Author's Notes: I'm not too sure how high this hits the old coherency skill, but blame it on a white chocolate mocha and an inability to sleep.

Summary: They dream by accident, and at random, but somehow, even these paths manage to cross.

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séparant la mer (1/1)

by darkstar
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séparant la mer: to part the sea

(sydney)

She dreams casually, now; it is often as simple and understated as a glaze over the left eye as she walks down the street, through a hallway. The right eye-- the dominant one-- scans the street to ensure that she avoids lightposts and bicycle messengers and old women with poodles but the left eye sees none of this. This lesser, forgotten eye wanders freely through time and space at whim.

An example: Joey's Pizza called, and on her way back from the warehouse, she blinked (no more than twice, at the most) and she'd reached another part of town entirely. The front of an imported French grocery store. Homemade soups. She must have looked lost; one of the old poodle women offered her directions.

She knew the way home, but in one sense the women was right. She is lost. She is under the spell of the left eye, the rebel visionary, existing within the infinite universe contained in the sphere of her dilated pupil.

And this is what she sees:

***

Danny is a cluster of stars above her right shoulder, low on a horizon the color of raw indigo silk. A constellation, or perhaps a galaxy. From this distance, she cannot tell which. Only that it is there.

Underneath her feet, a black ocean as broad and flat as an inversion of the desert. She walks on the water, and every time her foot hits the waves, there is a flash underneath, like sparks. This illuminates the vast, underwater world which she has not noticed before: an understandable ignorance, after all, she's a surface dweller.

There is a city beneath, silver and austere as if hand-carved from individual driftwood pieces of moonlight, and there are people in the streets with hair the color of seaweed. They stand outside their houses and watch her with Caribbean blue eyes; the children point and ask many questions which she cannot hear. The water muffles the sound. She can only see them, in between footsteps, wavery and indistinct. Every time she walks this way, she finds herself searching the crowd for his face. Angry if she does not find him.

(What have you done with him?)

She wants to ask the question, but they can't hear her either. The surface of the water reflects the sound, spinning it into useless air. In this respect, it is as effective as bulletproof glass.

(Why won't you let him surface?)

Or sometimes she sees him with the crowd, pale as foam, watching her from the bottom of the world. Irony: she has to step away from him just to create another glimpse of his face. Bare feet on the water, a residual glow. But no matter how far she runs, he is always there, underneath her. Keeping pace. Somehow it charges her with the energy required to move just above the speed of darkness, just fast enough to maintain light.

She aches (that dry, dusty, land ache) to split the surface of the ocean and wash the earth from her body. Then draw him up with her, cupped in her hands very carefully so as not to spill him on the way.

(What happens to foam in the wind?)

Vanishing.

(What happens to surface dwellers in the sea?)

Drowning.

Once, at night, she dreamed he broke surface and then dried up in her arms, a starfish on sand. A boy fathered by mermaids, cast upon rocks. They (speaking of those who create the darkness that demands she walk water) pinned him onto a board; they cut open the body to discern ocean secrets. He bled salt water.

In the morning she woke with tiny white crystals on her lips.

***

(It is obvious, then...)

She realized as she sat in a car and watched the pier disappear around her. Ninety-three miles an hour.

(It is obvious that I must be the one to go to him.)

And water the color of the seaweed children stretched underneath her, for the glittering of a second.

(If that's how I must find you, by sinking, then bring it on. I'll drown.)

Impact.

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(interlude)

They are at the warehouse again, because he has cancelled the scheduled meeting at the pier. He is afraid to put her near water now; she can tell because every time he thinks she's not looking he checks her for erosion. Salt water does that to sand girls.

"Does it hurt?" he asks, his eyes follow the bruises on her neck and wrists.

"I was not afraid when I broke the surface of the water because I knew you were already waiting for me underneath."

She whispers, an afterthought. She's preoccupied with his knuckles, the blood in the cracks of skin along the ridges. He fights with his hand, she thinks. Bare fisted.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"I couldn't hear you."

"I said it didn't hurt."

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(michael)

He dreams furtively, now, for fear they will ask him where he has been. Where his mind has gone, who it's gone with. They will know when he lies.

