Aftermath with Osu: Dreaming Dark Nightmares (Solo)

Lighthearted Aspiring Swallow - Tiny Hidden Owl – Precise Ebony Antbird

He awoke in agony, like the many nights before. The fourth squad had taken and fixed him up as best they could, but it still didn’t take away much of the pain. He had also been reprimanded for his actions, attacking Instructor Osu. As far as he knew, the girl, Rei Inazuma, had gotten away unscathed. She had also sent him a gift, which he had to give away to someone else later on. In fact, many people had gotten him gifts, all flowers, all heavily scented, which had made his condition worse. It wasn’t their fault at all either, since he had never disclosed his allergies to perfumes and strong sense of smell to others. Now only he and the majority of those in the fourth squad knew of his illness to smells.

And the cards he had received. It made him red with fury and embarrassment. Gina had sent him a heart-shaped card filled with words of worry. Natty even gave him a card, which was a surprise, since she loathed him at worst, and mildly tormented him at best. He hoped that she had not been included in the knowledge of his allergy, for his life would be hell if she had been. Natty’s card was short, a simple “Look at the balls on you.” Written on the back and her name signed below. Even the girl, Rei, had sent him a card. He kept it, even though he didn’t like it very much. She had sent him a card with a wolf-motif and wished him well and apologized. Worse of it all perhaps was the news that Fourth company had told him afterwards too.

Osu and the academy, had decided that a fitting punishment would be to permanently inhibit his powers to cast Kido, which were pathetic at best even with some thirty-odd years of training them. Trying at home, he struggled to cast even hado’s number one and two, nor could he even manage the power to cast a single bakudo either. Somewhere deep inside of him, they had irrefutably sealed his powers to limit himself from any other actions like those he had committed.

The seal had also been a pain, since he was bed-ridden, and relied upon the aid of few others in order to go about his day now, such as being fed and changed, and having his bedpan cleaned as well. Kindly enough, Gina and another woman, from fourth squad had been doing rounds twice a day to check up on him.

“Hello? Mister Gravelle?” came the voice of the woman who had been helping to nurse him for the past week and a bit. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“If it isn’t too much of a bother, would you kindly make me some curry?” He asked, pushing himself into a semi-reclined state. “Preferably that stuff over there, with the General Tao label on it.”

She smiled and nodded her head before moving for his cookware and settling into the task at hand. Again, she was the best cook he could get his hands on at the moment, since Gina was terrible, and so was his aunt, when she had dropped by. This woman, whom he didn’t even know the name of, cooked some of his foods about as good as he did himself, though she was only really good at cooking the curries which were labelled with ‘Chinese Food’ on them. In the beginning, there had been some argument between them, as she wanted him to eat the sushi and cold foods she had brought with her, and he refused to eat anything that wasn’t warm and spicy. Now she had stopped bringing food, and instead cooked what he had in the room with him.

It only took a few minutes, but eventually, she finished preparing his food and brought it to him. Though she treated him like a child by forcibly feeding him herself, and when she was finished, made coos and comments about how good he was to eat his meals, even going so far as to say that she would clean up his “widdle accidents” and make his “poopey-pants” all clean again. He swore to himself that he would never forgive her for those comments, and had even tried to slap her when she was leaving his bedside.

The slap hadn’t worked, as he accidentally ended up slapping her ass, causing her to start flirting with him from then on forwards, which was increasingly annoying. She looked at least twice as old as he did, which made her look like she was in her forties or fifties. And she was certainly not his type, for she doted on him and treated him terribly, and was none-too-gentle on the persona. He had a wife, and he was not going to betray her after all of these years.

With the encounter over, he lay back in his bed and began to drift off, leaving the woman to tidy up after herself and leave when she was ready. And when he drifted to sleep, the nightmares settled in, and he was torn to a world of darkness.

He awoke in his dream world, ensnared by a great twisting weed that constricted him so tight he felt he would soil himself under the pressure. Before him stood Osu, but twice as big and more menacing than before. She leered at him, and then her skin began to turn to burning stone as she raised her great hands and clapped them together, jolting him and setting him ablaze among the weeds. He screamed in agony before the flames drew him up into nothingness, and the world turned black.

