Chapter Text
Dreams are terrifying.
Images and sounds drifted through her mind without making sense, yet carrying a strange familiarity. Every night, Yelena fought against the temptation to close her eyes and plunge into herself. And every night, she lost the battle, falling without pause as she feared the violence of her own unconscious, watching the shadows of her hell stretch out, forcing the safety of her heaven to retreat.
Powerless, Yelena watches the deep darkness that claims her expand and transform, take on colors and shapes, and fragment into a million pieces. She sees herself divided into fleeting images: brown hair and golden eyes, a tight embrace and lightning branching through clouds on a stormy night. And the sky. A dark sky, with soft hints of lilac, stretching as far as the world extends.
It is a mystery with no solution why her mind associates the comfort of a home with the planet’s atmosphere. The sky was nothing more than an infinite space in which the stars are located and move. Family was merely the reflection of a perfect familial model, immortalized in a photograph that did not reveal the fractured decay within.
I miss you.
Those words were more painful than a cut from a knife.
Yelena used to think of dreams as a simple emotional processing mechanism of the brain: images that meant nothing because they weren’t real. But that was before she began to be haunted by flashes of a man completely shrouded in shadows, reaching a hand out toward her.
Sometimes, Yelena dreamed she was in an elevator. The doors would open, and before her appeared an immense room, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass windows that revealed the city of New York. A man stood silently by the windows, staring at the city with his hands clasped behind his back. His face was a formless void. He never turned, nor did he abandon that position. The act seemed almost deliberate, as if he wanted to keep his identity a secret.
All he allowed to be revealed was his voice, always uttering the same word.
Yelena .
Her name reverberated through the room as if hundreds of voices were whispering, emotionally, in her direction. She shivered, but did not let it stop her from closing the distance between them. She was far too determined in her purpose to fear his presence. With each step, her eyes curiously scanned parts of the darkness that surrounded him, searching for a glimpse of his features.
I hope that one day you can forgive me.
His head moved slightly to the side, as if waiting for a response. But what could she possibly say?
No matter how many times she tried to reach him or how close she came to finally giving a face to the void, just seconds before touching it, a surge would always erupt, and the entire environment would disintegrate into tiny particles, transforming into a distorted shadow. Her eyelids opened, and her return to consciousness was marked by a muffled scream that tore through the silence.
It was never the act of dreaming that terrified Yelena, but what those dreams meant — what came after they faded.
She blinked, disoriented and confused, sucking air forcefully into her lungs. The skin on the back of her neck was goosebumps, and her heart was racing. Her eyes moved from side to side, searching for a glimpse of her surroundings, but something was wrong with them. Her vision seemed out of focus, like a damaged lens. Small, glittering points of light amid a dark blur were all Yelena could make out of the world around her. A hiccup rose in her throat with such force that it felt like a cough.
She blinked repeatedly, trying to clear the murky veil from her eyes, while a distant, muffled sound buzzed faintly in her ears. It seemed familiar, urban, but it was hard to say exactly what it meant. Her brain felt like it was made of cotton; it throbbed. Yelena was so exhausted that she felt nauseous. The half-eaten dinner churned in her stomach.
Her blouse absorbed the moisture while the cold wind licked the bare skin of her arms. Somewhere deep in her foggy mind, she tried to understand why she felt so cold if the sweat was supposed to make her feel warm. Her hands groped the surface beneath her, hoping to find wet sheets and a furry shape that used to curl up near her feet at night. But what she found, instead, was unexpected and desolate — a heavy punch to the stomach, hard to recover from quickly.
Two diazepam pills were supposed to ensure that not even the strongest sensory stimuli could wake her. A month without sleep and everything was beginning to unravel. More than tormented, Yelena was starting to feel desperate.
All attempts to put an end to the nightmares yielded nothing. It seemed that the more determined she became to fight them, the worse they got. Opening her eyes in the morning and facing the landscape waiting for her on the other side had become the boogeyman under her bed.
They were like isolated pieces of a puzzle with missing parts. The portions she controlled offered no clue as to the figure being formed. Although the edges seemed almost complete, the center remained a disturbing void, like seeing the wreckage of an accident without remembering what the place looked like before the destruction.
Suddenly, she felt completely quiet and empty, like what it must feel to be a tornado, moving vaguely amid the chaos around her. Then the bubble surrounding her brain burst and reality hit Yelena like a punch.
She gasped, bringing one hand to her heart and pressing against her chest, which rose and fell with the irregular rhythm of her breathing. The roar of thunder echoed in the distance as the wind howled like a lament in her ears. Yelena gazed at the forest of gray buildings stretching to the horizon before her, breathing in the damp scent of rain and freshly turned earth in the air… She remembered having smelled the same fragrance on his skin: a pure, soft, intoxicating freshness, as if he were the very source of all that perfume in the universe.
How was this possible?
If the circumstances had been different, she would have fought against the urge to let his memory exert any influence over her mind. But if her suspicions were correct, she would need to hold on to something. And, as difficult as it was to admit, those golden eyes could sometimes be a comfort.
When Yelena’s gaze shifted downward, reality confronted her immediately, making her stomach rise to her throat. Traffic buzzed outside and the noise of the city wasn’t loud enough to silence her racing thoughts. She tried to swallow as she looked at the nearly deserted street, twelve stories below, but realized her tongue was heavy and dry as paper.
Why did this keep happening to her?
Was something in those dreams real, or was she going insane?
Shaken, Yelena finally climbed down from the ledge, collapsing to the ground as if the weight of the world had pulled her down. She hugged her legs tightly to her chest, as if trying to protect herself from herself. Her body trembled in soft, silent convulsions, while hot tears soaked her cheeks.
She mourned the pain of absence, of desperate longing, without knowing what exactly she was searching for.
How many times can something she cannot name break her heart?