Archive of Our Own ^beta

She is drawing a door, but it won’t come out right.

It’s her old apartment, but it isn’t. It’s her old apartment, but the decades of yellow nicotine stains have been scrubbed off the walls, and the windows that used to be painted shut are wide open and the fresh air is streaming in, and it’s fresh air, without the lingering chemical scent she remembers from the old days. It’s her old apartment, but there’s a bouquet of daisies on the kitchen table (which is standing straight and stable, without the lean from the broken leg she couldn’t fix right), and it’s in a vase that Jonah bought for her last summer, the green glass one he refills all summer long with flowers from his garden, all winter long with flowers from the grocery store.

The easel is the same, though, and the black magic marker in her hand is the same one she stole from the restaurant.

And she is drawing a door, or she’s trying to, but it won’t come out right.

She flips the sheet of paper over the top of the pad, starts again on the next one.

The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with the doors that she’s drawing. They’re perfectly fine doors – a little sketchy and loose, and the lines less than clean, but it’s black magic marker on paper, and it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. But they aren’t right, either, and she can’t remember why. There’s something missing about them. There’s something –

A croak from the window. A raven, sitting on the windowsill. Larger than Lucienne, without her careful posture. Not the same one she saw back in November, either. Amilyn suppresses a shiver, remembering. That had been a bad dream, and a worse day to follow it.

Things are better now, and obviously this dream has been crafted to be pleasant enough. There shouldn’t be a reason for fear.

And even if there is, it’s not like she can turn away. “Guess you guys need me?” she asks.

The raven croaks again, flies out the window.

Amilyn sighs, takes her marker, goes to one of the perfectly clean walls. She draws a door, just a simple thing. Not really any different than the ones she’d drawn on the paper. But there is a difference.

This door works.

She tucks the marker in the pocket of her ripped jeans, closes her hand around the very solid doorknob, and pulls it open.

What’s waiting for her beyond the door is nothing she’s ever seen before. It isn’t the cemetery of empty graves between the two haunted houses, and it isn’t the flat gray nothing stretching away from dark waters out into infinity, and it isn’t the ruins where she left Lucienne last.

What it is, is beautiful.

It’s the most beautiful goddamn library she’s ever seen.

The ceilings are high, vaulted, with enormous windows letting in the light. The shelves go on forever, or seemingly so, with leather bound books packed tightly onto all of them. The Last of the Steam Motors Cyber-Men, gold letters on green. Enemy of the Formless, silver and black. Her fingers linger on the spine of Freedom Fighters of Detroit in the Year that Wasn’t, considering (the way Martha used to look at her, and the questions she never fully answered). Then she sees Unwritten Torchwood Logs: Detroit, 1983 – 1986, and she can’t help herself. She pulls it off the shelf, smooth and cool in her hands, flips through the pages.

Update: Local Witch has found herself a spell book. Rissa is smug; Sam’s still trying to find a reason why this is all actually aliens. Personally, I’ll believe in anything that gets rid of the giant spider. Hate spiders. Absolutely hate spiders.

He’d always pretended he hadn’t; that was the funny part. God, that one time she’d gotten pulled in to helping them find something – a Daktari stool or something like that – they’d had to go into this girl’s room to get it, and she’d had tarantulas, and Amilyn tried everything she could think of to get Donny away but he insisted, even though he was shaking the whole time –

A croaking noise from further in the library calls her to her purpose. She slides Unwritten Torchwood Logs back onto the shelf, next to a copy of The Many Lives of Mr. Universe. She shivers at that, pulls Unwritten Torchwood Logs back out, tucks it further down the shelf between Song of the Last Living Time Agent and Gay Eminem and the Tall Guy – Stories by TWDLuvr, 2013. It’s better company for him anyway.

(He acts like he’s harmless, Donny had told her, once. He acts like he’s harmless, but he’s not.)

In the distance, a rustle of feathers. Amilyn strides on, past comfortably plush-looking chairs and ornately carved wooden desks, beautiful framed art, something that looks like a gramophone but visibly isn’t, even though Amilyn couldn’t say why. And the books stretch on and on, infinite. Stories unwritten, lost, forgotten.

Lucienne would love this place.

Lucienne.

(“I don’t even know who you are. I had to ask –” She’d pushed her glasses up her nose, stared down at the ground. “Never mind. Honestly, though. I’m next to useless in this.”)

But far from useless, of course. About as far as it was possible to be.

She takes a flight of stairs down with quick steps, one hand on the railing, turns.

There, returning a book to a shelf, is a tallish young man with stylishly messy dark hair. His bearing is regal, but his dress is simple enough – long dark coat, skinny black jeans, combat boots. He’s very, very pale. Gaunt in a way that makes the aunt in her want to take him out for a good breakfast. Familiar/unfamiliar in the way of all dreams, and absolutely not human in the slightest.

There’s a rustle of wings; the large raven perches on the shelf above him. Lucienne had been the raven, of course, one and the same. This young man is something else. Separate.

It clicks into place, and Amilyn’s throat tightens unexpectedly. “You’re okay,” she says, which wasn’t exactly what she meant to say. But it’s honest, at least.

He turns, his eyebrows drawing together in something like a frown. “I… Yes, I am well,” he says. Even with the slightly questioning lilt, his voice has a gravity to it. It sinks in like the words are etching themselves into the air. “Did you think I would not be?”

“Things in November were looking… rough,” Amilyn reminds him. Cracks in the Dreaming, or at least what was left of it. And in the real world – Well.

His eyebrows unknot themselves; he halfway shrugs, as if to acknowledge the point.

“I mean, obviously, the world didn’t end, so I figured everything came out all right in the end, but. All the same.”

Ben standing up in the middle of the diner and Amilyn watching him, worried. He’d looked up, toward the ceiling. Cocked his head left, cocked his head right. Listening, more obviously than she’d ever seen him do it before. As if the strangeness of the day finally eroded the careful walls he’d built around the strangeness in him. She’d watched with bated breath, aware that no matter what, she would never see him this way again.

“It’s over,” he said, finally. “I don’t know – I don’t know what happened. But it’s over. It’s okay now. I think.”

He’d looked to Amilyn then, and she’d nodded. “Right,” she said. “I’ll call Torchwood, let them know. And we’ll… Well. Guess we should open back up. Get ready to feed some people.”

“Yes,” he says. “I suppose so. And you, are you well? And your city?”

The concern is very sincere, almost shockingly so. He actually reminds her of Ben, a little bit. He seems like he would take things to heart in the same way. “Pretty well, actually, thank you. We had some rebuilding; I think everyone did. But it’s coming along well.” She hesitates only a moment, then adds, “Honestly, it probably would’ve been a lot worse if Lucienne hadn’t thought to warn us. She saved us a lot of time. And she helped me protect a lot of people.”

“Lucienne didn’t warn you,” he says, so matter-of-factly that it might as well be a slap. Seeing her flinch, he adds, quickly, “Although I have no doubt she would have, if she could have. But there was not a creature left in the Dreaming who could have, at that point. It was entirely up to you. I understand you do quite well in such circumstances.”

Flattery. Deliberately aimed. It doesn’t quite land, though. “I saw a raven,” she says, her voice surprisingly wobbly. “I saw –”

“Did you see a raven?” he asks her. “Or did you draw a raven? Because Matthew was with me, and Lucienne was… indisposed.” A note of trouble in his voice at that, enough to twist Amilyn’s stomach a little. “There were no other ravens in the Dreaming at that point. Unless you drew one.”

She’d been drawing ravens, then, in her waking hours. No particular reason that she could see, at least not at the time, but she’d been drawing ravens. Painting ravens. Black wings on dark skies. It’s not a train of thought she cares to follow any further, so she shakes it aside. “You said Lucienne was indisposed,” she says. “Is she – I mean, she’s okay now, right?”

His mouth quirks into what might be a fraction of a smile. “Lucienne is quite well, thank you,” he says. “She is currently completing a census of the beings in the Dreaming, in order to make sure all of the Dreams and Nightmares are present and accounted for. She suggested I reach out to you to recover the Nightmares that are in your custody.” He hesitates a moment, then adds, “They are still in your custody. Aren’t they?”

“Technically, they’re under Torchwood custody,” Amilyn says. “I didn’t exactly want to stuff them under my bed, and there wasn’t much space where I was living. But they’re safe in the Central. I’ve actually checked on them a few times recently. No damage to their boxes, no sign that they’ve been released somehow. You can still sort of… feel them down there, actually. It’s hard to explain.”

He shrugs. “You’re sensitive to it. Some are. Not many, but some.” Another little pause, as he considers things. “And you can bring me to Torchwood? To where my Nightmares are?”

“Sure,” Amilyn says. Honestly, it’s past time they went home. If the Library’s any indication, they’ve finally got a home to go to. “Yeah, absolutely. Did you want to go right –”

And just like that, she’s back in her body, in her bed, Jonah’s body warm behind her and his arm heavy around her waist. She lets out a soft, grumbling noise. It seemed so real, is the thing, and she wants the nightmares back home almost as badly as –

“Sweetheart.” Jonah’s voice barely a whisper in the dark, thrumming with tension. There’s the faintest twitch in the arm around her waist, like he wants to tighten his grip but knows better than to show he’s awake. “We have guests.”

Ah. It’s a moment before Amilyn can feel it, but when she does, it’s unmistakable. That peculiar electricity in the air, the echoes of the Dreaming. “I invited them,” she murmurs, a little louder than him. “I think.”

“You think,” he echoes, dubiously, but he eases his grip on her waist, lets her push herself up. She takes a moment to reach across and turn on the bedside lamp before twisting up into a sitting position, back against the headboard, blanket pulled carefully into her lap. Thank God she usually has at least a t-shirt on when she goes to bed; pity she isn’t wearing more than that. But no time to dwell on it now. There’s a pale, skinny young man standing by the window, in a black coat, with a raven on his shoulder. The lamplight catches in one of his eyes like the gleam of a distant star.

So that means she’s got work.

“Jonah,” she says, as he straightens himself up next to her, one of his hands reaching out to cover hers. “This is Morpheus, ruler of the Dreaming, king of dreams and nightmares. And his raven, Matthew.” She doesn’t hesitate on either name; Lando would be so proud. “Matthew, Lord Morpheus. This is my husband, Jonah Hawthorne.”

