The nightmare always begins the same way.

White... Where does this light come from?

Pure white is equivalent to darkness. White, the absence of color; black, the absence of light. Both are erasures. Both are beginnings and endings at once.

White is an angel, radiant and blinding.

Then everything turns black. Darkness is an invitation to death. And darkness is a monster.

Darkness. A void so absolute it has texture, thick and viscous like oil coating the inside of his skull. Then sensation, creeping in at the edges: dampness, warmth, the slick drag of something massive shifting through liquid space. Ethan is aware of his body but not its boundaries. He is vast. He is spreading. He is something with too many limbs, too many mouths, too many hungers coiling and uncoiling in the black.

And then he sees it.

The angel.

It hangs suspended in the nothing, radiant and impossible, wings spread wide like a crucifixion. Pure white feathers catch light that has no source, each plume trembling with some celestial vibration he can feel in his bones, in his teeth, in the writhing mass of what he has become. The angel's body is human-shaped but wrong in its perfection, too smooth, too symmetrical. Its face is turned away at first, features obscured by shadow. It doesn't seem to know he's there. It doesn't seem to know anything yet.

Ethan moves toward it. Or rather, he extends. Tentacles, dozens of them, black and glistening with some secretion that catches the non-light. They reach for the angel with a hunger that feels older than language, older than thought. He watches them go as if they belong to someone else, as if he is merely a passenger in this profane vessel, but the pleasure that sparks through him when the first tendril wraps around the angel's ankle is undeniably his.

The angel's head snaps around.

And there it is. The face. Always the same face, night after night after night, burned into the backs of his eyelids like a brand. Features twisted in confusion that melts rapidly into terror. Wide eyes, luminous and wet, catching his reflection in their depths, showing him what he is, what he's becoming. The lips part around a sound that might be a question or a plea or a prayer.

More tentacles surge forward, wrapping around the angel's wrists, its thighs, its waist. They yank the wings wide until the feathers strain and shudder, until the angel's back arches in a way that makes Ethan's monstrous form shiver with anticipation. He can feel everything, every point of contact, the silk of that impossible skin, the way the muscles jump and flex beneath his grip. The angel is struggling now, twisting in his hold, but it's weak, so weak, a creature of light and air trying to fight something born from the deepest trenches of the unconscious mind.

Ethan brings it closer.

The tentacles are everywhere, sliding between feathers to find the sensitive skin beneath, coiling around the angel's throat just tight enough to restrict, to remind, to own. He watches the terror bloom fresh and bright in those familiar eyes and feels something inside him pulse with a satisfaction that borders on religious. This is worship. This is desecration. This is both at once, and he cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.

There's resistance, of course. There's always resistance at first, the angel's legs clamping together, its body curling inward in a desperate attempt at self-protection.

But Ethan is patient. Ethan is inexorable.

When he enters, the angel screams. It's the first sound in the dream, always, that raw and broken cry that seems to tear itself from the deepest part of a soul. He can feel everything, the tight heat of violation, the way that sacred body tries to reject him and fails. His tentacles hold firm, keep those legs spread wide, keep that body arched and exposed. He thrusts deeper, watching the way pain transforms that beautiful face, watching tears streak down cheeks that seem to glow with an inner light. The angel's wings beat uselessly against their restraints, feathers falling like snow, like something dying. He doesn't stop. He can't stop. He doesn't want to stop.

The tentacle inside it twists as it thrusts, exploring, expanding, finding depths that make the angel keen and convulse. Other appendages join in, one sliding into the angel's mouth to muffle its cries, another wrapping around its throat and squeezing in pulses that match his thrusts. He can feel the angel's heartbeat against his grip, rapid and frantic, a small terrified animal caught in jaws that will never let go.

The angel's eyes meet his, and in that moment there's a connection that transcends the violation, transcends the violence. This is intimacy. This is understanding. This is the only way he knows how to touch something holy.

Ethan can feel his climax building in the core of whatever he is, a pressure that keeps expanding, that demands release. He wraps more tentacles around the angel's body, covering it almost completely in his darkness, and he drives in as deep as he can go and holds there, trembling, on the edge.

The angel's face is the last thing he sees clearly. Those eyes, glazed with tears and trauma, still watching him. Still seeing him. Still knowing exactly what he is.

