Tiberinus

[Thalia]

She did not disagree, though of course the mind itself was perfectly mutable, and the only way through which it might be perceived. People were often the most skilled with the lies they chose to tell only themselves, for those were often the ones indistinguishable from truth. But Nimeda had no interest in such a debate, especially with the stubborn pillar of faith that was Noctua. Nor did she much favour the solemnity that captured his expression as a result. Her hair spread against the water’s surface, droplets rolling ticklish against the planes of her face. Amusement framed her reaction to the way he looked at her like she was something to be studied. The more familiar her manner, the tighter he closed away, though she was not sure if it was her he shied from, or if it was instead only dogged determination not to relinquish grip on his pensive mood.

His gaze cast once more to the scenery, and Nimeda let her will press out like a rolling tide. They did not shift, but like the transient flickering of a city’s interior, the world around them began to gently flux. The suggestion of architecture imprinted amidst the forest around, translucent amongst the leaves. The ghostly stride of people too, women all. She did not know if it was something unearthed from her own imperfect memory, or if it were instead pulled from the dream’s own long tapestry itself. In the clouds of the waterfall’s spray it looked ethereal, and it faded without ever maintaining permanence. Such triflings were impossible to hold for long.

His words drew her attention with a curious tilt of the head, mostly for the poise with which he waited for a reaction. Idly, the drift of her arms buffeted little waves that spread in ripples out to brush against where he stood imobile as a statue. “Why do you think that?”

[Patricus I]

With a snort, Philip’s brows lifted high on confident supposition. “I presume it is because I am so incredibly handsome,” he said, blue eyes gleaming with delightful humor. Then he waited for the inevitable nod of agreement before the ripples buffeted against the wall that was his chest. The current split by the column of his physical interruption such that it pulled his gaze over his shoulder to bear witness to their death as they hit the bank.

What he saw beyond was a miracle of the mind. His own, he presumed, except to find that Nimeda beheld the same mirage. The woods flickered with shapes that circled like fog frozen to motionlessness. The resonance tugged, and he found himself walking on dry earth on the next heartbeat. His hands swept through the hazy outline of a woman with long hair pouring from a chalice. Then he peered into the foggy face of an old man on his knees before an altar. Flower petals dripped from tree limbs that were not there, but when his palm opened to catch one, it floated through him like a shiver.

It was amazing, he realized, watching the petal, a lotus blossom, sink to the ground and dissipate. When he turned back to Nimeda, it was with an expression of amazement. He himself flickered in the ghostly memory with all the different versions of himself he did not know. He was quite the foreigner in this place. “Life is but a dream from which we all will wake. When we wake, show me this place again.”

Face tilted; he studied the trees for the architecture now long gone. He sighed, thinking about the enormity of the past arisen for a brief moment around him. “You’ve shown me your home, but I did not ask to see it. Why is she so uncomfortable where you are not?”

[Thalia]

Nimeda did not pull herself out of the waters, only folded her arms upon one of the rocks to observe his exploration of the memories. A palm reached to cup her chin, and a small smile lingered for the unguarded expression with which he beheld the drifting spectres. Noctua himself flickered into a plethora of strange raiment, which she absorbed with abundant curiosity for the stolen glimpse that it was into secrets he did not mean to share.

His words and the way he said them made her glow with warmth for what she presumed he meant -- and certainly what she chose to understand in the sentiment. It touched somewhere deep and curled up there, content. Prickly and irascible as he often chose to be, sometimes he was so utterly pure in his convictions. But though she held onto that feeling tenderly, it was ringed with an inevitable sadness. For Nimeda did not wake, and she did not leave, and he reminded her that one day he would.

She pushed back from the rock and into the water’s open arms. It flowed cool over her shoulders and kissed the tip of her chin in welcome. Noctua had called this place a sanctuary before, and she wanted to explain more of what it meant and what he saw, but though the undeniable peace of it swelled her with the sense of remembering, it was a life long lost and beyond her ability to describe.

