Threaded Mode | Linear Mode

**Vincent Lane** · **02-27-2015, 07:21 PM** "Loverboy" - Past Lives, Part 1 -->

A Dream – Edgar Allen Poe

In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed—
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream—that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, thro' storm and night,
So trembled from afar—
What could there be more purely bright
In Truth's day-star?

It was 3:05 am

Some men leave a battle behind, like a lizard dropping an injured tail. They move on. They heal. They even evolve.

Some men are stuck in the warzone as if they were POW’s, as the memories of exploding IED’s and the smell of bullet-laden flesh is never far from them.

For those who can move on, trauma is a learning experience. Even a bragging right. They can be lauded as heroes and be constantly reminded that they survived – because they did, in fact, survive.

The others, though – they have not survived yet. The battle rages on. Every car backfire sends them looking for a foxhole and every problem’s solution must be, somehow, related to a gun.

Somewhere in the world is a man who cannot enjoy Fourth of July fireworks without having a panic attack.

Somewhere in the world is a woman who cannot experience a first kiss without anxiety reminding her of a man who raped her.

Somewhere in the world, Los Angeles to be precise, “Loverboy” Vinnie Lane sits up screaming in bed as the echo of a memory of a dream fades in his mind.

BAHAHAHAMAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!

He sits bolt upright, his heart beating like a soldier’s drum.

With his hands pressed to his pounding chest, Loverboy looks left and right, his stubbled head bathed in moonlight as it seeps through the shaded window in the unstoppable way only light seems capable of doing.

He sees his love in the form of a sleeping mound next to him, covered in sheets, but for the simple curve of tanned shoulder peeking out and slowly rising, then falling, in deep, rhythmic breaths of sleep.

As he slowly calms, he wonders how she could have continued sleeping as he screamed into the night.

Had he screamed?

Was the wailing and crying into the mutable, masked face of his nightmare captor left behind in the dream, or did the throbbing in his eardrums tell the story of his fear?

“Jesus.”

Loverboy swings his legs gently from under the covers, setting his bare feet onto the carpeted floor. Gently, not wishing to rouse his beloved, he lifts himself from the mattress and stands.

Running his cold palms across his hot face, he pulls his skin down, then up, rubbing at his eyes. He runs a hand over his scalp, feeling the sheen of sweat.

Eventually, his feet move as though through an ocean and he finds his way to the bathroom, switching on the overhead fluorescent light and staring at himself in the spotless mirror behind the sink as the bulbs flickered slowly to life above him.

He could say many things about Roxy, he thought, but one of them would never be that she was a bad housekeeper.

Standing then, stark and overexposed in the harsh fluorescence, Loverboy’s eyes were hollowed pits dug into an ashen wasteland of a face. Everywhere he looked, his alabaster skin was marred by various colors of bruise.

Yellow stretched across his lower ribs.

Blue and black around his thigh.

Deep purple cloaking his shoulder.

Welts and wounds and bruises and scars were a way of life to him in the same was a suit and tie might be to a businessman, so why then did they stand out to him now?

As he closed his eyes a memory of a gloved fist driving into his face caused him to raise a finger to a lip that was no longer split and swollen. Was, for all intents and purposes, “healed.”

But some wounds heal quicker than others.

Was it minutes or hours that he stood bathing in the electric hum of a bathroom light? He didn’t know.

A splash of water across his wan face and then back into the bedroom, where Roxy still lie, peaceful and unknowing.

As he made his way to the window and pulled the curtain aside, for just a moment, the haunting face of his abductor, the man he had known only as Hysteria, is behind him.

Or it wasn’t.

But to Loverboy, it may have been.

He spins around and shouts a wavering, broken warning to the nothing in the room behind him, serving only to startle the beauty who had been safely tucked away in dreams not filled with ghosts.

“Vinnie?”

“Roxy, I’m… I’m sorry.”

“Vinnie, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Why are you up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you yell?”

“I just… I thought I saw… something…”

Roxy, concerned, crawls across the queen-sized mattress towards the far corner, reaching her hand out to grasp the arm of her love.

Loverboy stands, shaking and staring out into the night, and trembles for what must be hours.

“Roxy… I think I might need to get some help. Tomorrow.”

It was 3:15 am

“Alright Mister Lane… just relax, get comfortable, lie back on the couch.”

“This is so cliché, dude.”

“It’s cliché because it works. You have to trust me.”

The therapist, a man in about his late thirties, quietly waited with his hands folded on his knee while Loverboy adjusted and squirmed his way into some semblance of comfort.

“You sure my girl can’t be in here?”

