The echoes of a large hall and the cloying smell of burning incense hit her before anything else. Sansa swore she could have been blind in addition to being in a different world, and she'd still be able to identify a sept when she was in one.
"Traditional cathedrals all have the same basic axis layout," Arthur was saying, his voice floating over the pews, "but when you get into the Gothic structure, you start to see things like flying buttresses on the outside, as well as a certain design style. Especially on the west front and the towers. There's a lighter feel than with prior engineering—thinner walls, larger windows…" He craned his neck as he talked, admiring the arched ceiling.
There were no worshippers here to assault the Seven with their pleas, Sansa noticed, and it put her oddly on edge. But then again, this wasn't the home of the Seven, nevermind the Old Gods. She spotted a statue of a man, his chest flayed open, displaying his heart engulfed in flames. His stone face was crafted to look rapturously serene, and she tried not to judge. "Because the night is dark and full of terrors," she whispered to herself. Who was she to decide what got people through it best?
She turned to see Arthur strolling casually along the center aisle, talking quietly about the history of the ceiling mosaics, although no one was listening. Behind her, though, Sam and Dean were another story.
Backs together, guns drawn, their faces were tenser than she'd ever seen them. Their eyes were everywhere at once, and Dean's mouth was a hard slash across his face as he scanned for danger and didn't stop moving. Like a dance, Sam stayed with him, guarding his back without being asked.
"Where the hell are we?"
"Don't know," Sam clipped.
"You see anything?" Dean shot back.
Sam's lips pinched together but he didn't answer.
Sansa chanced a step closer to the pair. "Dean?"
Dean either didn't hear her or was ignoring her. "How the hell did we get here?" he demanded. "Is this Gabriel again?"
"Arthur?" Sansa called, her voice rising. She tried not to let Sam and Dean's panic overwhelm her—Sam and Dean, who never panicked.
Arthur turned and his eyebrows drew together. "Hey, woah, guys." He held his hands out, placating, his eyes locked on Sam and Dean, who were still on high alert, weapons tracking sightlines.
"I don't like this," Dean declared, and Sam seemed to agree. "Sam, you got your blade on you? I'm thinking angels."
Sam checked his pockets without a pause in watching everything.
"Guys," Arthur tried again, "it's okay. It's just a dream."
"Yeah, no shit," Dean snapped, "but how did we get here? How do we get out? Whose head are we in? And what's happening with our bodies while we're stuck in here?"
Sansa realized she'd been holding her breath. "Dean. Are we in danger right now?" she asked, and she swallowed when Dean actually looked at her. So he was acknowledging her. That was something.
"Get over here," Dean commanded, walking over to pull her behind him. "Arthur, you too. Sam?"
"I got nothing," Sam announced. "Not even a lighter."
"Damn it," Dean muttered under his breath, and Sansa couldn't help but check Arthur's reaction from where he hadn't moved.
"Look, it's okay," Arthur said. "This is what shared dreaming looks like." He scowled, confused and annoyed. He started to circle them, slowly, keeping his eyes on Dean. "What is wrong with you guys, have you done this before or something?"
"Not on purpose," Dean said, and Sansa had to close her eyes. She was so tired of never knowing what was going on.
"Arthur, maybe you can explain it to me?" she asked. "I'm quite sure I've never done this before, so..."
Arthur let his arms drop. "Sure. Just... don't let your boyfriends fucking shoot me."
Dean and Sam, finished clearing the large area, glanced at each other and reluctantly tucked their guns in the back of their waistbands. But when they sat down on the benches flanking Arthur, Sansa noticed they didn't lean back. She cautiously took the seat down the bench from Dean.
"This is a dream," Arthur said. "It's my dream, actually. I built it and pulled all of you in, and you're populating it with your subconscious. Here the rules of the physical world don't apply, so on a job, we use it to influence our mark. In our job, that mark is Nick Fury."
"How do we get out?" Dean demanded, and his face said he wasn't interested in anything else Arthur might be trying to tell them.
"I shoot you in the head," Arthur said, his voice clipped and sharp. Then he shrugged. "Or you can just wait for the timer to run out. That's what I usually do."
He rolled his eyes at the brothers' identical jaw clenches and spoke quickly. "We construct layers to the dream, making the mark lose track of where he is, what is real and what isn't. Eames, who is topside right now, watching over us, to answer your question, has a knack for changing his appearance in a dreamspace. We essentially send him in undercover to find out what we want to know. But in Fury's case," he paused, one hand in his pocket, "he's going to try to plant information instead of stealing it."
Dean looked a little calmer, but still on high alert. "Okay, this?" he said, indicating all of them as well as the surrounding sept, "is stupid. I hate it. I don't want to be stuck inside my head with myself, let alone with Fury. And how do we know it's safe?"
