Who: Shane and Miksa What: Dreamtime! Miksa dishes out some tough love to the wolf. Where: Dreamland. When: Tonight, while everyone is asleep. Warnings: None.
In the dream, there was a dead girl on the bed, and Shane had a knife.
Or maybe he didn’t. The dream couldn’t seem to make up its mind on how the deed had been done, exactly. It was a knife when the dream started, but by the end it was all about claws, about tearing, about hurting to hurt and that was all.
Once, he’d hurt to show that he could go all the way, but wouldn’t. Was incapable of doing so. And here was the deepest, darkest fear of all - that, one day, he would hurt as much as he could, use his full capacity for damage and destruction, and kill the only person who could make him care about something, anything that wasn’t death.
In life he was a wolf, asleep in a dark corner of a darker alley, but in the dream, at least for the moment, he was human. Apart from the claws and teeth, of course.
He had wanted to leave this behind, this very human fear. In waking, it was much easier. Awake, he’d found a kind of freedom from fear and responsibility, from anger and from hurt. But asleep, it was him against the nightmare, a prisoner all over again.
The bedroom was familiar but indistinct - the guest bedroom of someone else’s apartment, with vines on the window.
He wanted to leave, and there was a door, a door that had been there all the time but hadn’t at all. It opened onto a dark forest, he knew, with trees that went up and never ended, and mist that curled around them in the moonlit night. He wanted to be there, but he couldn’t figure out how to get the door open. He looked behind him, and the body was still there, staring at him, and there was still blood on his hands. He whined, a canine sound from a human throat, and tried to get the door open. Still locked. He could see the forest through the vines over the window, where they tangled loosely, impenetrable but taunting him with enough gaps to see escape through. He would give anything to be out there, away from this.
Miksa understood this to be a dream almost immediately, and she could somehow sense the wolf in the dream, though she could not see him. It was unexpected. The wolf had never been her totem, and her own big, black cat padded at the periphery of her vision as she walked up to the bed with the dead girl. The man with the knife was unknown, but he did not frighten her. Dreaming was, Miksa knew, about messages and teachings, not about fear. She just looked down the girl, and wondered what there was to learn here.
In the dream, she was dressed in traditional Aleut dress, and she silently walked away from the girl and the man to look at the room beyond, the vines, the doors. No. Whatever needed to be learned was in the bedroom, not in this place. The door was not an exit for a reason: one could not run from what had to be learned.
She looked down at the body of the girl, and then back at the man. “You killed her?”
He’d tossed the knife aside, by this point, and begun pulling chunks out of the door with his claws that replaced themselves after he removed them. He couldn’t claw his way out, or pull the door off its hinges, though he’d tried.
When he heard a voice behind him, he turned his head sharply. He didn’t recognize the woman, nor her clothes, and he seemed much less aware that he was dreaming than she did. “Yes - no. I don’t know.”
He sat against the door, looking mournfully up at the knob, not turning his head toward the bed for anything. Looking at the woman had meant seeing the body lying there, and even for a fleeting moment, it was not something he wanted to look at. But the door was not going to open no matter how much he railed against it. He tried to be a wolf again, at least, but nothing happened. Trapped.
“Why did you kill her?” she asked; a simple and calm question.
“I was angry,” he said, that, in and of itself, an admittance that he’d done it. He rested his head against the wood. “I wasn’t thinking. I don’t think, when I’m angry.”
“Why were you angry?” she asked, still calm, still simple, still looking for a reason why she was here, in this dreamscape. “Territory? Food? Protection?”
He finally looked over at her. It was hard to pin down a reason, because the dream had been so indistinct. He hazarded a guess. “Mate," he said. "She was supposed to be mine, but I couldn't make her happy. I love her. I was an obligation. She found someone else for happiness." He slammed a fist into the door, which still refused to give, but he was too tired to put much feeling into it. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. I left.”
“You do not kill the mate,” she said, obviously confused with this turn of events. “You convince the mate, coax the mate, win the mate. Killing the mate, it makes no sense.”
“Winning didn’t work,” he said, getting up off the floor and walking around the bed. The body was still there, but he wasn’t looking at it. “Coaxing didn’t work.” It finally occurred to him that the woman’s dress was foreign to him, but her face wasn’t - it was the woman from the park. “I kept hurting her. So I left. I couldn’t hurt her again, and I couldn’t stay and not be with her and not hurt her over and over.” He gestured to the bed, and when he waved his hand, the body was gone. There was a bloodstain on the comforter, and a few red hairs, but that was all. “Now this.”
“And nothing is your fault,” she said simply, clearly not believing the statement. “You tried, and it did not work, and it was not your fault.”
“Of course it is,” he snapped, pacing away from her. “I’m a mess. She pitied me, I think, and worried what I would do if she left, so she stayed. She deserved better than that. It was selfish even to try to convince her.”
She sensed the wolf in the room again, but distant and weak, and she walked toward the body of the dead girl. “Then do not be a mess,” she told him, as if it was a very obvious thing. “You are not human,” she said, her own totem, a large, black cat coming into view at the periphery of the dream. “You know what to do.”
Do not be a mess. Simple as that. The cat caught his attention, and as he watched it a wolf materialized behind him, fading into existence as it walked around his feet and away. “I’m not anymore,” he said. He wasn’t sure if leaving all his human failings behind was what she meant. He had no idea what to do. He only knew that what he had done had been the only option. He wouldn’t look at the body, which had reappeared as soon as attention was paid to it. He looked at the woman instead, and then out at her cat.
