Decimated Dreams

--Prologue--

The eyes. It was always the eyes. Clouded with black fog and indeterminable in the darkness.

They had haunted Frank for years. Every time he fell asleep there was a new dream, but it was always the same pair of eyes watching him throughout the night. And every night it was as if he were seeing them for the first time, although there had always been something familiar about them. Something he couldn't quite place.

The nights he couldn't take the cold eyes staring over him, he opted for not sleeping. On the nights he decided to sleep, the next morning he felt as though he had never slept at all. There was no escape from the eyes.

At first they had scared him, but now they had become too familiar. When he was nervous or anxious, he now thought of the eyes to calm him down. His comforting thoughts. They watched over him. They kept him from sleeping too deeply so that he would be safe from harm. He both adored and abhorred them.

They guided him, but kept him from being normal. They deprived him of long lasting friendships by leading him to believe that they were all he needed. And, in some ways, they were. His family would have been the most important thing to him, had it not been so colossally and irrevocably broken. The eyes had always been with him, but after his family had shattered to pieces they comforted him while he sobbed into the darkness.

No one else cared.

Frank always felt hopelessly trapped in the spell of the eyes, but he only sometimes felt as though this were a bad thing. The frozen eyes behind the grey smoke protected him from harm and cared for him, even though they weren't always there when he was awake.

But the one consistent thing about them was that they scared him. They scared him to death.