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Far off distant noises that sound somewhat like the chatter of a moving carriage echo in her head, but grass surrounds her, she lays in it, candy hair flowing out around her. The bright green of the grass doesn't stain her soft pure white dress. She doesn't wear pure white, not often. The sun shines brightly, the sight of it doesn't hurt her eyes nor does it reflect heat onto her body. There is no carriage, though the distant noises she hears are far more realistic than her reality.
Slowly bringing the top half of her body up, her hair falling down her shoulders. Jam scones vision goes black around her, only for a second.
But a second is long enough. She's pulled to her feet by a hand grabbing her wrist.
She hasn't danced in decades. It's no wonder why though, she has two left feet, she'd always stepped on the feet of the person who fell victim to her poor motor skills and control of her pace. This person doesn't seem to mind that she grips onto their shoulders improperly and avoids stepping on their feet only by a hairs length. Their hands are around her waist, guiding her movements. It's quite awkward actually, because she's holding her arms above her head in order to place her hands on his shoulders, and her head is just at the height of his chest though he seems to be leaning down.
The touch of his hands is nothing more than a tickle, it barely feels as if he's holding her.
A lose thread wraps itself around her feet, around both their feet, she only manages to just escape falling over, but the other doesn't, and they decidedly pull her down with them. She yelps. She's on her hands and knees, now face to face with the stranger as she hovers above him.
"Hello." He says.
"Hi."
Only then does she realise that they seem to be completely tangled in a mess of Golden thread wrapped around their bodies and tied to each of their pinkie fingers.
The man below her has long flowing blond hair, longer than her own, it's sprawled beneath the both of them, and she realises her hands are on top of it at the sides of his head, crushing it into the ground. "I'm not something of a prude, but going from ballroom dancing to being beneath you as you straddle my waist and pull my hair in a matter of seconds, might be too fast." He teases with a lopsided smile.
"Ack-! Sorry!" She rolls off of him and sits to the side.
Her knees pull themselves up to her chest and she wraps her arms around them, burying her face from sight to hide just how red it is. He hasn't made an attempt to move, and is just laying on the ground from what she can see in the side of her view. His crimson eyes look towards her, very blatantly staring at her.
She adverts her gaze in return.
They stay like that for a while.
Jam scone suddenly has the off putting feeling that nothing seems as though it's actually there. Her hands brush through the grass and she doesn't feel any sensation tickling her palm. The sun is bright and should be disorienting, but she stares right at it, and her eyes don't burn. She cant feel her magic running through her, cant cast any spells.
It's an uncomfortable feeling, not having access to your own magic.
She has an odd feeling of familiarity for the man sitting next to her, as if she knows him and just can't place who exactly he is. Her eyes narrow. So do his. It's almost a challenge, as if he's copying her movements and daring her to comment on it.
Jam Scone realises abruptly late they're staring into eachothers eyes. A gut feeling in her makes her want to curl up and die at the fact she's shamelessly looking right at him.
It's not something she's felt since she was fresh out of the oven.
Her freezing in place is unfortunate, because this awkward staring drags out another minute. Jam feels like she can't look away now, and something in her wonders what exactly could be wrong with her face for this cookie to stare at it so intensely for so long.
It all feels like there's something she's forgetting.
Like something about this should be glaringly obvious to her.
He reaches out his hand, brushing a small loose hair from her face. Jam Scone was sure that if she was as fiery as Gold Cheese cookie can be, she'd have burst into flames right now. She couldn't look away from his eyes, drawn in by their scarlet colour and the slightest tint of what Jam Scone recognised as amusement.
The palm of his hand held her cheek and Jam Scone leaned in, following his movements, he leaned closer, and for a second she thought that he might-
"Hgh- ch!" Jam Scone choked.
All of a sudden her windpipe felt like it was being crushed. His hand wrapped around her throat and squeezing the life out of her.
She wheezed, hands scrambling to fight his away from her neck but it was like clawing at metal. He wouldn't let go. Jam tried to push and punch him but he leaned his body weight onto her, crushing her down onto the dirt beneath them.
Rolling to the side didn't work as he was kneeling down onto her chest and she couldn't breathe much less move. Her arms flailed out wildly from their sides. He leaned down against her, hot breathes just barely grazing her ear. "Shh sorry- I'm sorry, it's okay, you'll feel better soon." He promised and Jam could only think get off me you psycho-! but she had no way to fight him off. She tried desperately to call for any semblance of the life powder imbued inside her, to cast anything, but nothing responded.
