tampered | Log; complete

Log; complete

When; December 3rd, night
Rating; PG-13
Characters; Boy Blue

playstheblues and the Corinthian

bitingnightmare
Summary; The Corinthian seeks to show why the Adversary can never come to his kingdom...
Log;

Boy Blue didn't dream much anymore. It wasn't part of being a Fable, or anything about living away from the Homelands. It was a choice that he made a long time ago - if he could find a way not to dream, he would. It was a benefit of his age, that he could manage them, just a little. His dreams had a tendency to be nightmares more than anything. Nightmares about the Last Castle, about Little Red Riding Hood, about Baba Yaga.

Sometimes dreams leaked through the barriers of his mind, and sometimes he chose to let himself dream - or maybe, he allowed himself to remember his dreams. He recognized that the nightmare, that the Corinthian would come to him if he dreamed.

His dreams always began at the Last Castle, even the ones that had to do with Fabletown. He sat down on the parapet, the castle eerily quiet, the blossoms from the tree wrapping around him. He could hear the rise of the silence, the noise from the battle a ghost that could rise at any moment.

If the nightmare didn't show soon, Boy Blue would wake up. He'd rather that than be afraid.

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He recognized Last Castle, the smell of fire and cinder, the sweat under rusting metal, and blood. The Corinthian recognized war well, he considered his true self, that which first walked the Waking World free of his function, born on the eve of war; the war to end all wars. He was hard pressed to admit he secretly missed the scent and sound of artillery.

However, despite the time and environment, he appeared as a spectator in white jeans and a white t-shirt, both immaculate as the ethereal white in his hair. He wasn't one to touch or be touched in this production. It would disprove his point to the blond, even if with a mere thought he could allow himself to be both the killed and the killer on this battlefield.

Anachronisms were not his priority either. He sucked down the white paper of his Mild Seven, searching the sea of flesh for the one golden boy dressed in shades of blue.

Blue looked down at the battle, still silent, and after seen the same scene several thousand times, he could spot out the white haired man at several hundred feet. He swung his feet over the parapet, the parameter of his nightmares not allowing him down onto the ground level, onto the violence.

He cried out for the Corinthian, sitting comfortably on the rocks. He hoped that the Corinthian would come up soon, because he was uncomfortable watching the battle.

Twelve hundred years and I still think this is the worst thing I've ever seen.

Bigby would argue, but Bigby hadn't been there.

He cut a swath through the combatants with his path alone, a brief breeze of white that seemed to be there and yet not. The blades ignored him, cut through him without issue, and when the Corinthian raised his hand a soldier moved out of his way without even knowing it. He reached Blue this way, ever cool and casual like the day they first met in the City. Smoke drifted from his teeth eyes, those hidden even in dream.

"You don't need to yell, I can hear you," from the barest whisper, he meant.

This was a direct violation of dreaming etiquette, not necessarily the rules, and Cori knew it. But what the boss didn't know wouldn't hurt him, and if the boss didn't come to intervene immediately then surely his Master was indifferent to the situation.

Blue swung his legs and watched the nightmare move up to him. He was a foreign element, obvious and there and intrusive. It was blatantly clear that he didn't belong.

Blue took in the smell of the smoke and it made him start. "You told me to sleep," he whispered back. He gestured out to the battle. "This is every night. The Adversary, the Last Castle, all the death." He took a deep breath. "Unless I block it out."

He tipped his head to look at the Corinthian. "They can't reach your Homeland?"

It was clear he didn't belong at Last Castle, and the Corinthian would make no pretense at suggesting such a thing. This wasn't his dream after all, not his memory, not his past, though several of its elements were potentially under his control. There was a dark side to Boy Blue, something that the nightmare could reflect lurking under his bittersweet smile, a low melancholy. But that wasn't his purpose tonight.

"I did," he replied while looking down at Blue, then he took a seat himself and puffed smoke. "No, they can, but we won't let them invade. Knock on wood," Cori wrapped his knuckles on the stone anyway, "most of you blow by every night and don't even blink an eye."

