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Well well well, how long has it been since the last chapter of Waking Nightmares? Six months? Half a year? Good goddamn, it’s been longer than I thought. Depression will do that to you I suppose. But worry not! Chapter 10 is here, and hopefully you won’t have to wait six months for the next chapter after this. Let’s get right into it babes!

Waking Nightmares masterlist here.

Waking Nightmares: Chapter 10

Rating: Mature, SFW

Word count: 6,211

Content warnings: Passing mention of suicide, attempted drowning, emotional breakdowns, violence, manhandling, choking, gore, knife injuries, Freddy is a bastard

POV: Roxanne Love

I was ready.

Or as ready as I could be, all things considered.

I’d done the research. I’d made the plans. I’d gotten what I needed, made the necessary preparations, checked and double-checked everything to make sure it would work. It wasn’t a complex plan – if anything, it was ridiculously and perhaps arrogantly simple. Which was why I needed to make sure I wasn’t overestimating myself and underestimating either of them.

It wasn’t a plan of Rube-Goldberg booby traps or smoke and mirrors or Christian faith or vague dream powers. It was a plan of simple determination and brute force.

I had what I needed. Now I just had to do it and hope it was enough. Hope I was enough.

But, of course, it would’ve just been too easy to fall sleep and get to it. Of course, the one time I wanted to go to sleep was the one time I just couldn’t.

It’s not like I wasn’t tired. Because I was – I was fucking exhausted. My body practically gave out as I settled down on top of the bedcovers, as comfortably as was possible. Every bit of tension uncoiled from my body almost instantly, muscles failing and limbs dropping as if made of lead. My eyes ached. My body and mind sighed.

Finally. Finally.

A moment of goddamn peace. After days and weeks and nearly a month of forcing myself to stay awake and downing expresso shots and moving through everything with all the focus and conviction of a reanimated corpse. I finally got a chance to fucking go to sleep. Even if it was the calm before the storm, it was something. And I was willing to take whatever I could get.

But. Of course. Things weren’t that simple. Nothing was lately.

Even as I lay in bed, outwardly peaceful and comfortable, my mind whirled. I kept rolling my plan around my head, reviewing every part, poking every corner to make sure it was solid enough not to fall to pieces at the first hurdle. Was this part foolproof enough? If it wasn’t, was there a backup plan? How about this part? Was everything in place in the real world? Was I actually ready, or had I forgotten something?

And that wasn’t to mention the quiet little voice in the back of my mind that kept whispering, quietly but persistently, “This might not work. You might just be running head-first into a deathtrap.”

I shifted, trying to relax. But comfort eluded me.

If I did fuck this up… if for some reason, I didn’t wake back up… what would happen to Houdini? Would Mel take care of him? She would, right? She had to. Our relationship wasn’t so broken that she’d just toss him out her door or hand him off to a stranger, right? I didn’t think so… I hoped it wasn’t. Because it wasn’t like Mom or Dad could take him, not with Dad’s allergies. And Ami… she loved Houdini. But she lived in a dorm. She couldn’t take him. She wouldn’t have the time.

Oh God, what about them? What would they think happened to me?

I imagined being found dead in my own bed, fully dressed and with my throat slashed open, bedsheets soaked in blood.

It would be so fucking bad. Would they think I’d killed myself? The mad miserable artist, finally taking her own life? It would break Ami’s heart. I could practically hear her soft, broken little sobs. I could see Dad holding her tight like he would whenever she scraped her knee as a toddler. And I could see Mom. Sadness clinging to her frown and the lines around her eyes.

Disappointment, too.

The thought made my body feel hollow.

Or… what if I didn’t die? What if I didn’t have my throat slashed open? What if something worse happened, something a little more creative?

The various gruesome kills from the movies flipped through my mind.

…I sure as hell wasn’t going to go to sleep if I was scaring the shit out of myself. Not with my heartrate as high as it was now.

I blew out a breath and rolled onto my side, curling my arms around myself. I stared at the blackout curtains. Watched them sway, just a tiny bit, as the AC worked overtime and blew directly at them.

I lay there. I waited. I stared out my bedroom door.

The house felt so empty without Houdini.

I hoped Mel was taking care of him. And I hoped her milquetoast new boy was staying far away from him. I didn’t know how he felt about cats. But he seemed like the kind of guy who thought dogs were man’s best friend and cats were like women, whatever the fuck that meant.

