Difference between revisions of "Dream A Little Dream Of Me"

Latest revision as of 23:28, 1 December 2012

Jafar has posed:

"Hey, Jafah. Do ya think this is a good look for me?" Iago's wings are spread wide enough to simulate the span of Jasmine's shoulders, and he stands on the very edge of Jasmine's vanity, one of her gossamer blue tops dangling from his wings. He's not tall enough to actually occupy it, but he tries to hold it in roughly the right shape, and to improve the effect he inflates his chest at the expense of his waist to simulate voluptuousness. He's painted some rouge on his bony yellow beak as well, in two circular shapes on either side.

Jafar turns to him, already snapping, "This is no time for your fo--" but is interrupted by the ridiculous sight, which threatens laughter. Iago sees his chance, and bats long, full lashes (where do they come from?), and Jafar doubles over with a brief bray of mirth. "Very amusing," he says dryly. "Now set that down."

"Why, you afraid we're gonna get more chump suitors coming around here if I don't?"

Jafar pauses for a moment, near Jasmine's bed. "Now that is a pity," he says. "If the rest of our world had not fallen away, I expect we'd keep receiving them for a few weeks at least, before word travelled."

"Hah! Yeah, too bad, those bozos had a /lot/ comin'." It was telling that even Jasmine had resented them; at least they kissed up to her. They didn't even see a Vizier as worth putting on airs for. Iago wipes his beak off with Jasmine's blue silk, and flaps into the air with a slight grunt of effort; he might want to lay off the sweets. "So why are we here this time? Some remodelling, maybe build an indoor pool? Oh, oh, how about a statue of me? I mean, we should build one of you too, of course, but maybe you wanna practice first so yours is..."

"We won't be getting /rid/ of the princess's chambers. She will be returning to us presently," Jafar interrupts, with a curling smile. Resting a hand on her pillow as if it were the head of a horse, he looks down at it and his own spread fingers, eyes narrowed. "Sixteen years of dreams in this chamber. I should be a very poor wizard if I could not make use of them."

Ten minutes later, all is in readiness. Iago is leaning against the bed, sweating and panting, having carried an ornate (and heavy) brass huqqah to the princess's chamber. It now sits on the bed, along with a crosslegged Jafar, who in his placid concentration looks more fakir than sultan. As might be expected, the huqqah is stylized after a serpent, with its widely spread mouth emitting a thin tube of a tongue. Lazy tendrils of smoke rise from gill-like holes on the side of its neck, and Jafar holds the thin rod at the end of the tube between two fingers. With a gesture, he unhooks the translucent, thin veils of silk around the bed, closing them all at once. Placing the mouthpiece between his thin lips, he inhales, a rich, gutteral bubbling rising from the serpent's throat. When he exhales, the smoke is an ethereal purple, like a summer twilight, and its presence reveals tiny, star-like pinpricks of light.

Iago shivers, feeling a sudden sense of the uncanny. He knows what those are, whether from context or instinct, he cannot say. Little fragments of dream, crystalized in the air, made visible by the strange purple spice Jafar had long ago taken from a clay jar in the lowest level of a forgotten pharaoh's tomb. The ancient dust does not just affect the air, however. Jafar's expression has gotten distant, his eyes milky. Iago no longer wants to be here.

"Um, Jafar," he ventures. "You gonna need..."

Jafar turns his head eerily, and stares at Iago with a blank expression, face sallow, pupils dialated. Iago feels as if he has called out to a corpse and awoken it. Jafar doesn't answer; it's as if he no longer understands the language, or perhaps even the physical world. That is answer enough in itself, and Iago takes wing, fleeing the chamber without a look back.

The stars begin to pulse in their unnatural twilight as Jafar's vision grows more sensitive. The silken canopy above is their firmament, the smoke their milky glow. The gurgle of the huqqah no longer belongs to Jafar; it is the universe, inhaling and exhaling. The numerous pillows around him are the petals of a white flower, their fragrance suffusive, and he is right in the center of them.

Jasmine. All around him, Jasmine.

It would not be accurate to say he found her, or that a bridge was built between them spanning the vast distance. The soul knows no distance. This ritual would be no easier if she were in the next room, and no harder if she were at the ends of the earth.

The body can run. The mind can hide. The soul simply is.

