to love me is to suffer me

by shiremushrooms

Summary:

"If I can say death's a mug's game, why can't you?"

A very angsty exploration of Dream's trauma, where he learns all the ways so many people loved him and all the ways he didn't realize it, and that maybe death isn't the only path he can take.

With weekly updates! I'm so bad at writing summaries im so sorry. And fuck neil gaiman.

Notes:

Please enjoy some very angsty Dream washing the blood off his hands and Lucienne comforting him! Chewing on them their friendship is everything to me!! Set at the end of s2 ep6 where Dream washes off the blood. This chapter does discuss some suicide/self harm themes, as well as blood imagery, so pls be aware

Hope you enjoy!!

Chapter 1

Morpheus had often heard his sister describe death. Like being asleep in the car as a child and gathered in your parents arms, to have them carry you inside and lay you on your bed, sheets like clouds beneath your body as the sounds of your family’s voices slowly lulled you to sleep.

As he dragged himself up the stairs to his palace, he had to wonder that perhaps his child’s death had been like that. Orpheus. The name hit him like a punch to the gut and he doubled over on the last stair, stone slabbed floor slamming into his knees with a violent crack. 

If Orpheus was carried inside, Dream’s were not the arms that were gentle. Perhaps his son had only ever seen him as loving in his final moments. The only comfort his father afforded him was through violence.  But it didn’t matter anymore. His son was dead. Dream was soon to be dead himself. 

Pain snapped through his body, rendered him kneeling as he fought every impulse to let a sob wrack him. It was a relief, in a way, to feel it, like a hammer striking his gravestone. It felt like justice.

The Guardians all leant towards him, but he waved them away without a word, and hoped they attributed his silence to prestige, his ruin to simple exhaustion from his journey.

The candlelight flickering from within his open castle lit  his slow stagger to the door, like the inside of a church funeral. He’d often seen death so vilified, so romanticized. Yet there was nothing beautifully tragic about this. It was so desperately ugly. The blood on his hands was so, so ugly. 

Morpheus hugged them to his chest, as if to hide them from anyone who might see, as if to hold the remnants of his son closer to him than ever before. To protect him in death as he never had in life.  He wanted to tear himself apart. Hide in the deepest and darkest corners of his realm so that no one could reach him, not Matthew or Death or Lucienne. Wait for the Kindly Ones and hope his death stayed true to their name.

The thought of dying did not scare him so much as the thought of facing those in his realm, facing them and having to tell them how little time he had left. Would they be relieved? Free of their tyrant king? Did they ever love him, he had to wonder.  He certainly wouldn’t love himself, were he them.

The halls were dissonant, so grand yet so empty like it had been abandoned, like its inhabitants had long since left to go die in the dark. Like a house halfway through its owners moving out. Dream at least knew the library would be unchanged. Occupied by the one he feared seeing the most. 

How could he face Lucienne? How could he even look at her, or have her look at him, when he had done what he did?  Standing at the entrance to the library, the doorway loomed over him, formerly inviting warm light that seemed so horribly alive and alight, tarnished by the presence of a dead creature like him.

The sound of his first step against the dreamstuff hardwood floor echoed in the silence of the cavernous shelves, emanating from each surface and he knew she heard it.  She would not say anything. He knew her better than to assume otherwise.  Being back there, a place he’d found solace in for eons, in his final hours, was suffocating. He knew he couldn’t have her see him like this.

Dream pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, stifling another sob. His shaking legs still aching from the fall threatened to give out, yet he told himself he only had to tell her what was necessary, then he could leave. Mourn. Prepare for his own leave.

Leaning against the bookshelf in front of her desk, he hid himself from view. Not out of fear of judgement. He just couldn’t stand to look at her knowing they only had a fraction of time left. Couldn’t stand to have her final gaze at him be worried over him. How did he mourn her when he was the one marked for death? How did he miss someone who was here right with him?

“My Lord?” She asks from the desk behind him, her voice unusually tremulous and careful, like she was walking a rocky path she’d never encountered. It was rare when such scenarios occurred between them. He swallowed another sob at hearing her voice, hearing her speak to him as she had so many times before, and he wanted her to speak more, so he’d never forget her voice even in death. He wanted her to never speak again so there was less to mourn.

“ Lucienne.” Dream croaked, and slumped against the bookshelf as his legs finally became too unsteady. His head hit the case with a gentle thud, and he closed his eyes, feeling the leather of the book covers and wood of the shelves behind him, the only thing keeping him upright. He heard her shuffle papers on the desk, straightening them, like she did when she felt disorganized, like things were breaking around her. He winced at the gentle clink of metal on wood, though he knew it was simply her setting her glasses down.

“My Lord, are you alright, after… recent adventures?” She ventured, and the cadence of her voice is so similar to all the times he’d returned from foolish escapades, which now seemed so small and distant. Less fraught times that seemed so, so important, but now seem like pinpricks in a larger gash. She’d asked him almost the same thing after his capture. 

He wanted to draw out the conversation, have them sit in silence longer than necessary despite his evergrowing need to take leave of her, to have her rid of him. A rational creature would choose one or the other. But Morpheus was not a rational creature.

Many times he tried to speak, only to open his mouth and have no sound come out. Only forcing himself allowed him to speak. 

“ Please… tell the priests serving my son’s temple… that they may take their leave.” He could have built a city from dust with the effort it took him to speak. He nearly couldn’t bring himself to say what he did next. “ And…” He barely stifled a sob. “Have them dig him a shallow grave before they go.” 

He heard the squeak of a chair against the floor as she stood up, and Dream shut his eyes, slumping further back against the bookshelf. “Please… don’t.” He whispers, voice gone. He had never pleaded to her like this. He pressed his sleeve back against his mouth as the cries threatened to suffocate him. Silence from behind him as she didn’t move.

“Morpheus…” The devastation in her voice only made his worse. “Your child is dead?” It was futile to try to hold his breath, and a sob tore through him as he nodded despite knowing she couldn’t see him. 

“Yes.” He felt her lose a breath, perhaps a small cry. Dream didn’t want her to cry for him, not when he deserved anything like that.  “I killed him. I killed Orpheus by my own hand .” 

