𝐈𝐍𝐅𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 // 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝

A Descent Into Madness

AN: My most chaotic work, all spat out in Dream's melodramatic, word-heavy POV. Have fun!

-A Descent Into Madness-

Act I: Escape

The night was alive.

Time flashed and dragged, everything blurring in slow motion and then fast-forwarding as alcohol permeated the air and seeped into the walls of the manor. The space was bursting with people, drunken mouths slurring and yelling words that were stifled by the blaring music that seemed to strangle everything.

I loved it.

I loved the wild environment, loved how the deepest secrets and harshest truths were spilled out so easily, like the locks on minds and thoughts had been shattered and left everybody's vulnerability exposed and open. Call it manipulative, call it crazy, call it psychopathic, but I took full advantage of parties to analyze the defenseless nature of people not like me.

Under the lights, secrets weren't such secrets.

The strobing lights pierced our eyes, sweeping flashes of colour blinding and manic. From the drunk and the sober to the people in-between, every person was set aflame with neon light. It was a fluorescent world, a lurid subspace sphere that parties seemed to rage in.

I navigated this world with open ears, ready to catch and hear things the drunk rendered frivilous, ready to observe the true workings of minds incapable of shielding and defending their true natures. Most people navigated the landscape as an escape. They saw this landscape as somewhere to distance from reality, because this subspace felt so faraway and distant from truth. Whereas, I embraced this parallel, this demon, this beast.

The party was a friend of mine.

The party was a beast, with layers of incorporeal skin and bone and muscle. The outer walls were the skin that enveloped the party, and the alcohol was the lifeblood that coursed through the halls that were, by my example, veins. Its breaths were the songs that blared over the crowd, and its heartbeat was the thrumming bass of the music, reverbrating through the walls that were rendered bones.

Ah, metaphors.

Things went blurry when I was drunk. I thought in poetry and metaphor, and spoke in verse and stanza. I described too much and did too little, and the barrier between my mind and the public headspace ebbed.

Time no longer passed in minutes and hours. It passed in an unnamed measure, but the changes of the night were marked by drinks. New drinks and new drinks, seperating the time that slowly blurred into a colourful, warped mesh.

"George?" I said aloud.

Immediately, I felt his hand in mine. I clenched it tight, unable to feel whether I was crushing him or simply caressing his touch. Another side effect of a friendship with the beast. The inability to feel stimuli.

"Dream?" I could hear George's voice somewhere beside me, somewhere in the neon mesh that enveloped us. In a haze, I moved my kaleidoscope vision to where I could hear the wisp of sound, and found an angel wavering in the lights.

He stood there with his hand in mine, with his dark eyes glimmering and his hair painted with strokes of lurid light, his eyeliner smudged beneath his eyes and the glitter on his cheekbones faint and shimmering beneath the fluorescence. He looked like an ethereal angel, caught in a neon landscape that folded around him like a vaporwave jungle.

"You're so fucking pretty." I whispered, as my eyes found his smoldering gaze and held it, with some form of reverence. "I can't believe I was the one who did this." My fingers hovered over his cheekbone, yearning but refusing to seek permission to lower onto his skin.