Who: Dylan & Ella What: A series of dreams. Where: The wings of a theater, the bottom of a blood bank, and a beach. When: WAY backdated to dreamplot time. I take full respnsibility for this taking forever. Warnings: Weirdness, abstract everything, gore. Dylan has bloody dreams as a rule, obv.
It was velvety-thick black. The lights would come soon. The lights, starry-electric and then the violins - the violins who wept and sobbed and sang when she did, a beat and a half-drawn breath before she did. Ella knew how it went, she knew the paper-rustling, coughing, foot-shuffling of an auditorium and the majesty of the conductor in the pit beneath and the silence that would be drawn up over impatient people like a blanket over mussed sheets until they were quiet. The small space at the side of the stage was empty - that was not right, people pushed on and they pushed off into the wings, they strode onto a stage and they claimed it - but Ella smoothed small, sweaty hands over the tulle of her dress and she waited, for the conductor’s downbeat, for the swell of music that meant it was her turn. Hers.
One breath, then the next. The music came, a silvery trickle of the flute and the oboe - the violins skirled in, all color and demand for attention and the cello determinedly plodding beneath them but keeping pace. Lights. Supernova bright, like sunshine flooding the lip of the stage - a breath, inhale, remember the note - and Ella prepared. Sweep on like you own the place, don’t give one look to the gallery you don’t give to the conductor, smile like you mean every note: it was dark, it was thin as silk in the place beside the stage, the lights were there if only she could step out. The violins fiddled encouragingly and then the high, sharp purity of someone else’s voice, someone else an outline half-there in the bright of the lights. The aria undid itself, fell to glorious ribbons across the stage. Ella blinked and the sound died, the fiddles began the introduction once again. Ella froze.
He'd been here before. It seemed to him that he must have, although he'd surely been too small to recall it with any vivid detail. The opera house - or whatever - struck Dylan immediately as the kind of places that his grandmother had once herded him as a child. His parents had eventually stopped letting him go over to grandmama's when he'd started coming home with broadway pamphlets and brunch menus. All the little visits to the grans were cut off abruptly after that.
Theaters were not unfamiliar at all. Dylan could vividly recall the innocuous ticket takers, the dour dancers, and the seats of red velveteen beneath his hands. The only conflict at this moment was the fact that he wasn't in one of the chairs, shouldn't he have been watching from the audience? The sidelines of the backstage seemed like a strange place to be, but not so strange that he reflected on it for very long at all.
The backstage was cloudy with shoe chalk from the dancers and Dylan ran his fingers over the pale dust marks on the floorboards as he knelt with brief investigation. The orchestra was reaching its climax crescendo with quivering notes, and it was upon glancing further ahead to where the wings opened up to the side of the well-lit stage that he saw her. She was completely across the stage, hidden in the shadow of the opposing wing. The stage was entirely vacant although glaringly bright, and he waved at her from all the way across.
The raked seats beyond the lip of the stage were empty, they were faded red velvet and the wide arms and low seats of the grandeur of expensive tickets bought at the box office for several hundred dollars. They were empty, but the rustle of silk and of suits, the shuffle of feet and the faint murmur of several hundred people breathing in tandem, all of it filtered up to the stage. The orchestral pit was empty but the lights - glowing like fireflies trapped to a piece of black card - were lit. Everywhere was empty: the stage should have echoed but it did not. A spotlight, too brilliant to look directly at, caught the center in snowy-white perfection. The aria began again, from the beginning, the same five notes.
It wasn’t the theater she knew. There had been many of them unlit. Girls lined up front to back, like paper-chain dolls: you sang and then ‘next!’. The piano was wheeled out on-stage, the orchestral pit was dark. The only theater Ella knew lit was the one in the college. The nap on the velvet curtains had worn itself smooth, it had fallen so many times in a graceful, gracious acknowledgment of final performances, of graduations. This one was a composite, a paper outline like a model. The arch was constructed of two entirely different theaters; one column Ionic, one Doric. Theaters were familiar, they were home - Ella breathed in the sweat-and-chalk smell of the wings and she closed her eyes, sweet as homemade cookies and fresh-ironed linen. When she opened them, she saw him at the other side.
Ella dreamed often and she dreamed vividly. She dreamed of performances where the music rang in her ears and she dreamed of being center-stage in a spotlight, warm on bared arms and the music floating like water. She had never dreamed another person and she stood and she looked at him, wide wide eyes and blond curls and in the next minute she was there, stood beside him without blinking, as if she had never been anywhere else.