There, he’d said it. He’d admitted it, yet it felt nothing close to freeing. It was as if there was a hand at his throat, constricting him and forcing him to feel the weight of his regret.  He had to leave this place, the towering shelves looming over him like the walls of a labyrinth he’d never find his way out of.

Dream turned on his heel then, despite the shame of running, and staggered on unsteady legs. He didn’t know where he was going. He just wanted to leave. He wanted to leave everything. Yet Lucienne called out, her footsteps following behind him, and he couldn’t help but freeze his step. 

“My Lord, are you…?” 

Morpheus gripped the bookshelf with one bloodied hand, the other tucked and pressed to his chest. He prayed she didn’t see the red smear on the books, prayed she didn’t see how much of an effort it was to stay standing. 

To look back at her was selfish, yet he did it anyway.  And the last face he saw before he stepped through the wall into his quarters was hers. Her expression fallen as she saw the look on his face, at his broken form and bloodied hands. 

Eons of time and heartbreak stood between them. He supposed neither of them knew how to close this rift. As he stepped into his rooms, he was hit with nothing but endless silence. It was gratifying, he never had silence. But here he did. Silence for his own thoughts to suffocate him.

Dream was alone, as he had been so many times before, but only now did he feel lonely.  He shrugged off his coat, the fabric suffocating his skin, and he stared down at his bare skin, blood streaking up his forearms.  Only now did Morpheus straighten, could he walk without unsteadiness. It was easier to tell him he was washing off an enemy’s blood, from a battle and adventure he’d just returned from. 

But it wasn’t. It was his son’s blood, and it was all he had left of him. In some way, he wanted it to remain, let him stare at his crime until it rotted off of his skin. But he doubted he’d live that long. Gone was the chaise lounge he’d so often occupied the space with, gone was the roaring fire to warm it. Just in front of the mantle sat a small table, a bowl and a jug of water. A rag folded, white, but it wouldn’t be white for long.  In slow, methodical movements, his mind pushed away any and all thoughts, and he took to washing the blood off of his skin. He pretended it was like cleaning the dust off of a book that had remained unread for a very long time.

Dust washed off so much easier than blood. Gentle streaks of the cloth did nothing, and he needed nothing more than to rid himself of it. 

Panic mingled with grief and the hand around his throat loosened, and sobs tore through his body, like violent and vengeful waves that pushed him under again and again. Washing no longer satisfied and he took to clawing off the blood of his son, nails scraping against skin as father and son’s blood mingled in the water.

But it was never enough. Dream gasped for air and he knew he’d never survive the journey to shore.

When Lucienne found him sitting on that bench, his torn hands were hanging limply at his lap, his gaze  fixed on them, unable to see anything else.

Only when her fingertips grazed his cheek did he look up, eyes torn from where they had been to the face of the person who reached for him. Helped him. Lucienne knelt in front of him, and took his claw marked hands in her own like he was something worth caring for. She said something to him, but it never reached him.  How could anything reach him, when his senses had been muffled by grief and he’d been shocked into silence?

Her murmurs, soft and reassuring, made no dent in the wall he’d built against what was threatening to drown him. Dream hardly felt the hands cradling his own as they cleaned the remaining blood off of his skin, gentle and loving in a way that he didn’t deserve.

Maybe, later, some part of him would be outraged and embarrassed that she’d seen him like this. For now, she stood as a place to return home to, and he didn’t think of her beyond being glad to have someone there with him.  When the shock ebbed from him like a tide receding and the memories of what he did returned, so did the knowledge that Lucienne was there, drying his damp palms. She’d never touched him like that before, though, he’d never asked for it. Never given her a reason to. 

Coming to his senses was violent, an awakening to the bright and stark light of his quarters, the biting cold and the white cloth grazing his skin, and the hands moving it. Every sense hurt, every light was too bright, every touch was painful. No had touched him in a way that was like healing, like an apothecary wiping away a bloodied wound. But she did. 

And he hated her for it. 

“ What are you doing?” He snapped, standing in an instant and pushing her hands away from his. “How did you get here?”

Lucienne sighed and adjusted her glasses, a poor effort at looking unbothered when her eyes were puffy and red. Had she cried over him? Over Orpheus? Dream had left her so she wouldn’t grieve him. 

“The door reopened some time ago, my Lord.” She did well to hide the thickness of her voice from the tears. But not well enough, he’d known her too long for that. “I’d assumed you wanted company.” 

Dream stiffened, jaw clenched. “ I didn’t wish to be disturbed.” Yet he was so glad she was here. Another few seconds, minutes, hours of seeing her. He wanted it. Yet she did not deserve a dying king. Lucienne rose to his eye level then, her eyes soft as she assessed him in that measured way she always did. “Let me help you.” She whispered, barely audible yet he heard every word.  Hung onto them.

In his silence, his stillness, she reached for his hands again, cloth still in her own. It was an action she’d done so many times before, one he’d accepted so many times before. Yet now he flinched away. 

“ Don’t touch me like that.” He snapped, pushing his hands away from her.

Dream didn’t know why he did this. It was not that he disliked her touch, but his hands were tarnished already, and it felt unfair to have her touch them simply because she wanted to help. It was cruel of him to let her touch him, to let her help him, when he’d be gone so soon. He wanted her with him. He wanted her gone, he wanted her to forget about him and tend to the library she loved and not get her hands dirtied with the bloodied creature she called a king.

“My Lord…” Lucienne trailed off. What could she say? He certainly wouldn’t know what to say.

The last time she’d touched him, the last time that anyone had touched him, he’d been laying on the ground outside the Gates of Horn and Ivory, where she’d found him after his imprisonment. Her hand against his was the first touch in one hundred and six years he’d felt. And the first in a longer time that a touch was intended without harm. It was gratifying. It was mortifying. But he was grateful all the same that it was her hand that met him after rotting in that glass cell for a century.

It was unnatural to hate her, he knew. He couldn’t spend his final hour hating the one who’d stood by his side for eons just because he mourned the consequences of his own actions. He wondered once more how he missed someone who was right here with him. 