"I'll join you soon I promise, wait for me in the heavens, when I've killed all of cookiekind I'll see you again."
Jam choked more so than before, wheezing and trying to ask what the fuck he was talking about??
Tears built up in her eyes and she could feel herself getting lightheaded and dizzy. The crushing force on her neck didn't relent as her vision started to darken.
Everything felt like it was far from her grasp and she almost succumbed to unconsciousness before she could suddenly breathe.
She gasp and shot upright. Coughing and wheezing and tears ran down her face as she clutched at her neck.
The cold and hard realisation came to her. She no longer felt her mind numbed nor confused by the allure of a dream, she could think clearly, and yet her mind was the most fragile it had ever been. She sobbed. Her soulmate, that was her soulmate, and he'd been some freak that'd tried strangle her. If he'd thought that dream was reality like Jam Scone did, he would have thought he was killing her.
Suddenly she felt so fragile like any bit of her could crack and break apart. Jam Scone felt as soft as a brownie, like any small touch would completely melt her apart. She was sitting on something soft and nice and could *feel* what was around her. Suddenly she noticed hands on her shoulders, steadying her and soft whispers in her ear. Jam Tart, she was holding her and trying to calm her.
Jam Scones wheezes slowly turned into light coughs as she regained control of her body and leaned against Jam Tart for comfort.
She could still feel the phantom thug of the thread around her finger.
Jam Scone found that sleep disliked her.
She couldn't rest, for two days she'd been kept up by thoughts of what would happen if she met him in their shared dreamscape again. As she rolled over to face the window, light streaming in through the curtains, she tried to reason with herself that there was no way he would be sleeping at 3pm. She could simply turn nocturnal, so they would never see one another again and Jam Scone would be fine.
She was fine. He hadn't hurt her. Even if the dreamscape land doesn't allow magic, it doesn't allow death either, so nothing that happened that day mattered.
Jam Scone just needed her mind to shut up, and her hands to stop shaking. Perhaps she should get another blanket, that must be the issue.
Apon dragging herself over to the cupboard and rooting through it, finding her blanket and laying back down on the bed. She was ridiculously hot. What was she thinking anyway, five blankets is stupid, her room has heating. She screamed into her pillow intending to release some stress, but the only thing that did was make her less tired and now she didn't feel like sleeping at all.
She was exhausted but too restless to actually go to sleep. It felt awful. All she could do was pace around her room. She was going to burn a hole in the candy floor with her back and forth, so she made herself sit down and figured doing some paperwork would be just tiring enough that Jam Scone would finally be able to get some rest. It bored her to pieces within the first four minutes, and Jam Scone found herself reaching for the tart Jam Tart had made her. Distinctly she wondered if it was morally ethical to eat jam tarts when your second in command was a jam tart, but Jam Tart was the one that made it for her, so.
She dug into the delicious pastry and didn't bother with a fork, lifting it up to her mouth and taking bites.
A sudden wave of nausea hit her and it wasn't from the fact she was basically commiting cannibalism.
She felt her eyelids begin to droop and her breathing slow, and Jam Scone didn't know if she was grateful that Jam Tart drugged her to get her to sleep or if she was concerned it occurred to her to do that.
When she opened her eyes again, she was staring at a dazzling sun, beaming down at her.
It's rays did nothing to warm her, and despite the familiar white dress having sleeves, she was cold. She sat up and something in her chest twisted at the sight of the man preparing a picnic in a garden full of roses.
Large overarching candy roses spread out within the landscape, as far as the eye can see there is red flowers blooming. Jam Scone feels a dislike at the colour red, too bright and obtrusive for her. It's dazzling just how familiar this all seems, but her mind is clearer this time, and she understands she's never seen this before. It's a dream, and the man in front of her, Jam Scones soulmate, he cannot hurt her. Not in a dream.
She shakily makes her way up, the dress tight around her legs and making it hard to get up. There's a thug, the man pulls on the thread connecting them and she almost falls face flat onto the ground at the jolt forward. She stumbles but gets herself together and stands steady on her feet.
He's pulling her towards him, both with the smug glint in his eyes and literally with the Golden string tied to them.
She walks towards him but stops a couple feet away. Staring at the table. "We can't actually eat any of this." Is what she says.
He tilts his head at her, like an owl would when stalking prey, and steps closer. Jam Scone refuses to back away. "We can pretend..?" He sounds stupidly amused at his own joke, waiting for her to laugh. She stares at him blankly.
