"In the Forests of the Night"
By December21st
Fandom: Lost Girl
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Bo/Dyson
Warnings: Spoilers through the end of Season 3. Temporary character death. Style of ending may not feel complete.
Summary: When Dyson sleeps as a wolf, he dreams of forests. Post-3x13 "Those Who Wander" story.
When Dyson sleeps as a wolf, he dreams of forests. Unending woodlands covering entire continents, stopped only by the crash of ocean waves. Squirrels chatter from leafy boughs overhead; tiny starlings briefly pepper the sky before settling back into the forest canopy; deer flit though the underbrush, skittish even before they catch his scent on the breeze. On rare occasions, he dreams of other shifters in the woods with him; often wolves like himself, but over the years he's met a raven, laughing at him (in the way of ravens) from its perch in a pine tree; brought a freshly-killed rabbit to a family of bobcats with four mewling kittens; and once he crossed paths with a grizzly bear who yawned sleepily in greeting from a sunny boulder. He can smell that they're Fae, but in the forests of his dreams there's no Light and Dark, just a sense of kinship between shifters that's absent in the waking world.
"It's beautiful," Bo observes, her face turned away from him to watch the sun set behind the rolling hills covered in fir and aspen. Her form is a silhouette against the sun, and Dyson can only see her back. He wants to reach out to her, to cradle her face in his hands and tell her how much he's missed her, but in all the years he's been dreaming of these forests, he's never before changed forms - he's never seen the need - and he doesn't seem able to do it now, so he can only nuzzle her leg and whimper softly. They stand watching the sun disappear, her hand resting atop his head, fingers softly stroking his fur. When the last rays of sunlight have disappeared, he steps forward and looks up towards her face, but she's just not there anymore.
When he wakes up, Dyson the wolf looks around, almost expecting to see the forest, to see Bo, missing them both. He's alone in his loft, so he shifts back into his human form. He grabs the crutches stuffed halfway under the bed and, with their aid, struggles to his feet. It's been eight months since first responders pulled him and Tamsin out of the wreckage of her pickup truck. The doctors had said that it was a miracle that either one of them had survived, much less both. Since then, he's endured eight months of human medical attempts to repair his shattered spine; eight months of the best Fae healing that Hale and Trick could find; eight months of taxing his own enhanced healing abilities to their very limits so that he can walk with crutches instead of being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his very long life. These days, he can only run in his dreams.
The next night, he follows a meandering stream through the forest until it spills over a rock outcropping into a deep pool. Even though her face is turned away, Dyson immediately identifies the woman swimming naked in the water as Bo. He recognizes flow of her movements; her body language as unique as her scent and just as familiar to him.
"Come on in, the water's fine," Bo calls out, laughter in her voice, her wet hair plastered to her head, hiding her face as she swims away from him. He stands at the edge of the rock outcropping, shifting his forepaws as he judges the jump, not a strong swimmer in his lupine form, but eager to be reunited with Bo again no matter how awkward the journey. When his head breaks the surface of the water, he's a man, not able to see in the dark nearly as well in this form and barely able to see Bo at all, standing in the shadow of the waterfall. He swims to her side, grateful that he's able to manage something more graceful than a dog paddle.
"I've missed you," Dyson tells her, but she looks away, out towards the forest beyond the pond. "We all do." She'd disappeared the same day as his accident, and nobody, not even Trick, had been able to figure out where she'd gone. Dyson suspects that there's something Trick isn't telling him, but he hasn't been able to wheedle that information out of the barkeeper.
"I'm lost, Dyson. I don't know where I've been, or where I am now," Bo worries. He reaches out to touch her shoulder and she tilts her head towards his hand, leaning in to the contact. He'd feared that she would be cold, a bean nighe, a Fae whose appearance portends bad news about the person whose image she reflects, but she's warm and alive. "I found a way to get here, from where I've been, but I don't even know where here is. I just knew that you'd be here. Where are we ..." As she asks, she turns to face him, and Dyson is left with his hand outstretched in midair, reaching for the waterfall. Bo's gone, but he answers anyhow.
"It's just a dream," he informs the air. He doesn't know if he believes it.
Having lunch with Kenzi the next day, Dyson wonders if he should let Bo's friend (BFF, he can almost hear Kenzi correcting him, making sure he understands the importance of the distinction) know about the dreams. Kenzi's still living in the Clubhouse, the shack she shared with Bo, hanging on to some sort of hope that Bo will just reappear some day, with a funny story about where she's been all this time. Technically, she lives there alone, but Dyson's willing to bet that Hale stays there with Kenzi more nights than not.
