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When Hal gets home, after he checks on Misha and spends a whole lot of time scrubbing himself clean, he collapses in bed and does not dream of the sewers or the stage or the battlefield.
He dreams of Bolaire, which might be worse.
They had an argument once—Bolaire would call it a spirited debate, because he does shy from conflict with Hal in his own odd way—about one of their usual topics. The difference between art and artifice, whether beauty could truly be found in anything, whether all people had the potential for goodness somewhere down deep inside, those were debates.
This was an argument, started over something small. Their repartee shifted out of Hal’s hands, bubbled up and spilled over, and only once they said farewell did Hal fully realize his words had been meant to hurt Bolaire. He does not like to think of himself as a man who purposefully hurts his friends.
He dreams of that day, sitting at the pretty little wrought-iron table with Bolaire, drinking scalding little cups of coffee—but in the dream Hal has an array of daggers instead of a plate sitting before him, and Bolaire has what at first glance looks like a red chrysanthemum pinned to his shirt front.
It isn’t, of course, but at the start of the dream he can pretend. And it’s not the argument they had, back on that summer afternoon.
“I was not into it,” Hal says, glaring.
“Of course not,” Dream-Bolaire coos, which is annoying.
Hal grumbles, “Don't agree with me.”
And he picks up one of the daggers with the strange certainty of dreams, and flicks it to land with a sick thock sound, another petal added to the ruin of Bolaire’s chest.
“There,” Dream-Bolaire says fondly, as blood wells up and spills over the fabric of his shirt as if it’s always been there, waiting for Hal to see the stain. “Doesn’t that feel better?”
“No,” Hal denies, loud enough to wake himself up. He blinks up at the ceiling, numb all the way through.
---
It really wasn’t arousing, is the thing. It was physical, awfully so, the way the entire fight had been. Hal has never enjoyed fighting the way some people do. He doesn’t take the same satisfaction from seeing how much damage he can do.
The trust, brutal and clear as it was, is the thing he can’t stop thinking about. Was it real? Was it true? Some things are truer than true, realer than real; Hal decides to believe that Bolaire trusts him. Well, that Bolaire trusts his idea of him.
It was cold, and the smell was terrible, and the act of killing didn’t turn him on. The trust...
The mind is a tricky thing. Hal’s mind loves symbolism more than most, prefers narratives over realities, and Hal’s mind pipes up to occasionally posit that a bit of killing between friends might not be that bad as long as it means something. It pipes up at inconvenient times: while Hal is charming a merchant into leaving his cart unguarded, while Hal is trying to soothe the ragged tempers of his players, while he’s dreaming.
“It cannot possibly be that hard for you to admit—”
“You don't know what you're talking about.” The Grey Library looms around him, the shelves tall enough to cast shadows Hal could drown in.
Dream-Bolaire is sitting at a reading table with books spread out around him, leaning his chin on one hand while he uses the other to page slowly through the exact book Hal couldn’t find. His gloved fingertips trace letters too muddled for Hal to read. They fade as his fingers pass over them, becoming as light as the writing on the back of the mask. “Darling, I only mean that it's rather obvious—”
“You don't know what you're talking about.” Hal turns back to the shelves, where the spines of the books swim before his eyes. Every time he tries to pull one, it slips through his fingers like smoke.
“Don’t be jealous,” Dream-Bolaire pouts. “You are far more interesting than the things I was made to do.”
And the problem is, Hal wants to believe that too.
When he looks back at Dream-Bolaire all of the books are gone, not one scrap of paper remaining. The other man is smiling, unearthly but gentle, and there’s a shortsword laying conveniently on the table before him. Hal picks it up.
This time the blood that pours out of him is too thin, watery and black. It’s ink, staining the table and Bolaire’s silks and Hal’s fingers where they’re wrapped around the hilt of the sword. It’s blood, for a creature like Bolaire, all the stories he tells himself dripping out of the body he’s stolen.
And then Hal is staring at the blurry surface of his desk with a sore neck, very aware that he is too old to fall asleep in his study without consequence. And he feels...
---
Bolaire loves like it’s a seam ripper. Like love itself is a thing that can go straight through, cut away everything to find skin, the layers of life be damned. Hal doesn’t know what to do with that yet, because the layers matter a great deal to him.
Bolaire’s actions and his words have a nasty habit of not lining up. He says his cards are on the table when they aren’t. He says he has no more secrets before revealing the next one. He says he needs Hal’s help, in the depths of the sewers, when he must be capable of changing bodies on his own. It had been too chaotic to think of at the moment, but it’s a truth Hal can’t outrun.
He could see it as sweet, if he looks at it sideways. He could cast Bolaire as the wounded party, a wanderer in the dark, reaching out a hand with a hopeful plea. Hal has always been weak to please help me. Or the scene could take a darker turn, something halfway to seductive, Bolaire lonely and yearning and wanting an accomplice for his bloody work, coaxing Hal down a road paved with gentle words and false vulnerability.
Bolaire would prefer the first option, undoubtedly. Hal hasn’t decided what the truth is yet.
---
Hal has had this kind of dream before.
The candles glitter in their mirrored shells, casting light up to the stage. Hal has stepped out of the set, crossing close enough to the audience to almost feel the warmth of the footlights. He’s mid-soliloquy when the dream begins. It's an older play, a love story between a priest and a criminal posing as a divine messenger.
“... are in turns more animal and more celestial than we dare to imagine,” Hal is saying, his voice ringing up through the theater, warm and carrying and realer-than-real. The prop weapon in his hands catches the light like a falling star, the silver-leaf on the spearhead almost too bright to look at. “What of my heart, then? Is it a thing of blood and muscle, moved only by bodily instinct?”
There is a hush in the theater, the sort of silence he used to long for—as if the whole world has gone quiet to hear him speak. There is a spark, beyond the dazzling light of the candles; a face in the front row, upturned to look at him.
“Is it something else?” Hal asks, and he should turn his face up into the spotlight, so the thunderous crash of realization can fall on his character. He should be choked, near to weeping, by the terrible wonder of love.
The theater is completely silent. Only one face looks up to meet his, blue fire sharp in the dark.
“Is there a difference?” Hal calls down to Bolaire, throwing out the lines and completely disregarding his blocking, aching inside. “Does the difference matter?”
The dream is silent. Hal knows, somewhere deep inside, that whatever answer Bolaire gave him for such questions would be a lie. Hal steps past the footlights, balanced on the edge of the stage. It seems like a very long way down to where Bolaire sits.
The words return then: “Would you love me, were I only a man?” Hal demands, so softly. “If I cast my hand into the fire and it burned me, if I turned my eyes to the sun and it struck me blind, if my heart were only an animal thing, would you love me?”
“You like killing me. It feels like justice,” the only member of Hal’s audience calls up to him.
It doesn’t feel like justice, didn’t feel like justice; that’s just what his dreaming mind believes Bolaire would try first. Bolaire always acts as if Hal is a better man than he actually is.
“It doesn’t,” Hal admits, raw and pained, sweating off his stage makeup. The shaft of the spear goes weightier in his hands, no longer hollow. The silver vanishes from the tip, as does the star-bright glow; it’s steel, it wouldn’t shine like that. He likes killing Bolaire because it’s satisfying.
The mask doesn’t smile, but a gloved hand lifts like it can catch Hal’s tears in its severed fingers. Hal can see the wide wound in the body’s chest, the bootprint beside it where he had kicked the corpse away.
“Where’s the harm?” he asks.
Hal swallows and lunges, tumbling off of the stage, and wakes up just as the spear punches through Bolaire’s chest and the chair behind it.
He puts a hand over his face and groans.