Chapter 440: (434) 6.48. Would the Real Vin Please Stand Up

After everything Lumel had been through in her dream journey, it didn’t surprise Vin that she needed a couple of minutes to simply hold him close and cry. If his own dream journey had been based more so around his dreams and nightmares instead of whatever random junk he’d been thinking about that day, he was pretty certain he would have had a much harder time of things too. For the first year or two after officially running away from home, Vin had been plagued with a semi-reoccurring nightmare of his parents somehow finding him on his journey across the country, physically dragging him from his tent and forcing him to come home and suffer their arguing once more. He didn’t even want to think about how he would have reacted if he’d been forced to go through that one without his dream guide. It had only been Fred’s constant presence at his side that reminded him he was dreaming in the first place. Seeing as Lumel had lost Fria somewhere along the way, she’d probably forgotten she was dreaming in the first place.

In fact, Vin’s hunch was quickly confirmed. After a few minutes of loud crying, Lumel managed to collect herself, gasping as she jerked back away from him, staring up at him with wide eyes.

“Wait, Vin?! You can’t be down here! Oh, Gods, that’s right! Fria! The journey! I’m in a dream!” Lumel paused, her voice shaking a tad as she drifted closer and hugged him once more, far more gingerly this time. But despite the tender hug, Vin felt her hands clutch against his back, as if desperate to hold him in place.

“I had to attend your funeral,” she whispered, shaking slightly as she took an uncertain breath. “I had to listen to everyone talk about what life would be like without you now. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was afraid they’d kick me out of Terra.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through all that. It’s alright, it’s not real,” Vin said, gently rubbing circles against her back as he held her tight. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m right here.”

“You are here,” she murmured, letting out a deep sigh that seemed to take years of tension off her shoulders as she slumped against him. Tilting her head back, she smiled up at him, before leaning up and giving him a long, loving kiss that Vin happily accepted. It had been almost three weeks since he’d last spoken to Lumel, and despite knowing he’d missed her, he hadn’t realized just how he’d missed her during that time. The two of them stayed like that for a minute, lost in one another’s embrace as they drifted in the center of the labyrinth.

Eventually, Lumel broke away, her face slightly flushed as she beamed at him with quite possibly the widest smile he’d ever seen on her face.

“I never want you to leave me,” she whispered, drifting up and planting her forehead against his. Her cool, gel-like skin felt perfect against his own, and she sighed as she closed her eyes. “You are my water and my soul. My guiding current. My lifemate, hopefully now and forever.”

She kissed him again, a bit more forcefully this time, and Vin blinked, unable to shake the feeling like she’d said something rather important. Waiting until they broke away once more, he matched her smile, brushing his hand against her delicate cheek.

“Thank you, Lumel, that was beautiful. And I love you as well. But what’s a lifemate? I’ve only ever heard you call us lovemates before.”

“Hmm? Oh, right, I guess Vin wouldn’t know that,” she muttered, giggling to herself as she planted kisses on his cheeks in between her words. “I suppose the closest thing to your culture would functionally be two people getting married, but it’s not quite the same. It basically just means promising to forever be an important part of one another’s life. It’s a pretty serious thing on my world.”

“Oh,” Vin managed. He hesitated both at the revelation that Lumel had functionally just asked him to marry her, at least in pulmon culture, and the discovery that she hadn’t quite figured out what was going on just yet.

She didn’t realize he was .

“Don’t you ‘oh’ me,” Lumel giggled, stopping with the barrage of kisses as she drifted back and smiled at him. “I get nervous enough thinking about this kind of stuff while I’m awake, I don’t need my own subconscious adding to the pressure. I know the real Vin has some concerns about that kind of thing, don’t worry. Though it nice getting to sort of practice like this. The moment was so perfect, what with you showing up out of nowhere to rescue me, that I just couldn’t help myself. Once I learn how to cast Create Dream, I’m planning to get a bit more practice in to hopefully prepare myself for the real thing one day.”

“Lumel,” Vin said, holding up a hand in the hopes of stopping her before she told him anything more. He wished he’d made it clear what was going on sooner, but he hadn’t realized until it was too late. “Please, don’t freak out… but I am the real Vin. I’m not a dream.”

“Of course you’re not,” Lumel sighed, her smile turning a touch sad as she gazed longingly into his eyes. “You have no idea how I wish that were the case. It’ll probably be years before I manage to work up the courage to say that to you in the waking world. I know we haven’t even been together for six-months yet, but after everything we’ve been through… Half the time it feels like we’ve crammed entire years into our time spent together. I never would have expected to find my lifemate out here on the surface, but you see me for who I am, body and soul, and still choose to love me. I don’t care if it may be reckless, my heart knows what it wants. Any lingering hesitations I had before starting this dream journey were thoroughly squashed after getting to experience what attending your funeral would have been like. I promised myself I’d make an effort to go after what I wanted before it was taken from me, and I’m going to do just that… as soon as I muster up the courage.”

