Daydreams and Nightmares (Complete)

[Jamie Morrigan]

That made sense - in that matter-of-fact manner that old stories always made sense, like creation myths and Rudyard Kipling. Jamie stared distantly through the steam rising from underneath the pancakes. Stories around the stove at breakfast were just as good as stories around a campfire at night, weren't they?

"So did it work?" she asked. "Did the nightmares stop?"

Of course they had to have stopped, or what was the point of the story? But there were rules to follow, and Jamie wanted... needed to hear Tess tell the ending.

[Tess Abrahams]

Tess didn't say anything at first, concentrating on neatly sliding the pancakes onto a plate and setting it down next to the stove. When they weren't in danger of burning (any more than the slightly-well done state they were already in, that is) she directed her full attention to Jamie, brown eyes serious and unwavering.

"The really bad ones did," Tess said. "The kind that were too scary and real to be brave about. The first night he hung it over his bed, Felix slept straight through 'til morning without so much as a whisper of a nightmare."

Holding the spatula out to Jamie, the older girl lifted a shoulder in casual gesture. "They're not hard to make. We could try, if you want to."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie met Tess's eyes and accepted the spatula. It took her a few moments to realize what to do with it, and she swooped in to rescue the remaining pancakes before they went metamorphic.

"I think I'd like that," she said quietly. "I think I'd like that a lot."

She finished adding the last of the pancakes to the stack on the plate and turned off the heat on the stove just in time to be startled by the buzzing oven. "Oh! The eggs are done!"

With Tess's help, she pulled out the bubbling egg-and-salsa concoction and laid it carefully on a rack on the countertop. With care, she worked the spatula under one of the tortilla cups and lifted it onto a plate. Then she whirled off to the silverware drawer, grabbed a pair of forks, and pressed one into Tess's hand.

"A good chef always needs to taste her cooking before sending it to the customers," she said sagely. "It's a rule."

[Tess Abrahams]

"A rule, huh? Well, if it's a rule," the aromatic steam rising from the crispy tortilla cup really didn't make it hard for Tess's arm to be twisted and she neatly drove her fork into the huevos, arranging a colourful bite on the twines and blowing away some of the heat before pushing it past her lips. A blissful expression pulled on her features and Tess sagged against the counter.

"Oh, man," a note of pleased surprise bled into her voice and Tess looked at Jamie with admiration. "James, this is good. Really, really delicous."

The scent of breakfast cooking was always a surefire way to rouse other members of the House; there was no better alarm clock than the air ducts in the kitchen that betrayed culinary enterprise. In anticipation, Tess pulled a few extra plates down from the cupboard and stacked them on the counter, adding a pile of silverware next to them. She helped Jamie arrange Anna's plate and load it onto one of the folding trays that were kept for sick days, adding a glass of Tropicana and a paper towel folded into a fan.

"That's better than any bed and breakfast spread, by a mile," Tess winked and carefully guided the tray into Jamie's hands. "There you go, Chef. You attend to your patron and then you and me are going scouting for dreamcatcher frames."

[Jamie Morrigan]

The first thing you needed if you were going to build a dream web, Jamie quickly learned, was a couple of thin, flexible willow branches you could twist into a circular frame. Unfortunately, the neighborhood appeared to be fresh out of willows - the park down the street only had dry-weather trees like chestnuts and beeches. Jamie suggested they ask Mr. Munoz, whose garden was a thing to be proud of, and even he could only point them to the county arboretum in Arcadia - until he asked why they were looking for a willow tree. After Tess told him, he told them to wait a moment and disappeared into his back yard. Minutes later he returned with several switches of grapevine dried from weeks of drought.

"These will work just as well," he assured Jamie as he pressed them into her hands. "If they aren't going to give grapes, at least they can stop bad dreams."