“Are you supposed to be here?” The make-up was heavy-handed, it was suited for spotlights and raked seats, it was doll-like, the roses in her cheeks were clearly painted. But the dress below wasn’t anything for singing on stage, it was worn and faded and floral, a sundress above bare, sandaled feet. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here. Nobody’s supposed to be here.” Ella was soft South coloring words that were soprano-light, and wide blue eyes and she stared at him like he didn’t fit with red velvet and black boards beneath their feet.
The gregarious emergence of the young woman through such lofty dark space wasn't unsettling, and Dylan's grin of welcome was utterly insouciant. One never quite understood that things were off in a dream until they were awake and getting reflective in their sheets. She was right though, he didn't look like he belonged here. In checkered golf pants of fawn and rhubarb, with an old David Bowie t-shirt; not the Ziggy Stardust days with the glitter glue over that mismatched eye, but rather a simple mugshot portrait out of Rochester. It was clothes for lounging around the apartment(he didn't immediately recall that he didn't have an apartment anymore) and hacking into government-secure websites.. not for formal excursions into high society. Although he'd been born with a proclivity to disappoint, so maybe this was the outfit that he reserved specifically for these kinds of upperclass evenings with the fine arts. If there was anything taken from his immediate heritage, it was a fondness for gaucherie. "Yeah, probably not," he confessed. Dylan made a lot of easy confessions for a spy, although very few of them were legitimate or true, so it kind of evened out.
When the music started up again, Dylan turned away from the lithe dancer with the painted cheeks to catch another glimpse of the vacant stage, the abysmal orchestra pit, and the sea of empty seats where nobody was watching. "I think you're on, sweetheart.."
The sharp sweetness of the voice on stage (that there was no one at all to sing did not appear to matter overly to the theater which sent the follow-spot scudding over black boards to faithfully pick out the dust motes that spiraled there) was sudden, it was an intake of breath as you slid into cold water, it was high enough to raise the hairs on the very back of the neck and to leave them there until you inched down into your seat and your hands closed on soft-worn velvet and you applauded at the end for relief, for the impossible end to it. Ella turned her head and she looked at the light, sadly.
“No,” she said and it was neither whisper nor was it loud enough to be caught beyond the clasp of the wings: there was practice there, in the drop of the voice to alto, to the pianissimo required to be heard without the stretch of speech to the rise and fall of dust on stage and the pure-cold Ave on stage that rang out across the empty, fiddling pit. “No, I think someone else took my part. But it doesn’t matter.” She smiled, she shuffled deeper into the recess of shadow and she sat, knees curved to chest and sandaled feet very straight on the floor. “I don’t think I sing, any more. Do you?” As if it were legitimate question, he in David Bowie and pants without tuxedo-sophistication in a theater that demanded it of both of them.
He stared across the theater as she spoke, trying to ascertain who might have stolen the part from her. It was probably important, although nothing in dreams ever seemed to be at the time. There didn't seem to be anyone else around, as if the strong and melodic voice had originated out of pure air. Ghosts were always taking the best parts, weren't they? "It doesn't matter?" He had to turn and look at her with the words still fresh on his tongue. The tuck of his mouth suggested a pretty extreme sense of disbelief, because primadonnas always cared about somebody else stealing the limelight, ghost or not. But the look crumbled into self-deprecating amusement when she asked if he sang.
"Uh, no." He wasn't even that invested in music. The radio in his car was rarely on, but sometimes it did help his concentration to have some beats in the background. Primarily Daft Punk and the electro-nerd synths. Somehow Dylan didn't think that the orchestra knew those guys, not to mention that he wasn't quite in the improvising mood. "If they're not playing for you, who are they playing for?"
She looked at him again, the slide upward of a smile and the joke that held itself behind it: perhaps he wouldn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t, the violins raged and sobbed the introduction once again, the singer paused, the notes trickled once again, sweet-cold and sly. Ella cocked her head above her knees, she looked toward the stage as if insight was stood in the shadows of the thick curtains, held herself delicate as a sugar-plum, feet pointed to go on. “I don’t know,” Ella said, quiet and calm as someone sat down to tea; she shrugged narrow shoulders, an expansive, this is how it is in abandoning self to the dark at the side of the stage. “I don’t sing and she does. There are other things.”
