Darkness: Part Five

  I wake up screaming, balled up on the plush carpet. Sweat pours down my face, glistens on my body. I'm breathing as if I have just ran a marathon, and I feel like I want to cry. Five seconds later, I hear noises down the hall. Schuderich is yelling and pounding on my door, and then I start to hear a faint moaning. I figure it's Nagi out in the hall. But then I realize it is me. I'm laying on the rug still, so frightened I'm unable to even move, whimpering like a little child. Schuderich tires of pounding on the door and barges in. Light from the hallway pours into my dark room, but I can barely see without my glasses. I try to reach for them, but my arm won't move.  I hear his voice tell Nagi to go back to his bedroom. The only way I can visually recognize Schuderich is by the orange of his hair. For a second, he clearly appears to me as one of the nightmare-people, holding a knife, but I blink and my vision is blurred again. The orange mass returns. Orange. Like fire. Like the inferno that killed-
   -Schuderich starts to move in my direction. I see the orange coming closer. In a hoarse, strangled voice that sounds nothing like me, I choke out the word, "Glasses..." and Schuderich moves toward the bedside table. I guess he was holding the glasses out to me, but he soon realizes that I can 't move and gently places them on my face, adjusting them carefully for me. And then I notice that he is crying. His dark eyes glisten with tears. That scares the hell out of me. The Schuderich I have always known is cool and composed. Heartless. Like I wish-no. I don't want to be heartless, dammit! Why do I keep thinking like this?
   He extends his arm to help me up, and then he remembers that I can't move. After a couple of seconds of silent hesitation, he picks me up carefully and places me on the bed. I still can't move so much as a single finger. Schuderich sits carefully at the foot of my bed. He turns his face away from me for a couple of seconds to blink back tears and gives me a grin that I know is meant to make me feel better. Neither of us say anything. I guess the fact that I've been scared into paralysis is too much for him to handle and he drops the charade. To my complete surprise, he buries his face in his hands like I had done only hours earlier and cries.
   "My God, Crawford, what the hell's happened to you?" he asks. He's talking more to himself than to me, and I don't answer. "You're scaring me." He sounds like a small child as he states this last fact. He sounds so vulnerable, so innocent, so...upset. And so understanding.
   Sitting here watching him cry is worse than any nightmare. The tears pouring down his flaming cheeks are what enable me to move again, as if they are a hold on reality for me. I raise a hand to my forehead and push hair out of my face. I suppose his crying scared me out of that hellish nightmare realm, that, even in waking had continued to haunt my mind. I feel tears burning in my own eyes now, and I let them spill over. Schuderich and I are now both sobbing like innocent little children.
   "I'm so sorry, Schuderich..." I whisper through my tears. "I'm not trying to scare you." Still crying, I pull  my cramped body to a comfortable sitting position.
   I blink a few times and wipe my eyes. Regaining as much composure as I am able, I tell him, "To be honest with you I'm scaring the hell out of myself too. I don't know what's happening. I don't know what the hell is wrong with-."
   "-It's not your fault, Brad. I didn't mean to make it sound like I was repremanding you. Gomen."
   I realize that Schuderich is using my first name again. He sounds so sincere, so warm, so caring, that I don't stop him.
   I really have to wonder now if Schuderich is feeling the same burning remorse that I feel. If maybe he knows just what it's like to wake up on the floor in a cold sweat almost every morning. If maybe that's why he's here for me now. If maybe, just maybe, he isn't as cool and composed as he leads everyone to believe.
  

Continue on to part 6?

Or is this fic too lame for you? Go back and read one of the High Priestess's works, or maybe a fic by NightMajik?