Was I Beautiful?

[Rance]

Miss Gloria, was I beautiful? Was I beautiful, in your d-d-dream?

The seamstress led her mountainous compatriot with care by lantern-light. When they reached the hollowed husk of his woodcutting shack, she finally drew her fingers away from his elbow and wiped them -- once, twice, three times -- across the fabric of her stained skirt. To be so near to him drove pain into her jaw through a cavern in one of her teeth. Little did she know what was still tucked in there, the nebula of a black-oil droplet of blood clinging to the enamels of her sour teeth.

A piece of Catch.

When they neared the door of his shack, her breath became quick, desperate, and she stepped aside to raise high the lantern. Her gray eyes were tired, but they meant to pierce him like arrows.

He had kissed her. He had kissed her weeks ago, and even now her lips trembled like he might do it again. And though she feared being alone with the addled man, she crushed her tensions behind Jerno iron and let the fading lantern hang between them. In the night, woodcutter and seamstress were nothing more than that, but greater than those simple things all at once. Dreamers, both, and strangers, too.

"Why did -- did you ask me about my dream, Mister Catch?"

[catch]

He sang. The whole way, he sang, nursery-rhymes and nonsense-songs, bawdy, drunken things he had heard, lingering on the top steps of the Broken Dagger, silently yearning to join in, yet unable. He sang them, now, as if to scorn his weak limbs, to scold them unfairly. They had borne him through starvation, through exhaustion, through his wild whims and sleepless prowlings, and they could not hold him any more.

When Gloria stopped, it was a torture in him, for his bed was so very near, a thing to sit on, lay on. He sways, his song gurgling in his throat. His mismatched eyes met her grey own, and he frowns, a little, trying to think, the confrontation over a Squirrel's Grave already a puff of cobwebs. It could have happened ten years ago. It could have never happened. "I d-d-don't have dreams, Miss Gloria," he says, and though before he would have said it with worry, with fright that she would take offense, that he would say something wrong, and she would hate him for it, he spoke the words now quite calmly.

"B-b-but I remember when you c-c-came, you and Ser Eater - I remember I was beautiful, and little birds clad in silver."

[Rance]

"Then -- then why ask me about a dream. Why ask me about one?"

There was a quiet need in her voice, and her eyes fell away from his as she reached out, her fingers like claws for a moment as she hovered them over his belly. His belly, where babies would never grow, that had been chiseled lean and granite by the tension of muscles that hoisted axes.

...and little birds clad in silver.

"Tell me," the girl asked, not with harshness or command, but with a plea, the lantern thrust between them shaking in her gloved hand, the contained fire fluttering like a flame-winged butterfly. Though the hot wire seared into her palm, she did not loosen her grip on it. So high were drawn the skirts by her other hand that the hocks of her knees were visible, her ankles all but swimming in the mouths of her wooden clogs.

Ser Eater.

Birds clad in silver.

Was I beautiful?

In her eyes, a memory flickered. Ser Catch, his rattling chain, his bouyant power, his importance, keeping the food-begging people of Myrken from tearing down the doors of the Meetinghouse with their jagged, broken fingernails.

In that moment, she was not afraid of his kisses or his touch. She had forgotten about those things as her head felt swollen with the images of an old dream.

"Did you -- did you end it all, Mister Catch?" she asked. "You cannot ask me such -- such innocent questions and expect that I should not have my own inquiries in return." Her hand let go of her skirts and she scrambled to hold onto his sleeve, almost trying to drag him down to her level so their noses could almost touch one another, and their whispers could be their own conspiracy. "I had a dream of a future, the ugliest and most horrific thing I have ever witnessed.

"Did you -- did you see something too?"

[catch]

She pulled him, and even if he had the strength to resist, he did not. He refused. Her fingers were iron on the tattered remnants of his shirt, and though he shook, he would meet her, nose-for-nose, his lips a threat so close. But he remembers. He pulls the cracked, starving things into his mouth, pursing them out of existence.

