In all my dreams I drown [Closed to Wren/Mira tw: suicidal imagery, drowning, depersonalization]]

[overdrawing]

Ever since Mira took him to the beach, he's dreamed and dreamed of waves and water and woken up with an aching heart. Some nights, the longing actually pulls him out of bed and Mira's parents have found him sleepwalking, gently turning their somnambulant guest back to their guest room and closing the door. He wakes disoriented, but at least he wakes in the bed her parents insist is his.

Tonight, his dreams are especially potent and Gabe dreams of a calm, moonlit ocean, the salt air, and the gentle crashing against the shore. It tugs him out of bed and unnoticed through the Kazmis' unattended doors. The people who know him are used to seeing a quiet Gabe who walks with his head down and don't think to engage him as he sleepwalks to the beach.

With instinctive knowledge, bare feet take him to the end of the slippery pier and over the edge. Halfway through falling into the distant, low-tide ocean, Gabe wakes and his heart thuds in panic as he braces himself. The water is so cold his lungs feel like ice and he thinks he'll drown as a riptide pulls him out further. Thrashing, Gabe tries to make it to the surface, afraid and panicked because he can't swim.

Then suddenly he stops being cold and the water turns clear in his vision. Dark, silty water is as bright as daylight and Gabe blinks as instinct drives him to swim sideways, out of the current. His hands stroke in front of him and Gabe shouts, filling his throat and lungs with sea water. These aren't his hands. These are webbed, clawed paws, animal and inhuman.

Panicking, he thrashes again into the shallows.

Comments

[overdrawing]

He's not entirely sure he wants his body to keep him alive, not if it's become something like this. Thrashing again, Gabe tries to lurch free but only succeeds in kicking himself further back against the stranger and toward the shore. No, no no no no. He flails again and sends him self under.

The water is so clear. It shouldn't be clear like this; his eyes shouldn't be able to see in silty ocean as if it's broad daylight.

He's not human. He must be damned.

Lungs burning, Gabe surges up to the surface and cool air slaps him in the face. The shore isn't so far away now and he isn't sure that's a good thing.

[fairywren]

This is turning out to be a fight. Wren's whole body is sore and he's pretty sure he's going to have some really interesting scratches across his chest when he gets out of the water.

"I'm not going to force you," Wren bites off, a little harsher than he wants, and makes a face against the seawater he's getting in his mouth trying to talk. He's exhausted trying to pull a full size adult fighting him, and he stops for a minute, letting go of him and raising his hands, treading water. He can grab him again if he has to, but if he's that terrified of being held, it's not going to do anything to touch him.

"I'm not trying to hurt you," he says again. "I know this is frightening."

[overdrawing]

It's the release that confuses him enough to stop and Gabe sputters a little. Free of the rip current, the waves push him gently towards the shore, the moon heavy and bright over the low tide. Cautious, confused, Gabe lets himself go vertical and realizes then that his feet just barely push into the sand while his head can tilt back for air.

"What's happening?" he asks. Adrenaline ebbs back just enough that he can use his words because it's true. Aside from that night with Caleb, Gabe can't think of another time when he's ever been so frightened.

Despite his own panic, Gabe realizes suddenly how tranquil the water is.

[fairywren]

Wren relaxes a little as the young man pauses in his struggle and lets the wave push him; he takes in the constant moving energy of the waves, like home a little.

"You're a siren," he says, bluntly. "Like Siren Cove. Like me. When you --" he still isn't sure if the fall was an accident or a jump. "Hit the water, your body tried to protect you by changing to a form that could swim." He winces a little. "I know this sounds crazy. But you should be able to feel it. That the water won't hurt you."

[overdrawing]

"I'm a what?" Now that he's spent his initial energy, Gabe is too tired to panic. He just looks up at the moon, full and heavy in the sky, and avoids looking at his own hands. Whether or not they're still changed, they no longer feel like the body he's known and inhabited for twenty years. Now they feel like something foreign, traitorous.

"But that's not...I can't be like that." After months in this town, he's come to accept that there's something beyond human in this town, but he can still remember what the Bible says. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

[fairywren]

"Siren," Wren says, and looks up at the moon too. "I know it sounds impossible. Like the mythology, women singing sailors to their death. Or The Little Mermaid, if you prefer your fairy tales with an extra punch of knowing your place. Turns out it's a little more complicated, though."

"I don't think you get a choice," Wren says, gently. He knows how terrible it can feel to not have a choice about who you are. His childhood hurt, and it left lasting marks, but he's been luckier than some. "It doesn't mean anything about you. Who you are. What you do with that."

