Every night, you dream at least ten dreams a night
Do you remember the dreams?
If you do, you're well on your way
To having some fantastic times when you close your eyes
Today I'm gonna teach you about
One of my favorite things in the world ever
Dreams and dreaming
I want you to ask yourself this question
When you dream, do you dream only in black and white?
Or do you dream in color?
— Steal Something, Bring Me The Horizon
Niall Lynch believed himself to be a practical man above all and every single one of his choices was guided by that. Someone else, in another life, might have told him you’re an arrogant cunt, that’s what you are , but what was the point in lingering on her deep-set eyes and shiny blonde hair when there was work to do? He had a toddler that wouldn’t stop crying on his back: he was hungry, he was tired, he was bored, he was this and that, and Niall couldn’t stand it another fucking second.
In the same practical vein he dreamed up objects for rich people, he prepped the Barns, in a secluded spot in the backend of rural Virginia —surrounded by nothing but green, sprawling fields, no neighbors to bother him for miles, add a few cows here and there for realism—, and then he waited until Declan was asleep before locking himself in his own room.
It wasn’t the first time Niall dreamed himself something ambitious —the Barns itself was testament to his ability— but it was the first time he would dream a living, breathing being more complex than a cow. He had tried before, dreaming copies of himself to get out of impossible bets, dreaming a copy of someone he hated just to have the satisfaction of choking the life out of them, however dreams are fickle things and if not handled properly, there was no way to predict what would be waiting for him when he woke up.
In his dream, Niall was standing in the streets of Belfast as the night fell. His dreams were stuck in a state of perpetual twilight ever since he tried to take a star out of them. He didn’t have the patience or the time to fix it now though, his energy had to go somewhere else. Once, before she was known as Mór, she had taken Niall to a restaurant on the same street he was stuck in this dream. They didn’t even have dinner that time, they sat, they picked a bag from under the table and Mór slipped a small box under, giving the waiter a nod.
They could never return because the box was a fake and if anyone found out Niall was part of the con, he’d be shot first, questioned later.
Pulling from a sunlit memory of Mór getting out of bed in a Bed & Breakfast on their way to London, Niall got to work.
Dreaming people was a volatile thing. Not because it was difficult —most people dream of other people in their everyday lives all the time—, but because the human memory was a funny thing. Humans are prone to exaggerate, to make things prettier than they usually are in real life, but Niall considered himself a professional, and so, he wove the dream around him to pull her out.
Blonde hair light enough to look white under the sunlight, calculating blue eyes that crinkled slightly when she smiled, lips full and plump and sweet. Her body had been under Niall’s enough times that he vividly recalled the curve of her breasts, the width of her hips, the feel of her gaze. Niall could —and would— make her flesh and bone and bring her home.
As usual, he woke up unable to move. For a moment, he was frozen in bed staring at the ceiling, pins and needles on his arms. The next, he was sitting up, looking down at a rotting, bleeding corpse with Mór’s features but none of her spark.
Cursing, he glanced at the clock in the nightstand, happy to see he still had time before Declan woke up.
Niall got out of bed, wrapped the body in a comforter and took it behind the farm, digging as fast and as deep as he could under the moonless night.
By the time he was back in the house, exhausted and covered in mud, the sun was rising and he knew he’d have to wait to try again.
This time, Niall made sure to clear his mind before dreaming. He did that by drinking half a bottle of whisky that tasted more of home than anything else this side of the Atlantic.
Declan had been a pain in the ass for the last 2 hours and he still wondered if he shouldn’t have left him outside an orphanage in London before making his way to America. The thought was soon discarded, Declan was his son —presumably— and the boy had to have something of Niall’s. If that was Dreaming or something else, it remained to be seen.
Blonde hair, blue eyes, full lips. Rounded hips that may or may not belong to someone else. Breasts just shy too much. If he could improve Mór, then there was no reason not to, right?
As he woke up, Niall tried to imagine Mór’s face if she ever found out. She should be honored that Niall would go to such lengths to have her be a part of their lives. In reality, he suspected the phantom pain that shot through his face meant she’d punch him square in the jaw.
This Mór was asleep when he looked over her. She looked fatter than he remembered Mór being and he wondered if that was enough to guarantee a do-over. But he was tired and before he knew it, he fell into dreamless sleep.
