• Closed • Against Nature

[Sade Sauterne]

The one that called himself Hunter knelt before her, as if his genuflection could mean anything to her. Or perhaps, she thought cynically, he was simply trying to deceive her. To play the gentle gatherer who buried wayward dead things and traveled through the darkened forests for his dear one. He could just as easily try to trick her, the way that she had sought to trick him.

I had not meant to trick him, specifically, the huntress supposed, eyeing the young man. When she tried to follow his gaze, she found it only reached to the height of her hands.

He called her Sade, as she had told him to, and it only felt marginally more correct to hear the name in his voice.

“Come down?” she repeated, and frowned. If she had ever done such a thing, why did Hunter not remember it himself? Why did she have to help him recall? Was he incapable of thinking on his own?

She did not know how to help someone else. She knew only how to make them help her, and did not wish to be this Hunter’s guide.

She did not wish to. And yet, slowly, against all sense, she reached out with her free hand to touch the young man’s upturned palms. If he must look at her hands, let him see them. They were smooth, her fingers long and deft. And, as her fingertips lightly touched his wrist, they slowly stained with crimson blood.

“I… have,” she realized, furrowing her brow. “When I was someone else. I have walked with you through the forest, and swam with you, where the sand melts into the sea. I have kept your wolf beneath my bed. I have held your words in my hands. I have shared my home with you.”

Lost between dreams and memory, the lines began to blur. To the yellow-eyed huntress, they were one and the same.

In the distance – growing louder, racing closer – a roar of thunder shook through the impossible trees, loud enough to topple them over in waves and unearth their ancient roots. All of this escaped the dreamer’s notice, whose fingers curled inwards, ready to withdraw.

“But you have never stayed. Why do you linger now?”

Spoiler

The trees are falling! Yay! They are slowly collapsing inward in circles around the clearing. If Jinyel looks at where they used to be, he will not see fallen trees and roots, but darkness, as if the shadows are consuming more and more of the dreamscape.

[Jinyel]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Her mood seemed to hold at a steady prickle. His outward calm didn’t soothe her, but neither did it distress her. That would have encouraged him, if not for the building power in the air. The dreamer did not attack, but the dreamscape was a different beast entirely, and Jinyel felt the distinct pressure of an environment on the edge of breaking.

She examined his hands, as he did hers. She reached out, a single finger against his wrist, and where she touched, blood bloomed in her wake. He mirrored her, tracing the curve of her wrist with his own finger, and touched everything of hers that she had touched of his. Nothing more, nothing less.

Sade had dreamed of Jinyel’s companionship. Serene and peaceful things, with a serene and peaceful Hunter. These were the memories which seemed at last to move the dreamer, in that bittersweet way of beautiful things which ended too quickly. In another world, Jinyel might have lingered on the thought of them. Now they were clues, possible avenues away from this place, and he wondered how much time he had left to choose the right one.

His fear was real, when the thunder rolled. The mask of serenity cracked, he flinched away from the sound and toward the dreamer, and on instinct grabbed her hand. The trees were falling. They seemed to have been falling since he first came to this place, but now the colossal things had finally begun to meet the ground.

But he could not ― would not ― let his fear become carelessness. Not in this dream. Not with this dreamer.

“Sade.” He focused back on her, free hand already curled into Sorry. He released her hand, took a shaking breath, and went back to trace her knuckles. Not to grab, just to feel. To connect. “I cannot―” Another tree bent, closer than the last. “This place is not meant for me. I cannot stay here for long, but you…”

Calm. He had to keep hold of it. With unsteady breath, the hunter stood, glancing between the destruction and the dreamer and the destruction again.

“I cannot stay, but you ― can you come? Will you come with me, Sade? I will show you where I have gone each night, where you can always go to find me. My home is that way, it’s through the tunnel beyond the clearing, and I can share ― I want to share it with you, as you have done with me.”

Another roll of thunder. Another flinch.

“I will not hold you. I will not steal you. But I will show you how to always find where I have gone, if you tell me you agree. And once we are there, you can take your share of me, for however long you wish and not a moment less or more.”

[Sade Sauterne]

A tension coiled in the yellow-eyed woman’s body, beginning in the tips of her fingers, to her knuckles, to her wrist, all the way up and out from her arm when the one called Hunter stole her hand. The urge to draw away; the learned reaction to flinch from what grabbed and held too tightly. Had it been anyone else’s hand that took her own, she would have acted on that tension, pulled too tightly to withstand the offense.