"B-b-because it's your d-d-dream," he says, quite as if it were obvious. "N-n-not mine. It's a memory." His understanding breaks down, there, and he only shakes his head, unable to explain it fully, not having the words. Not through any language's fault, but because his shattered brains could not scramble them together.

Did you end it? Catch bowed his head, his ruined forehead to hers, his eyes full of star-like memory. "Ser Eater and I," he says. "We sang the Song. The g-g-golden streets r-ran like rivers. And you went away, went away, and I walked for a time - as I do. I walked for a time, and f-f-found myself in the forest." A hesitance. "I'm n-n-not good at answering, am I, Miss Gloria?"

[Rance]

Passers-by who knew them not may have thought them lovers. Perhaps she was a runaway from a farm-father whose intent had been to sell her for good stock and ten head of cattle; perhaps he was a squire whose knight tomorrow intended to lunge him into battle. Perhaps they were afraid for a future, and taking that moment to press their forehead so close, share one another's breath, and share secrets only they knew.

But none of those things were true. They were a Jerno and a world-breaker; their lips had shared only one kiss in the past, and this was not a time to be afraid of another.

"How d-...did you see what I saw," she asked him, her eyes heavy with tears, the lantern sagging down to her side so that their faces were dark. "The golden streets. The two of you Singing because -- because I hurt him. How did you see these things?"

The bottom of the lantern clapped to the ground. It fell to the side and the flame flickered out of existence. With her sweat-stained sleeves and her elbow peeking through torn dress-fabric, she lifted her arms up and cupped her hands around Catch's cheeks, her thick fingers rustling amid the hair on his face, her thumbs steadying themselves at the corners of his eyes. "You answer better than anyone. Because you were beautiful; you are beautiful. Do you know how it has agonized me, Mister Catch, to -- to be afraid? That I have told myself time and time again it was a mistake, that you were confused, and so was I?"

Then, her hands snaked up to his scalp, grappled at his hair and tugged him and his scar closer still, so that his chin was on her shoulder and her words were hot gasps against his ear.

"Does it come true," she asked him, believing -- in that instant -- that he could see across mountains and time, and there was a gift to his madness, all while her tooth drummed like a Jernosta war-tom and her tears cut streaks in her black-sweat face.

"It was just a dream. A dream I had -- a dream you had." How? "Wasn't it, Catch?"

[catch]

No answers. No answers. Catch only shakes his head in the confines of her palms, and he doesn't know that he cries, that his eyes are blinded by tears, spurred by exhaustion and a feeling he cannot name. She cradles him, and he can allow his tears to freely fall, too exhausted, too confronted to care any longer. The memory of Cherny's death was bitter. Gloria's abandonment of the dream even more so, because he had been alone, so alone in that memory, without even the comfort of dumb beasts.

"Always," he says, broken words and quiet sobs, "Always." Always it came true, the Song, the Memory, and not even the fay spring-tide could comfort him, the growing and birthing of new-things. He could not even lie to comfort her, to comfort himself.

[Rance]

Always.

A single word. That a Dream would come true; that a Dream might come to life; that they would always have the same dreams, sense the same terrors, walk in a world to the cadence of the rotten cavity that throbbed in her furthest molar. A hardened little jewel of Catch's blood swelled within the soft inner parts, tucked away, hidden from the occasional needlepoint that sought out old food in the cracks of her sand-broken teeth.

"Promise me," she whispered, while shivering thumbs tried to stroke away his silvered tears, her own damp eyes trying to keep his locked on hers. There was no fear there, not this time, but confident, glassy Jerno steel. "Promise me that -- that those things you saw you will tell nobody about. The golden city and -- and the terrors we did; promise me, Mister Catch, that this is our secret."

Her next whisper was hollow, exact, and cold. When tears streaked through the old grime on her face, she did not seem to notice them. She tightened her jaw against a thing that must be done.

"N'a'vak lia at'chem h'l do volvol k'a ar'vak par'do a't."

Glass words. Jernoan. Her language. A little poison to his mind, that she prayed he would obey as he always had before -- the way a good rat'vak did.

Never speak words of this dream to anyone except me.

"We have to -- to keep them safe. We have got to make sure it does not happen."