Soon they were back in the kitchen with the grapevines soaking in a pot of water to make them flexible, and they sat at the kitchen table pondering a roll of twine, some beads from the craft basket, and a pair of crow feathers they had found in the park (and thoroughly cleaned under Tess's discerning eye).

"So I know what it's supposed to look like now," Jamie said, "but how do I know what'll stop my..." She glanced around to make sure the kitchen was empty except for them. "My bad dreams?" she whispered.

No one but Anna and Tess knew she was having them. As far as anyone else knew, this was nothing more than a craft project.

[Tess Abrahams]

"I think it's less about knowing and more about feeling," Tess said, laying out spools of thread in shades of saffron and magenta leftover from some costume project that they'd rescued from Anna's sewing kit.

That sounded vague and New Age-ish even to her own ears and she offered Jamie a sheepish smile.

"What I mean is," she elaborated thoughtfully, "it's kind of like when Jake freestyles on his guitar or when Anna whips up a meal with whatever's left in the cupboards. Maybe they have an idea of what the end product will look like, but the way there is up for interpretation. Let your instincts take over.

"Here," Tess reached into the pot and withdrew one of the waterlogged vines, bending it until the ends kissed, backs rounding into a graceful circle. She secured them with a bit of thread, biting the excess of the spool with her teeth. "Just start by wrapping the frame, don't worry about the web yet. See what happens, kiddo."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie wiped off the excess water from the vine, and then she examined the dark, red-brown hoop in her hands. It looked like a good start - strong, supple wood with little twiggy springs curling off of it, rough and natural and honest. But it was a little thin.

"I think it could use another vine," she said. "My bad dreams feel... well... bigger than this."

They fished out another, longer vine and twisted it delicately around the first one, careful not to warp it out of shape. Now it looked more formidable, like a brambly thicket growing in a circle. Jamie took the yellow twine and started looping it through the gaps between the vines until she had a proper base for her web.

"Do you ever have nightmares, Tess?" she asked, weaving with the careful deliberation of a portrait painter.

[Tess Abrahams]

The rest of the vines were in danger of becoming limp noodles so Tess fished them out and began an assembly line, looping them and tying the ends until she had a row of hoops ripe for twining. They'd decided to make a few - dreams were common currency and everybody liked a homemade gift.

Jamie's question made Tess glance up as she snipped string.

"Sometimes. I have this recurring one," she squirmed uncomfortably, fingers fumbling she reinforced the soggy olive-green band. "I'm competing in a gymnastics tournament and there's about a million and one people in the auditorium, just watching, all silent and ominous like in a bizarre Hitchcock film. Anyway, I'm way up high on this absurd, definitely non-regulation balance beam... and I realize I'm naked. And I can't move. And everybody's just staring and waiting and..."

Tess trailed off with a shudder. After a moment's thought she shrugged. "I guess that's more of a bad dream than a nightmare, though."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie took a moment to make sure all her loops were evenly spaced. The last thing you wanted was a side-wickered dreamcatcher.

"That's really weird - you'd think after a while it would stop surprising you," she said.

And then she realized it might have sounded like she was making fun of Tess, and she looked up with mild panic on her face. "I mean... you as in everybody, not you specifically. I mean, most of the time I can figure it out when I'm dreaming. But it doesn't always help."

[Tess Abrahams]

It wasn't just that Jamie was such a sweet kid. It was that she was such a sweet kid in spite of all she'd been through. Her bright face and keen curiosity were unwavering and offered solid proof that hope still bloomed.

"I guess that's why they make good bad dreams," Tess shrugged and began wrapping the bendy frame in her hand with thread in a shade of blue that made her think of Aidan. "If they stopped surprising you, even when you know they're not real, then they wouldn't be such a big deal. And dream hunters would be out of business."

[Jamie Morrigan]

"I guess so," Jamie said, and she finished winding the yellow thread around her twisted frame and reached for a length of red to give her dreamcatcher stripes. She was beginning to settle into the rhythm of working with the thread and the wooden hoop. It was relaxing, therapeutic.

