Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You’re not inside the House,” Dylan says in his sleep, eyes narrowing, mouth too far gone to scowl. “You're somewhere nearby, though.”

Jesse can’t see what Dylan is seeing. Her world is the succession of cages, the reflections on the glass, and a trace of red carpet the House put in the distant hall one day. Instead, she watches her brother’s mouth gape, full of fangs. His tufted paws open and close like he’s dreaming. 

Dylan has been speaking in his sleep more consistently lately. Not more or less often. More consistently, about a man from the place between worlds who angers Dylan with his mysteries. Dylan speaks loud enough that Jesse hears from her mattress on the opposite side of the bit of House the siblings are caged in. 

So she reaches out and pats him on the shoulder. Jesse doesn’t want Dylan to be angry. The FBC always restricts their freedoms even further when Dylan does something because he’s angry.  

When he doesn’t awaken, she pats harder with the pads of her hand, mussing his fur. He reconfigures his shoulder in his sleep to squirm away from her touch. 

Come on, Dylan. You’re having a nightmare. You’re having a dream that Parapsychology might want to record.

Her brother snorts and turns over, flopping off his mattress and stretching twitchy paws toward her. She thinks he might wake up, might say something cutting with that pain in the back of his eyes and that bravado he copies from the Rangers. (That bravado will be really threatening on him, one day, and then … ?) He doesn’t wake, though. His expression smooths out, becomes a little more animal, and softens into real sleep. 

Jesse shakes her whole body, snout to tail, to work out some of the stress he caused. 

Dylan never mentions that particular dream to anyone who might tell Parapsychology. So, Jesse doesn’t either.

Dylan is walking. No, running. The full change is on him, so it’s a fluid run, over discarded paper and basement doors, over subway grates, over concrete and bronze, over manhole covers, over decorative bushes. Across long blocks and down, through Wall Street canyons. 

Beside him runs another person like him. This other person flicks back and forth between bodies like the opening and closing of an eye. 

It’s an astonishing fact: there is another person whose body changes and settles. Another person whose edges are under his own control. What incredible control! 

What the man says, though, makes Dylan question what he himself knows about the world, and about the House.

I come from a place with many doors, says the voice from behind lion’s teeth and a regal face. 

Your reality is just one layer of skin. The doors cross between them. At the end of the universe there is a last door —

“The end?” Dylan says, slowing down, watching his footing for manhole covers and grates and turned-over shopping carts. “Like the Big Crunch? Or the heat death?” 

Behind Door stands a stone lion, its marble pitted like the surface of the Moon but its face serene. Door stands as tall as the lion and shaped not unlike it, except that there is a lower-slung cant to the set of his hips, balanced, maybe, by a draconic tail. 

He gestures with the brightening of his eyes and the minute twitches of skin under his fur.

“The End,” says Mr. Door, and turns human. He does it swiftly, neatly, the last of a green-glowing eye disappearing into his temple and leaving only a waving afterimage behind. Dr. Darling would give Dylan such freedom if Dylan showed control like that. 

Dylan suspects that some law of the universe will stretch toward breaking if he himself changed in this night-world. Or is it the other way around? Is his real body native to this place? Anyway, Door is still taller than him, standing as Door is on steps. Dylan surely outweighs him, but on four feet it’s even difficult to crane his neck up. Columns behind Door stretch into fog. 

“It’s almost time for you to show your captors what you can do,” Door says. “Dr. Darling taught you about the shape and age of the universe, but hardly lets you step out upon it. What can prisoners know of the outside of their cage? Let me help you out.”

“How?” Dylan thinks of the tongue of red carpet in the House. “Where would we go?”

“Anywhere. You matter so little, in the grand scheme of things. Let that be freeing to you.”

This mix of offense and offering sends Dylan’s fur bristling. He wants to be free, but he doesn’t quite believe it can happen. Free is what you feel the moment before the pain gets really bad. Free is the moment before they stress test you past your limits. Sometimes, passing your limits is worth it. 

And ‘you matter so little’ confuses him. “We’re important,” he shouts, considering himself and Jesse as a unit automatically. 