Unbidden tears sprung into my eyes. Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe it was the frustration. Maybe it was at how fucking ridiculous all his was and how I was starting to question my sanity once again. Maybe it was the cold, empty feeling of isolation.

How many times had I cried in the past few weeks? It had to more than I’d cried in the past few years. Even with…

…Well.

Maybe not.

I closed my eyes. The tears hovered along my eyelashes. One slipped free, going along the contours of my nose and down my other cheek.

I just wanted to sleep. I just wanted this quiet. Just for a moment.

I’d do anything for whatever fucking god was out there.

Please.

The house rang with baleful silence.

I waited. And waited.

And waited.

And then I was in a dream before I even realized it. My legs were already moving when my mind caught up and emerged from its haze.

The first thing I realized was that it was warm. The same oppressive, damp heat that clung to my skin, just like in the hellish industrial plant from my last nightmare, and just like every night I’d been trapped by sleep paralysis and hallucinations in my own bedroom.

But I wasn’t in the industrial plant this time. And I certainly wasn’t in my bedroom. Not anymore.

Everything was stone. Ancient, pale, rough-looking stone. Flickering torches lined the walls, casting everything in a dim, sickly amber light. The air was. stale. Something roared in the distance. All I could see was a long, dark hallway stretching before me, and the torches creating little pools of light every twenty feet.

Things glinted in the dark as I passed them. Metal? Metal grates. Along with little grooves and barely-there carvings in the wall, too faint to make out in the darkness. Odd shapes, like sculptures and bones. And occasionally, what looked like flickers of fire beyond the cracks in the stone.

I didn’t know what it was. There wasn’t any one specific thing. But something about this place, wherever it was, felt… strange. And old. And like there was a history here, engraved and kept in the stone.

It reminded me somewhat of the mandirs Mom had taken Ami and me to see during a trip to India. At the time, I hadn’t cared. I was a teenager at the time, and why the hell would I have cared about dusty old temples? They didn’t matter to me. But even then, as I’d stared dubiously at the Kandariya Mahadeva Mandir, I’d been able to tell that the place was old. It had a history. It had secrets, and it had seen things I couldn’t have imagined.

This place felt similar. This place was old, and it had history and secrets and it had seen things I couldn’t dream of. But this felt less like a temple and more like an ancient labyrinth or an elaborate dungeon or a winding, lifeless catacomb. Or if it was a temple, it was a temple dedicated to something I didn’t want any part of.

…What was I actually getting myself into?

I stopped at a fork in the road. The hallway split into three identical dimly lit halls. They felt no different and no less endless as the one stretching out behind me.

I chose one at random.

Whether I’d made the right choice, I wasn’t sure. I seemed to walk forever. I walked until sweat dripped down my back, till hair hung limply across my face, till my legs burned and my tongue scraped against the roof of my mouth. My legs were moving but I wasn’t making any progress. I might as well have been standing still. I walked until I started to wonder if somehow, the hallway had looped back on itself, and I was going in endless circles. A simple purgatory.

There would be no need to kill me if I was trapped for eternity.

Despair clawed at my chest. My hands twitched with the desperate need for something, anything, to give.

Until finally, something did.

The hallway ended abruptly and plunged down into what had to be the most hellishly steep staircase I’d ever seen. It reminded me far too much of the near-endless staircase from my previous dream.

But it wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go.

I plucked the dampened material of my shirt, pulling it away from my skin for a moment of relief before releasing it again. Then I started the descent.

How much time had passed? It felt like an eternity. But there was no way to tell how long it had been in the waking world. It could’ve been no more than ten seconds. It could’ve been hours. It could’ve been fourteen minutes, and my phone alarm was about to go off. Or with how exhausted I’d been, I could’ve slept through it, and my backup alarm was about to go off.

Or maybe I’d slept through that too.

My heartrate kicked up at the thought. I quickened my pace, going down two steps at a time.

If I’d slept through both alarms, I was screwed. If they hadn’t gone off yet, I needed to get moving. This wasn’t going to fucking work if I didn’t have them – preferably only one of them – in front of me.

The distant roaring grew louder the further down I went.

What the fuck was that?

