☀ ( a jinxed mirror's shard ) :> from tae!
Send a symbol for Cường’s reaction to…: (No longer accepting.) ☀: Giving him a gift.
He sinks into dream. It swallows him up, devours him, and it’s a crash, a wave, and the suck, deep and crushing, of ocean swells.
A wonder comes, then: how can you survive it all, plunging and drowning in these nightmares? These visions fouling up your head?
Who knows, but each night, he survives. And each morning with the sunlight pale through the curtains, he stirs peaceful and angel-glowing. How odd. It’s like it little bothers him, all these summer-robbed dreamscapes freckling with frost because he doesn’t scream, you know, and he doesn’t think to tremor, rivers all about him flowing with corpse. The dead. Rot. But maybe -- certainly -- he’s grown too used to the terror; it wears him like his skin.
And why, he thinks, should he balk at his body? The ghosts that cling to him? The visions in his head?
At-- “Tae,” he starts, stirring beside the dream-river. The phantom looms there. Still, there’s fog that wreathes thick about them, and through the whispering white, their hand reaches out. Hello, they seem to say.
Cường blinks. Something glints in their palm, and he grabs it, careful. It almost bleeds him. He raises it, dream-moon licking it silver, and his wonder bubbles wild. “A gift?” he asks, blinking back. The mirror shard captures that face of his, and again: god, how alive he is. How breathing, unabashed, and pink, rosy in the full of his cheeks...! Tae looks. Tae settles.
Of course, they might have said. Cường’s not too sure; his head’s foggy, and hey: a present, straight from one’s heart, is a present, no? And a special one, too, don’t you think?
Hm. The dreamer tilts the shard to capture both their faces -- him, sun-warm and lively, and them, sharp and cold -- gazes met. Suddenly, a gust takes, pleasant, and the grasses between his toes tremble... "Do you--” there, bumped against my shoulder, “hate what you see so much?”
That they’d give him this thing? That they’d join him, staring?
“Or do you just like what you see in me?” That I live? That I can wake from here?
Presumptuous! Cường’s presumptuous, bold with the audacity of the living, and still, he doesn’t apologize. Instead, he eyes this wraith’s reflection as this dream begins to shed off its skin, unraveling at its seams in baffling ways. Green, fledgling. Weak daisies dot the meadow. And suddenly, bird-song a sliver too distant, but through the dead of this winter, something like spring. April. Honey-sweet. Cường stares wordless, and Tae? Tae haunts, wondering. Sprung blossoms take the branches. A stray petal crowns their hair. Huh. “Well, I know the legends, you know, about ghosts and mirrors. And if you saw more the you I saw, there’d be no reason why you’d try to take me.” Possess me! Haunt! He looks at them, and again: a warm gust. “Thank you for your gift. Fix your hair, by the way.”