What it was they were was bound up and cotton-thick, muzzy as reaching for memory in heavy sleep. She looked instead at the limmed stage-light that crept along the boards, startling-bright, as though creeping into it would be as natural as breathing. “I’ve been dreaming it over and over but it’s always the same. She sings, I sit. Who are you?” Ella’s voice was soft-husky, plaintive; she rubbed her thumb over her cheek, smudged the smooth, bright pink of the painted doll.
He didn't understand that she meant this was the dream, because as strange as it was, it didn't seem strange. It felt as tangible as reality ever did, and when he reached out to touch the thick fold of a strung curtain, the fabric felt like every velvet curtain he'd ever touched. Particles of dust fell off and floated like tiny angels in the shafts of golden stagelight, barely abiding by the constraints of gravity. They say that a thousand seraphims can dance on the head of a pin, and he watched the specks of vanishing dust while contemplating the physics of that. Even if they were not in Vegas -- and even if Vegas wasn't a notion of a thought in his head while trapped in the transient scape of dreams -- his skin was sand grazed. Just this side of sunburnt on his left arm, where it was accustomed to hanging over the lip of a half-full car window in the late afternoon sun of their fair city. That is, when he wasn't busy splitting atoms and inventing new breakfast cereals. The dream made him recall that he was scientific in some way, although the venue for those shoes wasn't exactly designated.
"Is this a dream?" He thought to ask it only because she mentioned having dreamt this so many times before.
Dust skittered into light, like a corps de ballet raising arms, whirling in unison and out of time. It didn’t matter that the music didn’t match, it was pretty as broken glass, as discords struck beneath water. Ella watched it and thought nothing of physics, only of the weave in and out of invisible partners, of patterns and notes, the stave spilling long and stretching wide and the coupled darting notes of singer and orchestra beneath as the dust settled once again, the interact. This was no theater of Vegas, this one, familiar only in the shapes between the curtains, the creeping huddle of people that ought be cloistered between them - it was a roughly-knit creation, the Frankenstein who made it so was bare legs and hands clasped over her knees, as though the music were particular knife and Madam Butterfly the role with its particular sharp sweetness, not an aria that unlinked itself from the silver-chain of story. “I think so,” Ella was vague, drugged on dreams that slipped between reality of truth and the truth she’d dreamed so fiercely it had been almost rather than fantasy. “I dream it over on over but I don’t know if I’m dreaming or maybe it’s true.”
He didn’t look much like a dream, he looked like a collision. Elision of memory and dream and something so tangibly different, Ella couldn’t think of dreaming him at all. “I don’t think I dreamed you. Who are you?” Softly plaintive.
"Dylan." His answer was simple in offering, and incredibly truthful for a spy. Although it seemed to him that there were not a whole lot of reasons for the cloak and dagger routine while in a dream. Okay, maybe that would occur to him in waking hours, but in the moment honesty was the only option. The words rose through him like so much smoke, and he didn't know what to say aside from what needed to be said. His thoughts moved through time in a somersaulting hopscotch kind of kindergarten jump over chalk outlined numbers, and it was a nice(although chaotic) change of pace. He was used to thinking so hard about everything, everyone, and every outcome.. but here, life was fluid. It moved around him, and him with it.
"Do you know me? Do I know you?" He reached out to touch the shoulder of her dress, seeking some sense of familiarity with it. Of course, there was none, and his hand fell away a moment later. The music started up again, and the deja-vu repetition would have been fucking creepy if the dream allowed him to remember that it had just occurred. "You're on.." He smiled, unaware that he'd previously said just that thing.
No, she hadn’t dreamed a Dylan. The letters slid around, glass on ice as her hands fastened around it, frost-on-window brief. The D tangled with the tail of the y, she’d learned cursive somewhere, hadn’t she? His name was a spill of ink on a page, crotchets and quavers interlaced; she hummed the notes-for-syllables, soft and low - it was a treble sort of thing, his tune. But she didn’t know it, she didn’t remember it the way Ella knew music, ripple of the empty stave a certainty. “I don’t know you,” Ella said, and she spread wide her hands, “But maybe I do somewhere. I don’t know all the things in my dreams and sometimes the things in my dreams aren’t true.” She’d dreamed a great deal of teapots and doilies, of woods that spoke as you ran through them, of sand running through glass, of cooling tea and ticking clocks.
She’d dreamed of teeth.
