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What dream keeps

Garth x reader fem

The testaments

…………………………………….

The dream had started with the apartment.

As often, the kitchen too small, the Saturday morning light, the sound of the market below. Ordinary, familiar things that memory rebuilt at night when Gilead loosened its grip on everything else just a little.

But that night the apartment had drifted.

Him.

The way he approached slowly, without hurry, with that deliberate patience that had always been one of his ways of saying things without words. His hands on your waist. His mouth against your temple first, always the temple, always that precise spot, then lower, along your jaw, into your neck, and you felt his warm breath on your skin and his voice saying your name softly in that way he had, Y/N, not calling, not asking, just placing the word there like something that belonged to him and that he liked to hold.

Five years of memory to draw from.

Memory knew exactly what to look for and where.

The dream had been generous.

You woke up at six in the morning.

The gray light of Gilead filtered through the curtain. The crucifix on the wall watched you with its usual indifference. Your heart was beating too fast and there was in your body a concentrated, precise warmth that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

You stared at the ceiling.

The problem with a dream like that was that it left you with something, a real, concrete physical tension that waking didn’t dissolve. Something that demanded a resolution that Gilead and its nineteen months of calculated distance had never planned for.

You looked at the crucifix.

You looked at the door.

You looked at the ceiling again.

What followed lasted a few minutes in the silence of your narrow room, under the sheet, with the only company the sharp awareness that the person you needed was three corridors away and that three corridors might as well be three continents.

The result was technically functional.

Functionally, entirely, cruelly insufficient.

Because the problem wasn’t mechanical. The problem was his hands specifically, his specific way of paying attention, that quality of attention he had had for five years and that nothing else reproduced, not the dream, not you alone in a Gilead bed at six in the morning thinking about him.

You let your arms fall back at your sides.

The frustration that remained was precise, nameable, and completely useless.

— Nineteen months, you said to the ceiling.

The ceiling didn’t comment.

Neither did the crucifix.

Breakfast was at seven thirty.

Daisy sat across from you, set down her tray, and looked at you with the precision of someone who read people the way others read texts, quickly, well, without apparent effort.

— You didn’t sleep well?

— No. You stared at your porridge. I slept very well.

— Your cheeks are pink.

— It’s cold this morning.

She drank her tea. She looked out the window. She came back to your face with a slowness that said she had followed the whole path and reached the conclusion.

— Ah, she said.

Just that. Ah. With that particular tone.

— Ah what.

— Nothing at all.

— Daisy.

— I’m not saying anything. She took another sip of tea. I’m very discreet.

You set your spoon down on the table.

— I had a dream, you murmured, eyes on the tablecloth, your voice barely audible under the muted noise of the refectory. About him. A very… You stopped. Very present dream.

— Present.

— Physically present, you said, and your cheeks decided to betray what your voice still controlled.

— And this morning you…

— I tried to handle the situation, you said with the dignity of someone losing all dignity in real time. The result was disappointing.

Functionally disappointing. Because it’s not the right person and the right person is three corridors away and nineteen months is…

— Long, Daisy said.

— Very long.

She placed her hand over yours under the table, a brief second, and in her eyes there was real understanding, not amusement, well not only amusement.

— Justin and I were separated for eight months, she said softly. I know. I know exactly.

— How did you handle it.

— Badly. Simply. I handled it badly.

The morning was long.

Two hours studying texts in the reading room with Aunt Vidala walking between the rows. You read the same three lines a number of times you didn’t count because counting would have meant acknowledging the problem and you preferred to deny it.

The tension didn’t leave.

That was the real problem with that morning, not the dream, not what followed, but the fact that neither had resolved anything. The memory of the dream stayed in your body like an unfulfilled promise, a sentence begun that you weren’t allowed to finish. His voice in your neck. His hands. Everything five years had made familiar and that nineteen months had turned into a precise, constant absence.

You turned a page.

You reread the same three lines.

The crossing happened at ten thirty in the main corridor.

You and Daisy coming back from the reading room, heading toward the sewing room. Him at the central checkpoint, standing, hands behind his back, looking straight ahead, on duty.

You saw him from a distance.

Which was a mistake because seeing him from afar gave you time to think about what you had dreamed that night, what you had done that morning, what it had been and what it hadn’t been, and the heat rose back to your cheeks with devastating speed.

— Oh no, Daisy murmured beside you.

— Be quiet.

— You’re blushing.

— I’m not.

— Y/N. You’re crimson.

You reached the checkpoint. The protocol required Pearls to lower their eyes before Guardians, a gesture of humility, daily practice, and that morning a saving grace.

You lowered your eyes.

And then you raised them.

One second. Just one. Because his proximity after that night and that morning was more than your discipline could fully contain.

He was looking at you.

Garth never looked at Pearls while on duty.

He watched corridors, angles, exit points, things that needed watching. Not the women who passed by, never, it was a line he didn’t cross in his role as a Guardian.

But now, his eyes were on you.

