Lucid Dreamer (1/2)
part 2
Gepard notices that it's been. Quiet lately. Like weirdly quiet. TOO quiet. He hasn't seen Sampo Koski in almost a week, which is about the longest he's ever been absent. And he is NOT worried. He's not! So what if they've been getting along more lately! So what if Gepard sometimes looks for him in his favorite hiding places! So what if he's been dreaming about blue hair and green eyes! It's nothing!!
But they're….strange, these dreams. Gepard doesn't usually remember what he's dreamt. It's out of his mind seconds within waking up. But these stick with him, they won't leave him be, they feel different somehow.
He dreams of Sampo bringing food to the frontlines and eating breakfast in his tent with him. Sampo always sneaks him extras. He dreams of chasing Sampo through the alleyways, Sampo sometimes letting himself be caught, Gepard sometimes catching him, and trying to ignore how it feels more like a game now more than anything else. He even dreams that Sampo tags along with him on one of his few civilian days. Sampo runs errands with him, prattles about inane bullshit while Gepard picks out groceries for the week, drags Gepard into some bakery he's never been to but he thinks Serval mentioned once.
And sometimes, it feels so close to reality, that Gepard half expects to see Sampo, shamelessly swaggering into the frontlines with all the guards' breakfast like his wanted poster wasn't only recently taken off the walls of Belobog. He's disappointed when it's always someone else instead. He tells himself his disappointment is ridiculous and if Sampo wants to go prowl around the Snow Plains or wherever he is, then fine. It's not any of his business.
…But it IS his job to investigate any unusual criminal activity relating to the frontlines. And the frontlines are Sampo's usual haunting grounds, and this is unusual activity, and Sampo IS technically a criminal, so it is absolutely part of his duty to look into this - is what Gepard tells himself the entire tram ride down into the Underground.
Natasha tells him he's gone, and Gepard has to steel himself. He knew Sampo made enemies wherever he went, there are a lot of people who would love his head on a platter, but he didn't think-
Natasha corrects him that she means literally gone. As in off-planet. Sampo always leaves her a note before he goes anywhere, so she knows not to expect any supply runs from him. He should be back in exactly two weeks. Thank the Preservation.
Gepard goes back home. He waits.
The uneasiness doesn't leave him.
"Where did you go?" Sampo stops dead in the middle of some story about Seele, and how you'd think someone with as blunt a mouth as her wouldn't have so much trouble asking a woman out, even if that woman IS the Supreme Guardian, and stares at him. He nearly fumbles his cigarette.
"Ahaha, what do you mean, I'm right here?" Sampo smiles at him the same way he always does. Gepard has no idea why he asked. It just popped out. He can never tell when Sampo is lying, anyway.
"I don't know. I feel like I haven't seen you in a long time." Gepard idly mouths at his own cigarette. He almost never smokes, but he wants to ration their stocks of Blizzard Immunity, and it helps with the cold. It's seemed colder lately, for some reason.
Gepard flicks his lighter once, twice, sighs at the third time because a metal prosthetic and thick gloves make the damn things so difficult. Sampo reaches over and wordlessly kisses the end of his cigarette to Gepard's, lighting it. "Thank you."
Nothing happens for almost a full 30 seconds. Something churns behind Gepard's ribcage. Because Sampo never leaves a "thank you" hanging. This is the part where he gives his spiel about how helpful and kind he is and Gepard either brings up how long his rap sheet was before Bronya helped clear his name, or just stares deadpan because seeing Sampo squirm is weirdly satisfying.
"…I'll be back in one more week."
Gepard jolts awake in his cot, mouth dry and eyes bleary.
The hell.
The next dream he has, Sampo looks tired. Sometimes he seems normal. Sometimes he says strange things, like how he wishes he'd gone to some restaurant in Belobog. Ate his favorite food more recently. Brought something with him. Gepard asks why he can't do that now. Where would he bring something? Sampo only shrugs. His rebuttals have less energy.
Gepard doesn't know if he wants to dream more, or less.
He ticks down the days on his calendar. Natasha hasn't told him any different. She promised she would if she got any kind of message. Sampo returns tomorrow, from whatever vacation or seedy business dealings he's been off having. He is not excited about it. He is not looking forward to it. He's not!!
Gepard falls asleep late that night, unable to settle. He dreams again.
He's alone. There are tons of people everywhere, the frontlines are always crowded. But he's alone. They all pass right by him as though he were a ghost. Gepard starts to walk before he realizes his feet are even moving.