But this was a senseless world. And in this dream, unlike many of the dreamer’s others, even those spent in the embrace of this very hunter – Sade did not pull back from him. And when Hunter released the hand, it did not settle for the soft brush of their knuckles. After having been held, the absence became known, became unbearable. It could no longer stand for any less.

Her eyes swept once again over the hunter as he stood, but it was her, this time, who could not meet his gaze. Each time it turned from the whirlwind that felled the mighty trees, she looked away from it again, down to their hands. Her right hand, empty. Her left dropped the bow.

Lest’ilei, the shadows sung, whipping cruelly through the trees that remained.

Stay.
He will take you away,
And he will discard you when he sees what you are.
When he sees that you are not what he wants you to be.

“You’re afraid?” the dreamer asked, in a voice not quite her own, not quite his own. He turned his head, eyes down, no longer what he had been or what he was meant to be. The phrase didn’t sound right to him, and he considered it a moment longer.

“You’re wary,” he corrected, and for the first time, sounded sure. He reached for Hunter’s hand, and though he was not himself – for he could not be, not here, not in the depths of his own mind where he was no one at all – he looked more like himself than a baby fox or the woman that hunted it.

He looked like Lest’ilei, only fourteen arcs older.

Around the clearing, just before the wave of falling trees reached the last row that encircled the dead land, the destruction was halted. Nothing solid existed there in that blackness, nothing that could be perceived when the eyes gazed upon it or the ears focused in to listen. All that remained was the dead ground beneath them and a narrow path, untouched by light, through that darkness. And at the end of it, a tunnel.

“I will go with you. I can be a Sade,” he said. “If you would like me to.”

[Jinyel]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There was a moment, long and frightful, when Jinyel thought the dreamer would refuse. She went still after he grabbed her, even when they touched again, and he could not read the color in her eyes. Something changed within the dreamer, he felt it, but he didn’t understand it.

He didn’t understand until she became something else.

Jinyel was wary. The dreamer knew it. That knowledge seemed to center them both, and more than that, it centered the world all around them. The destruction softened, the thunder was silenced, and the last circle of trees around the clearing stood firm against their fallen neighbors. The hunter looked around, breath quickening, and the silence was so loud that it rang in his ears.

When he looked back, the woman was gone. So was the fox. In front of him stood one person, and that person was Sade.

“You ―” Jinyel caught his breath. “You will ― yes. I want you to. I want you to be Sade. Just like this. As you are. We’re almost ― we’re almost there, I will bring you over the bridge. Follow me, I’ll ―”

It was getting hard to breathe. Why was it so hard to breathe? Jinyel took Sade’s hand, and from the ground picked up the bow. He prayed the dreamer wouldn’t need it on the other side, but he ought to have it anyway.

“Nothing will happen to you. I will not let it.”

With shaking hands, Jinyel interlaced their fingers together. Although the world was dark and the path all the darker, he felt the pull of his own dreamscape like a fishing line hooked into his chest. He could have led the way with his eyes closed, and would have done if so asked. A part of him wanted to. The selfish part of him wanted to close his eyes and cover his ears so he did not have to see the wolves or hear them howl on the other side. The selfish part of him wanted to stay inside Sade forever.

He held the dreamer’s hand to his chest, as if the lightest breeze might take one of them away. He stroked a thumb over the knuckles, followed the hook in his chest through that dark void, and every step toward the end choked him all the harder. But he did it. He brought them to the tunnel, and then, with his lips pressed to the back of the dreamer’s perfect hand, he led them through to the other side.

Spoiler

Sade will become lucid as soon as he leaves his dreamscape, approximately halfway through the tunnel.

Jinyel does not know this will happen.

[Sade Sauterne]

The hunter’s words fell upon the dreamer much in the way that all things did, in his dreams: truths only half understood, molded by his subconscious as mere echoes of the things that he knew in the waking world. Where the two bent close enough to nearly touch, and the things he heard and spoke mirrored what they did while awake – I will bring you over that bridge; Nothing will happen to you. I will not let it – this was where they broke through, and sense found him in a senseless world.

He knew this hunter, and he knew that he spoke true.

That Hunter, at least, wanted to believe that what he spoke was true. And though the dreamer that was not-quite-Sade, not-quite-anyone-else still could not reconcile within himself completely, there was a part of him that stood firm enough to know that he wanted to believe Hunter too.