“Gentlebeings,” Jonah says, and Amilyn falls a little more in love with him just for how calm he sounds, even though he’s just woken up to a strange deity in his bedroom. “It’s a pleasure.”

“It is indeed,” Morpheus says. “Jonah Hawthorne. My apologies for waking you. It could not be helped. Some years ago, your wife undertook to contain several nightmares that had been set loose in your city, a task which she performed admirably. At the time, I was… absent from the Dreaming.” Pain in his voice at that; Amilyn squeezes her husband’s hand. “Therefore the nightmares could not be safely returned. But I am back now, and the time has come for my nightmares to return home.”

“Of course,” Jonah says. “No, perfectly reasonable.” He turns to Amilyn, the hint of a smile on his face. He’s faking, a little. Amilyn can always tell. “So I’m assuming you haven’t got the nightmares up in the attic, then.”

“No,” she says, and plays along. “Torchwood took them for me. We put them in Subarchive C, down below the firing range.”

“I have been down there,” Jonah says, and then frowns. “I think. Isn’t that where we put that weird gauntlet thing? And the knife?”

“The very same,” Amilyn says. She glances back at Morpheus, waiting patiently by the window. “Anyway, since I brought the nightmares in, I figure I should be the one to get them back out again. Also, there really isn’t anyone left who’s interacted with the Dreaming but me any more, so. I’m sure Lord Morpheus could find someone else to go to, but…”

“But it wouldn’t be easy, and they’d be unlikely to trust right out of the gate,” Jonah finishes. He does not mention her casual admission that she’s interacted with the Dreaming before, but she’s sure it’ll come up later. “Well, and I suppose that if the Dreaming wants you, this really is the only time they can find you. Since you consistently refuse to do any kind of napping, even when you say you’re exhausted and you need to.”

“I nap.” She does not nap. “I nap plenty.” She never naps.

“I will not keep her long,” Morpheus says, all solemnity. “And no harm will come to her in our absence. You have my word.”

Amilyn and Jonah look at Morpheus, then at each other. “I mean, no harm will come from the nightmares,” Amilyn says. “Obviously, if there’s Sontarans or whatever…”

“Well, then you’ll be protecting them,” Jonah says, gesturing towards Morpheus and Matthew. The little perplexed frown on Morpheus’s face is oddly priceless. “That being said, would it be a terrible imposition if I asked to tag along? Only the Time Agency was remarkably repressive about anything it considered ‘superstition,’ so I never really got a look in at any witchcraft or… nightmares or anything like that. Except for when you put wards up around half Detroit, but it didn’t seem the time to ask too many questions.”

“Did he just say Time Agency?” Matthew asks, his voice something like a rusty screen door, if the screen door had a Bronx accent. Jonah startles slightly at the sound of it, but doesn’t comment.

Amilyn looks at Morpheus, who still seems a little miffed, although it’s fading quickly. “I’ve no objection,” she says. “But it’s up to you. They’re your nightmares.”

He shrugs. “If you wish to come along, I suppose you may,” he says. “Perhaps you might even be permitted to ask questions, this time.” He says it with the barest hint of a smile. “Although that is not up to me.”

Jonah chuckles at that, a good deal warmer now. “Well,” he says again. “In that case, I suppose I ought to put some pants on. You may want to look away for this part. I don’t tend to sleep clothed, as a general rule.”

“Your nudity is of no concern to me,” Morpheus says.

Matthew clears his throat (a very strange noise, from a bird), and Morpheus tries again. “However, if it would make you more comfortable, Matthew and I can both turn away.”

“Oh, completely unnecessary,” Jonah says, cheerful as anything, and climbs out of bed without another moment of hesitation. “No, we never had much of a nudity taboo, growing up. Well, and in the 51st century, it’s not quite as common as it is today. But I like to –”

“You’re from the future?” Matthew asks, sounding shockingly impressed for a talking raven from the Dreaming. Amilyn takes advantage of the distraction to slip across to Jonah’s side of the bed and scoot out from underneath the covers. She can’t quite hide herself behind him, as slight as he is. But he can draw focus, at least.

After all, he might be a casual nudist from the 51st century, but she’s not. And her parents were Presbyterians.

“He did say he was a Time Agent,” Morpheus says, a little chiding. Amilyn pulls a pair of panties out of the top dresser drawer, slips them on.

“Yeah, and then he never said what that meant, so –”

“Fair enough,” Jonah says, amicably. Amilyn hands him his underpants. “When humans found themselves with technology suited to traveling through time, it naturally followed that they started trying to change things that had already happened, running the risk of creating paradoxes. Some quite serious. The Time Agency was founded in part to prevent those kinds of paradoxes. At least that’s what they told us when we signed up. I’d be lying if I said I never had my doubts.”

“Yet you stayed.” Morpheus says it neutrally enough, but Amilyn still stops with her jeans halfway up her legs, turns her attention back towards him. She’s never fought a God, or a demigod, or whatever he is. But under the right circumstances, she’ll give it a try.

“I did stay,” Jonah says, and tugs a t-shirt over his head. “Because I never saw anyone who left that didn’t immediately turn into some kind of serial killing maniac, or at the very least a con artist, and I knew that wasn’t for me. And then it all fell apart, and I figured someone should clean up the messes we’d left behind. And I did what I could. For as long as I could. And then I got old, and I couldn’t anymore.”

“You don’t look that old to me,” Matthew says, immediately.

When Jonah grins in response, all the lines around his dark eyes fold beautifully into place. “Well that’s very kind of you to say, Matthew,” he says, crouching down for a pair of jeans. Amilyn buttons hers up, ducks around him to make her way to the closet. Even this time of year, Subarchive C is chilly. They’ll want sweaters, probably. Shoes, of course.

And then there’s the little package at the back of her safe that she should probably get as well.

“Anyway, I felt old. Certainly too old to keep on the way that I had been. But I couldn’t bring myself to fully retire, either. And I knew that the Torchwood here could use the extra hands. Especially being the last ones left. So this is where I came. Worked out pretty well for me.”

Even in the depths of the closet, Amilyn can feel him smiling in her direction. She hopes he can feel her smiling back.

“And the rest are all gone?” Morpheus asks. “London, Cardiff…”

“Oh yes,” Jonah says, and then, “Well… There’s Gwen and Rhys in Cardiff. Andy sometimes; he helps out here and there. But it’s just the two of them, no base or anything like that. And London’s been gone a while now, of course. Glasgow, Delhi…”

Behind the boots, at the back of the closet, is a small safe, about knee high. Combination lock, nothing fancy. Amilyn opens it, pulls out her .45, the boxes of ammo, the jewelry her grandmother gave her, sets it all atop the safe. She reaches back in, feeling out the edges of the false back. She pries it loose.

“Me personally, no,” Jonah says. Amilyn missed the question. Well… missed is a relative term, she supposes. She reaches back into the darkness. “No, I’ve only ever worked with the team here. As I understand it, we gave the rest of Torchwood a fairly wide berth. For good reasons, I’ve been told. Some fairly nasty business in the early days.”

The silver box is warm under her hands, even though it really shouldn’t be. She traces the engravings over it with a careful finger, and it opens to her touch. Inside it, an old purple and gold Crown Royal bag. It looks like everything’s still there – the paper, the key. The little pocket knife, and the band-aid for after. The antiseptic’s probably gone bad by now, of course, but they’ll have something at the Central.

She puts everything back into the Crown Royal bag, hides the silver box back behind the false back, and restocks the safe. No point in grabbing her gun, not for this. Either she knows what she’s doing or she’ll have to figure it out on the fly. But no one ever beat a nightmare by shooting it.

Can’t shoot a curse, either. But that goes without saying.

“-- ask Aly about that. He might be on tonight, come to think of it.” Jonah turns to Amilyn as she comes out of the closet, a sweater for each of them draped over her right arm, her boots in her right hand, his old running shoes in her left. The Crown Royal bag bulges one of her back pockets. “Speaking of. Should probably call and let them know we’re coming, yeah?”

“Probably,” Amilyn says. She drops her boots, wiggles sockless feet inside them. Jonah steps forward to take his sneakers, his gray cardigan. “Are we driving or teleporting?”

“Did she just –” Matthew starts, and then shuts his beak abruptly, ruffles his feathers. “Sorry. Forget I said that. I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

“Well, it’s your first time around a time traveler and we’ve only known each other five minutes, so.” Jonah smiles again. Then he turns to Morpheus, expression sobering slightly. “I suppose it’s up to you, really,” he says. “Can you go through the vortex? Or would it…”

“I prefer not to,” Morpheus says. “But you can travel as you please. Matthew and I will follow in our own fashion.”

“I’ll call,” Amilyn says, and crosses back to snag her phone off the bedside table.

It’s picked up after the first ring. It’s always picked up after the first ring, unless the world is ending. “Amilyn?” J’s deep voice rumbling down the line, heavy with concern. “Everything good?”

“It’s fine,” she says. “I just… So you know the nightmares down in Subarchive C?”

“Ominous,” J says. “But yes, I am familiar. You’ve checked up on them a few times lately, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yeah, well.” She glances up at Morpheus. Matthew’s hopped off his shoulder and on to Jonah’s, apparently to get a better look at the vortex manipulator strapped to Jonah’s wrist. “A lot’s been happening in the Dreaming, lately, so.”

“The Dreaming.” She can’t tell if J’s panicking or about to laugh. Or both. Probably both. J’s not the one who enjoys Torchwood’s occasional dips into mysticism.

“Yeah. The place where dreams come from. The Dreaming.”

“Right. Of course. Silly me. So. What’s new in the Dreaming, then?”

“Tons,” Amilyn says. Morpheus is watching her; his eyes are so shadowed they look fathomless and black. Somehow, there’s just the smallest reflection from her lamp in that darkness, though. A single star in a vast night. “It’s a very long story that I only know pieces of. But they’ve rebuilt, they’ve… And they’re ready for their Nightmares back.”

“Hm.” But J doesn’t ask. He will, eventually; she’ll probably tell him sometime even if he doesn’t. But not right now. “Okay. So, artifact repatriation, Subarchive C, the Nightmares. We’re gonna need two Torchwood agents – I’m assuming you’re bringing Jonah with?”

“Already woke him up, so.”

A chuff of laughter. “Taking that as a yes. And the agents of the Dreaming?”

“Two. Lord Morpheus and his raven, Matthew.”

“And you vouch for them?”

It takes Amilyn back for a half a second. She’s never really vouched before. Usually, she’s the one who gets vouched for. “Yeah. Yeah, I vouch.”