Arthur raised an eyebrow. "Who said it was?"
Just then, Sansa heard a sound outside, somewhere between a scream and a roar, and a shadow passed over the stained glass window.
She stood to look outside only seconds ahead of Dean.
"What are those things?" she said, unable to keep the disgust and thread of terror from her voice.
"Great. Just great," Dean grumbled. "There's a swarm of dragons out there. Dragons, Arthur."
"Those? Those aren't dragons," Sansa said, squinting. "They look inhuman, but no. Dragons are much, much worse."
She didn't realize everyone was looking at her until she dragged her eyes away from the glass. All three men were staring like it was an odd thing to correct them on their labeling of a dragon. She raised her chin and dared them to challenge her.
"Okay," Arthur said slowly, "before anyone starts shooting, I'll just explain that those things out there? Whatever you want to call them, they were populated by the mark, so in this case, Sam. That's how dreams work, and we're going to need to redesign your level, Sam, if this is what you're going to put us through. And, Sansa, if your dragons are worse? I'm feeling a little apprehensive about going into your head at all."
"If they're Sam's imagination, does that mean they can't kill us?" Dean cut him off, checking his weapon. Sam was already heading toward the front doors of the church, both of them focused on one thing—survival.
"Well, they can kill you but you won't die," Arthur clarified, and Dean snorted.
"That's called a Wednesday for us. Sansa, stay away from the windows. Arthur, we could use your help."
Sansa tried not to let their panic overwhelm her and she took a deep breath, focusing on Arthur. Arthur was the expert here, she reminded herself. Arthur would know what to do.
"For fuck's sake, will you two knock it off?" Arthur spit out. "I brought you down here to figure out how dreams work, not to practice killing things. I know you can kill things."
But Sansa knew about survival, and she knew they weren't listening. Couldn't listen. They called out instructions to each other and she gave Arthur a sympathetic smile. He gave up with an eyeroll and dropped into a nearby bench.
"It really is a lovely building, Arthur," she said as a window shattered behind her. She felt a strange sense of calm, even as Sam and Dean fired their noisy weapons and Arthur sighed.
"Thank you," he said. "I'm glad someone appreciates it."
She settled next to him and they watched as Dean and Sam wrestled screeching monsters into dust, destroying marble columns and shattering pews in the process. "Is this what you meant by the walkers getting agitated?"
Arthur shook his head. "We haven't changed anything since we got here, so this is just Sam's mental defenses trying to get rid of us. He seems pretty on-alert, so we might have to use some kind of sedative for his level. It's actually good to know."
Sansa nodded as if she understood and winced as one of the creatures' heads exploded in a spatter all over Dean's chest. He didn't even seem to notice. "You said there's a timer that runs out? How long does it last?"
So Arthur talked for a while about brain function and time differences and Sansa wondered if she would ever feel comfortably competent again. She watched Sam and Dean stand back to back and take down enemies and felt more homesick than she'd been since she arrived.
Sansa blinked when in the space between heartbeats the sept fell dark and silent. Panic flooded her limbs but before she could voice the cry which came to her lips, she blinked again and she was once again in the bunker. Beside her, Dean and Sam both bolted upright out of the overstuffed chairs which matched the one she was slumped in. Dean's eyes were frantic, nostrils flared, still hunting, still protecting. Protecting you, her mind whispered. He located Sam and then her and seemed to relax.
He wiped his nose, going for nonchalant, and said, "Right, so that went pretty well. What's next?"
He and Sam glanced at each other and she expected to see Arthur rolling his eyes, but instead, he was looking at her thoughtfully. "We go again," he said. "Uh," he looked at Eames significantly, "without Sam this time."
The next time Sansa blinked awake, she was standing on some kind of blue sand, and there was a scent in the air she couldn't quite place. It had to have been coming from the flowers surrounding the small clearing she was in, shoulder high and every color of the rainbow. A large hawk with two sets of wings caught an updraft and glided lazily through the air, and with an air of wonder, she counted three moons on the horizon.
"What is this place?" she breathed, not knowing if there was anyone to answer her. She wished her eyes were bigger so she could take more in at once.
"Planet Patzer," came Arthur's voice behind her. She turned to see him, hands tucked into his suit pockets, strolling through the odd terrain. "It's just past the ice rings of the outer nebula."
Dean stood next to Arthur, staring around him just as Sansa had been. She said, "Oh," quietly, and went back to taking in the strange wildlife. She thought of Theon, and how she'd have desperately loved to show him this place. He'd boggle at everything.
"I'm kidding," Arthur said, after an unbearably long silence. "It's not a real place. I made it up."
Dean looked annoyed and Sansa was glad she'd never had a glare like that leveled at her. Arthur seemed to take it in stride.