"Usually if I don't like how a dream is going, I can change things. Like this one time, I dreamed that I was in the van going down the street, but no one was driving, and I had to jump into the driver's seat and keep it from crashing. And then a police officer stopped me and asked me why I was driving without a license, and I knew I was going to get in so much trouble. So I told him I was racing to stop terrorists from dumping mutant piranha into the sewers, and he said in that case he'd call back-up, and we flew away on jetpacks. But I woke up before we got to the terrorists."

She wrapped the red fabric like a ribbon around the frame and tied it there. "I don't like it when I can't change my dreams. It's like I've lost control of my power. It's scary."

[Tess Abrahams]

Piranhas and terrorists were an interesting combination but the enjoyment of hearing the imaginative twists that Jamie's mind formed was diluted by her next words. The girl's eyes remained steadfastly attentive to the task at hand but the confession was honestly earnest, and Tess fingered the bumpy skin of the grapevine in her hands, a phantom pain running up the arm she'd broken last year.

"It is scary," she agreed. "What makes these dreams so different from the others, do you think?"

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie turned her fuzzy yellow-and-red grapevine ring in her hands, staring at it in silence. Everything else in the house sounded strangely loud and distinct in the long seconds before she answered.

"It's not just that the scary stuff feels real," she said, almost a whisper. "It's that... when I'm having a really bad nightmare... I'm afraid I'll wake up and find out that coming here to live with Anna was just a dream."

[Tess Abrahams]

"Oh, Jamie," Tess breathed, at a loss for what else to say. What did you say to something like that?

Her hand snaked across the table, easing one of Jamie's smaller ones away from the frame of her dreamcatcher.

"This is as real as it gets, kiddo. Nobody and nothing is taking this away from you," Tess ducked down, trying to find her companion's eyes. "None of us would let that happen."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Tess's hands over hers felt good and solid. Jamie worked to meet Tess's eyes and gave her a watery sort of smile.

"I know," she said. "Look."

The girl glanced toward the empty space over the middle of the table, and out of the air materialized a big, beautiful dragonfly with a jewel-green body and broad, shimmering wings. It thrummed in its flight as it swooped toward them and hovered lazily at eye level.

Jamie took one of her hands out of Tess's and reached up as if to stroke the dragonfly, but her finger passed cleanly through its head, leaving little sparks of green light behind. "You can see it, and hear it, but you can never touch it. That's how I always can tell."

And she couldn't feel the sheets from her bed at Jericho. She couldn't. She was adamant on that point.

[Tess Abrahams]

It wasn't the first of Jamie's projections that Tess had ever seen but that didn't make it any less breathtaking. Iridescent shades of ocean and gossamer wings hung suspended in the air, humming the sound of old summer afternoons. Tess watched, her face reflected in the bulging buggy eyes, and couldn't decide which was prettier - the illusion or the tiny fireworks it cast as Jamie's hand swathed through and betrayed it's falsehood.

Mirroring the girl, Tess reached up but didn't touch the dragonfly, somehow unable to bring herself to disturb the mirage. Her palm floated just below the delicately angled legs.

"That's good, Jamie," she said, genuinely. It was easier to believe that something would help if there was already a foundation to build on. "Because that means the rest of it, what you see and hear, shouldn't be too hard to capture. It'll be like trapping air in a jar."

Tess glanced down at the supplies spread out on the table. "Or a net, rather."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Over the course of the morning and into the early afternoon, with a break for lunch, a series of brightly-colored webs took shape. They'd decided they should make a small one for Anna, since Jamie had read that unborn babies dreamed a lot, and she could carry it around with her in her purse. And there were too many people in the house to make one for everyone, but they made one to hang in Aimee and Jennifer's room, and another for Ronnie and Scott, which was probably close enough to cover Alex, and Jim didn't sleep anyway.