“Sounds good.” He taps at the computer. “We need you specifically, or a witch with similar skills, including but not limited to…” He falls silent, just when she most wants him to keep going. “Huh. That’d make a hell of a Craiglist ad.”

Perry probably would’ve written the instructions. Amilyn’s going to have to see what exactly he thought she was capable of. “Kai would murder you.”

“If I die for anything, might as well be for a giggle.” More tapping. “I’m assuming you’ve got the cursebreaking kit and the spellbook.”

“Spellbook’s in Kai’s office.” She almost doesn’t want to look at it again. It’s a useful thing, in its way, but it’s full of traps. Even if the worst of it was long since excised. “The kit I’ve got. You could get me a couple antiseptic wipes and a band-aid, though. Anything else?”

“Fire extinguisher, but that’s already down there.” A pause. “Flour,” he says, and Amilyn grins, shakes her head. She’d forgotten about that trick. “I – Do I want to know?”

She shrugs. “Have you ever had a dream when you were running from something you couldn’t see?”

Another pause, of a different color this time. “Flour,” he says again, more approvingly. “And a black magic marker, which I think I can do. And that should be everything. You guys starting up in Kai’s office, then?”

“Makes the most sense, I think. Subarchive C is a no-teleportation zone anyway. Anywhere else and we’d just be wandering around in circles all night.”

“Well, some nights are like that.” A little more typing. “All right. I will finish this, gather my supplies, and meet you up there?”

“Sounds good. See you in a few.”

“See you in a few,” J says.

She hangs up, puts the phone back in her pocket. Jonah, Matthew, and Morpheus are all eyeing her, all different degrees of speculative. “You know,” Jonah says, “sometimes I really feel it’s better to hear one side of a conversation, without context. Makes it more of a mystery like that.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Morpheus says, and Amilyn tries to keep her face neutral at that and knows she doesn’t quite. But none of them comment, either.

“Well,” she says, and finally wriggles into her sweater. “Suppose I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Sweetheart?”

“At your command, as always.” He waits for Matthew to hop back onto Morpheus’s shoulder before crossing to her, holding his arm out. She tucks her arm through his, closes her eyes. Feels the tension creeping in, despite her best efforts to hold it off. She’s gone through the vortex dozens of times by now. Hell, she’s gone through the vortex alone more than once. She still hates it.

“Call my name when you arrive at your destination,” Morpheus tells them. “And we will find you.”

“Sure,” Amilyn says, more breathless than she’d like. She doesn’t open her eyes. “Sure. Sounds great.”

“See you in a few, then,” Jonah says, calm as can be. Of course, he navigates the vortex like he was born to it. Amilyn has just enough time to wonder how Jonah would react if she could bring him into the Dreaming –

And then the bottom drops out and she feels the vortex tearing at her, hears its howling in her ears, the endless gnawing hunger of it searching for a place to set its teeth –

And then she’s standing in a dark quiet place with Jonah’s arm in hers, his body slight and solid at her side, his grip a steady anchor, and the burning tension starts to ebb away slowly.

They’ve gone back. She can never tell how far. Time travel just isn’t really her thing. “When are we?” she asks, soft.

Jonah shrugs. “Figured we’d want to use the restroom sooner rather than later, given the hike we have ahead of us. And then I wasn’t sure how long it would take to send the nightmares back, not having done it before, so –”

It’s funny – she hadn’t even thought about needing to pee before he mentioned it, but suddenly it feels like there’s an ocean sloshing around in there, or at least a small lake. Erie, maybe. “Have I told you you’re brilliant today?”

She opens her eyes in time to see him shrugging. “It’s early yet. Let me get the lights on first.” He drags his finger across the front of his vortex manipulator and the lights come up dim enough that she doesn’t have to squint. “There,” he says, and if he’s more than a little pleased with himself – well, she’s pretty pleased with him too. “Ladies first.”

She presses a kiss to his stubbled cheek before hurrying off to the bathroom. It might have taken her a little time to feel the pressure on her bladder, but now that it’s there, the time she has left to deal with it is limited. Especially at her age.

Once she’s out again, and Jonah’s in, she turns to the bookshelf behind Kai’s desk. Most of the books mean nothing to her, quite literally – at least half of them are in languages only Aly or Jonah could hope to ever decipher. But there’s two that are only hers. One is small, unassuming, with a battered red cover. That’s the one she reaches for first, reflexive even now. But it’s not the one she needs.

A little reluctant, she rests her hand on the spine of the one next to it, a large, ornate thing. Obnoxious, almost. Ominous, certainly. She pulls it out with both hands, lays it down on the desk. It always opens to the same place, the gap towards the back where several pages were cut out with a knife. Simple physics. Still, though.

“So I just… leave him,” she’d said, eyes burning. Embarrassment, anger, hopelessness… all of it.

Half a year ago, she’d been unstoppable. Now here she was, in London, at a dead end she couldn’t draw a doorway through.

“You’ll see him one day,” Mad Hettie’d told her. “You’ll see him walking free. But it’s not your job to get him there. And you can’t make it yours. I’m sorry. All you can do is wait.”

The worst thing you could say to her back then, of course. But Amilyn had waited. Hating every second at first, and then less so as the distractions crept in, and then she’d stopped thinking of him at all for weeks, months. Never completely, though, even after Canary Wharf fell and she stopped working with Torchwood and she pretended she was capable of something like a normal life. Even then, she wondered sometimes about him.

Mad Hettie had been telling the truth after all. Not that it was really a surprise.

She flips back towards the beginning of the book, the easier stuff. Relatively speaking, of course. Certainly nothing she should’ve tried as a novice, even with Lucienne’s help. And the curse was something she pulled out on her own. But it is hers. It should be hers to break.

Hopefully.

The bathroom door opens – there’s a click of the lights turning off, then Jonah’s footsteps behind her. He hesitates an arm’s length away.

“It’s all right,” she says. “I’m not defusing a bomb over here.”

The yet goes unspoken; she knows they’re both thinking it.

He comes up behind her anyway, rests a hand on the small of her back. Funny how it seems to help her focus. “Feels like a bomb,” he observes after a bit.

Amilyn smiles. “Magic is a tool,” she says, something she does and doesn’t believe.

“So’s a bomb, in the right circumstances.” He grins at her. She grins back. “You’ve got time, you know.”

And if she doesn’t, he’ll give it to her. He’ll give her all the time she needs.

She doesn’t need more. There’s a particular sort of click in her head, like the last pin of the lock dropping out of the way. She’s ready.

“No,” she says. “We’re.. We’re good.” She glances back over to him. “I mean, assuming we’re good. If we need to wait a little longer, then –”

“One more thing we need to do,” he says, his arm sliding around her waist. She turns her attention from the old grimoire gratefully, takes his face in both her hands, tilts him up as she tips down for the kiss. It’d be better in bed, maybe, but. It’s pretty good right now, too. “Good morning,” he breathes, as they break apart.

“Morning,” she says, and kisses him again. Yeah, it’s pretty good. “Better?”

“Nearly.” One last kiss, then. Three’s always been a good number for her. They look at each other for a moment – the warmth in his brown eyes always lights her up from within – and then almost in unison, they turn their backs to the desk, facing the expanse of Kai’s neglected office. The door in the corner, the wall of old photographs. The empty space between is where he’ll show, when he does.

“Lord Morpheus,” Amilyn calls out. “We’re ready.”

He coalesces slowly out of the shadows, a gathering darkness taking form, resolving itself. It’s almost jarring to see the finished result, how nearly ordinary he is. “Amilyn. Jonah. Thank you for your… promptness.”

An amused glitter in his eyes as he says it. They must’ve cut it pretty close to when they left.

“And our escort?” he continues, turning to look around the room, as if J’s about to step out from the gaps in the wood paneling, or from behind the old hippie tapestries on the left wall.

“He’ll be here in a few,” Amilyn says. “Central’s pretty big, and he’s got a couple stops to make. But he’ll be here as quick as he can.”

“Hmmm.” He turns away, drifts toward the wall of photographs. Matthew, apparently uninterested, hops off his shoulder and flaps awkwardly to the desk, where he perches on an unlit goose-necked lamp.

“So what is this place, anyway?” he asks. “Like, it’s the Central, but… What is that?”

“Michigan Central Station,” Amilyn says. “It’s an old train station, out past –”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” Matthew says, perking up. “Hey, wasn’t there an Eminem video shot here? I remember –”

Dream’s talking raven is an Eminem fan. Interesting. “Couple years ago, yeah. That was up –” She points at the ceiling. “We’re a ways down from there. Looks a little different up there, too, now, with Ford moving in and all.” It doesn’t look that different, granted, after November, but.

“Still, though.” He hops a little closer to the lampshade. Peers down at the grimoire. “Cool book. Is that, like, your spellbook or something?”

“Don’t know if I’d call it mine.” She can’t hear Morpheus’s steps on the shag carpet, but she can feel him coming up behind her, somehow. “I don’t know. Things like this, I think they own you more than you own them. If you let them, anyway.” She pauses, then adds. “But yeah. It’s a spellbook.”

She thinks, briefly, of staying where she is, between Morpheus and the spellbook. Not that she’s afraid of what he would do with it, not at all. If anything, she’s afraid –

– not exactly the sort of thing you’d use to bind a garden variety nightmare –

Well. Just afraid.

She steps out of the way, lets him come closer to the desk. He reaches one pale, long-fingered hand toward the cover of the grimoire, but doesn’t touch it. Doesn’t flip the pages open to where one spell in particular was cut out with an Xacto knife.

“You found it like this?”

Amilyn swallowed hard, nodded. “Just like this.”

“How did you acquire this?” he asks, voice soft.

She shrugs. “Oh, I stole it,” she says. The look on his face (on all their faces, really) make it worth the saying. “I had my reasons. And that’s all I’m going to say until J gets up here. I don’t feel like telling the story twice. Or starting in the middle, for that matter.”

Morpheus studies her for a moment. It’s funny – in the library, he felt taller than she was. In her bedroom, taller than that. Here, they’re of a height. “Fair enough,” he says, finally, and turns his attention back to the book. He flips the cover open, runs his fingers down the ornate curlicues of the frontispiece. “This was in a library in London, once.”

“Yeah,” Amilyn says, and ignores the chill trickling down her spine at the memory. “Yeah. The guy I stole it from said he got it from a Torchwood agent there. Which wasn’t entirely a lie. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it wasn’t entirely a lie, either.”