Most of Fabletown dismissed Blue's darker side as nonexistent, but Blue knew about it; carefully contained behind a thousand permissions, behind a thousand rules. He had let a small part of it out when he had returned to the Homelands, but he hadn't tapped even the smallest bit of his anger.

He wouldn't kid himself. He knew how many people needed to die so that others could be free.

None of his smiles were false, but he didn't have to smile in his dreams. "You come from the land of Dreams. Not dreams, not Alice dreams or Aladdin dreams, but real Dreams."

It wasn't hard to figure out, not with his knowledge of worlds.

"You catch on quickly," the Corinthian remarked with another drift of cigarette smoke through his teeth eyes. He offered the burning cancer stick to the younger man. Boy Blue was not quite a boy just as Cori was not quite a human. "Alice comes through occasionally, a Sinbad or two," he shrugged again.

"You hate it, but you can't let it go because it's all you know," he posed his question as a presumptuous statement.

Blue waved a hand to decline the cigarette - even Bigby didn't like them, but they were necessary for him - and stood, staring over the battle. There went Robin of Locksley. Dead.

"I can almost forget about it sometimes," he said. "Fly, you know, he never fought, he doesn't remember anything about the war...well, he didn't..." Blue frowned, "And Pinocchio, he got out before anything really bad could happen. So with them, sometimes, I could forget."

He shook his head. "It's nothing."

He smoked it down to the filter in that case.

"Grew up before you were ready to grow," the Corinthian smirked at Blue. "Say whatever you want, it's your dream. They wouldn't be here if a part of you didn't want them to be," he shook his head, watching the fight pull in and out like a tide.

"I'm not sixteen," Blue retorted, "As much as I may look it. I knew what I was doing. But I'm Fortune's favorite son, and it's not likely that I would have died in that battle anyway."

Blue raised an eyebrow. "I don't usually dream, you know."

"Let's not discuss your virginity without your permission," the Corinthian smirked, this time tipping his glasses down to reveal the first rows of teeth.

"How often you dream means little. It's the dream and how long you spend in it that counts," nodded the nightmare. He would have mentioned those eighty years his Lord was trapped behind glass, but the Corinthian knew Blue wouldn't be familiar with that world. Not yet anyway.

Blue stared.

It was hard to get used to teeth where eyes were supposed to be. It was disconcerting, because he had never seen anything like it before, but it wasn't as bad as some of the horrors he had seen during the war.

Still. They weren't a joy to look at.

He pointedly ignored the first comment, and shrugged. "You would know about dreams more than I."

The Corinthian was no goblin or bain sidhe like the hordes that made up the majority of the Empire's troops. Perhaps that made him all the more sinister; normal to a point like a particular Fable with a penchant for gouging out his own eyes. Cori pushed his glasses back up then put out his cigarette on the stone. As with all dream material, it ground out before becoming ash in the wind.

"I would. Your Adversary isn't welcome in my realm, though the rest of his war keeps my neck of the woods busy," he smirked.

Blue bunched up his shoulders - he knew what was coming. He turned back to see himself on the parapet, vanishing, the witchcloak taking him to the last boat out, and then back down to see a figure in a red hood walking out onto the battlefield.

He felt sick to his stomach, in a dream sort of way. It always happened the same way, never a deviation, always the same image burned into his head. For as long as the mundies remembered his rhyme, he would remember her.

He turned back to the Corinthian, the color going from his already pale face. "I'm not in charge here either, I suppose," he muttered, his horn appearing in his hand.

He made no motion to stand with Blue, to oversee his past. After spending mere moments in this scene he already knew how the ending went. In a way the Corinthian was glad to have given up his ability to dream; he would always know that these memories weren't his. Even the dragon setting fire to a last man standing didn't faze him. The flames flickered in the black of his sunglasses.

"You are, as much as you want to be," said the nightmare.

He cared not for explaining the layers of subconscious that made Mervyn's work cut out for him, that was his Lord's skill. It was confusing, and for an agent of the Dreaming like himself, Cori found it full of psychological bureaucratic bullshit.

