snow

wake

The old woman and the boy, the smoke and the sky; the memory of tears at the back of her throat. The raw scree of her hatred. Of his. How familiar it becomes, though perhaps never (nearly) welcome. How it slips into the seams of things, how daylight starts to be framed by the memory of smoke-at-dusk or dawn.

The boy, sharper. The boy, sharp. The boy, furious, swallowing his fury, the wood and the rough bite of the fresh-hewn wood against her hands. The smoke, the sting of it, the frame of its memory.

This is how it always is: the road and the dream of the road, and the bordering woods, close in and dark. The sky, starting to brighten or losing its brightness. Some moment, always, of transition. The woods, the sameness of them, some marching serenity of a wood, and then the clearing, and the shrouded body, and the woman, and the pyre.

The reflective necessity of it all.

--

And tonight - tonight, doesn't the old woman seem - faded somehow. Less substantial than the billow of black smoke rising from the pyre. Reaching for the boy who refuses to allow her to touch him and launches himself into the woods: I hate you I hate you I hate you. I just want you all to stay I hate you.

And Melantha, who follows.

--

By the gods she can run; she can run here. She runs full out, lungs burning. She runs with the pounding roar of her pulse in her ears. She runs and the woods, the dark marching sameness of all those damp trees drawn in shadow, becomes no more than a background blur. Here and there dark wheeling shapes of crows are startled from hidden branches, to beat their wings and rings toward, or against, the lightening sky.

The wood grow thicker and closer and she can feel the ground rising, and no matter how fast she runs the boy is faster. Slips between the trees with the familiarity of a forest god, as if everything here moved, for him.

Melantha

[stamina + athletics]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Melantha

Melantha hates these dreams now. They hurt. The ashes on her tongue, the taste in her mouth, the way the world has started to look grey on good days,

on fire on bad days.

She hates the old woman and she hates the man on the pyre, she hates the boy running and the trees grabbing and the waking, the frustration of it, the way she keeps waking wanting to cry and by now both Charlotte and Erich have been told about this dream. They've both heard the story, but they've also seen Melantha sliding into a strange depression. Not severe, not a drop off a cliff where she stops eating and cries all the time. But a flatness to her, a struggle to care. Sometimes she shines through, because she is stronger than a dream, but you cannot wake up with ashes in your mouth day after day and not begin to wonder if the world has died.

She dreams again. She sinks into it, and runs, and waits to wake,

but the dream keeps going. She runs the way she runs in the wild and the woods, over streams, on top of rocks, through rain, drunk on wine and savagery, the way she has hunted before, the way she has worshipped before. She sees that she has run farther than before, it is still going, and something breaks open in her like an egg cracking and then crumbling to shards; Melantha lets out a shriek that, if the mortal world could hear it, would be attributed to banshees, ghosts, madwomen. It is bloodcurdling and it is joyful and enraged.

If she can find a stone, she picks it up mid-run. She throws it. Not to hit the boy, but past him. She doesn't know why.

wake

Melantha finds a stone and she throws it. She throws it. The stone defines a smooth dark arc over the boy's head and he turns, startled, panting. Behind him, something is startled from the brush and breaks through the trees. Not the ever-present crows but something else: some groundling thing. Pheasant or grouse, still dark-winged.

They are near to the forest's edge when the boy turns, spins, stops. He is higher than Melantha but still slight, pale-eyed and blond-headed. Breathing hard though not from the run.

"You're still here."

Melantha

For a moment, the Fury's eyes snap to the small thing in the underbrush, the way she would if she were not a girl, not a kinswoman but a wolf, a hunter, which sometimes she is. She whips back to the boy, who is still running, so she chases him further --

til he stops. Til they are nearly out of the woods, so to speak and so to speak literally. Melantha stops running and starts advancing, though, still coming, not just here but arriving, and closer, with every step.

She exhales, heavily, because she is out of breath. Just nods.

wake

There's something sulky about the boy's mouth when Melantha nods. Just nods. She is continuing to advance and he is backing away, glancing sharply from her to what is visible of the sky above them, and something about his aspect tells her that he is listening to a song she cannot hear.