[overdrawing]

"I never read fairy tales." It's the least important part of the conversation but the idea that Gabe is something other than human makes him feel sick to his stomach. He lays back and floats again and lets it be the ocean's decision as to whether or not he makes it back to shore.

This other man can't possibly know how far Gabe has strayed from what he should be. That this does mean things about him. It's another nail in the cross and he can't go back to the life he once knew.

"I'm a demon," he says. "This is...God is angry. I'm being punished." It's strange, now, how placid the water feels, neither cold nor violent. He feels like it's wrapping around him, offering him comfort. Like he belongs here.

Like he's no longer earthly or human. Just a demon.

[fairywren]

"Really?" Wren blinks at him. "Mother Goose? Hans Christian Andersen? Disney?" Wren tries to imagine a childhood without the repeated warning against wandering too far into the woods or not listening to your parents, or being cruel to strangers.

The next thing the young man says, though, makes him think he has a different source telling him to be kind to "the least of these".

Wren stretches his arms out, feeling the push of the tide under the moon, washing them back out and back in to the shore, and thinks about what to say. The first time he wanted to destroy himself he was seven years old. In the interim years, he's learned to love the things that make him anathema. Other things still stir that impulse in him, sometimes, but who he is at heart isn't one. But he remembers hating himself and he has to work on not just flaring up in indignant anger when he sees someone younger doing it, like he can force them not to.

"I don't think that's how demons work," he says thoughtfully. He knows neither of them are feeling it, but they're going to start to get cold soon. "Punished for what?"

[overdrawing]

"I grew up with the Bible. Fairytales were full of..." Lies and sins, pagan magic. He had not been allowed to read them and had not wanted to. Maybe if he had, this wouldn't seem so terrible.

Beneath his feet, Gabe can feel the soft sand, velvety with seawater. He feels as though he could sink beneath the waves and bury himself in it. Not to drown, but to rest. It aches in the same way that night with Caleb had ached. What had felt natural had then become terrible and left him confused.

"For my sins." He's already little more than a demon, his body transformed. Why not go to confession while he's at it? "I did...obscene things outside of marriage. With a boy. I ran away. Everything I am is wrong. Of course I'm going to be punished."

[fairywren]

Wren nods. His mother isn't highly church-going, but he's familiar enough with the trappings of Christianity to understand.

"And the boy you didn't marry first," he says, "is he wrong too?" It's more rhetorical, not with a mind of persuading the stressed out young man to accept himself, but then again he's always been good at putting someone on a pedestal. He stands up and lets the water rock against him. "I ran away when I was 16. If that's what you call it still, when your mother lets you leave. Left home. School."

"You ran away," he says, and this time it's directed at him. "Do you have a place to stay, here?"

[overdrawing]

Gabe just looks at Wren, slightly stricken. He's made peace, a while ago, that there are people who can be like that and be happy with themselves. He can judge them for it but Gabe finds it hypocritical. That doesn't mean he can't judge himself and his own wrongdoings.

"Mira," he says, rather than put a voice to any of those thoughts. "Oh...oh God if she wakes up. They'll be worried sick!"

[fairywren]

Wren doesn't break his gaze, and his look doesn't back down, but it's understanding; he knows all too well that it's easy to judge yourself for crimes you wouldn't judge anyone else for. And vice versa, but that's not Gabe's problem.

"Mira," he echoes. "The girl from the planetarium." He's only met her briefly, but she's sweet: he can imagine her letting someone crash with them. "Let's get you back to them." He holds out a hand. "You don't have to like me, or like this, but I want to make sure you get home."

[overdrawing]

There's something intense about this man's gaze and Gabe quells a little, feeling as though he should run away on his own all over again. It's mention of Mira that keeps him from acting on it.

"I'm just a guest. I-It's not my home." He thinks of it as a place of safety, but not as his home.

[fairywren]

Wren isn't great at recognizing when his gaze has moved from serious to creepy. He just looks -- at things, people: his awareness and care about social norms is shaky at best, and except on stage, he has a sort of stillness to him that holds over into things like keeping eye contact a little too long, not moving out of people's way, not speaking when he's supposed to and saying something when he isn't. He is, however, aware that it can put people off, and the young man is a bit of a wounded animal.

He drops his eyes as he speaks, carefully, and glances back up to him. "Well, to where you're staying," he mediates. "You're going to get cold, soon, and I know you feel all right in the water, but you're going to exhaust yourself."

[overdrawing]

"Mira Kazmi's house," he says again, something like resignation in his voice. If they'll even let him back into their house. It's one thing to take in a runaway but one as broken as him? No one should have to put up with that.

"Let's go then."

They need to get it over with.