Fearless?

Fearless? - Chapter Twelve

‘Fear does not shut you down. It wakes you up.’ 

- Veronica Roth, ‘Divergen’

Chapter Twelve

Cole had told Azelie that the thing that fill your nightmares are the things that you fear. For Azelie however, this was a lie. The things that filled her nightmares where not her fears, they were her memories. For her, the things that her nightmares revolved around, well, the people her nightmares revolved around, were dead.

Would he ever figure it out that it was nightmares that kept Azelie up all night, and not her late night part time job as a stripper? Perhaps he would - he had already figured out that the position as a stripper was a lie, but that was the easy part. It was just what actually kept her up at night that he had yet to uncover.

For Azelie, the act of waking up from a nightmare was the worst part of the entire experience. In Azelie’s dreams, right at the very end, she felt peace. The peace you get when you feel  no longer fell anymore, when you let go of the rail of a bridge, or the second before a train kills you. The peace of death’s icy embrace. Of course, Azelie wasn’t dying or anything, but she felt like it at the end of her dreams, and so the act of waking up from that was very unsettling. When she was woken up, she felt as if she was being pulled away from death and back into the world of the living with a huge painful kick. Her nightmares had the ability to blur what was reality from what was real. And, when Azelie woke up, she was left with her head pounding in pain, after waking herself up with her screams and cries, she wouldn’t want to be there anymore, she would want to go back to the peace she had felt, even if it was for a split second before she came tumbling back down into the sour reality that was her life. Like some kind of drug, Azelie was addicted to the feeling of feeling nothing. Of feeling like nothing mattered anymore, and that nothing ever would.

“Azelie! Wake up! Azelie!” A voice cried, pulling Azelie out of the peace her mind had been swimming in, sending her back down, crashing into reality. Her brown eyes flew open, Azelie coming face to face with her uncle who was trying to wake her up. Her body felt numb as her uncle wrapped his arms around her, hugging her tightly. “Jesus! Azelie, I thought you were being murdered!” he cried. Ted had been terrified when he was woken up by Azelie screaming out loud. He had forgotten all about her night terrors and thought that Azelie was being attacked, hence the reason why there was now a bat lying in the doorway to her room.

Azelie’s lungs took in only short shallow breaths, her heart beat pounding as her head spun. Nothing seemed real, nothing made sense. The room around Azelie continued to move, her uncle’s face just a swirl of colours. And then suddenly it stopped. Everything came to an abrupt halt and Azelie’s stomach lurched. This pulled her out of her mind, and sent her running out of her bed. She sprinted out of her room and down the hall, before running straight into the bathroom, with barely seconds to spare before her stomach emptied itself of everything she consumed at the party, along with any food she’d had before that. Pain shuttered through Azelie’s body as her stomach lurched again, causing her to throw up what little was left in her stomach. She shook slightly as somebody slowly walked up behind her, pulling her hair out of the way and quickly tying it up in a bun. She managed to stop for a minute or so, her stomach allowing her to take a short break. Azelie slowly grabbed a piece of toilet paper, wiping her mouth before flushing it down the toilet. She refused to move her body away from where she was sat, clutching her stomach, sure that she wasn’t quite finished throwing up yet.