Chapter Text
John had thought he’d had the Dream many times when he was in Afghanistan.
Before he was shot, he dreamed of sun and sand and shooting. He would wake up from these dreams in a start, the sheets soaked with sweat.
After, in the hospital, he’d slept more often than he was awake, falling into long, confusing dreams where he’d walked through endless hallways, his path obscured by thick layers of smoke and fog. Sometimes his parents were there with him, sometimes Harry, pulling at his sleeve and trying to tell him something that he could never quite catch. Other times there would be a dark shadowy figure who seemed like he could be the Collector, and time and time again John had thought this is it, this is the dream.
But he’d always woken up with nothing in his hands, just the line of the IV snaking up from his arm and the beeping of the array of medical equipment that loomed over his bed like a silent mechanical forest. Dream corridors built by pain and morphine, nothing more.
**
John went to stay with Harry when he first got back, though they both knew it couldn’t last.
She’d moved to a smaller flat after splitting up with Clara. Just a bedroom for herself and a large room off of it that served as kitchen, living room, and dining room all at once. John kipped on the couch in there the first night and woke up twice, his leg and shoulder twin coals of fire pulsing under his skin.
The next day they went shopping, because John didn’t have any clothes really, except what they’d given him when he was discharged, and in the evening Harry made pasta for dinner.
It was hard in the middle, but not al dente—more like Harry hadn’t boiled it long enough. The meatballs, as if to make up for this, were burnt.
John ate slowly, pausing frequently to rub his leg under the table. He was still getting used to his leg, and his shoulder, and the crutch.
It would take time, to accept and embrace his new limits and challenges, that was the language the doctor had used. To John, limits was too weak a word—it was a narrowing, instead, his world collapsing on itself until it was no bigger than the places he could hobble to on his crutches. Things John had done before without thinking—walking up the stairs to the shopping center, holding his shopping bags in one hand while opening the door for Harry with the other—had suddenly become impossible. He wondered if it would always feel like this, the crutch a chain constraining his movements, or if he would become so used to it that the crutch would feel like part of him, like another limb.
“You like it?” Harry asked. It was the point in the evening where she was still drinking soda, diet coke from a can, the sides shiny with beaded moisture from the refrigerator.
John gave her a noncommittal nod, and Harry took a large gulping drink of her coke, slurping like she’d used to do when they were kids.
The war was out as a topic of conversation, and Clara was out as well, which didn’t leave them with a lot to talk about. Soon John would resort to asking Harry about her job—she was an accountant—and then they’d know things were really getting desperate.
John cast his eyes around the room, searching for another topic of conversation. The walls were mostly bare, just a framed photograph of the Watson family on one wall and a new television mounted on the other.
“Like what you’ve done with the place,” John said.
“Clara chose most of the furniture at our old place," Harry said. "I thought I’d let her keep it.” Harry slurped her coke again and took her knife in hand, stabbing almost violently at a meatball.
Wonderful, John thought. So much for avoiding Clara.
He cast about for something else. The family photograph again—taken on a trip to Majorca when Harry was ten and John was at what his mum called his awkward stage, all knees and elbows and a bad home done hair cut—jogged his memory.
“Where’s Peter?” he asked.
Harry shifted awkwardly in her seat. Avoiding his eyes. “Peter?”
“Yeah,” John said, remembering. Harry’s living arrangements had gone on a upward trajectory from grubby student-y bedsits to the more adult flats she had shared with Clara, but one thing had always remained the same—that stuffed rabbit, his fur increasingly grey and dirty, perched on the top of her television like an ornament. “He’s always on the telly, every place you’ve got you did that. I guess now that you've got one of those new flat screens you can’t, but you should still—”
“I lost him.”
“What?”
Harry had said this quietly, her month full of meatball. Now she repeated herself, speaking more clearly but still not meeting his eyes. “I lost him. During the move with Clara to the new place last year. You were still in Afghanistan, remember? The movers probably lost him. Or Clara threw him out or something. I don’t know. I put him in the box marked entertainment room, and you how movers are. They lost like, ten of Clara’s DVDs, and broke six plates, including the one Aunt Marie gave us for the wedding and—”
“You lost him?”
Harry continued right over him, as though he hadn’t said anything. “And Clara said she’d sue, get someone at her firm to help to do it, because the china was a couple hundred pounds at least—”
“You lost your Lost Thing.”
Harry finally met his eyes. “Yeah,” she said flatly.