Red lights flicker. A cold wind rises, blowing papers around. An open newspaper flattens on Dylan's flank and then soars over him, leaving his rustling fur behind. Door disappears. The dream ends. 

“He’s like us,” Dylan says, wide awake and sitting alertly on the floor, his paws folded in front of him. “Our lives won’t look like Dr. Darling’s when we grow up, Jesse. You know that. We won’t ever be the ones who lead the experiments. But Door … he can show us what we might become, if we just embrace who we are.”

Jesse does want to embrace who we are. For years, she has been told to have two eyes, stand up straight, retract her claws. To look human. And Dylan is telling her there is a man — a ghost-thing, a dream-thing, but, in manner and voice a human — saying that she doesn’t have to be disciplined any more. Maybe the discipline was a lie all along, an arbitrary choice instead of a law of the universe. Seeing someone else embrace the life she has been punished for is infuriating and frightening and fulfilling. 

But she knew all along that most people didn’t live in enclosures. She’s aware most people don’t even live in the House. Not all the time. 

The idea of freedom is invigorating, like the idea of the sun.

Door appears to both Jesse and Dylan the next day.

Door doesn’t move though dreams at all, she realizes. Two people can’t dream together like this, the siblings side by side on a rain-slick sidewalk, the place vivid enough that Jesse can feel the rain on the desolate street and feel her fur ruffle when Dylan’s tail brushes her leg. 

Door moves through a place and time that happens sometimes to coincide with Dylan’s sleep. Perhaps it sometimes coincides with planes close to the House. 

Maybe their bodies are still in the cage. Maybe not. 

Door approaches them with high shoulders and soft eyes, a lion-badger-dragon with a crown of green-black mane. “Will you come with me?” He asks. 

Jesse curls around Dylan, the warm barrel of his side rising and falling against her own. He hadn’t expected her to move, any more than she had, and his muscles all tense with the desire to leap backward. “You can’t take him.” 

“You can’t guarantee he doesn’t want to be taken,” Door says lightly. 

Jesse doesn’t show fangs. That wouldn’t be polite, and Door is someone to whom she must be polite. Not because he dispenses the treats and the punishments like Darling, but because he is an unfamiliar adult. She doesn’t trust a voice that practiced at getting people to believe what the speaker believes. His voice is authoritative and gentle, and that combination makes her want to sit up straight, keep her two eyes fixed, and skitter away to curl into the comfort of her own fur later.

Dylan, too, seems to remember his hatred for authority. It overrides the pull Jesse feels, too. Jesse has questions. 

“You look like us.” She asks. "Were you made here? Do you have a kid? Were they engineered here?" 

This surprises Door. He shows more teeth, more gum. A smile or a sniff; either way, he wants a reaction out of the kids. Dylan cringes, slips outside of Jesse’s encircling limbs, and puffs himself up in quick succession. 

Door is stunned. He looks at them in a new way — compassion yes, but hurt; lofty but alien. A selection of green and brown eyes open along his forehead and jaw with wet blinks, the first sign Jesse has spotted of any mutability in his form. Door looks like he’s about to say something unplanned. Familiar footsteps sound behind the Fadens; Rangers and Darling walking along the bare House-concrete that replaced the red carpet that evening. The real world is intruding on the dream-space, or whatever plane overlaps here. 

Door walks backward into the fog, but just before he disappears his shoulders fold back, and he is a man crawling on all fours, uncomfortable. Stiff, like an old man.

Meanwhile Jesse sits back on her haunches, comfortably, and finds that she has dropped back into the real world (into her cage) with fur curling in a ridge up her back and her thumbs awkward. Dylan is mostly boy with his back to her and sweat dotting his shoulder blades. 

Darling lords over the Rangers, but Jesse knows he’ll lean down to the kids’ level soon to talk to them. He will put up lights and recorders, bring in other people. He will, as usual, be full of ceaseless energy to explore something he barely detected and barely understands. The air will smell like people, familiar but nameless clammy bodies in Black Rock vests. 

Where did he go? Jesse finds herself wondering, over and over, in the days after. Did Door walk those cluttered city streets? Could she? Did the House have a room for him? Why did he stand at the edge of her cage, insisting there were no bars? Would Door take Dylan with him? Where would they all go?