Then he found himself trapped in the blackness with a weeping woman near his feet. She had a bundle in her arms. Her long, rich and wavy dark brown hair flowed down her shoulders and back, and the bundle in her lap let out small whimpers as well. Below his dead form was his wife, and the child she was supposedly due with when he had died. It wasn’t entirely his own fault either. It was stormy, and he was contemplating the news of what was to be, that in some months’ time, he would likely be a father. He had gone out for a walk with his umbrella, a construct of his own modifications, when the unlikely bolt had struck him. It missed trees, power lines, houses and cars, and even bypassed his umbrella and went directly for his collar, where he kept a pendant of his worship.

He wasn’t entirely sure of the irony either. His grandmother had tried to raise him to be in the church, and he instead had shunned it and worshiped other, older religions, and even went back to trace his own roots as best he could. He had, after realizing the events, thought that perhaps if there was only one god, that it was a divine joke that he be struck down by the object which he expressed his own religious views through. But after further contemplation, he had decided that it was more likely that the bolt found the easiest way to grounding, through the heavy rain and towards his unprotected body, as he had worn open sandals then too, and the umbrella had protective rubber coating to help reduce the likelihood of shock. But the thought that some angry god had struck him down was still funny to think of.

But here he found himself, hovering over his dear wife, and his child. He wondered, if the child had been born, it would likely be forty-three by now, and his wife would be the same age as him, and probably even a grandmother. Which would make him a grandfather. He was shaken when the woman suddenly stared up at him and screamed, her face contorted into a white mask or sorrow and her eyes sunken to black pits. Even the child at her feet, which then fell and became revealed, was nothing more than a collection of bones held together by a paper-thin layer of flesh.

Then, from out of her mouth the darkness was drawn in, leaving him on a mound of earth surrounded by harsh jagged rocks and a stony coastline to one side, and mountains far off in the distance to the other. The hill was large, and covered in jagged rocks that would make descending dangerous, though the top and some small trails were soft and grassy, but still unwelcoming.

The ground shook, and a fissure no larger than three feet opened before him, allowing for the darkness to be expelled and take form. The witch, his curse, was now before him, and attached to her undefined mass was his own terrible mistake, his ID materialized. He had strived long and hard to contain his own ID, and now was face-to-faceless-mass with it.

”All you ever needed to do was to submit to me. I would have made sure you never suffered the pains of love, life, and sorrow.” The witch cooed.

Her form was distinctive, but still immaterial. She had a form, of a beautiful young woman, but was enshrouded in such a ways that he could never see her face, nor her arms. He knew she had no legs, for she never tried to walk. Instead she had the idea of legs, and the idea of a body, but no such true things. The only things he knew were real about her was that she had mass, mouth, and several hands; reaching, grabbing, clawing, tearing hands. Trailing behind her, attached by a thin strand, was the great brute that was his repressed self; Ira.

“I knew better after I severed the contract. You promise nothing but sadness.” He called back to her. Even though they were so close, they felt so far apart.

His ID shuddered and grew smaller. Ira was, for the most part, a great dark shadow, a mirror of himself, though that was when he was controlled, strengthened by his curse, the ID was hulking, brutish, and merely a fat-torso with a clownish face and no limbs.

He needed to get control of the situation. And in this nightmare, he knew that he had to place himself somewhere familiar. He focused hard, and the fat giant and its consort began to dwindle, shrink as the world seemed to become hazy before changing from one scene to the next. An angered howl was let loose, before the rocky hill and shore was replaced by a great hewn trunk, easily twenty-feet in diameter, and with a seal burned into its flat surface. Water, deeper than a man was tall flooded the scene, and mangroves grew so tall and so thick that no light penetrated this world save for the floating blue fox-fires in the canopy, giving it a ghostly appearance.

Comfortable, he sat cross-legged on his stump and focused himself, willing the nightmare to end. His ID was drawn into the seal, banished from existence for the moment, while the bean sidhe remained before him.

“You’ll never escape me. Eventually, like all of your family before you, you will fall to me.” She cackled, a high nerve-rending pitch that made her kind famous. He wondered now if perhaps this curse was a Hollow hidden inside of himself, and quickly dropped the thought as a hand reached out from the shroud and gripped his chin. He felt it there, but also didn’t. It could brush against him, but not hold him. “You’ll lose like those before. No one of your thick blood has escaped me.”

He waved her away, ignoring her, and eventually she dissipated into the air, like a cloud of ash finally coming apart. Finally alone, he closed his eyes in his dream-world, hoping for peace, but was abruptly woken to the sight of a great she-wolf that lunged on top of him.

And then he woke up covered in sweat, and the smell of urine filled his nose as he realised he had pissed himself in fear.