John breathed out, a sigh. He heard his mum in the back of his head like an echo, Oh Harry so typical and then all of a sudden the absurdity of it struck him, and he couldn’t stop laughing, his shoulders shaking with it. Harry joined him, and their laughter mingled together. He hadn’t laughed with that since he got back, and it felt good.
After that, it was better. They talked about Mum, and school, and the time John got punched in the face for fighting with a boy who’d called Harry a slag when she dated him for a month before she went off with his sister.
He went to bed thinking that maybe it could work. That maybe getting sent back to England wasn’t the end of everything.
He was almost asleep when Harry slinked into the kitchen. A creak as the fridge opened. Ice cracked out of trays, then low clink of vodka hitting against ice cubes, like a delayed echo to Harry’s earlier slurping of her coke.
John closed his eyes tighter as if this could shut out the sound, and turned on his side. Pretended not to hear.
He was a fool.
**
The Dream had come for Harry when she was eight.
John, six, had been old enough to know what was going on but not why his parents had been so upset.
Everyone talked about the Dream at school, and everyone knew what you had to do. Finding your Lost Thing sounded like an adventure to John, and when he had gone to Harry’s bedroom before breakfast to ask if he could borrow her astronomy book for show and tell only to find Harry lying silent and non-responsive in her bed—her eyes open but not seeing him—he’d been excited. He’d run into his parents’ bedroom yelling, “Harry’s having the Dream! Harry’s having the Dream!”
He’d been too little to understand why Mum had started crying, why Dad put his arm around her and told her it was going to be okay, of course it was.
“It’s Peter, right?” John had asked. “Peter is her Lost Thing.”
Mum looked up, her shoulders still shaking. “Peter?”
“Harry lost Peter at the picnic. She remembered she’d lost him in the bus on the drive home, but the driver wouldn’t let her go back.” John remembered this day clearly, the sweetness of the ice cream they'd served at lunch still on his tongue, Harry with her stuffed rabbit in one hand as through the festivities until, suddenly, the rabbit wasn’t there.
“The school picnic was two weeks ago,” John’s father said. “You remember,” he said, turning to Mum, “Harry was upset for days about that rabbit. We promised she’d get a new toy for Christmas. She’s going to find it.”
But Mum wouldn’t stop crying.
John wasn’t worried.
Kids almost always Came Back, everyone knew that. It wasn’t like the Collector was unfair. And besides, this was Harry, his sister. Of course she would Come Back. Harry was the best at finding things, the best at everything, ever, John knew this with a six-year-old's unshakable certainty.
John’s mum had cried all day, until her eyes were red and hurt-looking. No one made John go to school, and so he’d sat on the couch all day watching telly, eating a bag of crisps he'd taken from the kitchen—usually he’d be yelled at for this, but today no one seemed to mind—waiting for his sister to come back to him.
John had been right. Sometime between Doctor Who and the evening news Harry woke up. During later family recountings of Harry's Dream, Mum always prefaced this portion of the tale by explaing that she had been by Harry's side almost all day, so of course it was the one moment that she’d stepped away that Harry choose to open her eyes.
John had been the first to see her. He’d gone to the kitchen to look for more snacks, when Harry had come bounding down the streets from her bedroom upstairs, swinging Peter in one small hand.
John stood up from the cupboard, a packet of chocolate covered biscuits in one hand.
“Look,” Harry said to him, holding out Peter. “There was a house and loads and loads of junk—way more than Grandpa has, even—and this man said I had to look for what I’d lost, and I found Peter. I told the bus driver he shouldn’t have left him.”
John looked down at the rabbit. Wherever he’d been, he didn’t look the worse for it—same dirty fur and the messed up ear that Harry had chewed on when she was a baby.
“Cool,” John had said. “Want a biscuit?”
Harry took two, and grinned at John, her teeth smeared with chocolate.
“Was it scary?” John asked.
Harry shook her head, an emphatic no. “The man at the door said I was pretty.”
She opened her mouth, half-full with cookie. She was about to say something more, but then Mum swept into the room, and everything became a jumble of tears and Harry telling everyone about the house and the rabbit and John sneaking another chocolate biscuit during all the commotion.
**
Later, John understood that—his Mum’s tears aside—it was about as safe a Dream as you could have. A child under ten, a recently lost and beloved toy: hard data was difficult to come by, but everyone agreed that it was pretty much the ideal.
Kids almost always Came Back.
They were more resilient, more open minded, some theories said. They simply hadn’t had as much time to lose things, other theories went, so when the Dream came for them it was easier for them to remember what they’d lost. Some people claimed children lost physical things—a book, a toy, candies—and yearned for them with a intensity that burned that the missing objects into their memories, while adults yearned for the intangible. Nature’s way, some claimed, of ensuring that the child would remember the item and Come Back.