If the moment is a fourth as uncomfortable for him as it is for her, Jam Scone considers it a victory.
He circles around her and Jam Scone bares her teeth at him when his hands land on her shoulders.
He pushes her forwards and onto a chair. She slumps in it, tension coiling away from her shoulders as soon as he let's go.
Jam Scones eyes refuse to leave him as he circles around to his own chair and sits across from her. Her hands go to fiddle with the long sleeves of her white dress.
He leans, arms laying on the table and his head resting on them, eyes looking upwards at her. A blush creeps up her face and distinctly she can sense what he's thinking, as if the thread is communicating to her that he is thinking about how pretty she looks. Her face goes scarlet and she feels incredibly embarrassed, peeking into his thoughts without permission, and though it's a normal soulmate thing, it feels too invasive. Her blush only gets worse at the thought that he could end up hearing her thoughts aswell, and Jam Scone reminds herself not to think of anything weird ever again in case he might hear it. The cookie smiles softly and his features are almost cute, but he almost immediately ruins it by speaking. "Your dress looks beautiful on you, but it might look better covered with splats of your blood."
And immediately she's creeped out again.
Jam Scone may be a dessert, but right now she's as dry as a desert. Who speaks like that. The man who tried to suffocate her to death minutes after meeting her, she supposes. Jam Scone won't lie and say she makes great first impressions, but she hadn't thought they were murder attempt bad.
"It's 4pm in the real world. Why are you sleeping." Jam decides to ask, ignoring his compliment and the weird look he's giving her.
She half expects him to shoot the question right back at her, but he doesn't.
"Since I met you, all I've been doing is dreaming."
She's not amused. Whether this was an attempt at flirting like it looked to be, or if he genuinely meant he was lazing around sleeping, hoping to see her again, Jam Scone found that both of those options were the worse option and she'd rather puff a candy vape than find out which one it actually was.
She leans back in her chair and asks something she thinks is long overdue. "Who are you?" She wants a name.
"Your soulmate." He drawls, all dramatic and over the top.
"As in a name." She clarifys.
He blinks innocently. "You can call me darling," he tells her.
So called Darling flutters his eyelashes at her and looks up at her like a pathetic gumdrop. She sighs. Asking more than twice is just begging, so she gives up on trying to figure out who exactly this is.
"Okay, Darling, isn't there something we should probably talk about?" Being the fact he tried to murder her and now they were sat together in a rose garden in their dreams.
Darling exclaims as if he's forgotten something, "My sincerest apologies, truly, It'd slipped my mind, but I'll start preparing our wedding ceremony as soon as I wake up." He reaches out a hand to touch her hair and she slaps it away with a icey stare.
He's awful keen on playing with her and avoiding any of the obvious questions she has. He brushes his hands off his trousers, almost giving her a saddened look at the rejection. Jam Scone feels slightly pathetic that she hadn't been able to fight off this man from choking her. He looked as crumbley and soft as buttercream.
The food and drink on the table looked appetising but distinctly fake. Too perfect and ordered to be anyone's natural cooking, too thought up.
Jam Scone figured that since it was a dream, it wouldn't harm her or anyone else if she were to have a couple sips of Berry juice.
Jam Scone almost jumped out of her skin when she heard music start playing, from nowhere she could hear it, and figured that darlings brain must have heard this song enough to have it subconsciously memorised. She didn't recognise it awfully well, something kind of slow and sweet sounding-
She's dragged up on her feet and he's pulling her along with him. He's readjusting them, preparing her to dance with him, but she shoves him off. He doesn't seem any sort of angry, more so disappointed. He draws closer to her again, but the music's stopped and he's not reaching in to grab her hand for a waltz, he takes her face in his hand and it burns. The all too familiar string grip of his hand makes her jaw feel as though it's going to break apart like breadsticks any moment.
And though his features look gentle and kind, he is grinning too cruelly for this to be anything but sadistic pleasure.
"I don't enjoy hurting you," he says, lowly, "I'm sorry,"
"You're smiling-!"
"Because I can feel you, as if you're really here with me and not just in this dream." He whispers.
He leans closer and their faces are inches apart when she punches him, and gasps awake.
Dream ruined by the dreadful phantom pain in her chin, and by the fact that she can sense again his thoughts, and he is happy.
Content with their interaction in ways she isn't. It burns her.