Chapter Text
Pale blue light seeping in. Dust in his throat. A glare so bright it lit the world behind his shuttered eyelids in the warm shades of blood and flesh. Yes, he had woken here many times before.
“You are back quickly this time.”
Thancred's eyes slid open. “You say that like I mean to come back here. This is a dream I have no control over – at least, I think it is. You're a very strange dream, I’ll grant you that much.”
He turned to face what he knew would be behind him – a crystal of staggering size and a person before it, shockingly normal among their strange surroundings except for the smooth marble white of their irises.
“Well, for what other reason could you be here?” Their speech was archaic in structure, like some elegant fantasy of centuries past had stepped into his head. The way their accented voice slid around the vowels and rounded out the shape of the words brought a shiver to Thancred’s spine. The feeling didn’t cease as the person – the shade, the spectre, the phantom haunting some self long passed – it belonged to drew closer over the void of pitch below their floating forms. "We are alone together here, are we not?"
“Yes, I suppose we are…” Thancred trailed off uncertainly. He couldn’t say how many times he had found himself here in his dreams, facing a stranger. Still, he knew this wasn’t the first time he had been here, nor would it be the last.
“Does something trouble you?” his companion asked. The way the sentence trailed off left a space open, as if a word – or a name – was on the tip of their tongue but they couldn't find the will to say it.
“How many times have we done this?”
How many times have I lavished in the sight of your face, heard your voice in my ear, felt your skin on my lips? How many times have you kept yourself from saying my name, how many times have I grasped for yours in my memory?
“Never enough for me.” The faintest flicker of a smile touched their lips. “I miss you, achingly.”
How many terribly long years has it been for you? For me?
“I don’t even know you. When I wake up, I can’t say if I’ll remember you. And I might not ever come back.”
Even against his rebuke, that smile infuriatingly, endearingly, beautifully stayed.
“Kiss me before you go, won’t you?”
Thancred sighed. “I always will."