Blue raised the horn to his lips when the last man died, and played an old song, something he had written, something that they had always turned down at the clubs because he was too young and too white.

He lowered it when he was done, and looked back up at the Corinthian. "You know who I am," he said, "and you probably know how old I really am," he added, after. "But you're not giving me any answers. So I don't know what to do."

"Little Boy Blue," he answered the first, then tipped his own chin, "almost a millennia younger than myself. Tried to integrate himself in the Harlem jazz scene but Artie Shaw had already taken up the white man's intrusive role."

The Corinthian shrugged again then grinned, "the last one's a guess."

Blue clutched his horn to his chest like it was a child and nodded slowly. "It's not usual I meet many people older than me," he said quietly. "Even the other Fables..." he shook his head, "With a a couple of exceptions, of course."

"The last one's wrong. I was there before Artie."

"You'll meet a lot more, sticking around the City," he upnodded briefly. That Puck sort and a few other people came to mind, and that didn't even include the seven Endless Ones.

"Salt in the wound ain't it," the nightmare smirked over good old Shaw's reference. He tilted his head briefly then hummed a bar, before singing.

"Here's the story 'bout Minnie the Moocher, she was a red hot hoochie coocher. She was the roughest, toughest frail, but Minnie had a heart a big as a whale."

Blue smiled, honestly, when the Corinthian began to sing. The space around them shifted; they were in a 1920's Jazz bar, complete with the atmosphere of bootleggers and good music.

He had forgotten that some of his dreams were good ones. He raised the horn to his lips and played along to the Corinthian's words, matching him note for note. Sometimes people complained, and said he wasn't any good, but that's because they weren't listening.

He didn't bother reiterating that Blue himself, a dreamer, could change what he experienced in his sleep. The Corinthian had been there himself, a lone pale figure in a white suit, conspicuous against a smoky backdrop.

"She messed around with a bloke named Smokey, she loved him though he was cokey. He took her down to Chinatown and he showed her how to kick the gong around."

Blue had little to worry about, Cori's ad lib scat lyrical prowess was a little too polished for the scene.

He wasn't paying attention to the words, and when the song came to an end he sat down at one of the tables, rather pleased with himself. Drinks were there, conveniently. It was too bad that he couldn't actually enjoy them past the imagery in a dream.

Blue raised a glass to his lips. "You're not bad," he admitted, pleased with the nightmare.

"I was there. I came to New York around the second World War," he said to Blue while helping himself to a drink. It was whiskey on his end.

There weren't enough immortals around who remembered the world as he did, thought the Corinthian. Most of the ones in the City came from parallels far removed from what he knew best. Cassidy was one of the few who didn't, and now this young trumpet player. Scratch that, Boy Blue was only young in appearance, but the look suit him well. He sipped.

"You're not bad yourself."

"I was in New York," Blue said with a smile.

He had tormented half of Fabletown in the 20's with his music. Snow threatened to stuff his horn down a sewer grate once, and Bigby had actually hidden it for a couple of weeks before Blue's moping got to the entire office. But Blue had enjoyed the 20's; it was a good time for him.

"Practice, you know, it's part of the rhyme, and everything." It wasn't that the stories made the Fables - the Fables made the stories - but mundy belief did help a lot of the magic along. Or at least, that was Blue's opinion.

"It's a good city," he replied, knowing a certain redhead who would agree with that sentiment.

"I don't have a rhyme," he shook his head, unsure if Blue had realized he wasn't anything like the fables or the mundies yet. "But I picked up saxophone anyway," nodded the nightmare as he took another sip.

Blue nodded at the sentiment, then said, "We should play together sometime. I think we might have fun."

The Corinthian's ears almost perked at those words. Fun. He leaned forward, glass of bourbon balanced between his pale and dexterous fingers. "Is that a promise?"

Blue nodded. "Sure thing."

Why not? It wasn't a terrible promise to make - the promise to enjoy oneself. Blue lifted a glass to Cori. "To music, and no Adversary."

"To booze and the blues," the nightmare added to that toast, clinking the edge of his glass with Blue's before taking a shot.

He planned to make good on that promise.

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Log; complete

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