Villains and Damsels

Our story so far: Sam has entered his ex-girlfriend Natalie's dream using a device called the Somnigo. She's asked for his help dealing with a disturbing nightmare about the Master, a shadowy figure who continuously abducts and assaults her. After gathering his courage to confront the Master, Sam is horrified to learn that they are near-doubles.

Villains and Damsels

By Garnett Gibson

Part 4: The Cure

* * *

The Master's smile wasn't Sam's smile. It was crueler, more confident. His hair was neater, slicked back as if with hair gel. He wasn't clean shaven, but his facial hair was neater too, looking more purposeful and less like Sam had just forgotten to shave for a few days. And of course, there was the suit, like something out of a Tim Burton movie. Dark pinstriped and perfectly tailored, with a few cloudlike tendrils wisping out at random moments.

But other than that, other than the hair and the clothes and some parts of his face, Sam was looking at himself.

"You look uncomfortable," the Master said. "Let me help you relax." He snapped his fingers, and Lindsay rose from her place on the floor. Another woman came from a nearby doorway. Gillian, a former roommate of Natalie's, dressed in a lacy blue bra and panties set. Both of them came to Sam and began caressing his chest. He tried to shove them off, but they seemed magnetized to him.

"What the fuck is this?" Sam asked.

Fuck,

he thought,

just keep them away from my crotch.

"Did she--"

"She has no idea." If Sam tried, he could sound like the Master. He could drop to the same baritone, lose all the hesitancy and filler words. But he could never reproduce the ethereal quality, that natural echo, in the real world. "Her plea to you was genuine. Get in her head, defeat the monster plaguing her." He held his hands out by his sides and grinned, flashing teeth much whiter than Sam's own. "Surprise."

"What are you?" Sam asked. He'd never spoken with a nightmare like this before. He'd never had what any normal person would call a conversation with a nightmare before. Most of them were growling, snarling, animalistic monsters, who didn't even know they weren't real.

"What do you think I am?" the Master asked, his expression hard. He wasn't mocking. He genuinely wanted to know what Sam thought.

"I--" Sam faltered as Lindsay put a hand on his shoulder and tickled his ear with her tongue. He thought he knew the answer before he'd walked into this room. The Master was a manifestation of Natalie's fears, like most nightmares. He represented someone or something that had hurt her, or someone or something she was afraid might hurt her. "I've never hurt Natalie," he said firmly, though he knew that didn't answer the Master's question.

"No," the Master agreed quietly. "You haven't. You've never even threatened her, or anyone." This was somewhat reassuring, that he hadn't done anything Natalie perceived as harmful, even though the Master's tone was surprisingly not reassuring.

"That why--" he groaned as Gillian ran her fingers through his hair. "Why would she have nightmares about me hurting her?" He tried to center himself to ignore the women, but it was getting harder and harder. And so was he.

"She doesn't have nightmares about you hurting her. She has dreams about me hurting her." The Master laughed as if the distinction should be obvious.

Sam, however, had no idea what he meant, until he looked down at the two women, who had slumped to their knees but were gazing up at him adoringly.

Like all they wanted in the world was to please him.

"Did she know?" Sam asked. "Even deep down, did she know that this would happen? Did she want you and I to meet?"

Something flashed in the Master's eyes and he pointed at Sam. "Now you're catching on." He rubbed his chin. "I'm not a nightmare, Sam. Not in the way she thinks. I'm not something lurking behind dark corners, waiting to jump out at her. I'm the manifestation of her guilt, her shame."

"Me? I'm the manifes--" He stopped himself. The Master has already implied there was a distinct difference between them. Unless he was lying. Which he could be. To what end, though, Sam couldn't say.

"Do you know why I offered you these women? Why Natalie wanted to offer them to you?"

Sam shrugged. "To distract me."

The Master rolled his eyes. "They're not doing anything. You're barely looking at them."

That statement, more than any, was the most Sam-like thing the Master had said so far.

"At the coffee shop today, she could see your attraction to that cashier. And she knew you liked Gillian. She didn't like it, but she knew it." At this, Gillian sprang back into action, making quick work of Sam's shorts and pulling them to his ankles.

"Fuck!" Sam yelled, his torso shrinking at his sudden nakedness.

