She stayed very still as Mark moved off of her, ashamed and mortified to be caught in this sort of position by her best friend. She blushed a deep crimson at the comment regarding the room, and grabbed for her clothes, trying to put on her pants at the very least.

"It's n-nice t-t-to see you t-to Leslie...I'm s-sorry you w-walked in...on t-t-t-this....b-but we t-thought y-you'd...wha-?" she babbled nervously, trying to express her honest happiness to see her friend, while still apologizing for being caught in such a compromising position. And if her hands would stop shaking she'd be less compromised still. However, her hands froze, along with the rest of her, when she saw Leslie's eyes, astonished at the total change to a uniform black.

"Oh m-my god...Leslie what h-h-happened to your eyes?!" she whimpered, concern overriding shame and nerves as she tried yet again to slide her pants on, the khaki material sticking to the sweat and other fluids covering her legs.



Her heart stopped for a moment, her gaze shifting slowly back to Leslie. The little voice in her head (the one that hadn't stopped screaming in the last few moments) went quiet with dread, a palpable sense of foreboding building within her. ...too good to last.... she thought in the deafening silence.

She reached out grabbing Mark by his throat. Her grip was strong, she could tell by Mark's reddening face that she was firmly squeezing him cutting off the air supply to his lungs well before she hear him gasp in the least.

"My eyes? Why nothing compared with what I have in store for the two of you." Again she grinned as she shoved Mark to the floor. His naked body gasping out for air the moment that his throat had been released. The trajectory of the throw caused him to land near the threshold of the other room.

He began to crawl towards it and away from Leslie but he was booted in the rump each motion that he crawled, the pair disappearing into the next room, Leslie still kicking at him. She was toying with him. grabbing him by the back of his head by his hair she slammed him face first into the coffee table out there.

The letter and Mark's knife fell to the floor as blood streamed down his face from a laceration.

"You want to play, let's play!"

She could hear Leslie saying from the other room along with the sound of a few quick hard kicks against flesh. The thwapping sound ringing out along with the rising groans of pain that spilled from Mark's lips.

She felt nothing but cold, certain dread, filling her veins like frozen oil. She should have known better. After all this time, she really should have known better. Something as perfect and wonderful as having Mark for herself wasn't meant for her...not even in a dream. Her hands covered her mouth to stop from screaming as she watched Lesl-...no the nightmare that wore her best friend's face toss Mark around like a ragdoll, brutally kicking him into the other room. She let out a small keening cry of horror as she saw his face smash into the coffee table.

Unsteadily, Anne rose to her feet, letting the pants fall aside. Naked, she stumbled across the room, making it as far as the door before she faltered, a wave of nausea passing over her as she saw all the blood (Mark's blood) spattered on the floor. ...a nightmare....a nightmare... her inner voice repeated dully, as if it didn't believe it.

"...L-leslie...p-p-please s-stop....d-don't do t-t-this...." she pleaded weakly, knowing her words meant nothing, would accomplish nothing. Tears clouding her eye, she pushed away from the doorframe, trying to follow the nightmare Leslie, to take Mark's place...anything to stop her from hurting him any more. She stepped over the letter, one foot catching on the knife and nicking her skin on the blade. The formerly screaming voice in her head stirred, and whispered in a dark, soft whisper......kill her...you've already seen yourself do it....just let it happen again...

Leslie flicked up a wrist causing a pink tendril hatto lash out of her skin. She was not human? That would be the first guess and while Aegir had drawn out of her tight sheath he had not been finished with the illusion quite yet.

Head wounds, as Anne knew, sported a lot of blood even for superfical ones and most certain she hoped for that now as that pink tendril wrapped around Mark's throat, his head going white in contrast to the red from his own blood, a gash that would need stitches but as far as she could tell it wasn't too serious.

There was a lot of blood and the wound wasn't clear to her sight given the gore but she gagged that it wasn't too bad ... yet. The stinging pain of the knife bit into her foot. The blade was sharp as she could testify to though she had only grazed it.

Leslie turned her gaze in her direction, grinning again. She flickered her other wrist upward, a tendril shooting forth at her from a slit that opened up at her wrist. "Anne, Anne. Anne, I'll get to you in a moment."

Her tendril seeking to wrap around her waist to secure a hold on her and assure that she wouldn't be going anywhere ...

Somehow, it didn't surprise her that the nightmare Leslie was some kind of monster. The horror of her transformation was par for the course in Anne's tortured mind, just retribution for the vision she'd seen. The soft voice in the back of her mind continued to whisper, to croon quiet entreaties to murder her best friend, to kill the monster that wore her shape.

She gasped in fear as she saw how pale Mark was, how much of his blood was decorating his body like horrid paint. The pain in her foot was a distant echo, easily ignored, just like the blood welling from the cut. She continued stumbling towards the pair, monster and lover, her expression locked in an anguished visage.

