Aubrey Rois & Briar Rose (pricked) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-18 22:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | briar rose, robin hood |
Who: Briar Rose & Robin Hood
What: Nightmares
Where: Briar's dream
When: Backdated to fairy plot (Ridiculous delay is my fault, naturally.)
Warnings/Rating: None
Robin slept lightly. It was a consequence of forests and of the green cool when the evening settled, when the warmth drew itself out of the day and the moisture wicked itself from ground and stone and breath was still and slow. There were no men to stand at his back, to share the watch, and sleep safely in the presence of so he built the fire high and he let it burn uncomfortably warm until when he woke it was ash and embers. He dreamed lightly, of stags that walked through the undergrowth with the majestic sway of antlers, of the shadowed curve of Marian’s cheek and occasionally -- of the bloody, sticky-hot and sanded waste that was the East, and the screams of men upon the fields there. He woke easily, the stuff of his tunic clinging to him and he lingered not overmuch in one place or the next, leaving behind the fabric of his dreaming between the trees. This was no such dream. The trees were at once drawn closely together, knotted as though they stood back to back like swordsmen, men at arms - and further apart until his long-vision was gone completely, lost in the twisted loops of weathered bark. Robin had no sword but he had a knife, and the bow came down over his shoulder and his arrows were drawn. The leaves were oddly patterned and their edges curled and fingered at the air as though they were sentient. Robin stared with odd fascination, and he stilled as he heard the soft shuffle of footsteps, the too-slow, too-human sound of another’s presence. Thorns curled around his ankle, bit gently into his boot. Briar was no fool, but her recognition was a slow, cautious thing as she took in the dark familiarity of her dreamscape and the minutes ticked on and her mind became less fogged. Her arms and her legs and her chest felt tight, all coiled muscles fraught with tension as she slipped through the woods and the night alike. She heard the crunch of leaves beneath her bare feet, and felt the scrape of thorns that bit into her soft, pale flesh and left angry red lines in their wake. The fairy’s words echoed through her mind while drip-drops of blood trickled over the bone-white curve of her calves and her ankles, leaving a trail behind her on the forest floor. The shuffle of step after step, it served little to disrupt her fear of the darkness. “Who’s there?” She gasped, whirling at the sound of a soft footfall somewhere to her left. It was a quiet sound, a rustle of cloth against leaves and softer than her own bare feet against the underbrush. Closer to a whisper, a quick hare disappearing into the night, than the sound of a human. Still, it had Briar reaching beneath the folds of her skirts in order to grasp the hilt of a jagged blade that lay against her ankle, held in place with leather straps. The knife was freed and brandished before her, and still she felt exposed, vulnerable - she crept closer, footstep by footstep, daring the beast or the man in the night to advance against the blade. A sidestep to the left, and at last she spotted his outlined form, silhouetted by the faint moonlight that filtered through the canopy. “You. Why are you in my dream? I did not choose you. This is not how it is supposed to work.” She tried to keep her voice calm, but the attempt was futile - Briar’s slender hands shook and her smooth brow furrowed. Still she took a deep, steadying breath until the grasp of her fingers around the polished knife hilt steadied. Each motion she made was a silent promise, recalling the hours of training she had been put through by members of her guard. The dream - the fairy - had been a phantom, dismissed as Robin might a rainstorm, something passing and unnecessarily intrusive. This dream was a maw that stretched wide enough to swallow whole as Robin took each step inward, past the trees that reached for him with sharply pointed leaves and the flex of briar-knotted tangles around his ankles. He raised the bow and he aimed - but the arrow dissolved into so much living flex and Robin stared aghast as the arrow-head dropped with a mild bounce into the undergrowth and the arrow writhed backward into the rest of the massing vines. “If this is your dream, undream it, my lady,” Robin said in the direction of the lady with the massing skirts, with the shaking hands who wielded her blade as if it too might bite her like the vines and the thorns. “I do not dream this devilry.” She did not have time to flinch, as the arrow vanished quite as quickly as it had appeared in the man’s hands. The indignation of being drawn on was the least of her worries - for the moment she was far more concerned with the possibility of being swallowed up by the piles of slithering vines that moved across the forest floor as if in time to a pulsating heartbeat. “I am not your lady,” she hissed quietly, as if wary of drawing the notice of whatever beasts and monsters might lurk in the trees just beyond her line of sight. “Or you would not dare to notch an arrow in the first place. And it does not work like