Sanford
Sunlight followed no law of physics in the meadow. It drifted through open air in the same ribbons as it did through distant tree branches, far up in the canopied sky. When Owen dreamed of trees, they were always oaks, casting gauzy shadows over his face in the soft light.

The trunks of the great trees and their shadows were nowhere to be seen along the meadow, though; the earth was soft and mossy, dug into by the bare feet of a smear of red the shade of faded bricks. The flowers he gathered weren't quite daisies, buttercups, or lions' teeth, but he seemed to call them such anyhow, minding no alien curl of a leaf or whisper of confusion from a brightly-coloured stamen. 

Owen just wove them together all the same, determined to cover the smiling marble figure at the centre of the garden (was it a garden, now, with high pillars, and terraced layers of strange flowers? Did it bloom around the centrepiece?) with the brightest blooms like jewels. They clutched petals in their own hands, misty fingers tangled in stems; he wove his next crown slower upon noticing, holding it closer.

Gold painted them both through the oaken ceiling.
Nicole
Owen's mind was always a beautiful sight to take in. It felt like being enveloped in his shield, from that one time so long ago— warm, friendly, unexpectedly raw. Here, Uriel felt more at peace than they did many places. Owen was comfortable and known— they did not fear his mind, or whatever things could possibly lurk in the dark corners. 

After all, they had noticed a peculiar fact; the shadows creeping at the edges of his consciousness all seemed to ebb away when they appeared. 

"Ah, Owen," Their dream figure spoke. Flowers bloomed from between their fingers, still pressed against the light green lawn. Some were possible, others not so; daisies and orchids bloomed alongside flowers composed of silk and gold leaf. "Try using some of these. I made them with you in mind." 

The scene seemed idyllic, but there was a feeling Owen couldn't shake from him. Something else foreign, watching, like the same time Uriel first entered his brain. The cold and misplaced edges of something *Else* Only seemed to grow more tangible as Owen continued to think about it. 

Was there something out there?
Sanford
*"Oooohwow,"* The warm red face cooed, golden orange brushstrokes blooming from his chest. The sounds he made curled in the air in similar shades, hazy images of strings vibrating, the chords of the dream.

*"Thankyou..."*

Those painted red fingers slipped delicately under the cool heads of the flowers pushing cleanly through the green, admiring them as though the time he took to do so was thick and sweet as cream. *"You... Youalways make themso..."*

His sentiment was finished by the warm breeze through the pillars, the leaves beyond the sky; with it came a gold softer yet, blurring the edges of their forms for a moment. Those hands, red as hearts, blended so softly with the marble of their collarbones as he wreathed them in what the back of his mind knew to be their own splendour.

The edges of him, that sun-warmed red, blurred with something else for a moment, giving him pause—the light through the oak leaves cast a shadow on a form that wasn't there, that didn't soften the same as the grass. Owen wasn't sure if it frightened him, but instinct had him close his hand around his love's, pressing more wispy petals safe into their palms.
Nicole
The sunflowers turned to face Sophie Melançon as she walked. The very fabric of the human mind subconsciously recognized the shrewd woman with every step she took. The sound of feet against grass echoed through Owen's skull— it was clearer than even the twinkle of grey inside Uriel's eyes. 

A shadow loomed over Owen's sitting figured. It expressed little, just like Uriel— but while Uriel's lack of expression stemmed from amicability, this coldness was *Pointed*, and stern. 

"You are Owen." Thick, feminine French rusted with decades of cigarette usage rung out from around Owen. "My little angel's description was accurate, if over-zealous and flowery."
Sanford
The sharp spot of the garden turned clearer and clearer, the carpet of oil-pastel moss glistening with drops of crisp, cold dew around her feet. The reality of *Her*, exactly who he thought she was, with no barriers of flickering human faces or heavy-handed niceties, ran down his spine like the sight of a monument much more colossal than the woman standing over him must have been. 

