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I know you. Like I know the walls of my home, I know you.
—Benediction, CosmicJourney
“Lucienne?” Dream paces through the bookshelves, searching for their steward.
“I’m here, sir.” There is an odd choke in Lucienne’s voice that immediately catches Dream’s attention, and concern heats beneath his skin.
He pinpoints the sound and traces it to find Lucienne curled on the floor, tucked into the angle formed between the end of a bookshelf and the place where it meets the wall. Her knees are clutched towards her chest. He does not remember when last she seemed so small. By the moonlight filtering through the high windows, he can see the shine of tears on her cheeks.
He drops into a crouch at her side in an instant, gaze darting over her in search of injuries. “Lucienne, what has happened?”
Lucienne looks down at her hands, where they grip each other around her shins. Dream notices a book wedged between her chest and her knees. “It’s of no importance.”
“I doubt that.” Satisfied that she has sustained no physical harm, Dream uses his sleeve to gently wipe the tear tracks from her face. Lucienne tilts her head, leaning into the touch. It is a slightly birdlike gesture, and for a moment, she is frangible and feathered in his mind’s eye. “Will you make room for me?”
“There isn’t any room to be made,” says Lucienne, but she moves aside as best as she is able. Dream folds himself up beside her. She presses her side to his, and he is glad he can offer her something solid to lean against.
They sit in silence for some time. At this proximity, Dream can feel the rapid expansion of Lucienne’s ribs as her breath stutters in her chest. Then he asks quietly, “What is in that book?”
At first, he thinks she will not reply. He would not have insisted. He would have been content to sit with her wordlessly, until she felt able to stand again. He would have risen and offered her his hand and, if she accepted it, helped guide her to her feet.
But eventually Lucienne does speak. She props the book—a dream journal, slim and leather-bound—open on her knees and runs her fingers down a page. “This dreamer has dreamt of loneliness almost without fail for five years. It…struck a chord with me, that’s all. She’s only a child,” adds Lucienne, a twist of anguish in her voice.
The reverberating echo of pain—his being stretching out to find this child, mired in her solitude, her dreamscapes bleak and pleading, and the reflection of that pain in Lucienne—envelops Dream. It washes over him. He exhales. He lets it ripple away, and he returns his attention to the subject at hand. “It is understandable,” he says, voice steady, “that it would affect you so.”
“I’m far from a child, my lord,” says Lucienne tartly.
“That may be so, but that is no reason to disregard the ways in which you hurt.”
Lucienne closes the journal, her hands unspeakably gentle on its covers. “It was not as terrible as this,” she persists, “and not as—”
“Lucienne.”
“My lord,” replies Lucienne, mimicking his tone.
Neither of them have any intention of capitulating, and they both know it. Lucienne shoots Dream a mulish look, then lets her head fall with a thump against the bookshelf behind her.
As Lucienne stares with unseeing eyes at the opposing bookshelf, Dream locks his own gaze on her. He can read Lucienne more easily than words on a page. More effortlessly than the patterns of stars in the sky. She is no longer crying, but the lingering brittleness in her expression is nearly worse to witness.
Lucienne’s tongue slips out to dampen her lips, and when she speaks next, she does not look at Dream. “Matthew told me that the only reason you allowed him to accompany you to Hell was because you wanted to be able to send word to me if something went wrong. Because you would not leave me without explanation again.”
Dream stiffens at Matthew’s loose tongue. But he does not deny it, nor try to trivialise it to Lucienne. Perhaps he could have some millions of years ago, but not anymore. “That is true.”
She turns her head, then. She studies him with the deep brown eyes that have seen so much of what his own have, that have seen him for so long, and rarely flinched at any of it. “He also said, ‘I know I’ve only been here for about two seconds, but I can already tell the boss cares about you a lot.’”
Dream swallows. The words catch in his throat, sentiment thick and choking as honey, but he will not let Lucienne be in doubt. He cannot.
“That is also true. Though I have sometimes been…remiss in demonstrating it, I would not have you believe otherwise.” With utmost care, Dream reaches to cradle the back of Lucienne’s head, and leans in to press his forehead to hers. She does not shut her eyes in the manner many others would in that position. She holds his gaze, and he loves her for it. “I would have you unshakably certain of it. As steadfast as you were in your certainty of my eventual return during those years I so bitterly regret you had to endure.”
“Would you?” There are tears bright in Lucienne’s eyes again, threatening to fall with each blink.
“Yes.” Dream settles his hands on her shoulders; feels the warmth of her, the strength that she struggles to set down. “Yes, Lucienne.”
Lucienne makes a sound, a soft, fractured sigh. Dream hums low in his throat in response. Lucienne dips forward, as if seeking the vibration, a call beckoning her to shelter. Dream opens his arms.
Dream of the Endless has done and been many things in his long life, a handful of which he even allows himself to be pleased about. Without question, one of those few is this: having the privilege of being a safe place for Lucienne to land.