Pinkgothic played:

Noko

In his dream, the world was a slow poison pulsing into his veins. It steadily displaced the life from his body in the least aggressive way, a slow circulatory drain. Pandiamonium had disappeared around him. A soundless lightning split the obsidian sky, revealing knotted, funnelled clouds, and the fractal tangles of trees silhouetted against them, conveying nothing of individual note and yet all that was necessary.

He was suspended within a tangle of reality that was simply reappropriating him, like dark claws tearing chunk for chunk from his exhausted body while he found no volition in him to object, willing host to the parasite that dominated the landscape.

There was a serenity to the steady siphon of what was left of him out of his emptying shell. His after-thought terror was a steady trickle just as the foreign life that gradually crawled in under his skin and through the vessels capable of holding it. He bled in black, rivulets of himself threading down his suspended arms.

On reflection, he wasn't sure if they were his arms any more.

A pair of pale arms slid around his torso, attached digits interlocking to secure that loose grasp. A sense of warmth and pressure layered against his back, prompting a weak, instinctive squirm of his shoulders, head rolling to one side in some irrational flight reflex no part of him could fulfil. Lips brushed against the freshly outstretched neck and a foreign cheek settled against his jaw.

'Imagine seeing you here,' that living part of Frederick commented both without malice and fear, a self-directed bitterness, silent comment. If he'd had the energy to cry in despair, he would have descended into wailing, let terror dissolve what was left of him; this was not welcome. He'd killed Dread. By proxy, Dread had no right to appear in his dreams.

'Imagine,' he repeated to himself, letting his eyes drift closed, quelling the urge to let the knot of fear in his gut at the unexpected visitor overwhelm him.

He wasn't that all unexpected.

Superficially, there was little different to prior encounters. Superficially, he was still at whim of his demon, ensnared in a nightmarish exaggeration of the world around him. No externality proved this was anything but another of Dread's games. What did, however, was the sheer conviction that even the devil did not rise from his grave.

Realistically, his chances were no better, mind geared toward accepting that there was nothing that could be done against Dread, but at least now he only had himself to answer to.

It meant no words were necessary; no actions, even. The embrace was symbolism enough for all that he had never wanted; the circumstance plenty a harkening back to his absolution of helplessness.

This was it - the simplest conceivable nightmare. The psychological equivalent of a staring contest, where it was his goal not to slip from his delicate emotional balance and spiral inexorably into unbridled fear, and his imagined captor's goal not to leave before he did.

But this time, it was his nightmare and his nightmare alone.