At the lash of Leslie's tendril, Anne did the only thing she could think of to evade it...she fell, straight down to the floor, curling into a ball on the carpet. If she took a lash from the whiplike appendage, she intended to take it across her back, hoping the scars would blunt the impact. Her fingers, hidden from Leslie's view by her contorted body, closed carefully around the small knife, pulling it to her chest and concealing it.

Mark's hands came up trying to break the grip of the tendril around his neck that had been choking off his air supply. He could not budge Leslie's grip on him though as he tried in vain to pry it loose enough to get a breath of air.

Leslie took her eyes off of Anne and back to Mark, thus there was no direction to the tendril as it streaked toward her. Leslie did not make any adjustments since she was not watching what she was doing. She only glanced back when her tendril failed to connect with anything seeing that Anne dropped prone to avoid the grasp of the tendril.

Her tendril retracted like a tape measure back into the slit on her wrist. She frowned a little, this time watching her target she made a judgement call in her mind figuring that if she launched another tendril at her there was nothing to really grasp.

Thus she strode a little closer planning on delivering a swift kick to her and getting her to look up so her other tendril could wrap about her throat. "Now you're just pissing me off ..."

Believe it or not, Aegir had decided to go with a monsterous approach to Leslie thinking that it would be easy to handle matters and do what had to be done ... of course he could have kept her as a human and arranged circumstances just right but that would have proved to be far more difficult.

She couldn't see Mark, not from where she was. All she knew was that the lash had missed her, heard the air displaced in a soft hiss as it slashed through the air above her. Shuddering violently, she cradled the knife to her chest, sobbing as she lay curled on the floor. This was horrible, worse than what she'd feared.

She forced herself to suck in a deep breath, trying to calm her nerves (...kill her...), and to silence the whispering voice in her head. No, she couldn't kill Leslie, nightmare or otherwise. She wouldn't make the vision true, no matter what, even if the nightmare hurt her, hurt them both. Leslie deserved better...it wasn't her fault...it was...it was...



She stopped shuddering, staring at the knife in her hands, her breath caught in her throat. It wasn't fear, not just fear at least, that paralyzed her. It was realization. This nightmare, the visions...none of it was Leslie's fault...it was her fault....she was to blame. The dream was punishment, for seeing herself kill Leslie, for the fire...for all of it.

"I k-know...I'm s-s-sorry Leslie..." she whispered hoarsely, preparing herself for whatever the nightmare planned for her. She wouldn't fight...she deserved this...or worse...

The whispering voice went silent, a brooding, pensive silence, a thread of worry worming through it.

Her words were answered by a swift kick to the ribs, fortuanately it was to her right side and there wasn't much feeling from the dead nerve endings there. The only reason that she had felt anything was the fact that Leslie's foot tucked slightly beneath her and rained down on a portion of her chest as well.

"Get up, bitch!" She hissed her hand grabbed her by the hair jerking her head up. Now Anne could see the onyx black eyes glaring down at her, her sunglasses absent now and most likely on the floor somewhere, falling off while she pummeled Mark.

Mark croaked, the life leaving his oxygen depraved body quickly as the tendril squeezed his tender neck. Like a leather glove she could hear the tendril creaking as it synched up against the throat it had been seized around.

Another kick, worse than the first, was delivered to her, the same spot though her chest felt the impact more. The hand leaving her hair to seize her own throat and heft her up to her feet with a great display of strength. Then as a cold smile appeared over her face she glanced down at the knife in her hands.

"What are you planning to do with that Anne?" She asked. See saw the knife, she was not blind after all. Her fingers tightened against Ann's throat further and began to cut off her air supply as Leslie looked back up to her face with her cold smile etched upon her face.

She grunted as the first kick found her, braced for the blow, and for once grateful for the deadening in her nerves the fire had left her with. She winced but didn't cry out as her hair was yanked upward, forcing her to face her nightmare. She looked upon the perversion of her best friend's form and smiled weakly, shuddering at the horrible blackness of Leslie's eyes. She felt her heart breaking as she listened to Mark dying nearby, but she couldn't tear her gaze away from their tormentor.

The air left Anne's lungs in a hoarse cough as the second kick landed, hurting significantly more than the first as it caught her in the ribs. Again, she made no sound, bearing the pain in stoic silence, accepting it as nothing less than she deserved. Her lack of breath quickly became a problem as Leslie wrapped her inhumanly strong fingers around her friend's neck, lifting her easily into the air. Anne's fingers wrapped around the blond girl's wrist weakly, not fighting back so much as trying to get enough leverage to breathe.



She raised the small blade slowly, not trying to be sneaky, or attack her with it. She rested her shaking hand atop Leslie's gripping fingers lightly, her empty hand moving from the other girl's wrist to reach out for her coldly smiling face. Her burned fingers stretched out, trying to stroke that soft skinned cheek she had felt before, that she remembered...and if she wasn't stopped, to cover those horrible eyes, if only for a moment, so Anne could use the knife for what she intended.