He checks the trashcans in the dead end alley. He checks the supply crates that someone always stacks too high because they don't feel like finding more space for them. He pauses to check the soldiers that march past him, watching their footprints in the snow.
He finally finds Sampo on the rooftop along the northernmost wall, the one that looks out over the plains, towards Everwinter Hill, towards where the Stellaron had once been kept. With a full moon and an entire land of white snow, Gepard can almost see clear out to the horizon.
"Found you." Sampo stiffens, and Gepard is almost prepared for him to sprint off the roof. He doesn't. But he doesn't relax either. Gepard sits down next to him and stares out at the wastelands.
"…I fucked up." It wasn't what Gepard had been expecting. Sampo never 'fucks up,' Sampo just gets into incidents that are entirely, supposedly, not his fault and that he just happens to always be within the vicinity of.
"What did you do now?" It must be really bad if Sampo is coming to the Silvermanes for protection.
Instead, Sampo ignores his question completely. "See out over there? Right on the other side of that mountain. There's a safe house that way. It's hidden under a lot of snow and dead trees, but it's there. And in that safe house is a box full of letters. I need you to deliver those letters for me."
Gepard's brow furrows. It's a weird favor to ask. Sampo would never tell anyone where his hidden safehouses were. It defeated the whole purpose of a hidden safe house.
Something is wrong, something is really really wrong.
Gepard turns back to look at him again and startles, all of his questions dying in his throat, because the entire left side of Sampo's head is suddenly matted down, dark and sticky, his skin is dyed red red red-
"In three more months, there's gonna be something big happening." Gepard grabs Sampo's hand and it feels slick and warm against his palm. "I won't be here. So I need you to do my end of things for me." Gepard tries to keep hold, but something is fading, something is slowing, the sun is coming up but the colors are all wrong, everything feels like encroaching fog, Sampo's hand slides right through his. "I was gonna come back with my mask to finish setting the stage, but…" Gepard makes a frantic grab for Sampo's wrist, the air twists, he comes back empty-handed. "They have you. And you're the Iron Wall of Belobog. So it'll be ok."
Gepard finally manages to find his grip, snatches the front of Sampo's dark wet jacket and yanks him forward to hold onto him, and this close up, he can see it better, his colors are bleaching out, leaking outside the lines as if Sampo will become part of the background, as if he's fading into the strange fog that's been closing in on them. His fingers are already starting to feel empty again.
"Wake up."
Gepard jolts awake, uncurls his hands from where they're fisted in the blanket, scrubs the dampness off his face. Breathes. Breathes. Breathes. Today is supposed to be the day.
He throws on his civilian clothes, and he goes down to the shipyard the IPC had built. He finds a spot where he can see every person that returns to Belobog, and he waits.
And he waits and he waits and he waits.
No one he recognizes appears.
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[read on ao3]
"You okay?"
Lydia has her elbows on her knees. Sitting in the waiting room of Deaton's clinic, her blue dress paradoxically bright against the bland color palette of the room, she's a contradiction unto herself. She looks tired and shaken. She looks glad to be alive. She looks unprepared to believe that being alive is going to last.
"I've been worse," is how she answers him. Then, "I've also been better."
Stiles takes the empty seat beside her.
"Feels like we're always hovering in the middle there," he offers.
Lydia nods. "Ethan and Aiden are going to be okay."
"Thank God," Stiles deadpans. "I would have been heartbroken to lose them.”
Lydia gently shoves him. "They did the right thing in the end. They're not that bad."
Stiles only hums, drumming on his knee with restless fingers. A deafening silence crowds them in. Stiles reflects on the events of the last twenty-four hours and finds them alarming when compressed into such a small time frame.
"What's on your mind?" he dares to ask, after the quiet is almost insurmountably heavy. If Deaton is still in the exam room with the twins, they're being very quiet. Suspiciously so. Something for Stiles to check on, once he's done checking on Lydia.
Lydia who is smoothing out her dress with a persistence that could be called obsessive. Every motion creates a new wrinkle, and every time, Lydia flattens it under her thumb.
"Oh, you know." Her tone is light, but her twisting fingers betray just how uneasy she is. "Thinking about how the last time I was sitting in this waiting room, you were dead for sixteen hours."
Stiles takes that one to the solar plexus, though he's not sure how else it could be taken.
"I wasn't…really dead. It was more like a long sleep. A long, icy sleep."
