priordivergence | In All My Dreams I Drown

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In All My Dreams I Drown

I'm dreaming again. I know this in an abstract way that comes from repetition. This isn't the first time I've had nightmares of my time in Dauntless training. Sometimes I dream that I have to spar against Peter, only he's stolen all of my clothing again and so I have to fight naked or not at all. Those dreams are frustrating and abstract. The worse dreams are the ones of memories, when I watch my friends and family die.

Then there are the dreams of my fear landscape. The scenarios repeat and repeat until I wake myself up. Ironically, it's harder to separate myself from the fear when I'm dreaming than it is under serum. When I'm under a serum, I have a clear memory of being put under. When I'm dreaming, I lose myself in the liminal space between being awake and then being plunged into my own deepest fears,

Tonight my fears blend together. I'm on a rocky outcropping in the ocean, dragging myself up by my knuckles as I'm battered by waves. Overhead, I can hear crows squalling, waiting to eat me whole.

If I stay on the rocks, I will drown. If I climb them, they will come.

There's no point in escaping this by waking up because I will dream it tomorrow night too.

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"This is from my fear landscape." It wasn't real then and I've had this nightmare too many times now to be fooled. "My first fear was being devoured by crows."

But I'm not afraid of crows and ravens. I wear them on my body. They're not what I really fear.

"What they did to you in Chicago?" I remember her mentioning. It was discussed briefly. My memory is usually fairly accurate. It's a little harder to recall details when there are birds with sharp claws and cutting beaks swirling around your head, though. When you're out at sea with the waves crashing around you.

There's too much adrenaline pounding through me still that I've even managed not to be seasick.

"Can you get out of here?" I could wake myself up at any moment. But I won't. Not if it means leaving her to experience this on her own, even if that doesn't make any sense. Even if she does it nightly.

I send another flame into the sky, scattering the birds further. I don't have the lucidity, myself, to change the land. Just to know that I'm dreaming. "Doesn't really matter. I dream this kind of thing almost every night." Despite whatever fearful things I dream, I know that I'm asleep.

"Can you walk out the way you walked in?" Dorian's presence makes things clearer in the dream, I think. Like another dose of lucidity within my own sleep.

"No," I say, mouth forming a tight line. I can only wake myself up. Other than that, it's leaving the same way I came in, by walking the Fade. I knew the danger when I set out; I have power, but only power enough to wander, not enough to shape the Fade around myself to my desire.

"But maybe you can?"

I've had enough of the birds. What I can do is use my magic here, as I can in the material world, though it might attract nasties if I'm not careful and quick.

"Good runner?" I ask. Then I lift my staff. It gives a cold blue glow. The waves nearest me freeze into jagged peaks. The ice is walkable, but not thick, and the battering water of the turbulent sea threatens by the half second to wash it all away. I'm not powerless, either.

I'm about to nod, to take a step forward, only to realize Dorian's ice has warped in my dream. This is my fear landscape after all and my mind has no room for Dorian's magic, only my own terrors. Ice becomes glass, separating the two of us. The tank again.

Looking through at Dorian, I become aware of frigid cold water, rapidly pooling at my ankles, my knees. Faster and faster.

Deep breath. I place my hands flat against the glass. Dorian made ice and I made it glass and I can make it glass again, I can shatter it.

This isn't real.

It isn't my first trip through the Fade. Isn't the first time I've watched one reflection of reality melt into a different one, stumbled from one concept to another. Usually it doesn't involve suddenly watching someone drowning. I'm a decent swimmer. That doesn't mean I've trained to hold my breath for more than, perhaps, a minute. Not without royally fucking myself up for the next half hour. I can only pray to whatever will listen that Tris is a sight better at this than I am.

It is her nightmare. I try not to panic.

The water looks frigid.

"Tris!| A wheel back with my staff, cracking it into the plate glass of the tank. Nothing. I'm not surprised. Dreams don't follow the same rules as reality. "You'd better have a handle on this! If you scare me to death, I'm going to arrange to have you haunted for at least four years!"

I beat against the tank with my open palms this time. It doesn't work any more than the staff did, but it makes me feel better.

I may have a guest, but this is still my dream. There's no serum, no electrodes. I made this and I will control it. I press my fingertips against the glass and tap once. Water rises up around my ribs.

The glass is weak. The glass is like thin ice. I have to make myself believe it. I tap the glass again and cracks appear.

That's right. Just like new ice.

Pulling back, I slam my palm against the crack and watch the glass shatter.

The sound the glass case makes as it cracks is intense, a deep pinging that seems to be all around me, in my head and in my chest. It shatters, sending the water inside flowing out across the floor. It seems impossibly deep, up above my ankles, and more of it than there could possibly have actually been in the case. Is this usually her nightmare? Or is my presence here influencing it somehow?

It's an academic question. It doesn't have a place in my world right now; I can deal with all that later.

"Tris." I call out to her again, plucking my way toward her, careful of the sharp shards littering the ground.

It used to be that breaking the glass would make my landscape, and the dreams, change. Since the tank arrived in reality last winter, I have memories of what it's like to lay on the floor, surrounded by broken glass, coughing and shivering.

"I'm okay. I'm okay."

I am a very good liar.

"Is this really okay?" I ask, breath coming in pants now that it feels like I've got a chance to catch a few in a row again. It had all been too fast, too unfamiliar. I'm left gasping and trying to make sense of it.

