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!

Comments

[elegiaque]

In this moment — overwhelmed, frightened, and above all offended to once more have her fucking mind fucked with — it’s easy to understand the way that circle mages do not always exactly feel blessed by their fate, circles themselves notwithstanding. The demons, the dreams, the— magic. Every time she has to climb down into some ruin or up out of some spirit-induced nightmare, it isn’t as if she imagines the life she had been going to lead without the Inquisition or Riftwatch would have been so great, even half so good as the imagined dream that’s coming to pieces around them now, just—

like, there’d have been significantly fewer demons. There just would have. She’s so sure.

Gwenaëlle reaches for the sword on the wall that would always have been there, if she and Asher had shared a home this way (and they never had, and in the best version of the world, she isn’t sure they ever would have), furious,

“Do you know,” is shouted, to the dream entire, a jagged-edged defiance fueled by that old, renewed grief, how dare it use this loss against her, how dare it try to take more, to make her forget Stephen, “how many fucking things I have killed in the Fade?”

It’s a surprising amount. Flint would not necessarily be proud of her technique when she aims the blade, catching the thing off-guard in a way Asher would not have been, but Coupe would probably recognise the rage that swings from the shoulder.

[portalling]

It's more of what he loves so fiercely about her — that raw feral anger, the violence, the readiness to do what must be done — and the thing which isn't Asher doesn't stand a chance. Gwenaëlle cuts its leg like she's hacking down a tree, cleaving muscle and tendon, and it teeters and falls, its strength now useless, unable to keep its balance anymore.

Stephen looks around them at this cabin, which is cozy and homey and comfortable and nice in a way which speaks to the woman's flair for interior decoration, as if this spirit has rifled through her Pinterest lookbook, except all of her taste this time has been oriented and orbiting around Asher's aesthetic (less burgundy, more fur). And so, with a bit of flair and just a little bit of symbolism, Stephen follows up on her attack by pulling on the threads of magic and he brings the entire roof down, ripping a structural pillar loose. The bedroom of the Hardies' cabin collapses in front of them; the creature is swallowed up in a gust of snow and wood logs falling inward, the stifling stagnant room now buried in front of them, exposing the pair to the false elements.

He moves backward into the living room and away from the new ruin, drawing her with him. The wind is cutting and the mountain is cold but his scarred hands are warm against Gwenaëlle's cheeks as he clutches at her, and looks into her golden eye, searching for that flash of recognition or understanding.

"Do you know me yet?" he asks, still desperate for confirmation. "I've been looking for you everywhere, but you're always with someone else— christ, Gwenaëlle, we live together. You climbed in my window and we shared a bottle of honeywine before we fucked for the first time. I taught you songs on the pianoforte from my world. You wrote me a poem for Satinalia— I'm butchering the Orlesian, but it's called objets d'tendresse. I don't think your grandfather likes me much."

It's a scattering of facts and emotion in no particular order, not the tidy chronological structure he would have preferred; but to his own irritation, he can't come up with something perfect and clean and organised, not now, not yet.

[elegiaque]

Around them, the dream is coming apart at the seams— not her dream, Astrid’s, but not for nothing has every dream she’s had for herself come to ruin already, easier to persuade her of someone else’s truth than one she might want badly enough to be at the centre of. You’re always with someone else— because Gwenaëlle’s own dreams are too fucking fragile, now, after everything. Her marriage slipped through her fingers and her ex-husband a stranger,

nothing is permanent but he is true. He says, I don’t think your grandfather likes me much and she makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob, hands coming up to his wrists, her grip white-knuckle tight. The way she searches his face — she knows what she’ll find. The thing that a demon or a spirit or her own mind could not recreate, too true to trust.

Impossible to feign.

“You are butchering the Orlesian,” she says, sliding her thumbs against the inside of his wrists, and there has to be something more important that they be doing to get the fuck out of whatever is trapping them here, but it does seem urgent that she kiss him, so she—

does. Urgently, rising on her toes, tasting like the memory of an ale-and-meat diet, improbably soft against the howl of wind shaking a mountain apart.

[portalling]

It’s like coming home at last: a ship finding anchor, safe harbour in the middle of a storm.