Not for long, he supposed. His sister never claimed to know exactly what happened after she led the dead to the sunless lands,  but he hoped it would be merciful. He hoped he’d see them all again soon. Orpheus, he’d see. But was he deserving of that? Would his son even want to see him?

Some part of him knew that he’d never see him again. He deserved that. Grief threatened to drown him again, and his throat constricted once again with the weight of it. 

“ Lucienne,” He choked out, and at once slumped back onto the lounge, accepting her arms around him and the crook of her shoulder to rest his head in. He offered his hands once more and she began cleaning them again. “ Talk to me.” 

He wanted her voice, even if it was a prelude to his death, even if every word she spoke was an extended eulogy, a hopeless prelude to his future.  He wanted the mundanities of her day that were never that mundane to him, the small things that mattered to her and that he tethered himself to, reminders of her.

“A delegation from Chaos arrived at the gates today.” She murmured, letting go of one of his hands yet moving closer to him. He didn’t move away. 

“They wanted to know what the angels were doing with Hell. But, as I told them, that’s no longer under our jurisdiction.” She huffed a halfhearted laugh, yet he couldn’t bring himself to. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the lounge, nursing the tension headache that had never stopped building.

“I didn’t let them in of course,” she continued, and he was glad she did. Slowly and cautiously, he leant his head towards hers and rested it on her shoulder, exhaling a breath of relief when she rested her head over his.  “Though I suspect we’ve made an enemy of Princess Jemmy.” 

Now he smiled, though only a very small one. These were the things they’d talk about, before his capture, then after, before this. Before he doomed himself. It was almost like listening to the past. Things seemed so important back then. Things like the threat of Chaos, which now seem so small compared to his son. Compared to his realm. Compared to Lucienne.

Dream’s eyes remained closed, but he turned his hand over in her own, palm up. She began tracing her thumb over the lines of his palm, like she was memorising them, like she knew she wouldn’t have long to do so. Of course she knew. He shivered against her touch, sobs threatening to take him over again. 

But now was much less violent than quiet cries into her shoulder. Her lapel was most certainly damp with his tears, but she didn’t move away from him. This was mortifying. Why did he even allow her here? It couldn’t have been anyone else, yet he didn’t care. He just wanted her.

“Dream…” she whispered. She never called him that, only when she was furious, or desperate. 

“Let me help you.” 

Each movement she took was cautious, and he couldn’t blame her. He’d be cautious too, if he had to deal with someone like himself.  Lucienne ran a gentle hand through his hair, and for the first time, he looked her truly in the eyes. Her face was the same as when he turned his back on her to go to his quarters. The cold knowledge of what he’d done sat grim and fallen on her face.

It was like looking in a mirror. He couldn’t do it. Pushing himself up, he staggered away from her, covering his mouth once again with his wrist. He couldn’t stand to have her look at him. Did she see a murderer? A murdered man? Or both?

“ Why could you want to help me, Lucienne?” He gritted out, slumped against the far wall with his back to her. “ Do you think yourself a saviour?” The words sounded cruel in his head and were twice as awful out loud. 

He heard her shove herself to her feet, curtly as she so often did when she was offended.  Her quick steps rang behind him, but stopped abruptly.

“I think myself your friend.” She corrected. She circled to his side and he felt like she was sizing him up, measuring his responses. He had no counter argument.

“ How could you say that?” He whispered, turning to her. “I killed my son. Nothing can save me now.” 

She took his hand then, and staying away from her felt like a losing battle. As futile as it was pointless. 

“I don’t mean to save you, my friend.” Her voice dropped to a whisper like his. “I only wanted to lessen the hurt on your shoulders.”

A half-cry broke him, and he looked away from her in that moment, hating the understanding in her eyes.

"I killed my son,” he confessed, and this time felt more real than any of the others. He still can’t stand to look at her. “ I killed him twice. And he suffered. And I don’t know how long I have left until I am punished for his murder.” 

Now Lucienne seemed to tear up too, yet reached out, even more tentatively than before, like he was a dangerous animal she was freeing from a cage, and wiped his tears with her sleeve. She stepped closer to him, inches apart so he could feel the warmth emanating from her form. 

When she hugged him, he hugged her back, and if he had more tears to cry, he would have. 

“ I deserve to face justice.” He said against her neck, voice muffled by her collar. “ But I don’t want to die, Lucienne.”

She hugged him tighter and now it was his turn to hold her while she cried, when her legs gave way from underneath her and he lowered them both to the floor. 

“I don’t suppose I want you to die, either.” She wiped away her own tears and straightened her jacket even as they slumped on the floor. The night was late yet he didn’t care. He didn’t even know if he’d make it till daylight.

“ I’ve done so many terrible things in my life. I’ve been cruel and wrathful and murderous, yet… mercy is what I deserve to be punished for.” It felt most fitting. Even though Orpheus had asked, it had gone against Dream’s every instinct to kill him. His arms were empty without a child to cradle. There was a stain on this page of Destiny’s book, written not in ink but in blood.

“No, it is not.” Lucienne snapped and he turned in surprise, but she only fixed him with a gentle gaze, measuring and deliberate. It was a gaze he trusted. “To say that you deserve to die for offering mercy tells me that the beings you answer to are just as, if not more so cruel than you ever have been. Do not apologize for loving your son.”

Perhaps it was the truth. But the truth didn’t matter. He was not rational, but he believed in justice. Just as a mortal king is punished for killing his child, Dream deserved the same.

“ Perhaps. But the Kindly Ones will take my life all the same.”  He gave a small smile then, to reassure her, when he of all people knew death was not so bad.

“I suppose to wish against it is futile.” She said plainly, and slumped her head on his shoulder. “But I suppose all wishing is futile.” He felt the words against his neck. He wished, then, that he could tell her what she was to him. Friend was too small a word. Useless to describe her, when they stood between eons of time and space and still held each other. He still came back to that library. She still tended to the stories. 

“ I suppose so.” He murmured, eyes shutting once again. Did speaking to her help? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure anything could be helped, though there did exist a time when he believed she’d help everyone. 