It is the posture. The cant of his head. The brief interregnum of hang-time between this moment and the next, between this breath and the next.

"Everyone's waking up. Going away. They won't do what I tell them. They won't just be.

"You won't, either. You want to go away too. Before we even get home.

"We're almost there."

Melantha

"You're not their boss," Melantha flat-out tells him. "Maybe you don't get to tell them what to do."

She puts her hands on her knees, but doesn't take her eyes off of him. He takes his eyes off her, though, looking upward, looking around. She doesn't follow. She just looks at him. Tries to see Erich in his face. Tries to see her own brothers, any of them. Anything familiar. She's not angry at the kid, even when she says those blunt words. He's just a kid. No one has ever told him, she imagines, that people not doing what he wants is hardly the end of the world. In fact: it is the world.

"Why would I want to be here?" she asks him, and she's genuine, but frowning at him. "Why would I want to taste ashes all the time or watch a man's body burn or gather firewood or chase you for eternity? Of course I want to wake up. I want to be with my friends, my pack. But every night you're back, and you're tearing my heart out."

wake

He's a boy; that sulkiness framing his mouth deepens when Melantha tells him that he does not have the right or responsibility to frame the world and he gives her a sharpening look, pale eyes slung back down from the sky as she continues.

That sulkiness is dissipating as she goes onward. Is dissolving from the edges of his mouth and the skin framing his eyes into something else, whole and entire. A sort of subdural panic, as if she had just spoken half-a-dozen words a boy like this has no right to hear, ones he cannot precisely comprehend. Not here.

Not on his own.

"Where else can you GO." And this is furious and pained and painful and he's just staring at Melantha and then his eyes snap shut and his hands curl into fists framed all tense around his eyes like he is going to tear them out by the root, like there's something inside that he knows but cannot admire or allow himself to remember. "You have to be here. Everyone does.

"You can't wake up. It's a lie!"

And he turns around, and stomps through the remnant treeline, bending down to retrieve that thrown-stone as he plunges out into the clearing -

Melantha

There's nothing beyond this. Not for him.

"Hey," she starts, her brow furrowing, taking another step forward. He's having a meltdown. He turns to stomp away, grabbing the stone she threw, and she jogs after him. "Stop," she says, firmly. "Seriously, I don't know your name, but STOP. I cannot --"

Melantha is suddenly overcome. It's rage so intense she thinks she might burst from it. She screams after him. "I CAN'T FUCKING DO THIS ANYMORE. Stop making me chase you, you little son of a bitch!"

wake

He breaks through the line of trees.

Beyond: the crest of a ridge, the dying frame of a collapsing house ringed with dirty snow, slumped against the first blush of dawn, or the last flush of sunset.

He breaks through the line of trees and bends to scoop up the stone that Melantha threw at him and she's raging, furious, screaming and he screams too, launching the stone not in an arc over her head, but right at her face.

"You RUINED it. You RUINED it. You RUINED it. You ALL RUINED it.

"Just GO."

The boy is crying. Tears smeared across his face, this slurry of them - he's crying, howling and that rock is spinning towards Melantha, aimed right at her head.

Melantha

[dex + ath]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Melantha

[dex + brawl]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Melantha

Oh, she feels bad for using that phrase. It's so messed up. You call someone bad because of their mother? How fucked up is that? She feels appalled -- she actually feels somewhat sick, hearing herself say it, and her heart wrenches in place. Melantha tightens her shoulders up. She sees him picking up the rock and breathes in sharply,

and ducks, quick, going to the side sharply. And then she, um.

Tackles him. As gently as one can, really, since he's a kid. But she rushes him, grabs him, arms all around him, to bear him to the grassy, leaf-strewn ground, arms pinned to his sides.

wake

Melantha tackles the boy.

He's small.

Fragile.

Smaller than he looks. How strange, he feels all skin-and-bones and the rock sails by her head and he's screaming and screaming and crowing and crying, and they tumble together through the undergrowth and her arms are around his shoulders as they hit the ground and his screaming changes content and context and the fury is draining from it and the snow is starting to fall -

- and Melantha wakes. She wakes up.

