Welcome to Gaia! ::

Chapter One, Part One

The man who stood in front of me was someone I hoped to never see again. His black hair was brushing his shoulders, and though it was dangling in front of his face, I could see his lips lifted on the right in a tight smirk and his gray eyes with their typical invisible black tint looking at me like they were borrowing into my soul. His lip had blood on it, but I wasn’t sure if it was his own. I had never seen him injured before and the very thought of it made me want to run in fear; his anger would be exponentially more than when he was uninjured. He would want to take it out on me.

But when I tried to back up, I was stopped by something solid. Great. A wall already. Just what I needed. I’d been in this situation before, and I survived once, maybe he’ll let me live a second time. I wanted to close my eyes and await the pummeling that I was about to receive, but that’s when I noticed his lips were moving. I forced my eyes to stay open and read what they were saying.

“You can’t protect her constantly. One day, you’ll let your guard down, and that’s the day that I’ll get her, and you and that Witch will be unable to help her then. She’s mine; I left my mark on her, and I have never let someone with my mark go.” With that, he disappeared. No puff of smoke or anything, just there one second and gone the next.

My brain was spinning from what must have been overload of information. Why had he let me go? He had never done that before. And who had he been talking too? As far as I know, I was protecting no one and no one was protecting me.

Then I saw a hand come up from behind me and move towards my throat. Instinctively, I flung myself to the nearest wall and pressed my back against it allowing me to get a look at the man I had mistakenly backed up against. He had honey blond hair and forest green eyes that looked like they had a slight glow to them; he was wearing sandy army facades with a large dark spot on his right shoulder. He wasn’t much taller than me, maybe an inch or two, and looked about eighteen. His eyes were looking right at me, slightly pinched as if he was worried. But his lips were moving, and I forced myself to pay attention to what they were saying.

“It’s okay. I’m here to help.” He must have been the one who was protecting someone, me. “I just want to heal your neck,” he said taking a cautious step towards me, and I naturally took one step back away from him though my hand flew to my neck. It felt warm and wet, and when I brought my hand back to look at it, it was covered in a dark red semi-liquid that I recognized as blood, my blood. How many times had I seen it flowing from my body, but still I couldn’t calm the rising feeling of dread and fear. I tried to push the emotion down, tried to calm my soul, but the feeling wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t leave. It was transforming itself into darkness, blackness, so deep that I had never experienced it in my conscious self. It was blackness so deep I only ever experienced it in my visions.

I nearly wanted to kick myself upon this realization. I should have seen it before. My visions where the only place that I could see but never hear. But I didn’t have enough time to berate myself as thoroughly as I wanted because I was falling into the darkness, slowly at first but gradually gaining speed. I tried to claw my way to a stop because I knew what the darkness held, the images it always showed...eventually. I would rather face slow death by exsanguination than to see the images of the pit, but I couldn’t reach anything. It was a wall-less, bottom-less pit of remembered blood and death that no matter how hard I struggled I could never slow my decent or climb back out, never had and never would, but I continued to try.

I don’t know how long I fell, but it felt like forever. It could have been any amount of time really; time has no real baring in dreamland. Finally, the pictures started appearing. They were black-and-white stills and appeared to come from a projector used back in my elementary school days. The only real difference was the lack of the tape deck in the background going beep to change the slides. The pictures didn’t need a tape deck to know when to move to the next; they reacted to how much pain they had caused me before moving onto the next one for another layer.

The first image was a traffic light that I knew from memory would be blinking yellow or red depending from which side of the street it was on. And though this picture didn’t hold anything gruesome, I knew that the next ones would so I redoubled my efforts to get to a wall or something. My arms and legs flailed in the air both because of my near-state of panic and the fact that I had never learned to swim, and I was still falling though the images stayed in front of me.

The second image appeared just like I knew it would. This one was a photo of a mini-van and pick-up truck crashed head first into each other. Their front ends were twisted metals of silver, blue, and tan. It was hard to tell where one vehicle ended and the other began. There was a cloudy figure stumbling out of the pick-up’s cabin. I could remember every other detail of that night except the person who was driving that truck. For years, I tried to see the person’s face or even if they were male or female, but I couldn’t. It was like that information was blocked from my memory somehow.

The next image was one from my own eyes. It was a picture of the shattered windshield of our blue mini-van from my car seat. There was a dark liquid splattered across the inside of it; though it wasn’t quite clear in the black-and-white photo, the liquid was my mother’s blood. In the far lower, left-hand side of the photo, I could see her head laying on the steering wheel. I remembered struggling for the hours it took for someone to find the crash to get out of my restraints and get to my mother. I was never able to.

The last image was a picture of my three-year-old self being carried away from the remnants of our van. I was struggling to get out of the grasp of a police officer so I could get to my mother. I still didn’t understand that she was dead or what that really meant, but after a couple of months, I stopped looking out the window expecting her to come home. I cried the day we moved to the city because I was worried that she wouldn’t know where to find my dad and me.

As soon as that final image dissolved, a door appeared as it always did. Some days, I was sure that my dreams were sadistic, then other days I think maybe they just wanted to trade a little pain for the warnings they gave me; it usually depended on the significance of the warning. If it was as simple as the questions and answers on next week’s test, I leaned more towards them being sadistic; if it was advanced notice of when and where my next beating was going to be, I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Despite the fact that I was thankful for the warning, I reached for the doorknob, pulled it open with a jerk, and exited almost at a run. Though the vision gave me valuable information, I still had no idea when or where this confrontation was going to happen. I didn’t know the other person, and the one I knew looked as if he hadn’t changed since I last saw him almost a year ago. All alleys looked the same to me. The vision didn’t give me enough clues to avoid the situation. Besides, if I stayed, who know what sort of other horrifying images from my past my visions would torture me with.

*****

I sat straight up in my chair as if I had been shocked. Apparently, the mental effort of getting out of my vision had transferred into physical effort; it happened often enough that I wasn’t really surprised. Quickly, I scanned my surroundings; I still had a little panic left over from my dream. My surroundings hadn’t changed much. The old man sitting beside me was still asleep with his head resting on my shoulder. It was starting to cause my arm to fall asleep, but I didn’t have the heart to wake him. Besides, I would have to talk to him if I did, and I was still too flustered by my vision to say more than a few words per sentence, not that I usually said more than that anyway.

I looked at my watch to see how much longer it was likely to be until our bus pulled into Casper, Wyoming; I still had a few hours. After that, I would have about an hour to wait for the chauffer that they insisted on sending me. The company that I was interning with over the summer assured me that no taxi would drive the hour to where they were located, and I couldn’t drive myself so I had to endure the hour wait until a driver was able to come get me.

I didn’t really know that much about the company; okay, so I knew nothing about the company. My friend, Qing Yuan, had an aunt who was one of the CEOs or something so she helped me get the internship, and I would have gone anywhere as long as I didn’t have to go home, not that I called that place where my permanent address just happened to be located my home anymore. I didn’t know the name, I didn’t know what they did, and I certainly didn’t know the details of what my internship would entail. But I trusted my friend, and it was this or going back to face my step-mother.

Having just been woken up by my vision, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, not that I really should anyway, so I dug around in my purse for a book that I had packed for entertainment. I had finished it somewhere in Iowa, but I had nothing else to do so I restarted on chapter one. Even a book I had already read would be more interesting than staring out the window for hours.