Later, she dragged him back to the lounge, and they sat in front of that roaring fireplace until daylight did come, and he lived to see another sunrise in his realm. Later, they’d resume their duties, and govern the realm for as little time as he had left. But for now they sat, and though she was beside him, he knew some part of him was irreparably broken, a part not even she could fix.

She’d left later that day for the library, and he’d donned his coat once again, to walk out of his own quarters and pretend the king was well. Long live the king, he supposed.  But Dream’s steps would be heavier, his shoulders weighed down, and the residents of the realm would talk about how weak their king looked, how fragile and lost compared to who he used to be. He knew Lucienne would see it too. He saw it the moment she first looked at him when he’d returned. He was not the same. He never would be.  Morpheus wanted only to make them proud. Now that he was counting down the hours. 

Now that he knew nothing could save him. 

Chapter 2

Summary:

In which Dream tries everything he knows to stay alive, learns that some people never loved him, and that some people will always love him, and he'll love them back.

Notes:

Hi guys! Sorry for taking so long on this chapter, it turned out about ten thousand words longer than expected!
Just a warning, this chapter discusses stuff like suicidal ideation, abusive and neglectful parents and child abuse, self harm and depression. Stay safe folks, and tysm for reading!

According to Death, people who knew they were going to die often liked to gather their affairs. Sometimes they made amends, tied up loose ends without even knowing it. But Dream was perfectly aware of what he was doing. 

The New Inn, formerly the White Horse, stood as it had for the last 600 odd years. With a few repairs here and there of course, the decorations were perhaps one of the few things that truly had changed. 

Even a good deal of the patrons remained the same.

Including one in particular.

“ Hello, Hob .” Dream smiled, felt it like a lie, as he sat across from the man slowly but surely making his way through marking a great stack of history essays. Hob’s head shot up in surprise, of course, it wasn’t their usual meeting time. A slow grin spread across his face and he shoved the papers aside as he leaned forward.

“You’re back. I mean, you said in my dream - didn’t know you could do that, by the way - that you might not make it to our next meeting.” He loosed a relieved sigh, and Morpheus noticed how worn he looked, not any older, but certainly in need of a good sleep. “You had me worried, my friend.”

Now Dream couldn’t help but feel like a walking lie, getting his friend’s hopes up before he even told him the truth. 

“ Yes, well,” Dream straightened his lapel and waved a hand, and the other patrons vanished. Hob did not seem to know where they went, though he asked no further questions and only offered a confused and slightly awed expression. It was simply that the inn was busiest at night, and Dream did not wish to have an audience for their conversation. And it wasn’t like Hob hadn’t seen him conduct more impressive feats before. “ Everything carried over smoothly, after all.”

Hob leaned back against the wall and blinked, like he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing was real. “I’m glad. I’m really glad.” That small smile still lay on his lips as he looked around the empty inn. “So, is there any way we can order drinks with no staff?”

Dream rolled his eyes, having suspected the wine he’d given his friend had already been finished. In a blink, a full bottle of it sat on the table with two glasses.

“I thought you said it was the last one?” Hob asked fervently as he reached to pour it. 

Hob was far too motivated by wine, Dream often thought. Whether it was simply for fun, or to numb the worst memories of his long life, he hardly knew. “ I only said that so you wouldn’t go hunting for more.” 

“So this is the last one?” Hob raised his glass and eyebrow and Dream laughed softly.

“ I can’t tell you that.” 

“Of course you can’t.” Hob set his glass on the table with a clink, face shifting from amused to concerned, a furrow between his brows. “This isn’t our usual time. Do you… still think you’ll miss our next meeting?”

“No, it isn’t the usual time.” Dream elected not to answer the question. Instead he steeled himself, folded his hands neatly and took a breath, though he didn’t need to. 

“I worry… that it’s almost certain I’ll miss our next time.” Hob opened his mouth to question him, but Morpheus raised his hand to stop. It was hard enough to speak already without being pressed for it. “ I… think, this time it may be a… permanent leave. But that is not why I am here.”

Hob sipped his wine anxiously and wrapped his hands around the stem of the crystalline glass, bringing it closer to him. “Wait, stop.” He had that look on his face like he was working out a puzzle, and failing. “A… permanent leave? In what way?” 

Dream clenched his jaw as he looked his friend in the eyes, in eyes he knew would look disgustingly concerned in about a minute. It didn’t matter. He came there for a reason. He closed his eyes, perhaps to avoid that gaze. “ You know in what way, Hob.”

Hob smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. An attempt to lighten the mood. He always did those, but they never did work. “Aw, come on mate, if anyone's gonna outlive me, it’ll be you.”

Dream’s scowl was barely concealed as he cast his eyes on the table. He didn’t counter it. He’d let Hob think whatever would help him sleep at night. Dream knew his friend had enough trouble doing so without added worry.

“ I never told you how sorry I was.” 

“What?” Hob looked up like that was the last thing he expected to hear. It probably was, an apology coming from Dream.

“ About Robyn.” Dream whispered, looking Hob right in the eye. His friend’s face fell, dropping into hardened lines at the reminder of his dead son. As if he needed a reminder. He was surely all too aware.

“That was a long time ago.” Hob muttered, and drained the dregs of his wine. He’d become tense, locked as his dark eyes flitted around, looking at everything except Dream.

“ I don’t ask about it simply to hurt you,” Dream murmured, refilling Hob’s glass as it sat next to his own, still laying untouched. “ I only wanted to ask you how you… continued.”

“What, wondering why you’re losing your bet?” Behind his snark, Hob was blinking tears out of his eyes, covering a thick voice with an obnoxious half-laugh.

“ No.” Not for the first time, Dream steeled himself against his rising nausea, which was strange, given that he didn’t have a stomach. Grief manifested in strange ways, he supposed.

“ I… just want your counsel. On how to stop feeling like this.”

They’d never gotten quite that personal before. Well, Dream at least. Hob frequently shared every new revelation in his life. But he didn’t even know Dream had a child. Or used to.

