Don't Close Your Eyes: Devour

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Inside the dreamer's nightmares....

Monet, Kyle, and Piotr wake up in an abandoned stadium in Sydney.



Monet woke, cold and disoriented. There were flickering lights in the distance, blinking in and out of focus and it was hard to sit up. Everything hurt - dull aches running down her arms and legs, interspersed with stabs of sharper pain. She closed her eyes again, sinking back down to the ground.

She was broken again and began to cry. She was broken again and if she didn't move, she maybe wouldn't have to find out how bad it was and it would all be okay because she wasn't really broken again.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, she'd still be able to use her hands. Maybe walking wouldn't have been affected. It had taken her so long to get her hands working again and if she didn't move and didn't try to talk (because, oh god, what if she couldn't talk? She'd had trouble talking afterward last time) and didn't open her eyes, she wouldn't find out how bad it was.

Woke up in a weird place again and nothing smelled right or looked right or sounded right. It was all wrong. The lights Kyle could understand, they were the cheap kind that never worked right in the rain and it was raining and he was cold and wet and everything was wrong. The unfamiliar smells and sounds he couldn't explain, it was just all off like his nose was out of tune or something like he should have recognized it but it just wasn't making any sense.

The normal plan for "Kyle wakes up somewhere where he doesn't know where he is." was supposed to be "Stay put and assess his location". Which wasn't really useful when staying put meant he was getting rained on and all 'assess his location' got him was that it was some kind of sports field. So on to plan two, get in out of the rain and figure out where the fuck he was.

Piotr woke up in what looked like a locker room. Unsure of where he was he tried to remember what he had been doing before he went to bed ad when he drew up a blank he started to get worried. Not knowing if he had been drugged or what he slowly tried to move and when he realised he could he quickly got up looking around for something, anything, to tell him where he was but apart a weird smell and the cold air blowing through one of the doors he couldn’t work out anything.

She'd have to move eventually, wouldn't she? Monet opened her eyes and called "who's there?"

"Come out where I can see you, cause I'm sure as fuck not going in there." Kyle growled harshly. He rubbed at his face to clear some of the rain and came to a slow halt. Everything was wrong - smells, sounds, the way the concrete felt under his feet and his face was wrong too. His jaw felt heavy and out of place and too big and even for him there was an awful lot of hair, more like fur, where his beard came in. He pulled his hand into a fist and looked at it closely – it looked the same as always, but also wrong like his claws were too big, and his fingers were too stubby, but he couldn't remember what his hand was supposed to really look like.

As Piotr moved down the dark corridor he heard yelling echoing back through. It wasn’t any language he knew, he stopped trying to work out what area it sounded like it was from but he couldn't even pick that up. Not wanting to announce that he was out he moved a little further along hoping to see something from the mouth of the corridor.

Monet still didn't want to move. "Kyle? That you, mate?" She climbed to her feet, slowly, carefully, and managed two steps before her leg buckled.

It hurt when she fell.

"Right, I don't know who the hell you are, or how you know my name but you sure as hell don't sound familiar to me!" Going against his better instincts, Kyle crept closer, only to see matted dark hair on a figure crouched on the ground in what was very clearly to Kyle an attack position.

The growl that came out of his mouth was louder but less deep than usual, and he bared his teeth at the figure.

Monet looked down at her hands. Actually looked down at them as she pressed them down on the concrete to lever herself back up to her feet. They were man hands and the nails had been bitten. The nails had been bitten and, somehow, that was more jarring than the man hands and skinny arms striped with the scars of old trackmarks and faded tattoo wrapped around one wrist. She knew the tattoo. She knew the hands. Visited them whenever she went back home, guilt driving her into the nursing home. And this was not her body. But that was Kyle. Kyle was on the team. He'd get her body back and then. And then she'd be herself again and maybe, maybe, her body would be working when she was in it and she wouldn't be looking at another four years of physio. "Kyle! Help me. Please!" Monet screamed.

"My -ass-." He'd finally remembered where the hell he recognized that face from, and Kyle was having none of that. That was Monet and Marius' creepy-ass brother, the one that had been disowned and despite not quite being sure how he knew all that since he didn't exactly talk to them about it, he was certain this was some kind of trick. He'd messed with Monet before, and now he was messing with Kyle and so he jumped at the prone man.

Piotr had finally made his way to see what was going on. He could see the large monstrous mutant standing over the man who looked frail and week as if drained off all his powers. The only thing that Piotr could think of was it could possibly be a mutant slave ring again. Suddenly the monster pounced tearing at the man. “Stop It” Piotr yelled in Russian as he rushed towards the scuffle.

She'd tried to fight. She really had, but somehow, her strength was gone and all her training, all of it, had been focused on not using all her strength, on controlling it. And it meant that all she could do was flail ineffectually against Kyle. "Piotr! Help!"

Wait. Had Piotr even been living there when M's cray-cray brother went even more cray-cray? Kyle had the person he thought was Monet's brother in a headlock, he had time to think about this. To really think about it. Piotr hadn't been there, how the hell would Evil Marius Part One even know who the hell he was? Hell, he shouldn't have even known who Kyle was. "Wait, what the fuck. Okay, who the fuck are you?"

"Monet. Dickhead." She paused and wondered if Kyle was going to hit her again, refusing to think about the implications of everything else right now. "And my arsehole brother has finally stolen my fucking body. And I will kill him when I get it back." If he didn't believe her, she'd probably die, trapped in his body that didn't work right.

"Fuck. Can you even walk?" He wasn't waiting for an answer, Kyle scooped the male body Monet was stuck in up and hoisted it in a fireman's carry over his shoulders. "Okay, two questions. one, do you have any fucking clue where your body is, and two, how the fuck did we even get here?"

The lights flickered on again, illuminating a bank of plastic seats on one side and, in the distance, a rugby goal post. On the other side, was an add for Tooheys New. It was achingly familiar. It was where Marius (evil Marius) had stolen her life away last time. "Sydney. And no, I don't know how." But that was a minor problem, something that could be shelved for later, because right now, she was too busy dealing with the fact that this was not her body and if Monet thought any harder about that, she'd start hyperventilating.

By the time Piotr had reached them the animalistic mutant had stopped attacking. He still couldn’t understand what they were saying but they were seemed to be getting along better. He still eyed the mutant cautiously but didn’t attack him. Piotr didn’t recognise either of them ad without understanding the conversation he didn’t know what to do exept keep the piece. Something he hadn’t been great at. So he spent most of his time watching the bestial mutant keeping a close eye on the nasty looking arms.

His arm - lightly furred, hairier than usual even for Kyle, and with heavy claws at the ends of his fingers, also more so than usual, snapped out, grabbing Monet-in-Marius by the neck, and Kyle growled, and swore. "The fuck? M, you're not..." He pulled the frail body up, holding it by the neck and shook it a few times. "Seriously, what the fuck!"

Monet wanted to tell him to let her go. All she managed was a wheezing gurgle as the world started to go dark.