"Relax." The Master held up a hand. "None of this is meant to shame you. None of it is meant to harm you. I exist only in whatever way Natalie requires me to, and she's never meant to hurt you." He kept eye contact with the beleaguered Sam as Gillian's mouth wrapped around Sam's cock. "But she has hurt you, hasn't she?"

Sam groaned, both from the pleasure and from the pain of the memory.

What Natalie did...

"I just wanted to put it behind me," he said.

The Master sighed as Gillian sucked harder, her tongue darting along the veins of Sam's shaft. He looked around the room, clicked his tongue as if disappointed. "Her emotions after that incident...they resulted in me. All the guilt. All the shame. The anger--"

"The anger?" Sam blurted out, his knees buckling. He took in a breath. "Anger at what?"

"At herself, for cheating on you. At her friend, for sleeping with her even though he knew she had a boyfriend. And at you, for not punching him in the face when you found out. For not screaming at her. For not fighting for her."

"Was I supposed to..." He bit his lips, feeling like he might cum at any moment. Lindsay had stood up and was now behind him, hands moving across his chest, up his neck. But he was determined to power through the conversation. He gritted his teeth. "How was I supposed to fight for her? She didn't want to be with me. I don't want to be with someone who doesn't want to be with me."

The Master lowered his face, narrowed his eyes, curled his lips. "You're not only a liar, Sam. You're a wholly incorrect liar."

"You're saying she slept with someone else to make me jealous? To get me to slap him with my glove and call for a duel?"

"She wanted, Sam," a hint of impatience had been injected into the Master's voice, and he took a few steps towards him. Sam felt his pulse quicken, both from the crawling orgasm and the fear, "to extract out of you the darkness she always thought you were capable of. The darkness she craved in the partner that she loved. That's not what she told herself, but that's why she did it. And when it didn't work, her mind concocted me. The monster. The villain. The twisted, demonic Don Juan."

"But why me?" Sam asked with a grunt. He found his hand moving to the back of Gillian's head, almost of its own accord. If she could just bring him to orgasm, he'd be able to concentrate. He could tell her to stop but he just felt too damn far into--

"Why you, indeed." The Master's gaze was low, looking not at Sam's face, but at his hand, at the fingers that wanted so badly to force Gillian further onto his cock. Sam withdrew them, put them awkwardly by his side.

"If she wanted--fuck--if she wanted a bad boy, just go out and find a bad boy. Don't make some villain with my face."

"She doesn't want that," the Master said simply. "She wants you."

"I'm nothing," Sam said, almost as an argument.

"Oh, I know that. Shitty job after shitty job. Failed relationship after failed relationship."

"Thanks. Really."

The Master laughed. "This isn't just about rougher sex. This is about ambition. This is about ruthlessness." He bared his teeth, and Sam felt an inexplicable surge of pleasure that he hoped could be attributed to Gillian's sucking. "This is about what you want just as much as it's about what she wants. She wants to be dominated, and she's always recognized in you something that wants to dominate, but has held back out of a belief that it was wrong, that he was too much of a loser to take command." He looked at the wall then. "I don't enjoy being the bad guy, Sam. Well," he laughed, "I do enjoy it. I just don't enjoy her hating me for it."

Sam was panting now, so close to climax and yet so frustratingly far. His voice was husky, and started to sound something like the Master in both tone and diction. "And what do you propose to do about it?" Had he really thought, if he could just see the Master's face, everything could be resolved? That it would be so neat, so clean, so easy?

"I think you know what I'm proposing."

"You don't, though." Sam's eyes were wide and challenging. "You know what Natalie's thinking. You know what Natalie wants. You know what Natalie thinks

I'm

thinking, but you don't really know for sure."

The Master laughed, like he was impressed. "I'm proposing Sam, that if you want to help Natalie, there's only one way to do that. Only one way I can be excised. Only one way to release all three of us from this prison."

Sam glared at the Master. He couldn't...he couldn't actually mean what Sam thought he meant.

It wasn't possible.

If it was possible, it was highly unethical.

There was no way to know what it would do to Natalie, to Sam.

"No," he said, as Lindsay gripped him tighter around the waist. It barely brought his body a centimeter away from Gillian's mouth, but he instinctively stumbled forward. "No," he said again, like he was rejecting this entire scene he was participating in.

