It begins the same way it always does, with a door that materializes out of the dark, a hallway that stretches too long to be real, and a voice that reaches me before the rest of the dream assembles itself. It is never the voice from tonight, never the cold, polished cruelty he used in the penthouse.
Dream-Adrian comes from another lifetime. He is sharper, younger, more volatile, and more easily wounded. He is breakable in a way the present version of him pretends he has never been, and in the dream he is always on the edge of breaking again.
In the dream he appears the way he existed eight years ago, yet the outlines of him are warped, sharpened by memory, and twisted by all the things we never said. The years between then and now distort him, blending the boy he was with the man who stared me down hours ago. What I see is a hybrid of both, overlaid like projections that cannot quite align. It leaves me with a sensation of wrongness, as if my mind refuses to decide which version is the truth.
I never dream the full story. My brain protects itself even in sleep, so the dream comes in fragments: brief flashes that slice through me like broken glass—sharp enough to draw blood but never large enough to reveal the whole shape of the wound. A winter street appears first, always cold enough that I see my breath fog in the air. My phone buzzes with a message I can't unsee, one that replays endlessly though the words remain blurred. A choice follows close behind, a choice my dream-self is forced to make even though every part of me tries to resist it.
Then he appears beneath a flickering streetlight, younger than the man I saw tonight, yet carrying the same storm beneath his skin. His expression is open for only a heartbeat before the fury floods in, and I feel the force of it even in the dream. When I speak—when I say, "We're done"—the voice doesn't belong to the girl I used to be. It sounds tired and older, as if someone with decades more damage is using my mouth to speak the words I never wanted to say.
Dream-Adrian steps closer with a sharpness that vibrates through the air. He does not ask questions. He already knows the answers.
"You disgust me."
The words land with a cold finality that steals what little air the dream has left. There is no accusation in his tone, no heat. Just judgment. The kind that does not need explanation because it has already passed sentence. My silence does not protect me. It condemns me.
I watch his expression collapse in slow motion. Warmth drains from his features, leaving behind a calculation I have seen too many times. Hurt reshapes itself into something harder. Contempt gathers like frost. Everything we once were turns to ash in a single inhale, and the sight of it keeps me pinned in place, helpless to stop a moment that already happened.
The dream fractures with the same abrupt violence every time. Hands grab me, rough and unfamiliar. Shouting echoes from somewhere just outside my field of vision. A blur of headlights slices through the dark as if someone is dragging a knife of white light across the scene. The cold sinks into my bones so completely that I feel it even now. I hear my own voice begging—"Please, don't"—words I don't remember speaking in real life but cannot escape in sleep.
A crack follows, loud and jagged, as though something vital inside me breaks. A shove knocks the breath out of me. Pain erupts beneath my ribs, white-hot and electric, like lightning being forced through my body. The impact sends everything spinning into colorless static.
I jolt awake with a violent gasp, sucking air into my lungs so fast it burns. The darkness around me feels heavy, pressing against my skin as if trying to hold me down. My pajamas cling to my body, damp with sweat that has cooled and now chills me further. My pulse races with frantic uneven beats, and for several seconds I cannot tell if the danger has passed or if it followed me into the waking world.
My chest aches as if someone has been squeezing it while I slept. I try to steady my breathing, my hands trembling so severely I have to press them into my thighs to keep them still. The nightmare clings stubbornly, like fingerprints smeared across glass that will not wipe clean. The echo of cold wind lingers on my skin. The fragments of his voice circle through my mind, not the man from tonight's penthouse, but the younger boy whose pain I never learned how to soothe.
Eight years have passed, yet my body still remembers everything it refuses to name. It remembers fear before my mind does. It remembers cold before memory returns. I've spent years convincing myself that whatever happened then no longer controls me, but the shaking in my fingers tells a different story. The pounding in my heart refuses to let me lie to myself.
I lie back slowly, staring at the uneven shadows on my ceiling, knowing sleep will not return. The nightmare has taken up too much space tonight, reopening old wounds I pretend have healed. I try to connect the fragments into something meaningful, but the edges refuse to fit. Trauma has a way of blurring timelines, mixing one pain with another until everything feels like the same bruise.
A different set of images rises, softer than the others but painful in the way nostalgia always is. A library hushed with winter quiet. A boy sitting across from me pretending to read. The warmth that flickered in his eyes before he learned how to lock every feeling behind a wall. I don't know why my mind keeps that memory preserved when it erases the moments I desperately want clarity on. Maybe some parts of us resist forgetting, even when forgetting feels safer.
But those gentle flickers fade quickly, swallowed by the rougher shadows that rule my sleep. The shove. The headlights. The fear. The sense of something shifting irreversibly inside me. I don't know which of those images belong to Adrian and which belong to someone else entirely, and maybe that uncertainty is its own kind of torment.
The truth is that every version of Adrian in my dreams hurts—whether he's the boy who once looked at me with impossible tenderness, the man who speaks to me now like I'm a transaction, or the echo of him that my trauma has carved into my subconscious. They all cut in different ways, none of which I have learned how to escape.
The room is quiet now, too quiet. I pull my knees toward my chest and wrap my arms around them, trying to ground myself in the present. The past feels like it's breathing down my neck. The future feels like it's collapsing toward me. And somewhere between those two points stands Adrian Vale, the one person I have never been able to outrun—no matter how far I go, no matter how much time drags between us.
Tonight, with the nightmare still tightening its grip around my lungs, I realize something I have been avoiding. He hasn't just haunted the corners of my life. He has haunted my dreams, my fears, and the silent, unanswered questions I buried so deeply I hoped they would never claw their way back to the surface.
I stay awake until the first dull blue of morning creeps into the room, fully aware that sleep will not return, and equally aware that the past I tried to bury is no longer content to stay silent.