In the Forests of the Night (Part 1 of 2)
“In the Forests of the Night” (Part 1 of 2)
By December21st
Fandom: Lost Girl
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Bo/Dyson
Warnings: Spoilers through the end of Season 3. Temporary character death. Style of ending may not feel complete.
Summary: When Dyson sleeps as a wolf, he dreams of forests. Post-3x13 "Those Who Wander" story.
When Dyson sleeps as a wolf, he dreams of forests. Unending woodlands covering entire continents, stopped only by the crash of ocean waves. Squirrels chatter from leafy boughs overhead; tiny starlings briefly pepper the sky before settling back into the forest canopy; deer flit though the underbrush, skittish even before they catch his scent on the breeze. On rare occasions, he dreams of other shifters in the woods with him; often wolves like himself, but over the years he’s met a raven, laughing at him (in the way of ravens) from its perch in a pine tree; brought a freshly-killed rabbit to a family of bobcats with four mewling kittens; and once he crossed paths with a grizzly bear who yawned sleepily in greeting from a sunny boulder. He can smell that they’re Fae, but in the forests of his dreams there’s no Light and Dark, just a sense of kinship between shifters that's absent in the waking world.
“It’s beautiful,” Bo observes, her face turned away from him to watch the sun set behind the rolling hills covered in fir and aspen. Her form is a silhouette against the sun, and Dyson can only see her back. He wants to reach out to her, to cradle her face in his hands and tell her how much he’s missed her, but in all the years he's been dreaming of these forests, he's never before changed forms - he's never seen the need - and he doesn't seem able to do it now, so he can only nuzzle her leg and whimper softly. They stand watching the sun disappear, her hand resting atop his head, fingers softly stroking his fur. When the last rays of sunlight have disappeared, he steps forward and looks up towards her face, but she’s just not there anymore.
When he wakes up, Dyson the wolf looks around, almost expecting to see the forest, to see Bo, missing them both. He’s alone in his loft, so he shifts back into his human form. He grabs the crutches stuffed halfway under the bed and, with their aid, struggles to his feet. It's been eight months since first responders pulled him and Tamsin out of the wreckage of her pickup truck. The doctors had said that it was a miracle that either one of them had survived, much less both. Since then, he's endured eight months of human medical attempts to repair his shattered spine; eight months of the best Fae healing that Hale and Trick could find; eight months of taxing his own enhanced healing abilities to their very limits so that he can walk with crutches instead of being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his very long life. These days, he can only run in his dreams.
The next night, he follows a meandering stream through the forest until it spills over a rock outcropping into a deep pool. Even though her face is turned away, Dyson immediately identifies the woman swimming naked in the water as Bo. He recognizes flow of her movements; her body language as unique as her scent and just as familiar to him.
"Come on in, the water's fine," Bo calls out, laughter in her voice, her wet hair plastered to her head, hiding her face as she swims away from him. He stands at the edge of the rock outcropping, shifting his forepaws as he judges the jump, not a strong swimmer in his lupine form, but eager to be reunited with Bo again no matter how awkward the journey. When his head breaks the surface of the water, he's a man, not able to see in the dark nearly as well in this form and barely able to see Bo at all, standing in the shadow of the waterfall. He swims to her side, grateful that he's able to manage something more graceful than a dog paddle.
"I've missed you," Dyson tells her, but she looks away, out towards the forest beyond the pond. "We all do." She'd disappeared the same day as his accident, and nobody, not even Trick, had been able to figure out where she'd gone. Dyson suspects that there's something Trick isn't telling him, but he hasn't been able to wheedle that information out of the barkeeper.
"I'm lost, Dyson. I don't know where I've been, or where I am now," Bo worries. He reaches out to touch her shoulder and she tilts her head towards his hand, leaning in to the contact. He'd feared that she would be cold, a bean nighe, a Fae whose appearance portends bad news about the person whose image she reflects, but she's warm and alive. "I found a way to get here, from where I've been, but I don't even know where here is. I just knew that you'd be here. Where are we ..." As she asks, she turns to face him, and Dyson is left with his hand outstretched in midair, reaching for the waterfall. Bo's gone, but he answers anyhow.
