InsaneJournal

Who: Jonathan and Iris
What: That thing we wrote but forgot to post. First meeting in the real world, and a lot of "O_o"
Where: Ella's flower shop, where Iris is helping.
When: Backdated before the group plot.
Warnings: Zip.

Jonathan was out to get lunch before buckling down and working on the case he'd been brought by Cole. He needed a whole variety of evidence he didn't have his hands on yet, but he could at least spend some time laying out facts and making a list of all the things he'd need to get from records the following day. And honestly, he'd been inside way too much in the last few weeks, unpacking, getting settled, and working. It felt good to just leave the building and get outside. The afternoon was beautiful, and he brushed away thoughts of the case for the moment.

As he passed the flower shop, he slowed. This place had to be new-or very different from the last time he'd walked by. New owners, maybe? The front was attractive, with massive fresh flowers everywhere. He peered in the open front door, idly curious.

Iris was two steps inside the door, holding a little notepad and marking off inventory that was still present. When she gave a quick about-face and a step forward, she nearly knocked foreheads with the most recent customer. Rapidly backpedaling, she squinted through the setting sun behind him to try to get a look at his face (an automatic instinct to unfamiliar people) as she spoke. "Oh, hello." She was a far cry from the ethereal woman in the dark dream; she wore colors better suited to a tropical rainforest, and smelled just as good as any other flower in the shop.

He backed up a step, smiling. "Sorry. Almost knocked you over." He glanced to the shop behind her, and then back. After lingering for a moment he was struck with familiarity, then realization.

He didn't always remember his dreams, but that one, the one with the girl and the city, had been very, very vivid. There was no mistaking her, barefoot on a lonely highway or clad in bright colors in a flower shop. It took him a moment before he could go on, swiftly making a decision not to say anything, at least not right away. If she worked this close to the building, he probably had just seen her on the street and she'd been a convenient face for his subconscious to place on the nameless woman in his dream.

"I'm just a gawker," he said, after a moment. "I was looking at the display outside. Is this place new?"

"New ownership," she replied, eyes still watering a little. "We just..." as she spoke, Iris took a quick strategic step to one side to foil the light. It was obvious, despite her best efforts, that she recognized him, too. That dream was as close to home as any of the others, and she hadn't known the dreamwalking was a common ailment in the building before this. Her sentence trailed off and she was forced to grope for a shelf to catch her before the disorientation of the dream took over. It took a lot to knock Iris out of her carefully constructed cocoon of functionality, but this one did it.

That couldn't be a coincidence. He wasn't the type to tease, or pretend he hadn't seen her react when he had. "You recognize me," he said, a statement, not a question.

Her weight set the shelf askew and a small jar holding a variety of writing utensils tipped and fell, shattering on the floor. She retreated from the noise, pressing her lips together and not reacting at all to the mistake, suppressing all reactions to everything so quickly that she went from surprised and confused to absolutely blank in the space of a second. "From what?"

He took a step forward as if to catch her and keep her from falling, and stopped when he saw that she'd successfully caught herself at the expense of a jar. He knelt down, picking up the pieces and collecting the pencils that had been inside it. "A dream," he said. If he was wrong, then he'd just be misconstrued as a really lame pick up artist. He could live with that.

Silence. Her feet didn't move, and she was watching him pick up the pencils and wondering if he was real. After a little while, before he had a chance to look up, she said, "I have a lot of dreams. Why you?" He wasn't supposed to be real. She needed to sit down.

"Why you?" he countered, straightening and setting the pencils back on the shelf. He brushed past her, meeting her gaze for a moment, looking for a place to put the shards of glass. "I don't think either of us could answer that particular question." He turned away from her, finally finding a garbage can to dump the glass shards into, and looked back.

She didn't have an answer for that, or another question that could trump that first one. So she was silent, moving back as he came toward her, to the point of retreating across the room to one of the stuffed armchairs Ella had brought in for the mood. She had thought it was silly at the time. Collapsing more than sitting, she let him find the can behind the counter and then watched to see what he would do next. Leave? Ask her what it meant?

He walked around the counter, putting his hands on it and leaning back a touch. He didn't get any closer to her-her flight to the other side of the room hadn't gone unnoticed. "Do you live nearby?" He'd heard a lot of strange things about the building. If she lived there as well, that might...well, not explain it, exactly, but shed a hint of light on the matter. It would be a common factor, not just two people, entirely unrelated, stumbling into one another's subconscious.

She nodded wordlessly and lifted a hand to indicate the direction of Bellum Letale. She already figured out he must live there. Peter did too. Iris dug her hands into her hair, not pulling but tilting her head as if it hurt her. "I think the building is doing it. Someone else--" She paused and rephrased. "It happened to someone else too, with my dreams. Maybe it's something to do with me."