that, regardless. We are stuck here, until the dream runs its course. At least... that’s how it worked the last time.” Briar sighed softly, more than exasperated, and lowered the point of her blade. This man was not her enemy - and if he was, she knew she could not hope to deflect an arrow faster than it could pierce her heart - so she settled for watching him in her periphery as she climbed up onto the raised roots of a tree, hoisting herself up above the creeping vines by grabbing a low branch with her free hand. Robin did not drop the bow but he handled it carefully as if it were something live and likely to turn on him quickly. He slung it across his back cautiously and he reached for his own knife, the blade Saracen-steel and of the East. If magic were going to call his arrows back into the substances they had been made of once, then solid steel that had been made of nothing of trees and vines and live things that squirmed like serpents across his feet was best. He drew the blade and he kept it down, against his thigh and he followed the tracks she made in the heavy massing undergrowth. “We are stuck where?” There was no sight-line, the trees were at once tightly leaned toward one another in deadly lover’s embrace or looming over head. It made Robin bilious, like ship travel had, and he offered only a hand to help her up onto her perch. “What is there to see, lady?” Robin spoke with the solemn courtesy of a man used to gently-born women - and of that, there was no mistake given the skirts much snagged by the undergrowth and the silks she wore. “Can we not awaken from this dream, and,” a pause, Robin not well-used to magic’s whims, “Dream another?” Even as she eyed the weapon that he slung across his shoulder, that which could kill her with little hesitation on the part of this stranger, Briar could not bring herself to be afraid. He handled the bow with a grace that she rarely saw even amongst her own guard of archers, and she could not help but admire his skill as she wondered how they might survive their own particular nightmare. No doubt he was a hunter or a marksman for a living, in whatever far-flung corner of the kingdom from whence he came. “We are stuck,” she enunciated, crisply and carefully. “In a dream. My dream, possibly - though there’s a chance that this world has your influence as well. We are stuck wherever she wants us to be - the wicked one, that monstrous woman who cursed the entire kingdom on the day of my birth. It seems to me that she has struck again.” Briar cast a suspicious eye upon the hand he offered, calloused and tanned unlike the smooth, cream-complexion of her own as she finally accepted, reaching out and grabbing hold. He was surprisingly strong when he helped her up onto the platform of knobbly roots, and despite her suspicions she could not help but slide over in order to make room on the branch that served as a seat, creating a space for him to join her if he so desired. “I see the artificial confines of a spell, sir. Notice how we cannot peer beyond the branches? T’is magic, dark and foul and meant to blind us. Though you raise an interesting point - perhaps we could alter the dreamscape, if we so wished together?” She let out her breath in a woosh of air, slender shoulders slumping as she plucked at her skirts. “Could I be dressed more impractically, do you think? Come, let us decide on an alternative setting for this nightmare, while I try to free my legs.” And so she went to work, grabbing handfuls of her voluminous skirts and hacking away with her knife so that swathes of satin and silk fell to the forest floor, only to be swallowed up by the writhing vines. Slowly, her ankles and calves and knees were exposed to the nighttime air as she cut away layers of crinoline and petticoats, a furrow appearing on her brow as she concentrated on the task at hand. Robin hated being told - by anyone at all - that he was stuck. Stuck was no resolution at all, stuck simply meant not high enough for vantage point, not distant enough to think it until it had resolution that could be carried out, not fast enough to catch fingers upon the limitation and hold it fast. He thought nothing of wicked women - the East had been a place of tales told before sleep, the red-and-gold banners lowered beside the camp fires and the rattle of knucklebones in the games as men wound down to fight another day. Wicked women were told with lavish detail, along with the almond-eyed, milk-skinned houris promised to the men that fought the Christian invader. Wicked women had curses, their mysticism drawn in like cloaks and the men salivated over the stories, good Christian judgment and righteous justice to chase them out with swords and pelmet banners. He was not a tall man when he climbed up beside her. Robin was whippet-thin, a utility of muscle over bone and the sparseness of flesh was not overly indulgent diet but fighting and climbing and sleeping beneath his cloak half the journey back from the East to the green of England. He was a hands’ span higher than she, and he smelled musty, like animals and leaves and the earth itself. He was not especially dirty but he was not laundered and clean, and the fingernails of the hand that had helped her up had dirt beneath them. Robin didn’t think his dream would be of the trees revolting on