about | background | characters | fiction | illustration | preview

Dreams

by Blackrose

~*~

He dreams of flying.

Running, actually, but it is the closest he knows to flying - the blur of paws over ground, the wind in eye and ear and fur, the fierce heat of muscle and bone in one continuous motion that never ceases, never rests... he dreams of a wide open world where his feet are never halted, where he can run for the sheer joy of running. Where he can fly, his nose filled with fresh clean air and the scents of earth, of grass, of tree and shade and sun. Green and bright and sharp, filling his blood, and the beat of his paws on the ground is the drumbeat of his heart, neverending.

He dreams of freedom.

He wakes to stuffy darkness, to the still, stagnant air of an enclosed space. To man made walls and a man made bed... Peter's bed. And Peter's heat, Peter's stench, Peter's boundries and Peter's world.

He wakes from dreams of flying to find himself hobbled, trapped in a false den, and he seethes. Through all the long hours of the night he feels it, shivering under his skin, tight and coiled and sullen. The moon, beyond man made glass, mocks him. The stars in the sky laugh, and the night air with its scent of freedom is barred from his cage.

He would pace, the desperate twist and turn before the cage walls, if he could.

But sleep is a jealous mistress and the longer he lays awake, hating, the more insistent she is. He hasn't the heart to deny her - the dreams may only be the illusion of an unlocked door but sometimes, when he is tired, the illusion is a comfort. Other times it is a torment and he wrestles with each, but in the end sleep will have her way.

And sometimes, in that grey nothing between sleep and waking... sometimes he will wonder why Peter's scent slips so easily into that green, bright smell of grass and sky. But then the dreams will catch him and he will forget to wonder, too caught up in the chase for the sake of running, in the skim of paw over earth and the freedom and the wind.

He never remembers to wonder, in dreams, why the wind smells like Peter.