Lost in Transmission - Little Nightmares AU

Memories

     I wander.

     I barely feel at all, except for the little glimpses I see of what I'm actually doing. Sometimes I see grass beneath my feet, or stones or wood floors or city streets. It's only a flicker of where I am, which is everywhere and nowhere. A lot of the time, it's fragments of screams and flashes of red before everything goes blank and numb and empty again.

     The darkness says everything is fine, and I lie to myself.

     I say that this is fine. I say that I am happy.

     ...I don't think I really know what being happy feels like anymore.

      If this is what happiness is...it doesn't feel right. I thought happiness was feeling something - not feeling nothing. But all I feel when I'm not numb is hurt and anger and terror and guilt.

      The dreams definitely aren't happy. The dreams are never happy.

      There's a lot of things I don't remember anymore - I just know I forgot them. But I know that my shadow told me that it has the memories of everything I killed.

      ...I killed so many things....

      We killed.

      That's what I meant.

      I see how they died. I feel it. In my dreams, I'm them, and I'm the one who's getting killed. The best ones are the Guests. Being killed by the darkness just feels cold, and then like my life is getting sucked out of me, and then it goes black.

      At least it's quick.

      The worst one is the Janitor. It was blind, and in the dreams, I'm blind too. I fumble around in the dark until I feel fire burning into my skin and hear the smash as metal falls and crushes my hand and turns my bones into splinters. There's never any way to escape. All I can do is struggle and shriek and burn and bleed.

      That one makes me wake up screaming.

      I never scream for long. My shadow makes me go numb again, and it's okay; as close to okay as I can get. This is what I asked for. Feeling nothing is better than being terrified, right? Forgetting almost everything is better than remembering all the painful things, right?

     I don't know. I think it is. I thought so.

     Forgetting has to be better. I have to make it better or pretend it's better until I believe it, because I made my choice and I can't go back.

     This is life now. If I can call it "living".

     ...But...doesn't life mean remembering?

     There are things on the edges of my mind that I almost know. I feel a flash of something and I know it's part of a memory, but it disappears as soon as I try to think about it. There are things that I maybe want to remember; I can't remember if they're good memories, though, so what if I try too hard and then the only memory I have is one that's like a nightmare?

      My shadow keeps my memories from me, too. I try to think and remember, and the harder I try, the more it feels like everything I used to be is slipping deeper into darkness.

     But I know there's one thing I want to remember.

     Him.

     I can barely remember who he is. He was someone. Someone I knew. He was important, I know that, and I miss him. I don't know anything else about him. My mind goes blank when I try to find a memory with him in it.