"What's that?"

He peers over.

“—oh, damn. She cleaned up this time. Like, even more than usual.”

This is not maximally helpful. Camillo leans over against Z to get a look for himself.

She’s thronged by celebrating warriors. A thick white fur spotted and stained with blood is draped across her shoulders, fastened with a pin, not quite covering her pigment-streaked breasts. Her neck and arms and braid drip with mismatched jewelry, bangles and chains and hairpins in gold and silver, lapis and jade, all spotted with brown. An ornately stamped and painted leather belt sits low on her hips, with a heavy, damp sack swinging from one side, staining the bare skin of her thigh red.

She carries a sword in one hand and whatever clothes she was wearing in the other.

Holy shit seems insufficiently reverent. Camillo curls his toes and buries his face in Z's shoulder and tries not to squeak.

This is her. To borrow a turn of phrase from Sherlock Holmes: the woman, surpassing and eclipsing all other women. The only woman who matters.

Camillo is pretty sure that in real life she's studying, like, marine biology or something, but frankly she always kind of has this aura. No wonder he's dreaming her like this.

Also he's dreaming her naked. Which definitely signifies nothing. He's not into girls.

Z gives him a couple of firm pats on the back.

“Don’t die on me now.”

Dorothy lifts something out of the sack on her hip by its mess of red hair.

For a severed head, it’s oddly…un-corpse-like. More the concept of a head than a head.

The cheer from the assembled warriors is deafening.

Yeah okay he's cheering too. Fuck whoever that guy was. He had it coming.

Camillo stamps his feet and screams with everyone else and rides the high of it. Good dream. Good dream.

She tosses the head aside, towards the fireplace.

The whole hall has roared to life. Axes bang on shields, boots pound the wooden floor, voices chant and cry. Dorothy reaches out and grabs a passing girl by the wrist, and she gasps and melts. Somewhere else, a jug drops and shatters on the ground.

“…guess we’re really starting up,” he murmurs, watching as Dorothy sits and the flushed, starstruck girl climbs into her lap.

He could be a girl if he tried really hard and believed in himself. It's his dream. He can do whatever.

"How is she so cool."

“You think I know?”

"Seems like you've got the knack of it."

He laughs.

Somewhere in the room, someone’s started pounding on a drum.

Z drains the rest of the horn.

Dorothy’s hands wander over the girl in her lap. A man drops his shield to pull his companion over him while she grins and mocks shoving him away.

“You weren’t bad. Hell of a day to draw first blood.”

He leans in a little closer, shifts to get more comfortable.

Is more comfort really achievable? Z is superlatively comfortable. Camillo will happily flop all over him.

(Even in the comfort of a Z, though, he can feel his pulse in his throat as he watches Dorothy and her girl. His face feels hot and his hands feel cold and he has no idea why. He's riveted.)

Metal and leather hit the floor.

The girl screws up her face and her courage and shucks off her own dress, and Dorothy pulls her in to kiss her, laughing, one hand on her thigh.

Z, looking between them all, palms the front of Camillo’s pants.

It, uh. It wouldn't, technically, be the first time he had a sex dream about Z. Nor the third. Nor, for that matter, the tenth. They're not that kind of -- they're just friends -- but his subconscious has never quite gotten that message.

This is achingly vivid and he is going to wake up a sticky mess and he can't bring himself to regret it. Without tearing his eyes from the lady of the hour, he gropes along Z's leg for the bandage, presses his fingertips softly into it.

Z hisses in pleasure and leans up into the touch, and his palm twitches against Camillo for a moment before he starts picking open the laces at the front of his pants with a shaky hand.

Dorothy’s hand slides between her girl’s legs, and she gasps and clutches at her shoulders, the blood on the fur wetting her arms.

Camillo might be self-conscious if any of these people were real, or even if any of the imaginary dream-people seemed likely to be watching him and Z. But they aren't and don't, and so he can lean against Z's broad chest and move his hand between Z's thigh and crotch and stare a completely normal amount at Dorothy.

Dorothy’s girl grinds against her hand as she touches her, and the looted bangles and chains on Dorothy’s arm clink in time with the movement of her hips.

Z’s hand matches their pace, and he takes heavy, panting breaths into Camillo’s hair.