For all the sweet words the little red poet could weave for her child *(his stomach twisted with vines)*, none bubbled up that could make him seem half as strong and charismatic as Uriel made him feel.

Thankfully, though, he still held their hands in his own. He took them with him when he stumbled to rise, the rest of the scene struggling to solidify beneath his feet as he moved up, and... Back a little bit. Anxious little blooms wound around his ankles, sparking with gold.

"*I, ohhh-* I'd hate to disappoint," His dream-mouth hummed, those strings under everything rumbling back to meet Sophie. The childlike urge to know everything they had ever said about him and how much of it she believed needed to be kicked down a well in order for that meeting to go smoothly, but it stubbornly latched itself to the digits clutching his lover's.

"*Www*Welcome," He managed to release. Was she welcome? It was polite, wasn't it? Despite it being his unconscious brain she had slunk into? Could she hear all of his thoughts? *If he wet himself in a dream, would it carry over to the waking world?*
Nicole
Sophie says nothing at the welcome, simply giving a hum of acknowledgment. Uriel, meanwhile, looks ecstatic— their corners of their face soften at the sight of their mother, and their body (since when did they move?) envelopes the tired women in a strong embrace. 

"Mother," Uriel whispers into her shoulder, clutching the woman tightly. "I— I didn't know you'd be visiting today. Ah, this is... Owen, as you know."

There's the smallest undercurrent of nervousness, as expected, but the full confidence and trust Uriel has in the two people they love the most helps to steel their mind. Their dream-like visage does not waver in meekness— instead, the edges of their form solidify. 

Sophie, on the other hand, does not let her emotions influence her appearance. There are no hints as to what is going on inside of her mind; her practiced weaving has made separating her own mind from her ~~victims~~ guests into an art form.

"This is your mind." The stern woman says, her steeled eyes taking sweeping glances around the putty of the dream. "It's... Pleasant enough. Make us a place to sit, Uriel." 

Her dutiful child does so, and a set of table and chairs materializes from invisible seams. 

"You did not forget your manners. It is good, for them to be with someone raised well. I have heard many good things about your mothers."
Sanford
Owen blinked in confusion, the furniture's appearance shifting the nature of the dream before his mind would otherwise have. Uriel's giddy hand drew little memories out of the woven grain of his mind—briefly, before the dream righted itself, the footsteps of a small child pattered around the old wooden chairs as he remembered them, the figures of said mothers flickering through the atmosphere on long-concluded missions to set the table for guests.

The shade of a lean, shorter, muscular blonde set her favourite vase down in the centre, a much taller shadow with short brushstrokes of his own red hair dropping freshly clipped flowers into it. They were present and melted out of the scene in the blink of a silvery eye, as though they had just gone to the hallway to speak about something.

Owen himself, who had assigned himself the seat he always took, found himself reaching for the same patch of peeling paint on the underside of the table that he hadn't picked at in close to two years. Despite the sharpening of the two weavers' faces, his head felt thick, as though there were fingers pushing his brain into the sides of his skull, eons away in his sleeping body.

The softly-shaped form of the boy took a little too long to answer Sophie's addressing him, despite how cleanly her words bore into his consciousness.

"*Thheyyy*-they, um, it was a *Ff*Feat, yeah," Those strings behind his face plucked, rippling like nervous laughter. Trying to put said manners back together when he had no body to compose or regulate was proving to be difficult. "Uriel's told me so *Much too*But um I wasn't expecting the... Pleasure so—*Inmybrain.*"

The hazy forms of his eyebrows knit in focus, trying to command himself in a realm that, though made from himself, was not his domain. Lucidity was a veil that wrapped like shifting silk around his attempts to push his way into it, but refused still to let him through.
Nicole
"...." 

Sophie stands still, and the dream tenses as she does. The living, breathing walls of the dream come to a halt, the metaphorical diaphragm freezing at its highest point. 