In the end, he tells her. Dyson's not sure how healthy her conviction that Bo's coming back is, but he's not exactly in a position to criticize. There were some days, after Bo stayed missing and the extent of his own injuries was clear, when Kenzi's quirky, indomitable strength and unwavering faith - in him, in Bo, in the universe's abilities to right its own wrongs - was the only thing that kept him going. She listens to his stories of the forest, and just smiles and says to tell Bo "hey" the next time he sees her.
When he returns to the forest the following night, he finds bare footprints with the barest hint of Bo's scent in the sand next to the pond with the waterfall. They disappear into the water, and though he follows the stream through the woods for miles, nose to the ground, he doesn't find any other sign of her.
Dyson's next several days are filled with nothing but paperwork. The new Ash is, to the very depths of her soul, a bureaucrat. She's a stickler for forms and procedure, but also one of the most brilliant diplomats that Dyson's ever met. It took some time, but she somehow managed to reverse the effects of the Morrigan's anti-human crusade so that humans in their region now have more rights than they did even when Hale was the Ash. Kenzi is safe as a claimed human, although Trick had return from Scotland to claim her after Bo had been missing too long. If Lauren ever reappears, she will be welcomed as an ally who worked against Dr. Taft from within his organization, not as a traitor to the Fae. Once he was able, Dyson made sure that everyone knew how Lauren had saved his life and made Taft vulnerable. It was the least he could do.
When he gets home after hours of staring at a computer screen - the new Ash is, at least, a proponent of modern technologies - he's too tired to even change his form, and he sleeps as a man, with erratic, senseless dreams mixing his past and present, and his conscious and subconscious. One night, Bo and Tasmin, wearing dresses made from newspaper, dance to the Bee Gees at Henry II's court, trying to persuade him to join them, but he's afraid that if he does, he will miss the delivery of his new waffle iron. That dream he's pretty sure wasn't real.
The dream with Tamsin reminds Dyson that he hasn't visited her for a while. After his recent experiences, Dyson would rather not spend any more time in a hospital than strictly necessary, but Tamsin doesn't have anyone else. She's still in a human hospital after all these months. Dyson doesn't know why she hasn't been moved to the Dark Fae compound; his best guess is that the Morrigan can't be bothered to look after Tamsin, some form of petty revenge. So he comes to the human hospital, and talks to the comatose woman hanging on to life by a thread as the machines keeping her alive cheep steadily.
The next night that he visits the forest, it's in ashes. Acres upon acres of lifeless wasteland, only the charred skeletons of the largest trees still standing amid the ruins of a once green and verdant wilderness, now nothing but blackened stumps covered in a fine gray powder. The ashes are cold, so this must have happened days ago. He makes his way to the streambed, now dry and lifeless, and follows it upstream to the waterfall where he met Bo. The waterfall is dry, and the pond is gone now too, boiled away by the heat of the fire. In the shelter of the overhang, he finds the bodies of two wolves, a male and a female. The way they were huddled together as the heat overwhelmed them makes him think that they were mates. Dyson pauses a moment to pay his respects, then returns to the colorless world of the forest, finding it difficult to breathe as the ash settles in his lungs.
He finds fresh footprints in the ash upstream, although all he can smell is soot and not the person that made them. Dyson follows them uphill for a distance, until he sees a familiar figure on the hilltop. He barks, breaking into a run as he nears her, bounding through the charred remains of tenacious plant life. He notices that she doesn't turn to face him, but seems to be looking at the hills miles away where the forest is still green.
As Dyson takes his last few steps approaching Bo, he wills himself into his two-legged form, almost surprised that it works. Bo spins around and, before he can even see her face, she's hugging him, he body pressed into his to maximize the contact between them. "I was afraid you were dead," Bo chides him, and he can feel her tears falling on the back of his neck. They're both fully clothed, which Dyson assumes is because it's the sort of thing that makes sense in a dream.
"Hey, hey, it's okay," he reassures her, squeezing her just a little tighter. "I'm fine."
They stand that way for a time, not moving, just being together. Eventually, Bo shifts her weight from one foot to the other. "I think ... I can't look at you," Bo informs him, her tone serious and analytical. "When I try, I go back to that other place."
"Where is it? Where are you when you're not here?" It feels strange to Dyson to be holding a conversation without looking at one another.