"It's just a dream," he informs the air. He doesn't know if he believes it.
Having lunch with Kenzi the next day, Dyson wonders if he should let Bo's friend (BFF, he can almost hear Kenzi correcting him, making sure he understands the importance of the distinction) know about the dreams. Kenzi's still living in the Clubhouse, the shack she shared with Bo, hanging on to some sort of hope that Bo will just reappear some day, with a funny story about where she's been all this time. Technically, she lives there alone, but Dyson's willing to bet that Hale stays there with Kenzi more nights than not.
In the end, he tells her. Dyson's not sure how healthy her conviction that Bo's coming back is, but he's not exactly in a position to criticize. There were some days, after Bo stayed missing and the extent of his own injuries was clear, when Kenzi's quirky, indomitable strength and unwavering faith - in him, in Bo, in the universe's abilities to right its own wrongs - was the only thing that kept him going. She listens to his stories of the forest, and just smiles and says to tell Bo "hey" the next time he sees her.
When he returns to the forest the following night, he finds bare footprints with the barest hint of Bo's scent in the sand next to the pond with the waterfall. They disappear into the water, and though he follows the stream through the woods for miles, nose to the ground, he doesn't find any other sign of her.
Dyson's next several days are filled with nothing but paperwork. The new Ash is, to the very depths of her soul, a bureaucrat. She's a stickler for forms and procedure, but also one of the most brilliant diplomats that Dyson's ever met. It took some time, but she somehow managed to reverse the effects of the Morrigan's anti-human crusade so that humans in their region now have more rights than they did even when Hale was the Ash. Kenzi is safe as a claimed human, although Trick had return from Scotland to claim her after Bo had been missing too long. If Lauren ever reappears, she will be welcomed as an ally who worked against Dr. Taft from within his organization, not as a traitor to the Fae. Once he was able, Dyson made sure that everyone knew how Lauren had saved his life and made Taft vulnerable. It was the least he could do.
When he gets home after hours of staring at a computer screen - the new Ash is, at least, a proponent of modern technologies - he's too tired to even change his form, and he sleeps as a man, with erratic, senseless dreams mixing his past and present, and his conscious and subconscious. One night, Bo and Tasmin, wearing dresses made from newspaper, dance to the Bee Gees at Henry II's court, trying to persuade him to join them, but he's afraid that if he does, he will miss the delivery of his new waffle iron. That dream he's pretty sure wasn't real.
The dream with Tamsin reminds Dyson that he hasn't visited her for a while. After his recent experiences, Dyson would rather not spend any more time in a hospital than strictly necessary, but Tamsin doesn't have anyone else. She's still in a human hospital after all these months. Dyson doesn't know why she hasn't been moved to the Dark Fae compound; his best guess is that the Morrigan can't be bothered to look after Tamsin, some form of petty revenge. So he comes to the human hospital, and talks to the comatose woman hanging on to life by a thread as the machines keeping her alive cheep steadily.
The next night that he visits the forest, it's in ashes. Acres upon acres of lifeless wasteland, only the charred skeletons of the largest trees still standing amid the ruins of a once green and verdant wilderness, now nothing but blackened stumps covered in a fine gray powder. The ashes are cold, so this must have happened days ago. He makes his way to the streambed, now dry and lifeless, and follows it upstream to the waterfall where he met Bo. The waterfall is dry, and the pond is gone now too, boiled away by the heat of the fire. In the shelter of the overhang, he finds the bodies of two wolves, a male and a female. The way they were huddled together as the heat overwhelmed them makes him think that they were mates. Dyson pauses a moment to pay his respects, then returns to the colorless world of the forest, finding it difficult to breathe as the ash settles in his lungs.
