Chapter Text
The first time she has the dream—the dream—she thinks that maybe they didn’t get the Sandman after all, that he’s still messing with her subconscious, trying to pull her onto his turf.
She can’t look at Crane for an hour that morning, and he brings her a Red Bull, apologizing for some imagined slight in that painfully polite but also kind of sly way of his. “It’s not your fault,” she wants to tell him, but she can’t. She doesn’t. Because the words won’t move past the knot in her throat and the tips of her ears are hot with embarrassment. And because it is his fault. At least a little. For being tall and handsome and funny and decent…but mostly handsome.
The second time she has the dream, she wakes up drenched in sweat and gasping for air, still feeling his palms skimming down her thighs, still hearing him whispering, “leftenant” in her ear like it’s George Washington’s secret code for “You’re beautiful.”
She can’t go back to sleep after. She gets up, splashes water on her face, drinks half a bottle of water, and still can’t cool down. Would he really call her “leftenant” in bed? The question keeps running through her mind well into the next day, and when he drops her rank into some casual conversation about 21st century idiosyncrasies she can’t help but shiver and tell him, “Abbie. Call me Abbie.”
“Is something wrong?” He frowns, his musings about the wastefulness of paper products cut short. “Did I offend you somehow?”
No. Yes. Sorry, it’s just that I now have a Pavlovian response to that word and it turns me on whenever you say it. Nothing she can think of to say in response is adequate, so she just tightens her hands on the steering wheel and shakes her head.
He stares at her for the longest minute in the world. Four days go by in a blink. Except this time she’s conscious. Too conscious. Her collar and tie are too tight, her jacket constricting. The man has seen her in her plain, black, utilitarian bra, for God’s sake. This should not be a thing.
But it is. It’s a thing that follows her all day, as they work their latest case and deal with the latest crazy.
And that night, she dreams of him again. Of him and of them, a naked, slick tangle of limbs, and her laughing as he notes, with something that sounds like relief, that at least sex hasn’t changed in 250 years. No, it hasn’t. And it’s hot and it’s good, and it makes her feel strong and alive and…awake. To everything.
She wants to ask Crane if he’s having dreams, too. She should ask. It’s what a good cop does: investigate. After all, it’s entirely possible that the fantasies are part of their seven years of tribulation. Except she can’t even handle seven nights of it, so how can she handle years? And how does she talk to a man who blushes at a mannequin wearing underwear in a store window about intimate, inappropriate dreams? How does she ask a man things like that when he still considers himself married and gets prophetic messages from his dead wife whenever he’s asleep?
It’s crazy. She’s crazy. Stammering. Having trouble looking him in the eye. Feeling beard burn where there isn’t any. Abbie Mills is not some dumb little girl with a crush on a boy at school. She needs to get a hold of herself.
“Are you truly alright, Lieutenant Mills?” Again, he pronounces it “leftenant.” Again she shudders and grips the wheel, willing the red light they’re stopped at to shift to green so she can gun the engine and speed away from the concern in his voice.
But they just happen to be at the longest red light in Sleepy Hollow. So they sit there for interminable minutes, while Crane watches her. The professor studying her every movement, and her every lack of movement, too.
“Is it your dreams?” he asks, suddenly. “Are they disturbing your sleep?”
“Wh-what dreams?” She chokes on air, whips around to meet his gaze. No one in this century has eyes that earnest, or that exact shade of blue. “What do you mean ‘dreams’?”
He delicately clears his throat and then folds his hands one over the other. Only a few seconds go by. But they’re enough of a stretch to tell her that he’s about to lie to her. “Why…the visions, of course,” he says, careful propriety dripping from every syllable. Completely bullshit impropriety. “Of what’s to come.”
Visions. Of what’s to come. Oh. Oh, hell.
“No.” The light changes and Abbie’s foot slams on the pedal like she’s on the speedway at the Grand Prix. “No, nothing in these dreams is going to happen to us,” she assures, her voice thick. “It’s not important. Forget it. I’m fine. This is all going to be fine.”
She concentrates on the road, looking straight ahead through the windshield, and ignores his efforts to lock eyes with her in the rearview mirror. She ignores the itch along her spine and the lump in her throat. And the want.
She was wrong about asking him. About needing to know. Because realizing Crane’s sharing the dream—the dream—isn’t a relief or a comfort at all.
And knowing he thinks she’s beautiful is just another curse.