John didn’t know which theory was true.
He just knew that Harry had the ideal Dream, slipping away so that she was still young enough to find the quest an adventure. Harry had the Dream before she was old enough to worry about when she would get it, if she would be ready, if she would be able to find what she had lost.
For a long time, there were whispers at school. Kids talked about who had Dreamed and who hadn’t and what everyone's Lost Things were. There was this girl from Manchester, everyone said, whose Lost Thing had been a ham sandwich—gross!—and there was Colin, a boy in the form above him, who hadn’t Come Back at all. John had run into Colin's mum at the shops sometimes, picking her way through groceries with a blankness in her eyes that said she wasn't really seeing them, until Colin’s family had moved away—and there was Tim, whose Lost Thing was a magazine he’d swiped from his dad, with pictures of women that he’d show to you if you gave him a pound, and so on.
And then the whispers had changed, melted into who was going to be at what party, and who was going to uni and who had a job in town, as one by one more and more of his friends had the Dream. The Dream didn’t come for everyone, not by a long shot, but as people got older, they stopped talking about it. It was one thing for a fifteen year old to admit to not having had the Dream, quite another if you were thirty.
The Dream never came for John.
For long time he’d been jealous. He hadn’t joined the army because of the Dream, but it was part of why he'd enlisted. Discrimination against people who hadn’t had the Dream was officially illegal--no one could ask about it at an interview. But companies had ways of finding out if you’d had the Dream anyway.
It upset John, but he understood it. Who’d want to hire someone for a position of responsibility only to have him go to sleep one night and never Come Back?
The jobs wasn’t the worse thing, anyway. Forget about employers: John stopped trying to have a serious relationship when he stopped being able to count the number of people who’d broken it off with him when told them he hadn’t had the Dream on both hands. Even worse, John understood this as well. Who would want to build a life with someone who could disappear at any minute? Everyone knew that the chances of Coming Back went way down if you haven’t had the Dream by age thirty.
In the army, they didn't mind so much. Soldiers were used to seeing people disappear in the night.
So, yeah, John had been jealous, just a bit, of Harry’s perfect Dream, of how the Dream—an ordeal for so many—had been just a game to her. Just like life had been a game to Harry, as she seemed to glide smoothly from school to uni and then to her first job in a happy haze of parties and drinking and laughter.
It was when the parties stopped but the drinking didn’t, and Harry’s life went into free fall like a long-delayed awake up from a long slumber, that John finally stopped being jealous.
He understood it now: The Dream had been so easy for Harry to make up for the fact that was so much of everything that came after it wasn’t.
**
John moved out three weeks later. His pension wasn’t really enough for him to afford London, but he knew that he couldn’t stay with Harry, and going home to Mum and Dad would be giving up completely, so where else could he go?
London would be large enough to lose himself in. Large enough to start over.
Harry drove him into the city, and helped him move his things. It wasn’t much—he had the clothes he’d bought with Harry, and his computer. Some books.
He’d rented a room in central London, in a clean, institutional-looking building. The stubborn cleanliness of its hallways seemed an affront to London’s grime, and the resolute cheer of the woman who took his deposit and gave him his keys made John more depressed than rudeness would have.
He remembered the rooms he’d rented as a student--dank and dirty, yes, but full of noise and life, with someone always just about to knock on his door and ask if he wanted to pop down to the pub for a drink. John had somehow thought this would be the same, which was ridiculous. No one was going to be knocking on his door in this place.
It only took them three trips to get his things up. It shouldn’t have even taken that many, but because John couldn’t carry anything that required two hands because of his crutch, Harry had to take almost everything up while he leaned on his crutch watching her, useless.
The logistics of moving kept the silence between them at bay, barely. In the last trip up in the elevator—the room cost more because of it, but John couldn’t face the thought of trying to navigate a walk-up with his leg—the scraps of will you move this, okay, I’m coming, hold the door fell away, and they stared at each other like strangers.
Finally there was nothing more to be done.
Harry put John’s computer on the room's small utilitarian table, then turned to John, who was sitting on the bed, and straightened the covers, a reflexive, homely movement that reminded him of their Mum. “Well, that’s the last of it,” she said.
“Thanks for helping,” John said. “I know it’s probably not your idea of a fun day off from work and all.”
“John,” Harry said, “if it’s the money, you know, I could always—”
“It’ll be fine. There’s lots of things, locum work, hospitals.”
Silence for a moment, the bleakness of the room around them like an invisible partner in their conversation.