He finds fresh footprints in the ash upstream, although all he can smell is soot and not the person that made them. Dyson follows them uphill for a distance, until he sees a familiar figure on the hilltop. He barks, breaking into a run as he nears her, bounding through the charred remains of tenacious plant life. He notices that she doesn't turn to face him, but seems to be looking at the hills miles away where the forest is still green.
As Dyson takes his last few steps approaching Bo, he wills himself into his two-legged form, almost surprised that it works. Bo spins around and, before he can even see her face, she's hugging him, he body pressed into his to maximize the contact between them. "I was afraid you were dead," Bo chides him, and he can feel her tears falling on the back of his neck. They're both fully clothed, which Dyson assumes is because it's the sort of thing that makes sense in a dream.
"Hey, hey, it's okay," he reassures her, squeezing her just a little tighter. "I'm fine."
They stand that way for a time, not moving, just being together. Eventually, Bo shifts her weight from one foot to the other. "I think ... I can't look at you," Bo informs him, her tone serious and analytical. "When I try, I go back to that other place."
"Where is it? Where are you when you're not here?" It feels strange to Dyson to be holding a conversation without looking at one another.
"I don't know. It's big and dark, and there are lots of windows. No walls or doors or anything, just all kinds of windows hanging in mid-air. The windows show what's going on in the real world, or in other realms, and sometimes I can get them to show me people and places I want to see. And there's this one window that I can use to find you when you're in this forest that I've been able to jimmy open, and I can go through it to come here. Where are we, Dyson?"
"We're in my dreams," Dyson replies simply.
"Oh." Bo's quiet for a time. "What happened here, this was my fault," Bo confesses. "A few nights ago, my father found out that I was sneaking out to come here. He was very, very angry, Dyson. He burned the forest. I don't think he knows that I'm meeting you here, he just didn't like it when I didn't do as I was told."
"He doesn't know you very well, does he?"
"I figured, he wasn't there for my rebellious teenage years when I was growing up, I should really give him some idea of what he missed out on."
"So you decided to sneak out the window to meet a boy to give him the true teenage daughter experience?"
"Even when I was a teenager, I didn't do as I was told. So if he thinks I'll be a good little girl that he can bend to his will and make me like him, he's got a lot to learn. I know who I am. I'm ..." Bo pauses, struggling to come up with the best way to describe herself.
"You're Bo." Dyson finishes for her, the name encompassing everything he loves about her.
"That's right," Bo affirms, as if he's made her point precisely. They stand awkwardly for a few moments, no longer hugging, not talking, yet not willing to draw away from one another for fear that Bo will vanish.
"I want to try something," she tells him. "I want you to close your eyes. And then I'm going to look at you, to look at your face. If I'm right, that should transport me back to the window place."
Dyson smiles at the practicality of her experiment. "Very scientific."
"Hey, I picked up a few things when I was dating Lauren," Bo explains pertly. "Are your eyes closed?"
Dyson closes his eyes. "They're closed."
He feels her step away from him. A moment passes, and Bo exclaims "I'm still here! It's not when I look at you!" Her hand runs through his beard along his cheek, back to the scruff of his neck, and she pulls him forward into a kiss. His eyes pop open in surprise, but there's nothing for him to see. Bo's gone, the taste of her still on his lips, her scent lingering in the air amid the smell of burnt timber.
The next evening at the Dal, he lets Trick know about the dreams. He doesn't want to, afraid that Trick will tell him that the dreams are just dreams, his subconscious' attempt to reunite him with his mate. But Trick doesn't tell him that. He just looks at Dyson with sorrowful eyes and promises to look into it. Bo's disappearance has taken a heavy toll on the former Blood King, and countless evenings trying to find any clue to his granddaughter's whereabouts, reading fading tomes and casting physically taxing incantations was starting to wear on him. He looks tired, Dyson thinks. He wishes there were something he could do to bring Bo home again.
