She Who Never Dreamed Tales from the Waking World
Disclaimer: Borrowed from dreams, inspired by The Sandman. No ownership is claimed, and no copyright infringement is intended. All canon characters belong to their respective creators.
Genre: Dark Fantasy / Gothic / Morpheus POV / Canon-Divergent
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DREAM/READER
Humans believe habit belongs to lesser creatures.
They are mistaken.
Repetition governs tides, seasons, empires, and losses. It governed me as well.
Not at first. The first days after I found you obeyed another law: verification, inquiry, correction. I assumed your absence had a simple cause. A threshold poorly set. A passing fracture. An error that could be named and, for that reason, repaired.
It was not so.
Habit came later.
I began visiting you at the same hour.
Not because time imposed limits on me. It does not. But I chose an hour and held to it.
A precise point in the human night when the hospital grew quiet enough for the sound of wheels in the corridor to seem distant and the light to fade into that kind of pallor that comforts no one.
I always entered when other people’s waking hours had begun to give way.
The nurses spoke more softly. Exhausted relatives let their heads fall against the wall or into their hands. The machines persisted in their false authority. The entire building seemed suspended in a waiting without purpose.
I crossed the threshold without opening the door.
I stopped at your left side.
Never at your right.
At first there was no reason. Afterward, there was no need to seek one. At your left, the corridor light barely brushed your face. At your right, by contrast, the machine that tracked your pulse blinked with an insistence I judged intolerable. I do not permit a light to pretend it can dictate reality.
I sat.
I watched you.
And I waited.
I do not know at what point a method becomes a rite. I did not notice it when it happened. I only knew, much later, that my presence beside your bed had acquired the precision of a ceremony.
The same hour.
The same place.
The same failure.
Thirteen human years.
I name them thus because the number belongs to your kind. To me, they were something else: winters striking the glass, summers filtered through pale blinds, shift changes, nurses transferring away, the slow wearing down of those who kept coming to look at you.
Thirteen human years.
I came to all of them.
At first I chose gentleness.
Not everyone enters the Dreaming in the same way. Some cross without resistance. Others must be guided. Others are dragged in by their own fear. There was nothing in you that allowed me to know how you would have come, but I saw no reason to begin with violence.
I offered you peaceful places.
Not vulgar images. Not meadows without memory or empty skies. I built a beach at the edge of dusk, when the sea loses its blue and turns to metal. I arranged a garden closed against the wind, where white leaves barely moved. I made a warm room, a low lamp, a window open to rain, the creak of a house inhabited by something benevolent. I added the murmur of footsteps not yet willing to be seen, the promise of a voice, the certainty that something waited without threat.
You did not come.
I persisted.
I made dawns. Forests with paths of intermittent light. Empty stations where no train ever arrived too late. Houses whose interiors promised rest. The edge of a song not quite remembered. Such things are enough to bring many human beings to me.
You did not come.
Not a shadow.
Not an echo.
Not even the slightest disturbance in the fabric of sleep.
That was the first thing that truly unsettled me.
Rejection leaves a mark. Fear does as well. A mind can deform what it fears. It can close doors, darken faces, erase names, set landscapes ablaze. All of that can be read.
What was yours could not.
It was not visible rejection. It was not terror. It was not refusal.
It was the absence of approach itself.
As if I commanded an entire kingdom and, before it, there were no one at all.
I continued with those dreams for many nights more. Rigor required it. I had to exhaust the simplest path before granting the problem another nature. The simple path failed. And you did not come.
After that, I turned to urgency.
There are minds that do not cross through desire. They cross through shock. A fall sends them hurtling forward. An insistent call forces them onward. Fear, more often than not, does the work beauty cannot accomplish.
I do not like to employ it without need. I did so with you. I offered you storm.
Not gentle rain, but a broken sky and the electricity before lightning. I made corridors too narrow. Staircases descending farther than they should. Rooms where a door closed an instant before it could be reached. Cliffs. Glass giving way beneath the feet. A deserted city with frozen traffic lights and a distant hum that promised disaster.