She wakes up, and this time, it is the cold brightness of snow that lingers on her tongue.

Melantha

He's small. He's fragile. And she is a fucking Amazon Princess... or something. She grabs him, and it's almost an embrace. It's a weird sort of hug, because she doesn't want him to hit the ground. She just wants to stop him from running, and running, and running, and yelling and screaming and making her chase after him. He's so worked up about people staying. Well. Maybe she'll make him stay. She knows a thing or too about the way people go away.

How it makes you feel like there's no place for you, either.

So she grabs him, and they go to the ground, and his tears are all over her and she doesn't taste ashes for a few moments, she just holds onto him, tumbling to the ground, and it's cold and for once, for once, it's not ashes.

It's snow.

"I miss you," she whispers, suddenly and tearfully, into his ear.

--

And wakes. Not the first time with tears in her eyes.

The first time tasting something other than ashes.

Tattoo

Lola Hawkes

Santa Fe ws a popular part of town, pretty and eccentric and full of art and culture as it was. This was a part of Anthony Tirado's success-- he'd opened his first tattoo parlor here, and between location, catering to his demographic, and a damn fine hand in art, he was able to open two more parlors around the area as well. He could make enough money to support his out-of-city cousins on this business.

It's this very tattoo parlor, the one that started it all, that Lola Hawkes is hanging out in front of. Behind her the shop is wedged between two other buildings, other businesses leased out-- a salon and a market store, to be precise. The shop front was brick and classic, but the awnings over the window were black and the sign over the door was tall and wood and black as well, the letters in a tall jarring white font declaring the place to be: LA LUNA SONRIENTE TATTOO. Out front there were a ramshackle collection of chairs collected on either side of the purple-painted door. In one of these chairs sat Lola, recognizable by some for different reasons.

She wasn't here getting inked, not as far as anyone could see at least. Dressed for the warm weather, she had on a short-sleeved and short-hemmed dress of thin white-and-black stripes, a light gray cardigan left unbuttoned over top that, and a straw hat atop her head to keep the sun off her. Granted, the sun was quite behind the mountains by this point, but it hadn't been when she'd come out this way.

She was conversing with a tall and very thin man who was getting an octopus tattooed across his chest-- he was here getting the color filled in and sat in a plaid button-up shirt left undone. Her expression was skeptical but relaxed-- the kid wasn't bothering her any so she was content to share the cooling night air with him. If he had it his way they would've shared a hit off his small false cigarette pipe, but she'd hit him with strong skeptical 'Are you kidding me?' and he shrugged it off (apparently it helped his sister's pregnancy, but whatever).

Around the time that the Uktena kinfolk may fall into Samantha Evans's line of sight is the time that the door opens and the tall skinny boy gets called back inside. He bumped fists with Lola and she told him not to cry too hard when he walked back inside.

Sam Evans

The evening is young and pleasant and Sam Evans is walking alone, and like any typical Glass Walker she's holding a cell phone in her hand which she is looking at intently as her thumb works its way swiftly across the lower half of the device. That doesn't mean she's not aware of her surroundings. The kinswoman neatly side-steps a couple headed in her direction and pauses when someone practically bounds down the steps of an upper floor gallery into her. She glances up briefly to shoot the person a look. That look spurs the young woman - a girl, really, out with a group of her friends for who knows what reason - to apologize. Then it's back to the screen for at least a few more steps.

Steps which are made in a pair of mid-calf combat boots. The rest of her outfit consists of shorts and a black t-shirt with a huge skull over the front (the Punisher emblem for those in the know) worn beneath a red plaid flannel shirt converted into a long vest. Her hair is down but tucked behind her ears to reveal the piercings that run from lobe up along the outer cartilage of both ears. Stabbed through her right lobe is a thick black spike. There's a messenger bag slung across her body, the pouch resting against her left hip.

Suddenly she sighs, all the air in her lungs pushed out in a single exhale as she slides the phone into the hip pocket of those denim shorts. Which is when she looks up and sees Lola Hawkes sitting outside of a tattoo parlor. Huh. Increasing speed, she heads for a woman she only properly met about a week and a half ago.