Morpheus almost seems to smile, if only for a moment. “But that’s later in the story as well, I assume.”

“That’s the end of the story,” she says, and then amends it. “Well. It was. Until tonight.”

It’s the first time she can remember that she’s come so completely full circle. It feels a little like vertigo, actually. Like she could look down and there she’d be, sitting at that table, across from Mad Hettie, just starting to realize how completely she’d been had.

Jonah’s hand settles on the small of her back, and she takes a deep breath.

“Sorry,” she says. “I guess I never really believed I’d get here.”

Morpheus nods, his eyes still on the book. He has to know, or at least guess. But it’s hard to imagine him not knowing. “Yes. I confess I had my doubts as well, from time to time. And yet. Here we both are.”

He looks at her then, eye to eye, and the remnants of the vertigo fade away, leaving her more stable than she’s felt in a long time. “Yeah. Here we are.”

There’s a soft tap on the door – J announcing his entrance. They turn as a group, only to be confronted by J coming through the door, in his typical UNIT black, with a mint green baby carrier strapped to his chest, a sack of flour nestled in the baby carrier. There’s a matching diaper bag dangling from one of his hands. There are tiny yellow and orange giraffes on the baby carrier and the diaper bag.

“I have so many questions,” Matthew announces to the room at large.

J, bless him, isn’t even phased by the fact that the raven is talking. “It worked in junior high,” he says. Somehow, Amilyn thinks that J had the best-tended flour baby in his entire seventh grade class. “Lord Morpheus. Matthew. My name’s J. I’ll be your escort down to Subarchive C.” He steps forward, hand extended. After a moment, Morpheus reaches out to shake hands. However tall he’s meant to be, he’s absolutely dwarfed by J. But then, most people are. “Sorry about the wait,” J adds, stepping back. “Took me a moment to get everything together.” He holds up the diaper bag. “This is for your spellbook. And the antiseptic and everything’s in here, too.”

“Thanks, J,” Amilyn says, taking the bag from his outstretched hand. Slipping the ornate, ancient, slightly terrifying grimoire into a giraffe-patterned diaper bag feels like some sort of subversive victory.

“I too would like to thank you,” Morpheus says. “For serving as our escort. And for taking time away from your work to do it. I hope we haven’t interrupted anything important.”

J shrugs. “Mostly I just work in the archives on the overnights anyway,” he says. “Filling in the gaps in our history, that kind of thing. So this is actually kind of perfect. 1983 – 1986 is one of our bigger unresolved mysteries. Most of the records are pretty perfunctory. Especially the ones about the Nightmares. Shall we?”

He crosses to the door – it’s an invitation, in more ways than one. Amilyn takes it, stepping forward. Jonah is immediately at her side; Morpheus falls in behind her, Matthew settling on his shoulder. “In Donny’s defense,” she says, as she reaches the threshold. “Whole team was pretty sleep-deprived at that point. I don’t know if I’d have written much about it either.”

“Fair,” J says, and leads them out into the wood-paneled hallway.

“So… Like, were the nightmares actually running around Detroit?” Matthew asks. “Or were they – ‘Cause I kinda got the impression –”

“No, they were running around,” Amilyn says. She reaches out, finds Jonah reaching back. Their fingers tangle together. “Well. Most of them were. The House pretty much just stayed where it was.”

“The House?” Matthew asks.

Again, it’s an invitation. Or enough of one.

Amilyn takes a deep breath.

“So this was about a year after I’d moved to Detroit,” she says. “It wasn’t going very well. I was waitressing, making just about enough to live on, if I kept it cheap. A lot of mac and cheese. A lot of hot dogs. I was living in a not great part of town – pretty much doesn’t exist now, actually. Mostly just warehouses. Even back then, it kind of smelled like burnt plastic, you know? Chemical. And I just felt really stuck about it all. And artistically, very stuck. I’d open a sketchbook and just stare at the page. I’d try to paint and start to get edgy about ruining a canvas if I didn’t like what I’d done. Or running out of paint and not being able to afford more. Just… very trapped feeling. Very awful.

“And at a certain point, I started having dreams about this House.” It hadn’t been her grandmother’s house, of course, but it’s what she’d always thought of at the time, wandering the endless hallways of it. Something about the wallpaper, about the carpets. About the dim light of it. “I was trying to get out, trying to get to an exit, and it kept changing on me. I’d see a doorway, and then I’d get to it, and it just led to another hallway. Or I’d see a window, and when I approached, it wasn’t there anymore. I’d think that if I turned left, I’d be heading towards the door, and then I’d do it and just be going up a flight of stairs. I couldn’t get out. I know time’s always a bit abstract in dreams, but I’d wake up feeling like I spent hours and hours just walking in circles, trying to get out.”

As she says it, J leads them out to the set of metal stairs leading down to the main level, a vast, cavernous space. The “out” seems to echo strangely. There was never any place like this in the House, of course. There could’ve been. Maybe Morpheus could add it.

She files the thought away for later.

“I don’t remember the first time I had the dream. I just remember one morning realizing that I’d been having the same dream for a while, over and over again. Not every night, but once a week at least. And then twice a week. Every other day. I think at that point, I was more frustrated than anything else. I’d started to get to a point where I knew I was dreaming. I think the idea was that if I could figure out a way to get out of the House in my dreams, I’d get out in real life. I’d have ideas again. I’d want to do things. But I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t get free. The furthest I’d get was this empty white room. No windows, no doors. Just walls. I just needed to get past it. But I couldn’t figure out how. I’d punch the walls, kick them… nothing.”

They reach the bottom of the staircase, turn right. Amilyn has spent far more time in the Central than she ever intended to. Never once has she explored the black space to the left of the metal staircase. It’s probably just unused space, but still. Tonight, she’s glad to be going right, away from darkness and unknown places.

“Anyway, one night at work, it was slow. I was helping the prep cooks get things ready for the morning. Writing labels on the containers with tape and a black magic marker. And I just remember looking at the marker in my hand, and feeling something click in my head.” Like picking a lock, when the last pin drops out and the keyway is open. “So I put the marker in my pocket, and I took it home with me. And when I went to bed, I had it in my hand. And when I found myself in the House, in my dreams, I looked down and I still had that marker with me. In my hand.”

She’d almost sprinted through the House that night, deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of it, as fast as she could go.

“When I got to that room, the last one, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I walked up to one of the walls, and I drew a door. It wasn’t great, but it didn’t matter. I drew a door, and then I put the marker in my pocket, and I reached out and grabbed the handle.

“And the door opened.”

The faintest glimpse of something just beyond it, something under a dark curtain of night. Ruins, she’d thought. It’s just ruins now.

“And then I woke up.”

Past the fogged walls of J’s greenhouse. When Amilyn lets her fingers trail along the glass, one of the spider plants reaches back, follows along as far as its tentacles will stretch. Vicky, maybe? She really needs to get better with their names.

“It was anticlimactic, actually. I mean, I’d figured it out, solved the whole thing, and… then I woke up. Didn’t like it.

“But then the next night the dream came back. The House came back. And I was able to take a step outside it, into this… big, gray space. You could just see where the ground met the sky, but only just. And it went forever, or it felt like it. It didn’t last long, but it was enough to know that it wasn’t over. There was more happening. And I kept telling myself it was my dream, it was… me trying to tell myself something about where I was, who I was. I even went out and bought one of those dream dictionaries that’s supposed to explain all the symbolism. I couldn’t afford it, but.”

She’d meant to steal it, actually. Had gone in wearing the duffel coat, the one with the big pockets. It would’ve fit, easy. But there was something wrong in the air that afternoon, something tense and strange, even before she’d entered Book Tower. So she’d paid. All tip money – a couple ones, a lot of coins. Mr. U hadn’t said anything about it. Even then, there was something flat and speculative in his eyes that had given her the shivers.

“But I knew by then. Of course I knew. There was something else going on. Something bigger.”

How big, of course, she never would’ve guessed. But then again, who would?

“Anyway, one morning I woke up. I hadn’t had the dream about the House. Which felt weird. But I kinda brushed it off, had breakfast. Sketched for a bit. I was drawing this cemetery, between two houses. But the graves were all open, like something’d come out of them.” Abel. Sweet Abel, and his stammer. “Had lunch. Got ready for work.

“And there was the House. Two blocks down, what used to be an empty lot. I hadn’t ever seen it from outside before – I always started somewhere in the middle, and then when I was out, it was gone. But I knew it.”

It hadn’t looked a thing like her grandmother’s house from the outside, of course. Her grandmother’s house was blue,with paint that always looked fresh. Green shutters. Neat shrubbery, well-maintained flower boxes. This was shabby, decrepit. Peeling white paint, gutters hanging precariously. Crumbling concrete steps. It almost could’ve been on that corner all along. Almost.

“And I panicked.” They’re passing the main work stations, now, the rows of computers on their desks. Colored lights flicker from an old school fishtank screen saver. J’s music is still playing soft.

A terrible thought has crept into my mind…

“I did panic. I knew, absolutely, that I was going to have to do something about that damn House. I also knew I had to work. I had to pay rent. I had to make money. I was really looking forward to my shift meal, honestly. I just… Kept walking. I don’t –”

Jonah squeezes her hand. It’s funny, actually. How that guilt still lingers. That she didn’t run in immediately. That she stalled. It didn’t even matter, in the end. But still.

“But it weighed on you,” Morpheus suggests, very softly.

“Yeah,” she says. “I mean. yeah. Of course it did. Because I knew how to get out, but no one else would and… It’s one thing, in the Dreaming. I’d fail, and I’d wake up, and I’d get to try again. Here it’s different. Here you don’t wake up. You’d just be trapped. If someone went in, and got stuck, and couldn’t get out, then… That would be on me.

“So when I was going home that night, I went up to the door, just to check. And it was open. And I knew.”

She’d called out, “Hello?” into the dark endless silence past the doorway. Told herself she’d count to ten. She was on thirteen when the faintest echo of a reply made its way back to her from God knows where.

“-lo? Is anyone –”

Cut in and out, like a radio station from across the border. And she’d turned, and she’d run.

“Went home. Grabbed the marker and a flashlight. Went back. And I went in.”