You did not come.
I raised the intensity.
I allowed the endless fall. The sudden weight on the chest. The sound behind a door no one wishes to open. The certainty that something knows your name and speaks it from where the light does not reach. I placed into the dream the exact second before impact, when the body understands it will no longer be able to avoid it.
Not even then.
I remember remaining motionless in the midst of one of those violent architectures, while the storm I myself had raised fell upon a landscape without witnesses. Lightning split the sky. Wind bent trees that belonged to no human forest. Water beat against stone and earth.
Nothing answered.
Then I understood something I did not like.
It was not that you rejected the dreams I wove.
It was that you did not receive them.
Mine did not rebound from a closed door. It was lost before it reached any door at all.
I should have stepped away then.
I did not.
Waking life continued around you.
That was, perhaps, the harshest thing to watch.
At first there were frequent visits. A woman with a straight back who sat beside you and spoke in a low voice, as though the order of events might contain the ruin. She listed lesser things: a curtain changed, a dog growing old, boxes sealed, rooms preserved. She did not cry while she spoke. To cry would have been to admit too much.
There was also a man who came less often. He remained standing. Sometimes he rested a hand on the rail of the bed. Sometimes he did not quite manage it. I watched him age with a speed that did no honor to your species. I never knew what guilt he carried. I only knew that he carried it.
There were friends. At first they came in a group, then two by two, then one alone. They left photographs, bracelets, letters, objects to which affection had given a value they did not possess in themselves. A dark-haired girl read to you for months. A young man played music near your ear, as though insistence might break through what was forbidden to me. In time, they stopped coming. Not all at once. Waking life rarely abandons in that way. It does so through wear.
The seasons changed beyond the glass and humans continued with what they call life. Nursing shifts rotated. Doctors changed. There was one Christmas with small lights by the door. There were winters when they brought extra blankets, though the room knew no true cold. There was a birthday on which someone left a silver balloon and took it away again before dawn.
Then came the reduction.
First the flowers disappeared. Then the cards. Then certain words.
At first they said recovery. Then they said stimulation. Later they said stability. In the end they spoke of maintenance. When hope dies out, humans change their language.
I learned the sound of the footsteps that approached your door. I recognized perfumes, voices, hesitations, fatigues. I knew which doctor avoided entering when he was accompanied and which one lingered too long over your charts, as though the reading of numbers might absolve him.
They all kept moving.
You did not.
I did not know your voice. I did not know your waking eyes. I did not know the way you would have spoken a refusal, a mockery, or your own name when no one compelled you to answer. The memories that usually grant such things were barred to me. And yet I gathered an uneven knowledge of you. Insufficient. Persistent.
I learned that someone called you by a nickname that appeared in no record. I heard it only once. It was never repeated.
I learned that your birthday was in March. In the early years, someone marked it on the wall calendar in blue ink. Later they stopped. There was no need. I remembered it.
I learned that, before the accident, you did not like complete darkness. A woman said it one night while they adjusted your position in the bed. Then she fell silent, as though she had given away too much.
I learned that you had wanted to learn to drive. That you corrected people when they mispronounced certain names. That it irritated you when others decided for you. That at fifteen you broke a cup and cried not for the loss, but for the accusation.
They are minor details. They are not enough to restore a person. But waking life is made of fragments, and when access to the substance itself is denied, one learns to read what remains.
At first my attention gathered those remnants out of discipline. So I told myself. It was necessary to know as much as I could about that which disturbed my kingdom.
Afterward I noticed other things. I noticed the strand of hair that always ended up loose near your right temple. I noticed the different shadow beneath your eyes in winter. I noticed the slight tension at one corner of your mouth, as though an expression had been interrupted before it could fully form. I noticed that your hand did not rest the same way when they spoke your full name and when they avoided it.
