Feeling Reborn

T - Week 9

"Thank you, good day."

Nightmare attached the new object to his keychain, the movement rattling the other dozen residents, and walked back into a comfortable coolness only a summer morning could bestow to retrieve his personal belongings.

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The truck containing his furniture was due in a few days from today, which was marked as Tuesday on the calendar. Unfortunately, that meant sleeping on the mattress tied on top of the car with a thin summer blanket to cover it and substituting the rest of the less essential parts with whatever he had in his car: boxes served as adequate tables, threadbare pillows he never trusted with foreign hands acted as chairs. A smaller box would be useful for the few towels he actually needed.

Nightmare started hefting boxes upstairs. He had forgotten about the tedious process of moving everything into the apartment while rejecting offers of help; it was one thing to drag objects downstairs, and another to heave them back up and organize the room. Thank goodness elevators existed.

The bulkier containers pulled on his shoulders as he walked out of the metal compartment. He navigated through the hallway by peering around the stack, every movement calculated and precise as to not drop anything. There was no room for any internal complaining, lest he bump into a wall and drop the lot.

Unsurprisingly, it was silent, save the soft hum of electricity. The luckier people would still be in bed, the occupied already hitting the road to arrive to work on time.

His thoughts subsided, distracted by a silent ripple of movement behind him.

He could've sworn that someone passed behind him, glimpsing perhaps the tail of a darkly-colored scarf or jacket, but a quick sweep of the perimeter had him downplaying it to his spent mentality playing tricks on him. It didn't particularly trouble Nightmare, so the logical solution was to let it go.

And he tried, as the annoyed feeling finally started to subside in his chest. He brought the larger loads to the entryway. Nightmare stood there, hands on his hips, to observe where he would be living from now on.

Regardless of his examination — white walls, dark floor, three-piece apartment, electric stove — his mind continued to wander towards that miniscule moment in time. There was a connection to it he couldn't explain.

He took a deep breath. There was no time to dawdle on insignificant manners. He had things to unpack, a lesson plan to refine and a coffee to make.

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Carafe in hand and his bag slung over a shoulder, Nightmare hurried into the baking summer sun to his car.

He was wearing just about the same thing as yesterday; in fact, he owned several of the same suit, a little habit of his that made him buy doubles of anything he could afford at once.

Sure, this inspired odd looks from the more perceptive, but all in all, these small details slipped past people's radars.

By then, his annoyance had long since worn off, leaving a blank slate of emotions ready to be colored by the next eventful moment of his life. Hopefully, it would be something adequate, since whatever marked that slate tended to stick to him for the rest of the day, although no one could really tell if he was happy or mad.

Nightmare's facial expressions tended to stay the same throughout the day. The only indicators of a foul or pleasant mood; the twitch of an eye socket, the curve of the corners of his mouth, or the way his hands flexed while he sat or stood immobile. He snapped at others all the same and continuously carried his bone brows scrunched on his forehead, sparing social situations and classrooms, but the weight of his outbursts and the severity of the angle at which those ridges slanted softened occasionally.