Re: Lakeside night: Seven/Liam
He felt rooted in the ephemeral with the damp smell of murk in his nose and something else cutting through from underneath, clean and sharp and familiar in a way that tilted him off-axis like vertigo twirled up in deja vu. There was warmth bleeding through the cotton of Liam’s shirt and he felt like he’d wake up with blistered fingers and tiny pink ribbons sliced into the soles of his feet from the epilogue. Almost hoped it. Something to mark it as more than a flicker of brain synapses firing between one shallow breath and the next, fluttering the pillowcase under his cheek.
Sensing the way that Liam’s shoulders rose with the thrum of tension even before he saw the head shake, Seven felt his sternum creak under a twist of the vice that held him in place. It ached, hollow, with the weight of the grief in Liam’s voice unspooling over him. His hands were cool against Seven’s cheeks, but mercifully dry. Unpruned.
“I don’t,” he said, unwilling honesty dredged up from the depths and breaking through the placid acceptance that ruled his expression as the dream’s current lazily tugged him along. “Help me understand it, Liam.”
The how, and what it all meant. Was he supposed to piece together fragments when he woke, if they even bobbed to the surface in his wake? He swallowed hard and the roof of his mouth tasted like mud. He wanted to tell Liam that he was scared, too - but his tongue was a slab of waterlogged meat between his teeth. Instead he just leaned his head forward until his nose pressed against Liam’s temple, dragged over his hairline, let out an unsteady exhale. Help me understand.