smallestopener | Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

Ingress had a brilliant birthday. She’s eleven. Eleven is nearly grown up! It’s also the year when children in the stories she’s read come into their own. Adventures begin, schooling starts, worlds are saved… she can hardly wait to see what will happen next.

Her party earlier was such fun. Door was almost nice to Puck; Ingress had worried a little about that after she invited him. But he was very nice and charming, and Tom was nice, too, and Puck helped Ingress steal lots of roses off the cake while Havelock talked to Tom and Door, and it was brilliant.

She ate far too much icing sugar, but Tom had the peppermint potion waiting for her when the party was over. She feels much better now. And she’s eleven!

It sounds so good in her head. Eleven, eleven, eleven.

She should have asked Mary to stay the night with her, she thinks, as she tosses and turns. She’s never going to fall asleep, even with staying up past her bedtime. Tom and Door insisted she go to bed after she started yawning. They can be so silly sometimes.

She tosses one more time, and she thinks, again, how impossible it will be to go to sleep tonight. Her eyelids flutter and close. It is not long before she’s deep in dreams.

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He's still not-quite-glaring at Crowley, his expression looking less like anger and more like amused exasperation with each passing moment.

"I think what Crowley means, my dear," he says, turning his attention to Ingress once more, "is that you may be small, but you are mighty."

"But, of course," she says, in a very Mary Lennox kind of manner. She's practiced that of late. "That is because I am."

The wine is more purple than it was before. And there are sparkles in.

"You are mighty," Crowley muses, reaching out for his own wineglass, "because you are mighty. A philosophy I can get behind."

There's a flash of colour, bright against the black of Crowley's sleeve and his pale, sallow skin. At his wrist, strung on a plain leather thong (starting to show signs of wear, now, lightly cracked and slightly frayed), is a small rose, carved of the clearest apple-green jade.

Ingress watches the rose. The sun glints on the green, and she sighs. It's lovely.

"There are roses everywhere. Tom says they sing, sometimes. Or one does."

"Yes," Aziraphael says distantly. "That one inspires, they say." He cocks his head at her and holds up his own wineglass to examine it; there are sparkles there, as well.

"That sort of inspiration turns up in the oddest places, sometimes."

She clinks her glass to the angel's, and silver glitter puffs up in a cloud from the connection.

Ingress laughs and clinks her glass against Crowley's. Black glitter filters down, mingling with the silver as it drifts to the table.

None gets into the wine.

"I wouldn't lay bets against you hearing it, one day," Crowley says, holding his wineglass a careful distance - shielding it, almost - from the few glimmering flakes of glitter still swirling about, heedless of gravity in the service of a greater narrative purpose.

"You'll have to come tell me what it's like."

If you had to choose, you'd say he was speaking to Ingress.

Probably.

"I shall sing the song, and I shall hold the shadows back."

She beams at both of them.

"And I'll tell you."

"And when you do, you won't forget to tell us about your part in the song as well, I hope," Aziraphael reminds her.

She beams. "I'll not forget. Only I don't know the words yet."

"Oh, that," Crowley says dismissively. "Hmph."

His eyes are on his wineglass, as he turns it lazily in the light; the sun glints off the rim, and fails to penetrate the deepdark liquid.

"The butterflies will tell me. Don't worry."

The big purple one wobbles by the window and winks.

"You do better making up your own, you ask me," says Crowley.

(Nobody did, but this is a dream.)

The wine seeps blackly against the glass, glitter-free; leaves a deep red leg; curves away towards the other side.

"Dancing to the beat of your own tune, sort of thing."

After all, just because something's written doesn't mean it isn't written differently somewhere else, where other people can't read it. In bigger letters.

Underlined.

Twice.

She watched the dark wine. It draws the eye, and looks like blood.

It doesn't frighten her. Blood is blood.

"I have to know some of the steps, but I can make up more on my own."

Her melange of fighting skills will one day amaze many in Haven.

"Ah, a foundation," he says, nodding at her. Are there more sparkles in his glass now, or is it a trick of the uneven light, dappling in little patches on the hay?

"Then I look forward to seeing what you come up with, my dear. You've found a very strong foundation for all sorts of things."

"You'll be around to see. Forever and ever."

She asked Door what 'ethereals' meant, once, a long time ago.

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

Re: Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.