bakerstreet | NIGHTMARE FUEL MEME

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NIGHTMARE FUEL MEME

The Nightmare Fuel Meme

WARNING: This is not a nice meme, and will likely contain triggers for violence, pain, death, sexual situations, and all kinds of other unpleasant things. Click through at your own risk.

Nightmare Fuel: This is the stuff so horrifying that it can give people the creeps for years. This scares the pants off of just about anyone to the author/creator's delight. This makes you shrink in the back of your chair, look over your shoulder, and remind yourself that what's going on is (usually) only fictional....

HOW IT WORKS:
♦ Leave a comment with your character's name and fandom, and state any preferences. If you'd like to roll for/pick an option here, go for it. If you'd like, you can fill out this handy form to make things easier for others:

♦ Tag another character. Pick one of the options, either by using the RNG or just selecting one that interests you.
♦ Play out the results and respect others' preferences.
♦ Have fun and/or be traumatized!

1. ACID TRIP - Things are starting to get weird. Very weird. Your hands just popped off and are dancing the tango in the living room with your pet alligator while a Weeping Angel watches from the corner. There are invisible spiders crawling all over you and you don't dare open your mouth lest they fall in. It can only get as strange as your imagination will let it.

2. JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID DOESN'T MEAN THEY AREN'T OUT TO GET YOU - You just can't help the feeling that someone is watching you. Someone is out to get you. Who are your real friends? Is that person really an alien in disguise? Are there surveillance cameras in your bedroom walls?

3. THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES - Think about the worst nightmare that you've ever had. Guess what. You're now in it, and you just can't seem to wake up.

4. FUN WITH PHOBIAS - What do you fear? The dark? Heights? Swarms of insects? Snakes? Drowning? Whatever it is, it is now your reality.

5. TRANSFORMATION SEQUENCES OF THE NON-SPARKLY KIND - Something has gone wrong. You're...changing. And not in a good way. Are you turning into an animal? A demon? A monster? Were you assimilated by the Borg?

6. AND I MUST SCREAM - You can't move. You can't scream. You can't do anything but remain conscious of every passing second. Did you choose the wrong words for your wish? Were you turned to stone? Trapped by a curse? Turned into a doll, unmoving but forever beautiful? Sealed inside a tree for a thousand years?

7. A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES - The dread spectre of disease has raised its head. Do you have days to live? Hours? Seconds? Or will you waste away slowly? What will happen in the meantime?

8. EYE SCREAM, YOU SCREAM - Something terrible has happened to you. It could have been an accident, a curse, an attack, a disease, or a surgery gone terribly wrong. But you've been horribly mutilated (or are in the process thereof) and are disturbing to see. Perhaps the Phantom will let you borrow his mask.

9. HORRIBLE TO BEAR - Congratulations, you're with child! Except...this wasn't supposed to happen. Did you just wake up one morning and discover the surprise? Is it part of a bizarre science experiment? Are you carrying the child of the devil? Or did you just get a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong and hellspawn is about to burst out of your chest?

10. THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO - This is a really tiny space you're in. And it looks like you're going to be here for an awfully long time. Did the other person shut you up in here? Are they a fellow prisoner? Or can you somehow convince them to let you out?

11. WELCOME TO THE APOCALYPSE - The world is ending. In fire, in ice, in the zombie apocalypse, in a collision with a giant asteroid? Whatever it is, it's horrible. Do you even want to bother trying to survive?

12. SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE - You're hungry. Really, really hungry. Nothing seems to satisfy you, nothing at all. Except that other person standing nearby looks awfully tasty. Cannibalism? Can you?

13. MINDS ARE FOR GAMES - Mind control? Brainwashing? Total amnesia? Whatever it is, you certainly aren't completely in control of yourself. Perhaps the other person is....

14. THE PLURAL OF DIMENSION IS DEMENTIA - Everything looks familiar, but it's just a little bit off. Did your neighbor always have that mustache? Was the sky always that shade of green? Welcome to the mirror universe, where you're the crazy one.

15. THE LATEST DISPLAY MODEL - You're so pretty that you belong on a shelf. Or behind bars. Perhaps magically frozen in place so that you can't escape or mar those lovely features. Maybe someone just wanted you safely hidden away, kept all to themselves. Or did they want to show everyone in the world that you belong to them and them alone?

16. JUST KEEP RUNNING - Something is chasing you. Maybe you don't even know what it is, you just know that you have to keep running, because if you stop the consequences are worse than you can bear to consider. No matter how exhausted you are, you just have to keep going.