"You stopped breathing." Lydia stares lasers into her knees. "You didn't have a heartbeat. Deaton kept saying it was okay, that this was normal, that if something was really wrong we would know, but he was lying, I could tell. He wouldn't let us near you guys — he said he didn't want us interfering with the process." A fist forms in her lap, creasing the folds of her dress. "Sixteen hours. I didn't eat, I didn't sleep. I just sat here. Waiting. Hoping Deaton wasn't full of shit."
"And he wasn't," Stiles says, morbidly upbeat. "We came back!"
"You don't get it," Lydia says, sounding angry and scared and deeply wounded all at the same time.
Stiles frowns. If she would just look at him, maybe he could read her expression, but he can't tell what she's thinking from the set of her shoulders. "So help me get it."
Lydia breathes out, out, out, expelling air like it's a toxic gas.
"Humans have a reflex," she says in a small voice, staring through her palms. "It prevents them from drowning until the last possible second. The survival instinct is so powerful that it overpowers the breathing instinct, even when holding your breath becomes excruciatingly painful. It's called—”
"Voluntary apnea," Stiles says dumbly.
Lydia looks up at him and nods once. Her green eyes latch onto his.
"You told me once that death happens to the people around you," she says, biting her lip. "I can't imagine how it must have felt to be in that ice bath…but can you imagine how it felt to be the one holding you down?"
Stiles is too dumbstruck to answer.
"I killed you. I did that. It doesn't matter that it was temporary. I didn't know that, we didn't know that for sure. I held you in that water until you died, Stiles." Her hands tremble. "You were dead for sixteen hours because of me. I was a murderer. For sixteen hours."
"Whoa whoa whoa, hey," Stiles says. His 'Protect Lydia Martin' instinct is back online and the alarm is blaring. He grabs her hands in both of his, keeping them still and warm.
"Okay, first of all, you didn't murder me. It was consensual drowning! If anything it was more like assisted suicide." Lydia glares. "Not helping. Right. Sorry. Um, but secondly, and— and way more importantly, Lydia, yeah, maybe you temporarily killed me, but you also— you brought me back to life."
She’s unmoved, he can tell, so he shakes her gently. "Yeah. You did that. Look, anyone can kill me. I'm not even six feet of fragile bones and zero muscle mass, and my best friend's a freakin' werewolf, okay, killing me is not impressive. Bringing me back? That takes something else. Something special, and only someone who—" He tries not to stammer but his tongue sabotages him, "who cares about me enough to bring me back to life could do that, and honestly, those are in short supply, so yeah. Maybe you were a temporary murderer, but you were also a savior. My savior." He smiles weakly. "And I wouldn't have it any other way."
Lydia holds his gaze. She holds his hands, too — not passively but decisively, clutching them like a lifeline, like she's the one who's drowning. Reflecting once again on the past twenty-four hours, it occurs to Stiles that he is not the only person for whom that stretch of time has been alarming.
"That's certainly a nicer way of looking at it," she yields softly. Then she shakes her head. "But it doesn't change the fact that in order to save you, I had to kill you." Now she weaponizes that arresting stare, seaglass green pinning him to his seat. "I'm never doing that again, you understand? I can't."
"I wouldn't ask you to."
"You don't know what it was like," she murmurs — seemingly talking to herself now, more than him, anyway. "Watching you. And I couldn't do anything. I couldn't do anything but sit there."
Something niggles Stiles's brain, that feeling he gets when a few different threads braid themselves into a discernible pattern. The emotional tether. Lydia's remorse. Sixteen hours of sitting and waiting.
"Sitting there was exactly what you were supposed to do," he realizes, also half to himself. It gets her attention anyway; she frowns at his conclusion. Stiles goes on: "An emotional tether, Deaton said, someone to bring us back, I didn't really get it, how that could work, but you just said it. You all just sat there. For sixteen hours. You waited. You stayed, so I had someone to come back to. The way only a tether could do. Think about it, right? If a fisherman casts a line and then walks away from the fishing pole, it doesn't matter whether he hooks a fish because no one is there to reel it in."
"Are you comparing yourself to a fish?"
"We were underwater, I was thinking about water, it was the first metaphor that came to mind, give me a break,” Stiles says defensively. "My point is, sixteen hours is a long time. Long enough to get bored, to lose faith, to give up and walk away and pronounce us dead. But you guys didn't. You didn't."
"Deaton said—”
"You just told me you thought Deaton was full of shit. But you stayed anyway, right?" Stiles presses, looking Lydia in the eye. "You had a feeling. Or maybe you just believed. Whatever it was, you stayed. That's how you brought me back. You thought you weren't doing anything, but you were doing the most important thing." He squeezes her hands. "You were waiting for me."
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