"Hm." The woman says, the dream slowly rousing back to life. "You make a good point. I am not intruding here, am I?" She doesn't even wait for herself to finish before cutting herself off once again. "What am I talking about. Of course I am intruding. Do you care, is what I should ask?"
Sanford
Owen considered it, eyebrows knitting together in the blur of a thinking expression. It was as though all of her words came through two mouths—the one that formed sounds he could make sense of, and the one that bore sense and meaning straight under his skull, Sophie Melançon's grip on his dream like two icy fingers hooked behind his eye sockets. Accordingly, it almost felt like his eyes were in fact being pushed aside, so that she might get a better look at what ran behind them.

*So, did he mind?*

"A*Aah*Um, a little?"

His not-quite-voice was palpably nervous; the part of his mind that was under the dream-weaver's fingertip could tell her no lies, but the (very bewildered) line of thought that was, for better or worse his own, was *Very* Anxious to be welcoming to his partner's mother. In a moment of deliberation, the hesitant admission seemed the better option over screaming in terror and tearing the dream down with his bare hands. Shaken though he was, the strings of dream-stuff were strung stubbornly taut under the pressing fingertips.

Quickly, he looked to Uriel for help—the flowers in the jar turned their heads toward their familiar face, the grass around their feet nervously twitching around their ankles.
Nicole
"Oh." Sophie says, in much the same way Uriel tended to do upon receiving an answer they hadn't accounted for. 

Uriel steps in front of Owen, facing their mother— while his feet were rooted into the ground, theirs danced upon the meadow like the gentlest breeze. It almost seemed as if they floated above the grass instead of touching it.

"...Oh, indeed." They say, looking at their mother. They stare at each other, the only sign of silent communication between the two being how the dream warps around their heads. Sophie clears her throat, and the distortion stops. 

"Well, if you had just *Called* Me—" She says, grumbling in the manner French housewives often do.
"But you do not have your phone on you during work. It is easiest to see you here."
"And? What if I wanted to see my poor child's face every once in a while? I still haven't met that roommate of yours— Margaret, you said— and I cannot exactly do that here. Is she treating you well? Tell me you do not clean up after her."
"It is Margo, and..." Uriel shifts. "The way I divvy up chores is... A system that works for the both of us. But I am on a..." They look towards Owen, "*Date*, and..."

Sophie mutters something in French at Uriel's lukewarm defense of their chore load. Owen can't understand the words, but the sentiment is obvious enough— *Jesus Christ*, she says. She clears her throat as Uriel points their head towards Owen. And suddenly looks very, *Very* Sheepish. 

"I will..." Her voice, despite the embarrasement running thick in her voice, still remains cold and harsh. There's nothing malicious behind her tone, though, and that's the closest there is for warmth in her voice. "Leave you two to it, then. It is nice to meet you... Owen."

Their air changes as she leans over towards Owen. Uriel senses the shift immediately, and their eyes widen in surprise. "Mom—" They exclaim, rushing over towards her before disappearing in a watercolor blur. 

It's just Owen and Sophie, now in a white room.
Sanford
Owen's dream-eyes glowed softly like embers, the captured sparks in his irises when he was awake making themselves familiar features on his otherwise line-less sleeping face. The orange glow pinned itself to Uriel's shoulder as they glided through the stuff of his mind, which curled protectively around his ankles. Whatever it was they were saying made him sweat a little, he remembered, but what it was exactly eluded him.

*Sophie was leaving already?* She wasn't going anywhere, though. *Why say goodbye, then?*

Those fingers dug into the all-too vulnerable sockets into his skull twisted, and with a tremor like a string vibrating on a sour note he realized too late. Reddish-orange hands scratched at where his ears were supposed to be; a sound, it was to him, a wrong chord reverberating through his bones, that he wanted to scratch from his ear canals and hollow throat and chest with his bitten nails.

Alas, those were in a different body—far, far away, now.