It was different in real life. She remembers that viscerally. Even in the vast open spaces of the Central, she remembers how close the hallways felt. How tight the walls were. Claustrophobic. How she could feel the walls and the floors moving around her, hear the scraping of it. Dust falling into her hair. In her dreams, she’d been able to keep moving as things shifted. Here, she had to stop, try to hold herself upright. Fighting for each little bit of ground she gained.

“It took a while to find him.” It had taken a long time to find him, in the dark House, with it shifting and groaning all around her. She’d hunkered down for a particularly bad one, eyes closed against it, and when she stood up again, there was a man standing there, and she’d screamed and he’d screamed and the House shifted again and she lurched forward to grab his hand, terrified the whole thing would start over and she’d have to track him down all over again. “He was homeless. He just needed a place to sleep, you know? And then he got trapped, and… And we still had to find our way to the white room, after. Which wasn’t as easy as it had been while I was sleeping. To put it lightly.”

It was easier, though. Not being alone. They held hands to keep from being separated. Talked a little bit. One thing he’d said that stuck out, even then, and especially now –

“Man, I always said I didn’t want to get stuck in any Torchwood shit. Not after what happened last time.”

“Is that what this is?” The walls had groaned – Amilyn pulled them back two steps to keep them from falling down the flight of stairs that had opened in front of them. “Torchwood shit?”

She’d never heard of Torchwood back then, of course. Had no idea what it was, what it meant.

Which is kind of funny, in retrospect.

Then the stairs tilted them upright, from descent to sudden climbing, and she’d sped up, dragging him along behind her, knowing the end was near.

“What’s funny is I didn’t even think about it. We hit the white room, and I just went to the wall and started drawing. Which, I don’t know. Maybe that’s why it worked. I drew the door, and there was this… like a saw, almost. The weirdest noise. And then I opened it, and there was the vacant lot on the other side, and we got the hell out. A lot of shaking – a lot of things crashing. A lot of dust. And the House was gone.”

She’d started laughing, then, half-hysterical. He’d joined in. They sat there in a vacant lot, him holding the flashlight, her with the marker in her hand, for a lot longer than she wanted to think about.

When she opened her eyes, there was a man standing across the street, staring at them. Too far away, too dark to see who it was, and she hadn’t had control of the flashlight. But she’d felt a chill all the same.

“I didn’t necessarily think it was over. I didn’t necessarily think about it continuing. I think by then, I was kind of beyond thought. Just acting on instinct. I went home. Went to bed. Didn’t dream at all. Went to work. House wasn’t there. Came home. Everything fine. I went to sleep.

“It was the first time I’d gone to the Dreaming without going through the House first. One minute I was typing… something, gibberish mostly, and then the next I was on that flat gray plain, in the middle of nowhere. And there was a woman there. Lucienne, although she didn’t exactly introduce herself.”

“How are you doing this? Why are you doing this?”

Amilyn hadn’t quite sputtered, but she’d come close. “I’m not doing anything. It’s your House –”

“Yes, the House.” Lucienne straightened her little round glasses, and also her spine. She still had to look up at Amilyn a little, but God if Amilyn didn’t feel remarkably small anyway. “Which you appear to have stolen. Again.”

“I didn’t – First of all, if anyone’s stealing anyone, it’s –”

Then it sank in. Again.

“When Lucienne told me the House was gone, I knew where it was. What I had to do. I woke myself up, grabbed a pair of pants and my marker, my flashlight. Didn’t even stop for breakfast. Hell, I didn’t stop for shoes.” She’d stepped on glass on the way in, gone through the whole House bleeding. Faster this time, though. Just like it had been in dreams. “I got through, drew the door, got out. Got it sent back to the Dreaming, so no one could get caught in it while I wasn’t looking.”

When the dust had settled, she looked up, across the street, where the dark figure had stood the other night.

“My dream dictionary,” she says, her eyes on the broad expanse of J’s back. “I got it at a store called Mr. U’s. Mr. U’s Universe.” She watches his shoulders tense, rising. “When I got rid of the House the second time, I looked across the street and there was Mr. U, standing there, looking back at me.

“He asked if I was all right, offered to walk me home. It was… I don’t know. There was something off about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but. I didn’t like it.

“I told him I was fine, and I walked away, and I walked in circles until I lost him, and then I finally went home.” She hadn’t realized she was still bleeding until she crossed the threshold of the house, she remembers, and had spent a long time in the bathroom washing her poor foot. Hadn’t gotten an infection, though. Lucky for her.

“That night, I dreamed about the House again, but it was different. It wasn’t moving. I was in the… living room, I guess? Parlor? Something like that.” Uncomfortable looking chairs with ornate embroidery and dusty carvings on the legs. White lace runners on a too-slick wooden table. Bookshelves packed with leather-bound books, the titles shifting as Amilyn looked at them. “Lucienne was there, waiting for me.”

She’d pushed her glasses up on her nose. She wasn’t looking down on Amilyn anymore. “It appears I owe you an apology.”

“She said she realized that I wasn’t summoning the House. That I was trying to help, trying to get it back to the Dreaming. Someone else kept bringing it back, though. Lucienne couldn’t tell who it was. I think even by then I’d already figured it out, but I didn’t say. I didn’t have any proof. But it was… It was on my mind.

“Next day. No House. Day after. No House. Day after that. No House.” The hallway narrows back around them, funneling them towards the staircases that lead down to the lower levels. “I got my hopes up, a little. Maybe, yeah. Mr. U had been the one summoning the House. And he saw me send it back, and he knew I’d just keep doing it, and he’d given up and it was over.”

Ahead of her, J shakes his head, slow.

“Yeah,” she says. “Well. I didn’t know Mr. U back then. Anyway, sure enough, we got a couple days off. Then one night, I’m coming back from work. And there’s the House.” She’d almost cried. She’d just been so tired – it had been a bad shift, and no tips, and her feet hurt, and …

But even then, even before she knew what it meant, she’d been Amilyn Holdo. So she went home, she got her flashlight and her magic marker, and she did her job. Because there wasn’t anyone else who could.

“I thought sure Mr. U would be waiting for me when I got out, but he wasn’t. And he wasn’t the next night, or the next night, or the next.” Get up. Go to work. Spend an hour fighting her way through the House, which increasingly sounded as exhausted as she felt. Come out to an empty lot. Go home. Go to bed. Stand in the empty gray plain or Cain and Abel’s graveyard and talk to Lucienne and get absolutely fucking nowhere. Get up. Go to work. “I did think maybe I was wrong about him. That it was someone else doing it. And it’d just been a coincidence I saw him. But I didn’t really believe that. I just… I don’t know. There was something weird about him.”

Up ahead, J makes a soft, scoffing noise, but says nothing.

“So I did something stupid. I went back to the shop. Didn’t really have a plan, just wandered around. He had an office towards the back, but the door was closed. I had my lockpicks with me, but I was the only person in the store apart from him, so I couldn’t –”

“You had lockpicks with you?” Matthew asks, and Amilyn had been so focused on J’s broad back in front of her, his tense posture, that she actually startles. Jonah grazes her shoulder with his.

“Can’t very well pick locks without them,” he says, and squeezes Amilyn’s hand reassuringly.

“Yeah, but you just seem so – I mean, she does come across like –”

“I thought you didn’t trust humans, Matthew,” Morpheus murmurs, almost fondly.

Amilyn musters a smile. “Well. I’m glad my pretense of respectability has someone fooled,” she says. “And yes, I carry lockpicks when I think I’ll need them. Or hope I will. But it didn’t happen for me that day. I kind of just wandered around. Looked at book covers. Eventually, he came up to me.”

She hadn’t clocked him approaching. It was unsettling. There was just something about him, his presence. The same kind of feeling as hearing footsteps behind you in the dark, keeping pace. Speeding up when you started to speed up. That kind of feeling.

“He asked me how my dreams were going.” Her breath caught, briefly, in her throat. She’d swallowed hard. Pulled up whatever courage she had from God knows where. “I told him they were coming true. But not…

“He was pretty surprised by that, actually.” Brief moment of triumph, squashed down hard. Not the time to be cocky. “It was – I don’t think he’d expected me to admit it. Most people probably wouldn’t, even in Detroit. And I’m sure I stuck out as a recent import, so. But he recovered quick, started talking about psychic… whatevers. Mostly nonsense, honestly, and that’s coming from me. He gave me a book. Wouldn’t take money for it. Said he wanted to talk to me about it later, see what I thought.”

J is still silent, but he’s tense as anything.

“I remember he asked about the House a few times. Kept coming back to the same questions – when had I seen it, how often was I seeing it, was I sure it was the same House, was I sure it was still coming back. I got the impression, kind of, that he hadn’t deliberately summoned the House the last few times. He was up to something; he was definitely up to something. But it felt like maybe he was up to something new, or trying to be, and it wasn’t working.

“And then, you know, while I was walking around trying to figure out what to do next, that was when I saw the giant spider.”

Matthew makes a startled croaking noise. “The –”

“Yep.” It had been, admittedly, pretty jarring. Walking further and further into downtown, lost in thought, and there, suspended between buildings, seven stories off the ground (and still too close for comfort), was a giant fucking spider. “It wasn’t there long. Torchwood had already gotten there. Not that I really knew who they were. Just that one of them grabbed me and dragged me out of the way, and the other shot this giant sort of… almost like a bean-bag cannon, I guess. And then there wasn’t a spider anymore.”

“Sorry,” she’d said, after. Rissa, with her crazy muscular arms, her gorgeous dark eyes, gorgeous dark skin, gorgeous everything. The close-cropped hair, the high cheekbones and magnificent smile. She’d always smiled when things were dangerous. “Didn’t want you to get swatted.”

Amilyn had known she was into women for a while – college had been great for that. It had been a minute, though. And she’d never come that close to swooning. She kept her shit together, barely. “You couldn’t find a big enough shoe?”

And Rissa had laughed, her gorgeous, gorgeous laugh.

“Anyway, we got to talking about it. It turned out we were up to three nightmares at that point – the House, the Spider, and then the Invisible Running Thing, which is what the rest of the team was dealing with. It was just Rissa and Perry, for the Spider. They had practice. Anyway, so I told them about the House, which they hadn’t noticed – I guess because I was pretty thorough about making sure it went back as soon as it arrived. And then also it was fairly unassuming from the outside. Unlike the giant spider. I figured that, if the Spider and the Running Thing had just shown up in the last twenty minutes, if we went back to my neighborhood, then the House would be there.

“And I was right.”