Realisation lit up his face, then slow, sinking sadness and pity, Dream couldn’t stand to see that pity in his friend's gaze. He clenched his jaw and avoided Hob’s gaze, pulling his arms closer to himself as a low oh escaped from Hob’s lips. 

“Mate, I’m… I’m so sorry.”

He hated when Hob said things like that. What did he even have to be sorry for? He didn’t kill his son.

But Dream figured Hob wouldn’t appreciate that sentiment. “ As am I.” His finger tapped against the wood of the table, the only sound for a moment. 

Hob’s hands were still. “I didn’t know.” He whispered, eyes fixed on the untouched wine glass. 

Dream swallowed nausea at Hob feeling sorry for him. But that’s what friends did, apparently. Feel sorry for each other. “ I never told you.” A poor attempt at soothing a wound that wasn’t his to soothe. 

“When did it happen?” 

Dream stared at the man, for a moment, half in surprise and half in fury that he’d even ask such a question. They’d never talked like this before - never talked about the things usual friends would talk about. He weighed him for a moment, sized him up. 

Hob started, “You don’t have to-” 

But he was making amends, and it’s not like he’d be around long enough to care what Hob did with the information.

“Once, for the first time, millennia ago. And once, more recently… ”

Then Hob did something unexpected. That was rare, given how long they’d known each other, how many times they’d sat in this exact spot. 

He reached over the table and hugged him.

Immediately the feeling of arms around his shoulders suffocated him, much less the fact that he’d never even asked. Dream shoved him away, chair clattering as he stood. He was suddenly very glad the inn was empty. 

“ What are you doing?” He snarled, the feeling that some unspoken boundary had been crossed sticking to him like dried blood. 

Hob sighed, like he’d expected that to happen, and shook his head helplessly. That only infuriated him more.

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

But Dream had already grabbed his coat from the back of the chair. “ Then don’t say anything.” He made a move toward the door, the same door he’d left out of across centuries, prepared to storm out of his final meeting with the man he’d met every hundred years. 

But a hand grabbed his elbow, an iron grip that made him freeze in place. He didn’t turn around. 

“Stop. Please, stop. We are not going to have a repeat of 1889, my friend. All I can tell you is… outliving your child is a personal hell that far outranks the real one.” Hob whispered from behind him.

For a moment, Dream wanted to argue with him, to storm out and leave Hob wishing it could have been different when he was left waiting in a century’s time. 

But he didn’t. He didn’t want Hob’s last memory of him to be his cruelty, no matter what his petty side argued. 

“ I would know that well.” Dream paused, blinked the tears out of his eyes. He was glad he’d been turned away; Hob had never seen him cry. Few people had.

“When I first held Robyn, I honestly thought of finding you and asking to trade my immortality for his. It was the only time I’ve ever wanted to give it up.”

Dream set a hand on the table to steady himself, Hob’s hand had loosened on his shoulder. But it was still there.

“ I would not have the power to do so.” He murmured, still turned away. He lowered his head.

“No, I know that. But in that moment, I thought I could do anything to protect him. I thought… I would be enough to protect him.”

Now Dream turned around, gently pulling his arm from Hob’s grip. He let him go, and Dream faced his friend again, though not in anger now.

“But not from death.” 

Hob smiled sadly, smiled like he had through so many things. “No, not from death,” he agreed.

Then he asked cautiously, like Dream was a wild animal he was afraid of provoking, “How did it happen?”

Dream scoffed, but not in indignation, only feigning distaste as his throat closed, voice turning thick. “I killed him.” He admitted, and waited for Hob to turn to revulsion, to condemn him as he’d condemned himself. 

But Hob didn’t do any of that, instead looked at him in a strange way Dream couldn’t decipher. “What?” He asked softly, and he had the strange feeling Hob didn’t ask that in horror. Rather in sadness, grief, or, worse, pity. 

Dream’s lip trembled but he pressed his mouth into a bitter frown, fighting the urge to let tears fall again. He slumped into the chair again, and Hob joined him. He had the strange feeling, the one he got when they sat in the inn, that they were doing what friends did. Talk. Argue. About the good and the bad.

“ He’d been living in pain for too long. He’d begged me, and I refused many times before. But I owed him.” Dream said it in a way that hopefully didn’t invite questions. He paused and took a breath. It was a while before he choked out, “ And that was the gift he asked for. So I gave it.”

Hob sighed shakily, and thankfully didn’t reach out.

“I can’t imagine.” Yes, he probably couldn’t. Robyn did not die by Hob’s hand, after all. 

But again, probably not a sentiment Hob would appreciate. “It’s not hard to,” Dream murmured, and it didn’t feel like a lie. 

“I knew the time would come some day. But I was never ready. His mother was an immortal, too. A powerful one.” Dream froze at the mention of Calliope, even coming out of his own mouth, it was like he was talking, saying things he didn’t mean to say and he couldn’t stop. Was that what it was to talk to friends? 

“We had hoped that, his parents being what we were, he, too, would be like us. But…”

Again, he couldn’t bear to look at Hob. Shame burned his face as the thought of this being Hob’s last memory of him. At least he wouldn’t be around to see it play out. 

“But he was mortal.” Hob wasn’t asking.

“He was ours, and he was mortal. But he was ours. But he was mortal.” Dream shook his head, splaying his hands in trying to convey something he didn’t know how to convey.

“Does that make sense?”

But Hob was at least one of the few people who was able to understand. “Surprisingly, yes.” 

“I’m glad.” And Dream meant it. 

Hob smiled softly, sadly in that smile that had remained the same throughout the centuries, bearing more and more pain each time Dream saw him, yet it still smiled. Was still crooked in the way it had been in 1489. 

“Dream?”

His eyes flicked up from the table. “ Yes?” He asked it with no particular tone, no accusation or bitterness. He wouldn’t afford that in his final stretch of life.

“Will your leave really be permanent?” Hob asked in a trembling voice. Dream looked out the window, away from him, into the deeper night that had somehow gotten darker. 