“Who are you?” he asked, finally.
“Miksa,” she said, not hesitating. “The male wolf is the alpha,” she said, as if this should be enough to explain everything entirely.
The name meant nothing, which likely meant it was a product of what he was slowly beginning to realize was a dream. “Not to her,” he said. “She chose someone else. The more I fought to keep her, the more I hurt her. I lost, he won, and he doesn’t even care.”
“The male wolf is the alpha,” she repeated, walking away from the bed and running her hand over the door he’d been brutalizing a moment earlier. “The person she chose, what did you do? Did you assert your territory? Show her why you were the alpha? The better choice?” she asked. It was a very male question, asked in a way that made it clear she thought that was the only requirement here.
“I almost killed him,” he said, tone flat. Rehashing this for the thousandth time and examining yet again why he’d failed spectacularly wasn’t really making him feel any better about it. “It didn’t help.” The wolf at his feet paced a little quicker, and struck out towards the cat, moving away from him.
She huffed, a catlike, annoyed huff. “It is not about proving it to him. It’s about proving it to her.”
“Well I failed. Clearly.” He stalked toward the door and began trying to open it again. If this whole dream was going to be about scolding him for his failings, he was going to get the fuck out of this room, thanks.
“The door will not open until you learn your lesson,” she said, sitting down on the floor in a swirl of fur and leather, pushing her hood off her head as she settled. “Are we going to be here a very long time, tikaani?” she asked, sounding like she fully expected that at this point. Her totem had hissed from the corners of the dream, and she knew she had not yet learned the reason for this dreaming.
“What lesson?” he asked, patience growing short. He yanked on the doorknob with enough force that it should have come right off, but it didn’t so much as rattle the door on its hinges. The wolf was on the opposite side of the room, now, trying to find the source of the hissing and looking generally displeased.
“You are like a child. Are you man? Are you wolf?” she asked calmly.
He turned from the door towards her, claws clicking against one another as he flexed his fingers. “Wolf,” he said, then paused, adding, “Even if not here. I’m done with humans.”
“Lies. You are acting human. It does not matter what you look like; it matters who you are.”
He snarled wordlessly at her and went back to the door. He had to get out of here before he killed someone else in this stupid fucking dream.
“Why do you act human and claim to be wolf?” she asked, unconcerned with the snarling or his repeated, futile attempts to open a dream door that would never open.
“I don’t know!” he shouted, walking away from her toward the window to see if he couldn’t tear the vines off it, possibly with his teeth. “I’m no good at the one, and the other only made things worse. I thought I might as well give up and see if going all the way made things any better.”
“Tonraq, you must choose one or the other. You can not be both,” she explained, watching him go to the window. “You will always be at war with yourself.”
“And wouldn’t that be a change,” he muttered, and tried to get a few claws beneath one of the vines to rip it out. He was optimistic. Just because it hadn’t worked in reality didn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t work here.
She threw her hands up in frustration. “Can you not listen? Must you try the same things that have already failed? You must learn from mistakes; you do not. You repeat them.”
He dropped his hand and turned on her. “And what would you have me do? You seem to know everything about this stupid dream.”
“This is not my dream,” she said with certainty. “I may be guiding you, but this is not my lesson. You must learn to stop fighting who you are. Who are you? Are you a man who does not stand up for what he wants?” she demanded. “Who kills his mate instead of winning her from another? Who claws uselessly at vines and doors and does not learn? None of these are proud things.”
He set his jaw.
“I’m not a proud person,” he said. “I can’t think of anything about myself to be proud of.”
“Then change this. Do something you are proud of,” she said logically.
It was an argument so vague he couldn’t really argue against it. He sat down heavily on the end of the bed. The body had disappeared again, so there was nothing else there. “I used to do things I thought were worthwhile. I thought they made things better for other people. As it turned out, the only person I was doing them for was myself.”
“Past tense,” she said easily. “You need future tense. There is nothing to be gained in living in the past. Guilt changes nothing.”
“I’m not good at anything that’s not killing,” he said. It was a dream - it didn’t really matter what he said, considering all of this was a construct of his own head anyway. “I don’t...understand people.” He hadn’t forgotten about the idea he’d proposed to Boyd. At the time, it had seemed like a good enough plan. It was something productive, at least. But he would think about it and then dismiss it again - how was he supposed to help kids he’d never met when he was barely scraping by himself?
“How can you know what you are good at, if you admit you have not done anything else?” she asked, and she waved an unimpressed hand at him. “You are not alpha. You give up before you even begin. You gave the girl up to the other man, you give up on thinking a way out of here, you give up. You do not hold yourself accountable. You want to leave here? It is your dream. Control it and wake yourself. You want to do something good? Then do it. Do not whimper like a wounded tikaani about why you cannot.”
Everything she said made him angry on some level - some of it because it was true, some of it because it wasn’t. He didn’t like a scrap of it, however, even the parts of it that did make sense, but he took one thing from it, at least, for the moment. Now that he knew he was dreaming, he could wake himself up.
And it was almost that easy. Thinking about waking up made the dream fall away, the walls disappear and the vines shrivel into nothing. If nothing else, he was getting out of that room.