Part Two Continues Here
By December21st
Fandom: Lost Girl
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Bo/Dyson
Warnings: Spoilers through the end of Season 3. Temporary character death. Style of ending may not feel complete.
Summary: When Dyson sleeps as a wolf, he dreams of forests. Post-3x13 "Those Who Wander" story.
When Dyson sleeps as a wolf, he dreams of forests. Unending woodlands covering entire continents, stopped only by the crash of ocean waves. Squirrels chatter from leafy boughs overhead; tiny starlings briefly pepper the sky before settling back into the forest canopy; deer flit though the underbrush, skittish even before they catch his scent on the breeze. On rare occasions, he dreams of other shifters in the woods with him; often wolves like himself, but over the years he’s met a raven, laughing at him (in the way of ravens) from its perch in a pine tree; brought a freshly-killed rabbit to a family of bobcats with four mewling kittens; and once he crossed paths with a grizzly bear who yawned sleepily in greeting from a sunny boulder. He can smell that they’re Fae, but in the forests of his dreams there’s no Light and Dark, just a sense of kinship between shifters that's absent in the waking world.
“It’s beautiful,” Bo observes, her face turned away from him to watch the sun set behind the rolling hills covered in fir and aspen. Her form is a silhouette against the sun, and Dyson can only see her back. He wants to reach out to her, to cradle her face in his hands and tell her how much he’s missed her, but in all the years he's been dreaming of these forests, he's never before changed forms - he's never seen the need - and he doesn't seem able to do it now, so he can only nuzzle her leg and whimper softly. They stand watching the sun disappear, her hand resting atop his head, fingers softly stroking his fur. When the last rays of sunlight have disappeared, he steps forward and looks up towards her face, but she’s just not there anymore.
When he wakes up, Dyson the wolf looks around, almost expecting to see the forest, to see Bo, missing them both. He’s alone in his loft, so he shifts back into his human form. He grabs the crutches stuffed halfway under the bed and, with their aid, struggles to his feet. It's been eight months since first responders pulled him and Tamsin out of the wreckage of her pickup truck. The doctors had said that it was a miracle that either one of them had survived, much less both. Since then, he's endured eight months of human medical attempts to repair his shattered spine; eight months of the best Fae healing that Hale and Trick could find; eight months of taxing his own enhanced healing abilities to their very limits so that he can walk with crutches instead of being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his very long life. These days, he can only run in his dreams.
The next night, he follows a meandering stream through the forest until it spills over a rock outcropping into a deep pool. Even though her face is turned away, Dyson immediately identifies the woman swimming naked in the water as Bo. He recognizes flow of her movements; her body language as unique as her scent and just as familiar to him.
"Come on in, the water's fine," Bo calls out, laughter in her voice, her wet hair plastered to her head, hiding her face as she swims away from him. He stands at the edge of the rock outcropping, shifting his forepaws as he judges the jump, not a strong swimmer in his lupine form, but eager to be reunited with Bo again no matter how awkward the journey. When his head breaks the surface of the water, he's a man, not able to see in the dark nearly as well in this form and barely able to see Bo at all, standing in the shadow of the waterfall. He swims to her side, grateful that he's able to manage something more graceful than a dog paddle.
"I've missed you," Dyson tells her, but she looks away, out towards the forest beyond the pond. "We all do." She'd disappeared the same day as his accident, and nobody, not even Trick, had been able to figure out where she'd gone. Dyson suspects that there's something Trick isn't telling him, but he hasn't been able to wheedle that information out of the barkeeper.
"I'm lost, Dyson. I don't know where I've been, or where I am now," Bo worries. He reaches out to touch her shoulder and she tilts her head towards his hand, leaning in to the contact. He'd feared that she would be cold, a bean nighe, a Fae whose appearance portends bad news about the person whose image she reflects, but she's warm and alive. "I found a way to get here, from where I've been, but I don't even know where here is. I just knew that you'd be here. Where are we ..." As she asks, she turns to face him, and Dyson is left with his hand outstretched in midair, reaching for the waterfall. Bo's gone, but he answers anyhow.