“You did not have to ask,” she said. “I wanted to show you. But it is not my home any longer, Noctua. I do not have one of those.” She drifted as he returned to the question of her Other, and watched him for a long moment. Eventually she pushed under the surface to swim for the bank where he stood, and this time pulled herself out to sit amongst the rocks. Soggy tendrils of hair made patterns down her arms, slick as seaweed. “Are you sure she was the uncomfortable one?” she asked. “We do not share memories, but it is the only thing we do not share. What happened when you found her?”

[Patricus I]

When Philip decreed a conversation, no matter how trivial, was concluded, all parties swiftly departed whether they liked it or not. He should leave, but closure was a narrow door he couldn’t bring himself to lock. Self-reflection was the pillar of his identity, but the inspection was always intrinsically motivated. To be pushed into the realm unwittingly cramped a vice on his soul that he wanted nothing more than to escape. Was he uncomfortable? Hardly. What happened? She could hardly look him in the eye. He made every effort to ease the looming mountain that was the Church to find her, waiting in a small sanctuary, pacing prosaic gardens. Was it him that spiked fear? Or was glimpsing the Lord overwhelming? Philip hung his head, shaking it quietly. He had no answers, but this time, the questions were not beautiful.

He should wake. Burdens awaited and the dream was hardly a respite from duty.

Instead, his hands slipped into the pockets of the cashmere jacket and he shuffled forward into the woods, away from the water. As he moved, he spoke, although he wasn’t sure if Nimeda could hear him. “You’re wrong about not having a home. Ubi bene, ibi patria,” the Latin resonated like distant thunder when uttered by Philip’s tongue. “The water, in all its lovely forms, is your home.”

---

*Ubi bene, ibi patria
It is a saying or Latin sentence, result from abbreviation of verse of tragedy “Teucer”, of Pacuvius, which Cicero quotes in Tusculans, 5,37,108.
“In the last place, the case of those who refer the objects which they pursue in life to the standard of pleasure presents no difficulty, since wherever these objects can be supplied, they can live happily. Thus to every case Teucer's words are applicable: ' Where it is well with me, there is my country.’"

[Thalia]

She had understood that it mattered to him by the fact he brought her Other up at all, but Nimeda had no answers to offer him -- or at least none that she had not already tried to impart. Their hearts beat the same, and if they did not share memory and thought, they did share flesh and soul and feeling. Nimeda had only ever peered at her Other’s sister through dreams in the Inbetween, and yet the love she bore for the woman was bone deep. If Thalia’s reaction had anything more than transience to it, she thought she would feel it, as Thalia must feel echoes of her time here. More than that, she simply did not know. He asked the wrong one of them.

Nim twisted on her rock to watch him walk away. When Noctua spoke of the illumination of dreams, she thought he probably meant grander things than the fragility of simple human emotion -- particularly those he appeared to consider himself exempt from. She suspected he no longer wished to talk of it, yet if he truly desired to flee the conversation, he only needed to wake himself from it. Water in all its forms might be lovely, but it was persistent also, and went where it willed whether it was invited or not.

A shift brought her alongside his ambling, and her arm slipped companionably through his. She did not think he enjoyed the affection of touch, which was why she usually refrained with him, but he did usually weather it at least. “When Jon first found her, she was afraid of him. He said she ran. I don’t think he ever found her again. But I have not seen him either, so I do not know.” She peered at his profile as they walked, but did not expect much in the way of reaction. Noctua peered beneath the lip of his shell, but she did not think he might be coaxed any further this night. If he was about to rouse himself to the waking world, though, she would rather they did not part with the weight of his melancholy.

“If all waters are my home, then you will know where to find me when you next visit the dream.” 

A smile curled. For perhaps that was why when he had escaped his nightmare, he had jumped in the river.

[Patricus I]

After a few moments alone, Nimeda manifested herself at his side. He didn’t look to her. Nay, he barely looked up. The magic of the forest was gone, or else was banished by one unable to look into the temptation of the past a second time. Her explanation for Thalia’s behavior was rational and irrefutable. Fear was the strongest power in the world. Tragically, fear eclipsed love when it should be the other way around.