The staircase ended as abruptly as it has started, and I slammed into a wall full-force. “FUCK!” I shouted, nearly toppling back onto the stairs. My own voice echoed back at me. That fucking hurt.

I’d come to… a dead end?

No, I quickly realized, not a dead end. A door. If the light peeking through a long crack in the wall was any indication. I felt around in front of me in almost total darkness, until my hand connected with a knob and I pushed the door open.

Another hallway.

But this one had a small pinprick of light at the end.

Relief flooded my veins. I picked up speed, almost breaking into a run down the hallway. Finally, something, progress –

I burst out of the tunnel’s mouth and into the room at its end. It was almost like a mini courtyard. Circular and surrounded by ancient crumbling stone on all sides, but open to the sky. If you could even call it that. It was more like a black, starless, empty void, save for the distant metallic gleam of two somethings far up. I wasn’t sure what. The only light sources were the sickly yellow torches scattered around the walls, framing each mouth of another branching tunnel. And in the middle of the room was a rounded pool of water. A stream fell from some unknown source in the sky to fill it.

Cautiously, I approached the edge of the pool and peered in. Lukewarm stray water droplets hit my face at the proximity. I couldn’t see a bottom to the pool, and I couldn’t see a way for the water to get out, either. I glanced up at the sky again. The water just fell from the darkness, fell from whatever was up above with those two gleaming things in the sky.

What the fuck was this place? A nonsensical nightmare realm of endless corridors and hidden secrets that bordered on being just cohesive enough to have a history. Dreamlike, yet somehow not quite unreal.

I raked my hair out of my face.

Coming here might’ve been a mistake.

Something slammed behind me.

My heart leapt into my throat and I whirled around, arms flying up to block the threat.

…There was nothing.

My pulse reverberated in my throat. I scanned the room for any signs of life, for anything that looked weird or out of place. My gaze snagged on each tunnel mouth and stopped on the hallway that had led me here. It stretched ominously before me. I couldn’t see the end of it. Couldn’t see the door or the stairs beyond it.

Is that where it had come from? Did the door slam shut and echo down the hall? That wasn’t a good sign. A closed door meant no escape. A closed door meant I was trapped.

A closed door meant I was quite possibly fucked.

I stared at the darkness until color splotches appeared in my vision.

My hands shook in front of my face. I let out a slow breath to try and calm my nerves.

Rough hands grabbed my arms.

And before I could react, I was weightless, catching only a blur of color before my back hit the water and I was slammed back into my body.

I immediately writhed, kicking and clawing mindlessly. Bubbles and panic blurred my vision. Something dragged my deeper as cruel fingers and slicing claws dug into my flesh. A scream burned in my chest.

No this couldn’t be happening this isn’t what I thought was going to happen –

I kicked and clawed and punched at my captor, but the water stile any force behind it. Panic swelled in my lungs and ate away the oxygen left.

This had been a mistake. A fool’s errand. I was going to drown, and my body would too, choking on water while surrounded by land for miles.

And then I was floating. The hands disappeared.

I was free.

My lungs screamed at me to move. I surged towards the surface and exploded out of the pool, scrabbling for the edge and gasping down air and probably swallowing about half the pool’s water in the process. I choked and sputtered as I heaved myself out, muscles aching from the sudden lack of weight from the water. I forced myself up. Forced myself to stand on shaking, unsteady legs and stumble as I fought to regain my breath and my balance.

There was a loud splash behind me as something else burst up from the water.

I didn’t need to turn around. I knew who it was. Because who the hell else would it be?

I turned anyway.

And there he was.

Arms braced against the edge of the pool, metal claws scraping against stone as they found purchase. Water running off the odd pattern of scars on his face. Black coat fanned out behind him in the water like wings or tattered fins. Colorless eyes fixed on me.

I recognized his face from the movies. Recognized the feeling of dread from my own nightmares.

“Go ahead.” His tone was low and bitter and mocking.

“Just try and escape.”

So I did. I spun around and sprinted down a random hallway full-speed. The shadows swallowed me. It was dark and damp and dingy with only a single flickering torch here and there to keep me from crashing into the walls. I had no idea where I was going, no idea if he was following. But the adrenaline pulsing through my body didn’t let me stop. And I didn’t dare to look back.

How much time did I have left?

