The Glitter Jungle:
Fiction:
Reality Check
Untrue. Oz, Beecher/Keller
Years. He spent years of his life in Oz. Through death and misery and pain, pain beyond belief. He had no control and there was nothing in his world but Oz.
Tobias Beecher, prisoner #97B412, looked at the ceiling of his pod and screamed, and screamed.
~*~
"Toby! Toby, fuck, wake up."
Beecher looked around him, terrified. "Chris!"
But Keller is on death row, he can't be here, in a pod with me. Or am I on death row too? When did that happen? And since when do death row cells have double beds, he thought.
"Toby, breathe. Breathe, can you hear me? Look at me." Chris' eyes, familiar and blue. Beecher relaxed just a little. Breathed.
"You were having a bad dream, babe."
Dream? What dream?
"Do you remember what it was about?"
Beecher held his lover tight. "Can't be a dream. Years, it's been years..."
Chris looked confused. Now Toby was just as confused. The room around them sure didn't look like a pod. But it seemed familiar. Comforting. Messy, but comforting.
He knew now where he was.
"A bad dream," he sighed. "It was a bad dream. Fuck it, Chris, it seemed so real..." he shuddered, remembering the pain, his hand squeezing Keller's. The warm, strong arms encircled him, protecting him from... from things that weren't there. People who didn't really exist. A life that wasn't his own.
"Tell me," Keller whispered softly in his ear, and Beecher trusted him with all his heart, but found himself tensing slightly. Not because his Chris ever did anything to him, but because he dreamt that he did.
"I was... we were. In prison. For years, Chris." He couldn't bring himself to say it, to tell Chris everything.
~*~
"The kids!" He sprang out of bed, looking frantically around, nearly falling back into bed from the head rush. "Stood up too fast," he groaned, and then rose again, slowly this time.
"What about the kids?" Chris looked puzzled, only now truly awakening.
Beecher was already out of the room, checking on his children in their beds. He returned after a short while.
"I just checked, ya know... that they're okay." He crawled back into bed. A comfortable double bed, with matching linen. He remembered now, his mother bought them the linen on the day she accepted them. That, and a home-cooked dinner, was her way of welcoming Chris into her family.
Keller moved into his space when he slid under the blanket, practically cuddling.
"Why shouldn't the kids be okay?" he questioned. "They're too old for you to check on their breathing."
Toby remembered screaming when his son died. He couldn't get over the scar that left... the scar that was now fading rapidly as the dream melted into reality.
Chris hugged him, and then rolled on his back. "Want to go back to sleep?" he asked hopefully. Toby didn't know what to say.
"No... you go back to sleep. I'll... get something to eat."
He bolted out of bed before Keller had the chance to say anything. Went downstairs, to their kitchen. We decorated this kitchen together, he knew. Him and Chris and a friend of theirs, a woman from his office who insisted on coming along because 'gods know what would happen if you let two men decorate a house on their own'. Keller told her that years of feminism just went down the drain with this bout of sexism, which caused Toby to laugh at both of them. It was a fun day. They picked green wooden chairs which looked like garden furniture.
He went to rummage through the fridge. Maybe a drink. He didn't hear Chris' footsteps until he was right behind him. Then he remembered they didn't keep alcohol in the house, to keep him from being tempted.
"You dreamed about prison?" Chris said quietly. Toby nodded, still looking into the fridge, not seeing. He wasn't crying, but he knew that he probably should. It would probably be healthier than this nagging prickling behind his eyelids.
"Why were we in prison?" Chris asked, flipping the light switch on.
Toby swallowed. "I... killed someone." He didn't want to say it was a little girl. "By accident." Like that mattered.
Keller came up behind him and turned him around, wrapping strong arms around his loved one. "You know, that didn't happen, Tobe. It was only a nightmare."
Beecher knew that to be true. He never killed anyone. He beat his addictions years ago, even before he met Keller. And Keller wasn't a murderer, he was arrested for what turned out to be a false charge of sexual harassment. Katherine McClain wanted nothing but Chris' money. But they always joked, saying they owed her - they'd met because of her when Toby represented Chris in the trial. Neither of them served even one day in prison. The dream slowly dissolved in the harsh florescent lights.
"I know. It was only a dream." Beecher felt better now, knowing it was only a dream, and not some twisted X-File-like universe. Then Chris' hand landed on the table with a thump. Toby looked at him, startled.
"I know! I know. This is the last time, Mr. Tobias Beecher, that I'm letting you watch prison porn tapes late at night."
Now Beecher remembered too. They could only watch porn after the kids fell asleep, which usually happened after the kids finished watching the X-Files, which was rather late at night. They rented a tape about a prison in which, it appeared, everyone always wanted to have sex with everyone else. It was nothing like the prison in his dream, but it could definitely explain the theme.
"Let's go back to bed," Chris said comfortingly. "You can tell me the rest there... and let me kiss it all better."
~*~
They went back to their bedroom and settled back between their warm, soft sheets. Keller leaned on his elbow, facing his lover, expecting.
"Murphy and Tim." Toby said suddenly. Chris looked at him, the question clear in his eyes.
"They were in my dream. They were prison guards."
Chris snorted at that. "Figures. The only other gay parents in the kids' school, and they have to show up in your dream." He shook his head. "And why were they guards and we were prisoners?"
Toby didn't know. But he found out all the loop holes in the nightmare. People he actually knew in reality. Things that happened that couldn't possibly happen in a real prison.
"And Lee was there." He recalled. "Except his name was Ray. And he was a priest."
Chris now rolled on his back, laughing his ass off.
"Lee, the cute guy from the video shop? A priest. Wow. You have a twisted psyche, babe."
Toby joined his laugh, if a bit shakily. The dream drifted off, now seeming far away and vague. How could he ever think it was that realistic? It was only a dream.
"Who else was in your dream that we know?" Chris wasn't going to let this go soon.
"A woman who looked disturbingly like my first grade teacher. She was a nun."
Keller was still chuckling.
"In reality, jerk. Well, in the dream, too." Beecher only now placed all the faces. It was ridiculous, like Chris said.
"And a guy we used to live next door to when I was just a kid, who always scared me. I thought he was a Nazi. Turned out he was from Austria, and it was the thick accent that scared me. He had those spooky, tall leather boots..."
Keller was almost panting with laughter.
"Well, I was young! Too young to know the word 'fetish', Chris. I didn't think about this guy or his boots in years. Guess the movie brought everything out."
Chris gathered enough breath to ask, "What was he in your dream?", and that's when Toby stopped laughing.
"An actual Nazi."
Now Keller stopped laughing too.
"He raped me. He killed... Never mind." Even now Beecher couldn't bring himself to say that.
"Killed what?" Chris was worried. Toby didn't want him to be worried.
"Doesn't matter. Only a silly dream." He managed to wait a whole minute before jumping out of bed again. "I'll just... check on the kids again. See that we didn't wake them up, what with all this laughing."
He went to see the kids were there, safe and sound. All three of them. Chris waited for him in the hall near their room.
"It was a dream." He said seriously. "You don't have to worry about what you, or me, or anyone, did in a nightmare."
Toby hugged him, and kissed him. It was every bit as hot and sweet as
it was in his dream, but somehow better. More... real.