Finally, Harry, her face flushed: “You don’t have to move out.”
Christ. His leg was aching again. John just wanted this to be over. “Yes I do.”
“I’ll stop. I promise. You can stay, and I’ll stop, and—”
“Harry,” John said, “It’s fine.”
Harry brushed her hair from her face, her eyes wet.
“I’ll be fine.”
**
John read for a while after Harry left, opened his computer, looked at some news sites, then called up the blog he’d set up a couple of days ago using a free online programme. The therapist he’d seen in the army hospital had recommended that he try writing, said it might help. So far that advice had been as useless as the referral note the therapist had given John when he’d been released, but with the silence of the empty room hanging heavy around him, he figured he might as well try again.
He stared at the page for a while, the cursor blinking rhythmically, taunting him.
What was he thinking? He had nothing to write about. Nothing ever happened to him.
John shut down the computer, and went to bed.
**
He woke up in a forest.
John instantly knew that something was going on.
He had had false alarms before. There had been the dreams in the hospital of course, and there was that time in uni when, sleeping off the effects of some very potent pot, he’d had a dream about Prince Charles in a clown costume leading him on an epic quest for Maltesers that was so vivid he was convinced for a while that this was what the Dream really was like for everyone, and that the whole county had been subjecting him to some sort of elaborate joke.
But this was different.
The air crackled with energy. A sharp, spikey thrill of electricity ran through John’s veins, like the moment of anticipation that hangs between the handing out of tests and signal to begin writing.
The ground was thick with moss. John thought he could hear movement in the underbrush, rustling like birds or small mammals, but whenever he turned his head to look, he saw nothing but trees and bushes. Above him, the sun radiated down onto the trees with a heat John hadn’t felt since Afghanistan. Wherever he was, it wasn’t London.
John started walking.
He found the house in a meadow, and knew instantly—the way you do in dreams—that this was his destination.
A man waited for him at the door. He was short, no taller than John, dressed in a dark suit whose clean, restrained cut matched his neat, even features. Everything about the man was neat, from his short, tidy hair to the way his brows knitted together as he smiled at John.
This, clearly, was the Collector.
When he spoke, it was teasing, almost playful, with an accent John couldn’t place. “Took your time, didn’t you.” Not a question.
“I’m sorry,” John said, not sure whether he was making an apology or asking for an explanation. When neither seemed to be forthcoming, he continued, “I don’t understand. This is—”
“Typical,” the Collector said.
“What?”
“That you don’t understand.” The Collector’s smile became a sneer. “People like you don’t, generally.”
John wasn’t sure whether to be confused or offended. What did he mean, People like him? “This is the Dream, right?”
The Collector pursed his lips, frowning. “I imagine you know the rules, at least? Someone who comes here as old as you?” The upswing at the end of this sentence turned it into a question, if barely one. John got the sense that the situation would become unpleasant if he said no.
“I know the—”
“Still, it doesn’t matter. Have to tell them to you anyway. Rules are rules.” The Collector sighed, his demeanor that of someone who’d been asked to fill out an unnecessary and very long form at the post office.
John had heard the rules before, of course, but hearing them in the Dream was different. It was how John imagined vows might feel as you were getting married—ceremonial words that had almost lost all their meaning, now re-imbued with power when for the first time they applied to you.
His Lost Thing was somewhere in the house. He had until sundown to find it, and present it to the Collector. Be careful, and don’t look out the windows.
Opening the door for John, the Collector added, “The forest is different once you’re inside.”
John paused. The door was open, and he could see into the house where a heap of things lay mixed about on the floor. Was that his old Christmas jumper sticking out from under a book? John itched to get inside, but: The last statement, about the forest. That wasn’t in the rules. He’d never heard anyone tell him about that.
“What’s different about the forest?” John asked, pausing halfway into the house. Around him, the forest was green, and silent, no different than any other woods.
The Collector’s answering grin made John’s skin crawl. The memory of Harry telling him that the Collector had told her she was pretty flashed into his mind, and John couldn’t stop himself from shuddering.
“Daylight’s wasting, Johnny boy,” the Collector said, turning his eyes up to where the sun hung high in the sky. “In you pop.”
The sun glinted off the Collector's tie pin, which sparked silver in the light. John suddenly couldn’t wait to get away from him. He stepped into the house.
“That’s the spirit,” the Collector said. “Remember, you have one chance to bring me something. No wrong items. I despise guessing.” Drawing out the last word like an expletive, the Collector stepped away, and swung the door shut behind him.
John was inside.