"That could be," he said. "One person, maybe. Two people? That makes it sound like the building has a vested interest in you." He studied her posture, still water eyes taking her in. "Your sister. Was that real?" A memory, unspooled in a nightmare. That was what it had felt like, in retrospect, and now that he knew it had belonged to someone else, he could see it for what it was.

She stared. "It was a nightmare."

He thought about pointing out the obviousness of that fact, but didn't. Instead he paused, then pushed away from the counter. "I've made you uncomfortable," he said. "I'm sorry. That wasn't my intention." Difficult to avoid in the circumstance, but he didn't point that out either. As far as he could tell, she was shaken and didn't want him there. Maybe it would be best to leave and give her time to recover, try talking to her some other time. Then again, what did you say to someone whose head you'd been inside? It was the definition of awkward. No wonder she was uncomfortable.

"Was your city real?" It was abrupt and sharper than she intended it to be, but she didn't like think of Layla or anything related to her. That pain, she decided, was supposed to stay where it belonged, in the past.

The question caught him briefly off guard. "No," he said. "It wasn't." He frowned a little, like it had only just occurred to him, though it hadn't. The nature of the city wasn't something he thought about. It was a dream. Why pick it apart?

"Then what is it? You made it up?" She was watching his face, looking for weakness.

He looked back at her. "It's a back drop," he said. "Like you have for a stage play. The setting has to be believable, and after that, what the actors do doesn't much matter." His gaze was steady, and he didn't flinch from the question, a little fire in his honesty. "The city I know, that I grew up in-that's not it."

"I don't understand," The angry gaze subsided a little, and she stopped waiting for him to make a mistake she could take advantage of. "You made the city to have nothing to talk to people in?"

"I didn't exactly sit down and build it," he said. " 'Make' is too strong a word. That's just the way it ended up. It looks smooth on the surface, and it covers up the cracks underneath, and the people in it aren't real. So they don't take advantage of one another, and they don't try to kill one another, and they don't beat the shit out of one another. They get along." He walked toward the other side of the room, getting no closer to Iris, looking at a glass vase full of tulips and alstromeria. "They're not really people, the same way the city's not really a city. But it's peaceful, I'd argue."

She had to think about that a little bit, playing with the long hem of her skirt and not saying anything as she turned it over in her mind. "I can see that," she said, finally. "It's just... an odd thing to dream about."

"No more odd than anyone else's," he said, brushing the idea off apparently without consideration. "Do you always dream about the same thing?"

"The same things." She wasn't reluctant to say it, just a little grim. "Lately... it is more often. Do you have any ideas on how to make it stop?" She paused to imagine an answer he might give, and quickly amended, "Not the dreams, they don't stop, of course, I mean... I mean others in them? My neighbors... I don't think I'll have many for long, at this rate." She offered a smile; not much of one, but it was there.

"If you meet someone on the road, don't let them follow you," he said, with a ghost of a smile. "I don't know. If it really is the building doing it, you might not have a choice."

"I can't keep them away," she said, losing the smile for a sigh. "That's what I mean."

"The other person in your dreams. Did they damage the dream somehow?" He wasn't sure exactly what a guest could do to affect the dream, since clearly, all he'd been able to do was pull her out of hers.

"Damage?" she echoed, as if uncertain. After a moment's thought, she decided, "No. Sometimes they... interrupt. Or I visit theirs. I think. It's only you and two others. I think... unless the third isn't him, it's just..." she had to laugh, almost helplessly, and stretched all ten fingers to the ceiling at once, "...a dream."

Three? He raised a brow. "Have you asked?" Then he shook his head-that didn't really matter. Two was more than enough. "Maybe the building wants you to learn something," he offered. "The dreams that you've had interrupted-do they have anything in common?"

"They're just the repeating ones," she said, looking up at him to see if he saw any particular meaning in that, and not arguing about what 'the building wants.'

"Then new people in them is something different." He shook his head. "I'm not going to pretend to know what a supposedly supernatural building wants with your dreams, but it sounds like it's trying to break the pattern they've fallen into, for better or worse."

She couldn't think of a response. So she asked again, "How do I make it stop?"

"I don't think you can," he said. "Or if you can, it lies in figuring out what the building is trying to tell you. I'm not an expert on the supernatural, but isn't it usually all about meeting conditions?" How one extricated themselves from magical visitors in dream wasn't exactly something he knew a hell of a lot about.

Not the answer she was looking for, clearly. She dropped her eyes in disappointment and stood up again, in obvious effort to collect herself. "Well I... I'm sorry you had to go through that. I hope it doesn't happen again." She made it sound like he could call her secretary and cancel the appointment.

"It was nothing to do go through," he said gently. "But if it bothers you that much, I hope, for your sake, that it won't." With that, he gave her a nod and left the shop.