"It's just a dream," he informs the air. He doesn't know if he believes it.
Having lunch with Kenzi the next day, Dyson wonders if he should let Bo's friend (BFF, he can almost hear Kenzi correcting him, making sure he understands the importance of the distinction) know about the dreams. Kenzi's still living in the Clubhouse, the shack she shared with Bo, hanging on to some sort of hope that Bo will just reappear some day, with a funny story about where she's been all this time. Technically, she lives there alone, but Dyson's willing to bet that Hale stays there with Kenzi more nights than not.
In the end, he tells her. Dyson's not sure how healthy her conviction that Bo's coming back is, but he's not exactly in a position to criticize. There were some days, after Bo stayed missing and the extent of his own injuries was clear, when Kenzi's quirky, indomitable strength and unwavering faith - in him, in Bo, in the universe's abilities to right its own wrongs - was the only thing that kept him going. She listens to his stories of the forest, and just smiles and says to tell Bo "hey" the next time he sees her.
When he returns to the forest the following night, he finds bare footprints with the barest hint of Bo's scent in the sand next to the pond with the waterfall. They disappear into the water, and though he follows the stream through the woods for miles, nose to the ground, he doesn't find any other sign of her.
Dyson's next several days are filled with nothing but paperwork. The new Ash is, to the very depths of her soul, a bureaucrat. She's a stickler for forms and procedure, but also one of the most brilliant diplomats that Dyson's ever met. It took some time, but she somehow managed to reverse the effects of the Morrigan's anti-human crusade so that humans in their region now have more rights than they did even when Hale was the Ash. Kenzi is safe as a claimed human, although Trick had return from Scotland to claim her after Bo had been missing too long. If Lauren ever reappears, she will be welcomed as an ally who worked against Dr. Taft from within his organization, not as a traitor to the Fae. Once he was able, Dyson made sure that everyone knew how Lauren had saved his life and made Taft vulnerable. It was the least he could do.
When he gets home after hours of staring at a computer screen - the new Ash is, at least, a proponent of modern technologies - he's too tired to even change his form, and he sleeps as a man, with erratic, senseless dreams mixing his past and present, and his conscious and subconscious. One night, Bo and Tasmin, wearing dresses made from newspaper, dance to the Bee Gees at Henry II's court, trying to persuade him to join them, but he's afraid that if he does, he will miss the delivery of his new waffle iron. That dream he's pretty sure wasn't real.
The dream with Tamsin reminds Dyson that he hasn't visited her for a while. After his recent experiences, Dyson would rather not spend any more time in a hospital than strictly necessary, but Tamsin doesn't have anyone else. She's still in a human hospital after all these months. Dyson doesn't know why she hasn't been moved to the Dark Fae compound; his best guess is that the Morrigan can't be bothered to look after Tamsin, some form of petty revenge. So he comes to the human hospital, and talks to the comatose woman hanging on to life by a thread as the machines keeping her alive cheep steadily.
The next night that he visits the forest, it's in ashes. Acres upon acres of lifeless wasteland, only the charred skeletons of the largest trees still standing amid the ruins of a once green and verdant wilderness, now nothing but blackened stumps covered in a fine gray powder. The ashes are cold, so this must have happened days ago. He makes his way to the streambed, now dry and lifeless, and follows it upstream to the waterfall where he met Bo. The waterfall is dry, and the pond is gone now too, boiled away by the heat of the fire. In the shelter of the overhang, he finds the bodies of two wolves, a male and a female. The way they were huddled together as the heat overwhelmed them makes him think that they were mates. Dyson pauses a moment to pay his respects, then returns to the colorless world of the forest, finding it difficult to breathe as the ash settles in his lungs.
