Erich

wake

He is sleeping. He is sleeping in a room. He is sleeping in a nascent, idealized memory-of-a-room, an idea-of-things. Clapboard, windowglazing. Sun washing through trim lace curtains. The threadbare quilt beneath his fingertips, tangled in the curve of a fist. Morning always comes like this, a gullet full of light. His face slack against the pillow. Never any case, just the ticking that has the peculiar and intermediate taste of dust suspended in sunlight.

The fire’s died down. There’s a chill in the air. His first and second and third instincts are to burrow back into the cocoon of warmth trapped between mattress and quilt, but like clockwork -

- like clockwork he can hear the front door swinging open. Slamming closed after, the slap of the warped frame of the screen against the solid wood of the jam. It is morning. It is always morning.

--

The furnishings are solid and solidly plain. Hand-hewn, by clever though not fine hands. Only the ornate stand in the corner - rich, mahoghany, intricately carved - in anything more than serviceable. Dust has settled over everything; even his skin. He can taste it in the back of his mouth, on his tongue. The air is parched and dry. Everything is thirsty.

Everyone is thirsty.

Solid footsteps on solid stairs, with a beat as rapid as a rabbit's heart headed toward his room. He knows they're coming. He knows before the door swings open the face he'll see. The boy with a quick-laced grin and cheeks red from the cold -

"Ma says get up!"

- who launches himself toward the bed and the threadbare comforter and the wash of light through the half-remembered lace curtain, toward the middle of that room.

Erich

Wakefulness, sudden-slow, the way it always is on these brilliant mornings when summer's warmth is just beginning to shade into autumn. Morning is when you feel that bite in the air most. That nip, that snip, that everpresent reminder that nothing, nothing, nothing is forever,

not even those summer days stretching into summer nights, the cicadas in the trees, the stars overhead.

He is awakening. He opens his eyes and the room is so familiar and warm and it's his room, isn't it, and this is his life and that is his -- what? brother? (he doesn't have a brother.) such things are loose and liquid in the mind right now, hard to hold. He rolls onto his back and then the boy is barreling into his chest, knocking a breath loose from his ribs. Ma says get up.

"Too early," Erich mumbles. It is too early. Look how bright the light is.

wake

Too early, Erich says.

And Erich wakes up, and he's saying those words aloud and feeling the solid thud of the boy against his chest. The scent of hay in the air, the bite of something that is not winter and is perhaps spring. Or autumn; when the earth wakes, or it goes to sleep.

--

Then, again.

--

Then, again.

--

Then,

He is sleeping. He is sleeping in a room. He is sleeping in a nascent, idealized memory-of-a-room, an idea-of-things. Clapboard, windowglazing. Sun washing through trim lace curtains. The threadbare quilt beneath his fingertips, tangled in the curve of a fist. Morning always comes like this, a gullet full of light. His face slack against the pillow. Never any case, just the ticking that has the peculiar and intermediate taste of dust suspended in sunlight -

all of it. All of it.

He doesn't have a brother. He has this brother, a boy with blue eyes and blond hair who smells of hay and woodsmoke, those solid scents wrapped up into his hair, still damp from where someone tried to smooth down a cowlick.

"Lazybones."

- returns the boy, with a grin, sitting back on his haunches, ready to wrestle or something, grinning ear to ear.

"Ma says you're always sleepin'. Me, I've been up for hours. Hours and hours. You don't hurry [ ]" the name slews strange; goes warped behind his ears, somehow, " - 'll eat up all the biscuits and all you'll get is porridge."