“This is just between you and me, Vinnie. You have to go deep inside yourself to find the roots of your problems. You have to go deeper than you ever have before.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Nice. Good. Humor is a great self-defense mechanism, Vinnie, but we have to open up. If you let me help you, you can find out all of your past struggles.”

“I dunno, man, I know a shrink pretty well in the XWF, and that dude does some fucked up things, man. Granted, he is the champ, now…”

“Well, Vinnie, all of us in the psychiatric community have different methods and practices. You see that I’m not holding a pad and paper, I won’t be psychoanalyzing you. I want to get to the old pain. The original sin, if you will.”

“Well, dude, my daddy didn’t diddle me or anything weird like that, man, I told you what happened. A gaggle of freaks abducted me after my match at the last XWF pay per view event and assaulted me for days. I haven’t been able to shake it.”

“That may be true, Vinnie, but it isn’t what got you there. It isn’t what brought you on this lifelong journey to begin with. We need to find the seed that got planted that put you down the path of misfortune.”

“Heh. Seed.”

The therapist gently shakes his head and Loverboy falls silent. Producing a pocket watch from inside his jacket, the therapist then dangles it in front of Loverboy’s face.

“More clichés, man?”

“What did I tell you about clichés?”

“Right… right. Well, okay, doc… what do we have to do to get this show on the road?”

“You just… follow… the watch…”

“Uh huh.”

“And listen to me…”

“Uh huh.”

“And be QUIET…”

“Uh… oh.”

“And let your mind go back. Back to before the XWF. Before the abduction. Before your career. Before… your life.”

Dead Letter Day - Marc Levy

He sent the letter to the guy's wife
The same day,
Leaving out the following:
"About 2 in the morning the automatic went off
And nobody moved, we just waited for the morning
Light and the order to recon.
There were two of them. One was dead.
The other hung on all night,
Waiting to blow away some round-eyes
Before he bought it too.
He shot the second man, missing the point.
The point opened up and somebody threw a frag
And it was all over. Except that your husband
Took a bullet through his helmet that tore a
Gash in his head, and going down shot the man
In front of him. The blood was deep, dark red;
He was lying flat on his back, in shock;[/b]
His eyes were wide open and lifeless,
As if he could see everything.
They say he lived a few days in the rear,
Even got up and spoke. Then died.
Head wounds are like that."
She wrote back. First thanking him and the platoon
For writing her, then going on for pages asking
About his last moments. You could tell she was crying;
And he cried too, and did not reply to the desperate
Letter, and has desperately not replied ever since.

Bullets fly by.

There is a scent in the air of fire and flesh, blood and sweat and metal, and Loverboy falls to the ground, sinking into mud.

All around him are voices screaming and Loverboy attempts to scramble to his feet, wiping mud form his eyes and struggling not lose the grip on his… rifle?

Loverboy has a rifle.

An automatic rifle.

Suddenly, an Asian man runs up to him clad in black from head to toe, and wearing a circular straw hat. The man grabs Loverboy and helps him to his feet, screaming over the explosions nearby in a language Loverboy does not know, yet understands.

“Go! Go! We have to go! They are killing the women, the children!”

“Wait… what’s happening… who are you?”

The voice isn’t his, but it comes from Loverboy’s mouth. The sound of the same oriental language comes effortlessly from his lips as if he had spoken it all his life.

The man who helped him looks at him in desperation.

“We have to go! My Lai is burning! We are the only two soldiers, everyone has left, we have to…”

But before he can finish, his head explodes.

Loverboy screams as the twitching man’s body falls forward with blood spurting from the hole that used to be his head.

Backing away, he stumbles and lands on his hands and knees, staring into a pool of water.

Staring back up at him is a terrified reflection of a young Asian man’s face. It’s mouth open and twisted in the same scream that is coming from Loverboy.

His own reflection.

Stunned momentarily silent, Loverboy again struggles to his feet, tossing the gun away as if it were burning him. He tries to run, instinctively seeming to know the way. However, as he ducks under a thick overhang of tree branches, a soldier in green fatigues emerges right in front of him.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

The soldier says it with a voice so familiar, but impossible.

Loverboy backs up, nearly falling again, as the soldier looms out of the underbrush and reveals himself.

Tall. Bald. Older.

Impossible.

“Wait! Stop! What are you doing?!”

“Sorry Charlie, I don’t speak gook.”

But something in the intonation told Loverboy different. He knew instantly that this man understood every word he was saying.

As Loverboy tried again to step back, the soldier leveled his rifle at Loverboy’s face.

“D’Ville!”

Loverboy screams in his head, though the words are different.

“Ma quỷ!”

The soldier pauses, and smiles.

“Yes, exactly.”

And then the world becomes fire.

Threaded Mode \| Linear Mode "Loverboy" - Past Lives, Part 1
Author	Message