Daydreams and Nightmares (Complete)

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie Morrigan sat at a desk in a classroom that was bigger than a football stadium. In every direction were more identical desks with identical students underneath rows and rows of identical rectangular florescent lights for as far as she could see - but then, she couldn't really look because her essay was overdue, and she was trying to finish it, but every time she looked back to the page on her desk it was blank again. And she was in her underwear.

She looked down at herself and sighed. "That one again? Can't you come up with something better?"

She was in her pajamas, only they were several sizes too big, and it was hard to hold on to her pen. The thing slipped out of her sleeve-encumbered hand as if it were a live fish and clattered to the floor.

"Jamie Morrigan. I'm waiting for your paper."

Jamie looked up to see Mrs. Baumgarten standing over her desk with a stack of finished papers, and all the students had turned to stare at them. Now the whispering began, and the laughing.

"No, you're not," Jamie said. "I handed this one in months ago. And you're not even my teacher, you're the school counselor, and you're only here because I'm more afraid of you."

"Jamie, your behavior is deteriorating," Mrs. Baumgarten said. "You're a nuisance and a danger to the other children, and everyone thinks you look stupid in those pajamas. We're going to have to send you away."

"Well, good, I don't like being here," Jamie said, and she stood up violently, knocking her chair over backwards with a terrible sound.

She spun around and found herself at the top of the basement steps in her school, watching as Brayden Thomas tumbled down them like a puppet with its strings cut until at last he crashed on the floor below with all his limbs pointing the wrong directions. Jamie gasped and stumbled back away from the steps, hugging herself to try to stop the trembling.

"Okay, that was a cheap shot," she said with a tremulous voice. "It wasn't my fault, and he's already out of the hospital."

"You're going to have to go away, Jamie," said Mrs. Baumgarten, towering behind her. "Don't worry. I know just the place for you."

Jamie squeezed her eyes shut. "I know what you're going to do. I'm going to turn around, and I'll be back at the Jericho Center. It's not going to work, okay? It's not going to scare me."

"Of course, not, dear. It's where you belong."

She opened her eyes, and now she was in a brightly lit corridor that looked like a hospital but wasn't, because hospitals didn't have guards with assault rifles at every wardroom door and even the worst hospitals didn't feel like all the happiness and warmth had gone out of your life and you were never going to have any fun ever again. Jamie looked down and saw that her pajamas had been replaced with a disgustingly pink medical smock. She was defiant as Mrs. Baumgarten marched her down the corridor and stopped at a very familiar door.

Jamie spun to glare up at her counselor. "I told you, it's not going to work!" she repeated, though she felt her heart thundering against her narrow chest. "I get it, okay? I know I'm dreaming."

Mrs. Baumgarten smiled just the way she always did when Jamie said something she found particularly interesting. "Of course you are, dear - and you're very good at it! But how do you know where you're going to wake up?"

The door behind her opened with a crash, and Jamie stumbled backward and off the edge of the stairs to the basement in her school.

She woke with the dizzying sensation of falling still ringing around her ears and lay for a moment half-buried in her pillow, clutching at the sheets in her hands. But the sheets felt wrong. Where the thin and faded prints of tropical birds and insects should have been, there was a starchy sheet of institutional blue. Jamie choked and bolted upright on the hard mattress to see sterile white walls with no windows, a metal door with charts in a plastic folder hanging from it, and a small TV in the corner beside a bookshelf of books and DVDs she'd already read and watched a hundred times. And instead of the fuzzy pajamas Anna had bought her last Christmas, she was wearing that horrible pink smock.

"No, it's not real!" she whimpered, and she pressed her hands hard over her eyes and tried to remember her bedroom in Redención House, but the memory of her dream was still vivid and raging through her brain.

"Dr. Roken to gene lab four, please, Dr. Roken gene lab four."

"It's not real!" Jamie howled at the PA speaker in the ceiling. "Go away! It's not real, it's not real, it's not real!"

Jamie hugged her knees to her chest and put her face between them, sobbing as the whitewash slowly faded to wallpaper, the tile floor to carpet, and the buzzing florescent light to the gentle morning sunlight beaming through her bedroom window.

[Tess Abrahams]

Sometimes when the light was just so and the air rested at a perfect warmth that made it sweet and yet still biting like a pillowy meringue Tess Abrahams thought she could run past forever. Her muscles and lungs and mind rose to meet the pavement in all it's uneven, unpredictable glory and worked and worked and worked until they stopped working and simply were; for a little while nothing else existed but the blur of the passing world and the distant drum of her heartbeat in her ears.

Not an early riser by nature, the young woman usually preferred to wait until late afternoon before lacing up her sneakers. In Los Santos, the streets were wavering mirages by ten o'clock, sweltering with the sun that would only burn brighter as it arched across the sky and so necessity drove her out of bed at dawn a few times a week to get her fix.

Tess grinned in self-satisfied triumph as she cut across the lawn and took the porch stairs in one mighty jump, her legs fluid and graceful after a six-mile negative-split session. Wiping a forearm across her sweaty forehead, she kicked off her battered running shoes and let herself into the house.