Jasmine has posed:

Since the events at Balamb Garden, Jasmine has slept very rarely, and only very lightly when she does so. This is understandable: a fugitive on the run, alone, with her hunters seeming to rise from the very ground beneath her feet whenever she stops long enough to allow them to do so... cannot stop for long.

She has developed the mental art of 'sleeping with one eye open', not dropping her vigilance entirely even when unconscious, with ferocious speed. But then, she always was a fast learner.

And it both helps and harms, that the ever-approaching Heartless weigh down upon her spirit; sometimes, despite the constant black exhaustion she's been forced to accept as the price of her freedom, she CANNOT sleep, so tormented is she by the chilling breath of Darkness on the back of her soul's neck, the sense of impending danger too great to ignore. When she manages to overcome that, her catnaps are torturous, and woefully brief.

Now, for the first time in weeks, pushed beyond all endurance by the hunt and a taxing and hopelessly naive detour into Baron, she has arranged for a guardian, someone eager to fend off the Heartless long enough for her to rest, not for a minute, not for an hour, but for a night and a day. Her guilt in allowing someone to risk themselves in this manner, even for gold -- especially for gold, really -- is added to her subconscious ledger. But she needed this so desperately, and he seemed both eager to help and truly able to do so; his selfless and ferocious display on the battlefield earlier convinced her, reluctantly, to allow him to try.

She gradually relaxes, going totally limp, and in doing so reveals exactly how much tension had been in her body before, built up over terribly many trials and fears. She sleeps like a child, curled up into a tiny ball of fabric and hair. She's terribly vulnerable; no wonder she hired some muscle.

Surrounded by wave after wave of Heartless, held off by a man and her trust in that man, Jasmine lets herself fall into the dark embrace of true, sweet, deep oblivion, at last...

For a long time, she simply walks in Darkness, then runs from it, as it begins to seep into her spirit, cloying, toxic, corruption incarnate. The void is absolute. There is no light to guide her flight except for her own, and like a beacon it draws all the horrors dwelling within to her, ever faster, unerringly honing in on her radiance. Before long, her thighs are burning with strain, her breath is coming in ragged gasps, and she can't tell whether the stitch in her side is a pulled muscle or a jagged wound from a terrible claw that she more felt than saw.

As soon as it occurs to her that this cannot truly be a land of nothingness as long is there is /land to run on/, it disappears, and she falls, falls, plunging through the abyss for so long that up and down cease to have any meaning at all. Her screams are ripped from her lungs by a cackling sillhouette, and when she inhales for fresh air, the Darkness pours in, choking her, drowning her...

...she lands in Balamb Garden.

It is as though the attack never happened; children, refugee and student alike, run and laugh and chase a ball through the hallway, startling a Faculty member into a fierce lecture, and birds in the window to flight. Crowds of people more her age bustle down into the atrium, animatedly discussing boys, and Triple Triad, and boys who play Triple Triad. The sun shines down, fiercely, filling her with warmth and strength, and she can feel herself returning the favor, uplifting the very world around her with the same strength.

No one speaks to her, or even seems to see her; this is increasingly distressing. Eventually, someone walks right through her, and she looks down at her hands, wonderingly -- has she become a transluscent, incorporeal, is her spirit all she has left?

But she seems so solid. And in that instant, when she realizes that she's not the ghost, /they/ are, these are the ghosts of children and peers who were surely slaughtered in the attack on Garden, the walls shatter around her, revealing a tableau of the battlefield outside, frozen in time.

She sprints through it, pausing beside the fallen, broken bodies of friend after friend after friend, trying to revive them, to heal what has been lost, to bring back what once was hers: a sense of safety, but more importantly, of community, of belonging, that she had never truly had before. The miserable isolation and mortifying helplessness of fifteen years mewed up in a Palace, allowed to do nothing useful and meet next to no one, come crashing down on her, but self-pity does not do more than make the corpses laugh at her, their lips twisting into rictus grins, and she discards it.

The dead are the dead, they are cold and unmoving, and as her field of vision widens, so does the bloody count of people who have given themselves for her, willingly or not, knowingly or not. Refugees and Returners and SeeD, yes, but also Heartless, who transform back into Agrabah citizens, many bodies deep, all entangled with their newfound neighbors, the poor of Rabanastre.

Every single one wears the face of the boy in the marketplace.