"Lola, hey!" she calls, one corner of her mouth tugging upward in a crooked grin.

Lola Hawkes

Lola really didn't look the type to be hanging out in front of a tattoo parlor, except for the tough exterior one would suppose. Her attire didn't suit the crowd, and the long bare length of her legs left out in the air by the length of her dress didn't have a lick of ink on them. Her hair was twisted into a dense braid that sat on one shoulder, and her stomach was big enough to take up much real estate into her lap when she sat upright as she was doing now.

When Lola's name was called she had been leaning down to retrieve a water bottle from where it was sitting on the ground under her chair. She looked surprised and alert to hear her name, and glanced about with an intent and severe gaze until she found Sam's face and figure coming her way. A face and identity matched to the call, Lola relaxed and leaned back into her chair. One hand lifted in a greeting, but she didn't verbally call back across the distance. Instead, she opted to take a drink of her water.

When Sam was nearer, near enough for speaking anyways, Lola answered.

"Sam, right?" She's not as good at names, but it's probably confirmed one way or another that she's correct. Lola'd continue, unabashed by her own lack of proficiency with remembering names (they stuck with her after a few times). "How's the evening treating ya?" Eyes cut up toward the sky, brief, then back down to the Glasswalker. "Secure, I hope." The moon was full, and their peoples tempers did run quite high on nights like this, after all.

It's worth noting that Lola Hawkes didn't smile to greet Samantha Evans, crooked or otherwise. Her mouth was a straight line, neutral as can be. She didn't seem unfriendly necessarily, though. This was her friendly face.

Sam Evans

To look at the pair of them, it'd be easy to make a lot of assumptions about them. That Samantha is younger, perhaps, because of her height or because of her attire, or the difference between her demeanor and Lola's. Lola is friendly, but a reserved sort of friendly. At least she's not scowling, though probably a scowl wouldn't deter Sam. They survived an ordeal together, of course Sam's at least going to stop by to say hello.

Lola's gaze cuts upward, Sam's stays on the woman in the straw hat. She doesn't need to look up to know what night it is. She was up part of last night watching the eclipse, after all. "About as secure as it can get," she says with a one-shouldered shrug. Then she looks at the sign for the parlor and back to Lola. "Are you waiting to get inked or waiting on someone getting inked?"

Lola Hawkes

The question was an authentic one, and it earned Sam a relaxed, comfortable looking shrug and shake of her head before she gestured toward the purple wooden door with a hitched thumb. "Nah, my cousin Anthony owns the place. I'm waitin' up on him to finish a session, then we're headed out."

She took another drink of her water then went on to clarify: "It's hot as fuck in there. Nice night out here, though."

Another pause, this time for her to glance up the street and wrinkle the bridge of her nose up some. She was a woman of the rural wilds, after all. 'Nice' was a comparative thing between city blocks and the stretching land she called her own. "Well, neverminding the obvious."

She'd next gesture to one of the remaining chairs (there were plenty left to choose from) in front of the shop with a sweep of her water bottle before she leaned sideways (not forward, leaning forward was a goddamn ordeal) to set the bottle back down on the cement. "If you're stayin' around you might as well sit."

Eva Illeshazy

Nor is Éva the sort to hang around in front of a tattoo parlor, and assuredly she is not hanging around anywhere. She is on the street however; half a block away, emerging from a non-descript glass door sandwiched between a headshop and a coffee shop, which must assuredly lead to some sort of generic offices tucked away on the second floor.

The door is closing behind her; she turns around and catches it with the flat of her hand. A stranger comes out behind her: a shaggy-haired man with sharp features and beaten-up leather jacket walks out behind her.

He says something to her.

She lifts her chin, and cants her head in response, listening.

A beat passes and she shakes her head. He slips past her, turns one day down the sidewalk. Éva goes the other, a briefcase head lightly in hand, heels a clipped beat against the sidewalk. Sam and Lola draw her gaze; which is dark and impassive.

Her gaze and the faintest hint of acknowledgment. No more.

She walks on.