He has become adept in various methods of concealment: professed interest in paperwork, idleness over a styrofoam coffee cup, sudden fascination with the street outside a window. He sifts through crowds for fragments of her face: an eye, a cheekbone, a corner of the jaw. From this he pastes together a collage in his mind, images of her than only he can decipher.

Sometimes he finds himself in thrall.

An example: Joey's pizza called and on his way back to the office, he fell madly in love with three different women passing him on the street. This was because for ten seconds, he believed they were her. On the eleventh second, he hated them because they were not. Unfair, of course, but inevitable.

He opens the file on his desk and begins to write a report that details why he broke the law and assaulted federal agents, but he is distracted. He sees only his collages, the reflections of her that leave every piece of his surroundings (pen, paper, yo-yo, coffee cup) forever altered. A sort of flash, but distant, as if seen moving over the surface of water.

When he looks up at it, startled, this is what he sees:

***

His father is a wrecked galleon half-buried next to a black coral reef; inside the captains quarters is still the journal of the man who went down with the ship. But it's too late; the ink has returned to the sea, and he cannot read the message.

He lives in this galleon, quite comfortable, as he has acquired water lungs. He can see them glowing through his chest: thin golden sponges streaked with red filaments that move ebb/flow, ebb/flow with the currents. The ceiling of the cabin is painted indigo, tiny fragments of mirror embedded in the wood to reproduce stars, though he does not often look at them. He keeps to his normal, undersea business and does not dwell on worlds above the waterline.

One exception: when the others (those who live in the city of moon and bear children of kelp) come to tell him of the walker on waves, he forgets everything. He follows them as a man in trance. He stares through the looking-glass belly of the ocean, but it is too dark. He can only see her by the light cast by her footsteps as she strikes the water. Silver flint.

(Be careful, you'll slip...)

He wants to warn her but his voice bounces off the surface and ricochets back to the bottom, scaring the fish.

(How do you keep your balance on nothing but foam?)

And because her eyes-- in phosphorus millisecond glimpses-- search him out, or because she is preoccupied with his face and cannot see what is ahead, he runs with her. Out from the city, over drowned continents and submerged deserts. At times only her exploding footsteps provide light for him to see, but he is prepared for this. There have been times he's run blind.

He longs (a waterlogged, swollen desire) to breach the waves and take her by the hand, drawing her back to the galleon. He will show her the glass stars by the light of electric eels; this will prove he's not afraid to hold raw energy in his hands. After all, he holds her.

(What happens to sand in the water?)

It dissolves.

(What happens to water lungs in the air?)

Asphyxiation.

Once he dreamed she plunged to him and dissipated in his arms, golden dust spread thin on the waves. A girl, fathered by deserts, drowning under three tons of liquid. They (speaking of those who demand he stay submerged) tied her body to the mast of the galleon, as a warning. They dissected her heart to find why land defied water; it burst into flowers.

It was not yet morning when he woke with pollen covering his fingers.

***

(It is obvious, then,)

He realized as he walked into the bathroom behind Haladki, the man who had pushed her over a bridge. As he shut the door, turned out the lights.

(It is obvious that I must be the one to go to her.)

And he grabbed the man by the shoulder and spun him around, his fist already in motion despite the feeble threats of protocol.

(If that is how I must protect you, by surfacing, let it come. I'll choke.)

Impact.

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(postlude)

She stands too far away from him because she is afraid to smother; he sense it because at odd intervals she watches the rise and fall of his chest, as if to reassure herself. After all, they are on very dry land. Dangerous for ocean boys.

"What happened to your hands?" she says.

"I hit him because I have nothing to lose but you and he almost took you, and I'll drown him first. Bare handed."

He whispers, as if alone in the room. He is distracted with the abrasions at the side of her neck where the seatbelt checked her fall. He calculates her speed by the bruises, and suspects that for a millisecond she did not want to get out of that car.

"Pardon? I didn't catch that last part. You mumbled."
"Nothing."
"Don't believe that."
"Maybe you've still got water in your eyes."
"Maybe I do."

His hand with the split knuckles comes up to trace her neck with the watercolor skin. Both dreaming of oceans that will not part, not for them. Not yet.

Then they walk away.