#ariadote

He has made it his task to reconstruct, stitch anew, string by string, knot by knot: a new quilt of a memory.

For eleven months he makes a prison, tries to keep her in the shafts of his mind simply to keep her living -- the same way evidence keeps a crime alive. He creates from the moment they part; he knows there are details escaping between the spaces of his fingers every passing minute. (The crinkle of her nose, the dots lining her left shoulder bone. The floral scent she left behind in every space she existed in, the light she bled into him through the cracks of his skin, touching of void rooms he did not know he had kept closed for thus long.

Her touch, and how it made even his metallic skin tender, malleable to her very fingertips.) 

He keeps all these details scribed in a library he makes of in the house in his dreamscape. Each book writes of a different fragment of her, yet he knows he’ll never reach the whole. This is now the only way he knows to love, trapping her singularities in a room. Devouring every detail. There comes a day when the space fills up with too many books, and he still does not have the whole to fill it all.

He becomes a small writer lost in a library too vast for him, overwhelmed by all the books he has still yet not written, and never will write, in how time has thieved of his memory.

The twelfth month, although the room of use no longer, he keeps the space. He does not tell or show Aria, and instead, scribes of all the remaining books to complete the empty shelves. He becomes a writer still lost in a place too vast for him, now a poet reunited with his greatest muse, a dreamer met with the most real dream of them all:

“We have thirteen minutes. We go under, and that’s four hours and a sixth at the next level. Just enough time to find Sky and get out of here before we have to wake up.” Nothing’s gone to plan. “So are you coming with me or going to stake out here, Aria?” When he surveys her face, he catches the slight twitch of her eye. It’s sourced by the same rumble at his wrist, oddly similar to the rattles of the building they’re hiding in. He whole dreamscape shakes, like some warning towards collapse. 

Her eyes forego another glance, and he reads the worry, sees the fret plaguing her unstill pupils. “Aria.” He laughs, the sound, estranged. “Have I killed us yet?” The same anxiety fuels him. Plagues him with the kind of thrill that gave him a reason to wake. (Gave him the reason to dream.)

“Come with me.” 

His decisions were always too illogical in reality, but here, they worked. The dreamscapes were just as spontaneous as his feet, just as quick to change and deform, only to reform. So here too, he’s impulsive, taking her wrist. He’s also selfish, in taking away her freedom of choice. He’s pulling her towards the fabricated machine in the corner of the empty lot simply because he needs courage, in the form of Aria and the warmth of her hand. 

“You’ll find Sky faster than I will.” He reminds himself where they are. The last dream they had dove into was Jack’s. Everyone was still on the train to Paris in the previous level. Jack’s subconscious wasn’t trained like the rest of the team’s. The fact gives him a shudder, eliciting faster movements of his fingers to attach the wires onto their arms. When he’s finished, he looks back up at her, with a smile intended to fool her into his nonexistent confidence.

“We’ll find him. And then we’ll be back home.” 

Her heart is a cathedral: vast and small all at once, built on prayers and kept standing on faith. It’s not a place he belongs, nor dares to enter with hands like his own.

“I wish everything were as easy like it is in the dreams. Like in these films.” There are different colors painting her face from one second to the next, reflections off of the movie playing on the screen only a few feet away from where they sit. “If only things.. could be that movie picture perfect, hm? I wish I’d be the protagonist of one of these films. There’s a thought.” 

“There’s a dream.” He’s lost feeling in his shoulder where her head rests some time ago, but it’s not something he’d dare to let himself lose over the absence of some type of feeling. On screen, a girl comes out onto the city streets, her dress twirling as she does, without a care of the rain pouring over. There’s water everywhere that it could possibly be, and yet she smiles, without a care in the world.

“I’d build it for you.” At his words she turns her head, in question. “That. If that’s what you want.” It’s nonsensical. He’s never drawn out a dream, especially anything as complex as the scene in front of them. “You know I’d do it for you.” If that’s what’d bring you a little closer to alright. “You know I would.”

She laughs, and it overlaps with the laughter of the actress on screen. They’re both laughing, but one sounds right, the other, out of act. 

Her voice is almost a breath when she says the next. “And you know it wouldn’t make a difference.” 

The silence cuts, and it leaves the both of them to return back to escape into the film instead. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth leg of it, her breaths begin to slow, and he waits a few more minutes till they finally dull out. Watching her sleep is a rarity on it’s own, a dream in itself. He observes her closed eyes and her chest rise and fall, watching her breaths, as she is: 

A dream herself.

He shouldn’t and yet he does – his hand slips underneath the blanket over the both of them and holds onto hers. It’s not something he’s allowed to hold, god forbid, something he should be allowed near. “Let me in, Aria.” He requests of her as she continues to sleep, lips speaking in dreams. “Let me make it different this time.”

He finds her three levels under.

She's asleep in a chapel, all windows and doors closed and locked. He only enters from a floor beneath, through an entrance only he and she know -- from the Kernig mission, four whole years ago. The architecture of the scape is all the same. The same, quiet sanctuary, with only his steps in echo between the walls. The light bleeds in through colored mosaic, and he lifts his arm to keep sight. The light comes to kiss his skin but does no more -- it leaves, his bones remaining untouched.

He walks past thirty, or so aisles of empty, wooden benches. As he approaches the front area, he slows. (His blood begins to run.)

He remembers the morning of leaving. The rain showers outside, and the still apartment. Midnight, perched upon a chair, stirred awake with even the smallest of noise. His body thinks differently than his mind: it gravitates for, towards her. It knows not of space, and only of proximity. His hands not know of what to do when they are not in hers, and when he stands, his feet remain where she remains. All his lips desire are butterfly kisses upon her skin while his fingers thread through her hair -- his heart is in her palms. His human heart: that ill-obedient, tender engine.

Returning was out of plan and highly unlogical. Like everything else, he had made an impulsive, selfish decision, and everything else had followed, naturally and unnaturally. He was always running, and someone was always chasing. To ask her to come run with him for something as stupid as love -- was foolish. To have her need to join this endless, paradoxical race -- was selfish. And so he had ran, to anywhere she would not follow, to everywhere she could not follow. But here he was again, at the center of the loop. He had run right back to her, idiotically, illogically.

His human heart: that ill-obedient, tender engine. Love revved it.

The footsteps stop once he takes a seat besides her. She should be peaceful, slumbering in such a serene place -- yet there is dusk under her eyes and nothing warm about her. When he touches her, a palm against her cheek, the presence of God overwhelms him and sin sits besides him.

Selfish, selfish sinner.

But Lord, I will only be more selfish.

What comes after turns away the gaze of the angels. He ignores all conscious and he leans down, lips kissing upon her's. To the heavens, it is simile to Eve's first kiss with the forbidden fruit -- this is the start of mayhem, and he knows it. She stirs easily, eyes slow to open till meeting his. Then she slinks upward, a hand on his face, expression of someone who's seen a phantom, a white ghost. She seems at a loss for words, and so he smiles, hand placed over hers. They sit in silence for a minute longer, until she cracks at words."It's easy to return, difficult to leave... is this what it's like to die?"