Gwenaëlle has always been just barely out of reach, and so Stephen holds onto her as if he’s afraid the dream is going to rip her away from him one last time (and he does fear that, very much). They crash into each other, the kiss desperate like it’s the last time he’ll be able to do this. Stephen has always thought of himself as profoundly unromantic, cold and unfeeling much to the annoyance of every girlfriend he’d ever had when he was younger, but here, with her, always with her —

something cracks open and he would simply rip a world apart for Gwenaëlle, and he has, and he does. He kisses her back and it’s the ghost and the memory of every other kiss they’ve ever shared: brisk and exploratory in the Crossroads; warm and honeyed and playful in Halamshiral; quick and illicit and unthinking in their offices; drowsy and affectionate in the morning, in their bed, in their home.

His hands are no longer bandaged. His ragged beard is no longer ragged; it’s now a familiar scratch against her cheek, tidy and close-cropped to her touch. He’s not some disheveled hermit come straggling off the mountain, but Stephen Strange, the same one she’s known all this time. And these two realities can’t coexist at once; these two things cannot be true simultaneously. Her life in an Avvar hold unravels like the backdrop of a theater stage cracking, ripping in a half, the background falling away.

Somewhere between his next gasping breath, between swallowing her sobbing laugh, coming up for brief air, “I love y—”

[elegiaque]

The dream falls apart,

Gwenaëlle’s eyes open. It doesn’t, immediately, make any more sense than the moments beforehand— for a moment she thinks she’s still trapped, that she’s dreaming that breaking-apart house on a mountain, that all that’s happened is she’s been flung away from Stephen one more fucking time. She reaches out a hand to steady herself in sitting up and it crunches through dry, brittle bone and

“What the fuck, oh—”

Her stomach turns and in maybe the least romantic follow up imaginable to that reconnection, she’s sick before she can struggle away to do it somewhere she can be sure it’s not, undignified as it is, desecrating someone’s forgotten remains.

A little ragged, pushing herself up from her knees, “Stephen?”

He can’t be far. She’ll find him.

[portalling]

Stephen’s not far away.

It’s taking him longer to wake up, after all that energy and effort he’d spent to do the exact opposite of that. It had been like driving anchors into the dream, pinning himself to the structure of it, hooking himself in place so he could keep free-roaming its shape and searching for Gwenaëlle over and over without being flung entirely out of it. It takes time to undo, unstitching those threads and following where she’d gone this last time, swimming back up to cold hard reality.

In the real world: a few feet away on the creaking floorboards, the man sits propped against the wall, eyes closed and knees comfortably crossed and head tilted back as if he’s just having a quick snooze. Still clawing his way back up to consciousness, wading through it, following—

the sound of her voice, awake, somewhere out of this mouse-trap, it’s time to go.

[elegiaque]

The sound of her voice— the touch of her hands at his shoulders, his face, a knee down beside his thigh and her face (one eye amber, one eye gold, like she’s always had as long as he’s known her) terribly close when he finally opens his eyes:

“Stephen?”

— who the fuck is she expecting, the Divine?

“Come on,” softer, “wake up, come back to me.”

🎀?

[portalling]

Stephen wakes at last with a strangled choked sound — it’d be funny if he were in a living room armchair, unexpectedly startled out of a nap— but Gwenaëlle’s looming large in his field of vision, just like any other time he’s woken up at home to her staring at him. The right colour eyes, his name on her lips, come back to me. Their surroundings are hideous and his stomach’s in open revolt and there’s what looks like tattered skeletons and vomit on the floor. It’s grim and bleak enough that he is sure, finally absolutely sure, that this is real.

Their breath is horrid and this place is horrid and hideously unpoetic, but he doesn’t even care: he straightens against the wall and pulls Gwenaëlle to him, crushing her to his chest in an embrace. He lets out a long, shaky breath, face buried in the crook of her neck. He can’t tell how long it’s been in the real world; perception of time in the Fade had stretched, taffy-like, as it has a tendency to do. The labyrinth had been long and winding.

“As far as illusions go, I preferred tea at the Sanctum,” he says. “Hello. I missed you. Some of your exes are a real piece of work—”

and somewhere their exhaustion tangles into giddy laughter and relief and he kisses her again, not minding how stale and unflattering that part is, because it’s Gwenaëlle, and she came back to him, and he came back to her, and that’s all that matters.