For all you shatter is our seeming, And in breaking we are free

This mostly uses TV canon, especially for the vision scene when Childermass was shot. I have the book on order from the library, but it'll be another week before it gets in. I saw this photoset and book quote, though, and the bit about the pebble bumped into the pistol ball in my head, and ... Um. Here we are?

Title: A Pebble In The King's Pocket
Rating: PG
Fandom: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV)
Characters/Pairings: John Childermass, John Uskglass|The Raven King. Childermass/Uskglass
Summary: John Uskglass comes to Childermass while he sleeps, to offer him a reward for all his service. It is not a reward Childermass can accept, however. His choice was made years ago, and he will not undo it now. Perhaps, though, in sacrificing one reward, he may yet win a greater
Wordcount: 2730
Warnings/Notes: Dreams/Visions, Kings, Magic, Love, Loyalty, Fealty, Oaths, Freedom, Sacrifice, Reward, Kisses, Happy Ending
Disclaimer: Not mine

The sky caught me.

That happens, sometimes. Especially this time of year, autumn, the autumn skies in Ireland keep catching me. It's when they're silver. When there's these sheets of high silver cirrus over the blue, with white and lead cumulus drifting beneath them, like cloud ships sailing on a shining, silver sea. The sun high behind the silver, making the whole sky glow, wide and vast and white-gold. It caught me on the way home, because one of the cumulus ships had drifted across the sun and was shining a deep blue at its heart, with pearlescent rainbows feathering its edges from the light caught there. I was actually caught stupid, crouched down on the footpath with my shopping bag at my feet, smiling stupidly up at it. Cloud-ships on a silver sea. They make me feel like there's something unfurling in my chest, uncoiling open from a fist to a palm, tugging me up and out into the bright, endless wheel. They make me feel ... huge and open and clear as glass, chiming faintly with the turning of the world. Like a glass bell hung from the sky with the sun in my chest. They make me feel big and bright, like there's nothing in the world that's not beautiful. I love it. I love them. Those skies always catch me. They make me feel so alive.

Sometimes the world is too beautiful to bear, do you think? I end up crouched on the ground, staring out at it in wide, stupid joy. I ought not to, probably. It just ... it just catches me sometimes? It just grabs me, right around the chest, and tugs me open. I don't know what to do with it.

I would live in the sky. I would dream dreams of cloud ships and cloud cities and endless falls upwards into a molten, shining silver. I would dream of being bright and clear as a glass bell, dream of sunshine in my chest and this white, open joy in my head. I would live forever like that. I would be a silver autumn sun, if only the world would let me.

*shakes head* I ... It's so intense, sometimes? I don't know if you're meant to feel like this just randomly. This open thing in your chest that almost hurts with how much it ... with how much it feels. Loves, maybe. I don't know. It's so intense.

The sky catches me sometimes. I don't know? But my, my, me and mine. It's beautiful. It's so beautiful sometimes. Yes? I think so. I don't think I can help it. *smiles crookedly*

When I was a kid, the department store in the county town had a mirrored staircase. The store held two floors, the ground floor and the basement, and there were two broad flights of stairs between them. The three walls of that stairwell were walled in mirrors, so that as you walked down them, you could see yourself arcing out to infinity on either side, endlessly traversing up and down the steps, caught in transition between up and down, echoed to infinity on all sides.

It was fascinating. I used to spend as much time as humanly possible on the staircase, when we were in that store. (Admittedly, part of that was that I hated clothes shopping, and shoe shopping, and had to be dragged around the place at the best of times). Mam never had to use the intercom when we wandered off there. She just had to swing by the stairs on the way out. Reliable as clockwork, that's where I'd be.

Sometimes, when I look at the dreams I have ... I think that staircase must have flipped some sort of switch in my brain, or something. Because I have a fondness for ... I suppose you could call them 'transitional spaces'? *smiles faintly* I don't know. Stairs. Tunnels. Bridges. Hotel lobbies. Piers. Trains. The between places. The places between one stop and the next. They are ... I don't know. They do something.

I had a dream, once, where I stepped off a stairs not unlike that one, and out into ...

I ... haven't really been able to write, lately. I'm not quite sure why. I've just ... There's been this kind of ... luminous blankness? Full of the shadows of ideas, flickering things, there and gone again. Nothing concrete, nothing translatable. Nothing you could make words out of.

I've had this before. It's probably actually somewhat of a bad sign, in that long periods of this, of the kind of on-the-cusp reaching for half-felt, vivid imaginings, usually indicates a downturn on the way. It's a bit like the high before the crash, though I probably don't have to properly worry unless I start getting euphoric flashes and moments of universal alignment. It's just ... when the world gets a bit more stretched and vivid, and full of shadowed things, I'm usually reaching too far, and about to fall. *shrugs*

It's just ... kind of a shame, in a lot of ways. Frustrating, you know? It's the half-way place, the moment of hovering just within the upper edges of the cloud-cover, before bursting out into the upper sunlight. You see things, here, or catch the edges of them, and it's ... Just that little higher, that little further, and you could see them, they would be ... so vivid, so real, but ... well, that's about where Icarus's wings begin to melt, isn't it? *smiles ruefully*

I hate the falling part. I don't want to hit the falling part. But it's that moment, the moment just before, when gravity catches hold but doesn't yet cast down, when things are clear. When things resolve into something usable, something understandable. This, the half-way place, the reaching place, is too full of shadows and half-done thoughts. It's too intangible and too crowded, and nothing manifests itself here. Just shadows of thoughts, out of the corner of your eye. A luminous blankness. *sighs*

I had a mildly (okay, very) distressing dream last night in which my sister told me my father was dead (he isn't). Weird thing about it, though, she told me by saying "Ar nAthair, ata ar neamh", which is the first line of the Lord's prayer in Irish, and means "Our Father, who is in heaven". As in, Dad's dead.

My subconscious is a strange, strange place. Not only does it occasionally dream in other languages, it also dreams in code. *frowns bemusedly at self* Also, more than a little morbid, methinks.

Right, I'm running, late for a doctor's appointment, but I have to put these down before I lose them. I think this near-exhaustion thing does something to you, makes your dreams more vivid, or something. They were really, really vivid.

Fandom dream - Hakkai v. Ronon on the river path beneath the oncoming tsunami
Steampunk dream - the Wall (a metal-and-steam skin over a mile-high cliff), Yoline and Mikhail's love (he engraved his proposal on one of the Rising Columns while in the air - they're Wall-flyers), murder on the Rising Columns (massive pipes being transported up the face of the wall, by pulley and scaffold)
Climbing dream - the old manor, kidnap, climbing towards the roof on the far side of the house to rescue her (and wow, was that detailed! Who knew you could get vertigo in a dream), running, the cellar, caught in the knife-web (this part I think safely counts as nightmare, because no-one needs to feel in that much detail what it would be like to shred their effing foot, or spend that long huddled in fear on a patch of safe wall around the injury).