And in that single second he did what he had done for five years, he read your face. Quickly, completely, without you being able to stop him. He saw your cheeks. He saw something in your eyes he had seen before in other contexts, in other rooms, in a life that existed three corridors and nineteen months away.

His expression didn’t move a millimeter.

But something in his eyes, deep down, where no one else ever looked, lit up softly.

He knew.

He didn’t know exactly what. But he knew something, and that something was enough to light that spark.

You looked away.

Far too late.

Three meters later, Daisy breathed very softly:

— He saw everything.

— He saw nothing.

— He read your face in a second and filed the information somewhere, she said with precise certainty. He might not know exactly what. But he knows.

You walked to the sewing room with burning cheeks and a frustration that now had two distinct components, the original frustration from that morning, intact, and on top of it the new frustration of having been read so easily by someone who couldn’t do anything with that information in a corridor of Ardua Hall.

Two frustrations layered.

The day was going to be very long.

It was.

Sewing. Lunch. Afternoon study. Each hour with that underlying tension that didn’t fade, that stayed there in the background like a continuous note, and the awareness that Garth somewhere in the building carried that spark in his eyes and knew and couldn’t do anything either, and that symmetry was both fair and entirely unsatisfying.

The message arrived late in the afternoon.

A text reference in your evening reading list that wasn’t one. Drop point. Time. Storage room in the annex building.

Eight o’clock.

The storage room smelled of cold oil and dust.

He was already there when you entered, standing against the back wall, arms crossed over his chest. The battery lamp cast the usual orange light. The door closed behind you.

He looked at you.

For a long moment. Without speaking.

And in that look there was the spark from that morning, still there, which had had the whole day to settle into something more precise.

— So, he said.

His voice, his real voice, not the Guardian’s, had something in it that wasn’t entirely neutral. Something warm and deliberate and slightly, precisely teasing.

— So what, you said.

— This morning.

— This morning I had breakfast with Daisy.

— Before breakfast.

You looked at the wall next to his head, the shelf with its equipment crates, very interesting, fascinating even, much more interesting than his face right now.

— I don’t know what you’re talking about.

— Y/N.

— Garth.

He dropped his arms. Took a step toward you. Then another. That deliberate slowness he had had for five years and that was absolutely not accidental and that your body recognized before your mind finished pretending everything was fine.

— I saw something on your face this morning, he said quietly. At the checkpoint. Something I know.

— You were reading my thoughts?

— For five years, he said. More or less.

He was now a meter away. Less.

— It’s humiliating, you said.

— It’s not humiliating.

— Yes because I had a dream about you and this morning, The sentence struggled to come out, not from shame but from the absurdity of the situation, from the fact that you were having this conversation in a Gilead storage room. I tried to handle it on my own and the result was…

— Disappointing, he said, and in his voice there was that something, not quite a smile but the shadow of one, and beneath it something much more serious.

— Functionally insufficient, you said. Because it’s not you. And without you it’s…

— I know, he said.

And in his voice, this time, the teasing had given way to something else, something more direct, warmer, heavier with nineteen months of the same thing on his side.

He placed his hand on your jaw.

— Nineteen months, he said very softly. You thought I didn’t have the same problem?

Your throat tightened.

— You could have said something.

— Through which secure channel exactly.

Fair point.

His hand moved to your neck. His eyes in yours, that way of looking, fully present, fully there, unchanged in five years, untouched by Gilead.

— The dream, he said. What was it?

— I’m not telling you.

— Y/N.

— The answer is no.

— I was in it, I have a right…

— No right of review…

He kissed you.

That kiss wasn’t the soft kiss of corridors and waiting rooms.

That one had nineteen months in it and the frustration of that morning and all the calculated corridors and maintained distances and an entire day of carrying something without being able to put it down. It had his hands that knew exactly where to go and your breathing changing immediately because the body had its own memory and yours had recognized his for five years.

— Garth…

— We have time, he said against your mouth. Tonight we have time, I arranged it.

What followed belonged to that storage room and to the two of you.

To the orange light and the cold oil and the silence of the building outside that didn’t know what was happening inside.

He hadn’t forgotten the word disappointing.

He was methodical when he had a reason to be.

And he had spent five years learning the difference between what was sufficient and what wasn’t, between what worked and what left someone in a room at six in the morning staring at the ceiling with a precise, nameable frustration.

That night there was no ceiling to stare at.

That night it was him.

Later, the lamp still on, your voices returned to something normal, his jacket somewhere on a crate, you leaning against him, his chest under his t-shirt, like before, and you couldn’t quite remember why the day had been so long.

— Better? he asked, his right hand brushing your thigh, the other around your waist.

You considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.

— Functionally satisfying, you said.

He laughed. Really laughed. A free, brief sound in the closed storage room.

— Functionally satisfying.

— It’s a compliment.

— I know. His mouth in your hair. I’ll take it.

A soft silence.

— Next time you dream, he said, you send me a message.

— Absolutely not.

— Y/N…

— The answer is no.