At times I spoke to you. Not to obtain an answer. No answer came. But speech, even when uttered before silence, orders something in the one who speaks it. I spoke to you of things I would not know how to justify to anyone: a detestable rain over the waking world, a child who had dreamed of a horse made of lamps, the stubbornness of the human world in continuing to change while you remained outside all change.
I did not know whether you heard me. I kept speaking.
Thirteen human years teach forms of perseverance that are not always dignified. I do not return anywhere on a whim.
There are duties. There are regions of Dream that demand vigilance. There are ancient creatures, fissures, private wars, spreading nightmares, lesser kingdoms that must be contained before they forget to whom they belong. My domain is not small. Nor is my burden.
And yet there were nights when I could not go at once.
And then something appeared that I had not expected to admit.
Lack. Not yours.
That hour’s.
I discovered that I thought of the light in your room while tending to other matters. That I measured, without wishing to, how long it had been since my last visit. That a portion of my attention inclined itself toward that white building even when I stood in the deepest corridors of my kingdom. This did not please me. I told myself it was obedience to the unresolved anomaly. To the implicit affront of your absence. To the persistence of a problem that had not yielded. All of that was true. It was not the whole truth.
One night I decided not to go.
The decision was deliberate. I wanted to prove that habit did not govern me. I remained in the Dreaming beyond the customary hour. I did not look toward the waking world. I did not speak your name. I let that stretch of the human night pass without my presence.
Nothing altered.
The kingdom did not collapse. The night continued. Other people’s dreams went on with their course.
And yet, when I crossed over later, I found your room sunk in a different kind of dimness. They had changed an IV line. A nurse slept briefly at the corridor station. The monitor maintained its obstinacy. You remained motionless.
I should have felt relief. It was not relief. It was the unpleasant certainty that omission distorted everything else. Your room had become part of my nights. After that, I returned every time. Not out of tenderness. But because the absence of that visit altered all else. That was enough.
On the night I felt it, rain had fallen over the city for hours.
Not rain worthy of memory. Human rain: gray, insistent, without grandeur. The hospital was quieter than usual. There was less traffic in the corridors. One of the corridor lights flickered with an irregularity I found offensive. I entered.
I took my place at your left.
I had brought no dreams that night. No gardens. No storms. No architecture of any kind. I merely remained. I watched you for a long time.
The assisted breathing maintained its rhythm. They had gathered your hair away from your face. A sheet too white covered your legs. On the bedside table there was an untouched glass of water and an aging bouquet no one had yet removed.
I moved my hand.
It was not hesitation. It was weariness. Or something close to it.
I rested my fingers on the back of your hand. The warmth was not new.
What was new came from elsewhere.
I felt no response in the skin. Not a reflex, not a contraction, not any sign physicians would have known how to name. What I felt was lower. Deeper. It did not belong entirely to the body, nor to dream, nor to waking life.
It was opposition.
Light. Instantaneous. Undeniable.
As though, in touching you, my reach had descended along an invisible surface until it met a sealed substance that rejected passage.
I withdrew my hand. I watched you more closely. The monitor had barely altered its rhythm. Nothing conclusive to a human. Sufficient for me. I touched you again, this time imposing nothing, calling for nothing, weaving no form at all. Only contact. Again.
Not physical resistance. Not muscular reflex. Not clinical life.
Opposition.
The equivalent of a door shut from the other side. Then I understood that for thirteen human years I had named your absence wrongly.
You were not empty.
You never had been.
All that stillness, all that impossibility, concealed a closure. Something barred the way with such perfection that only then, beneath my fingers, could I perceive its outline.
I remained motionless.
Rain continued beating against the glass. A nurse crossed the corridor without entering. Your assisted pulse maintained its fiction of continuity. And I understood, at last, that I had not spent thirteen years before a void.
I had spent thirteen years before a sealed threshold.
Then I looked at you differently.
Not as one looks at an enigma. But as one looks at a prison.
Because you are not empty. Something is preventing me from passing through.
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