When he woke up again, the New Mór was still lying limp on the bed, unresponsive. Niall searched for a pulse but there was none. He didn’t think he’d have to dream a pulse into her, but he should’ve known better. With a sigh, he dragged her lifeless body through the back door and started to dig again.
It was Declan’s birthday —or at least it was the day Niall remembered to be Declan’s birthday. The boy had no real concept of time yet, but that morning, as Niall scrambled some eggs and drank his coffee, he asked in that infant babble that’s only understandable when you spend hours with a toddler: “when is ma home?”
“She’s visiting her ma. She’ll be here soon.”
That was enough for the boy who continued drinking his milk as if his mother was indeed coming home. Whether he actually understood, it didn’t matter then.
At night, Niall dozed off in front of the TV, some 60s movie in the background and a half-empty bottle of whiskey sat on the table next to the brown armchair. The past week had been a fruitless exercise, lifeless Mór after lifeless Mór on his bed by the time he woke up.
Maybe it was the house, maybe the Barns weren’t sitting in the perfect spot he thought they were. It was supposed to be on a ley line, the energy was supposed to be strong enough to feed not only his dream objects, but also to keep Declan’s new mother alive.
Some time later, Niall heard a noise and started: standing in front of him, just a couple feet away, a full-fleshed Mór stood, eyes oozing a black liquid reminiscent of car oil. With a sigh, Niall focused on himself to slowly wake up his tingling limbs, or at least pretend the process started. It felt like hours passed until Niall could finally move again.
He examined this new iteration of Mór and noticed she was perfect, save from the leakage. Her breasts looked perfect, asymmetrical enough to be like Mór’s own, her hips were wide enough to bear a child but she didn’t look fat. Her blonde hair was the exact shade of gold.
Maybe the leakage could be fixed, he thought, as he reached out to touch her and her mouth opened wide and it kept growing and growing until Mór’s unhinged jaw was open enough to swallow a whole arm, row after row of sharp teeth and an ex’s perfect body behind her. The joke was cheap even for Niall, who reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded 4-inch knife in silver and drove it directly into her abdomen.
The dreamed creature didn’t budge but Niall felt a shiver down his spine that he only ever felt in a nightmare.
He was still dreaming.
He hadn’t woken up yet.
As soon as the thought set in, the dream creature lunged again, this time her teeth scraping his upper arm, leaving his nerve endings on fire, his heart pounding against his ribcage.
He was dreaming.
He was still in control.
With that, he gave himself an ax and swung it directly at the dream creature’s head. His momentum made him crash in front of the creature and as he fell in the dream, he woke up.
Back in his living room, his real, solid living room, Niall sat up and wasn’t even surprised to find the dream creature —decapitated, but both pieces of it were present— in front of him. The moment he recovered movement in his limbs, he took stock of himself. He had a few teeth marks on his left arm, but he needed to clean up before–
“Da?”
Well, it had to be before that, clearly.
Niall cursed his luck and turned to Declan, already minding his movements to spare the child from the decapitated head at least. Niall couldn’t afford a child who was scared to stay where he left him because the kid was scared of his fake mother. Niall needed his child to be a dreamer who didn’t bring monsters to the waking world, but whose dreaming could be shaped to help the family business.
“Why aren’t you in bed, wee lad?”
“‘m cold,” Declan’s babble is less understandable when Niall hasn’t had a cup of coffee before. Still, he walked closer to his son to shield him from the mess.
“Da, you okay?”
Wasn’t that a good question? Niall was still shaking from the adrenaline, but he put on a smile when he said, “I’m great. Let’s get you to bed, alright?”
Once Declan was back in his room, settled under the comforter, Niall sings him to sleep, watching him fall into dreamless sleep soon enough. He wondered how long until Declan’s first dream came to life, but didn’t linger on the thought as he went back to the living room to clean up.
Niall’s next attempt was during a quick morning nap.
Declan was entertained in the room next to the master bedroom and Niall had been thinking that maybe the conditions needed to change if he wanted a different result. The last Mór he dreamt under the effects of whisky had come with a set of tentacles for arms, meaning his night creatures were coming more often than not out of the nightmares instead of staying where they belonged.
For the first time in months, he dreamt of a morning. It was a hotel room in London where the light hit in a weird angle that didn’t reach the bed, but was enough to bathe the room in a gentle light that reminded him of Mór holding Declan when he was a baby.
As he wove from the dream, he noticed there was music playing from somewhere in the room. A small music box with a little headless ballerina played a tune that reminded him of home. He’d lost track of the amount of time he pulled from the dream, but as he woke up, the music from his dream continued.