He finds fresh footprints in the ash upstream, although all he can smell is soot and not the person that made them. Dyson follows them uphill for a distance, until he sees a familiar figure on the hilltop. He barks, breaking into a run as he nears her, bounding through the charred remains of tenacious plant life. He notices that she doesn't turn to face him, but seems to be looking at the hills miles away where the forest is still green.
As Dyson takes his last few steps approaching Bo, he wills himself into his two-legged form, almost surprised that it works. Bo spins around and, before he can even see her face, she's hugging him, he body pressed into his to maximize the contact between them. "I was afraid you were dead," Bo chides him, and he can feel her tears falling on the back of his neck. They're both fully clothed, which Dyson assumes is because it's the sort of thing that makes sense in a dream.
"Hey, hey, it's okay," he reassures her, squeezing her just a little tighter. "I'm fine."
They stand that way for a time, not moving, just being together. Eventually, Bo shifts her weight from one foot to the other. "I think ... I can't look at you," Bo informs him, her tone serious and analytical. "When I try, I go back to that other place."
"Where is it? Where are you when you're not here?" It feels strange to Dyson to be holding a conversation without looking at one another.
"I don't know. It's big and dark, and there are lots of windows. No walls or doors or anything, just all kinds of windows hanging in mid-air. The windows show what's going on in the real world, or in other realms, and sometimes I can get them to show me people and places I want to see. And there's this one window that I can use to find you when you're in this forest that I've been able to jimmy open, and I can go through it to come here. Where are we, Dyson?"
"We're in my dreams," Dyson replies simply.
"Oh." Bo's quiet for a time. "What happened here, this was my fault," Bo confesses. "A few nights ago, my father found out that I was sneaking out to come here. He was very, very angry, Dyson. He burned the forest. I don't think he knows that I'm meeting you here, he just didn't like it when I didn't do as I was told."
"He doesn't know you very well, does he?"
"I figured, he wasn't there for my rebellious teenage years when I was growing up, I should really give him some idea of what he missed out on."
"So you decided to sneak out the window to meet a boy to give him the true teenage daughter experience?"
"Even when I was a teenager, I didn't do as I was told. So if he thinks I'll be a good little girl that he can bend to his will and make me like him, he's got a lot to learn. I know who I am. I'm ..." Bo pauses, struggling to come up with the best way to describe herself.
"You're Bo." Dyson finishes for her, the name encompassing everything he loves about her.
"That's right," Bo affirms, as if he's made her point precisely. They stand awkwardly for a few moments, no longer hugging, not talking, yet not willing to draw away from one another for fear that Bo will vanish.
"I want to try something," she tells him. "I want you to close your eyes. And then I'm going to look at you, to look at your face. If I'm right, that should transport me back to the window place."
Dyson smiles at the practicality of her experiment. "Very scientific."
"Hey, I picked up a few things when I was dating Lauren," Bo explains pertly. "Are your eyes closed?"
Dyson closes his eyes. "They're closed."
He feels her step away from him. A moment passes, and Bo exclaims "I'm still here! It's not when I look at you!" Her hand runs through his beard along his cheek, back to the scruff of his neck, and she pulls him forward into a kiss. His eyes pop open in surprise, but there's nothing for him to see. Bo's gone, the taste of her still on his lips, her scent lingering in the air amid the smell of burnt timber.
The next evening at the Dal, he lets Trick know about the dreams. He doesn't want to, afraid that Trick will tell him that the dreams are just dreams, his subconscious' attempt to reunite him with his mate. But Trick doesn't tell him that. He just looks at Dyson with sorrowful eyes and promises to look into it. Bo's disappearance has taken a heavy toll on the former Blood King, and countless evenings trying to find any clue to his granddaughter's whereabouts, reading fading tomes and casting physically taxing incantations was starting to wear on him. He looks tired, Dyson thinks. He wishes there were something he could do to bring Bo home again.
Part Two Continues Here