"You do realize I'm not stupid, don't you, Arthur?" Dean growled. "I mean, I know you think that, but let's just stay in our lanes here, alright?"
"Never said you were," Arthur clipped, one eyebrow raised.
"Can you travel to other planets, then?" Sansa broke in, innocently.
Arthur gave her a soft smile and Dean blinked. "Oh," he said. "Um. Not exactly. I mean, we've been to the moon, but a manned Mars mission is still… you know, a few years away."
She nodded at him with a pleasant, "I see," and went back to staring at the three moons visible in the deepening purple sky.
Arthur brushed past her mumbling about picking a different name for this place, and she watched how his feet sank into the ground before it welled back up in his wake. "Okay, listen up," he said coolly. "I brought you to someplace neutral, no monsters, nothing familiar for either of you, so you could practice changing things and exploring impossible physics and maybe, just maybe, experience something, I don't know, not horrible for once in your lives. You're fucking welcome. Don't get killed and you'll be down here for about an hour."
He brushed aside a wall of hanging orange vines and into an automatic lift, closing the grate behind him and slowly ascending out of sight.
Sansa and Dean looked at each other and Dean opened his mouth as if to say something, then snapped it shut and shook his head.
"Well," she said with a sigh, trying not to sound as lost as she felt, "what do we do now, Ser Dean?"
He frowned and moved some more orange vines out of his path as he started to explore. "Well, I guess we try to change things. Wait to see if something tries to kill us."
He was peering into the growth around them, his face set in stone, and she took a deep breath in of the fragrant air. "Whose head are we in, again?" she asked.
Dean snorted, and for a second, he was himself. "Hell if I know, man, I can't keep any of this straight."
She smiled and looked for any more hawks. This place was really incredible. Arthur really did know how to create an experience, she couldn't deny that.
"Dean…" she hesitated.
Suddenly Dean was next to her. "What?" He looked around, his movements smooth and jerky at the same time. "Did you see something?"
She pictured Arthur's eyeroll and tucked her smile away. "No, I was going to ask you if you wanted to walk with me for a bit. We could explore Arthur's made-up world."
He frowned but squared his shoulders. "Right. Sure."
He led the way through the underbrush, scanning and protecting even though Sansa was sure Arthur wouldn't have added anything that could hurt them. She followed calmly, enjoying the leaves which shimmered when touched, and keeping an eye on the sky for the hawk.
Dean grunted when they got to a violet lake and with a small house on one side. For all the vibrant colors of this world, the cabin looked almost homely. She looked at it curiously as Dean steered them around the edge of the water. He had eyes on everything, and if he'd had a weapon, it would have been held at the ready.
She reached for the doorknob but Dean got there first. He swept through the tight space, checking everywhere large enough to hold a person, until he looked at her and nodded. Her skirts, which she hadn't realized she was wearing, brushed a wooden floor of a one-room cabin, a comfortable looking bed with a quilt on one side and a wooden table set simply for two on the other.
"What is this place?" she asked, peering into a bathroom. Even one-room cabins had indoor plumbing, apparently.
Dean shrugged. "Looks like your standard hunting cabin. Good visibility, probably a… yep," he reached behind the headboard of the bed and pulled out one of the weapons he preferred. "Rifle. Right where it should be."
Sansa peered into the teapot on the table and found it full of steaming tea. She poured herself a cup, shaking her head at Arthur's thoughtfulness. She poured a cup for Dean but when she turned to offer it to him, he was bent down, frowning out the window.
"What look what we have here," he muttered, sounding completely unsurprised. But when Sansa looked, she felt the cup slip from her slack fingers.
A hoard of white walkers stood poised on the far edge of the lake and as the scream built up behind her teeth, the water started to freeze over.
Faster and faster it hardened, crackling in the still air. The first walker stepped onto the ice, and it supported his weight. Panic started to take over and Sansa threw herself backward, putting as much distance between herself and those beings as possible.
"Pigeon...?" Dean asked in concern, but she didn't hear him.
"They're here," she mumbled with numb lips. Her hands sought an exit she knew wasn't there. "They're here."
She couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. She was going to die and she was going to die on a made-up planet not being able to breathe or think.
The crack of the rifle made her jump, and she let out a garbled sound she didn't recognize. Dean was aiming at the encroaching wall of walkers, but it didn't matter. There were too many of them. Dean noticed too and with a curse, pushed over the table, scattering the contents everywhere, and pushed it against the window. Then he wedged a chair under the doorknob.
"Get in here," he yelled, pulling her into the bathroom.
He's going to protect me, she thought. He's going to keep me safe. This is a dream, she reminded herself. But when he slammed the door, it sounded like a coffin lid.
