259. After a bad dream, 7

(Rose)

We're pushing slowly further into France, eating our more or less dry meat as we go.

Bleue's bag of petals is gone. They finally rot and lost their softness. My belly tends to serve as her pillow since, despite my low inclination for the matter. I haven't withered yet I guess.

We've returned to the fields and scorched roads. I see there roads like I saw elsewhere, in a succession of tilted tiles thrown in disarray. As if this road had been violently ploughed, from below it seems, and like so over kilometres.

This makes a dented line of rocky teeth protruding from the ground.

We find a couple of wild cows along the endless fields. A few of them survived the end of domestication.

We went to have a closer look at them. We don't bother them and neither do they.

We let them be while they seem to have little concern for us or anything else.

We cross an immense field to reach a large farm.

Bones are scattered everywhere, but they're old and there is no smell of death. It's where the two remaining cows must live or come from. We found their old barn.

We go to the houses a little further south, and find a place to stay for the night.

Bleue found a bottle of wine in the cellar.

As usual, I can't help but shiver at the thought of what it might bring.

Bleue tries it but then spits it, saying it turned bad. I can't help but sigh my relief. We laugh.

We can feel the air being warmer at night. Summer is upon us.

~

My dream this night is strange. I can see my own heart beating inside my chest.

I see the muscles squeezing themselves, through orange and dark pink lights.

I see blood cells being pumped along. I feel warm. Too warm.

I'm unable to breathe enough. As if cats were sleeping all over me, my neck, my face, my chest and my tummy.

They all purr softly.

I'm scared.

You know how in a dream you forgot all of your life sometime, you just know what's necessary for the dream to continue along its path.

That night, I felt...

When father and mother had died. I was all alone. The bitterness of grief, overwhelming. It's surging back with that oppressive sensation.

My sorrow as an orphan child, feeling pain, feeling wrong.

My ache behind it was far worse and the names I now put are meagre pictures of that oppression suddenly choking me that night.

It tortured me in my chest, and lungs, and within my sleep until I could no more, and woke up in painful cold sweat again.

It was the middle of the night. Bleue's arm fell away from my neck where it had lied as I sat.

Her holding me as she sleeps soundly makes my heart race in a painful way right now, I can't bear it anymore.

This warmth makes my heart and stomach pulse together as one, as dreadful remnants of nightmare still sip through my eyes and mouth.

My entrails throb again. I feel death. I jump out and rush to the window and some air to refresh me.

My stomach is screaming at me, as my nightmares are shrieking and I'm soon vomiting all my acids outside.

A minute of convulsive pain later, I'm trying to catch my breath again, leaning outside.

That sludgy hell in the depths of my mind and memories, it's erupting again.

Bleue woke up and is calling my name, and getting closer. I shiver.

I raise my hand as a sign for her to stop.

R - Don't come any closer! Please...

B - Rose, what's wrong?

R - I'm just feeling... Like I had a painful nightmare...

B - About me?

R - No. Just... Some old demons of flesh of mine.

She withdrew the hand that was about to touch mine I notice, and sigh in relief without realising.

B - This aversion of touches makes your life a nightmare at times.

R - It comes and goes... Tonight's just not a good night...

B - To think you managed to have sex with that crow woman, and twice at that, is weird.

R - Bleue!

I'm shocked. I can't breathe. I'm gasping for air.

I'm falling in a sitting posture there, unable to breathe.

Bleue is standing before me, conflicted at whether she should try to help me or avoid touching me for now.

I feel absolutely awful but I need help and try to raise my hand to show it.

She rushes to help me, and lifts my head slightly to open my airway. It doesn't change a thing.

I'm collapsing in her hands, terrified.

~

The most gruesome scars of my life, and lives before rather, still comes to haunt me periodically, like astrological curses. If curses and blessings are linked to the proximity of celestial bodies, then there is one for the guilt of murdering a child up there.

There is one for the torture inflicted upon me by Ogre. There is one for the crow. There is one for each murder.

And a few others much, much older, for the years of the first Rose, back in the beginning of the 20th century.

The ones I talked too much about. The oldest one I can barely remember, for it's before my adoption my adoption by my true parents... And there is one, wider and darker than all others, old, harder to remember. The darkest one, I keep eluding and never spoke about. My parents gone, I'm all alone with it...

Blume read it in my memories I know, and never spoke about it.

Bleue doesn't know, and can only witness what it made of me.

I myself don't quite remember.

I was too young.

But if there is one nightmare that twisted my persona during its construction, it is not the guilt of murder. It's the unbearable guilt of being a victim.

I can see Ogre's sadistic smile and her sharp clear blue eyes. I think she knew.

Ann probably knew...

Everyone...

Scarlett... Elise... Father. Mother... They all knew.

Everyone but Blue...

I'm bursting into tears and cries, even though I'm still unconscious.

You were the only one left I couldn't see a defiled reflection of myself in your eyes.

I was precocious...

Very precocious.

I always thought afterwards that the smell of blood must have been like a trigger for some monsters.

I just can't voice it out. I still can't.

A curse entered my flesh, and never really left.

Reality stopped feeling real to me then.

I became a monster.

Slowly.

Surely.

Stained, tainted soul above the abyss of flesh, pain and misery.

The truth is I became a monster far before the new world forced me to act as one, and reveal that truth.

I wish what I romantically called my thorns were more than toxic poisonous bile suddenly finding purpose. The faeces of my soul.

My body is melting in its nightmare.

~

The sleep is painful.

The torture repeats itself, again.

I'm all alone.

If I tell you Bleue, it will kill me, drowning me in my fears, in my illogical fears.

They're just a suffering I was never able to overcome. I'm ashamed.

Even though I then grew up.

Even though I came to a new world.

Even though I died, and came back to life.

Even though I know you love me...

~