Once he was able to sit up, he turned to this new iteration of Mór who wasn’t exactly Mór —a little smaller around the hips, her eyebrows a little thicker— and realized the music that continued to play after he woke up came from her. She wasn’t able to speak or even open her mouth, but the music continued to play in a loop.
With a sigh, he got up, grabbed the gun that once belonged to Mór, put the silencer on and shot her right in the middle of her bushy eyebrows.
This version of Mór bled and he spent the next hour cleaning up after himself when he remembered Declan. He left the body in the room, wrapped in the bloodstained comforter, and went to look for his son. The kid was sleeping on the floor in a patch of sunlight similar to the one in his dream. It briefly pulled something in his heart, then he took advantage of the sleeping kid and dragged another lifeless Mór to the backyard.
Cocky bastard, she said with a smile , you think you can get away with conning the Barrets? They’re old money, my love. They’ve got eyes and ears everywhere.
We’ll be out of that restaurant so quickly that no one will know.
Niall, suddenly aware that he was dreaming, pulled this Mór into his arms and willed himself to wake up. Like every single time, pins and needles came and went and he sat up. Next to him, rousing from sleep was Mór, every single feature exactly as he remembered.
“What time is it?” she asked.
He even got her voice right.
Looking over to his bedside table, he glanced at the clock, then back at Mór. It was barely past midnight.
“Go back to sleep,” Niall said, feeling confident that this was it. The one he’d been expecting all along. “Declan’s sleeping already.”
“Who’s Declan?”
Well, fuck him sideways.
He didn’t think he’d need to dream the memory of a son into her.
As he buried her body behind one of the barns, he wondered if it was better to start anew: dream himself a woman who was better than Mór, not just a new version of her ex.
Niall Lynch was, above all, a practical man. That’s why nearly a month into his enterprise to bring Mór out of his dreams, he changed his angle. He went into the nearest town —a quaint little thing named Henrietta— and got himself a babysitter.
He was running out of real money, so he paid her to watch Declan, who still hadn’t brought anything out of his dreams, while he drove to Richmond to close a deal with an American who wanted a forged painting.
Usually, Niall wouldn’t accept that kind of deal, as art forgeries were a risky investment. He could dream the thing to the best of his ability, only to have an expert declare it a fake within two seconds. But this man didn’t care about the quality, in fact, he’d let on that a sloppy copy would be sufficient, as it was for someone else.
The man met him at a Denny’s parking lot, deemed the painting perfect for its purpose and paid in cash.
Niall used his time off babysitting duty to indulge himself a little and drove downtown to the nearest Irish pub he could find. Did it matter that he was raised in Belfast when all he missed from the other side of the Atlantic was the quality of the scotch and the one woman who wouldn’t be pulled from his dreams no matter how hard he tried?
The pub was small and its scotch was subpar, but there was a blonde, pale waitress that reminded him of Mór, so Niall put on his charming smile, his saccharine words and brought her to a cheap motel just a little ways out of the highway.
Her soft and pliant body reminded him of the many nights he spent with Mór before she was Mór, before she decided they should part ways. In a different universe where he could trust anyone else, he would’ve sweet-talked her into moving to the middle of nowhere to raise his son. She had the makings of a good mother and a charming accent that she could’ve passed down to any other children they might have.
The state of his world being what it was, he could trust no one, least of all a waitress who could be lured so easily. He quickly took a shower and drove back to the barns, where the babysitter was charmed by Declan’s ways and told Niall in no uncertain terms that she would be willing to babysit again.
Niall Lynch was a practical man, so he said his goodbyes in good faith, but hoped to never need her again.
That night, Niall dreamt of a blonde nameless woman, children and sunlit playgrounds. He didn’t weave anything out of his dreams for the first time in ages.
The sun hit the master bedroom at just the right angle for it to wake him up around 8 o’clock, giving him enough time to shower before Declan woke up. This time, however, he woke up to the sounds coming from the kitchen and tensed immediately. He took his gun out of the nightstand and clicked the safety off.
In the kitchen, a new version of Mór was cracking eggs open in a pan.
“Mór?”
The woman gave him a look above her shoulder.
“Oh, I wanted to bring your breakfast to bed,” she said, an almost smile that was partially hidden by her pale blonde hair. “You work so hard for us, I wanted to do something nice.”
