It's snowing inside the high school today, and in every open window floor fans are buzzing, blowing snowflakes down the corridors in drifts. They're knee-high at the lowest dips, chest-high against the walls. Not a one of the students or teachers thronging through the school is having the slightest difficulty in walking through.
     Except for Loki, who's caught in the snowstorm, and trying to find the class listed on the printed schedule in his hand. Every time he slogs far enough to have the right doorway in sight, the bell rings, and out pour the other students in a wave of impassable human flood. Off to the next class. And of course the next class on his schedule is across campus, and the snow just keeps getting higher...
     There goes the bell, and he stares at the sheet in his hand. Then turns around in grim determination to get to the next class on time this period, somehow.

     Gwilym wanders through the snowstorm more like the students than like you, watching with the interest of someone who never attended a public school. Or any school, for that matter. For him, ignoring the snowflakes is a matter of minor effort at best, screening out the parts of the dream he chooses not to be affected by, as he is, after all, only a magical construct rather than there in the flesh.
     He catches up with you as you turn around, dressed in jeans and t-shirt and bomber jacket again. He strips off his jacket, offering it to you with that thieving, knowing grin and a wink of one emerald eye. "Have you considered therapy? Or at least putting on some nice soothing music before y' head off to bed? This can't be healthy, y' know."

     Loki stares blankly, snowflakes catching in his hair. Then with a brisk shake of his head, he's pulled himself far enough out of the dream logic to actually follow what's being said. "Dreams are a way for the unconscious mind to work through recent events and stress, right? So I've been stressed lately. It happens." He accepts the jacket from you even as he's saying that, pulling it on over his shoulders against the bite of the wind. "This isn't half as bad as the one where I'm back in college. High school wasn't any more traumatizing than strictly necessary."

     "You don't need to look so surprised." Gwilym grins with some satisfaction as you pull the jacket on. It wavers and sinks into you, vanishing- but the air does seem somehow warmer for having been there. "I told you that I would visit you again, oes? I do try to keep my word, you know." He looks around. "Let's get inside, shall we? Sod classes. They can't teach y' half so much as I will."

     "If you can find a room that's not full of snow, I'm all for it." Loki's fingers twitch once at his sleeves, where the jacket...isn't. "I don't even like snow. And there wasn't any where I grew up. Why the fuck it always shows up in my dreams I have never figured out. I do not buy the pre-verbal imprinting theories of dream creation."

     "Metaphor, probably," Gwilym answers easily, brushing snow aside as he begins heading for one of the buildings. "Though there's also some mystical significance to snow - it doesn't bother me, thanks to the mystical crap. It's all bullshite, 'course, but as long as it's shite that can bite back, it doesn't do to ignore it entirely. But if y' really want the room to not be full of snow, you'll have to do that yourself."
     He reaches one of the buildings, and puts his hand on the handle of the door, turning to grin at you with wicked intent. "It's very easy to get rid of the snow, though. Just focus on something you want. Don't let yourself be distracted, and imagine it; visualize it. Vocalize it or not, but y' need to at least hold it in your mind. Try it now." The look he gives you is a thorough up and down examination, somehow lewd and insolent at the same time.

     Loki glowers. It's not at you, exactly, but at the door and the snow, and everything that goes with not being in complete control of what goes on inside his own head. Including what he wants at any given moment...
     The door opens to the school library, smelling of dust and cheap carpeting. Tall bookshelves of undefined endless book spines, sunlight streaming through the high windows, and not another soul to be seen. Nor any snow.
     "Close enough," he says, and looks over to you, the glare disappearing. "So what's the mystical significance to snow?"

     "Depends." Gwilym grins as he steps into the room, waiting for you to follow. "But it is a part of my domain, snow. The Holly King holds court over autumn and winter; that half of the year is mine. The Oak King holds sway the other half of the year. Of course, in the modern age, seasons are more a matter of concept than of actuality, so neither of us need disappear for six months at a time."
     He goes and takes a seat on the edge of a table, letting his legs dangle as he leans back. "Psychologically, I'd say the significance of the snow is your lack of resolve. You're confused, and you don't want to make a decision because the choices available to you either suck or are too unknown in their long-term consequences. You do not want to shut the door, but you have not yet decided to open it, either."