Jafar has posed:

The courtyard is quiet, muffled under heaps of corpses. The walls are shattered, gates splintered, but though silence prevails, it does not seem as though much time has passed since the battle. It is as though Judgement came and the living simply evaporated. Even the bullet casings lie as if they had just been spent, tendrils of oddly purple smoke rising from their gleaming husks.

A dry tapping sound. Bent with loss, thin as famine and withered as pestilence, a man is approaching, through the splayed planks of the gate, his beard nearly reaching the ground. He stares at Jasmine as he plods forward, each step requiring preparation. She cannot help him. Dreams make you wait.

When the waiting is over, the old wretch stands in front of Jasmine on his three legs. Rheumy eyes lift to her face, then across to one of the crumbled walls. Its pieces look oddly brittle, shards rather than chunks, as white as a kitten's teeth, and with a curved shape that does not match the wall. Why? There are no accidents in dreams.

Jafar bends, taking a shard of the wall in his hand, no bigger than a thumbnail. He offers it to her, but not there, not in that war-blasted courtyard. He offers it to her in the hallway of the Palace. He is her father, though he is still the same skeletal man. She is a tiny child, too young to know she must remember things, and so this memory had been lost until now. Between them, on the floor, a shattered teacup of finest white china. It had been Jasmine's mother's, and then it was Jasmine's, and now it belongs to no one but the God of What Never Comes Back.

"If you take this from me," Jafar her father says, though the Sultan her father had not, "it will be whole once more. But it will also break once more, soon enough. This power has always been yours. You may revive any thing or any person you have ever loved, but only to kill them. Is it worth it, to you? To keep them alive by killing them ever and again?"

Jasmine has posed:

Anticipation is agony. The princess has lost her kingdom, her family, and forcibly loses her friends as quickly as she makes them. To help others is all Jasmine has left, and though she does it for them, freely, and not for herself, to stand by while the dried-up husk of a man approaches her, forced to watch him struggle across the battlefield, unable to rush forward to render aid, is its own kind of torture.

It makes her eager to bend her head to hear his words, to meet his eyes unflinchingly, to await his pleasure, whatever it may be, that she may serve, and ease his pain.

Instead, he presents her with a precious shard of her past... one of the oldest guilts of all, a diamond in the rough of toddler memory. Sometimes the greatest treasures are those you never knew you possessed. Sometimes the greatest burdens are those you never realized you were carrying.

Jasmine's father had not sharply chastised her for tripping and dropping the teacup; he was simply, quietly sad, and she learned a different lesson from that day than she might have otherwise. If he had ignored her completely, she might have discounted the value of beauty. If he had been furious, she might have opened up to his attention like a flower in bloom, and found pleasure in shattering more valuable things.

'All is lost to time,' said the Sultan, in his younger, wiser days, gathering her into his arms, and speaking not of the cup but its previous owner, 'But that does not make our time together any less precious, knowing it will end.'

Staring with narrowed eyes at the shard, the little princess looks back up at her father, biting her lip thoughtfully. She turns the enigma over in her mind, screwing up her tiny painted toes on the marble floor to help her focus, rocking back and forth on her heels. Sitting, statuesque, in one place, has long been one of her traits, but only if she has something to occupy her, like a book or a pen (or a brush).

When Jasmine thinks deeply, she thinks best while in motion.

"It doesn't matter if it's worth it to me," she replies after a second, a heartbeat, a year -- dreams make you wait -- her sweet, high voice clear as a bell, beautifully enunciating phrases far beyond her years. A truth gradually dawns in her face, as she comes to recognize it, her eyes wide and wondering once more.

"What counts is how they feel about living anew, then dying at my hand. If that is their choice..." Her voice wavers, and she hesitates. It is an ironic struggle, one who raged against having no choices of her own, having difficulty with the choices of another. And though she knows what she must do, part of her shrinks from that duty. It is so painful, murdering them, being the poison in their veins, the dagger in their back, the tremor in their heart.

"...it hurts, Father," she admits finally, in a low whisper, full of shame at herself for daring to whine, gaze unfocused, forlorn, lost. She hates to admit weakness of any kind, but if she cannot unburden herself upon her Father, who else is there? The absence of a tiger makes itself known like a plucked string in the air, but she does not see it behind her. "It hurts all the time. But... if they truly wish to be brought back... the needs of the people outweigh my own."