I turned a corner and burst out into the open.

Except it wasn’t the open. It was a round room with no roof, different pathways branching off into darkness, and a waterfall ending in a pool in the center.

My heart dropped. What the…

Either this place had multiple rooms that looked exactly the same. Or I had somehow ended up back in the same place I’d just left.

Shit.

Now that I wasn’t moving, I could hear the echo of footsteps that weren’t mine. Along with the now all-too-familiar sound of dragging metal.

SHIT.

I sprang back into motion, picking another hallway and plunging down it. A long, straight path that just kept going and couldn’t possibly stretch back around.

Except.

It did.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” I muttered. I swung my gaze around, trying to discern where the hell the footsteps were coming from, from which direction he was coming from, but it was impossible. The sound echoed in a way that it shouldn’t have in a roofless room. And the pathways led back here in a way that they shouldn’t have.

This was a nightmare, a nonsensical fucking nightmare meant to tease me and frustrate me and get me fucking lost.

But I couldn’t just fucking wait here, either.

I ran down the third hallway. Ended up back in the same place.

Then the fourth. Same result.

I was desperate. I was losing time, wasting time, I didn’t know where he was and I didn’t know how to fucking survive in a place designed to trap me.

One hallway remained – the hallway from which I’d come. Where there was a door and a staircase.

I didn’t know if the door was still open.

“Roooooxyyyyyyyyyy…”

I’d take the chance.

My heart thundered in my ears and my throat and my veins as I took off again. I slammed shoulder-first into the closed door, pain reverberating through my bones as I scrabbled for the handle. I grabbed it. Twisted and pulled.

It didn’t move. It was locked.

My heart plunged into my stomach.

Fuck.

“Roxy.”

The hairs on my neck stood up. I drew in a slow, steadying breath.

Turned.

And was slammed against the door, metal claws digging into my throat and a forearm pressing against my chest. The air wheezed out of my body. His face was inches away from my own. Even if I couldn’t see him in the pitch-black darkness, I could feel his gaze boring into me as if it was a physical third hand.

“You.” Warm breath puffed against my face. I grimaced. “Are a very hard woman to catch, Rock-see.” His drew out the syllables of my name, as if savoring its taste in his mouth.

I swallowed the urge to spit out a smartass remark. This wasn’t the one who’d first chased me and nearly killed me. This was the one who’d been haunting me for weeks now, the one who more closely resembled the character from the movies. And if he’d said the words with the same bombastic, biting snarkiness of that character, I wouldn’t have hesitated to bite back.

But this one, the real one, said it so lowly, so cruelly, so intimately, as if he was sharing a private deadly secret with me. Spoke it while his gaze brushed up and down me like a physical hand, eying me up like a piece of meat he was trying to figure out how best to slice. Spoke it while his claws brushed against my throat and left coldness in their wake. Spoke it while his very presence suffocated me with its burning intensity.

This was not a movie. This was not the ridiculous movie character I’d seen chasing random teenagers across my screen the past few nights.

No, he didn’t seem so ridiculous anymore. Not as Freddy Krueger dug his claws in, just a little, just enough to make me flinch at the prick of pain.

“I hope you know that I could’ve killed you already,” he said, softly. “I could’ve killed you before you even turned around. Or when you were running like a rat in a maze. Or when you were drowning. Hell… I could’ve let that little imposter slice you up and do my job for me.”

This time, the words left my mouth before I could stop them. “What, are you expecting a thank you?”

Pain bloomed in my neck as he dug his claws in and broke enough skin for blood to well. I froze, breath catching.

“I’m expecting you to know that you’re not dead because I don’t want you dead.” A pause, then a flutter of breath as he laughed to himself. “Well. Not yet, at least.”

“How sweet of you,” I said, flatly.

“Don’t worry.” I couldn’t be sure, but he seemed to lean in a little closer. “It’s not out of the kindness of my heart.”

A hollow pang went through my stomach. I’d been under no illusion that he was sparing me out of good will, but the fact that he had something else in mind was… not comforting. Especially since I had no idea what that something else was. But it was nothing good, that was for certain. Even if he said he wanted me alive, that didn’t mean he wanted me unharmed. There was plenty he could do to me while keeping me alive.

I swallowed my own rising nervousness. It was hard to feel tough and in control of the situation when I was between a rock, a hard place, and five very sharp blades.

