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)

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They're running, and he's following the sound of Tim's footsteps, but that's the only tool Jay has to orient himself. He doesn't recognize where they've gone (not that he expects he would, even if he could still see), and when he runs his hand along the wall, all he can feel are interior doors, painted wood instead of glass.

Tim grabs his wrist and tugs him to the side, and while it's not enough to send him too far off-balance, it's enough to startle him. There's the unexpected crack of a door closing (out of the hallway? in a room?) and then a horrible scraping sound that Jay isn't sure how to name.

Someone's pounding on the door, and Tim's saying something, and it's all Jay can do to keep from covering his ears.

'Can you climb out?'

That's what he said.

There must be an exit here. Or a hiding place. Either way, he's sure he can, but he needs to know--

"Where?"

It's all he can manage, in the noise and the mounting chaos, but he hopes it's enough.

Shit. He forgets, again, that Jay can't fucking see. That's not something you can just shrug away, walking off like a sprained ankle. The table scraped up in front of the door as an impromptu blockade, Tim hastily snaps up Jay's wrist again to begin to guide it to the windowpane, only to halt midway.

"Here. Or, uh - wait."

Yanking the blankets off the bed and winding them awkwardly around his hands, Tim sets to work punching the glass from the pane. The glass falls in pinwheeling arcs of glittering dust, and as much as Tim works to direct it outward, plenty of it falls inside the hospital room the pair of them are occupying.

He shakes the sheets out to drape them across the window's ledge, glass crunching underfoot.

"Watch your step. Can you get to the window from here?"

When the glass breaks, Jay flinches, pulling his arms up to shield his face. He hears Tim rustle around for a bit more, the glass sliding and crumbling wherever he steps, and then Tim speaks again.

In response to the question, Jay reaches out slowly, tentatively, just in case there's still glass sticking out from the window frame. When he feels the thick layer of sheets, he relaxes a bit.

That lasts roughly half a second.

There's another noise at the door, a slam, as if someone threw their entire body against it, sending the frame rattling. Jay wastes no time scrambling onto the ledge, and in his haste to get out as quickly as possible, he tips forward at an odd angle, crashing into the bushes below.

The landing comes too quickly, Jay thinks, and as he wrestles his way out of the bushes and onto the grass, he realizes that distances make a bit more sense now. He's not crammed into as small a space, physically or mentally, though he can feel himself buzzing at the edges in a way that's probably not natural.

(Then again, it might be in his head. That's a thing he's had to deal with before, right?)

"You coming?" he calls in the general direction of the window.

The door shivers in its frame, and Tim jumps. Familiar. Familiar. Can't let it stick, can't let it get to him. But Jay's already hauling himself out and over, too hastily for it to be wholly safe.

Another loud crash of someone colliding bodily with the door, and the table clatters against the ground with a series of loud metallic clangs. His makeshift barricade is already crumbling.

So there's only one thing left to do.

Tim yanks the sheets off the window, balling them up at the corner of the room. The paint on the walls is cool beneath his fingertips.

Not, he should think, for much longer.

Spark to flame, and flame to sheet. It ignites swiftly, the smell of singed cloth leaping to his nostrils in a muddled blur of nostalgia. Tim slips the lighter back into his pocket, elbows braced flat against the window ledge. The glass bites into the flesh of his forearms, now unprotected by the blankets, but he wastes no time in vaulting over the window's edge and landing at a stumbling roll in the undergrowth beneath.

His arms are slick and warm with red, but it doesn't matter. The smoke is already coiling out from the open window. He casts about frantically for the shape of the only other person here he can protect.

"Jay?"

"Here, over here," Jay mumbles, swaying as he pulls himself to his feet. His head's spinning from the change in altitude, and it's like he's been stretched too thin. When he moves, he feels like he's being run through a broken projector, like he's skipping frames.

There might not be enough of him left to make a whole person anymore.

(Not much of a change.)

The tang of burning insulation reaches his nose, and he tenses automatically, adrenaline hitting what's left of his bloodstream.

"Tim, we have to go--we have to go."

