“Had someone only told me there was a door.”
Her sarcasm brings a grin, bright but fleeting. One had the sense that joy was not allowed here. And although the seeds of it may sprout in the cracks in the stone, there was no point in taking root. Nothing here was allowed but-- not quiet pain, it was something else-- but nothing at all.
A long exhale. “”Kings.” He rolls his eyes, thinking of Orestes and Ipomoea, then not just kings but nobility in general, fickle and frail as spun sugar. Something about having everything you could ever ask for, it made one rot from the inside out.
And how they made the world go round, these rotten apples. Dune personally could not scrape by without the nobility. The old families, established as stone… he tended their gardens, hauled their many imports from the docks, scribed the letters they dictated with his precise, meticulous penmanship. He knows he should be grateful--
(Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth)
But he’s not.
(Blessed still are the strong, for the meek accept their collars.)
At the heart of the matter, Dune is just ashamed... he wonders if it isn’t better to be a starving beggar than a leech fat with rotten blood. But mostly he tries not to feel anything at all-- there’s too much there to untangle, none of it good, and moreover feeling has never put food on the table. He found to maintain sanity it was a constant balancing act: one had to hope for something better, yet one must also accept their place in life. Lean too much into either and you would be lost to disappointment or despair. And he was too much of a survivor for foolish waysides such as those.
Dune shakes his head, tries not to think of his stomach-- which clenches in the dream as though it were empty. It’s not, it hasn’t been in a long time, but starvation, like imprisonment, is not very easily forgotten. The body remembers long after the mind thinks it has found its peace.
“Was it worth it?” The question is sincere. Rationally, (and he is a very rational creature, despite the whimsy of his magic) he thinks the answer is “no”. But he is not sure. This is, after all, a dream, and dreams breed strange truths-- especially when there are shadows.
Speaking of strange truths-- oh no, he’s not the door, although he knows why she might think so. Some night his magic will be strong enough to rip this world apart with the shrug of a shoulder, then sewn back together with the blink of an eye. But not tonight. Likely not for many nights. Tonight the dreamer is not just the door, but the lock; the key too. She is the architect and the guard and the prisoner. She is the crumbling walls and the scent of stale time and all the rest of it. He pities her-- not initially but later, when the light from his forehead that illuminates the ceiling finally fades and the hope in her eyes (the thing with feathers, someone once said) the brilliant, white-fire hope in her eyes, it fades to black.
She straightens, stiffens, and his pity melts away into something almost like resentment. All the freedom, all the power, locked behind walls of her own construction. Gods damn these dreamers and their issues. “Alqarf,” he mimics with sour enthusiasm, like it’s a stupid toast-- to good health or new friends or wandering the bleak expanse of the mind’s prison-- and when she brushes past him he does not immediately follow. He simply looks at all her sharp lines and rigid posture. It carries through even into the way she walks, like starched linens, like someone shoved a stick up somewhere dark. Or maybe it’s just militaristic, he wonders with a thoughtful frown. Picking apart his dreamer and putting her in a box. Or, multiple boxes.
Eventually he trails behind her, but never too far. Dune was a good listener, and anyway the dreamer was far more interesting than her prison. “Where would you rather be right now?” There is a hint of a dare on his tongue. A challenge-- surely she’s not the kind to say no to one of those. “If you could be anywhere in the world?” Perhaps she could take them there, if she focused on it well enough. He has no idea how any of this works, but it's as good a shot as any.
Strutting noisily through her dreams, he almost forgets “I don’t do this. I don’t speak. Not in real life.”
Almost.
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