Chapter 1 #2
Sure enough, Daphne flinched. Not visibly, but he felt it inside her, where everything was remembered.
Her fingers curled in the blanket as rage spiked and was buried under obedience.
She knew this. Not the words, but the pattern.
That practiced calm meant for survival. The hush that begged the storm to pass over without noticing them. “Be a good girl. Just stay in bed.”
Hunter felt the shift in her as the memory-fed nightmare rose like bile, pushing a tremor just under her skin. The wild, shaking no clawed its way up her throat but stayed there.
Good girl. Obedient. Silent.
Hunter felt the weight of a childhood spent being good and how that it had bought her nothing. He cheered when the question she’d never dared ask out loud bloomed in the darkness behind her eyes: Why didn’t you stop him? Why didn’t you save me?
But years of conditioning pulled her back, and she tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, just like always.
So, Hunter pressed again. “It’s not that bad. He’s just tired. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
That one landed.
Hard.
Daphne didn’t move, but he felt her screaming inside.
Because it had always been tomorrow.
Tomorrow, they’d leave. Tomorrow, it would stop. Tomorrow, they’d fix it. Tomorrow, the bruises would fade.
Tomorrow never came.
Her fists clenched under the blankets.
Hunter let the voice out once more, delivering a challenge he hoped she’d take. “Just stay quiet in your room, and this will all go away.”
And that was it.
Daphne sat up.
Slow. Stiff. Trembling. Not with fear but with fury. Because the comfort her mother offered was betrayal. Because obeying was agreeing.
He recognized the fire in her and smiled. She was ready now. And he’d burn in any mask he had to wear if it meant she’d take that first step.
Her feet hit the floor. The room creaked. The air pulled, like the dream itself sensed the change and prepared.
Hunter knew exactly what she felt because in this place, he wasn’t separate from her.
He was the dream, and the dream was her.
He felt the split between her body and her mind.
She was an adult, strong and capable, but in this nightmare, she was still the child.
Small. Scared. Trapped in a moment she’d never escaped.
The floor was cold beneath her bare feet, sweat clinging to her brow, heart pounding somewhere between get on and get out. Fear slithered close, crept in muted and inevitable, whispering like a snake threading through her thoughts. Go back to bed.
But she didn’t. Not yet. Because rage was louder, clearer. Angrier.
Hunter felt it twist inside her. If only he could help her move, give her that first push. But it had to be hers. He wouldn’t take that from her. She had to choose.
She stood frozen, breathing heavily, her fists clenched at her sides.
Hunter felt her doubt like static under his skin–what was the point?
What could she even do? She couldn’t save her mother.
She couldn’t fix her father. She had no comfort to offer.
No lesson to teach. Only the same silence, on loop.
Everything in him went still, breathless in the way only a nightmare could be.
And then it came.
Pride.
It flared like a spark catching dry wood. Hungry, sudden, seething. It swelled inside her, aligning with her thoughts, lining every memory with steel.
Dear Dad wanted to be the big, mean man? Then he could be while she looked at him with eyes filled with disgust.
Mother wanted to be a punching bag? Then she could be while her little girl watched and learned what not to be.
Daphne took a step.
It wasn’t a big, dramatic one. But it was enough to break the spell and carry her on while her mother’s soft cry reached her.
Her mother’s sobs were never loud; God forbid her pain would cause a ripple or matter.
But in the stillness Hunter created around Daphne, the sound reverberated like grief into an empty cathedral.
She took another step.
Her hand reached the doorknob, cold and smooth. She swallowed hard.
Then she turned it.
The latch gave with a soft click.
And Hunter, still folded inside the bones of the dream, shifted it, redirected it.
The long, narrow hallway stretched out before her, her tiny shadow pressed against the walls.
Dark. Chilly. Empty. In the distance, down the hall and into the kitchen, Hunter moved the crying there.
It echoed faintly now, distant but not gone.
Because she wasn’t done yet. There was one more room, one more wound she needed to look in the eye.
Daphne didn’t stop or hesitate anymore.
She reached the kitchen door and opened it.
And when her eyes took in the room, she saw what was waiting, what had always been waiting.
Her mother, sitting on the floor in a corner, her face hidden in her hands, trembling.
Her father at the fridge, looking for a beer.