A tiny hand, painted with a henna mandala that burns with a pure white flame, reaches up towards her father's face, but cannot reach alone; she is too small. "How do you handle power like this?" she asks in tones so raw as to be broken. "What should I do?"

Jafar has posed:

Jafar knew the risks in coming here. Here he is just a soul. Mind was always his weapon, with body a more recent and secondary ally, because of his newfound powers. There were a thousand ways he could destroy her if he could come here whole, as an agent of evil, ploys intact. Unfortunately, all he can do is join her in dreaming, with all the powers and weaknesses of a dreamer. Age and mystical training have given him insights into the world of the dream that he counts on for an advantage, but here he is forced into a profound honesty. For Agrabah's most dedicated liar, this is somewhat terrifying.

He cannot even intentionally disguise himself in this place; as he began the ritual, he meditated on this alternate identity. This old man was a part of him, and so Jafar can wear his face here, but at any time the dream might strip it from him. Now he is Jasmine's father--there is some archetypal truth somewhere in that monstrous falsehood, or it would not be possible--but if the context changes, so might he. He might be dreaming this, but this is not his dream.

His weapons of disdain, cloaked sarcasm, pretention, fastidious politeness... they are all gone. He cannot keep her away, and so she can hurt him. A pain he would enjoy is now a pain he has to experience, as he watches this little girl-woman contend with loss. His parents are dead, too. It is expected, he is old and it was time; Jasmine is young and so it is a tragedy. Those are society's rules. The rules for a son, even a wicked son, are different.

He holds out the shard. She holds out the pure white flame. Neither is yet willing to take the other's gift. "You ask about /should/ when there is no /should/," Father tells Jasmine. "The dead wish for nothing. You can ask yourself, what would she have wanted? You can tell yourself, this is how he would like things. But they are beyond all wanting, forever, and no wish can change that." This last is not philosophy, to Jafar, it is immutable arcane law. "When you bring them back, it is as they were, not as how they might be today. You cannot use their desires as an excuse to avoid making a choice yourself. Not this time." There is bitterness there.

Father extends the shard a little further. "Take it. You are not ready to let them die the final death, the quieter death. If you were, we would not be here." In this Palace hallway named Balamb. "This power is like any power. You have it for yourself, or you do not have it at all. A mountain has more 'power' than any man could dream of, but it does not act on its desires. To be forced to abide by the desires of others is shameful, but to make them master of even your innermost choices is waking death."

Jasmine has posed:

"/Wrong/," Jasmine responds fiercely, defiantly, to Jafar's immutable arcane law -- she says the word with fiery conviction, absolute belief. At the core of her being, she embodies the ultimate answer to that law: hope. She burns with it, growing and changing from adorable toddler to luscious teenager in a few moments. There was hardly a gawky in-between, which was as much curse as blessing, in her line of work, such as it was.

Her eyes burn as well. Then all of her does; she becomes pure flame, then a candle's flame, dream logic shaping the wax into the facsimile of a certain oil lamp. She is mighty in her diminuity, all the light of the universe condensed into such a tiny, delicate thing.

As she burns, she smells of her namesake, of course. The perfume is faintly blue, spiraling swirls that caress the air.

"/Nothing/ is so lost to the darkness that it cannot return to the light. It just takes time, and will... and faith. The belief that it can be done. Nothing that is loved is ever truly gone."

Balamb is rebuilt at a dream's pace, flashes of workers here and there, construction equipment puffing along. There are setbacks, and difficulties -- even another attack, that comes in the form of a thunderstorm, full of purple lightning -- but SeeD persists, and their home is restored.

It sits next to Agrabah, on the Sultan's model table.

Her flame dances, spreading forth its petals gladly, blossoming with luminous joy. She reaches up and touches the shard, and it transforms, back into the teacup. There are no flaws, no cracks; it is not a thing that merely was. Already it holds a different flavor of tea than any it contained before its crash. "Love is stronger than death," she whispers, as though admitting the greatest, most hidden secret anywhere. And perhaps she is.

The teacup starts to fade away, dissolving into her heart. "It hurts, but it's worth it. They're all worth it. /You're/ worth it."

Is she onto him? Yes or no, nothing pleasant lasts for long in the princess' dreams, not with the battle for her survival raging just above her subconscious. It's like a constant tension, and it haunts her dreams like a whispering undercurrent. Once in a while, it becomes a roaring river.