He swallowed at the thought of Orpheus, pushing down the memory of his bloody hands in favor of the thought of his imminent atonement. “I’ve committed a crime. The only punishment is death.” At least death had finality. At least it didn’t leave him to languish in his own memories and have them pull him under in waves of grief. At least that would end soon.

“What crime?” Hob’s brow had creased, and Dream realised he must not have understood him the first time. “ I’ve already told you.”

It took his friend a moment to realise. When it dawned on him, the look of anger in his eyes was entirely unjustified. “What? No. Bullshit. Your son asked you to kill him. It was mercy.” Dream hated that word. Mercy. It was the word he used to comfort himself after killing his son. It was a lie. He didn’t deserve comfortable lies, only painful truths.

“ It was a crime.”

Hob spluttered and slammed his hands on the table, showing himself to his feet. “But that’s not fair!”

Dream didn’t know who he was angry with. Or what the point of it was. 

He remained sitting, and folded his hands in a vain attempt to pretend he wasn’t about to say the same thing. Instead, Dream just recited what he’d been thinking since he’d stuck his hands through Orpheus’ head. “None of this is fair. But there are laws.”

“Fuck your laws.” The finality with which Hob said it surprised him. To be fair, his friend wasn’t a stranger to emotional outbursts, especially those out of anger, but it was still surprising.

“Hob.” 

“No, really. I say, go to whoever made those laws, and plead your case. No, don’t plead, you should yell and kick and fuss and scream at them until they let you live. Loving your child isn’t a crime.”

What a nice thought. What a different world Hob lived in. But Dream couldn’t blame him, after all, he was the one who offered him immortality. 

Dream knew those who made the laws. They weren’t kind beings. Night and Time were cruel, but even the idea of being cruel to them brought some semblance of satisfaction.

“ It is for us.” Dream said softly, but he knew it was futile to argue. To be cruel to his parents about the laws would be futile too. 

“You aren’t listening to me.” Hob tossed his hands like he thought the same; that it was really no use. 

So this was how they were going to end up, Hob’s last memory of him being hopeless, being a fight, with Dream storming out just like 1889. 

“I’m listening more than you know.” Dream really was listening. He just didn’t see the point in a lot of it, when it was hopeless. 

“ You shouldn’t have to die when you don’t want to! You shouldn’t have to die for any of this!”

Hob cried, maybe he was close to really crying. 

But for once, Dream understood what his friend was saying. Maybe it really was hopeless to go to his parents, but wouldn’t it be satisfying? Even for a moment?

And Dream whispered, because it was the first time he agreed, “ No, I shouldn’t.”

“I’m glad you agree.” Hob nodded, but didn’t smile, eyebrows creased and mouth pressed in a tight line, like he was thinking hard and didn’t like the conclusion he’d reached.

“And, listen… If I can say death’s a mug’s game, why can’t you?”

Dream scoffed. “That’s my sister you’re talking about.”

“Screw your sister.” Hob snapped.

“Hob.”

“You know what I meant.” And Dream did. He really did. Because for once, for the first time in a very long time, he had a plan. He had hope.

Dream stood slowly, pulled his coat over his shoulders and shivered, though it wasn’t even very cold. “ I suppose I’ll have to take my leave of you now.” 

Then Hob surprised him, not for the first time that night. He stood, held out his arms, and waited. 

Dream froze, but only for a moment. Tentatively, and slowly, he hugged him back.

Hob’s arms tightened around him and Dream’s back stiffened, though again, only for a moment. He actually didn’t mind it at all. 

“Not permanently, though, right?” Hob asked gently, the sound reverberating against the shell of his ear. 

“ Not permanently.” Dream said, probably comforting himself more than he was comforting Hob. But he felt his friend smile, a broad one.

Dream pulled away first, but Hob still gripped his shoulders, brown eyes searching his face, maybe for a lie. But he’d only find a small, hopeful smile. 

As Dream turned to go, Hob’s shaking voice stopped him.

“Hey, Dream?”

He turned back, though not out of annoyance. He was glad to get another look at his friend, even as Hob stood there awkwardly, hands tucked into his pockets.

“Yes?” Dream asked, lips pressed into a small smile.

Hob returned it, though his was tighter.

“Don’t be a stranger, okay?” His words were clipped, nervous, like he expected a cruel response. 

But Dream wouldn’t give him one, not now.

“Never.”

 

—------------

 

Dream had no pleasant memories of his father’s home. 

The twisting, brutalist landscape of the rotating world had sickened him for as long as he knew. Maybe that was why, in his early days of life, he’d preferred to stay with his mother. 

But Dream wasn’t there to speak to her.

Time had always cared far more for the laws, and creating them, than Night did. He twisted them, wrenched them to keep his children in check, and away from him, as successfully as possible. 

Look how that turned out.  

The concrete echoed as Dream stepped into the bare hall of his father’s office. A lonely space, vacant except for a desk in the center, stacked with a few odd books and a golden globe compiled entirely of rings, each showing the flow of time across the worlds. Time had never really cared for any domains that weren’t his own. 

“Hello, Father,” Dream rasped as the cloaked man behind the desk turned to him, turned like his son was a buzzing fly he needed to swat, looked at him like remains he needed to call a servant to clean. 

To call Time ‘father’ was an insult in its own right. He insisted on formalities, ones appropriate for one of his standing as a being of the beginning of the universe. But ‘father’ was what he despised, because it reminded him of his greatest failure, his greatest shame. His children. 

Time straightened, and walked to his slitted windows on the far wall, looking out at nothing in particular, but only to get as far away from his son as possible. 

“Why are you here?” He demanded in a short, clipped voice. 

“ Cannot a son call upon his father for no other reason than to wish him well?”

Dream stood behind the desk, the closest he was going to get to his father, but he didn’t touch anything. He never did. 

Time’s lip twitched in an unsavoury way, but Dream had become accustomed to his disgust. 

“A son can,” he scoffed, “ you can’t.” 

Of course, to Time, he’d never had any children. The things that called him father were simply nuisances, or, as he’d put it before, ‘inconvenient consequences of love.’

But even now, Dream’s parents' relationship was… strained. It had been that way or worse since he’d been born. Since they’d all been born. 

