Fiddler's Went A'Courtin'
a Sandman story written for Demoerin in the Yuletide 2007 ficathon
by Merlin Missy
Copyright 2008
PG
Hoom.
Gilbert incarnates and walks amongst his own foliage, a feat entirely unremarkable here in the Dreaming, but which nonetheless upsets the waking minds of those who visit his verdant, quiet self.
He has no complaints. Lord Morpheus has returned to his domain, and as was only right, Fiddler's Green returned to the Dreaming, once again to be left to the beck and call of the dreamers. Soldiers, sailors, and those who fancied themselves the same, all come to him when the night winds are sweet, or when his Lord is merciful. Silence, broken only by the occasional chirp of a welcome bird, is his gift, along with the refreshing breeze, the scents of hibiscus and honeysuckle.
In days past, Gilbert attempted to reconfigure himself to match the songs sung of himself, but he got confused, and the beer was all pretty and the girls were all free, and his dreamers woke flustered instead of rested.
Cool trees. Brisk air. A brook babbling nearby. Simple.
Less simple.
He configures her face, fleetingly, in the eddies of his brook, and then again in the smoky wisps of clouds overhead. Beside his feet, he incarnates a single rose bush. Life as an occasionally anthropomorphic personification of an imaginary land means not having a particularly subtle subconscious.
It isn't as if he doesn't know of Desire. It comes to visit the Dreaming all the time to pester Lord Morpheus. But Gilbert knows the dangers, knows Dream's creations ought not to wade too deeply in his sibling's waters. The Corinthian is proof enough of that.
Hoom.
Night has fallen in the world, in the place Rose Walker calls home. Her dreams have always been oddly-shaped. Gilbert has known this ever since she first set foot in the house and her mind opened like petals that first night.
"Love" is not the word he would use. "Enchanted" fits his mood and temperament far better.
Rose dreams.
She is a little girl, orphaned and alone, living with her spinster aunts in a great, rambling house. Rose lives there for months, unliked and unlikable, hard with her schoolmates and lying to her aunts. There are voices behind the walls, though, speaking and singing nonsense. One day like any other, she climbs the attic stairs and there are two china dolls having tea.
"Hello, Rose," they say, and she tries to scream.
"Have you seen the news?" says the man doll. "Two lost in a fire."
"Two what?" asks the woman doll.
"It doesn't say. Gloves, perhaps."
Dolls, they are dolls, and Rose knows they are also ghosts, the couple who built the great rambling house that was once a school, and she will be here forever with them, trapped behind the walls and speaking mad words to little girls who come through the door.
"Hello, Rose," says another voice. Her uncle, the madman who sometimes hears the dolls. He's come to rescue her. He's.…
"Gilbert?"
He bows, in his odd way. Atop his head is a bowler. The dolls watch him warily. "I would love some tea," he tells the woman doll gravely, and she pours him imaginary tea from her teapot into a chipped teacup.
"I'm dreaming," Rose says, shaking her head.
"You are," Gilbert agrees. He sips the imaginary tea and thanks the dolls. "Would you be inclined to grant an old man the pleasure of your company for a walk?"
Rose nods and takes his arm. They walk past the dolls, who turn back to their burnt and fading newspaper. A tiny china dog grumbles and snores from his basket.
Beyond where the dolls sit at their mad tea party, the slope of the roof creates a bent ceiling in the attic. The faded print of rose wallpaper twines with leaves and vines around them.
"The dolls call this their garden," Gilbert explains. "I like it here."
"Are you a garden?" Rose asks. In her dream – in the Dreaming – it makes perfect sense.
He lowers his head in half a nod. "I am like a garden, yes. I'm a place. An idea. Hoom," he adds, not seeming to know he's said it.
"What am I?"
"You? My dear, you are a girl. A woman, if you'd prefer. You may be immortal now, though if that is the case, you didn't hear it from me." Gilbert bends over and deeply inhales the scent from the paper roses.
Rose kneels down on the floor. Like any dream, this place is both large and small, familiar and vastly separate from anything she's experienced before. The attic ceiling stretches over them like a cathedral's roof, and from within the roses, she hears rustling noises that could be mice in the walls or tigers in the tall grass.
"Nothing will harm you here," he says, reading her thoughts.
"Are you controlling my dream?"
"No. But I can ensure that none of the harmful dreams enter in while we're talking."
"Why are we talking?" This then is the crux of her dream. All Rose's memories of the aunts, the house, the dolls begin to shimmer like a mirage above the hot desert, but she is here in the cool garden that bears her name with a place who is also a man.
"I … Hoom," Gilbert says, and turns away, what could be a blush creeping up the back of his neck. He instead plucks a paper rose from the wall and hands it to her. "This is for you."
Rose takes the flower, but its scent speaks of old, dusty and forgotten rooms, stale air and mouse shit and clothes gone to moths. "Thank you," she says anyway.
The paper pricks her. The pain makes her gasp and she pulls her hand away, but though the thorn has plunged deep through her flesh, there is no blood. "I don't bleed," she says rationally. "I don't have a heart."
Gilbert watches her sadly. "Of course. I knew. But I'd hoped." He takes the flower back from her gently before it can hurt her again, and breathes in the scent again. "I wish you could smell these. I modeled the scent from the roses that grew on the palace grounds at Tusfun."
"Thank you," Rose says again.
Gilbert removes a package from deep within his pocket and hands it to her. The box is wrapped in gold foil with a stiff crimson bow. When Rose unwraps it, she finds a dozen perfect chocolate morsels inside. "I was less certain of these," he says apologetically, as she places one in her mouth.
The candy tastes like her first full candy bar, the one she didn't have to share with anyone and gave her a stomachache. The second piece tastes like her first glass of liquor, hot and burning and raw down her throat. The third tastes like her first kiss, stale bubblegum and Pepsi in his mouth, french-fries in hers.
She closes the box. "Gilbert, why?"
"Because you should be courted properly," he says in his grave, polite fashion. "And all the songs I know these days are the songs of ended wars and lost seas."
"Sing me a song of ended wars," Rose says, and Gilbert clears his throat.
She doesn't recognize the language, but the meaning and the longing shine through like a star hidden beneath a sheet: a home never before seen, a peace never before known, death.
When he finishes, she knows she should be weeping, but there is nothing inside her. Not sorrow, not longing, just the echoes of someone else's desires.
"I'm sorry," she says. Rose closes her eyes and presses her lips against his rough cheek.
"I know," Gilbert says. "I wish you only joy." He gives her the rose again. "I'm afraid I can't remove the thorns."
"No," she agrees. "I'll be careful."
They walk, not touching, back to where the dolls are having their crazy conversation, and then she is alone with the dolls and the dog. Rose sits at the table, placing the paper rose beside her cup, and she takes a deep drink of pretend tea and listens as the man doll reads the newspaper.
Gilbert wanders the pathways of his own form, unhappy and tired.
Hoom.
Desire appears beside him, smiling devilishly. "And what are your intentions towards my granddaughter?"
Fiddler's Green stareds at the Endless. "None of yours," he says eventually, and discorporates, leaving it alone in the peaceful solitude of his forests.
The fourth piece tastes like blood, the fifth like ash. The sixth tastes of fish scales, the seventh of earth, the eighth of rare steak. The ninth piece tastes like the color blue. The tenth tastes of the first cherries in Spring. The eleventh tastes like rain.
The last piece tastes like the scent of her baby's hair the morning Rose gives birth, and her heart beats in joy.