He called it as soon as I left. It made it more menacing, somehow, that realization. Even though she knew the House, knew it didn’t want to be out in the waking world, let alone being summoned constantly for… whatever Mr. U was summoning it for. He’d called it as soon as she walked out of that store.

It pissed her off, too. Him just yanking nightmares out of the Dreaming like that, on a whim, just to prove a point. Or test a theory. Or whatever he was doing.

Staring up at the House, she promised it that she was going to fix it. She was going to send the House back to the Dreaming. For good.

“I couldn’t take both of them in. They didn’t like that much. Well. Perry didn’t like it much. And he said Donny wouldn’t like it much either, but Rissa was fine with it. Rissa took a lot of unnecessary risks, actually.” She wasn’t much better, come to think of it. But then none of them were. And they still weren’t. “Anyway, somehow I convinced Perry that this was me being cautious, and I told Rissa to hold my hand and not let go, and we went into the House.”

It was always a little worse with someone else, having to hold onto them, to keep them from getting away from her when the House shifted and twisted. Rissa took it well enough, considering; it obviously unnerved her, but she tried to hide it. There was just that extra edge of nervousness every time she asked “You’re sure you can get us out of here?”, that joking-but-not-really. And her arm interlinked with Amilyn’s, grip tight enough to leave bruises.

Finally, Amilyn had stopped moving entirely, turned and looked at her, and asked, “Is it that bad, not being in charge for a change?”

And Rissa had laughed, shaken her head. “You try it sometime. See how you feel about it.”

And Amilyn said, “Fuck that,” and they understood each other better, and they went on.

“I got her through and out the other side. The rest of the team were there at that point. They wanted me to come to the Central, to talk more about the House and the nightmares and everything. I don’t remember feeling like I had much of a choice. But I needed backup at that point, and they sort of knew what they were doing, so. No offense, J.”

He shrugs. “Honestly, ‘sort of’ knowing is pretty good. Better than I do most of the time.”

Jonah lets out an exaggerated cough of “Bullshit!” Amilyn just shakes her head.

“Seem pretty knowledgeable to me,” Matthew offers, politely.

“To me as well,” Morpheus adds.

“There you go. Outnumbered. Anyway. So I went to the Central.” It had still been a working train station then, if only barely. As they’d steered Perry’s old Buick down the tunnels to the garage, she’d heard one rumble over them, an uneasy feeling. “They told me what they’d been dealing with, with the Spider and the Invisible Running Thing. I told them how I’d gone from seeing the House in my dreams to seeing it in real life. And I told them about the Dreaming, a little, and Lucienne. How she thought someone was summoning the Nightmares.

“I told them I thought I had an idea who it was.”

She still had that book, the one Mr. U gave her. Donny’s eyes had fixed on it. He’d looked at her.

Then, very quietly, he said, “Guys. Why don’t you give me and Amilyn a minute to talk.”

“Turns out, there’d been an incident with Mr. U. Not long after he opened the shop. Somehow he’d gotten his hands on an alien artifact. Pretty dangerous. Sold it to a kid – he said he didn’t know what it was, really – “

J scoffed.

“Right? Anyway, it was bad. Couple kids died. Donny wasn’t ever sure it was much of an accident. Something about Mr. U he didn’t trust. He wasn’t super happy with the idea of me going back into that building alone. But then I didn’t want Mr. U to get suspicious of me, or to think I was suspicious of him. If I brought Torchwood in with me and he saw them, it was all done. And I knew it.

“So I needed a plan C.

“It turned out Lucienne had one.”

“This shop,” Lucienne had asked, her head cocked to one side. “Are there any windows in it?”

“She said she’d send a raven to watch me. I had my friend Junior outside as backup – I figured if something went wrong, the raven could get his attention, and he could come pull me out of whatever mess I’d gotten myself into. Or make a scene or something. So I read the book, which was neither good nor terribly accurate, as it turns out. And I went back.

“It was… weird.”

Which is an understatement, to say the least.

“I thought I was going to have to do this whole kind of subterfuge thing to get into the office and hunt for the spellbook and everything, and then he just opened the door right up, and there was it was. Right on his desk. Plain view. At one point he told me, casually as anything, I could use it to summon a nightmare, if I wanted. Just said it like that.”

She’d stared at him in disbelief. It wasn’t even breaking character, really. “I’m already summoning nightmares,” she’d said. “I – I’m trying to make them stop. I don’t want any of this.”

“Bit late for that,” he’d said, and chuckled. “Anyway, there’s other things you could do. If you wanted. You could do anything, really. Anything you want.”

Amilyn shook her head. “I just want to paint,” she’d said. “That’s it. That’s all. I just want to paint.”

“One thing I noticed,” Amilyn said. She’d noticed a lot of things, actually – she’d noticed ledgers in strange languages, artifacts in sealed glass cases, the 1911 he kept in the same desk drawer as his reading glasses. She’d noticed that the door wasn’t as solid as she’d first thought, and that it would probably succumb to a good kick if she didn’t have time for lock picks. She’d noticed at least one other book she’d need to steal if the opportunity presented. Lots of good things. “The book was missing pages. They’d been cut out. I wasn’t sure if he’d done it or if someone else had. He told me, that day, he’d gotten it off a Torchwood London agent. I thought maybe the other guy still had it. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d cut them out before I got there, so if he did lose the book, he wouldn’t lose that spell. There were a couple of good spots where he could have put the pages, but I couldn’t exactly start rummaging through his papers. And he never left me alone long enough to look.

“I knew I was going to be able to come back; he was obviously interested in me, in a weird way.” J’s shoulders hike up around his ears again. “I wasn’t sure how much longer I wanted to string it out, though. I didn’t want to have to keep going there, I didn’t want to have to keep sending the House back, there were more and more nightmares getting pulled through – I wanted it done.

“And then I got back down to the street out in front of Book Tower, and there’s Rissa. Standing chatting with Junior like they’re good friends. And I didn’t look up. I didn’t look back at his office. But I knew he saw.

“And I knew that he knew.”

“He probably can’t even see –”

“He saw you.” Amilyn had never been more sure of anything in her life. “He saw you. He recognized you. He knows.”

“I was supposed to go back and talk more to him the next day. I had no idea how it was going to go. What was gonna happen. I woke up that morning, and walked down the street, and sure enough, the House was there. Except when I’d gone through the whole thing, when I drew the door on the wall of the white room and stepped outside, I turned back. And the House was still there.”

She’d gone in and out. In and out. No change.

“I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t make it go away. I finally went back inside, drew a lock on the door I’d made. Drew myself a key. That was… odd, just picking it up off the floor like that. I went outside. Locked the door behind me. Went around to the front and the House had very thoughtfully given itself a lock on the front door, so I locked that too. Couldn’t do much else, but. At least it was a little harder for anyone to get stuck.

“Ran out to where I thought I’d seen the spider that one time, and it was still there. Rissa and Perry were there, freaking out. I told them what was going on with the House. That it was going to happen to all the nightmares. That I was going to stop it. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, I sort of did, but. It wasn’t a plan, as such. I just –

“And I left them there to figure out how to contain a giant spider, and I went back to Book Tower. And I walked up to Mr. U’s shop, and I walked in the front door, and I walked right past him and I kicked my way into his office and grabbed the gun from his desk before he could get to it first and I told him I wanted the spellbook, missing pages and all, and I wanted it right then.”

There had been something so chilling about the way he smiled then. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew you were Torchwood.”

And for the first time, but certainly not the last, she’d said, “I’m not Torchwood. I’m just a painter.”

And he’d laughed at her. “Oh my dear,” he’d said. “It’s safe to say you aren’t just anything. And you never will be.”

“It didn’t go that well at first,” Amilyn admits. “I’d never done anything like that in my whole life, and it was pretty obvious he’d had a lot of people pointing guns at him. Which didn’t make me feel any more confident. Then I heard something tapping on the window. I turned – there was a black bird, sitting on the window ledge.

“He wasn’t fast enough to stop me.” He’d tried, though. She’d lunged, and he’d lunged, but she was closer, long arms and long legs, and close enough for him to grab her was close enough for her to get the gun up against his chest. The doubt in his eyes was enough to embolden her. She unlocked the window left-handed, her eyes never leaving his. Ripped the window open. A flutter of feathers, a sense of something tilting. And then Lucienne, her little round glasses and her old-fashioned suit, standing at Amilyn’s side.

“Well,” she’d said. “Perhaps you didn’t need me after all.”

“Pretty sure I did,” Amilyn said.

“Lucienne left the Dreaming?” Morpheus asks, sounding only faintly bewildered. “She came to you, in the waking world?”

“What’s funny is that I wasn’t really surprised,” Amilyn says. They round a corner, down another set of stairs. Nearing the end, then. “I guess – I mean, I’d drawn a door on a wall in a dream, and my whole life stopped making sense. Sure, Lucienne was a raven. Why not? But it freaked Mr. U out, pretty visibly. He started talking about how he didn’t know, and he hadn’t meant any harm, and he was trying to send the nightmares back and he’d fucked up, but he knew Lucienne and I could figure it out, and…” She shakes her head. “It was bullshit, and I knew, and she knew, but. We got the book, and the missing pages, and we left.

“Out of curiosity,” Amilyn had asked Lucienne, as they hurried to Junior’s shop – the closest friendly place she could think of. “Have you ever cast any spells before?”

“No,’” she’d said. “But I’m familiar with the theory.”

Amilyn had contemplated it a second. “Well. That’s more than I can say for me, anyway.”

“After that, it kinda blurs,” Amilyn admits. “We went through the book, figured out what spells he’d been using and how. He wasn’t wrong about fucking up. Every time he tried to summon a new nightmare, he summoned all the old ones with it; he’d somehow locked everything to this plane and none of them could be banished simply – It was a mess. The easiest way we could figure out to fix things, since there wasn’t a lot of time, was just to bind the nightmares for now, keep them contained, and then try to figure out a way to get them back to the Dreaming at another time. Neither of us loved it, but it was all we had.”

They round another corner, head down another set of stairs. Nearly there now.

“Junior was a metalworker – I mean he still is. Beautiful work. He made the caskets for me. I drew the runes, learned how to draw a binding circle, how to actually cast the containment spell. Lucienne helped with that, and with nightmare-wrangling. Perry did a lot of apologizing to the spider. A lot of apologizing. She was gracious, you know. For a spider.” They reach the bottom of the stairs. Twenty feet further on, there’s a large, heavy door. “Torchwood handled some of the police logistics and the storage, obviously. And here we are. J, I’ll let you get the door.”

