Nothing But Bones

6: Soft As A Peach

She's in another star-studded black void. This isn't that place in the back of her head where she confronts herself or climbs on top of gold-painted filing cabinets to climb through rifts and exit into the Dream World itself. It's infinite; and there isn't a hint of star-dusted strings holding together a conspiracy of thought and being. There is no edge of the concrete slab. Black stretches on in every direction, broken only by twinkling stars in the sky and reflected in the puddle of water at her feet. The water stretches on infinitely, without break, without end; and the stars are close enough to touch.

She reaches out, left hand cupping in the same way as the right. If she could just touch one—

Something splashes off to her left, somewhere behind her. Tiff whips her head around to see it— what is coming toward her, what her head has in store for her sorry ass. They're still too far off to really see, but she can feel, deep down in the pit of her stomach, that she doesn't want to meet whoever or whatever this is. She frowns and starts to move away from it— whatever "it" is.

That's how it is, sometimes. Even when she knows she's dreaming, there are times when she can't break out of her own head and take control of what's happening to her. There might be something to be said there, some uncovered truth about Tiff Sheridan, but she doesn't want to be the one to say it. It feels a little foolish; it feels a little weak; it feels like she should be over it by now, but she isn't. She's never over it. That's so fucking stupid.

She walks away from the approaching figure. Frustratingly enough, she can't walk as quickly as she would like. The dream and the water at her feet, barely up to her ankles, are slowing her down.

She goes to shove her hands in her pockets and realizes: this is another linen slip dream. Not linen this time— something silkier, something softer. Satin, maybe, in a gentle shade of off-white off-peach. That's an odd deviation from the norm, like how there isn't a single scar left on her uncharacteristically-soft skin. She snorts a little at how stupid that seems, then laughs again when she looks down to her chest and spots a small, gold, five-pointed star dangling from a delicate chain that ends at her clavicle.

This is stupid. She knows how this is going to go. That person is going to catch up to her, she's going to feel guilty, and then she's going to get sentenced to death. Or they're going to force-feed her some immutable truth about herself that she refuses to acknowledge. Tiff rolls her eyes as much as this dream-strapped version of herself will allow her to. It stops; it won't let her move more than she already has, almost as if a way to seal her fate.

She reaches up to grab one of the stars again. Nimble fingers pluck it from the heavens, let it tumble down the interior of her knuckles, let it fall into cupped palms like a firefly looking for a spot of rest. She raises it to her eye like she's going down its barrel. This is no star glowing and turning gently in her hands. When it touches her, it barely glows. This is no ball of gas and plasma, hydrogen to helium in an infinite red. She holds dentin; she holds enamel; she holds wonderful, bloody pulp between her fingers, letting it drip down her wrists.

It blooms in her hand, a molar seed sprouting into toothwheat, spiraling up her arms like record player scars, hands steady around a growing plant nipping at her fingertips. Tiff takes it in, a time lapse of what she has witnessed of fae plants growing on her windowsill and in the soil outside the old shed. It's more wondrous this way, she thinks: the beauty of something growing right in front of her, of small pods opening to hungry mouths full of teeth like bicuspids and tonsil stones.

The person approaching behind her and to the left finally catches up to her, feet bare and splashing in the inch of water as the stars fall from the sky. Toothwheat sprouts all over, and there they are in the middle of it. Just the two of them, standing together in a labyrinth.

It's another scene where Tiff has no control of herself. No matter how much she screams in her head and tries to get some sort of hold on it, to spin the ball in a different direction entirely, ses going to be beholden to it. She just has to watch it play out.

At least she gets the benefit of a dream-signature sudden cut to a different vantage point, watching from the side through grain and static like she's on the couch and watching Camp Bloodshed again. Outside of her body, she watches.

She turns at a medium speed to look at the figure behind her. Wearing a shirt and shorts made of the same satiny material as the slip, Caroline Bradshaw holds out one hand to her. Tiff takes it, letting the toothwheat crawl up the both of them until Bloodsaw brushes it away.

They raise a hand to Tiff's face, palm gentle as it cups her cheek from below. The height difference isn't lost on her from this angle, or when she's behind her eyes again: pupil to pupil, unflinching when it should be uncomfortable, gentle when it should be a warzone and a horrorshow. Blue raspberry irises stare back at her, flickering between the clearness of life and the cloudy-white of death. They linger clear for a moment, until Bloodsaw's face eclipses her entire field of vision: lip piercing on living flesh, nose impossibly close.

It's not a kiss. It's almost a relief, the way the teeth bite into her lip, then her cheek. Their mouth tears away from her face: all blood, all flesh, all freckled skin torn from bones, cartilage dismembered and ripped from the hole of her nose and the lobes of her ears, metal stars falling to the rippling puddles beneath. All that's left is bones; all that's left is the blood on her wife's face.

There's a moment, in the toothwheat, where they look to the sky, bits of the girl with the gold star necklace stuck to their teeth. They wipe their mouth with the back of their hand; they smear what remains down the front of their shirt, into the silky fabric. There's a moment, in the spiraling green stalks of toothwheat, that they look to the sky and weep.