"Why not?" the Master asked with a tiny shrug. "What do you have to lose? What does Natalie have to lose?"

"Everything," Sam replied. "This could turn her mind into a puddle of goo."

"Has that happened before?" the Master asked.

No. As far as Sam knew, it hadn't. But also, as far as he knew, no one had ever done anything like what the Master was proposing. "It's definitely not legal, either way," he said. "Messing with a client's head like that, even if they want you to. It's not legal."

"Oh." The Master's lips curled into a mocking smirk. "How would anyone possibly know?"

"They monitor my device's usage. The government."

"Do they see what goes on in here?" the Master asked. He looked around with a mocking conspiratorial glint. "Are they watching us right now?"

Sam shuddered. His climax was so close. So close now. "No." They didn't watch. Couldn't. They could only see that it had been used, if they cared to look at all. If Sam was a bigger fish, if he made more money, had more clients, more sessions, a sudden personality change might be noticed, might be reported.

But even then, what would they do? What would they think had happened? How could they possibly prove it?

No. No, it was insane. "We don't know what it'll do to Nat," he repeated. "It could hurt her. It could kill her."

"Let me make one thing clear." The Master's eyes were hard as he caught Sam's gaze. Sam struggled to maintain a stoic, attentive face as Gillian's lips seemed to form an even tighter seal around his cock. "Natalie is in pain already, on a road to something much worse. She is suffering. Psychologists, psychiatrists, witch doctors, they haven't been able to help her. Other consultants would not be able to help her. It doesn't matter how much money she has. It doesn't matter how knowledgeable they are. She told herself she asked you because she trusted you, but the truth is, this is something that only you can do."

The Master spoke confidently, but that didn't make his words true. It just made them true in Natalie's eyes.

But couldn't that be the same thing? If the Master was her deepest subconscious, and in her deepest core Natalie believed she could only be cured by this deranged act, could anything else help her?

"Think of what it will be like," the Master said. "Think of the first time you like at yourself in the mirror after Natalie wakes up. What you'll see there."

"It won't be--" Him. It wouldn't be him. Wouldn't be the Master. It wasn't possible to change your physical appearance like that. His beard and hair wouldn't be neater. His teeth wouldn't be whiter. His eyes wouldn't be darker.

But there'd be something there. Something different. Inside. He thought about how easily Natalie had been able to control her surroundings in the dream, after just a bit of encouragement from him. She hadn't even

known

she could do it. The power she had...he could have it too.

Or, rather, he could take it from her.

Finally, he came, letting out a guttural moan as his seed released into Gillian's mouth with a jerk of his torso. He held onto her head for support. He wondered what was happening to his body in the real world.

He took a moment to recover his breath, and then looked up at the Master, who stood placidly, hands clasped behind his back.

"You're saying if I don't..." His mouth was so fucking dry. God. "If I don't merge myself with you, she'll die."

"I don't know about 'die,'" the Master shrugged, "but I don't know if she'll want to be alive for much longer anyway."

"You can't be possibly saying that she'd rather die if she can't be with some twisted version of me." Sam's mind was clearer now that he'd found release, and his vitriol only seemed to please the Master more. He realized bitterly that pretty much everything he did seemed to please the Master.

"No. Don't flatter yourself too much," the Master said with a wry smile. "I'm saying she'd rather die than be tormented by a twisted version of you. And I'm saying the only way for you to stop her torment is to extract me from her. Perform a bit of psychic surgery. But if I leave, I have to go somewhere, and what better vessel than the person I was modeled after? She gets to be rid of her demons, and she gets you, combined with me. The best of both worlds. Your sensitivity, with my darker nature. She gets everything she wants, and so do you."

"You're her. Do you not get that?" Sam asked. "You're asking me to let part of her personality live inside me. Forever."

"You told her once that you would do anything for her," the Master said. The women rose and went to him, rubbing him the same way they had Sam. "Were you lying?"

"No. No, of course not. But you're saying if you leave you have to go somewhere, and I don't think that's true. You could just--"

"Die?" The Master laughed as Gillian undid his trousers. "Oh, no. No, I don't think I like that option. And you can't kill me. You don't have the guts, the strength, or even the knowledge of how I could die. The only thing that could give you that would be for you and I to merge, and I think once we've done that, you'll find you don't want to let go of me like Natalie does. Because I wasn't made for her, Sam. That's the crux of it. I'm like a battery that's been installed in the wrong slot. I was made for you."