He steps out ahead of her, goes to the keypad on the wall. Fingerprint scan first, then the password. D33pS3aSk!v!ng, unless Toby’s changed it without telling her, which he wouldn’t. There’s a faint hum, then a click, and J heaves the door open. The lights inside flicker on – dim, faintly reddish.

“Some of the artifacts are photosensitive,” J explains, as they hesitate on the threshold. “I can bump up the lights if anyone needs, but only so much. Also, this probably goes without saying, but Matthew, I’m going to need you to stay on Lord Morpheus’s shoulder. There’s things in here you don’t want to touch. That none of us want to touch, honestly.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Matthew says, and resettles his feathers. He looks more uneasy than offended. Amilyn doesn’t blame him. Ever since they took custody of the gauntlet and the knife, this room has made her skin prickle.

They file in slowly, take a moment to look around. There’s a few tables in the room, for the occasions someone needs to work in here. Simple wooden chairs, a few small lamps. A box by the door with gloves for the times that they’re needed. But the eye is, naturally, drawn to the artifacts themselves, on shelves that line the wall, in plexiglass cases and heavy lead boxes and a few oddly-shaped containers of opaque black glass. The gauntlet and knife gleam metallic and deadly in their individual cases on opposite sides of the room. There’s a single rose in a white vase. A stuffed Garfield toy. What looks like a mason jar full of shifting, moving glitter. Several axes. Some books, of course, and keys. Various beautiful gems with various deadly effects.

On the back wall, on their shelves, four silver boxes, covered in runes. Junior really did beautiful work on them. Amilyn slips free of Jonah’s grip, makes her way to them. Morpheus trails in her wake.

Forty years, and it’s finally time. Her eyes prickle with unexpected emotion; she blinks it back.

“Anyway, long story short, turns out I’m actually something of a natural when it comes to witchcraft,” she says. The first box she picks up has the House in it; she can tell by the feel of it. It tugs at something familiar in her, the way the others don’t. “We got everyone safely locked up without much fuss and bother, and they’ve been sleeping here ever since.” She looks up at Morpheus. In the reddish glow of the lights, his eyes look almost black again. “I always wondered if they dreamed.”

“Unlikely,” he says. “Under the circumstances.”

She nods. “Well. Maybe that’s better. Under the circumstances.”

He holds one hand out.

Amilyn hesitates, just for a moment. Her eyes fall down to the casket in her hands. She swallows hard. “Be good now,” she murmurs, to the nightmare she’s looked after so long.

She hands it over.

Morpheus holds it in his outstretched hand until she finally looks up at him, meets his eyes with hers. “You’ll see it again,” he reminds her. “It will never be further than the Dreaming. Which is not far.”

“I know,” she says, and blinks back tears again. “I know.”

He smiles, then, just a crooking of the corner of his mouth, and finally tucks the casket into the folds of his black coat, where it disappears.

She gives him the spider next, then the Running Thing. Then the Thick Air (the hardest to catch, she remembers, and Rissa and Donny had both gotten caught in it before they managed to make a good perimeter around it for her to draw the binding circle). That takes care of the nightmares. But there’s still one box left on the shelf, just a cheap metal lockbox she’d picked up at Kmart, easily ignorable, covered in dust.

She takes a deep breath and picks it up. Morpheus, expectant, holds his hand out, but she shakes her head. “This one’s not a nightmare,” she says. “This is… this is something else. You guys might want to back up a little,” she adds, raising her eyes and looking at J, at Jonah. At Morpheus, watching her intently. “It’s been a minute since I had to break a curse. J, we’ll need that fire extinguisher now.”

“On it,” he says, and turns back towards the doorway, tugging Jonah with him.

Amilyn carries the box to the nearest table, sets it down, wipes the dust off it. The shine of the silvery plating is dulled a bit. She can still see the faint brown traces of the mark she’d left on it, nearly forty years ago. The thing about curses – they always require a bit of you. Breaking it is really just calling that bit home again.

“You didn’t lay a curse on the other boxes,” Morpheus notes, hovering over her shoulder. Immune to curses, apparently. Or he thinks he is. Could be either.

“Didn’t need to,” she says. She lays the Crown Royal bag on the table next to the box and pulls out her pen knife. “Those were meant to keep the nightmares in. This was meant to keep humans out. And I wasn’t about to take chances. Matthew, if he’s not going to move, you should probably hang out with Jonah for a second.”

“Boss?” Matthew asks.

“Do as she says,” Morpheus says, soft, still not moving. “For her, if not for you.”

A flutter of wings, then. “Thanks,” Amilyn says. “We should probably get those alcohol wipes ready, too. And if everyone could just be very quiet for a moment.”

Immediately, the ambient noise in the room drops down to nearly nothing. Just the faint hum of the climate control, the buzz of the lights.

Amilyn closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. Intent, that’s the first part. Almost easier, really, with Morpheus right behind her. The nightmares safe in the folds of his coat, the Dreaming restored. Easier, absolutely.

She’s been carrying this a long time. She’s ready, finally, to set it down.

Another deep breath, let out slow, and she opens her eyes. She flicks the pen knife open, sets the blade of it to the tip of her right index finger. Pushes a little too hard, clumsy with her left hand, cuts deeper than she’d wanted. It’s sharper than she’d thought, maybe. But it’s blood.

Quick as she can, she sets her fingertip to the faintest part of the mark she’d drawn, the ending of the rune. When the fresh blood connects to the old, she feels a sudden shock of connection between the girl she was and the woman she is, standing across from each other like mirror images. The same uncertainty, the same determination. She didn’t totally know what she was doing. She never had. It had never stopped her. And it wasn’t going to now.

Another deep breath, quicker this time. Her heart pounds in her chest. “What I weave, I undo,” she murmurs. “What I create, I erase. What I have set in motion, I now lay to rest.” She traces the path she’d drawn so long ago in reverse, undoing it in one fluid motion. At the very end, she hesitates. She looks back across the years at that rainbow-haired girl, her tattered clothes and her nervous glare. She smiles. “It’s okay,” she tells herself. “You did it. It’s over, now. You did good.”

When she pulls her hand away, the curse comes with it – every part of herself that she’d put into the spell flooding back in a rush so strong she stumbles. Morpheus catches her with gentle hands, puts her back on her feet again. She lets herself lean into it for a minute, gasping for breath. “I’m good,” she says, quickly, before anyone can panic. “I’m good. Just –” She exhales slowly, feels some of the tingling slip out with it. “Wow. I put a lot into that one.”

“Yes, well, you never did anything halfway, did you?” Jonah’s at her side in a minute, reaching out to take her right hand in both his. The alcohol wipe stings on the deep cut in her finger. “Not even this. How old is that knife, exactly?”

“I’ve had my tetanus booster,” she tells him, and he rolls his eyes. It’s funny, being close to him like this, with all that energy still in her system. It’s like being close to him when they first met, when the splay of his eyelashes against his cheeks could make her absolutely crazy. “It’s fine. I’ll be fine. Just need to catch my breath.”

He squeezes a little antibiotic gel on the wound and carefully wraps it in a bandage, and there is no way she’s going to catch her breath any time soon, not while they’re in the same building.

Matthew clears his throat, and she does her best to pull herself together.

“The key,” she says, since Jonah’s not letting go of her hand and doesn’t seem inclined to. “For the lockbox. It’s in the bag. You can open it now.”

Morpheus looks at her, at Jonah still holding her hand. A little amused, she thinks. Then he pulls the key out of the Crown Royal bag, unlocks the box, and opens it.

“Like I said. There were pages cut out of the spellbook when Mr. U showed them to me. Obviously I had no way of knowing what they were at the time. Once we had them, when we were trying to figure out what they were… Well. It was pretty obvious that spell wasn’t designed to summon a garden-variety nightmare.”

“I never told you,” Lucienne had said, after that long, awful silence. “What happened to Lord Morpheus. Why he’s gone. I never told you because, to be quite honest, I don’t know myself.” Her gaze had fallen back on the pages in her hands.

Morpheus’s hands are shaking, a little. He holds the pages carefully, like they could still burst into flames. “You think this is the spell that captured me?” he asks. His voice is shaking too, a little.

“We thought it was a possibility.” They’d thought it more than that, of course. But it sounds better, this way. “Anyway, it was all we had to go on. There hadn’t been anything else, not since you left the Dreaming that night. I figured it was worth investigating.

“Mr. U said he’d gotten the book from a Torchwood agent in London. A little research on the book showed that it did come from there; it disappeared from the library that housed it about the same time you vanished, actually. Torchwood London always had some interest in occult artifacts, and from what little I could find about them, it definitely seemed like they might try to capture one of the Endless. Certainly they were power-hungry enough. Arrogant enough. I guess I should’ve figured out somewhere along the way that I wasn’t ever going to able to take them on on my own. But I was young, and I was cocky, and I’d done so many things I never would have thought I could do and I came out okay, so.”

Morpheus turns his eyes to her, disbelief plain on his face. “You believed that I had been captured by Torchwood One,” he says.

She nods. “Yep.”

“So you went to rescue me. By yourself.”

“Yep.”

He stares at her, brow furrowed, genuinely perplexed. “You knew nothing of me. You had no reason –”

“I knew you were in trouble,” Amilyn says, with a shrug. “I knew someone needed to do something about it. Obviously I was not that person, in the end. I thought Torchwood had you, and they didn’t. Even if they had, I never would’ve gotten through, but. I didn’t know that at the time. I just figured something needed to be done, and I was someone, and I could do things. So I went.”

Morpheus carries on staring at her, bewildered.

“Out of curiosity,” J says, finally stepping forward. “How close did you get?”

“Not very.” She turns away from Morpheus, back towards J. He’s still holding the fire extinguisher in his hands. “Oh, I thought I was really getting somewhere. They were actually getting into the business of occult artifacts back then. So it was easy for me to make myself useful. I helped them get the book they were after. A bunch of us went out to celebrate. After a while, it was down to just me and Peter.” She doesn’t remember any of the others’ names now. Fitting, in a way. She remembers Peter, though. Sweet, scrawny, awkward Peter.

“He left to get the next round. This woman slipped right into his seat, like it was nothing. Older woman. Crazy hair. Kind of just… a pile of mismatched clothes. Big hat. And I don’t know how, but I looked at her, and I just… I knew.” Her voice cracks a little at the memory. Funny how much it still hurts.