“Well what do you want?”

The pressure of the blades eased, just slightly. It was too dark to tell, but something told me a self-satisfied little smile had unfurled across his face.

“Don’t worry. I just wanna talk.”

That sounded incredibly suspicious.

He wanted to talk. Talk about what? I doubted it was anything good.

The rising nervousness had become a little ball of panic lodged in my lungs. I struggled to keep it from getting any further.

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

He definitely leaned in this time, so close our noses were practically brushing. Close enough to press a tender kiss to my lips like a lover would, or close enough to unhinge his jaw like a snake’s and sink sharp teeth into the soft, vulnerable flesh of my throat. The ball of panic rose a little further. My heart hammered in my ears. I felt as though he were about to deliver a death sentence.

But then he jerked back sharply, head rising and twisting away so I could just barely make out the sharp profile of his face. The suffocating weight of his attention was elsewhere. He was rigid and still, totally immobile.

Houdini did this. When he’d heard something that I hadn’t, and he’d whip his head up and go still as he listened and tried to discern its source. Half of the time, it was something benign – the dishes in the sink shifting, a sudden noise from the television, my phone alarm going off. The other half, it was something I hadn’t heard at all.

This was the latter.

I heard nothing but empty, ringing silence.

…Until something faint and barely-there echoed down the halls. Quiet enough that I would’ve missed it entirely if I hadn’t been straining, quiet enough that at first, I couldn’t even tell what it was.

Until it grew a little louder. And I was hit in the chest with overwhelming familiarity.

It was the sound of a guitar riff I knew by heart. Piercing through the illusion of whatever nightmare hellworld this was.

“What,” Freddy asked, tone laced with malice, “is that?”

The darkened tunnel around us blurred, snapped back into place, then blurred again. My heartbeat sped up as I started to rouse. And as I realized that the backup plan had worked. The second alarm had worked. I was waking up.

The surge of adrenaline made me grin recklessly, and the stupid words were already leaving my mouth before I could stop to consider his reaction. “That would be the sound of my high school years coming to save my ass.”

I was slammed against the door again. Pain ricocheted through my bones and sent my head spinning. He said something, but the words were lost between my bleary not-quite-asleep state, my spinning head, and the crescendo of music.

But I still had the sense to grab his wrists and mumble out, “And you’re coming with me.”

And then the music hit its peak, the snarled vocals “HOLD ONTO SOMETHING!” rang through the air, and I was torn awake.

Painfully, immediately awake, bolting upright in bed so fast that I thought I felt the vertebrae in my neck crack as I just about gave myself whiplash. Blood chugged through my veins to the staccato rhythm of my pulse in my ears. My palm was sweaty as I gripped the handle of the kitchen knife I’d yanked from the waistband of my jeans before I’d even registered I’d done so.

I scanned every inch of the bedroom from my half-crouched position on the bed.

There wasn’t another soul in sight.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Where is he?

In the first movie, he’d sprang up from the far side of Nancy’s bed after she pulled him into the real world. I peered over each side of my own black wire bedframe.

Nothing.

I jabbed my finger against my phone screen, cutting the song off mid-death growl and plunging the house into silence. My ears rang from the abrupt change.

The only sound was my own rapid, too-shallow breathing.

“No…” The words came out a whisper, dangerously close to a whimper. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again. The room was still empty.

My body felt numb. Too warm and too cold and prickly. My stomach threatened to climb its way up into my mouth.

Oh my God.

I’d made it all up. I’d really made it all up, hadn’t I?

I was going to have a panic attack. I was going to vomit. I was going to have an AMI.

It wasn’t real.

No…. no no no no no.

I dropped the knife onto the bed and dug my nails into my scalp till it hurt. I was about to break. I could feel it. I could feel panic and despair prying at my ribcage, squeezing my lungs. My eyes burned and my vision blurred. My breathing was too shallow, too fast, too wheezy, but I was powerless to stop myself from plunging into the depths of my own hysteria.

It wasn’t real I’d been wrong it had all been in my head I’d lost my mind.

A broken little sob clawed its way out my throat. A second tried to follow its path, and I choked on it. Drowned in it. Burning tears spilled down my cheeks. I clenched my teeth so hard my jaw popped and I thought my teeth might break. As if any of it would make it stop, stop the tears or the sobs or the hollowness growing in my chest and threatening to devour me from the inside.