17. WILDCARD - Pick another option, mix and match, do whatever you'd like. After all, when it comes to nightmares YMMV, so feel free to invent your own.

(original meme by

enthymeme)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

He has his lighter. Jay can't see it, but he can picture it after months on the road, trying to keep his eyes on the highway while Tim dangles a cigarette out the passenger's side window.

"You're not..." And Jay tries, he really does, but he can't quite keep the grin from tugging at the edges of his mouth. "You're not thinking...?"

If they tried to burn the place down, would they get caught in the blaze? Would they just be able to keep running? Would they ever reach the edge, if they did?

(Would it be worth burning, just to bring this place down with him?)

"It'd break the sequence," says Tim, perhaps a bit drier than necessary. Dry enough to set his words afire and watch them spark in a sheet of red flame. "Wouldn't it?"

Would that just skip them back to the start again? Would burning the setting damage the timer?

If they've got an infinite loop to toy with, to break out of, they've got every opportunity, don't they?

Jay's fully grinning now, and it feels wrong, thin and crooked and too-wide, but that's how it should be, isn't it?

This place is exhausting. It's terrifying.

But after a few
thousand
times through, it starts to become
home, even if it is
boring.

But now that Tim's here and solid and maybe even real, there's a chance things'll change. They already have, and even if this just sets them back to the beginning again, at least they'll have tried something.

"Should, yeah." His head's still buzzing, and he reaches up to rub at the back of his neck. "I say go for it."

The look on Jay's face is unnerving in its unfamiliarity, a smile all but bisecting his thin, pallid face, which, when paired with the weeping pits where his eyes should be, manage to make him look rather deranged. The fact that Jay, he of the poorly-rationalized decisions and debilitating paranoia and complete lack of strategy, finds the plan of potentially self-destructive arson a sound one should be a warning sign. It is a warning sign.

Tim just doesn't care.

It's simple, and without ceremony. It's like touching a flame to sheets. Squirreling the little silver prism away from the nurse who took the same three minutes of smoke break every day when he thought no one else saw. No one but the gaunt, too-quiet child who never spoke unless it was to answer the doctors or to scream when his head began to burn. Waiting for the day when he'd set the lighter down on a table or a counter instead of slipping it in his pocket. And when it come, tiny fingers netted about it in a scabbed, slightly grubby cage, and he'd huddled back in his room with his heart beating in the taut cradle of his chest.

Hadn't wanted to then. Don't want to now.

But it is, in its own way, easier.

He clicks it on and crouches to the base of the tree, still stained with the rusted black blotches of Jay's blood. The wood is dry, and the flames lick up the crackling bark eagerly.

With an angry whoosh, the tree goes up in a beacon of yellow, and Tim steps back as the heat grows unbearable. The fire leaps from branch to branch, creeping steadily about them, encircling them. The heat waves shimmer at the air, clouding his gaze no matter how he blinks. Singeing his hair. Scalding his skin.

There's no point in running. It'll find them regardless.

Jay can feel when the tree catches, and he backs away, ready to run as best he can. The fire spreads quickly, though, and soon he can feel it on his neck, cutting off the only escape route he can picture.

Tim's not running. Jay won't either.

Easier said than done.

Fear creeps back in through the cracks in his anticipation. He wants this place to burn, wants to see how it'll try to recover from this, but he doesn't want to burn with it. He thought he did. He thought it would be worth it, but as he feels the heat increase and the flames close in, it becomes harder to maintain that self-destructive apathy.

It's going to hurt (again).

"Tim. Tim, wait, I--"

The sound warps and skips, and suddenly the pain that splits Jay's skin isn't from the heat.

He's being taken apart.

This world is being taken apart, and Jay's part of it. He reaches out, trying to grab Tim's arm, something, but

FATAL ERROR

Traceback (most recent call last):
----File "452", line 1, in None
Exception occurred in system. Exception ID: 4

Restarting... 25%
Restarting... 50%
Restarting... 75%

Traceback (most recent call last):
----File "44", line 5, in None
Timeout occurred before restart could complete.

Run "haven"

When you open your eyes, there's something off about the trees. They tower over you, larger than you remember, and their spreading canopies spiderweb across the space above. Moonlight filters through the cracks.

You are alone, but not for long.

Branches split and crack, and before you can run, a silhouette comes into view, flanked by two others.

"Timothy? There, down there!"

The voice is older, matronly, and as she rushes closer, you can see that she's wearing a short white coat over a simple shirt and slacks. The figures on either side are younger, both wearing scrubs, and the one on the left drapes a blanket around your shoulders.