I try to catch her eyes, wondering if this will be the last of it. If the birds will return. Or worse. "I this every night for you?" I know that the quaver in my voice says all that it needs to about how unacceptable that idea is to me.

"Not every night," I say, staring up at the cold steel ceiling provided by my imagination. Not every night. Just most of them. "I know it's not real." That knowledge doesn't do anything to keep me from feeling afraid, but it gives me the strength to know that I'll wake up and this won't be where I die.

"Every Dauntless had to go through it."

Not every night she says. As if that makes it any better. As if knowing it's not real makes it any better. I know that dreams aren't real; that's what it is to be a mage, to be wholly aware of when you're dreaming, and where you are when you do it.

The reminder sends a vicious chill swimming up my spine, making my shoulders tense.

"If you know it's not real," I ask, worried about the answer. "Can't you just wake up?"

It does not actually surprise me to hear that every Dauntless had to experience such a thing. As every mage had to experience a Harrowing, however different in every way that might be from whatever-the-hell this was.

Edited 2015-06-22 04:23 (UTC)

"I could, but I'll dream it again tomorrow, or the night after." Even if my mind remains fearful and lost, my body can at least recover. "They're not as bad as they used to be."

Not as bad as they were before Tobias came. Most nights, his arms around me are enough to distract from the worst of it.

"Everyone has bad dreams. I just have to learn to cope."

"Tris," I say, moving closer with the crackle of wetm broken glass as I close the distance. I want her to see my face when we talk about this. It seems, somehow, horribly important that I don't just let her slide by thinking ... that this is alright, I suppose. Something along the line failed her. That makes me angry.

I try to catch her eyes.

"Everyone has awful dreams. Not everyone remembers having them in the morning! Not everyone has the same kind every night. Just coping seems like a real kick in the arse to me. There's got to be better out there than just learning to cope. If this was me, well I'd ... I don't know what I would do, but I certainly wouldn't be just accepting it."

"You'd have to go to my city and undo every single Dauntless initiate then," I say, sitting up. I can still remember Al crying at night while Christina would simply sit quiet except for the way she occasionally startled. Tobias has gone into his fear landscape so many times, dealing with the same four fears again and again.

"I'm not scared of my dreams anymore, not really. But they don't go away."

She seems set in her beliefs, that nothing can be changed. As much as that bothers me for some reason, I'm not about to fight with her about it -- or anybody else about a personal belief, if it's truly personal. This is. This is her problem, because she wants it to be. In the same way, I suppose, I feel about the rift between my father and myself.

"Well, then, ah--"

I pause, shifting my feet around in the glittering wet glass, rivulets of cold water still moving through the field of it. It would be shitty behavior to cut and run while she's still here, especially if this is every night for her.

Why this? Why the crows, why the glass case?

"Then you can't just wake yourself?"

"I need the sleep." My body needs to rest and recover, even if my mind is still exhausted and fraught. Despite the lucidity of my dreams, I'll step out of bed refreshed in all but my mind. "And I am asleep, outside of this dream."

Isn't he? I'm suddenly less certain. Dorian is a mage, I suppose. Maybe he runs on different rules. What Dauntless would make of him, I think.

"As am I, for the most part," I say. I've managed to make my way over to Tris, though not without a little stumbling, and a lot of intensely paranoid staring around. This is her dream, not mine, and dreams are unpredictable in the best of circumstances. Someone else's dream, that was a realm of impenetrable that was maddening at worst, annoying at very best.

"But I don't -- mages don't, where I am from -- sleep like other people do. We're lucid. We know we're dreaming, and we remember, every time. We don't usually go traipsing into other people's. There are a few reasons for this particular situation, and I can go into detail about them later, but suffice to say; at least one of the methods I am currently regretting, just a bit."

"We don't have mages, where I'm from." Just science and serums that help me eke out everything I fear. I'm waiting too, for the next obstacle, but it seems as though focusing on Dorian keeps my brain from designating new horrors. I can't complain.

"You can still leave if you want. I know my dreams aren't exactly fun."

Do I want? Yes and no. But if I can't help, and she can't leave, and there is not much for me to learn here, it seems foolish to stay, even though it also feels cruel to leave when Tris is stuck to her nightmares. Alone.

Pressing a thumb against my cheek, I smooth down one edge of my mustache. I must seem agitated -- I am agitated -- and all that I can think to cover it up is to take a smooth, slightly too theatrical bow to Tris. I doff an imaginary cap.

"I suppose I'll take my leave -- but I'm going to make you talk about some things the next time we meet." I don't want to be cruel. But I can't help but think that talking about them, these awful nightmares, to someone, anyway, can't be the wrong decision in the long run.

We can talk as much as he wants, it won't change my dreams. Christina still has the same night terrors and Tobias finds new ones. I'm not special, though Dorian's concern is surprisingly kind.

Feeling better, I offer him a bow of my own.

"We can talk then. It's okay."

After a lingering look at Tris, at the strange space around me, the emptiness and silence of everything outside of the broken glass case and Tris' too-steady expression, I take my leave.

Waking, it fades behind me. I find myself, a moment after, sitting up in my own bedroom on a messy bed; I must have been tossing and turning. I didn't, not usually, especially not after lyrium. My feet are cold, the blankets discarded. It reminds me a little too much of the rush of icy water.

Tris will be around town; she will have to be, because Darrow was not something easily left. I can find her at leisure, I suppose, and speak to her again about it. Though I know she won't very likely be in much of a mood for discussing it.

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In All My Dreams I Drown

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