tamingthemuse | Prompt #7

This one was a bit of a surprise even to me. The prompt didn't fit anything I was currently doing, but the dark humor of the phrase called up this little bit of angsty darkness.

Title: Dreams of a Dead Man
Fandom: Angel the Series
Prompt: Early Bird Catches Pneumonia
Warnings: Angst
Rating: Adults only
Summary: A zombie contemplates his life and unlife.

It was the dreams he lived for. It was hard to dream for a zombie, even one with his brain and personality intact, but he managed. He was very clever, researching ever more exotic magical hallucinogens to give him something approaching real sleep, with real dreams.

In dreams he could feel again the touches he’d had, dream the touches he longed for. His dead friends – the ones who’d been lucky enough to really and truly die – lived again, if only for him. The dreams got more and more vivid each night, more and more solid and real, and the ‘real’ world he walked in less real each day. It was the waking world that was hell for him. A little part of him was convinced that perhaps that was only right. That he should pay for his sins, his failures. But the rest of him just prayed, on those rare days he was capable of prayer, for death.

Last night it had been her. Slender, elfin, fragrant, full of joy and strength. Her skin petal-soft against his fingers, her hair a gentle curtain on his skin when she leaned over him. The last face he’d seen, the last voice he’d heard as a living man. Sometimes he almost fancied he had dreamed her, that she had never been real. He sat and looked at his haggard face in the mirror. No, she had been real, he assured himself. If he’d merely dreamed her she never would have been snatched away so horribly.

Other nights it was him. The dark beacon who’d drawn him here, kept him here. Who fashioned the bars of his hell, all out of good intentions. Out of love, and the desire to save. The man he’d lusted for, desired, needed. He’d never had the courage to confess his feelings, to lay bare his need to this man, and now he’d never have the chance.

The zombie chuckled bitterly. It was a terrible sort of irony that everything, all of this, had started with his own good intentions. His desire to save the man he loved from himself. He had made his own plan, kept his own counsel, trusted too much in his own research and conclusions. It was truly ironic. Those who had trained him and discarded him would have been proud. He’d rejected them but never truly left behind the towering arrogance of certitude they had indoctrinated into him.

He made himself stare into the mirror, confront the tormented face, the haunted eyes. Face it without flinching. He might escape every night into the comfort of the dreams but he could not take them with him during the day. Couldn’t let the horror touch or contaminate the last fragments of goodness left to him.

He picked up the small crystal glass of scotch. It was habit to drink it, even though he could no longer taste it, no longer numb himself with it. The knock of the door came, as it always did. Time to walk into hell. “Come in,” he said, mechanically, without inflection.

The handsome young man stepped inside. His assistant, Jules. “Time for your meeting with the head of the firm. You don’t want to be late, Mr.Pryce.”

The former Watcher chuckled darkly. He really must learn to read things more carefully before he signed them. Lilah had warned him, a contract with Wolfram and Hart didn’t end with death. “Of course not. The early bird catches pneumonia, after all.”