It's already painting his fingertips in red, but the pain is secondary to the objective, the urgent pull to Jay's voice as he pleads for him that they have to go. He gropes out wildly, fingertips raking the surrounding leaves in search of the solidity that would betray Jay's presence.

He finds him, fingertips wrapping around a thin, bony wrist.

"I gotcha." A lie if he ever heard one, but at least it spurs Tim to his feet. "C'mon."

They have to go.

Tim's hand is dripping something warm and wet, and Jay wants to recoil (or at least ask what happened), but getting out is top priority. Tim is here and real (as real as Jay can determine), so it's time to run.

(The frames of the memory are warped and jumbled, but Jay remembers there was a fire. That must've been what sent him to the hospital.)

He can't move too quickly without his head buzzing, without feeling like the edges of his silhouette are leaking, but at least he's putting distance between himself at the hospital. At least the smell of smoke is a bit fainter now.

That thought must've jinxed it, because something catches in his smoke-irritated throat, and Jay doubles over coughing, knocking into Tim as his balance wavers.

There are footsteps.

Jay might not be able to see, but Tim can.

A too-tall form, the skin split and cracked from burns, steps from the trees into their path. It speaks, and the voice is familiar.

"The simplest answer isn't always the right one." Her voice is slow, reluctant, tinged with what sounds like genuine regret. "This isn't just your dream, Timothy. Not entirely."

It's starting to spill out from the hospital's windows in earnest in great blackened bursts, shading the world surrounding with the smoky haze. The smell of burning paint stings Tim's nostrils with the familiar chemical tang that snaps him back to the day he set it aflame.

When Jay doubles over, Tim drops an arm hastily over his shoulder to keep him upright.

"Jay?" Shit, he's not - is it just the smoke? Or is he drowning?

The shape in front of him wavers, the smoke threading along the ridges of her silhouette, rendering her faded, like she's not quite all there. Like her edges are bleeding off into the trees. His heart thuds, and his grip tightens on Jay's shoulder.

"Who else would it belong to?" he snaps, the words as much a challenge as they are a terrified question.

There's something in his lungs. He coughs, and nothing clears, and the coughs turn to dry heaves, and he can't get air, he can't he can't--

A distant part of him is thankful for the support, thankful he's not on his hands and knees by now, because at least if he's drowning he'll have someone to pull him to shore. This same part is reminding him that this has happened before. It will happen again. The feeling always fades.

The rest of him is wondering if this is the time he finally suffocates.

He can hear the woman's voice above him, warped and muffled like he's at the bottom of a lake.

"The forest is hungry." She speaks with a world-weary disdain. If she notices the dark, waxy burns across her skin, she doesn't show it. "You ran, but distance doesn't matter here. It found you, Timothy."

She exhales, crossing her arms. "We tried to help you, both of you. We thought we were helping, but we're still just...we're just as much the forest as the rest of it. We're just here to keep you here." She spits the words, like they're burning her. "So you need to wake up. You need to wake up, or else this place will eat you alive."

The forest is hungry. The matter-of-fact way she says it, almost clinical in her approach, gets under his skin more than the actual content of her speech. It's not the words themselves; it's the fact that she's evidently accepted this as her lot in life. As...his?

"He's here." The desperation pitches his voice upward as he tightens his grip around Jay's bony shoulders, as if holding onto him will make him any more real. "He's real. I can - I can get him out. I can."

He can walk and not look back for as long as he needs. He can get him out. He was close this time - he was so close.

He just has to not look back. He just has to fall.

Anyone can fall.

Tim's trying to get him out. Still, even when he's no longer as convinced of his own reality as Tim seems to be. Tim's dreaming, she says. He's the one who needs to wake up, not Jay.

(If Tim wakes up, will it all stop?
Worse, will Jay be left to wander by himself again?)

Tim's trying to get him out, which means there is an out. There must be. Tim's arm is around his shoulder, grounding the sparks in his head, steadying the painful heaving of his chest, and Jay allows himself a sliver of hope.

They're going to get out.

Even if Jay's lost his sight, been burned alive, been taken apart and put back together a thousand times, they're going to get out.