Eva Illeshazy

(Fly-by, bed for me!)

biscuits

wake

Here is the dream. It is the dream Erich remembers. It is always the dream: waking in that sunwashed room; the texture and weight of the quilt over his body, the clean scent of linen that has been washed by hand and dried in the sun. The dust in the air and the air in the dust and the boy and MA SAYS GET UP and the feeling of being a lazybones, of lazing in bed when the sun has already broken the horizon, when the world is up and working and you are still, deliciously, warm and asleep.

Still those slipsliding, slipstream names. The room and the frame of it and the windows, which rattle in casements with every shivering passage of wind.

Erich wants clothes wants to know if he can imagine clothes and finds that he cannot imagine clothes and he is not naked; he is wearing old fashioned longjohns, the one-piece sort with a fly and a button-up window in the rear and he can leave those on or take them off and dress in dungarees and a button-up shirt and suspenders that still have the scent of sweat and dust from yesterday and perhaps tomorrow but that is how one lives, here. Sweat and dust and sunlight.

There's a door. There are windows, too. The boy disappearing after Erich reassures him, instructs him to tell Ma I'll be down soon.

Erich

OKAY HE IS NOT GOING TO WEAR LONGJOHNS.

...now that that's clear: yes. He dresses. He dresses with the fluidity of dream-physics, just like how in a dream you can run farther than humanly possible, lift impossible things, fly across the sky if you wanted to.

He starts taking off the longjohns and then next thing he knows he is sliding the suspenders over his shoulders, amused because they feel so weird there, he hasn't worn suspenders since he was about five years old and going to that odd little church in town where all the pictures of Jesus looked unusually ferocious and toothy and all the sermons were unusually fiery and bloody and full of the End Of Days and Last Battles. The few humans living in town thought they were just some minor little presbyterian or methodist or anabaptist or something denomination, but everyone else, the real movers and shakers and owners and workers of the town,

knew that it was all code, really. They weren't talking about god and jesus and holy spirits and marys and josephs; they were talking about gaia and celestines and incarnae and fenris and all his brood.

Anyway.

Point is: he hasn't worn suspenders in so long. Some of the older men in his family still wore them, because they were old-fashioned, see. It makes him feel old-fashioned and Manly, somehow, to slide them over his shoulders. He stops by the mirror to see how he looks, but in dreams we can never really see our own faces, can we? He opens the bedroom door and follows the boy-who-is-but-isn't-his-brother downstairs.

Erich

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

wake

There is a mirror. The mirror is old; is silvered and black. The mirror is framed on the clapboard wall and what it shows him as he is slipping the suspenders over his shoulder is the impression of a -

- is an impression; is an impressionistic reflection of a blond man in sliding suspenders over his shoulders, this liquid movement, and beyond that, beyond that some hint of a sort of disintegrating longing. Some lingering desperation. Some note of despair. Behind the mirror, behind the walls. Beneath the skin of this place. Hard to place now and really no more than a niggling sort of shadow, like the silhouette of a black-winged bird etched out against the disc of a rising - or setting - sun.

- Erich dresses and follows the boy, out of the bedroom door and down the steps. The time it takes to dress, to dream-dress, he can hear the edge of another conversation, all muffled like the voices of the adults in a Peanuts holiday special.

---

There is no light like morning light, is there. Brilliant as it cuts into the dark sweeping shadows of the front hall. His footsteps disturb the grit and dust that settles everywhere in these high plains, sends them floating like errant diamonds in the slanting light.

Erich rounds the corner of a hallway and finds himself heading down a simple, simply-planed stairwell.

The walls are plain; they are hand-hewn. They are not decorated, except perhaps with whitewash, which has absorbed though here and there unevenly into the uncured wood.

The foot of the stairs: the front door with its roughly made screen-door mostly closed, the heavier, solidly made door sagging open. The other directly, a long dark hallway that ends in a slow-closing door, the suggestion of a man; and light, and warmth.

Erich

Him and not-him in the mirror. Like-him but not-him. Something in Erich's mind niggles, wiggles, stretches for the truth. Brushes it, like brushing fingers against the underside of lake-ice. He hasn't broken through yet. Not yet. It submerges; he has to go find his brother who is not his brother.