It's about to be a crashing waterfall.

Jafar has posed:

It would not be so strange, for Jasmine to know him. Indeed, it's inevitable that she does, the only question is whether that knowledge is firm enough to be retained should she remember the dream. 'I had a dream... my father was in it, but he was also Jafar.' Such things are normal in dreams, and indeed in any interaction of the soul. Such is the genesis of friendship, hate, and love; identification with facets of other people, taking them into oneself.

Jafar is no longer Father when he looks down at the Balamb diorama, but Famine again. /Why/ is this disguise so essential to his identity that even his soul can take it on? What has starved and withered him? Whatever it is, it makes it hard for him to look at Jasmine as she becomes a living candle-flame. Her brightness cannot hurt his eyes here; it is something else. He cannot help but part the fingers he shields his eyes with, however, as he watches the cup disappear into her chest, only to be reborn pure, /new/ as kitten's teeth... and, significantly, changed.

His eyes fall to the tea, as petals float fragrantly past him. It's a very different shade. It's hard to distinguish dark liquids, but it looks purple. Purple seeps through this dream where it can, though it is not corruption. Jafar's eyes are still open, back on the bed, staring into desert twilight. A dream absorbs sensation.

"Don't be naive," Famine half-coughs. His voice as Father was more refined; it is now wheezing and hoarse. "Perhaps your tutors spoke of King Menzentius and his surpassing cruelty? Of all his crimes, the greatest was shacklingly the living to the dead, that the rot might spread and fester. That is your love. Revive them and kill them, or let them turn to dust at last, whichever you please. But do not bind yourself to corpses!" Spittle is starting to fly from Famine's loose lips, his outrage has built to a fervor, and the walls of the palace creak and buckle with the deep, churning river of Jasmine's soul, his emotions wracking the marble even as they wrack his bent and ugly frame.

"Your love means nothing to them," he continues. "They are NOT worth it, they are by /definition/ worthless... and SO AM I!"

The pillars nearby, if they were hollow, could easily have contained several elephants, and it is said they took two thousand slaves to drag from the quarry. Exaggeration, surely, but their strength is obvious. When they shatter, when they practically explode from Jafar's anguish and Jasmine's hope, it is like the world being unmade; the sound fills everything, even the small chunks of stone pound the floor like thunder. A solid wall of rich violet water erupts from the wall, blasting the palace apart, the great burnished spires groaning like wounded titans as they slough down. Water sweeps over Jasmine and Famine alike, a river with roughly the dimensions of the palace itself churning past.

The initial rush of aquatic force dies down somewhat, leaving the untouched Jasmine and Famine hovering above a giant, vibrantly colored waterfall. Famine is panting, loose teeth clenched, eyes wide.

Jasmine has posed:

For an instant, they were both totally submerged, as a sheet of violent, violet water swept past them. But dream time is strange, and they remain suspended in that instant, floating -- not drowning, as Jasmine was earlier in her nightmare -- and staring at one another.

Assailed by the aqueous blast and, more importantly, by Famine's cutting fury, the candleflame gutters in the wax lamp, which itself tumbles end over end, battered about. It is the exact hue of the liquid, which is resolving, in taste, to be exquisitely pure and sweet. The flame is not; it turns electric blue, then orange, progressing through lower and lower temperatures as it fights for its own survival. Its expression, condensed onto a smaller and smaller face, is devastated, as though Famine's words have sliced past all her shields and impaled her, straight in the heart.

There's an instant in that instant where it seems to have gone out completely, all but the tiniest spark.

But that seed of light blossoms once more, and Jasmine erupts from it, full-sized again but still composed of that white radiance, which could be fire, but perhaps never truly was, all along. She is vivaciousness incarnate; life pours from her, the infinite potential for growth shining in her eyes, her hair, her smile... she is Bounty to his Famine. Where he is sunken and hungry, she is lusciously curved, full. His withering is her flourishing vitality, his constant dissatisfaction not only her abundant wealth, but her joy in what she has, the exuberant urge to spread it across the land, that everyone can partake. It's an appropriate analogue in more ways than the philosophical, considering the harvest of power, on every level, that she embodied as an heiress, and only does moreso in some eyes, as a Princess of Heart.

