Things come back, gradually.
She wakes up one night screaming and Allen has to stay up with her for hours. She never does go back to sleep that night, and it takes several days for her to gather herself enough to tell him what it was she saw.
A soldier.
A prison.
A mob.
Next she dreams of Jajuka.
In the prison, bringing her food and whispering jokes and holding her while she cried against his soft fur.
Held down by the mob as strange men dragged her away.
Taking a snail from her hands...he is smaller in this dream, or she is bigger. She doesn't have to crane her neck so far to see his face.
When the next round of dreams hit—
dark rooms full of scientists and needles
cold fluid through her veins
pain, darkness, pain, screaming
—the thought of Jajuka keeps her from going completely mad.
Allen does what he can, but he wasn't there. She knows he wishes he had been, but he wasn't. He doesn't know. Jajuka knew. He was there. He loved her when nobody loved her. He tried to protect her when everybody else was trying to use her. Jajuka knew. And so even now, his memory keeps her sane. She imagines his voice calling her name, and it keeps her...what? Herself?
Allen knows something he isn't telling her.
A dimly lit room.
Wine glasses.
A startled face.
This is the dream that haunts her longest, the one she fights to have again and again. It seems important, so important, yet she doesn't know where the room is or who the man is. Somehow she doesn't think he knows who she is, either.
They could have been friends.
Two startled faces.
Finally, after dozens of iterations, a name: "Folken Fanel...?"
She wakes up reassured that she isn't slipping into unreality. She'd seen the eldest prince of Fanelia once, in a procession. Even as a young girl, she remembered thinking him a striking figure. And she knows his brother now, Van Fanel. He's one of Allen's friends from the war.
Strange, though, dreaming about Folken Fanel after all those years. Did he always have that tattoo in the shape of a tear, or did that come with the dream, symbolizing...what?
She decides, rather uneasily, that it's probably nothing.
She doesn't even like wine.