as much as he's tried to forget and to tell himself he didn't really share so much with the real Lucy. "Guess that'll teach me to think I've got any privacy in my head."

[essentiallyharmless]

Lucy sighs and resists arguing that he was the one who told her. It's not like she saw something he didn't want to share - at that point, anyway. She may be inquisitive, but she doesn't force him to share.

She takes the mug out of his hand and sets them both in the bookshelf, since he doesn't seem to want to drink any of it. She's not exactly sure why he's so prickly, when Lucy's neither mocked him nor shared his secrets with anyone. So instead of arguing the case, she leans against him, wrapping arm around his waist, and resting her head on his shoulder. Physical comfort is something they've gotten quite familiar with, even if most times they have the excuse of sex.

[fucking_ebay]

"Hey --" Peter starts to protest, since just because he didn't want his tea doesn't mean she gets to take it away from him. He takes in a surprised breath when she simply cuddles into him instead of arguing back. He knows she found out because he told her, not because she saw something private like certain people who have visited his mind, but on some level it appalls him that he's voluntarily let anyone in on his secrets.

He sighs back and puts his arm around her in return. "I wasn't sure that conversation was real," he explains reluctantly.

[essentiallyharmless]

Lucy has started to learn when to argue and when to comfort. Sometimes he really does act like a dick, and a good scolding is in order, since she refuses to be pushed around by him. And sometimes it's just a self-preservation method, lashing out to keep her at arm's length, which she refuses to let him do.

"Neither was I," she answers. Of course, this means that she's admitting to the things he's seen of her life, too. It's a bit freeing, to have him know. She was never particularly secret about the abusiveness of her husband, but the details are more painful. "It was nice, though," she adds. "The sex, too." Like, that was some really good sex. They should try that more often.