"I don't know. It's big and dark, and there are lots of windows. No walls or doors or anything, just all kinds of windows hanging in mid-air. The windows show what's going on in the real world, or in other realms, and sometimes I can get them to show me people and places I want to see. And there's this one window that I can use to find you when you're in this forest that I've been able to jimmy open, and I can go through it to come here. Where are we, Dyson?"
"We're in my dreams," Dyson replies simply.
"Oh." Bo's quiet for a time. "What happened here, this was my fault," Bo confesses. "A few nights ago, my father found out that I was sneaking out to come here. He was very, very angry, Dyson. He burned the forest. I don't think he knows that I'm meeting you here, he just didn't like it when I didn't do as I was told."
"He doesn't know you very well, does he?"
"I figured, he wasn't there for my rebellious teenage years when I was growing up, I should really give him some idea of what he missed out on."
"So you decided to sneak out the window to meet a boy to give him the true teenage daughter experience?"
"Even when I was a teenager, I didn't do as I was told. So if he thinks I'll be a good little girl that he can bend to his will and make me like him, he's got a lot to learn. I know who I am. I'm ..." Bo pauses, struggling to come up with the best way to describe herself.
"You're Bo." Dyson finishes for her, the name encompassing everything he loves about her.
"That's right," Bo affirms, as if he's made her point precisely. They stand awkwardly for a few moments, no longer hugging, not talking, yet not willing to draw away from one another for fear that Bo will vanish.
"I want to try something," she tells him. "I want you to close your eyes. And then I'm going to look at you, to look at your face. If I'm right, that should transport me back to the window place."
Dyson smiles at the practicality of her experiment. "Very scientific."
"Hey, I picked up a few things when I was dating Lauren," Bo explains pertly. "Are your eyes closed?"
Dyson closes his eyes. "They're closed."
He feels her step away from him. A moment passes, and Bo exclaims "I'm still here! It's not when I look at you!" Her hand runs through his beard along his cheek, back to the scruff of his neck, and she pulls him forward into a kiss. His eyes pop open in surprise, but there's nothing for him to see. Bo's gone, the taste of her still on his lips, her scent lingering in the air amid the smell of burnt timber.
The next evening at the Dal, he lets Trick know about the dreams. He doesn't want to, afraid that Trick will tell him that the dreams are just dreams, his subconscious' attempt to reunite him with his mate. But Trick doesn't tell him that. He just looks at Dyson with sorrowful eyes and promises to look into it. Bo's disappearance has taken a heavy toll on the former Blood King, and countless evenings trying to find any clue to his granddaughter's whereabouts, reading fading tomes and casting physically taxing incantations was starting to wear on him. He looks tired, Dyson thinks. He wishes there were something he could do to bring Bo home again.
In the forest that night, it's raining. Not the light drizzle that he's often experienced, but a real downpour, dulling all of his senses and drenching his fur. The low, dark clouds, stretching across the horizon, have covered the moon, making it impossible to see more than a few yards even with his improved night vision. The creek by the waterfall is overflowing its bed, the water looking angry and lethal as it surges through the forest, black with ash. If Bo is here anywhere, he's not going to be able to find her in this weather.
When he wakes in the morning, he almost expects his fur to still be wet, but it's dry and smells of the dust of his loft, nothing more. It makes him wonder again if these are just dreams. Dyson transforms, struggles to his feet, and goes through another day of humdrum routine. Given how much he's looking forward to going to bed that night, it occurs to him that he's probably depressed. If the dreams turn out to be nothing, he should probably find someone to talk to, someone like that police psychologist, but Fae. They'll probably advise him to take a lover, or find a new hobby, or something like that. Neither option sounds particularly appealing. But he misses Bo, and accepting that she's probably dead is a pain that he's not ready to face yet.
Dyson arrives in the forest just as the sun is beginning to set. Seedlings have started to grow in the blighted area, optimistic green leaves poking up through the ash. The ground and ash are still sodden with water after last night's heavy rainfall. In the real world, it would take months or years for the land to start recovering from such sweeping devastation, but here the land has its own ideas, not tamed by science and what is possible. An eagle soars overhead, screaming at him before turning and heading back towards the far-off green hills that escaped the wrath of Bo's father. He lopes eagerly through the new beginnings of what may someday become a copse of trees, looking for a decent-sized clearing. Dyson's nowhere near the waterfall, but if Bo is following him into his dreams, that shouldn't matter. He finds what must have once been a meadow, a flat stretch of land with no tree stumps or other signs of burned plants.