But instead of the quiet she had expected to find, the sound of young screaming galloped through the ceiling in discordant greeting.

"Jamie?!" Tess called as she attacked the staircase, hair slipping out of it's elastic collar at the renewed burst of motion. By the time the landing rushed to meet her the shouting had subsided but an awful sobbing had taken it's place and it only made Tess hurry all the more. She nearly crashed into the girl's door as she anxiously twisted the knob and stumbled in to land sweat-soaked next to the small, huddled child.

"Hey, hey," she said breathlessly, arms gently encircling the trembling form. "What's wrong, what happened?"

[Jamie Morrigan]

"It's not real," Jamie said, shoulders still heaving. She didn't open her eyes, but she grabbed onto Tess's arms and held on for dear life.

"Tess," she said, "where are we? Are we in my room? My real room?"

[Anna Fernandez]

Anna stumbled out of bed, pulling her threadbare terry cloth robe on over her nightgown and belting it as she hurried into the hallway. Jamie's cries had quieted already, and Anna gently pushed the girl's door open. "Estás bien, cariño?

"Oh," she added, seeing Tess, but continued into Jamie's bedroom, taking a seat on the other side of the twin bed and opening her arms for the girl.

[Tess Abrahams]

"Yeah, kiddo," Tess nodded, carding a hand though Jamie's damp hair. "We're in your real room. Where else would we be, huh?"

Anna's voice caused her to glance up and Tess traced a gentle thumb down Jamie's cheek. "It's okay, you can open your eyes. Nothing scarier than me and Anna here, I promise."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie slowly opened her eyes. Everything was a massive blur at first between the tears and the detritus of sleep, but the colors were right. She rubbed her face, smearing away the tear-tracks and saw her room just the way she'd left it last night - window propped open to let in the cool morning air, books piled prodigiously in the little wheeled bookshelf in the corner, wallpaper with its wildlife motif running all around the room, a sensibly random distribution of stuffed animals scattered around the floor, the bed, and the plastic chair in the corner. And more importantly, she was surrounded by something she'd never had at all in Jericho - family.

She let them hold her as she ran out of tears and took a few gasping breaths. The fear that had been so sharp and real and immediate was fading away just as the illusion had, and suddenly she felt embarrassed that it had bothered her at all.

"I had a bad dream," she said quietly.

She used to boast about her bad dreams. More than once during the last summer, she'd sneaked into Jake's room late at night while he was watching some cheesy horror movie on his old TV set that only had color half the time, just hoping the monsters would invade her dreams so she could show them how it was done. This had been different.

[Anna Fernandez]

"Oh, Jamie." Anna smoothed the girl's hair and used the edge of her robe to dry her tears. "You're safe now, mi corazón." Jamie's dreams were so much worse than the nightmares that others might get. With her power of illusions, sometimes it was hard for the girl to determine what was real, and what wasn't.

And, of course, sometimes her dreams got projected all over the house, leading to some quite interesting nights, like when Ronnie and Jake were attacked by giant mutant tomatoes. "If you want to talk about it..."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie was afraid to even think about it - afraid that if she dwelt on it, her room might morph back into Jericho, and Anna and Tess might turn into Ms. Harmon and Dr. Roken, and it would be just like the nightmare hadn't ended, or even worse, like the House was a dream and Jericho was her reality, even though she knew it really wasn't.

She shut her eyes again before the walls had a chance to turn white. "I was back at J-Jericho," she said.

She felt Anna reflexively crush her to her chest, and she considered just leaving it there. Anna knew what Jericho meant to her foster daughter - dreary captivity, painful experiments, and despair. She'd dreamed of it before. And on happier nights, she'd conjured up the alien tripods from War of the Worlds and watched in satisfaction as they heat-rayed the whole place while all the other patients cheered.

"I was at Jericho, and I knew it was a dream, and I said I wasn't going to be scared. But then I woke up, and I was still there, and--" Her throat tightened up and threatened to send her back into a sobbing mess. "--I couldn't make it go away. I tried, but I could even feel the scratchy sheets, and I'm not supposed to be able to feel things when they're not real!"

[Tess Abrahams]

All that Tess knew about the Jericho Center she had learned by reading and listening to the experiences of others, mostly during her time with the Brotherhood. She recalled with appalling clarity the collar that Tron had shown her once, the cruel thin band an inconceivably barbaric implement of confinement. Seeing the terror of the place echoed in Jamie's face and ringing in her voice sent a chill down her spine.

Tess exchanged a look with Anna over the girl's head, rubbing a small wayward knee with a hand.

"I'm going to get you some water, chica," she said softly because right now Jamie needed to be a child in need of consolation from a mother. Tess knew all too well how good they were at chasing hurt. "I'll be right back."

[Anna Fernandez]

Anna waited until Tess had lightly closed the door behind her before she relaxed the hug she was holding Jamie in. She had done some reading on lucid dreaming, and how things could feel ultra real while in a dream.

"You know, dreams can feel very real. That's part of why they can be so scary." Anna plumped the pillows behind Jamie, letting her relax back into them while she gently rubbed the girl's arm. "Your illusions do not touch, but in your own head..." She sighed, trying to find something comforting to say. "When you know its a dream, just think of me, or another of your friends. I'll show up and give those mean Jericho people a butt-kicking!"