Niall came closer without putting the weapon away, inching closer to her and inspecting her body. She looked every bit like Mór, except where her hair was slightly longer —as the waitress from the previous day was— and her hips were slightly wider. Her voice was different as well, it sounded subdued, not anything like Mór had ever been, but its rhythm and intonation reminded him of the girl he met the day before.
Was this it? Was all he needed a good fuck before dreaming the perfect copy of his ex?
“How do you want your eggs, dear?”
“What’s my name?”
“What?”
“What’s my name,” he stated this time, the point of his gun pressing to her side, finger on the trigger.
“Niall, what’s going on?”
“How long have you been here?”
“Just a couple of minutes. You woke me up with your snoring.”
“And before that?”
Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion. She stood there for a second without speaking, looking at the wall, trying to draw a path to her being in the kitchen. Niall could smell the eggs burning on the stove, so he reached behind her and turned it off, gun still digging into New Mór’s side. Finally, she said, “I can’t remember.”
“What about Declan?”
“He’s sleeping, I already checked on him. Will you tell me what the hell is going on?”
Niall went to check on his son himself, taking a second to put the gun in his waistband. The child was indeed still sleeping, but Niall didn’t get to where he was by trusting people, so he softly roused him to check if he was still alive.
Declan looked up at him with soft, blue eyes heavy with sleep. “Da?”
Niall didn’t have time to do anything before he heard the hurried steps behind him and then New Mór’s voice: “what’s wrong, Niall?”
Startling from his sleepy state, Declan jumped out of the bed and ran towards his fake mother, crying a cheerful Ma! that did something to Niall’s heart. This was it, then. This fake had to stay.
They had breakfast together and then New Mór played outside with Declan until it was nearly time for lunch, which she also cooked. The stew was passable, if a little bland, but this fake Mór was very much the bland version of his Mór on the other side of the Atlantic.
When night fell, she put Declan to sleep and even tried to sing to him, but the kid had become more and more irritated during the day until he yelled for Niall from his room.
“When is Ma home?”
“What do you mean, wee lad? She’s right here.”
“Not me Ma,” he said, a sour look on his face.
Fake Mór was standing outside, having left Niall and Declan alone for a minute. Niall heard her sniff, as if holding back snotty tears. Was she capable of that? Could a fake do that?
“Ma just looks a little different because she spent a long time visiting her ma, alright? She’s your mama and she gets sad if you say things like that.”
Declan didn’t look convinced, but he was still a toddler and his father’s reassurance was enough for now. He took some time to calm down but eventually, he asked for a song and Niall was happy to comply, singing until he was knocked out cold.
That night, Fake Mór cried herself to sleep and Niall watched her the whole night. She wasn’t a bad work, but she wasn’t Mór and that stung. No matter how hard he tried he could not make the woman who left him because everything that made her Mór was beyond what Niall was privy to. Now he was stuck with a cheap knock-off who was perfect to raise Declan, but not perfect to be his.
Still, when she woke up the next morning, it was as if the day before was left behind and she was bright as the Virginia summer sunlight that filtered through the window. She made breakfast, played with Declan and performed as a gentle version of Mór that only he could dream to life.
That night, after Declan was in bed —with far less fuzzing about her mother than the night before— Niall sat down in the living room with her and asked “do you remember how you got here?”
Her face was soft, so soft it almost hurt. This was definitely not Mór.
“You brought me here. I’m not sure what else you want to know, love.”
And that stings for some reason, Mór wouldn’t just drop that word. But she used to, once, a lifetime ago.
“I don’t know what to call you,” Niall admits in the end. “You’re not her.”
After a long beat of silence, she turned to him with a half smile. “I woke up at dawn. Does that help?”
He tries the name in his mind, in his mouth before he decides Dawn Lynch is not it. “Not Dawn.”
“I was thinking of Aurora.”
That was news to him: he didn’t know a dream could think by itself, but as far as Niall knew it wasn’t impossible. Dreams were fickle things, they changed and shifted inside Niall’s mind, why wouldn’t they change and shift and grow outside of him?
Aurora. Aurora Lynch . She wasn’t Mór, but she didn’t need to be.
“Alright, Aurora Lynch. Show me who you are.”
She smiled with a glint of mischief that was very Mór-like and yet so unlike anything he ever saw on her face that Niall’s heart beat double time. This dream —Aurora, as solid and real as his living room— was exactly who he needed.