Title: Ever Happily, Chapter 2
Summary: Some things never change. Unfortunately, they're getting fewer and farther between.
Author's Note: This one is my first real attempt to try and describe Delirium's realm. It's hard, but I hope I did all right. You be the judge of that.
Curled up on a mattress of candyfloss card tricks, Barnabas sleeps. He drifts across a sea of pinstriped cathedral bells, and storm clouds swim through it like fish, only they aren't fish, they're giraffes, and the thundering of their hooves (wings?) wakes him up. He stands and strides out onto the shuddering stream of bells; deprived of his stabilizing presence, the candyfloss mattress explodes with the sound of a choir and the smell of scorched meat.
Barnabas walks across the water that was made of bells and now is made of mercury-flavored ice cream. The things he walks on are lilypads, but they're also mud puddles, and his paws squish and tingle unpleasantly and then they start to freeze and by the time he reaches the far shore his entire body is covered by a thin sheen of ice. He sneezes, and shakes, and a coat of butterflies lifts from his skin in vast irradiated swarms (they are painted with raw colors and shaped like screams).
The scream-butterflies fade, and in their wake Barnabas can hear Delirium's bright shattering laugh drifting towards him over the hills of thyme and Time, and he pricks up his ears and sniffs the air, although that won't do him any good because there's a low wash of television white noise today and the entire world smells, not unpleasantly, like yellow and viridian and chlorine.
Nonetheless, he thinks he sees a flash of multicolored spiked hair and pushes towards it in a half-swimming lope, only by the time he reaches the distant hilltop it's turned into Atlantis, and he knows there's no point in talking to Atlanteans, they can only gibber like monkeys and bellow like bulls.
But that's all right. Sometimes Barnabas forgets that nothing in Delirium's realm can be reached in a straight line. He'll find his mistress eventually, unless maybe he doesn't, or she'll find him, unless maybe she can't. He pulls himself together, regaining a little solidity and shaking his head to dislodge a pair of antennae sprouting where they shouldn't be. He drifts a little further inwards, toward the sundial at Delirium's heart.
The sundial is tall today, tall in the bizarre, depthless scale of Delirium's realm where dimensions only pretend to exist, and that only when the mood takes them. The sundial's plinth and pillar are wound about with tinsel, bedecked with garlands of wriggling silver fishes threaded on twine, and its face is twirling merrily, a shadow whirligig that has nothing to do with time at all.
Good. That means Delirium is in a good mood today, and Barnabas has been surprised to discover how desperately he wants her to be happy. (Happy, a passing clown face whispers, happy happy everyone happy whether they like it or not or not or else. if they don't like it then the happy smile-knife let out the happy red rushing to burble and giggle-glug happy down the drain.)
At least the sundial still exists. There's always a moment of anxiety when Barnabas approaches it, and prays it's still there; it is the only thing remaining more or less constant in Delirium's shifting, splattering realm, and he's come in some bizarre way to depend upon it. Not as a measure of sanity, he's too used to being Delirium's companion to look for or put much stock in that. It's more like a reassurance, a promise that the explosions and bubbles around him are only the normal explosions and bubbles, and nothing more painful or more sinister.
It's odd that he should be thinking of Destruction, but more and more often now Barnabas finds thoughts of the big pseudo-man leaping up from his unconsciousness when he least expects them. Maybe because Destruction was always so unchanging, so solid; and now he, Barnabas, has become the only solid thing in a fickle and convulsive world, and he needs a past example to show him what to do. His tongue lolls out and he laughs silently at himself as he thinks it, but maybe he's digging up his memories of Destruction in a quest for security, a search for guidance.
Barnabas understands how Destruction – or Dream, or Death, or any of them – must have felt, must still feel, when they step into the waking world only to find that everything they knew and loved and hated is gone, that everything around is strange and new, though they'd been gone only for a moment (this morning Barnabas lived in a little wooden doghouse; now it is evening, and his doghouse is a whale). He thinks he's beginning to understand the gratitude, the attachment that they feel towards those things that remain unchanged for thousands and millions of years; those things that are constants.
Destruction never spoke of his family, but as soon as that back-room pool started bubbling a vast and timeless loneliness had appeared in his eyes, in his posture, in his gait. Barnabas had sensed it. He had sensed Destruction's need for him as well, the need for a steady companion who, even though he was annoying and sarcastic at times, posed no threat of leaving or crumbling into dust.
The dog feels a similar attachment to the sundial at the heart of Delirium's realm. Though he knows it's stupid and childish (puppyish?) he finds himself needing, longing for at least one thing that will never change…
His train of thought is interrupted by a high, piercing squeal of laughter that shoots over his head like a bolt of lightning, and then Delirium is tumbling down a hill that didn't exist a moment before and she scoops him up in her arms and they're tumbling together, bypassing gravity without noticing, and Barnabas' wagging tail beats against the reassuring solidity of his mistress as he licks her cheek.
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