"Thank god," the oldest murmurs, softer than she thinks you can hear. Her voice hardens as she speaks to you. "Timothy, what you just did was extremely dangerous, do you realize that?"

The regret cracks through the patina that rendered him almost unrecognizable, something a little more familiar as he reaches out, gabbling his panic and his second thoughts, and there's a split second of seeing Jay unravel like he's made up of the ribbons of tape that he spent so very much of his life pursuing, whipping out from the gaps between his eyes and mouth and stretching a thick sheet across the forest, altering the backdrop.

Tim gasps like a drowning man resurfacing. He's on his knees now, fingertips splayed, braced flat against the ground. A ripcord dislodges in his throat, hitching at his lungs. A clot of something black splats wetly against the leaf mulch, soaking the roof of his mouth with its iron tang.

A loud crack of a voice both familiar and startling in its familiarity rouses him, and he stands, staggering.

"N-no," Tim mumbles, one hand lifting to shield his face, as if that might blot out the reality of her presence. "You're not - you're not real."

A flash of pity crosses the doctor's face, just for an instant, before her expression grows stern. "I am real, and these two standing with me are also real."

One of the nurses nods, though the tension in her shoulders and the look in her eye make it clear she's not comfortable with the situation.

The doctor crouches down to speak face-to-face. "If you're seeing other people or things that aren't there, I have something I can give you that should help. But first, you'll have to come back with me. Is that alright?"

Edited 2017-07-26 19:30 (UTC)

He spits out another gobbet of his own black blood as one hand goes to the nearest trunk to steady himself. A thousand memories coursing like oxygen through his veins, and he's not about to look at either one of them. He's still scanning the treeline.

He's out there.

"No," he says flatly. He's moving away, staggering unevenly. "Jay? Jay!"

He may as well be ignoring the nurses entirely.

The doctor hums, visible surprise shifting to resignation as she stands back up to her full height. A nurse circles around to one side and puts a hand on your shoulder, as if to guide you away from the rest of the forest.

The doctor crosses her arms, unable to keep the irritation out of her voice. "Jay's fine. Nurse Jameson found him first." A muscle in her jaw tenses. "Either I or somebody else is going to have to have a talk with you both about how this happened. But first, it's my job to make sure you're both safely inside. We need to take a look at you, make sure you haven't gotten hurt out here." She gestures stiffly to the blood on the ground.

Edited 2017-07-26 20:48 (UTC)

Wait - what?

Tim jerks around to stare at her, incredulous, acknowledging her properly for the first time. The hell's she mean, he's fine? Jay isn't - he was never here. He never got to be here. Not for years.

"You're lying," he says, the words leaping automatically to his tongue as he flinches, pacing back. "He was never here. He was never here."

The nurse who placed a hand on your shoulder earlier--male, still crouched down to eye-level, around the age you should be if reality held any sway here--speaks up. "He might not've been here, exactly, but they still found him here, as in Rosswood." He looks up at the doctor. "They wouldn't've put him to bed yet, right?"

She nods. "We need to make sure you're both alright before we can make any big decisions."

The way she says 'big decisions' sounds an awful lot like 'room reassignments'.

No - no, he remembers, he remembers this. He knows this. Jay wasn't here. He didn't grow up here. He didn't grow up broken the way Tim was. He'd know if he had. He'd know.

They're not real. The sequence broke, and something went wrong. This isn't the same setting as before, but Tim's eyes fall to the patch of scarlet on the ground.

Breadcrumbs.

He takes off after the trailing red at a dead sprint, the shreds of his past forgotten.

"Jay!" The word squeezes in his chest like a bubble of hot air, but he's not losing him again. "Jay?"

As you run, the forest looks more and more unnatural. The trees twist in strange directions, and patches of earth and bark look flat and featureless, like matte-painted metal. Then there are pieces that are just missing, flat, unnatural shapes that, if looked at from the right angle, look like endless holes.

The further you progress, the more you see evidence of a fire. Burn scars across the trees and the scent of smoke hanging heavy in the air.

There's something on the ground up ahead.

When you get closer, the shape becomes familiar.

It's Jay's body, burn-scarred and tied to the ground with thick vines. Upon closer inspection, the vines appear to have taken root underneath his skin. He's not breathing.

There's another form lying next to it in a similar state, a little harder to recognize.

But it is familiar.

It's you.

The trees whip past in a blur of black bark and trunks gnarled like arthritic fingers, but there's no direction, no knowing, no nothing. It's like the place has lost its direction, gapped with empty patches of nothing that hurt to look at, so he doesn't.

