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Sometimes Daeron dreams impossible things. Not while he’s asleep, but wide awake. Not at night, when the terrors claw for him, but in the brisk light of day. These dreams he doesn’t chase away with the wine.
He doesn’t need to, for this. The wine isn’t rich enough, sweet enough, anyway. It can’t compare.
He dreams of them older, he and Dunk, as he lies in his lofty bed over tangled white sheets, wrapped in his mother’s silken robe, his hair tied up in ribbons that his father once wore after mother gave them to him. Ribbons that Daeron spirited from Maekar’s study as a child, had hidden in a small box in his wardrobe, and now keeps coiled in a clumsily-sewn pouch. He doesn’t wear these often, for their edges are fraying, their colors gone pale.
But they are his treasures, all the same. His tokens. Just like the bird Dunk had whittled for him on the road, when Daeron was full of dark dreams and regretting, of longing and hope, just like the flowers Dunk brings to him now, after long trips spent abroad, when he and Egg are home to visit. There are the broken, thornless stems stolen from the blackberry vines of the summer at Summerhall, too.
He has all of these tiny things spread out around him where he lies on the bed, an array of memories fanning from his head, pressed in close around his body. He’s careful not to shift and crush them. They are the artifacts of his heart, willfully cleaved open, the contents spilled out and displayed; all these pieces of him—of where he’s come from and where he’s gone. Where he can’t go any longer. Pieces of Duncan. His Dunk.
He daydreams now.
The thoughts are wispy tendrils, a pleasant smoke curling about his mind, gentle and soothing. He dreams of them older and then truly old. Growing that way together, greying and weakening. Their skin thinning and fragile, easily bruised. Bones weary and creaking.
He dreams of helping his beloved over the lip of a copper tub, Duncan’s burgeoning arms withered narrow by age and toil and too many swings of his sword.
He dreams of the knight, still sturdy of foot, taking Daeron’s weight to his side as they walk through the gardens, once Daeron’s nimble knees grow frail and won’t hold him on their own anymore. Not for that long.
He dreams of forgetting, not from too much drink, but from the vibrance of too much time spent living, their minds overfull and overtired. They will have to remind each other to eat well, to rest, to take their tinctures and apply their salves.
He dreams of the slowness of slowing down, the privilege of losing their young and fine bodies to the years they were able to spend together. Every heated kiss, every indulgent mouthful, every pointed thrust, each sweat-slick grappling of flesh made all the more precious the less they can manage it with their wilting shells.
Yes, Daeron dreams of impossible things in the bright, warm sun of the late afternoon, dizzied by the current of time pressing his imagination as far as it can go into the future he knows they cannot have, his eyes wide open and turned up at a ceiling that he doesn’t really see.
He only sees them. Older, and then old, and finally dying.
Together.
A tear slips silently from his unblinking eye and he reaches out blindly for the whittled bird, his trembling fingertips brushing through a blanket of dried flowers to find it. He squeezes it in his fist, the palm with the knife scar. He turns his scarred cheek into the gifted iris, the lavender, the lily, and the poppies, tears soaking the petals and making them soft again.
It’s enough, to dream like this; to pass the day with these tender renderings. It’s enough for now, at least until Duncan comes back to him, covered in dirt and brimming with tales. He’ll return with a new flower, a token, a treasure.
With more time.
Both of them older, but not old. They never will be.