Erich

[int+enig! IS THIS REAL LIFE.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Erich

Time skips. Backwards, like a needle over a scratched record. He's sleeping again and it is a golden, gold-sifted room and it is morning, it is always morning, it is always the cusp of a season,

spring or fall,

beginnings or endings or beginning again,

and he is waking up because his brother-who-does-not-exist is pouncing onto him and telling him --

"I can't eat porridge," Erich says automatically. "I can't eat biscuits either. I can maybe try the gravy if there's a ton of sausage in it. Otherwise I'm gonna have to eat eggs or ... "

Like Ariadne's thread, that. Shining and golden in the murk. Murk doesn't have to be dark, see, it just means you can't see clearly. He's in a sort of murk here: it's a dream-murk because he can't see clearly through it, can't see the truth, but there's the thread and he picks it up: I can't eat biscuits and porridge, and he follows it backbackback up winding staircases and endless halls, up through the layers of his unconscious and his subconscious and his almost-conscious to remember:

hey, yeah. He can't eat anything but meat because he is a werewolf, and he is a werewolf who no longer has a home like this, he has a different home now, he has sisters, he has spirit-sisters and he has one blood-sister and nowhere does he have any brothers so, so,

so this is not real life. No. Erich sits up, he scrubs his face with his hands. "You're not my brother," he says to the boy, which is sort of a mean thing to say except well it's his dream so that's really him, right? "Are you me?"

wake

This is what he says now. This is what he will always say.

You're not my brother - - and the boy, who does resemble him in the way that all blonde-haired and blue-eyed boys must resemble Erich, when they are still young; when they are still open-featured and unfinished - sits sharply back as if he has been backhanded. Swallows hard and frowns at Erich, something

troubled

etched between his brows. As if he were momentarily unsure of where he is. As if he himself were on the verge of waking. As if there were, beyond and behind the curtains of the room, some other room, some greater room, knife edged and even more real than the room they inhabit, but -

like a dog emerging from some body of water the boy shakes it off.

"I'm not you. Jerk."

He's leaning back, unwinding his legs, jumping down to the sunstained floor, a rag-rug the only protection for bare feet against the cold. And Erich knows - somehow knows, with a deep and abiding conviction - that is is often very cold here.

"You can eat biscuits. You eat them all the time. I don't care. I hope [name-slew] gets them all." Mumbling as he backs away and grabs a hat out of the back pocket of his overalls and turns to run back the way he came."

For all that bravado, beneath it the boy still looks like he has something caught in his throat.

Like a knife, perhaps.

Something bladed.

Erich

[what is up with boyo!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )

wake

The boy's real. Erich can feel the warmth of his skin and smell the sourness of his morning breath; can see the bits of sleep in the inner corners of his eyes. The boy's real; Erich can see his own reflection in the surfaces of the boy's irises, can see the brief and sharp contraction of the pupils as the boy absorbs Erich's question and blinks and reels. Erich does not believe that the boy is evil, nor does he seem to be a piece of Erich's mind. That flash was like the flash of another dreamer, briefly brought to consciousness that this may be a dream. A sort of subliminal panick outlined in the flash of light across his eyes.

Erich

Something there -- some shred, some grass-leaf, some tiny edge of awareness. Like a sleep awakening himself, the boy, though: that's the thing, isn't it? Erich isn't really awake. Neither of them are awake.

Erich's words are caught in his throat. Like a knife, yes. Something bladed. Or just something beating. Like his heart. Yes, his heart, a great thud of WHOA and HEY I THINK I GET IT and

just past that, doubt, doubt, doubt washing over him. He's not smart like Charlotte or Melantha, not intuitive like them, maybe he's wrong. They boy is running off: Erich calls after him, suddenly feeling-bad, "Uh, tell Ma I'll be down in a sec, okay?"

Only, when the boy is gone, Erich doesn't get up and go downstairs. He gets up: he looks for clothes, or maybe he can just imagine clothes onto his body, and if so then god don't let this be the sort of dream where he gets to school and then realizes he's not wearing pants, but anyway the point is: he gets clothes on somehow and then he goes to the window and pushes it open and looks out and --

if he can, climbs out, drops down, starts jogging in ... some direction, any direction. Starts looking for Melantha, or Charlotte, or even Tamsin.

wake

- and then,

Erich wakes up.