I cried. I cried until my body ached. I cried until my head hurt and there were no more tears left to cry. And then I wallowed in the cold silence that followed. Waited until the noise in my head settled to a buzz, and the hollowness inside of me subsided a little.

Not much. But a little.

For now.

I took a slow, shaky breath. Let it out. Did it again. Wiped my cheeks, which came away stained black. Likely from makeup I’d forgotten to wash off at some point in my sleep-deprived few days, and had dripped down my cheeks once I’d started sobbing. I could barely even remember the past few days. I could’ve killed a man and I’d be none the wiser.

It’s fine, Rox. It’s fine. We’ll figure this out. We’re gonna figure this out.

It’ll be fine.

I pushed my hair back out of my face. Took another breath.

And that’s when I noticed the hand wrapped around my ankle.

The hand made of bone and viscera and gleaming metal claws.

My heart slammed into my throat. I lurched away. He cut through the bed as if the sheets were made of water and grabbed me by the neck, fingers curling and biting into my flesh. I choked, writhed, kicked uselessly. He bore down on me, crushed me, overwhelmed me.

He was real he was real a living breathing nightmare a story come to life an impossible reality holding my life in his hands and crushing it–

He leered down at me, every scar on his face etched with cruelty. “Awww, you really thought I wasn’t real? That I was all in your head?”

My vision blurred. My ears rang. My lungs screamed. He leaned down.

“I promise you. I’m far worse than anything you can imagine.”

I reached out blindly. Grabbed something. And crashed it against his head full-force. He yelped in pain, grip loosening, and I shoved him off. He landed on the floor with a thud. Oxygen flooded my lungs and I threw myself off the other side of the bed as my body heaved with coughs. I frantically looked around, half-blind as darkness prickled the edges of my vision.

Knife knife knife where was the knife???

Freddy rose from the other side of the bed, unfurling from the shadows. “Stop that,” he spat.

Fuck the knife.

I grabbed the baseball bat I’d leaning against the wall and swung as he tried to round the bed. He stumbled back, eyes flaring wide. He dodged once, twice, but the third time the bat whacked against his side. His entire body bent like a piece of paper as he curled over himself in pain. I wound up and swung again. This time the bat hit his skull with a crunch. My spine crawled. I swung again.

He caught it.

The blood smeared across his lips looked almost black in the dim light. His teeth were bared in a snarl and his eyes blazed with anger.

My stomach sank.

My arms were nearly yanked out of their sockets as he tore the bat away from me and tossed it across the room like a toothpick. He surged forward and slammed me against the wall. Pain rattled through my bones.

“Stop it,” he snarled again, spitting the words into my face.

I kicked and knocked his legs out from under him. We crashed to the floor. A blade sliced through my shoulder and I cried out in pain. We grappled, all arms and hands and legs and my fingers tight around his wrist as I tried to keep his claws away from me. Blood smeared across his face and dripped from me onto him, blood spat from his filthy mouth onto me. He writhed and bucked his body. I clamped my legs around bony hips and held on. He couldn’t get on top or else that’d be it, I’d be pinned down and vulnerable and dead and I’d have failed.

A flash of metal caught my eye. I took my eyes off him for a second.

The knife had been kicked under the bed.

Then he lashed out and grabbed my hair and pulled.

Excruciating pain pierced through my neck and scalp so hard that for a split second I’d thought he’d snapped my neck completely. But no. I was still blisteringly, agonizingly alive. A scream tore out from me. He threw me off and I crashed into the bedside table.

The knife was right there.

I lurched forward like an enormous misshapen worm. He grabbed me by the ankles, yanked me back. I slammed a boot against his jaw and he let go with a muffled groan. I clambered forward, grabbed the knife, and shot to my feet just as Freddy got to his and pounced on me. I spun around. Swung the knife.

It hit its target, tearing through fabric and flesh and splitting Freddy’s torso open.

He staggered, face frozen in shock.

I didn’t hesitate. I punched the blade into the fresh wound and twisted. Warm blood gushed around my hand, slickening my fingers. I pushed, pressed further, watched his face twist in pain before he collapsed, me on top of him and pinning him to the ground and victorious.