Jamie had watched intently as Tess strung the web around the first dreamcatcher frame, because she wanted to be absolutely sure she got it right. It was stunningly simple for something that ended up looking so beautiful - a net of spiraling diamonds, like a spiderweb heavy with morning dew. A bead was perched on one side to represent the spider, and there was a hole in the center to let the good dreams through, and from the excess string at the bottom dangled a blue feather from the craft box.

Satisfied, Jamie set to work on her own dreamcatcher. You wrapped the string all around the frame in loops with a little slack at the bottom, and once you got around to the beginning, you started looping through the loops so you made an interlocking net. She chose a spot for her spider, a large, white bead that she privately decided to name Spectre, and on the other side of the web she decided to put a second spider, a blue bead named Anna. She finished it off with a pair of crow feathers.

"There," she said, just having tied the knot around the second feather's stem. "What do you think?"

[Tess Abrahams]

"I think that those nightmares better watch their backs," Tess said, gently capturing one of the smooth ebony feather between her fingers and tracing a thumb down it's silky length. Grinning, she gathered the rest of the colorful hoops in her arms. They could distribute them later. "C'mon on, let's see how it looks!"

Together they took the stairs, footfalls thudding in a purposeful cadence, and made their way back up to Jamie's room. It was softer now, somehow, with the heat of the afternoon floating around lazily amongst the scatterings of childhood paraphernalia and the warm light from the open window filling even the farthest corner.

Tess watched as Jamie deliberated, one small finger tapping her chin in thought, and watched as the girl walked to the bed and carefully, almost reverently, slipped the lasso of twine atop the dreamcatcher around the smoothly rounded peak of the headboard post.

"Look at that," Tess said. The beads knocked gently against the wood, a chorus of muted plinks, as the woven web settled in it's new spot. "A perfect fit."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie stepped back to admire her handiwork. Then she stepped back in and measured the distance between the dreamcatcher and her pillow. She realized suddenly she wasn't exactly sure how it was supposed to work - did dreams follow a path through the room into her head, and, if so, did she have to put the dreamcatcher in the right place like a real spiderweb, or would it just draw them in like a pitcher plant?

And then she decided it didn't really matter - after all, she knew dreams didn't really work that way, and she was pretty sure Tess did, too. It was the thought that counted, and the dreamcatcher, for all its garish colors, certainly looked the part of a friendly mystical talisman. And truth be told, it felt good to do something about her dreams.

[Jamie Morrigan]

They finished handing out the dreamcatchers that evening. Jamie finished off the night watching a movie with Aimee and Jen in the den upstairs, and she finished off the movie by adding fighter planes and flying saucers in the background as the two boring main characters professed their love for each other. Jen complained, but Aimee laughingly agreed it was an improvement.

By the time she climbed into bed, the slits of streetlight glare through her window blinds were resting softly on the dreamcatcher at the corner of her bed. She touched it lightly and then squirmed under the covers, pulling them snugly all around herself like a cocoon. She saw the two beads grow spindly spider legs, and they delicately plucked the strings of the dreamcatcher as if daring the nightmares to try and cross its threshold.

She slept soundly that night without so much as a murmur. Tess peaked in early the next morning to find Jamie breathing deep and evenly. They celebrated with pizza rolls for breakfast when she woke up.

A week passed. Every night Jamie looked at the dreamcatcher last thing before she closed her eyes to sleep, and every night she woke up refreshed and at peace. But then, at the end of a particularly hot and stuffy day with an equally hot and stuffy night in the forecast, a bank of black clouds rolled over Los Santos, growling like a faultline. The bedroom windows of the House, left open so its residents wouldn't suffocate, whistled with the gusting wind. It clawed its way into Jamie's room, making the dreamcatcher swing on its post, further and further each time, until it swung around behind the headboard, and the loop of twine it hung from slipped over the top of the post, dropping the dreamcatcher into the crack behind the bed.

The clouds rumbled more insistently, and Jamie began to shiver underneath her covers.