Their hands joined, fingers entwined. The hunter’s trembled, and so the dreamer held on tighter as he was pulled towards that path through the darkness. In his dream, he did not need to question how this path would lead him to the home of this hunter.

But in the tunnel, he left that dream.

“Hunter?” he called out, or thought he did. His voice stuck in his head, where all his many voices had lived and died and called out in the sanctuary of his own dream while his mouth, in the waking world, remained sealed. Here, somewhere – he was not in his head, not yet anywhere else. He was only in the darkness.

His grip had loosened at some point, and the dreamer – and Sade, now lucid, did not recognize that something held his hand and kissed it until some instinct told him to hold on tighter. All the sense that he’d made of his own senselessness flooded out of him as he felt an awareness rush in to replace it, and felt a cool, ancient wind drift indifferently through the tunnel. He walked forward not because he willed it, but because he could not stay here.

In the moments before they reached the end, his mind raced. His heart sped up to follow the erratic flight of his thoughts. He’d gone to sleep – he’d forced himself to sleep. So that Hunter could…

“Hunter,” he said again, this time aloud. This time at the end of the tunnel, as he stepped out from a once-shallow cave and into the last place he remembered consciously being. Sade all but stumbled into the dream’s rendition of their camp, eyes a-swirl with colors that shifted as easily as the shadows at the edge of his vision. They, with their indecipherable noises, withdrew from his own dream to return to the safety of his head within this one.

Even through the haze of dreaming, and the familiar cast thrown over it, this place felt entirely different from his own. It felt familiar, the way the camp did – and in a way that it did not.

This was Hunter’s dreamscape.

“Hunter?”

It seemed to be the only word, at first, that he could focus through the disorientation of being present in a place that he was not meant to be. Being awake while his body was not. Sade, shutting his eyes, used his stolen hand to pull the hunter back to himself, into his arms. He needed an anchor to hold onto. So he held onto Hunter, in that selfish way of a desperation that in the real waking world, he could suppress. But not here. Not yet. Not while his mind was reeling away from him too quickly to catch hold of alone.

[Jinyel]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

His magic seethed. He could feel it even in this place, prickling underneath his fingers with the treacherous desire to see. It knew his intentions, and it was impatient to manifest them. The spark of fleshweaving had always been a hungry one.

Though Jinyel was supposed to be the one steering this ship, he held onto the dreamer’s hand like a shipwrecked sailor to the last rock in a storm. There would be no need for Sade to fight, once the veil was cut open, if he could react quickly and do as Jinyel said. Once the Emeyans were called, once Sade was lucid, he could run back to his own dreamscape until they were dealt with. Or he could hide, or stay in the camp until the storm went quiet, or… whatever else happened. Whatever else happened, it would―

Hunter.

Jinyel almost stumbled. The end of the tunnel was almost before them. It almost sounded like Sade was saying his name in the waking way.

“Here.” He coughed on the word as it came out. “It will be easier to explain in a moment, you just―”

Hunter?

Nothing ‘almost’ about that one. It came clear and sharp, as soon as they stepped across the bond and into this new dream. Jinyel looked over his shoulder and found the thief seeing. Sade pulled the hunter close for… comfort? Explanation? For some reason that only made sense to someone who was still asleep? If the dreamer needed something, Jinyel had to find out what it was and then provide as much of it as he could.

“I’m here.” He wrapped willingly around Sade, hands in his hair, cheek to his cheek. “We’re past the worst danger. I can carry the rest. Just a little further, that’s all we still need to do.”

A foolish, traitorous thought ran through him of a lucid Sade, a Sade who had said ‘Hunter’ from a place of awareness instead of unconsciousness. But that couldn’t be right; no sky had been torn, no Emeyans brought to bear. Jinyel would only do such a thing, once they were out of sight from the camp. Sade had no magic; all he had to do once the chaos began was to come back here and stay out of sight.

“Sade.” Jinyel pulled back just far enough to look him in the eye. “I will stay. This time―”

The thief’s eyes were closed. He clung to Jinyel with a warm, solid hand. A living hand. His muscles were locked, his grip uncannily similar to Jinyel’s own. But it couldn’t be the same. Sade couldn’t ― he couldn’t be lucid. Not this soon. Not this easily.

Could he?

He couldn’t have. He couldn’t have.

And yet.

“Sade.” Jinyel cupped his face. Ran a thumb over his face. Tried and failed to keep the tremor out of his voice. “Sade, can you hear me? Do you ― do you know where you are? Where you were before this moment? Do you know how you got here?”