Her feelings can be hurt, but not quenched entirely. Her gaze is level, now, shocked out of her ecstatic revelation, but smouldering within it is no less pure emotion. Bounty studies Famine's face, and her acceptance of him is unwavering, her luminous face made more poignant by the sadness underneath, the concern. It is not superficial pity, but something more fundamental.

"I will remember your lesson, for there is wisdom in your caution, to treasure the living above the dead. But I bid you, think of Orpheus and Eurydice," she observes gently in the sudden silence, after the wave has passed. It's a conversational counter, to be sure, but it sounds less like a riposte and more like tidings of gladness, delivered with no interest in oneupsmanship, the debate enjoyed for its own sake. "Their love defied death... and what truly separated them in the end was... insecurity. If Orpheus had only believed in himself, theirs would have been the happiest of endings."

She moves forward, arms outstretched, to enfold Famine warmly, to clasp him to her breast; it is rather like bathing in the heart of a star. Being reforged in the fires of creation. Nothing exists there but love, and so nothing is lacking. Through a mirror brightly, Jasmine sees Jafar's many strengths and many faults, and seems to embrace them all freely, without hesitation.

"Of course you're not worthless," she reassures him fiercely, whispering the truth, golden, precious beyond measure, in his ear. It floats around him like a halo, ultimately coming to dwell, shining, upon his brow. "Saying such things does no one any good, but you least of all. You mustn't be so cruel!"

Plunging downward in smooth, opaque sheets, the waterfall freezes in place, to reflect him as he might be, if he allowed himself to appreciate the many wonderful aspects of himself, of his life. No longer is he old and miserable, but flushed with youth, strength, and more importantly than either, the wisdom of the heart so long denied him. She guides him towards the vision slowly but inexorably. "You claim to desire respect above all things, but how will that ever be yours if you don't even respect yourself?"

Jafar has posed:

Famine does not grin or cackle at his victory, if it is such, as Jasmine is snuffed out. There is a grim satisfaction in having his dark views confirmed, but one of the weaknesses of pessimism is that being proven right is not a joyous occasion. Her light is gone, the world is as he knew it to be. Welcome to reality, princess.

Then a white starburst, shimmering motes of light wafting away from Jasmine's yearnful form, her beauty and completeness. She is curves, he is lines; she is silk and he is sticks. She wants for nothing, he wants for everything. Again Famine shields his eyes, but this time he lets his hand drop after a moment. The other flaw of pessimism is that it is so resilient. But is that resilience not proof of its correctness? As beautiful as she is, can she last?

"Hope requires strength to maintain, and all despair requires is weakness. A man will never run out of weakness, but no man has infinite strength," Famine tells her. "You cannot last like this forever. Cloistered princess, Agrabah's crown jewel. You have not yet begun to be tested, and so you misunderstand the lesson of Orpheus. Did any man love more truly? And yet he could not endure." Famine begins to cackle now, low, more sad than triumphant. "I almost be-lieved you for a moment. Then I remembered you have only taken a few /paces/ on the marathon the rest of us have endured our whole lives. Come, tell me again of self-love, you who are praised by all. Tell me it is not love itself that is flawed, but gold-thr...oated... Orpheu..."

Famine is stilled, embraced physically and spiritually. Hugging him is like hugging a ribcage, and though there is a jerky-like toughness to his frame, it is still rickety and achingly thin. His beard drapes over Bounty's shoulder as his lower lip wobbles. It's one thing for Bounty to love herself; he disdained that as little more than the delusion of an overly praised child, who suitors allowed to win games, who was apologized /to/ if she made an error around anyone but the Sultan himself. It was another for her to love him, perhaps even more so in this wretched state. Famine stammers his own pronoun softly, eyes turning guilelessly to his own reflection, that of Jafar the sage. Still thin, still ugly, with little change in his dark fashion sense, and yet his face is scarcely recognizable to him. He is placid, his cheeks less gaunt, the shadow under his eyes fainter; self-hate does not consume his body. More importantly, he looks back at himself without pretense or guile. For so long has he been lying that he wears honesty like a mantle, his eyes windows instead of mirrors. This is a man who has real friends, and indeed real enemies, who actualizes himself in relationships rather than manipulating others. This is a man whose soul does not burn with a thirst so profound and permanent that he does not even recognize it as such.