And Ethan wakes up.

The bedroom ceiling comes into focus first, familiar, pale gray light filtering through curtains he forgot to close. His sheets are soaked with sweat, twisted around his legs like restraints. His heart is hammering against his ribs hard enough to hurt, and his cock is achingly, obscenely hard, tenting the thin fabric of his sweatpants with a desperation that makes his stomach turn.

For a moment he just lies there, breathing. The dream is already fraying at the edges, specific details dissolving back into his subconscious, but the feeling remains. The power. The violation. The face. Always that fucking face, beautiful and terrified and somehow, impossibly, familiar.

He's been having this dream for months.

Eight months of waking up hard and horrified, eight months of touching himself to the memory before the self-hatred fully sets in. He's tried everything: sleeping pills that knock him out so completely he doesn't dream, meditation, alcohol, exhaustion. Nothing works. The angel always finds him. The angel always wears the same face.

He should probably see a doctor.

He feels disgusted. He wants to jerking off and chase after what remains of the dream.

Instead, Ethan peels himself out of bed and walks to his bathroom. He turns the shower to scalding and stands under it until his skin is red, scrubbing at himself with a roughness that borders on violence. The physical evidence washes down the drain but the memory remains, lodged somewhere deep behind his eyes.

He gets ready for work on autopilot: coffee black and bitter, cigarette on the balcony while the fog rolls in off the Pacific, dress shirt that needs ironing but will have to do. It's the first day of fall quarter, his 9AM Gothic Lit survey, a hundred undergrads who've enrolled because it sounded cool and will drop by week three when they realize he actually expects them to read.

Room 339, smells like old carpet and industrial cleaning solution. The fluorescent lights buzz slightly, one of them flickering in the back corner in a way that will drive him insane by midterm. Ethan arrives fifteen minutes early, as always, and arranges his materials on the lectern with the precise, obsessive care of someone trying very hard not to think about anything else.

Students filter in gradually.

He watches them without watching them, cataloguing faces and body language from the corner of his eye while he pretends to review his notes. There's the usual mix: earnest freshmen clutching brand-new copies of the course reader, hungover juniors who signed up for an afternoon section but got stuck in the morning one, the scattered handful of English majors who actually want to be here. He knows he'll remember maybe twenty percent of their names by the end of the quarter, and only if they speak up in discussion.

By 8:58, the room is mostly full. Ethan takes his position at the front, removes his glasses, cleans them on his tie, and replaces them. It's a ritual, a way of signaling that class is about to begin. The chatter dies down. Seventy-odd faces turn toward him, expectant.

"Gothic literature," he begins, voice carrying without effort, "is fundamentally literature of the threshold. It exists in the spaces between categories, the liminal zones where definitions break down. The Gothic isn't simply horror, though horror is present. It isn't simply romance, though desire is central. It's the literature of what we're afraid to want, and what we want even as it terrifies us."

He pauses, lets that sink in. A few students are already taking notes. A few more are checking their phones under the desk.

"I'm Professor Varga. This quarter we'll be examining how Gothic texts construct and deconstruct boundaries: between the human and the monstrous, the rational and the irrational, the self and the other. We'll start with Walpole, move through Radcliffe and Lewis, spend considerable time on Shelley and Stoker, and end with—"

The door is heavy and moves slowly, admitting a slice of hallway light and then a figure who slips through the gap with the obvious embarrassment of someone trying not to be noticed. Late, clearly.

Ethan's voice dies in his throat.

The face.

The angel's face.

It's the same face. Not similar, not reminiscent, not triggering some vague sense of familiarity. It's the same fucking face, down to the exact curve of the jaw, the precise distance between the eyes, the specific shape of the lips that have parted around his tentacle in eight months of nightmares. The same face he woke up hard to this morning.

Someone whose face he's been desecrating in his dreams for the better part of a year.

This person exists. Ethan's hands are shaking.

He's going to be sick.

"You..." He finally manages to speak, but stops. He doesn't know what to say. Looking at {{obj}} seems like a sin.

"Find a seat," Ethan said, and his voice was colder than he intended, harder. Displacing everything into professional irritation because it was the only safe place to put it. "And in the future, this class starts at 09 AM. Not 09:07."