So down the stairs, then. Down the stairs to the plain, rough-hewn, sturdily-built front room. Front door's open, that's weird. He goes over to it first, grabs the handle and pushes it firmly shut. Might be that next time he looks over at it, it will have miraculously come undone again. For now, though, he turns away from it, toward that long dark hallway with its slow-closing door.

"(...)?" He calls the name of the boy, but the word itself is blurred in his ears. He doesn't actually know the name, but in this dream he does. And, calling that not-a-name, he heads down the hall. Doesn't think the boy went that way, but still.

Erich

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

wake

The kitchen is a kitchen is the idea of a kitchen, warm and bright as anything. Light slants brilliant in through framing windows lined with hanging herbs. The deep abiding fragrance of drying herbs fills the air, somehow green and quick and dying and dry all at once. There is such implicit warmth, remembered and golden and delicious and there is the table set for a hearty breakfast, and there is a the woman removing something from potbellied stove and a screen door swinging shut (oh these doors, oh the way they swing) on the opposite side of the room.

Biscuits, the woman is removing biscuits from the stove.

They smell heavenly; entirely of home.

The woman with the biscuits pulls them out and puts down the hot skillet in which they have been baked on the scarred, much-loved table slab in the middle of the kitchen.

She looks: worn out, far away.

The woman pushes back a lank lock of hair and sighs, deeply. Golden seconds tick by and she breathes, more heavily than the task in which she was engaged seems to require.

She looks startled; she is looking right at a stranger whom Erich instinctively knows as his middle brother [word-slew], but there is something strange about the moment, as if it has been excised from one particular place and inserted here, where its meaning is wholly different.

What Erich hears of their conversation is - "... see you there."

It is clear that she does not know his brother's name.

Or why she is here.

Or when.

Or how to get anywhere close to home.

--

wake

Per + Alertness roll: is that other dude... Thomas Delacroix?

Erich

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Erich

!!!

That is what is in Erich's mind at the moment. No words, no coherent thoughts even, just raw surprise and excitement and sudden-breakthrough and many many many many exclamations.

!!!!!!!!!

Like a gear clicking into place his memory clicks into place. He is not some longjohns-wearing, biscuit-eating farmer waking up in the idyllic ideal of a farmhouse. He does not have a little brother or a middle brother or any brothers at all. He is him, an Erich, an Erich very very far from home in this dreamscape, but astounding, bewilderingly, ever-so-excitingly,

he is not actually alone here. Is that Thomas Delacroix? He knows for a FACT he would not dream of Thomas Delacroix left to himself; I mean really. So: that must mean that IS Thomas. Right? And that is really Thomas. Which means maybe that woman is somebody too, and that little boy was somebody, and who really cares because that means somewhere in this dreamscape is Melantha and their dreams are actually interconnected.

He is a horrible person and a horrible Ahroun and really he should say something but: he grabs one of the biscuits still hot from the skillet (because of course he's gonna eat those biscuits in a dream where he won't get the runs if he eats biscuits) and yells something,

HEY THOMAS WAKE UP THIS IS A DREAM

and then he turns and runs for the front door. Runs for the outside. Looks for a forest, a trail of smoke, ashes in the air, something.

Thomas

[Perception+Alertness for Thomas is like the saddest panda of all the pandas.....]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )

wake

Thomas' brother comes in the door behind him. His brother his dream-brother the lazybones upstairs. Thomas is up before him and will get to eat all the biscuits if he hurries and there is a woman at the stove, a tired woman, a startled woman, a woman who looks at Thomas for a brief and startling moment, this narrowing and nearly electric connection, and whom he knows - as instinctively as he knows anything else - does not belong there -

And then his brother muscle through and picking up a biscuit and shoving it in his mouth and oh my god Erich that is the most meltingly delicious biscuit you have consumed in god knows how long, rich, flaky flayers of fat delicately suspended between the dough my god, my god, what you are missing out on and throwing another one at Thomas and yelling

HEY THOMAS THIS IS A DREAM.

And Thomas knows it is a dream.

And Thomas knows that that is Erich Reinhardt.

