I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He keeps moving, trying not to look at anything, trying not to hear anything. Focusing on his steps. He reaches the center, and while he doesn’t know what he expected, it certainly wasn’t this…this nothing. He stands quietly, unsure how to proceed. He looks back, but the trail behind him is gone, the clouds merged back together, and he thinks if he tries to run back the way he came, he would find something solid blocking his path.
And then the clouds move. And keep moving, faster now, and there are glimpses of more things in the rapidly-growing wind – tornado? – and Sleaze forces himself to look, to watch. The temptation to close his eyes against the nightmares is thick in him, but he ignores it.
The tornado swells, and the feathers on his new wings ruffle, his mane tossing against his neck. It’s almost pleasant, for a moment, and then the strength of the wind increases, and Sleaze has to fight to stay upright. He knows this is a fight he will lose, eventually, but he fights nonetheless.
The tornado grows, as do the nightmares. The wind whips at his face as his eyes water. A gust hits him, hard, and he stumbles sideways – right into something solid.
He looks, and meets the figure’s orange eyes.
Garbage – his dream-father, his nightmare-father – stands and looks at him. Garbage’s mane is unmoving, and he stands unaffected by the tornado around him.
“Sleaze,” his father murmurs softly, and Sleaze shouldn’t be able to hear it, not against the howl of wind and screams that the tornado shrieks out, but he does. Because Garbage is a dream, isn’t he? A nightmare?
“Follow me,” Garbage says, and he turns, begins to walk, and Sleaze follows. He fights for each step, but he manages it.
The clouds part for Garbage in a way they did not for Sleaze. Because Garbage belongs here, in this strange world of nightmares. Sleaze wonders, briefly, if it was because Garbage was always so plagued by nightmares, or because he caused plenty himself.
(Certainly Sleaze had many a night where he dreamed, again and again, of waking up to find his father gone. He will never forget how hard his heart had pounded in his chest, how he had shouted his father’s name until the words crumbled to dust in his mouth.)
They continue to move, and eventually they are far enough away that the wind doesn’t reach them.
“You look different,” Garbage says, and Sleaze barks a laugh at the casual absurdity of this remark. He does, of course – he was black when his father left, not purple, and the wings are still new even to him.
“You don’t,” Sleaze says, unsure how to properly make small talk with the dream-slash-nightmare manifestation of his father in this nightmare-cloud.
A few steps more, and Sleaze asks the question that’s been rattling in his mind ever since he first saw his father here.
“Are you dead?” he asks. This time it’s Garbage who laughs.
“I don’t know,” he says, “I die here. Over and over again. But I come back and live it again.”
Sleaze shudders. Garbage keeps talking.
“I don’t usually…it’s the same. I’m with Agetta and then there’s monsters and the river. And we can’t change it. Neither of us can. Usually we don’t…realize it’s happening again. And again. But something’s different here. With you.”
Sleaze doesn’t know how to respond to his father’s purgatorial existence. He wonders if all the nightmares are sentient in this way. He wonders if somewhere there is a version or versions of him, living out different horrors on repeat. He walks faster.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
“The edge,” Garbage responds. Sleaze decides not to inquire further.
They reach a small clearing that looks much like the center Sleaze had stumbled into, but this place is quiet. Sleaze strains for the sound of the nightmares, but they sound distant, far away. He looks at his father, whose form has begun to flicker.
“Here,” Garbage says. His voice is quiet and Sleaze has to strain to hear him. Garbage’s form fritzes out again, for several seconds this time, and then he reappears.
“I love you,” Garbage says, and there is a distortion to the words now, a warping. Sleaze moves forward, tries to touch his father, embrace him, but he passes through him, feeling only a faint charge, like the shock of static electricity.
“I love you too,” Sleaze says, pulling back, looking at his father’s flicking shape.
“I-” Garbage begins, but then the form flickers again and this time it doesn’t return. Sleaze lets out a cry, moves into the space where his father had been, but there is nothing, no shock, no form. Garbage is gone, and Sleaze is at the edge.
He squeezes his eyes shut against the tears.
He steps forward, and then he’s falling, tumbling back to earth.
Sleaze
please scramble his electric induction, acid generation, and jaguar mimicry (carried)