The dress was thin; his palm bled heat that seeped through worn cotton, Ella looked at that hand, all broad, flat-edged fingers, but the music skirted, shied and his hand slid away from her shoulder, and Ella tensed, ballerina-strings pulled up tight, wires set to jangling. “I don’t like dreaming it over and over. Dream something else? Maybe your dream can make the music stop.” It was thin, it was quiet, her eyes slanted past him, the spotlight spinning on empty stage, a pool of yellow warmth to step into. The singer began again.
Normally, he would have been curious as to the spelling of his name, and not just the rise of letters through phantasmal orchestra notes (although that, if anything, was something to get curious about). Any hero kept an eye out for smoke signals from trapped princess towers. And wasn't she royalty? She was fair, and maybe it was the make-up smudged all over the rubied apples of her cheeks, but she seemed delicate like the painted dolls that he imagined were having perpetual cake in Victorian toy shoppe windows. "You're beautiful," he said. He said it with a dimpled grin that was charming only because it wasn't trying to be. It was the self-affected smile of thoughts that resided anywhere but here, and he completely forgot about wondering why she decided to spell his name with a yla instead of the weird mash-up of is and ls and ons that some people opted for. Pretty or fetching might have been more appropriate words for the girl's soft-edged and glowing appearance, but Dylan was the type of man who used all of his good words while awake, and he left very little of them behind for slumber.
When she suggested that he dream, realization rose over his head for another brief moment when he recalled all over again that they were asleep, that none of this was happening. Not really. "You think I can?" The question held more excitement than uncertainty, because possibilities always put a little bit of fire into the blood of cheaters, liars, and (especially) spies.
The floor gave way in that moment, answering an unspoken need with gusto. Physics recalled that it had no place in dreams, and it raised its little white flag with admirable extinction. This was no slow deterioration of antique floorboards, no crumbling fixtures, just the sudden absence of ground. Somebody had popped the hinge on the trap door beneath their soon-to-be hung feet. There was nowhere to go now but all the way down. Whoosh.
Way, way down into the black nothing, where they moved too fast to even hold on to a scream. Far below the Earth's crust, beyond the catacombs of Hades, and into the caliginous nectar of nightmares. After a couple minutes of falling, all that black nothing wasn't quite nothing anymore. It wasn't so noticeable in the beginning, but the dark was permeated pinpricks of silver. Tiny holes of starlight that grew into frequent gashes. Wounds in the night that bled titanium alloy. On their freefall, he couldn't see her, but he could feel her. She was close enough that he could smell her, which didn't seem as strange as it would have if he'd been awake. These days there was enough off kilter, singsong whispers about smellies and tasties that it seemed rather expected at this point. Much more expected than falling through the end of the Earth.
Splash. Like a pair of trick poodles swandiving into spangled dixie cups, there was suddenly water in his face, his eyes, and his nose. Yet when Dylan came up, surging to break through the endless surface, he found that the pool shrank exponentially until it just breached his naval where he sat. He could feel her there in the dark again, the tough gauze of her opera skirt tangled with some of his fingers, soaked through with whatever dank swamp water they were currently sitting in.
But it didn't taste like water. It was thicker than any true liquid, and so metallic that it made his teeth hurt. There was a sweetness there too, and a familiarity that sang with apprehensive nostalgia through Dylan's sleeping mind. When the lights came on, he suddenly knew why. He was finally able to see that the water they sat in was actually old, clotting blood gone cold. Their pool was a glass basin with clear walls that rose straight up some thirty feet.
She’d learned to swim. She knew it tangentially, thoughts tangled together like damp silk, I know this but the drag-weight of dead-draggled skirts and plunged full deep, it was struggling against molasses-thick water, shadow-of-the-moon dark. She’d learned to swim, she thrashed upward, dogged paddle in sticky-thick water until the tidal-wave retreated, until looking up was glassy bell-curve, butterflies to thrash within it. Close enough, perhaps, to smell-touch-hear but all around her was thick, sweet metallic -- enough to blind her, enough to choke her with the true-dead smell that caught in her nose, sat on her tongue like pennies. Ella screamed, C sharp over E - glassy-eyed with tears and fear.
