open | merry & bright

[exequy]

WHO: Anyone!
WHAT: Everyone lives happily ever after, forever, for real, wait don't look behind that curtain—
WHEN: Late Haring
WHERE: The mountains
NOTES: No one is late to this. Feel free to get around to it in January. Or February! And if you have questions you can ask me here, but for any question that's "can I do this within my character's dream?" the answer will be yes! You can do anything.

The snowstorm that blows up around them in the mountains isn't unexpected and isn't a disaster. It only dashes some thin hopes that it might not come on so strong or so swiftly. But they've almost reached what they're aiming for — a cave along the cliffy coastal road that's associated with the disappearances of several caravans and now said to be home to a rift — and there's a village up ahead, glowing warmly through the snowfall once they're near enough.

They're not the first waylaid travelers here. The one little inn is full to bursting, with just enough room for Riftwatch's contingent to squeeze in at tables if they get creative about the seating, the lower floor so packed that body heat and the little fire combined make things outright toasty. The beds are all spoken for, but the innkeeper, a warm, upbeat woman with frizzy hair escaping a bun, says not to worry. She's not turning anyone out into the cold. Blankets on the floor is better than that. If anyone finds it too uncomfortable to sleep curled with old blankets on a creaking wooden floor surrounded by the snores of colleagues and strangers — no, they don't. It's comfortable. It's warm. The sniffles and rough coughs from the other side of the room have the rhythm of a lullaby, and the snow-covered roads and the rift and the missing are all problems for a tomorrow that does not immediately come.

They wake, each of them, in a world where there is nothing of significance left for them to worry about. Not the road or the rift or the missing. Not the war; that's over now. Not poverty or obligation or illness. Between them and the life they've always wanted, the way has been cleared of obstacles, and there is nothing left to do but enjoy the comforts of a well-earned easy life — and if something is a little off, no it isn't. Shh. If the victories feel hollow, or the details blur, or the seams begin to show, the world will tighten around them like hands around a wounded bird who needs to be kept from thrashing, whispering that they don't need to worry. Everything will be fine. Just hold still and let it take care of you.

The first to pull free of the delusion on their own will find themselves in the twisting grasp of a lucid dream that's trying very hard to snare them again, stumbling out of their happy endings into the worlds of others'. They might be pulled beneath the surface for a time: the entity saying, all right, if that didn't work for you, maybe this? But the more of them who congregate together, with their incompatible wishes, the more the fabric will begin to fray, until at last it rots away altogether and they find themselves waking on the floor of a cold, abandoned inn, covered in moldering blankets and lingeringly queasy from half-rotted food eaten at least a day earlier, surrounded by the bodies of the inn's other occupants in various early states of decay.

And after, because rest for the weary really is just a dream, they do have to go find that rift.

ooc | Final confrontation with the spirit that allows breaking out into the real world will happen via a log in here I will link when it's happening. But you're also welcome to say your character wasn't involved in that part and went straight to waking up!

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[elegiaque]

The oppressive feel of the house — her house, it’s her house — can’t be solely attributed to the bitter cold. There’s a shadow in it that doesn’t seem to be concerning Morgana, confident that her father is simply in the next room,

and he is. Gwenaëlle is certain that he is. She can hear the weight of his step, and the rattle of his struggling breath in his chest, and when she thinks of going to him she feels as heavy as the dead. Her heart jolts into her throat at the sound of fists landing on increasingly brittle wood and she can’t reason herself out of the dread rising tight along her spine, the nape of her neck. This is her home. She’s safe here. There is no reason to feel this way, and she could go into the next room if she wanted to.

When she opens the door to Stephen, she stares at him for a moment, baffled in recognition.

“Stephen?”

— in the tone of a woman trying to understand why she knows his name.

[portalling]

Some relief unclenches in his chest, some ragged unexpected small blessing in disguise. He thought he’d have to introduce himself. Start all over from scratch in an attempt to convince her.

