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“Do you love me?”
“Of course I do! Why are you asking me that?” Does he, though? Does he really?
“...You know as well as I do, Aspen.”
And he flinches back, but he can’t deny it, can he? Everything has just been so distant, lately. It’s like looking at a reflection in the mirror, reaching out and being confused why it’s all blurry, only to realize that you are the reflection. He remembers loving her, remembers the joy, remembers every good moment.
So, when had he forgotten her name? Because he can’t see anything other than a stranger, interchangeable with hundreds of faces he has never seen before, yet knows as well as he knows her.
Her? No, that can’t be right, because the boy in front of him is most certainly a he.
“Are you coming, Munn?”
Munn? Isn’t he…
The boy smiles brighter at him, extending a hand, and suddenly he finds his thoughts slipping away, like so many waves in the ocean the boat rocks on. Because they are on a boat, and the ocean waves throw themselves against the hull, and the rain pours down. Thunder booms and lightning strikes and the boy is falling but he’s the one in the water, watching bubbles escape to the surface, trapped once again-
He wakes up, and doesn’t remember his name. A familiar man stares at him from the mirror, hung right there against the wall. He had hung the mirror there, but he hates mirrors and can’t look himself in the eyes, so why had he-
Slowly, the pieces start fitting themselves back together, first with a name. Heathcliff. The name is as strange as it is right, and it settles onto his lips in a way Munn and Aspen don’t. Yes, he’s Heathcliff. Aspen is the one that loves his fiancee, and Munn is the one that fell in love on a tumbling sea. But he is not Aspen, and he is not Munn, so he does not love and he does not fall.
Ludger Cherish rises, and puts himself back together, firmly ignoring the way his room is not his (sprawling walls, and there’s a kindly old man calling him son), or the way his legs don’t move like they’re supposed to (the prosthetic was the best version possible, arguably better than his original leg, and running has never felt easier).
Is he even still alive, when he remembers dying so many times? But he has to be alive, because he is feeling, and he is present. Suddenly, a fit of frenzy overtakes him, and he must know, right now, if he is here, or if this is another dream, another life that will grow muddied with time. This can’t be another dream, when he has just escaped, but if it’s not why doesn’t he feel whole at all? Why isn’t he settled in his body and confident that his voice will be his own when he speaks?
There is blood on his hands and his gloves are ripped to shreds before he comes back to himself. He stares in somewhat morbid fascination at the cuts, his fingers slowly dripping blood onto the floor. Yes, this is right then, because he can feel each cut, knows the blood on the floor is his. He slumps back onto the bed, not bothering to bandage his hands. The black gloves will hide everything anyways. (He firmly ignores the fact that only a few of the cuts were new, all the rest were opened from last night, and the night before that, and what day is it?)
Perhaps it’s time he takes a walk. Just to center himself again, and let the cold air chase away the memories. Yes, that sounds good.
He shrugs on a shirt and leggings, forgoing a coat. He wants to feel the cold right now. All he needs is to look presentable enough that any students who catch him don’t-
He’s not even at Ceoren right now, is he? Now that the mania has faded, he can recognize his room at U.N.Owen’s little hideout. Less pressure then. Perhaps he’ll lose some respect in their eyes, but of all the people who will judge, they are the least likely, when all of them have broken down themselves. He puts on a new pair of gloves before heading out, barely remembering to grab his cane.
It’s easy to muffle his footsteps, and slip out the backdoor when he realizes Bellaluna is still awake. He really needs to see about offering her some new stimulation before she inevitably creates clones of him, or worse, starts experimenting on some innocent passers-by. Perhaps he should offer Hans up again? A faint sense of guilt tugs at his heartstrings, but it’s pushed aside by the amusement of yesterday, watching Hans defenestrate himself to get away from the combination of Sheridan and Bellaluna. Sedina even brought popcorn. The thought of everyone in his little family seems to click something in place, and he truly has the peace of mind to enjoy the fresh air as he opens the door.
“Going somewhere, my disciple?” A familiar singsong voice rings out, blond hair fluttering in the wind.
“Master,” he murmurs, surprised. Hadn’t she still been asleep? She approaches him, raking her eyes over him. Even after all these years, that gaze makes him feel small, like he’s being cut into pieces for her perusement. But it’s as familiar as it is disconcerting, and he remains still, waiting for her to finish her examination. She doesn’t seem pleased.
“Walk with me.” The demand is acquiesced to easily, and he holds her umbrella for her as they walk. It would be a funny sight, him being considerably taller, but one of the first things she taught him is how to appear elegant. Less suspicion if you look like you belong there effortlessly.
