It seemed to Dune that life was suffering, no matter one’s station, and in the dull waking hours as he trudged through whatever tedious task was at hand that day, he often wondered what meaning was to be found in any of it. Take the dreamer, soaked in shadows: the march of her step, the veiled look in her eyes. He can feel, in the very fabric of this oppressive dream, that she has suffered for a very long time. And for what?
No one deserved this.
Well, maybe it begs the question was there something more to what she did, something beyond pouting?, and he almost asks but--
No, no one deserved this... this imprisonment. No matter what. Still, life carried on, apathetic to all the shit it stirred up, each year twice as heavy as the last. And then it came to an end, sometimes abruptly, sometimes slow and drawn out; sometimes clean, usually messy. He wanted to believe there was some greater purpose, some way to rise above the suffering, but most days he did not have the energy for faith.
Then she speaks of regret, and he wonders… maybe it was as simple as balancing your suffering, bargaining with it. Biding your time until the enemy showed its face. Maybe life was a waiting game-- if you really wanted to win at it-- but he finds that thought depressing, and promptly leaves it in the shadows behind them.
It is not a companionable silence between them, but neither is it uncomfortable. Eventually she says: “You do not feel like anything I would come up with,” and the dream turns its attention to Dune. A hundred invisible eyes slowly turn to look. A hundred invisible knives turn to point. A nervous shiver creeps down his spine, and to his surprise it’s not entirely unpleasant. He’s not usually noticed; it brings a strange kind of enjoyment...
He realizes-- It can be nice to be seen.
And-- it can be nice to be heard, too. Perhaps I should do more of this, speaking and being seen. Out there, on the other side.
This feeling of niceness is surreal. The boy is too used to cruel streets, hungry nights, violent landscapes; the brutal grind of poverty. He is used to anonymity and silence. Then he glances at the dreamer, backlit by a smear of dirty torchlight, just as she glances at him in a way he deems judgemental and detached, like looking over a rack of weapons for sale at the market. And the situation suddenly strikes him as hilarious. He’d bet his meager life savings that nobody has ever met this woman, in either the waking or dream world, and thought “this is nice.”
He can’t hold it in anymore. Dune cackles, a boyish and birdlike sound that rings brightly across the shadowed hallways. It feels forbidden here. He doesn’t care. “No, I wouldn’t. I’m Dune,” he says, and resists adding smartly “you know, like a pile of sand?” Too stupid. Instead he subtly dips his head in introduction. “From the low quarter.” Could someone be proud to be from such a place? Yes, of course-- and, to prove it, a prickly sort of pride fills his voice. Defensive already, imagining how the way she sees him might change.
But home is home.
And home, for Dune, would always be home. Win a million signos and he’d still live there among all that poverty and despair. The colors were so much brighter when held in contrast to all the dirt. Anyway he’d never have that much coin-- he’d give it away first, or (more likely) spend it on something stupid. Dune the Loon, sometimes the cruel nickname was so fitting... or at the very least, it suited him more than prosperity.
“I cannot imagine you would want to be in here with me so. Grave mistake, was it?”
Dune likes her dry tone of voice, her manner of speaking rough and familiar as sandpaper. It makes him feel like he is not held in any esteem, which is both familiar and comforting. There was nothing to lose, that way. (Whereas when a beautiful stranger weaves you a gilded crown, flies with you across the stars, and on the brink of waking tells you to find her… well that had been a lot of pressure on his young shoulders. He still thinks of her, that dreamer. Hhe still wonders...)
He smiles broadly-- the look says yes-- but his words diverge from the expression. “Mmm, not quite mistake.” He muses on the word, mistake, and all its wrongness. “It was an accident. There’s a difference, no?” The question is asked with an almost laughable sincerity-- although if she were to laugh, he would be deeply offended. Street children like him did not learn frivolous things like vocabulary. What would be the point? That had not kept him from slowly learning to read, and even-- his latest endeavor-- to write. But these things had taken time, and they had come to him much later in life than they would have if he was born to the middle or upper class.
All this to say the distinction between mistake and accident, though minor, was deeply important to him. It was this attention to detail, he knew, which would one day unlock doors which a younger Dune did not even have the imagination to dream of. (And then one day he began to walk through the dreams of others, which were even grander and wilder than his own, and he learned to dream bigger.)
As they walk the dream begins to gently change. He tries not to pay it any attention-- some dreams, if not their dreamers, had something akin to stage fright. But the air is slowly becoming easier to breathe, almost fragrant, and it puts a little extra spring in his step. He wants to go there, to the place promised by that sweet breeze, where goblets chimed and it was not forbidden to laugh. He very carefully does not allow himself to press her into going there. She knows the way better than him, anyway. The dreamer always does.
“So do you always wear a collar, or--” the words trail off as he glances at the shadowed ceilings, then the ever-burning torches. Or is that another part of all this?
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