He waits for the nurse to call behind him, for the rustling tread of footsteps launching in pursuit. But instead the trees coarsen until it becomes obvious that they're burnt black. That they've been seared by something that raged through here, intense and heated and destructive.

Shriveling the crumpled shapes at the foot of the trees, practically melting them into the bark. The hot smell of singed flesh rank in his nostrils.

No. No, no, no, no, no, no.

Tim staggers, then falls, his lungs heaving. Coughing, spraying more clotted blood onto the mess beneath his hands. Between sputtering breaths, he manages a word -

"Jay - "

There's a shuffling in the leaves behind you. It's not the sound of a pursuit, but the sound of something already settled.

If you look back, you can see her: white coat, sensible clothes, and an unreadable expression.

"I'm sorry you had to see that."

Oddly enough, it sounds sincere.

They said he was back at the hospital. They said he was all right. They said he was safe.

His hands curl at his sides, knotting into fists. That's - familiar, in its own chilled way. It's the way the blood roared in his eyes when Alex seized Brian by the hair and tilted his head back before turning to Tim with his mocking deadpan.

"How does it feel to have killed one of your friends, Tim?"

How does it feel?

The word that tears from his throat is hardly classifiable as human. He lunges for her, hands outstretched and reaching for her throat, the moisture beading in his eyes and whipping down his cheeks.

She lied.

(She didn't expect this.
In retrospect, she probably should have.)

You lunge for her neck, and even though you fall short, the force is enough to knock her off her feet. She twists, topples backwards, and hits the ground crookedly with an audible snap. Her face contorts with pain.

You're on top of her in an instant, fingers wrapped tight around her windpipe. She reaches up, tries to claw your hands away, but it isn't enough.

"Tim--Timothy, stop," she chokes out. "This isn't all--He's not gone. Please, listen."

Edited 2017-07-27 05:20 (UTC)

A slip of metal plunging into another man's neck, his life's blood crimsoning out like a grotesque flower as he'd gasped and choked in shock, in pain. Because he missed one. Did he feel the way Tim feels now, pinning her down, fingers constricting, constricting, trying to grind her out?

He's killed before. He's done worse! He'll keep doing worse. This is all he's good for, isn't it, now. What's one more body to his name? What's one more line slashed out in red? What's one more crime to his record?

He's fucking crazy, right?

"You said he was fine."

"We did--" She wheezes, barely able to draw in enough breath to keep talking. "We did everything we could. We saved...part."

She shoves at your hands, but the force of it is weaker now.

"At the hospital."

Edited 2017-07-27 06:16 (UTC)

"Part?"

He releases her almost at once, jerking upright as though burned. They did everything they could. They saved part - what do they mean, part. The hell is that supposed to mean? His gaze swivels back to the seared, blackened shapes coiled at the foot of the tree, his stomach turning.

"The hell you mean, part?"

Pulling back at once, she sucks in a painful, haggard breath. "Thank you," she mutters hoarsely, "Thank you, Timothy, that was very good."

She makes no move to escape, but she takes an interminable while to catch her breath. Finally, she answers.

"You two did something truly impressive. I want you to know that." She rubs at her throat with one hand, her left arm curled tightly to her side. "In cases like this, where there's too much broken to repair it quickly, this place finds it easier to start over. Rebuild from scratch. That includes Jay, and that includes your own memories."

She takes another moment to breathe, air whistling through her bruised throat. "So we stepped in. What you see there--" She gestures to the corpses, to the roots buried under their skin. "--is what we couldn't save. The rest of you is, well, you. And the rest of Jay is with us."

Edited 2017-07-27 19:04 (UTC)

What the hell is she...

She knows. She knows what this place is like, what it's doing, and for a long moment he can only stare in open-mouthed uncertainty, eyeing her suspiciously. This is supposed to be just a dream. Just some - some construct of his own damaged head. How's she, or anyone, meant to make sense of this?

"How do you know?" The words aren't as hard as he means them to be, wavering with doubt. "How do you know that?"

With some effort, she manages to pull herself to her feet.

"The simplest answer is that you know," she speaks slowly, gently, like she's explaining your next course of treatment. "You're dreaming, as I expect you've noticed, and in a dream, what happens is entirely up to you. Even if it doesn't feel that way. When the dream became a nightmare, you did just what you've always done before." A smile tugs at her lips. "You called for a doctor."

Her face falls, and she looks deeper into the forest. "Unfortunately, the simplest answer isn't always the right one."

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