She bent over Jamie and kissed the girl's damp forehead. How she longed to be able to take away the pain her daughter was going through. "I do have something to tell you, something that might help you think happy thoughts..."

[Jamie Morrigan]

The thought of Anna showing up and freezing Mrs. Baumgarten's feet to the floor should have made her smile, but Jamie still wasn't over that terrible feeling of being helpless within the confines of her own mind, the one place she'd always been in control regardless of what was happening to her body.

After that line of thought, any diversion was welcome, and she looked up at her foster mother with curiosity shining on her tear-stained face. "What is it?"

[Anna Fernandez]

"Well..." Anna brushed a thumb over Jamie's cheek and then tucked some hair behind the girl's ear. "I'm going to have a baby." She couldn't keep the little smile off her face as she finally told her adopted daughter the news.

[Jamie Morrigan]

It wasn't the sort of thing you heard all at once. It was spoken all at once, true, but after it was said, you had to listen to the shapes it left behind in the air and in your mind. And while Jamie was doing that, her eyes darted all over Anna's face, reading every curve and every line.

"Really?" she said, breathless. She glanced down at Anna's stomach to see if she could tell. Was there some roundness there she hadn't seen before?

The dream was gone now, as far from Jamie's mind as two things possibly could be. She whirled over all the possible implications she could think of, and the one that she landed on turned out to be: "I'm going to be a big sister?"

[Anna Fernandez]

"Yes!" Anna beamed, and Jamie was the one hugging her this time, skinny arms tight around her neck. "The best big sister in the world... oof, not so tight! I need to breathe!"

When Jamie released her Anna flopped sideways, pretending to gasp for breath.

[Tess Abrahams]

A soft knock sounded and then Tess poked her head in, checking the state of things before she entered. It was a considerably less tumultuous scene than it had been the first time and the grin on Jamie's face was like a clear sky after a flatland storm.

"KO!" Tess winked as she took in Anna's prone form and handed the girl a cool glass of water in her favourite python mug from the city zoo's reptile lair gift shop. She raised one of Jamie's arms in the air, declaring her victor to an unseen crowd. "Morrigan takes state once again!"

Sitting at the foot of the bed, Tess leaned against the frame and quirked a brow. "Now that's got to be the fastest recovery I've ever seen. What's got you looking like a cat with a canary?"

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie laughed - hard enough that it occurred to her how strange it felt to be laughing with that rubbery-wet feel of crying still hanging on her face, but only for a moment. There were more important matters at hand!

"Oh my gosh, Tess, did you hear? Anna's going to have a baby! Why does no one ever tell me these things!"

She was on her feet in a flash, practically bouncing with energy. "Is it a boy or a girl, or are you keeping it a surprise? Oh, what about names? I can help with that! Can I? Please?"

[Anna Fernandez]

Anna laughed, sitting up. "Woah, disminuya la velocidad! No, no names yet, and si, I was thinking of keeping it a surprise." She was relieved that Jamie was taking it so well, although she'd expected her to be excited. She held out her hand to her capering daughter. "Come back to the bed, you'll wake up the whole house.

"I was thinking maybe Maria, if it is a girl."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie took on a very put-upon look, but she managed to keep her voice down to a stage whisper. "Back to bed? But there's no way I'm getting back to sleep now. Oh wait I know!"

She hopped on over to Tess's side and grabbed her sweaty arm by the wrist. "Anna, you can go back to bed, and Tess and I can go make breakfast for you and bring it back up. Oh, except, Tess, you probably want to shower first."

Jamie took her now-slick hand away and wiped it surreptitiously on the seat of her pajamas.

[Tess Abrahams]

Jamie had a valid point. Her clothes were beginning to stick in that cold, clammy way that they did after a hard workout and even Tess was picking up on the pungent bouquet of sweaty cotton and lapsing deodorant. It was always a bad sign when you could smell yourself.

"Good idea," Tess nodded, nose wrinkling in agreement. She peeled off the baggy t-shirt that she'd borrowed from the laundry room (it hadn't been quite dirty enough to warrant a wash and so Tess had figured she'd do it's owner a favour and push it over the line) and shivered a little as the cool air brushed against the exposed skin of her belly, soothing against the red chafe marks that blossomed under the straps of the running undershirt she wore.

"You heard the newest big sister, Anna," the teenager pointed a finger at her friend as she loped towards the door. "Relax. Your sous chef will be reporting for duty in ten minutes, Chef Jamie."

[Anna Fernandez]

"Oh no, you two are going to be in the kitchen... unsupervised?" Anna threw up her hands in mock horror, but gave in readily to their demands. She was pretty tired. "Very well, I will go back to bed."

Jamie half pushed her down the hallway toward her room, and Anna added, "Don' burn the house down, okay? Okay, okay, I'm going." She giggled, and gently closed her door, listening to Jamie traipsing down the stairs and the water in the pipes rattling on as Tess started her shower.

After a moment she slipped underneath her sheets, her body finding the indent she'd molded over time into the elderly mattress. She was really, truly, blessed.