He stood in a void with sharp corners and sharp eyes and sharp light; the thrum of a heartbeat and a mind that had run through the scene before hummed now from beneath his un-skin, still stubbornly tinted like a lantern rendered in oil paint. Hanging from his thumb still was one last flower crown, wrought with Uriel's blooms.

"*Aeugh*," He tried, to see how his voice worked in the new air.

Doe eyes, squinted a little against the weaver's strains, stared anywhere but into grey.

"Did-I-offend... You-meet-you-it's niceto."

Grammar rules from two languages smeared together in a filter riddled with knots, but Owen could think in a mostly-straight line now. *Like riding a bike.*

He cleared his throat and blinked before whipping his head suddenly to his side.

"*Uriel?*"
Nicole
"Not here," Sophie says in response. It's *Her* Voice speaking— it's not like Uriel's dreams, where the environment seems to speak their words and the boundary between their mind and the dream's blurs. 

Sophie is clinical, precise; She is lucid, and with her dream brings a clarity to both Owen's form and his mind. His arms have pores on them, now— pores and freckles and acne scars dot his previously nebulous skin, and the texture is a jarring thing to suddenly remember. 

"I wanted... To *Ta*— to, ahem, chat with you." The crows feet crowing her eyes crunch as Sophie winces at her attempts to communicate.

 "Of course I want to chat with you," She mutters. "You are *Entangled* With my child. You are all they ever dream about anymore, and—", Sophie sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose with sturdy, calloused hands. "And they are *Vulnerable.* They do not know it, but Uriel is not used to kinship, and especially with their..." 

She stalls for a bit, scrunching her face to think of a suitable word. *Doormat nature,* She wants to say. 

"Demeanor," She settles for instead. 

"They are not as mature as you and others are with love. Uriel has—" Sophie's voice cracks with emotion, yet the dream stays impeccably stiff. "They have been through too much already, and I... Failed to shield them from the worst of it. But this... *Young love.* That is something I have been through myself. That is something I can protect them from." 

Her hair is the same shade of white as Uriel's, and yet there's a dusting of grey by her scalp. Her tired eyes have a different intensity compared to that of their child's— one is the spacey, detached gaze of a person stuck in a waking dream, while the elder's eyes contain the exhausted stare of anxieties worn to a dull throb. 

"I want to know you will not prey on their naïveté." Sophie's voice is firm, and it seems as if she's slipped into the carefully cultivated interrogation tone, until... 

"Please. Give me that," And it almost sounds desperate.
Sanford
Sophie hooked an ice-cold finger through an impossible space behind the bridge of his nose that connected his eyes, invisibly jerking him forward with such a shock and a sudden sharpening of the world that for a moment he understood in reverse how Uriel saw no real difference between waking and dreaming—at once he was sweaty flesh and loudly rushing blood and feet with nothing real beneath them, no substance but silently howling space until he might hit the wet cushion inside his skull. How they must have gone mad, and were madder still with exhaustion each time they took a step.

The woman tracing every invisible seam in his face, itching to peel it away, could do so in one practiced move; Owen thought of prehistoric surgeons boring holes in skulls clean enough to drill six more if they couldn't find the ache; he remembered that the word *Quick* Once meant *Alive*, and understood exactly then how it still did.

The way she bore into him, the boy's reflexes threatened to bend him like such a weak sapling against a windstorm: 
He should cry, his eye sockets screamed—like a child whose body couldn't contain the fear and shame that threatened to splinter his trunk, bits of him coming off in soft earthen shards, broken along his grain. He should apologize, for making her worry like this, for pressing his rough, uncareful, *Unthinking* Hands so deeply and so fast into where they didn't belong; he should bare his teeth like a cornered dog, tail pried from between his legs, his breath so suffocatingly hot and his fangs so unreasonable that the dream weakened and melted off his mind like meat from bone.

The dream was silent as he recalled quietly how to tie them all together again, to discern what he was from what his fear made of him and what it made of her, lifting his eye from hers like a palm from a hot stove. The burning lessened, enough for him to think; he mustn't eat himself like this, not when all she asked for was peace.

