Nightmares hears them as they scream at night.

They can't thrash, can't move, are held still as they scream in their sleep, and she sits on their chests, perched vulture-like, her knees up to her chest. She looks into their dreams and smiles.

Here's a little girl who combs her hair and as she runs the comb through, chunks come out. She isn't screaming; she is used to it by now. She is a survivor. She is starving to death, because the ash is poison to the fish. Her mother is dead, and her father is blind. There is a nurse beside them, sitting calmly with some ointment and a cotton ball held carefully. The nurse holds the father's eye open and dabs at the blackness there. They were burned black, his eyes.

The little girl brushes her hair and lets the chunks fall to the ground. She shudders, sick and starving.

She screams at night, and the Nightmares drinks it like wine.

Across the world, a little redhaired girl sits with her sister and soothes her as her sister screams. Her sister is dreaming of the same event, a world away. Of television images of explosions that take up an entire city. Of something they're calling a Cold War. The image freezes her in her sleep. A nuclear winter is what she dreams of. Cities exploding under her feet as she walks, ice turning jagged and making her bleed. She thinks of a bunker in the back yard and thinks of turning to dust and thinks of what it would be like if it were her shadow burned onto walls and thinks of it and while she thinks of it it happens in her sleep, her Cold Winter turning into a battlefield of fire as it explodes and she burns and she burns and she screams, and her redheaded sister can't soothe her at all as she wakes and clings, sobbing hysterically.

Nightmares walks through the dreamscapes and comes upon another watching them with personal interest. He wears the armour of burned skins and weilds a bomb in one hand. His face is white as death, his hair as black as charcoal.

She smiles at him, her lips thin over sharp teeth as she passes him to enter another dreamscape. "Thanks," she hisses.

The War watches her go and nods, one professional to another. "Any time."