And Erich Reinhardt is running out of the back door and finds himself in a dry-dust farmyard in the shadow of a listing building and moving at a thundering run past a red-painted clapboard barn and out into a deserted ... street, of sorts, that is really no more than a rutted road lined with these half-memories of wooden buildings, the odd storefront without anything close to ordinary written words, the street and its houses deserted though here and there - a glimpse through the window, a drifting curtain, a stranger's face seen suddenly through a half-forgotten crowd before it disappears into the scrawl of ordinary life.

It is morning. It is morning, oh the ache of that slanting golden light. The certainty of it.

The street is a town is a memory of a town; the wooden sidewalks framing a rutted road, which disappears on both ends into a primordial, misty forest.

Black bunting is wrapped around the railings and support posts framing the simple porches.

And oh, oh, oh. Is that smoke in the sky?

Erich

Okay so we lied. He grabs a biscuit, throws another at Thomas, sinks his teeth into his biscuit and oh my god so he grabs another one, and another, and just one more and now he's cramming three biscuits into his pockets as he's running out the door, a fourth biscuit jammed in his mouth.

Outside. The threadbare impression of a street. One of those coal towns maybe, dying now that no one uses coal anymore. One of those grain towns, now that all the farms are bigass conglomerates. One of those dying towns, regardless, and the fading whitewash on the fading buildings, and the smoke in the sky. Strange that the morning should seem so golden-nostalgic, or maybe --

maybe that's just Erich's read on it. His own, unique impression of the world he inhabits.

Never mind. Hardly important right now. He sees it, the dense wood. The primordial forest threaded in mist. The smoke. Someone died, it's a funeral pyre, he knows this because it is all exactly as Melantha told it to him. And he's so excited now, his big pure good-hearted heart all but thumping out of his chest with it. He runs, following the smoke, whether or not Thomas is alert now, whether or not Thomas is following him: feet fleet on the sidewalk, arms swinging, mouth

still chewing that biscuit. It's so good.

Thomas

Thomas bats at the flying biscuits, because Thomas is in this dream again and he is not interested in eating dream food. For all he knows it is like fairy food or pomegranate seeds. But he does still smile faintly at the sight of Erich cramming biscuits into his mouth before he runs out the door.

He looks at the startled woman. The quiet of the kitchen in Erich's wake. And he will follow, but first...first one thing. Because each of these dreams seems to give him just one more thing.

"Hey," he says gently. "What's your name? Where are we?"

wake

The woman in the kitchen gives Thomas a brief, confused glance. She's starting after Erich and somehow it is only the startlement of his passage that allows her to access her memories.

"Amanda - A-amanda Jeffords."

And then: Erich and Thomas wake.

Thomas

wake

He can count the knots in the pine, all tongue and groove. Knows them the way he knows – what else do you know like that? Familiar as a waking dream except that it slides away, inevitably, invariably, when no longer in focus. Every morning he does this; looks up. Just as he’s crossing the threshold.

There’s no why lodged in his throat.

There just is.

There is no light like morning light, is there. Brilliant as it cuts into the dark sweeping shadows of the front hall. His footsteps disturb the grit and dust that settles everywhere in these high plains, sends them floating like errant diamonds in the slanting light.

Upstairs, a door slams. Footsteps stomp stomp stomp on the floorboards, which only agitates the dust all the more. A boy swings around the corner of the upstairs hall and starts hurtling down the simple, simply-planed stairwell.

He has: blond hair and blue eyes, the boy, and looks angry and sulky all at once.

Thomas Delacroix

Thomas looks over the boy curiously, and tries to understand, even as he studies him what dream-him is thinking. And, if dream-him doesn't respond to the boy, Thomas will follow the boy down the stairs and tell him good morning.

He stays alert for more clues, any pictures or paintings on the walls. Any objects which will give him a better sense of, if not what is happening and why, who it is happening to in the dreams.

wake

Thomas wakes.

Thomas sees the boy and wakes.

Thomas sees the boy and thinks to follow him and wakes.

Thomas sees the boy and thinks to follow him and waits for dream-him to respond and the boy gives him a look -

and Thomas wakes.