A laugh escaped me. It sounded weak and wheezy and disbelieving, even to my own ears.

But I did it. I did it.

The plan had worked.

I’d taken him by surprise, I’d overpowered him, I had him on the ground and underneath me and at my mercy, with my knife buried in his gut and his own blood seeping onto the wooden floor.

“I did it. I fucking did it.” I laughed again. Exhilaration and relief flooded my veins. I felt downright fucking giddy. “You fucking bastard! I fucking beat you!”

He grit his teeth. His breath was shallow and unsteady against the hand I had pressed to his chest. He was covered in blood, his face smeared with it, his sweater dampened and sticky with it and only getting more drenched as he bled out.

I’m sure I wasn’t much better off as my shoulder and back and shoulder blades throbbed with pain. My throat still felt raw. My skin was sticky with sweat and blood, both his and mine. Distantly, I could tell my body was exhausted, and that once the adrenaline wore off I’d collapse and probably wouldn’t be able to move from the pain.

But that was later.

He came first.

I pulled the knife from his body with a squelch. He spasmed underneath me, throwing his head back and hissing from the pain. He’d lost his hat, at some point.

I pressed the knife to his perfectly exposed neck. Colorless eyes flicked down, met mine. Pain and anger and hatred were etched into every line of his face.

Oh, victory felt so good.

“Now. Listen up.” I adjusted my grip on the knife hilt. Ignored the sticky slickness of his blood coating my fingers. “Here’s how this is going to go. You’re going to tell me who the fuck you are. What the fuck you are. How the fuck you’re even possible. And tell me why exactly you’ve been plaguing my fucking dreams and what the fuck you want with me. If you don’t.” I paused, swallowing against the sudden dryness of my throat and the reality sinking into my skin. “If you don’t, I’ll do what I have to until you start talking.”

I increased the pressure against his throat, just a tiny bit, and curled my fingers into his sweater.

“So start talking.”

Freddy stared at me for a long moment. His gaze was so intense it almost burned. I didn’t know what he was thinking, what was going on in his head.

And then.

He smiled.

A slow smile that stretched across his face, lips parting and peeling back from his teeth. A Cheshire grin, a deranged baring of fangs that teetered into the uncanny and sent gooseflesh erupting across my skin. A warning bell went off in the back of my mind. The smug afterglow of victory withered.

I swallowed again. “What–”

He moved. I wasn’t even sure what he did. But in a heartbeat, I was on the ground again, pinned on my back, knife knocked out of my hands and out of my reach. And he was the one on top of me. Shoulders hunched, eyes wild and mouth still affixed in that Cheshire grin. Blood ran from his wounds and dripped onto my skin. He reached down and smeared his own blood-stained fingers across my lips, mirroring the blood smeared across his. I squirmed, cringed, tried to pull away as a gag rose up inside my throat. But he grabbed my face, nails biting into my cheeks as he forced me to meet his gaze.

I was a rabbit staring into the face of a predator. A predator with a bloodstained maw and metal claws and no more patience left.

“Maybe.” His voice was quiet. He sounded out of breath. And somehow, that was worse. I squirmed again but stopped when he dug his claws into my diaphragm, so sharp and unforgiving that I couldn’t stop the whimper that wormed its way out. The noise was muffled against his palm.

“Maybe”, he said again, “I shoulda just killed you. Maybe you’re more trouble than you’re fuckin worth.”

Fear stabbed at my heart. It must’ve shown clear on my face, because he chuckled.

“Or maybe… I’ll give you one last chance.”

A sliver of hope – a possibility of survival, however tiny it was.

“You gonna be good? You gonna behave?” Never had the word “behave” sounded so threatening before. Never had it had such an edge.

Was I going to behave, and not attack him, and let him say whatever the hell it is he wanted to say? Or was I going to misbehave, and attack him, and probably end up a bloodied corpse to be found by whoever was unfortunate enough to stop by first?

There was no real choice. There was only one right answer to this.

I nodded.

“Good girl.”

#HOW has it been six fucking months since the last chapter?????#literally what the hell #oh well i guess #ace writes #waking nightmares #freddy krueger #freddy krueger x oc #freddy krueger x roxanne love #oc roxanne love #new nightmare #anoes #a nightmare on elm street

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