*Quickly, now.*

"Never."

_ _
It came out of Owen like the first inhale after holding his breath beneath the flood, desperate, imminently necessary to his continuing to exist. A whisper of a chord, smaller a sound than he'd have liked, but no less sure a truth.

"I—I wouldn't, ever," He tried, fearing how false he must sound, even within his own mind. How the tremble under his words must incriminate him, revealing the true face of some grimy, villainous user that dwelled behind his whole personhood, the one Sophie came looking for. Owen banished that face as soon as it was born, dreading to misuse the lucidity she had thrust into his hands. Some newly bold part of him wanted to laugh in the face of her accusation, but he was much more practiced in reining it back.

Behind his eyes replayed for the thousandth time a chasing: his footsteps pounded the earth after forgotten figures with moss and splinters beneath their fingernails, sap on their lips. His sides and chest and face bare, soft bark stripped off and carried away, exposed layers raw and green and sticky like a person's, a *Person's*.

"They—*Cachu*, I'm not worthy. But I—I'm trying to be. Honest." The boy traced the petals of the woven crown still clutched in his hands, tenderly despite his nerves. He willed the imaginary heat from his fingers, loathing for Uriel's handiwork to wilt.
Nicole
The flowers growing alongside the path Sophie trotted along were warm under her fingers; they burned with the same heat *She* Once burned with towards Alexander, long ago. *Alexander*, a man who possessed none of the qualities present in the boy she was tethered to. Owen had neither his eloquence nor his cold feet. Owen, unlike Alexander, surely knew by now who he was falling for, a person with far less baggage than the born-and-bred villain currently creeping inside his mind. A *Good* Person, one Sophie still hadn't a clue how she managed to raise to be so kind in all the ways that were still second nature to her. 

 *Oh, what a fool I was for harboring that old love.* Her longing voice echoed as the familiar petals curl away from her palm. *I wish I still had that foolish nature,* She thought, and no sooner did that long-buried wish of hers bubble to the surface of her mind than the blossom sleeping on her hand wilt. 

"I believe you." 

Despite her own reminiscing, Sophie smiled. It made her seem younger. 

"I am happy for you both."
Sanford
"Y-you are?"

The dreamweaver's easy smile unnerved Owen almost more than her hostility; the boy wasn't sure, in his sleeping heart, whether he had worked harder to deserve her approval or her ire; one certainly felt stronger than the other regardless. The gesture made him bolder, though, his fingertips touching the curled stamens of the hazy flowers Sophie left in her wake as he followed her through the landscape that she unmade as quickly as she wove. Even dreaming, the palms of his hands were warm, as though embers fell from the hearth in his chest and down his arms to gather around his knuckles when he breathed. 

Old, old sunlight leached out of the dry petals before they dissolved back into the strange sleeping stuff of his mind. He regarded them carefully, but without understanding. It wasn't his place.

He pressed one of Uriel's silken flowers in the little garland he still held to his nose, and breathed—it didn't *Smell,* Not like a real flower would, but the pollen settled on his nose and brought forth the feeling of raindrops on his faraway skin, cool fingertips on his cheeks. The world seemed to sigh as he did, the earth filling with the impossibly light sweetness his love had planted there, exhaling a lush carpet of soft green moss beneath the dreamer's feet. Their handiwork was beautiful, as always. It gave him more strength than he knew what to do with, sometimes.

"I figured that I'd never be able to hold something like this in me." Owen's voice was soft. Perhaps he'd give her something of himself. "I dreamed, night after night, of my chest filling with grave dirt, and here they've gone and planted things like this in it, all over where I think I ought to still be..."

His sentence trailed off, blown from the tip of his tongue like dandelion fluff in the wind. He pressed his lips to a petal, as though willing it to seal them.

"I'm a fool, m-miss, but one who's got the world in his hands, with them trusting me to keep theirs warm."