     "Disappearing for six months wouldn't make sense anyway, unless your sphere of influence is limited to the northern hemisphere, which seems unlikely. Maybe moving to Australia or Chile," Loki says absently, as he follows you into the library. He takes a chair at the same table, slouching down in the cracked plastic seat. "So I'm standing in the doorway wasting energy while I make up my mind?"

     "Oes, that's about right," Gwilym agrees, watching you with idle interest, a faint smile playing about the corners of his mouth. "And you're making yourself nervous because of your fear of commitment. I know something about that. Commitment issues, I mean. They're all justified, in your head, but whether they're really justified or not..." He shrugs.

     "Commitment has a lousy track record," Loki says. "Not just with me." He shrugs, and hangs his arms over the back of his chair. "I know. One more thing for me to get over. I have the usual psychological flaws of the idle rich. It's like there's a misery equilibrium, and if circumstances don't provide enough on their own, the mind has to work overtime to make up the difference."

     "Misery isn't hard to find without going looking for it," Gwilym retorts. He leans back on his palms. "So. What're you going to do?"

     "Worrying about commitment at this point is very barn door, horse already booking it for the horizon, isn't it?" Loki says, with a twist to the corner of his mouth. "Whether I did or didn't agree to get into this mess--and don't think I've forgotten about the lack of full disclosure on that point--I'm in it, and I need to learn to cope. So. I start studying. Practicing. Whatever the appropriate verb is. Which should demonstrate soon enough whether my problem is my issues, or that I'm just no good at whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing."

     "Oes, well. You wouldn't have said yes if I'd told you the truth then." Gwilym grins lazily. "You'd have thought I was insane, and if I'd proven to you then and there it was true, you'd have run like hell and you wouldn't have stopped running. I took a gamble, Loki. So. You tell me. Is my gamble going to pay off?"

     Loki shrugs jerkily, looking down at his hands. "The best I can offer is to try. Talent and aptitude, I can't do much about, and I don't know enough now to tell if I have any for this kind of thing."

     "I believe that you do." He lounges as comfortably as if it were a sofa, lazily like a Persian sheik. All that is missing is the wine and the grapes, the bread and the dancing girls. And possibly a beautiful boy or two. "If I did not, I wouldn't have chosen you. I know you're missing some knowledge, and you're not sure that you want this lifestyle. You are worrying that it means giving up other things. And it is true it brings changes."
     He sits up, leaning towards you, grinning and winking. "Life is change," Gwilym tells you. "Things will always change. But this does not involve giving up your life. It involves adding to it."

     Loki summons up a tentative smile in return. "So long as it doesn't interfere with the band's schedule... I don't have much else to give up, do I? Maybe some sleep, and you can see what I usually get out of that." He waves a hand to indicate the empty library, best he could come up with for some relief from the snow inside his head.

     "This is something you would do with the people you meet along the way, Loki." Gwilym stands up from the desk, smiling at you and closing one eye in a wink. "In any case, you will find now that some people will look ... different. When you concentrate, you will begin to get more than you had before; more than just emotions, now..."

     Loki draws one knee up to his chest. A foot on the library chair: it's almost as bad as feet on his father's coffee table. "Concentrate, see more about people. Okay. That actually makes sense. I wonder if that should worry me."

     "It means you're learning." Gwilym grins and closes his eyes for a moment; and for the moment, he looks tired, and vulnerable, and young. He is ethereally beautiful; but there is, for that moment, no apparent blood in his body. "Wake now. I must go, and tend to my wounds."
     And with that, he is as gone as suddenly as he'd arrived.

     "Wait--"
     Of course it's not fast enough. He didn't expect it would be. Loki pulls his other knee up, arms wrapped around them, and watches the windows for signs of snow. Or sunlight. There's a glitter on the glass that could be either one, even as the library melts away to leave him back in his own bed, awake again.

Posted by rowan at April 14, 2009 07:42 PM