ooc (dream)
The world is a dark and cold place, full of hate and lies, filth and cruelty...but that doesn’t matter. His world is small, and warm, and though it is dark the darkness is not icy and pitch but rather the comfortable darkness of a pleasant night. Conducive to sleep. Conducive to many things. He is in a tree, a massive tree so old its base is petrified--in a sea-torn hall of ruins--in the decayed, haunted dome of the end of the world--in the machine city of lies, in the machine city of the past, in an icicle palace, home of a goddess--he doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter. He is buried in the small-dark-warm-soft core, and she is with him.
Under him, she is beautiful and innocent, pure, gazing up at him with pretty mismatched eyes--he fancies that he can see reflections of two different hims in them, as well as a light and a hope and something else he wanted for his own. Her voice is crying out his name but from so far away he cannot hear her anymore, though he can hear pain and fear in her cries. There is blood. She pushes against his shoulders and when her palms come away they are coated in blood, he clasps her to his chest and when they pull apart her white skin is covered in red, all down her front. Now, he can hear her voice echoing in the small room, something about sending and bonds and summoning and I Can Fly. Wings erupt from her back, somehow not tearing the sheets, and when the feathers have fallen away she might be free.
There is a new voice, but not a different one. It is the same voice, with the addition of ten years and the subtraction of fear and pain. When he has a moment to look, through a hazy, half-open eye he can see her face is different, with long dark hair he could lose himself in. He redoubles his efforts and lets her stroke his face. “My son, my son,” she is saying, and she is so proud of him, he can hear it in her voice, he presses his lips to hers and wills his breath to pass from him into her, wills the dark blood welling up in her to stay down, wills her to smell like smiles and cookies and freshly laundered clothes and hugs instead of grim dark death.
Now he can hear Medusa’s voice, hissing with her snakes, ”Poor thing. Would you like to save ____, princeling?” He doesn’t answer in any way other than to hold her so close he might be trying to make her part of him. ”If you wish it, I will give you Anima.”
He gives neither assent nor dissent, but nonetheless what he’s tangled with has changed in his arms, he opens his eyes and surveys--”In your wildest dreams, princeling, did you ever imagine this?”--a corpse, dead and rotting, with even her funeral shroud tattered over her body but merciful enough to hide her face from him. The corpse screams through her fangs and looks at him with her glowing eye. This is the truth, he knows, and wraps his arms around her and loves her, wants her, needs her. Where they touch he too is dying, he too is withering into a shadow of a living thing, even as light builds behind her eye until he is struck blind, uncomprehending.
He dies, then, but the death is small, and it does not trouble him overmuch.