Pain sliced through her like wire and was discarded.
She let it cut and shed it like old skin she didn’t need anymore.
He, on the other hand? Something hollowed him out.
Like someone had reached in, grabbed his spine, and yanked.
Which was ridiculous, of course, he didn’t even have a spine.
He wasn’t real. Not here. Not now. Just a shadow in her mind, wrapped in shapes and whispers.
And still it felt like he’d been gutted.
And then... the dream flexed, recoiled, twisted. Reoriented around her, and it wasn’t him. It wasn’t his hand on the nightmare’s wheel anymore, and it hit him like a drop in gravity, that visceral lurch when you’re just free-falling.
What in the actual fuck?
He tried to stir the nightmare, to redirect the flow, pull it back under his control.
Nothing.
It didn’t respond because her mind had snapped into full awareness.
She was lucid and present. Commanding. She wasn’t drifting or reacting anymore, but leading.
And she was angry. The little girl was gone.
What stood in her place was a woman who had nothing left to lose and absolutely no interest in staying quiet.
The fear was still there, but it didn’t control her, just as he wasn’t controlling the nightmare.
Alright.
Fine.
He’d known this could happen. Hell, it was why Dorian had sent him in the first place.
She was a lucid dreamer with trauma deep enough to fill the fucking Grand Canyon.
Of course this was going to get messy. He had news for her, though.
No matter how far she pushed, how much power she reclaimed, he was still part of this shit show.
Hunter adjusted.
Lucidity gave her power, but she wasn’t omnipotent.
She was still in the landscape of her subconscious, and the subconscious held anchors.
He started scanning for cracks in her awareness, the seams in the dream where her lucid control frayed, where emotions blurred the edges. That’s where he could still move.
He found one.
Not surprisingly, it was her father.
A familiar presence in the nightmare, the one that held the most emotional baggage. The form her fear still wore when she wasn’t looking.
Hunter focused there and slipped into her father’s shape. The stance. The emotional weight. The exact, measured cruelty in the way the man moved. Hunter wore it all. He didn’t like it, but the subconscious recognized power. Let the dreamer fight back and reclaim the ground.
Daphne must have gotten that memo, though, because she didn’t freeze, shrink, or even blink. She walked straight up to him—
—and punched him in the face.
Not theoretically, not symbolically. It wasn’t dream-weight.
No, no. It was fucking real.
He felt the hit, the stunning impact that rattled his skull and cracked through the entire dream like a brick thrown through stained glass.
Then–
Whiteout.
A flash of nothing. The unmistakable snap of being ejected.
Hunter was ripped out of the dream, violently severed from her mind, and flung back into the sentient white fog that was really him.
Formless, and yet shaken and spitting metaphorical teeth.
It took him a second to pull himself together and reform in his office at the Dreamscape HQ.
His body defaulted to his favorite form, human.
Jeans. Bare feet. White t-shirt. He slumped on the floor, relieved that being human allowed him to pant out his surprise–fuck that, his shock.
Eyes closed, he rested his head back on the wall.
His ass had been kicked out of a nightmare.
He was millennia old.
Fucking millennia old. Had dealt with countless nightmares. And never, not once in his existence, had he been jerked out like that. The long, deep intake of breath stabilized him enough to open his eyes and get on his feet.
He wiped a hand to his face and.... What...
What?
He walked closer to his reflection in the glass wall across from his desk.
A black eye. He had a legit black eye. A big one. Swollen and purplish-red.
He blinked.
Twice.
“What the fucking actual fuck?”
It made no sense. He wasn’t supposed to feel physical pain in dreams, and sure as hell, he wasn’t supposed to bring back injuries from someone else’s dream on a body that wasn’t even really his.
“This breaks every law of dream physics,” he sputtered.
“And probably most of basic reality.” He touched the bruise gingerly. Flinched. “Seriously?”
Hunter slumped into his chair.
“She hit me,” he muttered, as if saying it out loud would make it somehow more reasonable. “She hit me. In a dream. While lucid. And now my actual face hurts.”
There weren’t numbers high enough to quantify how wrong that was.
Daphne Claire Quinn had officially broken protocol, him, and possibly every Dreamverse law.
He stared at the ceiling.
“Dorian’s gonna have so many big feelings about this.”
And none of them would be nice.
~*~