He's real, and Tim's real, and they don't belong here.

He can still feel the weight in his lungs, but he's not coughing anymore. He's shaking from the effort, and his chest feels like it's being constricted by a vise, but he refuses. He's not drowning. It's not real.

No longer so far above him, the doctor speaks again.

"You can. Keep moving," she instructs, concern tinting her voice. "Don't look back, or this place will change again. Find the edge and cross it." She chuckles, nearly inaudible. "And don't worry about me. The parts worth keeping are yours anyway."

You can.

He expects it to be another pretty lie, garbed in cobwebs and charcoal, but his lies have never been courteous to dress themselves up as something worth swallowing. That's the poisonous ache to his lies, to every lie he's wrapped himself in; it's only ever marginally more appealing than the reality beneath.

Find the edge and cross it.

Who's to say that edge even exists?

He pauses. Only for a moment. Dark eyes searching hers from beneath lowered brows, lingering.

"You're not...are you..." Are you alive too? God, is she some - some remnant of someone else? Someone he doomed, someone he burned alive? "Can you get out?"

Her face falls, though the motion is crooked, hindered by the swollen skin. "I don't...believe I can anymore." She wraps her arms around herself. "At this point, I doubt I'm much more than parts of other people, stitched together. The roots of this place burrowed under my skin...years ago."

There's a crinkling around her eyes, and she manages a wan smile. "I still have footsteps, though, don't I?"

There's no hope for her. That's what she's saying. Is this...this is that place, with the trees like skeletons and the empty black, where there is no light. Where a corpse lies limp like a gutted fish on the ground, the blood crusted around the concave indent that was once his face still fresh and glistening like a mass of frozen garnets. This is that.

And she's...just someone else. Someone from forever ago, some remnant of someone that endured.

Did he know her?

"I'm sorry." She doesn't deserve this. No one does. "I can..." He wets his lips, his tongue darting out briefly, eyes flickering out across the surrounding dark before they settle back on her. "I'll come back. Okay?"

"Oh, Timothy." Her brow furrows, and she looks directly into his eyes. "I can't ask you to do that. What kind of doctor would I--?" The sentence cuts off, choked, and she takes a moment to squeeze her watery eyes shut, to take a breath. "I'd tell you to leave and never come back, but we both know neither you nor I have any say in that. But don't you dare try to come back here for my sake, alright?"

She shoots Jay a look. "Either of you."

"There's still ways I can make myself useful here. And if there's a way out for me, you're not the only one who can find it."

Why is she trying, then? Because there's the slightest, barest chance that they'll both be able to get out? Because she's a remnant of someone who would have wanted that?

This isn't just his dream. They really are - somewhere else.

"Thanks." It's not nearly enough, but he holds her gaze, even if the skin surrounding is still pocked and blistered with burn scars. If she's real -

If she's real, he has to come back. He has to get out first, with Jay in tow.

And he will.

She smiles, just for a moment, and then grows stern. "Now go, quickly, before this place heals any further. I shouldn't've kept you this long." And with that, she steps back into the trees, her outline dissolving in the darkness.

--

It's wrong, seeing her walk away, seeing her refuse their help. Jay's thinking of somebody whose name he can't quite recall, somebody with tangled hair and wide, pleading eyes. He just took his eyes off her for a second, and then she was gone.

He can't let that happen again. They have to come back.

He leans more heavily against Tim, chest still aching from the effort of holding back another coughing fit, and forces himself to take a deep, slow breath in. He straightens out his back, stands upright as best he can, though he's still shaking. He gives Tim a quick, questioning look. Now?

Fixing his eyes on a spot in front of him, he takes his first tentative step forward. (Don't look back, or this place will change again.)

Now.

Don't look back.

Tim nods, short and terse, and starts to advance. She's already faded behind him. He can't help her - he can't save her. Not right now. Jay is his priority, and he's going to get him out.

"Don't look back," he says, the words barely more than a whisper.

And he begins to walk.

Don't look back. It's like a sick joke at this point, isn't it?

He feels the pull of Tim's arm, still around his shoulder, still helping him stay upright. He hears footsteps, and he walks in time with them as best he can.

