DREAM 2
There is a curtain of blood falling from him, he can see. He is just where he left off, sharp branches impaling what feels like every part of him. It is painful, terribly painful, but he belatedly realizes that he cannot scream, for one of the branches is embedded in his throat. Perhaps screaming would not help his situation, but having the option would be appreciated. Stress relief, he thinks with what would have been a hollow laugh if he could only muster a sound. Unlike the way he died in real life, however, there is no city. There is only miles and miles of bleak nothingness, a desert and a clear blue sky. Is this what hell looks like? Perhaps solitude is hell, he realizes. Even worse than the pain is the despair he can feel welling up in his chest and weighing down every inch of his body. He does not think he has ever felt such a thing so profoundly before, and he tips his head further back. The wretched smell of his own blood and bile crawls up his nostrils and curls in his skull.
He stares up at the sky, questioning what he did to deserve such agony, and realizes that he can feel the sun bright on his face, unhindered by the glass of the sphere. He is in immeasurable amounts of pain, but he is free. A gurgle escapes him, though he suspects it’s just the sound of blood trickling through an air pocket in his throat, which is split wide open. He heals over the wounds, but they’re just pressed wider and wider. He is sabotaging himself, but he is a free man. If he could, he would smile.
Then suddenly, he’s in control of his limbs again. He takes a deep breath, and rips his neck away from the offending branch first. Then his hands, then his legs and feet, then his torso. The tearing of flesh and muscle and bone is an awful sound, but he soldiers on. By the end of it, he is lying heaving on the dirt and watching in morbid fascination as the rips in his body slowly restore themselves. He opens his hand, stretches it, closes it again. Open, close. Open, close. His smile is wooden, but real. His cradle of branches remains, spattered with his blood and bile. He notes that there were bugs crawling all over it that he never managed to notice, wonders if there are any trapped within him now. He can't help but think that if they were, he would feel it; he can keenly feel the sewing of his muscles, the blood warming his cold body, so why not a bug?
Dream-like, he rises to his feet and staggers across the wasteland until he comes across a house. He throws the door open, and sees a rich mahogany desk. A fat man sits behind it, a cigar clenched in his yellowing teeth, and he is handed a hat and a gun. He takes both and saunters out the door, only to be greeted with what can only be called an old fashioned gun-fight. He takes part in it gleefully, adrenaline shooting through his veins, and cares not for his own safety; why be afraid when he is a man that can come back from the dead? The skies above are grey with pollution, and the buildings are tall and bleak, but it feels so much realer than anything he has known before.
He hoists his gun and begins to shoot, but somehow, all sound fades away and is replaced with a thundering piano. As sound slips away, so does colour. There is nothing but the feel of the gun, warm under his hands and jerking with every shot and the vision of life sliding away from these men’s bodies. Once the fight has been completed, he brushes off his comrades and goes strolling down the street. His life is still in black and white, devoid of colour, and now he can hardly see the horizon. The pavement turns to nothing but simple lines underneath him, but he forges on, whistling along to the music under his breath.
He turns a corner, and sees Cross Punisher laying on the pavement beneath him. After a moment, he picks it up, and then looks up only to see Chapel standing in front of him, congenial smile on his face, but he notices that his clothes are still ragged from the fire, and there is a burn covering half of his face. The music fades away.
“I believe that’s mine,” Chapel says.
He stares at the other man, voiceless. Behind him is the Sphere, and it is loud and colourful, and its leaves and grass are not green, but red, red, red. He can see faces behind Chapel, drifting like ghosts-Nikki, Sumi, Lyle…
“Well?” Chapel asks. “Aren’t you going to return it?”
Grift stares behind him, then looks at Chapel. “I don’t want to go back,” he whispers. “Allow me to hold onto this. I want to stay here.”
“You need to return it. Grift, what is behind you is not real. It’s not even there anymore.”
Grift’s brow wrinkles, and he places one hand on his breast, where he can still feel the ache of the branch. “Ah, my friend,” he says quietly. “But it is my nothingness. What is behind you?”
“A life.”
“Not my life. Will you not even permit me to die?”
“No rest for the wicked, right?” Chapel says, and his arms cross the threshold between them to grab onto the Cross Punisher, and before he knows it, Grift is falling down, down, down, into those wretched leaves of red. Soon, all he can see is red, and then he sees nothing at all.