Hologram ☼ Lauren & Flynn
They were pretty.
The monsters, anyway. Or the dreams, more or less. He’d always managed to think that there was something beautiful about everything he saw in the nightmares. Flynn had been raised like any average boy— one that should have been afraid, instinctively, of all that went bump in the night. Instead, he was attracted to the cryptid creatures from bad television shows, infatuated with spectral images and verses of light that made him wonder. Still, wondering had been much simpler a few years previous to his admittance to the institution.
Before he knew it, thinking well of the beasts plaguing his dreams had become a crime. Even his own mother couldn’t bear her son’s strange, nighttime hallucinations. They were graphic, vivid, yes, but Flynn wasn’t frightened until he opened his eyes, come morning. The blood didn’t faze him until he awoke. Nothing mattered until reality set in, and to be frank, the more that fact crossed his mind, the more Flynn had begun to ‘wonder’ which reality belonged to him, in the first place. Often, he sank into his sheets as the bright blue in his eyes turned to a fading gray. Still, not even that was an escape from the cage with a name. He knew better than to wake up with intentions of releasing such tones in flights of sounds, for it was no use. Flynn couldn’t muster the thought of making someone frown with the intent to do so, much less could he go through with a massacre that made out to him in the dimly lit evenings.
Only sometimes, when he woke up… He wasn’t alone, anymore.
“Man, you’re predictable.” His voice. How could his own voice speak to him? The sinister tinge was like a mirror, but when Flynn moved, the other did not. Between them was no wall of glass, no shift to an alternate dimension. Sometimes, it was late. In the middle of the night, even, where this man, this creature would face him, make Flynn stare into his own eyes that held such difference. They were deep with hatred, filled with anger. And often, Flynn wished that there was something he could to, so he could make it stop.
Just one night, just make it stop for one night.
It never did, though. Instead, it worsened. On the worst nights, Flynn would succeed in shouting out, burning his throat. “Who are you?” They should have been sensible words, they should have come out reasonably— when he asked a question, an answer was supposed to come to him that made sense of absolutely everything. Strange, really, how even when Flynn reached out to grab ‘his own’ shoulder, to push it away, it was concrete. Existent. Once or twice, the doppelganger had thrown its knuckles into Flynn’s teeth. Another night, he’d simply disappeared. Either way, the unfortunate patient always wound up in solitary for breaking the rules when they had been so explicitly clarified. They hadn’t bothered to keep him alone long enough for him to crack. So in that, he could manage to keep his lips parted, white teeth a threat to his own emotional privacy. Avoiding the visitor had proven futile when Flynn asked for someone to watch his room as he slept; it had only led them to consider his Transorbital Lobotomy with a spreading prospect. With a punishment so immense lingering in the back of his mind, it was much easier to pretend that nothing was happening, rather than spitting it up, like bile.
And the moment he stepped out of his one-patient room, Flynn could smile again. As he took on empty seat (he was typically early— no reason to wait around when there was a monster in the mirror,) it was easy to feel a light contentment with the company of others that would be back before long. It was the only hope that he had, after all. Holding onto anything else might have been entirely capable of leaving him emptier than he already was.
Lauren held the journal pad tightly in her fist. She’d learned, time and time over, that it was easily snatched away. Apparently, it made a good throw toy and was good for a laugh, watching as she scrambled to get it back. She no longer left it in her room, either, as it was too easily found and rummaged through, even hidden from her, once. Instead, she carried it with her, as a majority of the time, the only person she had to talk to was herself. She was the only person she trusted, the only person that cared enough to know her, crazy and all. The paper never judged her, it didn’t stare at her with half-lidded eyes and fake-concern, it never laughed at her, never called her names. The words inside were her own, where nobody else’s could hurt her. As pathetic and sad as it would have been to anybody on the outside, the marker and the book of half-scribbled sheets was as close to a friend as she had. At least it had been, before she’d met him.
So began the internal debate with herself, the very same one she had every Thursday afternoon. Did she sit next to him? Did she sit a few seats over? Though they had become… rather friendly, if that was even the word associated to it, whatever it was, she was still weary around him, careful. Less than she was with the rest, maybe, but none the less. She wasn’t known as Jinx for nothing. Lauren could hardly remember what it was like, having actual friends… trusting someone, wanting to. It’d been such a long time since everything had fallen apart, since she’d lost everyone that’d ever mattered, anyone that had cared about her, and not about the supposed-to-bes and numbers in her patient file.
She went for the seat on his left, much as she always did, her lips curling into a small, sincere smile. She sat down over one of her legs, bringing the notebook over her lap. The thick, ugly scars on either of her wrists, from when she’d slit them in the girl’s bathroom Junior year, the least of her concern, anymore. She’d long stopped trying to hide them. Many of the people that slowly gathered around them displayed similar markings, though some of them had opted for bottles of pills, instead — even one that’d tried a rope around the neck. Their stories may all have started differently, but they were all the same now.
In a place like this, nightmares were nothing out of the ordinary, were as frequent and as expected as anything else they were dealt. Morning medications, cold showers, group therapy sessions. It was only another, unfortunate thing that simply came with the life they were all living, locked away from the world, miles away from anything else. She’d never thought anything of his dreams, what little she knew about him and what haunted him at night. Her nightmares were real, too — to her, stayed with her long after the sun was over the horizon. Their lives were nightmares. No escape. No safety. No mercy. The same shit, day after day, week for week, month for month… eventual years. Time was a blur, passing slower than what seemed possible or real, taunting.
They were trapped, each of them, and they had no right to pass judgement onto one another, though it often happened, anyway. One, just as bad as the next. Locked up long enough, you were capable of anything. “Seeing things” after restless nights and bad dreams didn’t seem terribly worrisome. “Hi…” She greeted, averting her gaze from him and focusing back in her lap, smile lifting slightly. Lauren honestly wasn’t sure why any of them bothered. The sessions were never guided, or that helpful, really. She’d made a habit of coming because there was never much else to do, but she normally sat there, paying attention only to herself and the doodles she sketched into the margins of her book.
What was there to talk about with someone, that likely hadn’t done anything since the last time you’d seen them? Her life hadn’t changed in any significant manner since she’d seen him last. His probably hadn’t, either. As the rest of their age-group settled into the circle, Lauren flipped the journal open to a random, clean page and yanked the cap from the black, fine-tip marker with her teeth. She drew four lines, two horizontal, two vertical, and added an ‘x’ in the bottom left corner. It was silly, but they had all the time in the world — and more, it seemed, to waste. Setting the marker between the pages as a bookmark, she closed the journal and threw it into his lap.