Knowing his luck, he probably still has to convince her. But at least one step’s down already —

“Hi,” Stephen says, looking at Gwenaëlle’s face, drinking it in, and this stranger looks at her with a kind of raw desperation and fondness which is uncomfortable to see in its intensity. Like a drowning man finally encountering land and solid ground beneath his feet. Finally reaching her door, at last, which is further than he’s ever gotten before.

“You know me. Do you know me? Who I am?”

Please, says the thing he isn’t saying. His eyes glint, watery.

[elegiaque]

Ouais, she nearly says, impatiently, of course I—

except that she’s still gazing back at him hovering in that uncertainty. Of course she does, but — it feels tantalizingly out of reach, the sudden slam of a window somewhere else in the house beneath the kicked up onslaught of wind and snow jolting her nearly out of her skin. The shadows in the house stretch, and she says, “You’re going to freeze to fucking death out there,” which is not an answer at all, reaching to grasp his elbow to pull him in out of the elements.

He feels so much realer than anything else. She hadn’t thought that it didn’t until this moment.

[portalling]

She pulls Stephen through and he hustles in, the door slamming behind them with ringing finality.

Some part of him is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. His shoulders have hunched, braced for the next blow to rip him away from her: a rolling boulder, mountain lion attack, some avalanche crashing through his half of the cabin and sending him spinning down the mountain. But then he follows Gwenaëlle deeper into the cabin and he lets himself look around the interior at last.

All the accoutrements and debris of a life, a cozy contented domestic life, one without Stephen Strange. One with a husband and a daughter. A tall, strapping, handsome warrior of a husband. A smart, coltish precocious daughter. A life without room for him in it.

(A persistent, irritating voice, small and self-doubting: What selfish right does he have to take her from this?)

Something tightens in his jaw, looking around. Stephen kicks his boots against his ankle, knocking off the snow at the entryway, still a neat and tidy habit.

“You live on a houseboat,” he says, blurting out, “in Kirkwall harbour. Not… here, not like this. I know that makes me sound insane, but this is my first chance to tell you. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

For longer than he can express.

[elegiaque]

Something about the way she repeats, “Kirkwall,” incredulously is so perfectly, flawlessly Gwenaëlle— her train of thought nearly visible on her face as she dismisses it as a place for criminals and vagrants and then considers the degree to which he appears to fall into the latter category.

He looks like shit, tidy habits notwithstanding.

Another thought tugs at the hem of her sleeve; Yngvi is from Kirkwall. Had gone back to… he hadn’t left, exactly, but that can’t be right, because he had returned to the Carta, in … Kirkwall. So he must have gone much further, surely, but,

her frown deepens, though it still sort of looks like she’s finding his hygiene wanting. The question she asks is more to herself than to him—

“Why would Yngvi have left us?”

How can she know that Asher is here and equally that Yngvi is not? She would remember a reason for him not to be. She would know. Maybe it makes sense if she allows that he might be telling the truth, but not— enough, not quite enough. Astrid was here when she had her daughter, she knows it; how could Yngvi have not been?

[portalling]

The man from the snowstorm takes a deep breath; a slow exhale. There’s truly no way he can deliver any of this information without sounding like a lunatic, without delivering pain and literally ripping her world apart at the seams, but there’s no alternative. Not if he wants to see her again as anything more than a distant wisp, out-of-reach, untouchable, dreaming of other worlds and other lives.

“I don’t know exactly why he’s not around; one of the many things I now regret not having asked you. I do know that you named a small ratty kitten after him, though. Small Yngvi. The one he gave you; the cat’s my favourite of all your massive menagerie since he happens to be partial to me. The dog prefers you.”

He’s grasping at straws, any piece of Gwenaëlle he can dredge up, waiting for something to echo and feel true. His neck is tight, shoulders strained; he doesn’t look over her shoulder to deeper into the cabin where there might or might not be an Avvar in the bedroom. Schrödinger’s husband.

“But I imagine Yngvi might have left because— Asher Hardie died of an infected wound. Years ago now. I’m sorry. Gwenaëlle, none of this is real.”