[Sade Sauterne]

Danger seemed to Hunter what lying was to Sade. A force of habit, an ever-present itch. Something awful that they needed against all odds to stay alive. When Hunter told him that they were past the worst of the danger – well, Sade didn’t know what dangers had been present to begin with. Hunter hadn’t told him that. He’d only told him to be cautious, to be wary, while he left out every clue that could have told Sade how.

It didn’t matter regardless, not anymore. He was here, wherever here really was, and if Hunter told him that the worst dangers were past then he had no other choice but to believe it was true. What else was he meant to do? Turn around and retreat into a tunnel that led only back to…

…his dream?

Sade’s eyes would have squeezed shut even tighter, if they’d been able. It was hurting his head, trying to wrap around this reality. All he could do was keep his hold around Hunter for as long as he was able, and when his – companion cupped his face within his hands, he bade his eyes to finally open. Yellow, orange, pink – they shifted in tandem with his fleeting confusions, before settling finally in that soft pink shade.

“Yes,” he insisted. His voice came out sharper, harsher than he meant for it to, like the point of an arrow. “Of course I do. I’m not–”

He bit his tongue before he could say stupid. Hunter was not his enemy, nor was he patronizing him in asking. Sade knew that there was no logical reason to lash out at him, and still there was that clawing urge to do it anyway.

The thief took a breath. Let go of Hunter’s waist only to cover his hands over the ones that held his face.

“Yes,” Sade repeated, softer this time. “I’m… I’m asleep, aren’t I? Right there.”

With a slight tilt of his head, he glanced to the spot near the fire where he remembered sitting down with Hunter. Eating together, holding each other. At some point he must have fallen asleep, to be here, though he could not fully remember doing so.

“I was… dreaming, before. Wasn’t I? I don’t remember what I dreamt about, only that you were there. You led me here. Which makes this… your side of the bridge, right?”

Did he understand any of this? No. Not at all, not even close. But he knew what Hunter had told him, and he could only hope that was enough.

[Jinyel]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The harshness of the response went right over Jinyel’s head. Perhaps he would have noticed if they were awake and sitting next to each other, or still making preparations to come here. Of course, Sade said, and rattled off the things which had happened to them in the waking world. No mention of the dream he’d just had, and it was all so… lucid. It was all lucid.

Sade was lucid.

And Jinyel was panicking.

It didn’t make sense, the wave of dread that crashed through him. The memory of a sky torn open echoed so loudly in his skull that he could almost mistake it for the present moment. His magic coiled like a serpent on the edge of a strike, building spell upon spell of Graft: Energize: Prevent Pain for a wound that wasn’t there. No blood. No broken bone or split muscle, just the same injury he’d had as they fell asleep. He wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t hurt and Sade was lucid anyway.

“You’re…” He could barely muster the air to speak, his breath was so shallow. “You’re aware. How? How did you―”

He thought he lost his footing because of how badly his legs were shaking, but with a crack of stone so far away that it felt like thunder, he realized the ground was actually moving.

From far away came the murmur of an earthquake, from a broken castle, and from the skeleton of a colossal wolf.

In the forest just beyond the pond, wolves began to howl.

Back up back up back up. Jinyel faced outward and walked in reverse, pushing Sade back into the tunnel. Not all the way to the other side, just a few yards into the darkness where he felt the limits of his own dreamscape grow blurry. A place where none of those wolves had the power to follow them, nor did any of Sade’s dreams have the power to follow.

You’re awake. “Sade?” You’re hurt. “Sade.” Tell me, show me, help me.

He turned, and he unlaced his fingers from the thief. He ran hands down Sade’s chest, under his arms, around his back and then up to his neck, hunting for the blood he knew should be there. It had to be there. Sade had to be injured, because Jinyel wasn’t, and there could be no lucidity without injury. But this was wrong, it wasn’t supposed to be Sade who paid the price ― how had Sade gotten hurt? Nothing had struck them in between dreamscapes, and he couldn’t have been injured as a dreamer. Nothing made sense, and Jinyel couldn’t use magic to look through enervations to see what was wrong. He could only see with his eyes.

Take off. “Take these off, you have to―” He coughed. Something wanted to come up his throat. “Watch the entrance, I’ve got to ― got to find where you’re hurt, I can’t―” speak. He couldn’t speak. So he grabbed instead, undoing buttons and laces and everything else that kept Sade’s skin covered. “Help me find it, I can ― I can fix it. Tell me where you’re hurt. Tell me what hit you.”