“I know why you’re here,” Time clasped his hands behind his back like a disappointed teacher, his whole form, even so far away, bristling with a cold Dream could feel across the room. 

“You think that because I’m your father, I’ll have it in my heart to spare you punishment for your crime.”

“ I was merely wishing to -”

“Well, I won’t. I wrote those laws for a reason.” Time snapped, ironically impatient. Though, Dream had expected this. He didn’t know what he was hoping for. 

Maybe Dream had hoped his father would sympathise, after all, he’d hoped that to kill his son was as horrifying a thought to Time as was to him. 

But given that's what his father was about to do, he doubted it. 

“ My son begged for death,” Dream gritted out, and it was nearly embarrassing to admit his pain to his own father, it was embarrassing that he found it that way. But he had to try. “ And I granted that wish.”

“You were a coward. You were sentimental. You were always like that, even from the start. You were born that way. Do you think even I could change that?” Time snarled, now on the other side of the desk, and Dream was a child again, dwarfed by his parents’ rage and indifference. “Do you think,” now his father circled around the other side, and stood before Dream. Something told him his father did that on purpose, like he knew how he towered over his son even as an adult. “Do you think I could send you back in time, save Eurydice, or send you forward and save yourself, and anything would change?”

Dream pressed his lips together, shame already burning him harder than it had before. He shook his head, bitterness familiar and at once new leaving a sour taste in his mouth. 

“ No. No, I don’t think that.”

Time nodded, still annoyed and that was probably never going to change. He stared at Dream, black eyes raking across his form, assessing what lay under his skin and judging it with no remorse or mercy. 

“You’re scared I was never your father.”

Dream closed his eyes, clenching his jaw and biting back something a younger version of himself would have gotten banished for. “ No,” he gritted out. “ I’m scared you’ll always be.”

Time smiled then, like he’d heard something that amused him. “Well, you don’t ever need to worry about that. I don’t think we care enough about each other to worry in that way.”

His voice felt like acid in Dream’s head.

“ I can’t help but care,” he admitted, and again, he felt two feet shorter, weak like a bug waiting to be stepped on. Something about his father made him speak, made him admit everything, even the things he couldn’t admit to himself. 

“Hm,” Time mused. “Tell me, Dream,” his tone like a cat playing with its food. “Do you love me?”

His words were like a cord pulling words out of Dream’s own mouth. 

“ A child cannot help but love his father. I learned that from my own son. I abused him. Yet he loved me.” The words were poison in his mouth. Not because of what they were, but because of who he said it to. 

“Did I abuse you?” 

The question was so upfront Dream didn’t process it for a few moments. But Time did not ask things out of goodwill. If he was asking it, he asked it for entertainment or punishment. Nothing else. And this was probably both. 

For once, Dream was lost for words. He didn’t want to reply. But something compelled him to.

“ I don’t… I don’t know…”

What was abuse, to Dream? He could take a lot. Time never hurt him, only ignored him. Maybe it was justified, though, for Dream was not an easy child. 

“You don’t know a lot of things, do you?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Judging by the curve of Time’s lips, he wanted an answer. 

For once, Dream didn’t answer. As he turned away, he thought that the rot that he felt inside him at his son’s death didn’t begin with Orpheus. It didn’t even begin with Dream. Maybe it started at the root, and spread along to everyone else. Maybe everyone who came near them was going to get sick off of it eventually. 

But Dream didn’t know. Maybe it was just a lie he told himself to avoid the blame. He was horrible, after all. He didn’t need a father to tell him that, even though he was the first to do so. 

Maybe it was just a lie he told himself to comfort himself, that it couldn’t have been any different even if he tried. But he’d tried so hard. He was so tired. 

“Dream,” Time’s voice stopped him automatically, even though he wanted to keep walking, and maybe never stop. “Have you spoken with your mother recently?”

His jaw clenched. ‘ No ,” he said simply. “ Why? ”

“I’d thought maybe you’d gone to see her before me. You two were close once, after all.”

Dream scoffed, the last time he and his mother had been close was millions of years ago. 

“ Yes, well.” He swallowed. “ I haven’t.”

“Well, if you see her…” A rare pause from Time, but Dream didn’t turn, even as he wished to see his father unsure. “Tell her… tell her I miss her.”

Dream give Time the satisfaction of a nod. He just left that concrete world, because he hadn’t gotten what he’d come for, but he’d left with something else. 

An idea. A last resort. 

 

—------------------

 

Dream far preferred his mother’s home to his father’s.

That didn’t mean it was welcoming, though. 

“ Hello, mother, ” Dream called softly as he brushed through a fern. The greenhouse, full of misted wide leafed plants, was beautiful, if not crowded and oppressive, in a way. He had to maneuver around potted trees and vines, only when he stepped out of them could he see the night sky through the arched glass ceiling. Dream sighed, forced to appreciate the freedom he felt at that sight, before his mother spoke. 

“You’re naughty, not to have called.” Her voice had gone flat and stern over the years, when he was a child, she’d either been perfectly kind, and warm, a soft place to land, or an oppressive, suffocating force enveloping everything and everyone in his life. 

A coin would be flipped, every interaction with her. Comfort or suffocation. He craved the comfort over the years, of the millions of years, and after a while, began to miss the suffocation too.

“ I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly, joining her at the small engraved table and chairs she had laid out in the center of her greenhouse. She’d put a carafe of wine there, red that she’d insist he drink even though he’d only really ever liked white. 

“ I didn’t have time to call.”

“You never do,” she pouted, and for once he could see her face amongst the darkness and stars that made up her form. “You’re just like the rest of them, you only ever call when you need something.”

Why did they make him feel like this? Small and utterly insignificant, just a tiny dying star, guttering out in the night sky as time marched on. 

But Dream admittedly cared much more for his mother than he did for his father. Or, used to care for her more. But she’d gone that same kind of acidic as he’d grown. Rotting slowly over time so he couldn’t even bring himself to miss the old her, because the transformation had happened so slowly it was like it had never happened. 

“ I just wanted to talk to you.” He whispered, and she rolled her eyes. 