“No,” shudder-soft, thin as smoke-ash and letters that dissolved in dark theater air. “No, I want to wake up. I don’t dream like this.” But she didn’t, couldn’t; awake was aware but if aware was dreaming, how could aware be awake at all? She was stained opera skirts and scarlet-painted arms; blood clung in clots to curls. It was cool as long-gone things by the side of the road, sticky like death in a bed, filmed-over eyes and stiffened limbs. “Dream something else, Dylan.” Fingers fastened above his wrist, sticky-warm; five prints stood starkly on his arm. “Please?”
"I didn't dream this," he argued while gagging on the feeling of something as thick and gelatinous as a slug sliding down the back of his throat. He retched, mingling curses and prayers as the taste of something long dead painted his tongue. "Fucking goddamnit.. baby Jesus.." Whatever he'd swallowed, it seemed intent on not coming back up, and when Dylan glanced her way again, he seemed ill, damn near green in the way that cartoon rabbits could be. He couldn't have dreamed this, this was horrific and he just never had been the type of person to develop nightmares. His dreams usually consisted of suddenly gifted flight, the occasional bout of realizing he went to work naked, and sometimes there was some weird Sailor Moon meets the Care Bears shit going on, but there was never blood.
Not like this. Not so real that he couldn't stomach it, the smell actually seared itself in the sensory mind, and he could remember the first fresh murder scenes he'd ever seen, the way that death taste stuck to the roof of his mouth for a full day afterward.
"I didn't," he argued -- although it sounded more like a plead for her to agree -- with a voice that sounded more hitched than convincing as the blood grew ever higher, sourced from nowhere that could be seen. The clots and thick sickness just bubbled up from the glassbottom below.
It was sweet as syrup, cloying darkly in her throat, up her nose and thick to move in like swimming in treacle. She wanted to scream, she wanted to breathe, she wanted to be sick, horribly sick - he’d gone green, and she’d paled out to the color of spoiled milk, bluish-yellow and gasping for breath in the pant-pant-gasp of hyperventilation, of fighting for a little whilst taking in a surfeit of sweet-tainted oxygen. But he’d gone green and Ella’s hand loosened a fraction and her fingers skidded down his wrist on red-paint marks, and tangled with his own, chilly-damp. “It’s okay,” she said, desperate-soft, but it wasn’t, the level in the bulbous glass rising like high-tide, like sand spilling down to an hour completed, “It’s okay, you don’t have to have dreamed it,” soothing like a child ready for bed.
The dress was heavy, the dress slithered around her legs, a weighted bloodstain, Ella clung because she could, because she had to, because the futile kick-kick of staying upright as the dredge of gore rose higher was near impossible, close to terrible. “You just go ahead and dream something different,” and her voice squeaked up higher as the spatter-bubble of clots rose, nightmare whorl of movement at the center of the glass.
He pulled a deep and desperate breath in through his mouth, and Dylan wasn't sure if that made it better or infinitely worse. The blood managed to smell more like death than any body ever had, and that wasn't right. He knew with closed eyes and paint-by-numbers logic that none of this was right. Not just because of their abberant belljar of exsanguination, but blood didn't liken itself to third world slaughterhouses; cloying with thickened fear and meat gone bad in the midday sun. Dylan sucked down some more gruesome air, swallowing the dirty taste that coated his tongue like wool. He exhaled slowly through his nose, combating the panic in his galloping heart while Ella tried to bargain another dream out of him. He'd allowed himself to freak out, but now it was time to think. Dylan refused to get desperate, even as he could feel the sewage blood crawling higher. He'd tried to meditate once in his whole life, and that had lasted for about seven minutes before he gotten bored and ordered some pizza. So this was a hell of a time to try for a second attempt. Dreaming didn't make the calm come any easier, but it seemed like implementing a still mind was the only way to truly control where they went. He didn't want to switch the dream out for something even more fucked up. God forbid he end up tapdancing with her in a giant food processor before some giant flipped the on switch -- fuck, why did he think of that?
Maybe it was her determined solace that finally made his mind go stoic, or maybe it was him, but the dour dream opened up. Unlike her own, this did not unravel in abstract spools of gravity, Ares' fishbowl did not bottom out in a blink. The tide continued to rise steadily, and by the critical moment of upheaval, the red sea was nearly boxing his chin. Dylan's fingers streaked against the glass as he tried to remain steady while also helping Ella to stay above the rolling tides of gore.