He wills himself into his two-legged form, the process easier now that he understands how it works in this place. Dyson notes that he's clothed again, and leans against the husk of a dead tree on the edge of the former meadow, waiting, amused by the modesty of his dreams.
Some twenty minutes later, hands wrap over Dyson's eyes from behind. "Guess who!" Bo's voice greets him. He resists the temptation to turn around, instead keeping his eyes on the empty land in front of him.
"You have any trouble getting away?" Dyson inquires, as he feels Bo rest her head against his back.
"Nope," she asserts. "The old man is clueless. I let him catch me watching ... well, let's just say I was watching the Playboy channel and he thought that's what I was hiding. So now he's leaving me to my own, um, entertainments."
"Bo, are you ...feeding?" Dyson wonders, concerned.
"No, I'm not. It's weird, I'm never hungry, not in that place. And not regular food hungry either. And it's been ...how long since my father took me there?"
"Eight months and seventeen days."
"Has it been that long?" Bo sounds amazed.
"It feels like a hundred years." Dyson admits. Bo is quiet for a moment, and he hopes he hasn't made her uncomfortable.
"I need you to do me a favor." Bo asks hesitantly.
"Anything." He means it.
"I finally found Lauren yesterday. She's being held by some of Taft's former people in a research center in the middle of Alaska. Can you get her back for me?"
"Of course." Even if he wasn't willing to do whatever Bo wanted, he'd come to think of the good doctor as a friend. "I'll make sure she's safe as soon as possible." Bo doesn't need to know that he's in no shape to mount a rescue mission personally, he can make sure that it gets done, and done right.
Bo gives him as many details as she could discover by watching Lauren through a window in her father's realm. They talk idly for some time, Dyson sitting cross-legged on the ground as Bo leans against his back, both watching occasional clouds skitter across the night sky. Dyson updates Bo on everyone else she wants to know about: Kenzi (Bo laughs when Dyson passes along her "hey") and Hale, Trick, and Tamsin. That Aife is missing again. Dyson reports on the new Ash and her penchant for paperwork. It's all very comfortable, two old friends getting caught up.
When the time comes for them to go their separate ways, Bo warns Dyson that they better not meet for a while, lest her father become suspicious. She insists that they verify their latest theory, that Bo doesn't vanish until Dyson looks at her face. This time, the theory holds sound.
In the morning, Dyson leaves a message for an old acquaintance, the leader of a small pack of mercenary wolf-shifters that he'd fought alongside centuries ago. They specialize in working for individuals or small corporations in cold climates, disdaining the politics of either countries or large corporations at war. He knows they can be out of contact for months at a time, but hopes that isn't the case this time.
His hope is validated when the mercenary leader contacts him three days later, and all necessary arrangements are made. The next time Dyson talks to him, Lauren is on a flight home, and the other wolf informs Dyson that he was actually impressed with the doctor. It seemed that she had found a way of synthesizing cyanide out of almonds she'd stolen from the kitchen, and had been regularly dosing her captors with it whenever she could. Their way was faster, of course, and there was a tricky bit with the guards (Dyson can practically hear him grinning on the other side of the phone), but she would have rescued herself eventually.
The night of Lauren's welcome home party, Dyson changes into a wolf before he goes to sleep, settling down on top of the covers, feeling content as he drift off. The first thing he sees in the forest is a tangle of wild blackberry bushes nearly surrounding a small clearing. The fruit on the bushes is still green, but the bushes themselves are nearly as tall as Dyson is himself when he's a man. Beyond the clearing, most of the trees have grown taller than that, skinny boughs full of leaves. Dyson can sense the life in the new forest. Bees happily buzz around the blossoms on the blackberry bushes while a garter snake slithers out from below. A squirrel chatters angrily in the distance. It's been no more than two weeks since the woods were consumed by fire, and it's already well on its way to full recovery.
He starts exploring, reveling in the new life of the forest. Dyson's not just a wolf, and the man in him likes being around people, and having friends that he spends time with regularly. But he's not just a man either, and the wolf in him needs this, needs to be connected with nature on a primal level. He finds a river tumbling over a bed of smooth stones, too wide to cross, and spots several fish struggling upstream. He barks at them, because the wolf he is now wants to. He finds a ravine, half-covered in ivy, that smells like a raccoon stayed there two or three nights ago. He finds a cave that cuts deep into a hillside, moss making the entrance slippery, mushrooms growing up one wall.
When he comes out of the cave, Bo is waiting for him, her back to the cave so he can't see her face. He butts the back of her leg with his muzzle, barking at her.