Then a slight pressure pulled his arm from the shell of his side. He looked to the girl that slipped her limb through his with the raised brow of concern. His pace paused as the beating of his heart. He barely blinked. He barely breathed. Nimeda’s innocence broke him, and when he cupped his other hand over hers, it was with the gentlest of tugs. He turned, smooth and natural as a stream seeking lower ground, and enveloped her hand in both of his. However, there was no hesitation of a drawn-out moment. He released her hands at her waist as carefully as one may relinquish a baby bird to the wide, dangerous world on faith it would fly.

His voice was a whisper as he searched her eyes for forgiveness. “You are full of affection, and I am honored to be the recipient of your good heart. Which is why I must decline the tenderness, as wonderful as it is.”  

His arms hung loose at his side with the sadness of shame that veiled his expression.

[Thalia]

Hurt fractured her expression for the delicacy with which he very carefully set her aside. The venom of a bite would have been a less painful wound than the kindness he offered instead. Where Noctua pressed her hands, Nimeda folded them at her waist, hugging herself tightly. She wanted to cup the cheeks that turned so gravely away; to catch the shame pouring from his expression, and soothe it from him. But Nimeda never asked for more than could be given, and she didn’t ask it now.

He called her heart good, but it was the wrong word. Her heart was as wide as the lake she had shown the Vánagandr, and as unfathomably deep; buoyant with compassion that often grieved her as much as it brought her keen joy. But it was not good.

The rejection hurt, no matter how softly spoken, for it was her very nature he spurned. Though her wide eyes briefly turned back to the trees, where beyond lay the water and memories she had shared, it had been a long time since she had been so selfless as the soul who had once called it home. She did not speak for a time. If she thought he truly did not care, she could endure it with grace, but the bars he imposed were ones of self-denial. As he refused to swim. As he refused to show her his city. It was the reclamation of no one.

She thought of Jon’s absence and Calvin’s silence, then. Thought too of the way she continued to fail Mara, though she tried desperately to hold on to the impetus to save the only friend she had. Her eyes pressed closed. The emotion capsized like a storm in her chest.

She forgave; of course she did. And she accepted, as she always wished to be accepted in turn.

But oh it hurt more than it should. She contained herself quietly. “We do not get to choose who we come to love. But neither do we get to choose those who love us,” she told him soberly. If ever she had sounded ancient, it was then. “You never asked me why I think we dream, Noctua.” Her expression flickered, the duty of Need at war with the desire for self-preservation. She seemed on the verge of saying more, but the emotion squeezed too tight, and the epiphany faded. The sadness washed in, and she was gone.

[Patricus I]

Her wound did not penetrate the shell of his armored expression. Truth was painful, which was the motive for its avoidance. He spoke the truth, and she fled the rejection. It was not unexpected, not even for one such as she. 

However, even for Nimeda, there was an inevitable fate that transformed truth to acceptance, even if the metamorphosis transpired over an entire lifetime. For those that avoided the pain of truth, illumination brightened their deathbed. In the last moments of life, truth was desirable, because to endure pain was to be alive. He knew it first hand, haven given the last rites of heavenly embrace for more faithful than he could remember. Sometimes those solivagant souls laid in plush beds awash with medical comfort and familial presence. Sometimes, they were criminals destined for execution at the hands of mankind's worldly powers. He learned early that those who desired truth and those who rejected it were often not what one would predict. The brave and the cowardly all faced the same end: holding Philip's hand, listening to the song of his earnest prayers because absolution was an equal right's opportunity open for any who sought it.

But for the cowardly, who could not tolerate the pain of truth even at their mortal end, their first moments with eyes awakening in eternity would encounter what the flesh avoided, much to their eternal torment. A sad fate, to avoid the fleeting passage of pain of the flesh only to walk an eternity of painful hell as an abandoned soul. Philip once called the dream an illumination of truth. When he first encountered Nimeda, he thought that truth to be an escape from himself. Now, alone in the verdant forest, he realized The Truth. A painful truth. That he was alone asleep as much as awake; alone but for a companion the Lord and their divine bride, the church.

He hung his head, solemn in Nimeda’s swift absence. He took a breath and spoke to the waters in her absence, as if they may carry the message to their mistress. “You’re wrong about love,” was all that was spoken, and then he woke up.