[Sade Sauterne]

Sade knew that something was wrong before he ever felt the tremor shake through the dreamscape. He didn’t know this place beyond what Hunter’s dream had conjured of their camp, and couldn’t tell from which direction the earthquake came. Only that it was far enough away to die to a rumble beneath them.

“Hey,” he started, just before the hunter turned. Anything else he might have said was cut off, as he fought to steady himself when his legs were pushed suddenly backward. He stumbled back into the cave, hand caught, and when Hunter allowed them to stop, he took a half step back from the other man.

“What? I’m not–”

The hunter’s hands were all over him. Everywhere, prying what information they sought from – what? From an injury that wasn’t there?

“Hunter, wait,” Sade tried to catch his focus, but his hands kept going. Hunter was distressed, confused – but why? What convinced him that he had to be hurt? The thief’s hands were slow to try to capture Hunter, delayed in his own disorientation with his sudden undressing. His shirt caught at the elbows, exposing the thief’s tan skin and the various scars and scattered moles that covered it, but no trace of injury.

“Stop it,” he finally hissed, eyes flashing a virulent green for but a trill as he caught the hunter’s prying hands before they could undress him any more. “I’m not hurt. I’m right here. I’m alright. You brought me through and I’m not hurt.”

He’d certainly never thought that he’d be the one to stop Hunter from taking his clothes off. But this, the panic that surged through his dear hunter, it wasn’t at all what he wanted to drive it. Sade loosened his grip, releasing the other man’s hands to let them do as they willed.

“I’m not hurt. I promise. Did I do something wrong? Am I not supposed to be here?”

[Jinyel]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sometimes the mind could play tricks. Everyone knew it, everyone experienced it at some point. But the body could play tricks, too, and if the body decided that a threat was upon it, no amount of thinking would convince it otherwise.

Jinyel heard Sade’s assurances. He understood them. He knew his hands were dry, and that if there had been blood, he would have found it. That Sade wouldn’t keep standing here if something had gone truly wrong. But Jinyel’s body was rooted to the spot, adrenaline coursing through him like fire, and it believed with every muscle that a hundred Emeyans were rushing toward them at that very moment. And he couldn’t move, he couldn’t defend himself from something inside his own head. ‘It isn’t real’ was supposed to mean he didn’t need to feel panic; in times like this, all it meant was there was no way to stop it.

“No, you ― you’re supposed to be here. You are.” Jinyel heard Sade’s voice as if through water. “You did everything right. You did it ― you made it so quickly. I don’t understand…”

It took strength to stop grabbing, and to peel his hands off Sade’s chest. As much strength as it would have taken to stop himself if Sade actually did have a hole in his chest. Arms locked with effort, Jinyel put both hands on the thief’s shoulders and fisted the cloth there, to spare himself the second task of restraining his magic. He bent his head, stared at the ground between them, and counted the trills in which Sade didn’t fall.

Sade didn’t fall.

He still didn’t fall.

He continued to not fall.

“It… was supposed to hurt more.” Jinyel gathered a lungful of air, somehow, and rose to look at Sade’s mouth. Not his eyes, yet. He needed another moment for that. “I thought it… was going to hurt more than this. I thought more things would break.”

Joint by joint, Jinyel relaxed the fingers knotted in Sade’s shirt. His panic didn’t ebb, but his body at least realized the tension wasn’t solving anything. It yielded a bit more control to his mind, so he could react to what was actually happening instead of what he felt was happening.

I’m sorry. He traced the sign against the thief’s shoulders. Finally, slowly, he dragged their gazes together, and said with as much calm as he could muster: “This isn’t ― you didn’t do it wrong. I’m sorry. This is a happy moment. You ― you just did it. I didn’t know anyone could just do it. I don’t know how you did it, but it’s… it’s perfect. You did it more perfectly than I ever imagined it could be done. It’s just a bit ― a bit too perfect, I wasn’t prepared for it to be this… painless.”

The last word hitched on the way out. Something hard and sharp lodged in his throat. He closed his eyes before Sade could see how wet they were, and rested both hands against the thief’s neck. His magic wanted to connect them. He didn’t let it.

“You made it.” Jinyel took a breath. It hurt. “You’re safe.” He let out a breath. It also hurt. “I’m feeling the wrong thing. I’ll fix it in a moment. Can we ― can we stay in here awhile? Just until the wolves stop howling.”