PLEASE SIR, IT'S BEEN SO LONG <//3
Nicole
I have nothing else to do while I'm bedridden :D
Sanford
YIPPEEE but also W H AT
Nicole
Sophie chuckles at the young boy (at least in demeanor— when she was this boy's age, she was far more jaded and pointed than he was. It was sweet, Sophie realized, to see someone act their age for once, and not eons of years older) and toys with his love-sick soliloquies. They float off of his tongue and dance in the air, carried by the same wind blowing imaginary pollen into her face. A *Fool* Dances with a *Them,* And a *Warm* Grabs the hand of a *Grave.* 

"How polite of you to wait for my word on things." Owen's pleading demeanor made her a tad squeamish, if not bemused. Sophie almost imagines that if she said *Sit* Or *Give paw,* The poor sap would do so. *They could do worse, that is for sure.* 

She waves her hand aside, and the fabric backdrop of the dream ruffles with the gesture. Owen was a kind boy, and it almost made Sophie feel guilty about how her protective hands longed to crack open his skull and pick apart the pieces, to examine every wrinkle of his brain for negative tendencies or dangerous family members. 

*Ah,* Sophie thought, sighing. *But my little angel has grown up. If this is a mistake, it is one they will have to make on their own, just as I did.* 

Somehow, though, she doubted the boy in front of her could ever be so cruel to Uriel as men have been to her. *Perhaps Uriel will break that cycle, then,* She mused, *Alongside all the others they've sworn to end.* 

Sophie might have been the better dream weaver, but she was the only one aware of the truth— that Uriel's conviction was far stronger than her own. 

*Let's hope their taste in men is better, too.* She giggled. It was wildly uncomfortable for a grown, morally ambiguous woman to giggle at her own thoughts, *Especially* If you couldn't hear them. 

"Well, you have my blessing." A pause. "But if you ever visit France, you *Will* Be taking the guest room." The tonal shift from giggling to serious was dangerous, and it was impossible to tell how strongly she meant her words.

...Still, there was amusement in her eyes, just one buried by the bite of her French accent.
Sanford
Owen lagged behind Sophie through the unnerving shifts in tone and temper, his dreamy form nonconforming to her chosen theme of thinly-veiled woven threats. Normally, Owen thought he communicated better in some ways, dreaming with Uriel; he liked the exchange of pure feeling, the difference between viscera as described in poetry versus notes from the scene of a crime. But where Sophie wrote, she did so with an exact purpose, her tool a scalpel dipped in ink, always poised to cut away the edges and reveal his true shape in language no more exquisite than a death warrant needed to be.

The forefront of his mind knew that she was giggling at him, and the back of it wanted to climb out of his skull. *That's not what I meant at* ***All***, that impudent part of him wanted to scream. Perhaps it wrote itself on the petal of a flower, promptly burning so fast that it was hardly even flame before ashes.

His face blurred, as though his very being were vibrating like a chord, the strange sky the hollow body of an instrument. Owen bit his tongue, humming. It wasn't as effective here as it would have been in his body, but grounding was grounding. He stared at her, wavering as little as possible—he would not feel ashamed, not like he used to. 

"O... Kay," He managed. "That or... Under a Lavender bush, I figure." If she thought he was just so amusing, the least he could do was crack a joke (instead of screaming. He could always just start screaming instead. He could.) (*No. No screaming. Scream about this later, B flat minor.*).

"I'm not a... Seer, like the others." Owen yearned for his flames again, to curl protectively over his stomach, but he pressed on without. "So it's just... Up to me. I *Know* That."
_ _

A half nonsensical statement aboveground, but one Sophie would understand just fine here, where it mattered. Owen was no fool—the first unable to see behind any of the veils, time or dreams—and though he didn't carry his curse the same way the others did, he knew it well. How long he intended to live with it in mind, and more importantly, how happily. Surely, that was something in him the dream-weaver could find to respect.
Nicole
I won't! I'll reply tmrw >:]