The Face in the Dream

 Elara's POV 

"It's you," I said. "Isn't it. That's why you went quiet."

Kael didn't answer right away. He'd gone very still against the fence, the kind of still that took effort, and I was starting to recognize that particular stillness on him, it was what he did instead of flinching.

"Describe it again," he said. "All of it.

Every detail you can remember."

"Kael..."

"Please." His voice cracked slightly on the word, just slightly, just enough that I heard nineteen years of careful composure straining under it. 

"I need to know if I'm imagining the parts that match, or if they actually do."

So I told him again, slower this time, watching his face instead of my own hands. The dream never changes much.

I'm on the ground, somewhere cold, somewhere with too much sky. There's blood, mine, I think, though the dream never lets me look down far enough to be sure. And there's a man standing over me, close enough to touch, and for years his face was just a smear of nothing, the way dream-faces are, familiar and unknowable at once.

"But last night," I said, "after the ceremony  when I finally fell asleep, it came again. And this time I could see him. His face." I made myself hold Kael's eyes while I said it. "It was you."

Something in him seemed to fold inward, just slightly, like a held breath finally let go wrong.

"I've had it too," he said.

The training ring went very quiet around us. Even the showy bird in the trees had stopped.

"What?"

"Not as long as you have, I'd guess. Only the last few months." He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was looking at some fixed point past my shoulder, the way people look when they're describing something they've spent a long time trying not to think about. 

"A woman on the ground. Blood. I never see a face, I've never been able to, not once  but I know the shape of her. I know the color of her hair even in the dark. I've had that dream more nights than not since early spring, and I never understood why, because I'd never met you. I didn't even know you existed until last night."

"That's not possible."

"I know."

"Dreams don't work like that. They're not..." I stopped, because I didn't actually know what dreams were and weren't supposed to do, not anymore, not after nineteen years of being the exception to every rule anyone tried to explain to me.

"They're not supposed to be shared.

Premonitions aren't real. This isn't..."

"I didn't say I understood it," Kael said quietly. "I said it's happened. Those aren't the same thing."

I sat down hard on the fence rail, because my legs had apparently decided they were done holding me up for this conversation. Kael didn't move to steady me, which I was grateful for. I don't think I could have handled him touching me right then, not with my whole understanding of what was and wasn't real currently rearranging itself in real time.

"So in your dream," I said slowly, "I'm dying. And in mine, you're the one standing over me while it happens."

"That's what it looks like on the surface, yes."

"On the surface."

"I don't think it's that simple." He crouched down slightly, so we were closer to eye level, careful, deliberate, the way you'd approach something you didn't want to spook. 

"Elara, I've fought in exactly the kind of violence this pack has spent generations trying to avoid. I know what it feels like in my body when I'm the one causing harm. That dream doesn't feel like that. It feels like I'm trying to reach you. Every time. Like I'm too late, or something's stopping me, and I can never quite..." He stopped himself, jaw tight. "I don't think I'm the danger in it. I think I'm failing to stop the danger. Those read very differently, once you've had enough of them to notice the difference."

"You've had it enough times to notice a difference."

"More than I'd like to admit."

I didn't know what to do with any of this. Nineteen years of nightmares I'd never told a single living soul about, and here was a man I'd known for less than a day, telling me he'd been having the same dream from the opposite side, and somehow making it sound like the least strange thing that had happened to me all week. Which, given the week I'd had, was saying something.

"Damon's going to think you're manipulating me," I said finally, mostly because it was easier than sitting in the silence. "When I tell him this."

"Are you going to tell him?"

"I don't know yet." I looked up at him.

"Are you going to tell your Alpha, sorry, you are the Alpha. Are you going to tell your lieutenants?"

"Sable already thinks I've lost my mind over you. This wouldn't exactly improve her opinion." 

The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one trying to survive a conversation that didn't have much room for it. "But yes. I don't keep things from Ronan. He's earned better than that, and frankly, so have you, I'm not going to start building whatever this is on secrets. I've watched what that does to people."

I wondered, briefly, if he meant Damon. I didn't ask.

"I don't have an answer for what this means," Kael said, straightening back up, putting a careful few feet of space between us again like he'd only just noticed how close he'd gotten. 

"I want to be honest with you about that, because I think you've had enough people in your life who weren't. But I know two things for certain. I know my wolf has never once been wrong, about anything, in twenty-eight years. And I know that whatever's coming, in that dream, in real life, whatever this ends up meaning I'm not planning on being too late a second time."

"A second time. You make it sound like it already happened."

Kael went quiet again, and this time when he looked at me, there was something old in his expression, something that didn't belong to a twenty-eight-year-old at all.

"Doesn't it feel like it already did?" he said. "To you?"

I thought about the pressure between my chest on the walk to the ceremony. I thought about nineteen years of a dream that had waited patiently for its own face to arrive. I thought about the low, ancient thing under my ribs that had opened one eye the moment he said my name and whispered finally, like it had been waiting considerably longer than one night.

"Yeah," I admitted, quietly. "It does."

Neither of us said anything else for a long time. We just sat there at the edge of the training ring, an Alpha and the girl with no scent, both of us staring down the same unfinished nightmare from opposite ends, and for the first time since the ceremony, I didn't feel afraid of it.

I felt like I'd finally found the one other person alive who might actually help me understand it.