The trees here twist into angular, unnatural shapes. Artificial. Paint and concrete and bent steel.

The air tastes thicker, like he's breathing in fog. It's too much (just for a moment, but that's long enough) and he cracks. He tries to strangle the cough halfway through, but it just becomes a dry heave instead. He can feel something dripping from his lips, and he hopes it's just saliva (not blood not water not black, dripping tar).

Don't look back.

(That's why.)

He'll have to guide him for the both of them, without ever looking back. Can't look at Jay either - or maybe he can, but he didn't think to ask. Didn't think to clarify. In case this is anything like any old story, though -

He doesn't look.

"Just hold on," he says, the words taut, almost whispered. Stay with me, he'd once said, desperate in the face of the thing that stalked them to the very last. Hold on.

He pressed them through before. He'll do it again now.

And he'll make it stick this time.

The trees have started to thin, piece by piece. Like the landscape is being eaten away by the choking nothingness surrounding. He can only hope to god that that's a good thing.

The ground is still solid, crackling with leaves. The trees have thinned to almost nothing, spindly wireframes spaced every thirty feet or so. The monlight is nearly impossible to detect, but every few seconds, an uneven patch of the environment--part of a tree, part of the air itself--will flicker and flash, glitching itself into a new configuration.

Jay can still feel the fog on his skin, but there's something new now. He smells copper and ozone like before, like someone's been firing off a tesla coil, and the air feels static. His head's not buzzing yet, not like it does when It's around.

Not yet.

"What's the plan if that thing shows up?" He tries to sound nonchalant--they've done this so many times before, after all--but there's still a fearful edge to it.

"I tell It to get the hell out," Tim says darkly, as if that's a foreseeable option. He's done it before, hasn't he? Stood up to the thing and made It go, leave the pair of them alone.

It's easiest to fight when he feels like he has something to lose.

He's not leaving him with It. Not again.

"You feeling okay?" He resists the urge to glance Jay's way, keeping his gaze fixed firmly ahead. "How's your head?"

Jay snorts. They're just gonna tell it to go away, like a parent peering under a child's bed.

Tim's asking how he is. He's expecting something to be wrong.

"I'm fine," Jay says, maybe too quickly.

The place feels off, but that's hardly a change. If When they get out, Jay wonders if home will feel even stranger. Maybe he's gotten used to the way things are here, like a frog being slowly boiled alive, and by the time they get out, a hotel room will feel less like home than a bench in the woods.

(God, he hopes not.)

Something shifts.

It's like a switch was flicked, like the winds changed, and Jay can't see, but he can see that it's here. The footage is being seared into his head frame by frame, abstract but meaningful. It's too far away to reach them, but that doesn't matter here. It tips its head.

They can't leave. They belong to the forest. They can't leave. They belong to the forest. They can't leave.

That's just the default response to any question as to anyone's well-being, in their world. They're always fine. Jay in particular is always fine, because being anything other than fine, or reasonably within the parameters of fine, is unacceptable. Unthinkable. Places him in the realm of the hospital - Tim's domain.

The world tilts, on an axis askew, like static-torn footage shuttering past shut eyelids. It's a chill racing up through his nerves, down his spine, tingling at his fingertips, prickling in his lungs.

They can't leave. They belong to the forest.

It's waiting for them.

Tim's jaw clenches so tight that it feels ready to pop. His brows curve downward, and his grip on Jay's shoulder tightens.

"Keep going."

It's footage from a thermographic camera, half-recognizable shapes fading and contorting, multiple perspectives overlaid. He watches himself watch it watch them, and from here, they look like insects. Blank, alien, and fragile.

(Is this--?)

They can't leave.

He sees that now.

(But it's wrong, it's all wrong--)

They belong to the forest.

The smaller one freezes for a moment, contracts, and when his mouth moves the sound is received in stereo.

Keep going.

(Yes, yes, come on--)

Keep going.
Keep going.
Keep going.
Keep going.

The taller one (Jay, my name is Jay) takes a step.

NIGHTMARE FUEL MEME

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