"Why, hello there!" she laughs. Bo squats down and ruffles her hand through his fur. "Love what you've done with the place."
He shifts, almost reluctantly, to talk to her. "It's all the ash. Very rich, good for the soil."
"Sometimes things have to die to come back stronger," Bo agrees philosophically. "And sometimes they don't. I saw that you got Lauren back, Dyson. Thank you. Thank you so much. I owe you."
"You don't owe me anything," Dyson argues. He's wrapped his arms around her from behind, being careful not to look at her face. This, the woman he loves in his arms, this is what he wants more than anything in the world. In either world.
He wakes up with Bo's words echoing in his memories, certain of what he must do that day, that what Tamsin's sorority friends once told him after the accident works the way he thinks it does. Dyson visits Tamsin again at the hospital; there is no more change in her condition today than there was in the last six months. Lying on the hospital bed, she looks more like a corpse than some corpses Dyson's seen, her eyes sunken, her hair thinning to nearly bald, her limbs spindly and brittle-looking. He takes stock of the machine that's breathing for her, the tubes that are feeding her, the monitoring equipment that makes sure nothing ever changes.
He makes sure the door is closed, and sits on the edge of Tamsin's bed, speaking softly. "I'm sorry. I hope this is the right thing to do, but I know you wouldn't want to stay like this. Sometimes things have to die to come back stronger."
Dyson approaches the machine that's breathing for her, feeling the awkwardness of his crutches as he does, conscious of how artificial it all is after his time in the forest. He leans to one side of the machine, putting all of his weight on one crutch as his eyes flash yellow and his other hand distorts and becomes longer, his trim fingernails becoming sharp and deadly claws. He reaches out and flicks his wrist and the machine's power cable splits in two. In the time it takes him to stand upright again, nothing happens. Then the monitors are all screaming, alerting the humans that something has gone wrong. He doesn't know what to expect, but over the alarms, Dyson can hear hoofbeats approaching, and then there's a horse there, rearing and spreading its wings, even though there isn't room for it in the tiny hospital room. A woman, dressed more like a biker than an angel, dismounts from the horse and calms it, muttering gently in its ear.
"She smells a wolf," the woman explains and the horse whinnies, as Dyson tries to show it that he means it no harm by backing away and showing it his palms. She goes over to Tasmin and, using the only hand she has, starts unhooking sensors and feeding tubes. Tamsin opens abruptly her eyes, looking first at the woman, then at Dyson. Once she's unfettered, Tamsin cautiously gets to her feet and approaches Dyson. "You do this to me, wolf?"
"I did," he replies. No explanations will make any difference now.
"Thank you." Tamsin kisses him chastely on the cheek, then mounts the winged horse behind the other woman. The horse starts moving again, galloping through the wall as though it wasn't there. Dyson can hear the hoofbeats fade into the distance as a nurse bursts into the room in response to the alarms. He doesn't know if it took this long because the response time at the hospital is really terrible, or if some Fae magics warped his sense of time, allowing everything he just experienced to happen in mere moments.
"Where is she?" the nurse demands, looking around as though expecting to find Tamsin hiding crouched in a corner.
"She rode off into the sunset," Dyson replies truthfully, glancing though the window at the setting sun. He doesn't say anything else, just walks steadily out of the room with the aid of his crutches, and the nurse staring after him in utter confusion.
That evening, as Kenzi kibitzes, he talks to Trick about possible ways to get Bo back from the realm she's trapped in. Kenzi suggests that he just hang on to Bo and bring her out of the dream with him, Nightmare on Elm Street fashion. It's not quite the way that Bo got her out of Baba Yaga's realm, or the way Bo got Dyson out of the Temple in Bo's Dawning, but if it worked on Freddy Krueger, Kenzi reasons that it should work on Bo. Trick has his own ideas - nothing definite, but he has a few ideas involving the use of mirrors and the Wanderer Tarot card that seems to be connected to Bo's father. Trick seems more optimistic than Dyson has seen him in a long time. Dyson paces the floor of Trick's quarters at the Dal, the wolf in him feeling restless and trapped, hating the crutches he has to use and looking forward to the freedom he has from them in his dreams.
A light breeze stirs the leaves of the trees, measurably taller tonight than they were just last night. Dyson finds himself not far from the meadow where Bo told him about Lauren. The grass in the meadow is green and about waist-height, rippling in the breeze like water on a lake. The moon is full and low on the horizon, and the air is warm and smells of pollen. The forest is still working on bringing itself back to life. Dyson sits by a soft bed of moss near the edge of the meadow and waits, his chin on his paws, watching the grass ebb and flow while the sound of nearby cicadas makes the entire scene hypnotically relaxing.