Then, thwack. A singing bluebird(cartoon in formation with big, batting eyelashes) hit the glass several feet above them. Soared straight into the crystalline blockade with no heed for fighter pilot swerving, no instinct for stopping, and certainly no hindsight after the fact. The bird tumbled straight down, wings spread like Jesus, x's for eyes. It left behind a smudge of cerulean feathers on the glass, a leaking dribble of roux-thick brain matter, and a significant crack in their belljar.
A fault line was born with sprouting roots that plunged down, down, down to the bloody base of their bowl. The fractured lines spread out like far-reaching fingers, witches claws or tree branches cast in Halloween shadows, long and going thin at the ends. The fractures were stressed, and it was too much to hold all of the dark within. Blood punched a hole at the bottom, and they surged through its gaping maw of glass splinters like being drawn through a drain. Sucked down to the bottom of a wartorn, goreslick sea. A bluebeard undertow where even the light didn't want to go. Water was good for giving one the sensation of weightlessness, but this wasn't water. There was a weight on his chest and in his head, a heaviness that pulled him down like fishing weights. Dylan was imbibed with a sensation of depth, but no true sense of distance or leagues. The pressure alone told him that it was deep, and dangerously so. His heart was beating frantically, ready to explode from the pressure. He'd gone down too far, there was no getting back to the surface now. His heart burned with the knowledge that an inhale would only bring in a lungful of sick.. but he couldn't fight it.
He gasped hard.
The air was sweet. Dry and sun warm. When Dylan opened his eyes, there was no blood. Only a crystal blue sea and an even bluer sky. He was laid out, flat on his back in the wet sand of a tropical shoreline, and distantly he was aware of the fact that she was somewhere beside him. The waves rolled up over his legs, not feeling either warm or cold, and not even wet, but comforting. The air tasted like coconut and rum, leaving the memory of all that red far behind.
"Are you okay?" He finally remembered to ask.
There had been no malformed gore, no capricious, bloodful death for her to learn, to see, to twist against like malevolent conductor twitching strings. There had been no copper pennies to burn inside her throat, nothing of this drenched-dread scene of soaked-to-skin in blood, in the ocean-wave of thick filth to drown her in. Ella was no words, was futile flutter of feet against the sticky-whirl of blood and if she had to drown, if she had to die gasping in her own dreams then this was the first, the introduction of death as other than the retreat, than the shudder-breath of nothing. This was violence, cupped in glass - and then the bird flew, zig-zag drunken sway of wings and Ella screamed; sharp-high note as her throat contracted, bile sweet-sour rose in the back of it, her stomach heaved.
There was nothing but inevitability; Ella’s fingers skidded over soaked cloth and she was loose, like sand in spinning hourglass, submerged beneath the red-limned tide that bowed over her head like a veil, a wedding to the sweet-salt roil of her belly. The glass tinkled, sang soprano. Ella did not fight, she was flung fingers starfished in so much ruby-red, squeezed-closed eyes and breath held until strangulated bubble after bubble. The world narrowed, it was the white starburst of held breath, of her lungs compressing like a held-note, of nothing but the timpani of her own heartbeat.
And then - her back hit hard against the forgiving compression of wet sand, an air that was clear and merciful and wide-wet blue. Ella opened her eyes, the salt-streak across her cheeks a track amid so much gore-red. She turned her face to look at him. “I didn’t like your dreams until now.” A beat. The held-breath shiver of letting go; her edges were ash and white-soft dust, filtered into sand, motes on the breeze. Gone.
In waking light he could have joked. Even in tumultuous night with consciousness at his back, he could have strung his quipped bow with sarcastic arrows.. but there was none of that now. Just the whistling luau of a breeze as it did a lovely foxtrot over their heads. "You got a crown," he whispered with a voice so soft that the words didn't even have the power to crawl for her ears. They would have gotten lost along the way in the foxtrot anyway.
There was sand in her hair, a wet cake batter application of it, and Dylan reached out to touch it. Just a method of trying to figure out if this was real or if the fishbowl had been real. But nothing was real, and he remembered that when her temple went to grit under his thumb. It gave way with a dent and a weak crumbling. The edge of a pretty sandcastle eaten away by the sea. He watched her eyes get carried away by the wind while his fingertips dripped a molten groove of sea water into her cheek, where the tears had run deep enough for a grave. She was wet sand, then dry, then gone in a gust.
Dylan closed his eyes when the sea crashed a little higher, demanding the salty moisture of his own skin to join its marauding waves. The band of briney brothers, barnacles, and broken ships welcomed him. He melted away.