Musings of a Wizard

[madimpossibledreamer]

To those in the US who celebrate it, happy Flag Day, and a good day to everyone else!
(Steel = Spike)

Main Points:
Buffy/Dresden Files Crossover
Chapter Summary: Xander mulls over the Soulgaze he shared with Steel.
Word Count: 475
Rating: Teen
very light preslash

         A soulgaze is a whole lot of symbolism and a dash of poetry and Platonian Truth.  Which makes parsing them more a matter of free association and instinctual understanding than using your logical brain.  No one ever gets fluent in it because wizards like being the ones with all the information and aren’t particularly fond of giving anything away.  These two statements might seem counterintuitive until you realize you’d have to do a whole lot of soulgazing to get the knowledge necessary to understand exactly how any of that works, and while you’d be learning a whole lot in the process, other people would also be learning a lot about you.  Not the safest proposition, particularly when you might accidentally be giving away fatal weaknesses to the kinds of people who might sell you out or use said weaknesses themselves.
         Fortunately, being a wizard is also pretty good practice for figuring out what specific symbology means to you.  Spells?  Game of association.  Potions?  Game of association.
         That’s something all the kooky dream interpretation books miss.  Sure, there are some common symbology meanings, but even those vary by culture.  For example, snakes.  Some people love ‘em, some people hate ‘em.  If both people have a dream about snakes, you’re dreaming (ha!) if you think it means the same thing for them both.  If you’ve got nowhere to start, common cultural beliefs are a good place to begin, but you’re almost just better off sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and writing down any word that comes to mind.
         So there’s not a ‘book of Soulgaze Truth’ that I can just sit down and ferret out all the details of what it meant, seeing the “Pretty Boy” mob boss’s soul all laid out for me.  What makes it even worse is that while most wizards think it’s all in the eye of the beholder, because everyone sees something different, theories exist that it’s a two way street.  In other words, the imagery and metaphors chosen are a combined effort between the subconsciousnesses of the two people sharing said Soulgaze.  So while I might see wolves as…kind of feral dogs, loyalty and all, he might have chosen it as a sign of strength, and it might mean one, both, neither, or somewhere in between.
         I’m also experiencing the issue that I am itching to ask him what he saw, because while he didn’t look pitying, he’s become oddly protective and it’s taken me weeks of encounters to notice.  Asking about such things is Generally Not Done, and while I don’t usually care about that sort of thing unless it’d bring the Doom of Damocles ever closer to Willow’s head (I like it right where it is, thank you), I don’t think that’d even apply here.  It’s just…I think, more than anything, I’m scared of the answer.