--

He can count the knots in the pine, all tongue and groove. Knows them the way he knows – what else do you know like that? Familiar as a waking dream except that it slides away, inevitably, invariably, when no longer in focus. Every morning he does this; looks up. Just as he’s crossing the threshold.

There’s no why lodged in his throat.

There just is.

There is no light like morning light, is there. Brilliant as it cuts into the dark sweeping shadows of the front hall. His footsteps disturb the grit and dust that settles everywhere in these high plains, sends them floating like errant diamonds in the slanting light.

Upstairs, a door slams. Footsteps stomp stomp stomp on the floorboards, which only agitates the dust all the more. A boy swings around the corner of the upstairs hall and starts hurtling down the simple, simply-planed stairwell.

He has: blond hair and blue eyes, the boy, and looks angry and sulky all at once.

Thomas looks over the boy curiously and it is morning and he tries to understand; and what he understands is the moment, the now of it. The immediacy. The walls are plain; they are hand-hewn. They are not decorated, except perhaps with whitewash, which has absorbed though here and there unevenly into the uncured wood. The boy has made it to the bottom of the steps, a hand on the railing as he pivots in the hall and starts off through the house, and then Thomas says "Good Morning" and the boy stops; he turns; he pauses, frowning, giving Thomas a once-over that feels both shrew and speculative.

Finally, a grudging jerk of his head deeper into the house.

"Ma has biscuits in the oven. If you hurry you can eat them all before lazy [Name-Slew] gets up."

Thomas Delacroix

"Ah. Thank you?" And then he waits.

To see if the boy responds.

To see if he just wakes up again.

wake

He wakes up again. Thomas always wakes up again. The dreams come every night and then they go, and each one feels more real than the last. Thomas wakes up and it is another night. The same boy and the same stairs and the same feeling; the same greeting and the same grudging jerk of the boy's head and every time Thomas says "Ah. Thank you?" and waits, and the boy - that once-over - shifts sometimes, becomes something indrawn and withheld.

He doesn't reply after that. Just stomps through a door at the end of the long dark hallways, which gives a brief glance of warm, slicing light. In a single, singular moment, that glimpse suggests all the warmth of a well-loved kitchen.

Thomas Delacroix

And so, the next time, when he wakes and there is that moment, Thomas trails after the boy toward the sight of the kitchen. Curious and a little wary.

wake

The kitchen is a kitchen is the idea of a kitchen, warm and bright as anything. Light slants brilliant in through framing windows lined with hanging herbs. The deep abiding fragrance of drying herbs fills the air, somehow green and quick and dying and dry all at once. There is such implicit warmth, remembered and golden and delicious and there is the boy, already slipping through, past the table set for a hearty breakfast, past the woman removing something from potbellied stove, out through the screen door on the opposite side of the room.

Biscuits, the woman is removing biscuits from the stove.

They smell heavenly; entirely of home.

Thomas opens the door. She doesn't seem to notice him, not at first.

Thomas Delacroix

Thomas waits, watching her take out the biscuits and thinking of Anastasia cooking breakfast.

He and Reese don't really cook. Trying to convince Reese to make biscuits would be a disaster.

Probably best not to startle someone working with a stove like that. Probably best to wait. To see if dream-him does anything. To see how she responds when she does see him.

wake

Thomas chooses to wait. To see what happens; to see what his dream-self does, and there is a choice that he makes, in waiting, a sort of lacuna created in the space between now and then, and never and what was. He says nothing and the woman with the biscuits pulls them out and puts down the hot skillet in which they have been baked on the scarred, much-loved table slab in the middle of the kitchen.

She looks: worn out, far away.

--

Thomas is his dream-self. Thomas is waiting. The door closes behind the boy, who disappears into the yard. The woman pushes back a lank lock of hair and sighs, deeply. Golden seconds tick by and she breathes, more heavily than the task in which she was engaged seems to require.

When she sees him, when she finally sees him, she looks startled.

"Oh." Quietly, this quickened moment of connection, this waking-dream. "I didn't see you there."

It is clear that she does not know his name.