Famine does not return to the hug, but he buckles into it in anguish. Seeing what you could have been can be a terrible punishment. "How dare you... show me this neutered mirage? This happy ignoramus? No one respects him, he's just too stupid to realize it!"

Jasmine has posed:

Bounty says nothing more, expressing her feelings through the the deed, and not the word, of love. His protestations of strength and weakness, tests and failure, wash over her no more effectively than water over a stone. They pass quickly, and she remains, indefatigable, having not ignored them but /listened/, intensely, then stayed with him regardless. Her eyes are turned towards his, and within them he is not ugly at all. She sees the tiniest fragment of light in his heart, and what it could be if only he embraced it. And his darkness is there as well, but no more scorned than an ear or a thumb. It is part of him, and that's okay.

They are interrupted by pinpricks of sickly yellow light emerging from the icy purple cascade, shattering the mirror, fracturing it into a thousand and one falling razors. Eyes. Uncountable eyes. Jasmine stiffens, then, by the time the Heartless -- recolored by the waterfall, which is fast transforming into familiar crimson sand -- emerge, she's turned to flee. "They're after me. We have to go! Come on!" By the third exclamation, her voice contains a low roar.

Yanking him onto her suddenly broad, black-and-orange back, the tigress of Agrabah tenses like a coiled spring, then is off like a shot. No tiny kitten, she. Her muscles bunch and release beneath him, legs silently bounding forward, steadily putting distance between them and their pursuit, the huntress having become the hunted but, if not relaxed within her role, well-practiced at it. It's like riding a furry avalanche, a shooting star falling through darkness, in perfect control of herself but nothing else.

It's an open question, whether she knowingly rescued Jafar from the Heartless, or just some depressed old man. If she would have saved anyone, everyone, or especially him. At times she seemed a creature of marvelous and dreadful clarity, but now... pure instinct. And her instinct is protection.

But will he choose to ride the tiger, or join the wild hunt?

Jafar has posed:

There is much that is rotten in this man. He has betrayed everyone who ever trusted him, murdered, lied, all for his own pride. If there is a germ of good in him, perhaps it is built around the fact that he, like all humans, wants to be happy, wants to connect to others. It may not be enough, but it is enough for Bounty, right now, and that is something.

Jafar does not hesitate in his decision. He may not be able to use deceit to get what he wants, here in the dream, but he still /knows/ what he wants. He wants to know where she is, and following her while she flees in the dream is the best chance he may ever have. He sits astride her muscular body and fills his bony palms with striped fur, hunching his bent back further to stay on.

It is exhilarating; a tiger's sheer strength and grace makes even a horse seem inert. It's like every motion could be a deathblow, every leap an attack, and yet the deadliness is in a calm stasis of opposing forces and stretching limbs.

"I do not fear them," he admits, because his dream self cannot understand why he would not. "They endanger you, not me."

Jasmine has posed:

The tigress' flight is like a retrospective journey. It shows Jafar everywhere she's been so far, through the lens of the Heartless she's encountered. The potted centipedes of Agrabah, and the dark swordsmen, both of whom chase her from Balamb to this day, they come first. Then, shadowy Huns: the Land of Dragons. Awful plant creatures: Golmore Jungle. And on, and on, she's confronted by creatures of all shapes and sizes, from such a wide range of places within mere weeks that one insight is painfully obvious:

Jasmine has been /cheating/. One way that she's managed to evade the Heartless is by not moving in a straight line between two places. Exactly how she's done so is less than clear, but there are only a few competing theories and all of them boil down to the same source: Darkness. Ironic, that she's passed through others shadow lords' portals and corridors to circumvent her hunters, able to do so freely, untouched by the corruptive nature of such places because it simply cannot find a foothold in her spirit.

The second defining attribute of her journey is loss. Every few paces of her brief marathon, when the next wall of Heartless appear around a corner to bar her way, someone helps her... and suffers for it. People jump out of the darkness, illuminated in crystalline detail, to strike down her latest assailant, and then be struck down in turn. The tiger's furious roar as she occasionally cleaves through Heartless herself is nothing compared to its soft, agonized bellow of grief at the pain she causes with her mere passage.