"Dyson," her voice comes from behind the trees, sounding serious. Like something's wrong.
He shifts, willing himself to be in his other shape, his bones twisting and rearranging themselves, his fur disappearing and changing, teeth and claws morphing into something less dangerous and more domestic. As his body changes, he turns around, closing his eyes, making himself even more vulnerable. He's grateful that Bo's not actually trying to hurt him when he feels her small fists pounding against his chest.
"Did you forget to tell me something?" she demands, slowing and then stopping her assault altogether.
"Tamsin died today." he admits, not surprised that Bo is upset, but not sure when she expected him to let her know about it.
"No, I'm not talking about Tamsin. She's getting drunk in what I can only assume is Valhalla with a bunch of Vikings. I'm talking about you." Dyson feels her finger poke him in the middle of the chest.
"You don't need to worry about me."
"I saw you, taking to Trick and Kenzi. Why didn't you tell me you were hurt?" Bo thumps him on the chest for emphasis.
"I didn't want you to worry." He's trying to be disarming, to deflect. She's the one that's in trouble; she needs to be worrying about herself, not about him.
"Well, I am worried, Dyson. Damn it, you need to tell me these things!" Dyson smiles at her intensity. Bo's voice drops, and her voice becomes seductive. "Maybe I can help."
And then she's kissing him, tentatively at first, but with increased ardor, and it's an effort to keep his eyes closed with her lips blazing a path of kisses along his jawline as he places his own lips on any patch of skin he can find.
He hasn't even managed to get her top off before he first feels the euphoric rush of his chi being pulled out of him, and he remembers what Bo looks like when she's feeding like this, her eyes glowing blue and wearing a predatory grin of anticipation. Within moments he feels the tangy adrenalin surge he recognizes from those few times in the past that Bo has had to heal him, but for right now, his only interest is in the very remarkable succubus soon to be naked in his arms.
They make love in the meadow, on a soft bed of moss as they take the time to learn each other's bodies anew. When they are both fully sated, Bo snuggles against Dyson, her back to his chest so that he can open his eyes again, his arms protectively wrapped around her waist and chest. They don't talk, satisfied to lie together and watch the stars in the clear night sky.
When Dyson wakes in the morning, he's alone. He'd unreasonably hoped that Kenzi's cockamamie theory was right, that he'd be able to bring Bo back with him just by hanging on to her. He feels different, better than he has in longer then he can easily remember, which he readily attributes to the events of his dream. Reality be damned, if these are only dreams, he'll take what he can get. Dyson grabs the crutches by his bed almost without thought, but when he gets to his feet, Dyson suddenly realizes that he doesn't need them. He walks across the room, tentatively at first, but there is no pain, no weakness, his legs as sturdy as though he'd never been injured. He runs around his loft, the first lap as a man, the second lap as a wolf, both forms fully capable of speeds their non-Fae equivalents ... could only dream of.
That night at the Dal is friendly chaos. Lauren is clucking over the medical reports she'd compiled that day, calling Dyson's new mobility nothing less than a miracle. Trick advises Dyson that he's managed to concoct an aromatic that will allow Dyson to bring others into his dream with him, and it's not until then that Dyson notices the collection of backpacks and rucksacks in the corner. Trick's bag is overflowing with trinkets and charms, potions and other strange concoctions. Lauren's case smells of the sterility of science equipment, while Hale's rucksack has the business end of two weapons poking out of it, while its bulk suggests it contains more. Kenzi's backpack bears the scent of trail mix and beef jerky.
Dyson looks around the room, at this collection of friends, ready to risk everything to get Bo back. And standing at the doorway, looking wary but very much alive, is Tamsin. He approaches her, giving her a big bear hug.
"It's good to see you," he welcomes her, grinning.
"It's good to be seen," Tamsin admits, allowing herself to smile. The others are looking at her curiously, none of them aware of what happened in her hospital room only the day before. "This looks like a rescue mission. You got room on the team for one more? I have some intel that might help."
"Of course!" Dyson leads Tamsin over to Trick, where she starts briefing them on what she knows.
It's nearly midnight by the time they're gathered in a circle in the middle of Trick's great room, and Dyson prepares to light the incense that will transport them all to the forest of his dreams.
"Is everyone ready?" Dyson looks around the circle to see a series of nods. "Okay, then let's go get back our lost girl."
*** The End ***