Breaching from dream is a pained exhalation. For that liminal shiver between wink and wake, he always forgets which world he's in, perpetually in search of gravity in the wrong direction.
He is screaming, his hand outstretched for the starlight cast through the window. His palm has left a shadowy impression on the glass. What a beautiful world to wake up to, he finds himself thinking, once he blinks the afterimage of blood from his eyes.
He is still screaming. He hasn't stopped. He cannot stop. His throat has choked around the emptiness inside him, springing from a bottomless well, and there is nothing to do but keep screaming.
His eyes are watering from the exertion. He looks around for her, for Robin, or even the illusion of her he greets in his greatest moments of weakness. Surely she could alleviate this pain.
Instead he finds someone else in his room, a name he should know that slips through his grasp. A dark shadow of a person, smelling faintly of the seawater swept into his eyes. The young man pries Sunday's hand away from the glass and surrounds Sunday's body with his own. It is like falling into the sea.
Sunday gives up all pretense of breathing. The cavernous space inside him floods with water and salt, and the screaming is drowned with him.
"Only a nightmare," Dan Heng assures. His name, as the tide, has returned to Sunday with the retreating waves.
"Thank you." His voice is cracked, parched, drawn feebly from his strained throat.
"They'll get better, over time. They did for me."
"But they haven't stopped." Not an argument, but an acknowledgment of self: I have heard you calling in the night.
"They haven't."
#StarRailFic #sunheng
sunday/dan heng — a treatise on drowning
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