If he can remember those faces, and find their owners, he now has a fresh supply of individuals the princess cares for. That in itself is not a spectacular gain; he already holds all the cards he needs, and it's undeniably true that she'd give of herself to help a total stranger. But these heroes -- and otherwise, it seems she really does take all kinds, touching their hearts briefly before having to move on -- might know, better than anyone else, where to find her.

She cannot respond to his admission directly; she's a tiger, and tigers cannot speak with their mouths. But he can feel the pressure of her soul against his, full of sorrow at all the trouble she's causing others. She feels like a harbinger of doom, and is acting on those protective instincts, more and more often, by isolating herself. /Rejecting/ the freely offered aid of others, protecting them from protecting her, she flees friendship as frantically as she flees Darkness. But, being who she is, she cannot help but make new bonds wherever she goes, only to break her own heart when she leaves them again.

It is a cruel fate for someone who has craved true connection all her life.

But, in her feline way, she seems to be thinking about what he said, weighing his words. And in a dream world, such musing quickly becomes reality; her strides take on new purpose as she runs not /from/ her problems, but /towards/ something that she wants him to see.

The tigress comes to an abrupt halt in front of Jafar as he might most happily view himself, not flush with honesty and good nature, but as sorcerer supreme. His eyes crackle with ultimate power realized; terrible power that also flows freely from his mouth, his fingertips, and, of course, his staff. He's about twenty feet tall. Every line of his person is fearsome authority embodied, from the ominous glint of the red gem on his turban to the razor-sharp points of his shoes.

Heartless spill out of him, comically tiny and misshapen. They form in his footsteps, wriggle out of his cloak, rise out of his shadow, and compared to him are no more important than an ant is to a boot. But there's nothing funny about the way that with every new addition to his army, he grows darker, and smaller, and stranger.

In a few moments, he is indistinguishable from his minions.

It's about as heartfelt a warning as he'll ever get about the dreadful price of using Heartless, delivered from a primal awareness in Jasmine's subconscious that she has yet to fully comprehend, when awake.

Jafar has posed:

Dream-Jafar doesn't even fully understand why he wants to find Jasmine. He must possess her, he must own her, this is all he knows. His heart therefore pounds with excitement as he gathers so much information so quickly; it's not fully reliable, as some of these events might well be imaginary, but it's such a perfect start, and certainly there is no doubt, now, that ground pursuit alone will never avail him. How strange, that she finds herself safer in the void than he is.

At least until now. Famine's lips twist back with pleasure.

Faces kaleidoscope past as the tigress flees through her own past. Jafar tries to pick them out; many are unfamiliar to him, but they have seen Jasmine, and if he finds them, they could help ensure he does, too.

Finally, they stop beneath the great black monolith of Jafar himself, arched mantle-shoulders spread like bat wings, a living dynamo of arcane power. A surge of pride fills his chest, and this time, /he/ is the mirror; he becomes himself once more, instantly standing beside Jasmine rather than as her rider, staff in hand, cloak unfurling like a ship's sail behind him, black and thin and terrible. He grins down at her confidently, but it may not be clear it was him all along... because in a sense, it wasn't, just like Jasmine is in a sense not herself at the moment. She is a stand-in; no, a facet, a sublimation. There is no true Jasmine, no true Jafar; they are /all/ true.

Watching himself corrupted, watching the veins in his hands turn purple and swollen, only to burst where they knot and release tiny monsters instead of blood, Jafar blanches. He turns slowly to Jasmine, seeking the truth in her eyes as his body begins to decay into evil: lumpen, misshapen, barely able to stand. When its knee buckles, he looks to want to run to her like a son to a mother, to hide himself. But denial kicks in like a hissing valve, his mind rescuing itself.

"Liar," he accuses her. "Here I stand." He lifts both hands, one grasping his staff. His body is whole and sound... or as whole as it ever is, anyway. "Master, not slave."

Subtly, his thumbnail twitches. Or did it? It was such a tiny motion. Like the sandy hatch of a trapdoor spider.

Jafar jerks air into his lungs with a sudden heave, eyes blinking wildly, fists clenched in the robes over his thighs. Once again he is surrounded by petals of Jasmine, once again he is wreathed in twilight. Sweat drenches his sallow face as he pants; this is the trouble with dreams, any real catharsis is generally strong enough to wake the dreamer.

Mopping his face with a hand, Jafar shivers, or rather, learns that he has been shivering for some time. The spice wracks him; he feels sick.

He hopes it is the spice.