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“” Vin said a touch more firmly, his own face heating up as he prepared for the pulmon’s inevitable reaction. “Seriously, please, don’t freak out. Everything you just said means the world to me, and I promise you I feel similarly, and we can have a more in-depth conversation later about all of that… but I’m not a figment of your dream journey. You and Fria have been trapped in this labyrinth portion of your dream for a good couple of days now out in the waking world, and it seems Fria was afraid you were going to be trapped here for a hell of a lot longer. She managed to get a message out to Fred, who then reached out to me, asking for my help. He shoved me into the middle of your dream journey in order to find the two of you and get you out. It took me a while to get here, but I’m here now, and I’m .”

Vin may as well have slapped her across the face with how violently Lumel reacted. Lurching back in the water, Lumel’s face took on a look of abject horror as her eyes finally landed on his missing arm. Raising a shaking hand, she gulped, her voice wavering as she pointed at the lack of appendage.

“…Your golem arm… Where is it?”

“Remember? I told you, whatever that epic monster did to me, I don’t even get to keep my arm on me in the dreamscape,” he shrugged, offering her a sheepish smile. “…I take it that the dream versions of me you encountered along your dream journey had both arms attached?”

Lumel simply drifted there in the water, staring at him with that same look of dawning realization and horror. Blood rushed up to her cheeks and her face turned a darker purple than he’d ever seen it before, as her horror rapidly shifted to a look of utter embarrassment. Slowly, she turned around, drifting over to the stone wall of the labyrinth and pressing her head against it. Her body and cloak then rippled and changed to match the exact color of the wall, all but turning the pulmon invisible.

“Lumel…” Vin sighed, trying hard to keep himself from laughing at the adorable reaction.

“Just me,” she groaned, and a portion of the gray, stone wall that was a Lumel-shaped silhouette turned a slightly more reddish shade. “I just asked you to be Just like that! I should have known you weren’t a dream!”

“I should have said something sooner, it’s my fault,” Vin said, swimming over to her and laying a gentle hand against her shoulder. Lumel flinched at his touch, but she didn’t shoot away like he’d half expected her to. “If it helps, I thought all that stuff was really beautiful. About me being your water and your soul and all that.”

“” Lumel snapped, returning to her regular color as she buried her face in her hands. “This is the most embarrassing moment of my entire life,” she mumbled, her words barely audible.

Drifting there, watching his girlfriend wither away in anguish over what she’d done, Vin realized he had a choice. Almost like the very labyrinth they were trapped within, Vin could practically envision the different paths his next words might lead him down. He could tell her to forget about everything she’d said. That she was exhausted and not in her right mind after all the traumas she’d gone through during her dream journey. He could tell her to put a pin in all that for now, and that they had far more important things to worry about at the moment, such as finding Fria and getting them all the hell out of here. He could even agree with the out she’d already given him earlier, admitting she was right, and that he had plenty of concerns about advancing their relationship to the next step like that. There were plenty of potential paths available to him, each one giving him a different out.

Yet the more he stared at the embarrassed pulmon actively trying to hide herself in her own hands, the more he realized he didn’t want to go down any of those paths.

Without a word, Vin gently pulled Lumel’s hands away from her face, taking one of them in his own and silently cursing the absence of his other arm as he smiled at her.

“You, uh... You’re probably aware by now that I’m not exactly the most eloquent of speakers,” Vin admitted, getting a quiet laugh out of Lumel as she stared hopefully at him, her face still a dark purple from shame even as her eyes shined. “I don’t have anything quite as poetic as you said… but I feel the same. I feel like I’ve lived through more excitement and important events in the last few months than most people experience in ten lifetimes after everything that Edregon has thrown our way, and you’ve been by my side almost since the beginning. I still have a lot to learn about pulmon culture, there’s no question there. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have concerns about taking that next step… but they’re concerns I want to tackle together. You already are an incredibly important part of my life, and I never want that to change, so to me, we pretty much already are lifemates. If it makes you happy to put an official title on it, then that’s more than fine with me.”

“Vin…” Lumel whispered, gripping his hand in her own so hard he thought for a moment she might actually be trying to break his fingers. Before he could ask her if he said something wrong, she lunged forward through the water, slamming into him hard enough to drive the air from his lungs for the second time that day. Vin struggled to replenish his lost breath when Lumel locked her lips around his with a foreign fervor he’d never seen from the pulmon, and Vin all but gasped when he finally broke free. He was so focused on gulping down water that was somehow air to him that he didn’t even realize Lumel was ripping his shirt off him until she was pulling it over his head, and he blinked as he quickly realized what was happening.

“Lumel? Shouldn’t we—”

He was silenced with another kiss, and Vin decided that was a pretty compelling argument as he joined Lumel in her frantic efforts to get rid of the rest of their clothes.

If this was what it meant to lose an argument against one’s lifemate, then he certainly wasn’t going to complain.