Sorry, love, she’d said. It hadn’t been gentle, exactly. It was probably as close as Hettie was able to come. Least no one can say you didn’t try.

“Turns out it was the fourth artifact I’d gotten for Torchwood One,” she admits, and J just nods, solemn. “I’d help them get their hands on it, the team would take me out for drinks. Once they’d gotten my guard down enough, one of them would go up to the bar for the next round, and my drink would come back drugged. I’d wake up in the morning with a couple weeks missing, and the game would start over again. And over. And over.”

Jonah squeezes her hand.

“God, I cried.” All that night in her rented room, jamming her things back into a duffel bag. Nearly a year of trying, and it had all been running in circles. “Leaving like that, with nothing to show. And I still thought they had you! I wouldn’t know the truth until after Canary Wharf fell, when you didn’t come back. But Hettie told me I’d see you someday.” She turns back to Morpheus then, still watching her, still with that stunned expression. “She said it wasn’t for me to free you, but that you’d be free soon enough. And if I left London, if I came home, I’d be here when you came back for your nightmares. But if I stayed…”

Stay here, girl, and there won’t be nothing left of you by then, and that’s a fact. Universe needs you too much for you to waste yourself that way. Do us a favor, yeah? Go home.

“And I believed her. Most of the time.” She swallows hard. “I won’t say I didn’t have doubts. But I believed her enough to stick it out. I guess that was actually the right move, in the end.”

“Yes, I suppose it was.” He blinks, shakes off some of the shock. “Even if it was difficult for you.”

“Yeah, it was probably worse for you,” Amilyn reminds him. “I… Well, I never liked losing. And I don’t do things halfway, if I can help it. But at least I was free. That’s more than I can say for you.”

“I am free now,” he says, quietly. “But thank you. For coming to find me.”

Just like that, she’s close to tears again. “But I failed.”

“But you tried.” He says it with the utmost of seriousness. “That means more than you know.”

It probably does; that’s the worst part. For him to be trapped somewhere, for that long, not even knowing if anyone would ever come… She slips free of Jonah’s grip, holds both hands out to Morpheus. She’s a little surprised that he takes them, but she tries not to let it show. His hands are cool, soft. His grip is very careful. “For the record,” she says. “I’d do it again. Even if it came out exactly the same. I’d do it again.”

He nods. Then his hands slip free of hers, the moment breaks. “And the spell?” he asks, turning back to the parchment pages on the table. “What will you do with it now?”

“You’re welcome to it,” Amilyn says, and leans against the table. Jonah’s hand comes to cover hers. “If you think there’s anything useful in it, it’s yours. If you don’t want to bother with it, we’ll take it somewhere safe and burn it.”

“I take it you don’t find anything useful in it, then,” he says, eyes still on the parchment.

“No.” The answer is quick and easy. “No, absolutely not. I only ever kept it because it was our only clue to where you’d gone. Now you’re back. I’d burn it right now if it was safe to do it in here.”

“But it isn’t.” Morpheus contemplates the pages a little longer, then picks them up with a careful hand, passes them over to her. “Do what you feel is best. I trust your judgment.”

“Bonfire it is.” She takes the pages from him, doesn’t crumple them in her fist, as much as she wants to. “You could stick around and watch if you wanted. Might be cathartic.”

“No.” But he says it with something like a smile. “But thank you. I have work to do. And I’ve imposed on your hospitality enough already.”

“You’d be surprised how far our hospitality can stretch,” J says, cheerfully. “Also, you’re going to have to impose a bit longer, since Subarchive C really is a no-teleportation zone. We’ll have to go up at least one level before you can take off. Sorry.”

Morpheus frowns at him a moment, then sighs and shrugs. “Fair enough,” he says. “Matthew?”

He extends his arm – Matthew hops from Jonah’s shoulder to Amilyn’s (oddly light, his talons gripping without biting), and then from there to Morpheus’ forearm. “Out of curiosity,” he asks, once he’s settled. “If the curse had gone off down here, with… everything. What would’ve happened?”

J looks at Amilyn, eyes wide. “In my defense,” Amilyn says. “We didn’t have most of these things down here when I laid that curse. Back then we gave the really scary things to Windsor, or UNIT. So I wasn’t thinking about –”

“No, I getcha,” J says, but he doesn’t look entirely appeased. “Just. Take the box with you. When you go.”

“I’ll get it,” Jonah says, and brushes his hand along the small of her back as he passes to gather up her things.

In the silence that ensues, Amilyn realizes that, for the first time all night, she is completely out of stories.

“So,” Matthew says, finally. “Mr. U, though. What was he doing? Why bring nightmares to Detroit in the first place? Was he just practicing so he could get one of the Endless later on, or –”

Amilyn looks to J, again. “They were traps,” she says. “People who went into the House would get caught and be unable to leave. Or they would’ve if I hadn’t gotten in the way. The Spider could, and did, trap people in its webs. The Running Thing. The Thick Air.”

“Thick Air?” Matthew repeats.

“You know those dreams when you’re trying to run, and you can’t?” Amilyn asks, and then realizes her mistake. “I mean, I guess probably you don’t, but.”

“I was human,” Matthew says. “Once. That makes sense, I guess. Thick air. But what was he trapping people for, anyway? What was the point?”

“He was going to experiment on them,” J says, his deep voice solemn. “That was what he did. That was why we had to stop him. I didn’t realize he’d been doing it that early, though. I thought he waited around a while. Until Torchwood wasn’t suspicious of him.”

“Like I said, he’d just opened the shop.” Jonah, having bundled everything back up into the lock box, crosses back to Amilyn’s side and holds out his arm; she takes it, and they follow J out of Subarchive C, Morpheus and Matthew behind them. “Most likely, he was testing the waters. Trying to see what Torchwood was capable of. Whether or not they were paying attention. Once he knew he couldn’t get away with much, he pulled back. Waited. And one-by-one, we died off or retired or moved on to other things, and new people came in, and memories faded. And he had time. He had plenty of that.”

“Yeah,” J says. He closes the door of Subarchive C behind them, then leads them back up the hall to the stairs. “Yeah, I guess he did. He stayed away from magic, though. After you.”

“Well. Not a lot of witches in Detroit. If you guys had brought me in on something, and I got to sharing war stories…” Which, in retrospect, she probably should’ve done. But she was with Cheri back then, and Cheri wanted her out of Torchwood, and… “But he didn’t make too many mistakes. Just enough, in the end.”

J nods. “Yeah. Just enough.” They reach the landing, the next set of doors. They pass through, the doors close behind them, and J turns. “Well. Matthew. Lord Morpheus. You’re certainly welcome to stay as long as you’d like. But if you need to leave, you are now free to do so. Your call.”

“Then we will take our leave.” It’s not surprising. A little disappointing, then, but not surprising. “Thank you, all of you. For everything. I won’t forget.”

“It’s what we do,” Amilyn says. “For the record, if you need us, you know where to find us.”

“I do.” That, actually, is a little surprising. “Thank you. And remember. The Dreaming isn’t far.”

He smiles, and she smiles back at him. “No. I suppose it isn’t.”

“Amilyn. Jonah. J.” Lord Morpheus nods to each of them in turn, and then reaches into his coat. He pulls out a fistful of something (sand, she thinks), and pours it out on the floor, and is gone in an instant, leaving nothing behind. Not even sand.

“Well,” J says, and yawns. Almost immediately, Amilyn finds herself following suit, Jonah right along behind her. J laughs; they follow that, too. “Guess you guys are heading home to bed?”

Amilyn looks at Jonah. Jonah looks at his vortex manipulator. “Nearly 5,” he says, and glances back up at Amilyn. “What do you reckon the odds of us going back to sleep are?”

“Abysmal,” she says. “Plus, I’ve still got a spell to burn. Don’t have to do it here, though, if you’ve got things you want to finish up, J.”

He shrugs. “I’m never productive this late on the overnights anyway,” he says. “Kitchen’s a good place to set things on fire. I can make coffee. And there’s still cinnamon rolls, I think.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Jonah says. “Lead on.”

Without another word, in companionable silence, they make their way back towards the Central’s upper levels, leaving Subarchive C behind them.

*

There is a House on a formerly vacant lot in Detroit, but it isn’t the House Amilyn remembers.

It’s her house, actually, the house she lives in right now. The narrow black Victorian in Corktown that she’s lived in for the last twenty-odd years. It’s just… not in Corktown. At all. It’s not in Delray, either. They’re nowhere near Dey Street.

The Dreaming isn’t far.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Morpheus says, stepping up next to her. “The House wanted something of a change, and as fond as it is of you, I thought this would be suitable. It was certainly very pleased with the result.”

“I…” Hard, even, to put it into words. And if she had them, there’s still that damn lump in her throat to contend with. “No. I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.”

“I didn’t think you would.” He takes a step to the side, gestures to the steps leading up to the front door. “After you.”

Up the walk then, the two steps to the small porch, through the front door.

Inside is nothing like her own home, which probably is for the best. She met Lucienne here once, in this little parlor. The doilies are gone – the furniture has been updated a bit. It matches the library more, her grandmother’s house less. But she still knows it. “It’s not moving,” she says, stepping further into the parlor. She runs her fingertips along the smooth wood on the back of a chair; as close as she can come to a greeting.

“Well, I think you’ve found your way through more than enough,” Morpheus reminds her. “The House exists to help dreamers learn to find their way. You’ve done that. But I thought you might like to visit sometimes, as you’ve grown fond of each other.”

And they have, in their way. It isn’t just Amilyn – she can tell by the way the breeze blows the curtains in gently, by the green vase on the side table full of daisies. By the easel set up for her at the window. It’s the House, too.

It trusted her once. It came to her because it needed someone, and for the first time, she managed to be that person. And here they are now, after all that time.

“I’ll leave you to get reacquainted,” Morpheus says, and slips out through the front door.

There are a million things Amilyn can do from here. She could walk through the whole House, see rooms she only glimpsed for a moment before they vanished. She could go in search of the white room again, see what she could draw there, what places she could go. She could make a cup of tea. She could have a nap.

After a moment, she moves over to the easel. There’s a newsprint pad on it, flipped to an invitingly blank page. There’s a plastic yogurt tub full of markers. She pulls out a black one, considers it, and begins to draw a door.