birds singing in the sycamore tree

[baedalites]

As night falls on Baedal, the city is almost quiet. The streets have a few last minute workers returning home, but by now, most citizens have already gone by the temples and picked up their vurt, ready to lay down and dream.

After placing a not-feather in one's mouth, there's a moment where it fizzes against the tongue before sliding coolly down the back of the throat and pulling the user down into sleep. A series of impressions, more sensation than anything concrete, appears before the user and this is how one chooses which Dreamer to enter.

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[alan_shore]

A bat connects with the ball—a crack, clean as childhood heartbreak, sounds. Without looking, Alan has a sense of the soaring arc, the pop-up's lazy plummet into a waiting glove.

He's staring at Mycroft, auditioning words for...this, whatever it is that's taking place. Whatever it is that has him riveted. Extraordinary hovers on his lips, but it's one of those pallid adjectives swollen with its own importance, liable to shrivel up in sunlight. As he looks on, the tip of Mycroft's nose sharpens and broadens at once. He very nearly laughs—whatever else the details may be reputed to contain, there's certainly life in them—when he apprehends his mistake. There is no name for this but Mycroft.

And suddenly, he's afraid. Not for himself but of himself. His gaze wavers. His fingers brush the grass in a twitch.

At Mycroft's voice, he looks up, uncertain. His smile—timid at first, feeble—becomes playful. “Hold still,” Alan says, an unnecessary instruction if ever there was one, “and I'll count yours.”

[diogenesis]

Mycroft doesn't simply hold still; he finds himself frozen in what feels like a combination of fear and anticipation, something inside tightening just beneath his sternum. He's sure he knows which organ it is. He's sure he knows exactly which common biological reaction to an emotional response is occurring within him now (crawling across his skin, pulling his muscles tighter, drying up his throat). He's so sure. It's right on the tip of his tongue.

But he can't reach it.

It's this that makes him realize he's being pulled more deeply into the dreaming. He hadn't thought it possible—after all, how does one more deeply lucid-dream? But Mycroft can feel the baseball game and Alan's words and the grass beneath him and Alan's smile and the bright, dazzling detail of it all (almost like one of Ilde's illusions) begin to coalesce into a wave of surreality that drags away his desire for routine logical conclusions and leaves him awash in what must simply be wonder.

As this tide rolls in, Mycroft's appearance continues to change. His face is certainly his own now, though like Alan, he looks younger and less worn. The scent of fresh snow becomes detectable and the air around him cools a couple degrees. The grey of his eyes develops a small hint of blue. The brown of his hair gains the lightest touch of ginger. Each of his eyelashes has become easy to distinguish from the next.

"Why?" he says, almost to himself. His lips barely move. "Why would you want to do that?"

[alan_shore]

“It's going on the back of your card,” Alan murmurs, in the thick of those eyelashes—eyelashes whose color you'd find upon peeling back the bark of a tree, or in a last mouthful of scotch, a brown poised to either evaporate or ignite. He holds his amusement protectively close. It's a glib answer he's given; yet it takes to the air with fledgling tenderness.

The number, whether arrived at, anticipated, or recollected, is tucked away for safekeeping, leaving Alan to make a study, cautiously treading the line between interest and intrusion, of each change undergone by Mycroft, every shift in hue, texture, definition.

“You,” he says, sighing as he lies back (and it's quite particular, that “you”—even more so, perhaps, than a name), “need to find a new question to ask me.”

[diogenesis]

Mycroft watches Alan recline, blades of grass bending under his weight, sunlight sliding across the fabric of his jacket and the planes of his face. Though the distance between them has barely increased, Mycroft feels the space stretch taught, and the desire to reach across and close the gap pulls at him like gravity.

As one does daily with gravity, he resists it, though it gradually erodes his immaculate posture into something willow-like. With curved neck and shoulders, he eases the pull by centimeters, millimeters, and the scent around them shifts to petrichor.

“In that case,” he says, “tell me why a raven is like a writing desk.”