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He was no stranger to dreams. Good ones or bad ones – he tried them all, and if once asked him – sometimes, but only sometimes, mind you, he would admit that he would rather have nightmares than face the pictures his normal dreams presented him with. Nightmares were logical. And with the PTSD coming into play, they were /expected/ - if he woke up in the middle of the night, breath coming out in panicked gasps and echoes of memories still floating before his eyes? Well… It was nothing he hadn’t seen before, sans rare (yet still unpleasant) variations. But he knew how to deal with them, for the small price of not having a good night’s sleep for what felt like /years/ (And for some of those dreams, years it really was).
The /dreams/, though? Those, were rare. But when they came, they left behind a wreck Tony wasn’t even sure how to /begin/ to deal with. And unlike the nightmares, these weren’t a recent acquisition – the first one he could remember (and there was /nothing/ normal about remembering ones’ dreams; he should know. He did his research) forcing him under when he was barely five, if even that. But back then, it didn’t seem so worrying – and Tony could remember the sheer awe he felt surveying the sweeping arches of greyish-white stone webbed with thin lines of shining blue. He could remember his footsteps echoing as he run through the endless halls, unlit by sun but still lit brightly by whatever it was that mapped the high walls with the glow he only now could compare to the poisonous blue of the Tesseract. Tony could even recall the barest brush of wind that came in through unprotected windows, and the echoes of voices speaking in a language he couldn’t understand coming from what seemed so far away.
And the older he got, the sharper the dreams became. Midnight darkness and sharp blues grew less as the night slowly creeped into twilight and then into the pinkish hues of the early sunrise that dulled the webbed glow on the stone and, somehow, made his surroundings seem even /more/ than they ever were before then. The bare architecture became more and more detailed: gaseous cloth appearing on the walls in a useless attempt to cover the windows; a set of furniture made of light ivory wood popping here and there, and the style it was made to emulate was like nothing Tony had ever seen; and sometimes, just sometimes, he would catch sight of a person – though never close enough to see anything but the pale, almost white hair on their heads and the vibrant blues and golds of the cloth they wore. The voices grew more, and though Tony still had no idea what language the people were speaking, the words rang in his mind, and he could have sworn he understood what they meant in the moments before all comprehension slipped from his mind.
It culminated the night he actually /saw/ himself – just before leaving for Afghanistan, it was – within the dream. But, as it seemed, in the ability to witness himself he became visible to those that roamed the halls of the building he spent so many years dreaming of. He did his best to avoid people – but there were times when he could do nothing but look as the men and women, all sprouting some manner of jewelry made of the same thing that set the stone aglow once the sun set, caught sight of him.
But he could run, and on more than one occasion, he did. It was on one of such runs he ended up on a terrace – a balcony, or therelike – and finally got his first glimpse of the outside, of the giant structure that wouldn’t’ have been out of place in one of Tolkien’s works were it not for the ocean he could easily see from atop of the tower he, it seemed, spent so many years in. That, and the clear sights of technology he could spot /everywhere/ - and more of the webbed lines of blue that led to each and every thing, beginning with what looked like streetlights and ending with the far-away lights of a gigantic port on the horizon.
It was amazing.
It was alien.
It felt so much like /home/ Tony couldn’t help but feel a sharp zing of longing when he woke up.
No, it wasn’t nightmares he feared. Not the memories of the dead world beyond the portal and not the deaths he had a part in. Those, he could deal with.
It was the dreams he wasn’t sure he wished to come back from that he learned to both fear and love that made him shudder with ill-hidden foreboding.