A Lonely and Twisted World
Summary: Glitch and Wyatt dreamed of their youthful selves while trapped in their lonely and twisted worlds of isolation and insanity. Now that they're freed, can they connect the dreams to the present? Loosely based on themes of Emma Hewitt's song "Foolish Boy."
Pairing: Glitch/Wyatt
Length: 5,600 words

-x-

I.

Starting the night he met DG, Glitch again began to dream. They flooded to him. Torrents, impossible to decipher, waggled incessantly behind his eyes, stole his breath, and made him wish for the emptiness that'd plagued him before. He drew patterns in the sand when DG wasn't looking. He turned fronds of ferns upon the dirt to mimic the movements he'd seen in his sleep. Then, one afternoon, when they were on their way to meet the end of the world, he opened up his mouth to speak. "I confess," he said, laughing—he always did laugh now in his speech, "I confess that I blame the nightmares on you."

DG stripped the dreams down for him, analytically, emotionlessly. She was better than her mother in some respects. "It's not me you're really blaming. It's the situation. The stress. I know," and she pressed his arm but began immediately to walk away, "it's just the stress of seeing it all again."

She meant the whole of him he was in his memories. But even to DG, it couldn't be drawn together peacefully—the first Ambrose, the second man born of him. He concluded the difference. Memories strangled, and the strangler was Ambrose. Dreams fascinated, and the mesmerizer was Glitch. He tried to tell DG this, but it was late, and the stars hum and the fir trees sang, and he was captured by his dreams.

It was the first night he dreamed of a boy beneath a moon and a rainbow, someone he hadn't seen before. The image of the youth plagued him all day, romping through marshes, through mist. He thought of the youth and a warmth enveloped him, though the sky came down in silvery streaks, his breath plumed ahead of him, and DG's sympathies mutated into worry.

"I dreamed about a boy," he said for the sake of speaking. She became his ambulatory diary, the pen he never held, the paper he never creased. She listened, absorbing his verbal ink like complacent stationery. She held his hand, and he saw at his fingertips the imagined stains of forgotten fountain pens.

"What kind of boy?" She grew curious because she, since coming to the Other Side, the Far End of Hopes, she hadn't dreamed of prosaic things. If she did, she failed to see them as a cyclic nighttime vision, with plot and thesis and schematics. Her mind was pressed with a series of images. Cosmos, corn, doohickies in a laboratory far removed from her present life, locked in a place in her past—and woke cold, smelling of leaf mold and pine tar, and regarded the bald white mountain peaks as she had in her sleep. She never had the dullness to dream of a boy. "I hope he was nice to you in your sleep." DG raised the side of her mouth, turning away prior to his ability to see anything lewd underneath her stark stare.

"Nice to me?" Glitch fervidly repeated, dumping it out there in a winded, hackled, contentious manner. "I'll have you know, missy, I was really someone important once, and even in my dreams all the boys are nice to me!"

"I'm sure they are." DG pressed his wrist. He bobbed about in her present sweetly, and where would she have gone, and what would she have done, if she hadn't met Glitch? But he was not his own master, not really. He roamed the wilds, encountered situations that were beyond his brain power—and he frustrated himself with the woes of his past. He knew so little of what he was, who he was. He remembered his life in tangles. There could've been a boy once; Glitch was old enough, she judged, to have a child. But there could've been a man once, too; he was old enough to love forever. DG caught that persistent thread. She hoped someone had loved Glitch once. "Was it someone you knew, do you think, in the past?"

"I don't know." The little hill he climbed sucked the vim from him. He paused at the apex, shifting around the tattered cuffs of his coat, every button down the front lost in accordance to the annuals he wore it. "The past is all the same to me, my little catkin. Well, look, we've managed to find more marshland." He winced, his eyelashes extravagant, black down covered in a silvery rainy soot. "I don't recall all this marshland. But I do recall a flood. A massive flood." He turned his snicker into a blowy laugh. "It would have to have been massive for me to remember it, or to call it a flood."

DG steered him away from failures, from forgetfulness. These were nuisances, projectiles that maimed Glitch's wafting self-confidence. She squinted, too, but her black lashes were not so downy, and she'd blinked away the ashen rainwater. "I think I see something up ahead. Looks like—like it might be a cabin."

"These are the western plains," Glitch responded, conjuring from his inner soul a long-lost map rolled upon a table of iron and marble, surrounded by windows and light, perfumed by books and gardens. What was that place? It scraped against his conscious like the youth he barely knew. "This is where the rebellion started, where—" he paused to capture a hint of it, "where the Sorceress sent the Long Coats first. The first blood was shed here."

He lifted his holed shoe. DG watched the gratuitous demonstration, concerned but disassociated with his palavering of war, Long Coats and this sad business of a mad Sorceress. What he found at the end of his sole was nothing but grit from trees, sludge and flecks of duckweed.

"No blood." The tip of his toe returned to soggy earth. He itched a spot in his hair. The zipper nagged, distracted—itched and screamed and scared him. "I expected the blood would stay. There might be bodies in that cabin. You never know."

"It could be the boy from your dreams, too." She looked back at him. He was hesitant to go. He was thinking of blood, and she was thinking of different wars. Did they want the same things? He wanted what he wanted: to find where he belonged, to remember who he was. She wanted to find her parents, wanted to go home. Yet as she stepped ahead, her eyes met mountains caught in a fine web of clouds, and she wondered if her home was where she had left it, or if it was nowhere especially wonderful now.

"DG," he hailed her, but no princess of a fairy tale ever lingered when momentum shoved her ahead. She was far ahead. He sighed, trembling. Why did everyone have to move so far ahead? He fidgeted with the broken cuffs again, unraveled a thread, tugged until it snapped, and espied the cabin of the dead. It was easy for DG to go ahead. She was a kid, really. No past, only the future. What he longed to embrace was the past. He was stuck in an antiquated world, one that would be penned in books of O.Z. history.

He rambled along the least soggy path. He slapped bugs that nibbled meanly at his neck. "Who lives in this gods-forsaken place, anyway?" But in his wakeful midnight state, he'd seen the gargantuan being of the sky, felt its cold caress. A thousand miles from nothing, from no one, but he would be happy having the stars for his neighbors. He raised his head then, still walking, and tried to find a star, a planet, a hint of the midnight he'd seen. There were raindrops in his eyes, and limbs of a pine copse overcame his vestiges of one lost night.

He and DG bumped. She was peering round a bole. He looked with her across the draggled land, up to a cabin, up to a metal box somehow in the shape of a man.

"No, wait, DG! Shouldn't we talk about this?" But whenever he called for her to stop, DG, obstinately ran ahead.

What kind of man was in the box of whirls and wheezes, the box that had the outline of a concrete man? It could be a lunatic. A murderer. He whispered to himself. "Could be a headcase like me. For DG's sake, I hope it isn't. I can barely handle one of me!"