Leslie sneered at the blade, though she seemed unconcerned with it. She assumed that the blade was a normal blade of steel, though she really hadn't looked at it. If she had she would have been more concerned seeing that the blade was silver engraved with his name and a dragon.

It was a birthday gift since Mark had since he was 12.

But the nightmare continued. Anne could feel the warmth of Leslie's skin as she placed hers over her friends though as her other hand moved down towards her friend Leslie's brow scrunched up in curiousity as she was trying to discern what she was doing but couldn't figure it out even as her eyes were covered.

Had she been aware of the properties of the weapon she would have stepped back as far as she could after releasing her and attacking her with her tendril again to place some distance between the two but she hadn't recognized the threat that the weapon posed to her seeing that normal blades could not harm her so she gave this one no additional thought. Her fingers just continued to press in against her throat as Anne's air supply was cut off.

Her eye shifted to gaze fondly on the glittering blade. She remembered it well, how Mark had never let it out of arms reach, the times he'd used it to carve Leslie and she little figures out of wood, the ribbon he'd made from an old dress of Leslie's for her hair. It seemed fitting, really, that this should be the knife in her hands at this moment.

Anne's attention slid back to Leslie, her eyesight darkening as air became a scarce commodity, her head swimming with memories and pictures, the happy three years they'd spent together...the happiest years of Anne's life in fact. If this was what it was to die, then...it wasn't so bad. Far better than burning to death had felt.

Her fingers trembled violently as she stroked Leslie's cheek, her air-starved mind drifting back to the day she'd first been "seen" by her best friend, the blond girl's delicate fingers tracing over her own scarred features. ...she said...I was beautiful....

With little time left before she passed out from lack of air, Anne gathered what meager courage she possessed, and pressed her fingers over the horrid obsidian eyes of her nightmare tormentor. Her other hand tightened on the knife and slid it into position, ready to finish this horrible play. But all things must be done the right way...and with the last of her air Anne whispered...

"..I love...you Leslie..."

It was so easy, so familiar the sensation, the blade moving from left to right in a smooth arc, drawing a crimson line across her own throat, just above Leslie's squeezing hand. For the second time that day, Anne began to die.

She woke up sitting bolt upright in her bed. She had been redressed by Aegir though the bloody sheets may have been a give away to what had happened not to mention that her eye caught upon the window only because they were dancing back and forth slightly by a cool breeze coming into the room by an opened window.

The window was barely opened, a couple of inches but that was all that Aegir needed. His boneless nature let him flow though cracks by far smaller and it was to the window that he flowed. He was slow moving and already climbing down the wall with ease due to the suction cups on his tentacles.

His pigment was black better to blend in with the surrounding darkness that closed in around him though he had already used some foresight in the event that Anne went to the window and looked out dulling her senses so that she could once more not detect him ... just incase.

But he had been stunned and partially confused by the chain of events that had transpired. No doubt he detected the change in her mental state as she faced a familiar situation. He had assumed that as stressful as things were that she would plunge the knife into Leslie's chest where upon he would end the illusionary state she was in but that was not the case.

He figured with her life endanger and that of Mark's she would react ... differently ... so he was a bit confused by this. Of course Aegir did not understand the limited life spans of humans. Nor with his long life did he understand the concept of ending it, as bored as he grew most times from having had done so much, knowing as much as he did ... there were few things that he wasn't an expert at or hadn't done.

But this baffled him ... for once he was confused, he turned it over in his mind as if he could work out a viable reason for Anne's behavior especially with her prior visions but nothing seemed to make sense to his alien mind.

For the first time in a long time he grew interested in something. There was something knew to look forward to if only understanding a human conception it was something. Indeed, he expected to drudge more into this mind and had told himself that they would cross paths once again.

She woke in a cold sweat (honestly earned actually) panting for breath and clutching at her throat. Once again finding her skin unbroken, she sighed in relief, sliding out of her tangled and sweat soaked covers and padding slowly to the window to close it, her memories of laying down fuzzy and indistinct. She might have left it open, she couldn't remember, didn't really care so long as she got it closed and blocked out the hot, humid air of the island.

-click- went the lock of the window, -thud- went her body to the floor, her back to the windowpane, her head in her hands. Hollow eyed and exhausted beyond belief, Anne stared at a random spot on the floor. She felt ill, her stomach quesy, her abdomen and head both dully aching. She could feel herself breaking down slowly, between the horrible nightmares plaguing her both awake and asleep, the phantom pains (she assumed), and the visions...always the visions.

Without even the strength to cry, she sat and stared into nothing, the chill of the room returning as the air conditioners did their job. Her hand reached out and pulled the blanket from the bed, tugging it around her shaking shoulders and bundling herself up in her little spot by the window. It was fitting, in a way...her room felt as cold and empty as she did. Alone in the darkness, her body finally succumbed to the pull of real sleep, her exhaustion indelible.

This time, the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness was undisturbed by anything at all.

~Fin~