“How many?” The question is abrupt, interrupting the little bubble of peace they had created. It takes him a second to realize – after all, he had taken care to avoid anyone realizing exactly what had happened when-
(“Sleep, now. It’s okay, you won’t even realize.” And he hadn’t realized, not until the beach, until his mind was polished smooth, the sharp edges of his memories rubbed to nothing by the never-ending waves.)
But it’s his master, who knows him likely better than he knows himself. Of course she sees through him, even with little to no knowledge of that horrid dream they had all been trapped in.
“So many,” he whispers, and he hates how his voice cracks, but what can he do when thousands of lives he had never lived suddenly become his? Grander nods beside him, understanding in her eyes. She might be the only one who understands.
“You might be older than me now.” On any other day, his master telling a joke would be the highlight of his day; he might have to check her for possession. But now, all the words do is make him crumple, and he collapses heavily onto a nearby bench, shoulders shaking with grief for people he has never met and places he has never been, yet knows as intimately as the street he is currently on.
“That’s a horrifying thought,” he rasps out, once he doesn’t feel like breaking down there and then. There’s another moment of silence, then, as he tries to put himself back together without ripping himself apart first. There’s not much about him he’s unwilling to let his master see, but the scars on his hands is one of them. He doesn’t think she’ll call him weak, when his teenage years were spent by her side watching her self-destruct in ways only a vampire can, heart heavy with the knowledge he’ll be the one to facilitate her death in the end. No, she of all people wouldn’t blame him. And yet, the thought of making himself bleed in front of her is still unappealing.
“Tell me about it. The worst one,” she demands once he raises his head once more. He pauses for a second, sorting through the torrent of memories, the thousands of times he has died, the tens of thousands of times he has watched someone else die. Sometimes, he’ll have lived the life of the brother and the life of the sister, watching the same story unfold from different perspectives, acting out the tragedy and only realizing later how everything could have changed. But it’s all past lives, and he can’t change them. He couldn’t have changed them – so why is there still so much guilt?
“I can’t recall it well now,” he murmurs. “It’s not that I don’t remember because there were so many, it’s just that this life had been…”
He had been like a cloud, drifting past the world, disappearing unnoticed and arriving unseen. He had been like the falling rain, each raindrop so inconsequential, the full picture hated by most. He remembers falling, and shattering, and screaming out beneath the boundless sky unseen. He remembers tiny white rooms he could never escape, bland rice day after day even as he flew above so many plains.
And that’s just the thing. He remembers the utter disconnect, and the separation, and the feeling of being trapped. But he remembers nothing else other than terrifying emotions and flickers of memories. He does not have perfect recall by any means, but every other life, he had been real as he lived it, no matter what his dreams say.
But this one, he had not been present. He hates it so much, hates the way that life feels so much like the here and now, hates how floating is not a distant memory. He hates how he is drifting in the exact same way he had drifted, hates how he is not sure if he will open his eyes one day and find himself in a tiny white room, all a delusion of that one dream he does not feel like he has ever escaped.
In the back of his mind, he realizes he has fallen to the farmer-butterfly fallacy, the farmer believing whole-heartedly he was in the wrong body. But the farmer was a farmer, the butterfly a butterfly. How can he know, at this moment, that he is not a fragment of a broken dream, created by a shadow in a white room, along with the pouring raindrops and the white wisps of clouds?
And he says as much to Grander, stumbling over his words in ways he hadn’t done since he was dropped into this world, language foreign on his tongue. He had stumbled over his words thousands of times too, suffering sometimes from stutters, but this is different, as he searches desperately for ways to explain that terrifying disconnect, like nothing matters because this is all just imagination anyways.
He does not do a good job. He repeats the same phrases over and over again, and raindrops pour out of his mouth but the clouds follow the rain out of his mind, and when he finishes, his mind is clear.
Grander doesn’t tell him it’s all in his head. He is grateful, because if he heard those words right now, he doesn’t think he could believe them.
“You might be right. This may be some epic fantasy of a man trapped in a white room,” she starts, and pauses, in a way Ludger has never seen her do. He tilts his head, too exhausted to ask her to continue, but she continues anyway, staring straight ahead.
“But would it change anything? I feel alive right now. Do you feel alive?”
Ludger looks at the bright moon, and thinks about a woman with blue eyes like the sky and a child with a mind as polished as diamond, and he looks at his master and thinks about a well, and a mother. He thinks about the eighty students that hang onto every word in his lectures, and the motley group of individuals gathered in the building he has just left. He thinks about tomorrow, and his lesson plans, and the fragments of stone in his coat.
He breathes in, feels the cold wind, breathes out.
“Yes. Yes, I feel alive.”
Slowly, the night ends, the two still sitting side-by-side. And when the sun rises, dreams leave too. Closing his eyes, Ludger finds that he’s perfectly content to leave this dream behind.