them: trees were safety and high, cool and sweet-smelling. They were home, as much as the grey stone of the castle had been. “Magic is only for dreams,” he said, with the pride of a man who trusted far more in sword and in bow than in dreams - it sounded cocksure, because it was, and it sounded a little contemptuous of magic because for all the houris and the wicked women, he had survived the Crusades to come home to England too without a curse or a bewitchment. “What is it you would have me dream?” he said, jumping down and Robin observed the hack-job of her skirts with interest, watching swathes of silk meet the prickling briars that writhed along the forest floor like living things. They seized upon the silk, spiking it through - Robin grimaced, it looked like cannibalism, the wisps of silk all knotted up in brown, twining undergrowth. “I do not dream of magic. I dream of home, of England.” And Marian. But he didn’t say a word of that as she pulled apart her robes and bared more flesh than he’d seen outside of the East. It took a tremendous amount of effort for Briar to refrain from rolling her eyes in a most unladylike fashion, unimpressed by the man’s boastful display of pride, mixed up as it was with a willful sort of ignorance. Either he was from a very different part of the world than she, where magic was not the sort of omnipresent danger to which Briar was very much accustomed - or he’d simply been fortunate enough to have never encountered it. Regardless, she made a face as she examined her roughly-altered skirts and gave an experimental kick of her freed legs, ivory flesh practically glowing in the strange, eerie flicker of moonlight that filtered through the canopy above their heads. “Magic is as real as you or I, sir. Deny it all you like, if you wish to get us both killed. Or worse,” she murmured with a grimace, thinking it best not to elaborate on the many terrible scenarios that she might consider a fate worse than death. Perhaps they might be trapped in this dream-world forever, subjected to eons of torture and an endless, agonizing darkness. Forced to watch their loved ones die, over and over, unable to cry out or - No. She shook her head once as if to dislodge the terror that lingered just beneath the very surface of her psyche, threatening to overwhelm and consume her within the span of a breath. “Perhaps you are in my dream, then. This place feels familiar. It feels... it is almost like the last time.” Briar’s voice caught in her throat for a moment, and she pressed the back of slender fingers against her brow. She struggled to absorb the confidence and the cadence of the man’s words, fighting the fear that rose up in her throat. “We will dream,” she began again, swallowing her anxiety as best she could and looking up to meet the stranger’s gaze, as steadily as she might hope to manage. “Of something beautiful. Something happy. Come, take my hand.” And she reached out, grabbing hold of his hand once more without waiting for protestation or acceptance. She closed her eyes and she reached with her mind, stretching out the curious fingers of her consciousness into the swirling, inky-black darkness. There. She could feel the edges of the magic, like the concave edge of a thick, viscous bubble. Briar gave an experimental prod, once, twice, testing the flexibility of the bewitchment. And then she jabbed out hard, gritting her teeth with the exertion and pushing, pushing - until, at last, she felt the bubble give way with a pop. She felt the enchanted forest fading around them, and she thought desperately of happy things that might replace it. She thought of music and sunshine and brightly-coloured banners that flapped in the spring breeze, while children ran barefoot beneath them and screamed their delight. She thought of a harpist and a bard playing his lute, singing in his high, sweet voice. She thought of her wedding day. Robin dreamed of cool green, of wide-spread trees. He dreamed of cold-dripping stone, of a father as disapproving as he was loving, of laughing amongst friends. He dreamed of women. His dreams were simple, disjointed things, they lacked beauty as they lacked distinction. That the nightmare, the trees that drew themselves down and threatened to throttle with their roots, was hers and not his, he accepted without question. Robin’s nightmares were truer than this, realer than this. No one dreamed of trees when one could dream of war. Her hand slid over his wrist, grasped his fingers; it was cool, smooth - if he hadn’t thought her a lady previously, he knew it now: in a dream where everything was hardened, torn, scarred-rough, the lady’s hand was not. It was high-born, women he’d danced with, walked with, when the fires were stoked high and the music sharp but clear. The magic was a yawn around memory, was inky-deep indelibility but where Briar dreamed of lutes and weddings, of children and of banners, Robin slipped sideways, thought of home with an unguarded hunger that was kept away from days in unfamiliar trees, from nights spent sleeping beneath his cloak. His hand slipped beneath hers, his cloak was shadow; Robin fell sideways into his own dream through the viscous gap in dreaming and was gone before his mouth could open, a word to a lady who cut her skirts instead of losing them to nightmare. |