That simple statement nearly knocked out whatever wind remained in Sam's chest.

He'd come here to unmask the Master. To kill him if possible.

But whatever part of Natalie was speaking to him, it was right. He'd found the face under the Master's costume, and he was no closer to figuring out how to defeat him. He'd warned Natalie from the start that he was no wiz at this, and this was far different than helping a child deal with a monster that represented a belligerent school principal. This was so much worse, something that had been brewing in Natalie for years, maybe decades. A version of the Master had almost certainly existed within her long before Sam came along, but now it all came down to him anyway.

This could drive him insane. It could drive Nat insane.

He thought back to the moment she'd first come to him for help. The desperation in her eyes. The crack in her voice.

She'd been broken by this nightmare, and she couldn't take much more. If he went back out to her, he'd either have to tell her what happened, or lie. Either way, she'd be further cracked. Either way, he'd have to tell her there was nothing he could do. He couldn't ask her conscious mind to weigh in on this, or to give him permission to do this. That would open up the floodgates to more problems he definitely wasn't equipped to handle.

And what about him? What about what this could do to him? He didn't give a shit about himself most days, but he still cared somewhat. He still wanted to be himself.

Gillian lowered herself to suck the Master's cock, and the Master placed a hand on her head.

Sam remembered, then, his own hand moving to Gillian's head. How badly he'd wanted to thrust further into her, force his cock as far down her throat as it would go. How sure he was that she would love it if he did, even if she wasn't real.

Natalie was real. Natalie would love it.

He almost choked at that thought as the Master smirked at him. It couldn't have been his own thought. It had to have been inserted by the Master.

But dreams didn't work that way. The Somnigo didn't work that way. Which meant that Sam was seeing the potential benefits of the Master's plan all on his own, the ways it could improve his life. It could give him Natalie back. It could give him new confidence, new skills, new opportunities. It could get him out of his shitty apartment.

Or maybe, it wouldn't work at all. Maybe they'd all be back to square one. Or maybe the Master would just disappear, and Natalie would be cured without any effects on Sam.

Either way, his inner arguments, his protests, every reason not to attempt this, were all fading fast. Fast enough that moment to moment, he was starting to forget what they were. Something about...hurting his brain? Or it was illegal? Or...

Gillian's sucking on the Master's cock was reaching a fever pitch, and for a moment, Sam swore her visage shifted to that of Natalie. Natalie, on her knees like a wanton slut. Natalie, doing whatever Sam wanted. Natalie, looking at him like he was the answer to ever question she'd ever asked.

Suddenly, nothing seemed more important than finding out if this could work.

"How?" he asked.

The Master laughed through gritted teeth. "That's going to be the fun part." He crooked his finger at Sam, who walked forward as if pulled by an invisible string at his chest. When he was just inches away, it occurred to him that maybe the Master

could

just simply die. If Sam had picked up the iron poker stealthily a few moments before when the Master was distracted, while Gillian was sucking him as tightly as a vacuum and his eyes were closed, maybe Sam could have gotten the jump on him. Maybe he could have just whacked him in the head, ending the nightmare's life with a mundane

bang

and no further issues.

Maybe.

But it was too late, he reasoned. Convinced himself. The poker was too far behind him at this point, and he was too close to the Master, who now watched him with rapt attention that he clearly didn't intend to break.

Sam's jaw hung open slack as he approached his near-double. He was mesmerized, hungry for his smile, his approval. Hungry for this version of him to accept him, to become a true part of him. To save Natalie, yes, that was the most important thing he wanted. More than anything, obviously. He'd do anything for her. He'd die for her. He'd become a different person for her.

For her. Yes. It was all for her.

It was all for...

"I was made for you." He wasn't entirely sure who said it, him, or the Master. It could have been either. The Master had been made for him by Natalie; he knew now that was an irrefutable truth. But in a way, he'd been made for the Master. How many times had he seen men like that, in bars, at parties, in movies, and wished he could be like them? How many times had he thought there was something missing from his life? The Master was the missing piece he'd been searching for, like there was a hole in his gut shaped exactly like this entity.