“That’s what all of you want to do,” she tossed her hair over her shoulder, and sipped her wine like this was a daily conversation, even though they hadn’t spoken in millenia. “You all come, and want to talk, and don’t think about your poor mother, wanting to be left alone.”

Dream furrowed his brow. “ I thought you wanted us to call more.”

“I do!” She laughed, spreading her hands like this was a joke shared between friends. “Just not in the ways you always do.”

He frowned down at his untouched wine, though he already knew it’d be too sweet. 

Night stood, and swept across her garden to continue tending to her plants. Dream stood with her, and slowly trailed in her wake. 

“ I wanted to ask-” 

“If I could save you?” Night paused mid cut, shears still in her hand. As she turned, her lips twisted into a nasty sneer. He shrank under her gaze, and he began to wonder why he even went to his parents in the first place. 

“It’s just like I said,” she tutted, “Children only come when they need something.”

“ If I live,” Dream hated how pleading his voice sounded, how desperate his step forward was. “ I will use it to see you more, please know that. Please understand me.” 

When he asked that, he didn’t know if he meant it only then, or always. Because he knew she’d never understand him. Neither his mother or father ever had. 

“Now you sound like the little one. What’s her name?” Night turned away, apparently distracted by another plant in need of tending, even though the ferns there couldn’t die even if they wanted to.

“ Delirium,” Dream said softly, unsurprised his mother didn’t know her youngest’s name. 

“That’s right. I don’t know what she wants from me, but she’s always rattling around here, scaring the plants and the like.” Night snipped an unnoticeable imperfection.

“ The same thing she’s always wanted,” Dream met her at the plant she was tending, softly demanding her attention, even though he used to never have to. “ Your attention. Your interest.”

He paused, because she’d looked away now, distracted by another plant in need of a cut. But he didn’t care that she wasn’t listening when he said, “ Your love.”

Night turned then, slightly, a small smile dancing over her half visible face. “Love. That’s something you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?” 

Dream froze. Even as she approached, he couldn’t bring himself to move, or ask what she meant as she patted his cheek. “Why don’t I give you a little world here, with me, and a relationship? You can be safe, you can have everything you’ve ever wanted.” She gave a self satisfied smile, and he paused for a moment, considering it despite himself. 

But that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to live, and that wasn’t living. Not really. 

“ Thank you, mother, but that is not what I came for.”

Night’s face hardened with distaste; he’d disappointed her again. But by the look in her eye, she’d expected it. He always did, somehow, someway. 

“That’s my only offer,” she said in mock sadness. “You’ve always been so demanding, Dream. Even as a child. You aren’t going to realise that? Not even for me?”

Dream stepped back, pulling himself out of that familiar desire to make her proud. The smell of plants was becoming awfully similar to mildew, and he began to wonder if the copious amounts of water she sprayed on them was leading to mildew. 

But maybe he was right. Maybe the rot really did start at the root.

“ I’m sorry,” he said bitterly. “ For who I was and for who I am now. I was only trying to be the person I thought you wanted me to be.”

It felt like a plea. It hurt that it felt like a plea. 

“Yes, well.” A leaf fell to the ground and it wasn’t even browned. “You aren’t succeeding, are you?”

Dream left, then, without another word. The humid air suffocated him like his mother’s darkness, and he didn’t want her to see him cry. Still a child acting brave for his parent.

Leaving that place, he decided that he had lost her. Over the millenia, he didn’t know if he hated her or loved her. Now he just knew that he lost her, and she lost him.

And the worst part was, Dream didn’t even regret it. 

He didn’t get what he came for, when he saw his parents. But he knew more. 

He was wrong, his siblings were wrong, his parents were wrong. 

Maybe they were all born like that. Maybe they made each other like that. But all that mattered was that they were wrong, so wrong, rotten to the core, a family tree with rancid roots and bearing poison fruit.

 

—--------------------

 

Dream sat sprawled on his throne, head hanging low between his shoulders like a man shot. Gone was the regality he so often thought to present himself with. Here, in the silence, he took the time to give up.

He was foolish to hope that his parents would ever help him. Hob was a greater fool to inspire the idea. But, for the idea to take root, he would have had to believe, in some way, that Time and Night loved him. Now that he knew they didn’t… he knew he was going to die. And his parents wanted that. 

He’d heard stories, pretty and stupid ones, created by mortals about how love saved them. He wasn’t loved, so why should he be saved?

“Boss…” Matthew murmured from the high back of the throne. “You’re… not gonna get up?” 

What a horribly hopeful, childish, naive raven. Dream hardly had the energy to scoff at him like he’d done so many times before. 

“ Why, Matthew?” He croaked, lips turning in an almost amused way. He didn’t know what or who he was laughing at. Probably himself. “ So many people have longed to see me on my knees. I might as well appease them.”

He could have gone and thrown open the doors and they would have opened to black nothingness. Save for his raven, he was entirely alone.

It was only when he raised his head, looked at his shattered reflection in the mirror and remembered that he didn’t have any mirrors in his throne room. 

“You’ve always had one foot in my realm, brother. Why step further now?”

Despair leaned against the arm of his throne, though he still slumped away from her. “Though I appreciate the visit. You really never visit. Not properly, at least.”

Matthew chirped and hopped onto Dream’s sleeve, but he hardly noticed it. “What’re you looking at?”

“ I’m sorry.” A tear dropped onto his sleeve, he hadn’t even noticed he was crying. Under different circumstances, it would have been embarrassing to be seen like this by his little sister and his raven. If he was in her realm, he was far too gone to care.

He didn’t hear Matthew questioning why he spoke.

Despair only laughed, in that soft and morbid way she did. “Don’t be. If I had a sister called Despair, I wouldn’t want to visit her, either.”

A sharp prick hit his arm as Despair’s hook gently grazed it, only enough to cut the fabric of his shirt and draw a drop of blood. “ Why are you here?”

Any other sounds, sensations, sights, had become muffled. Matthew’s incessant questions - Who’s there? Why are you talking like that? Why are you bleeding? - and nudges against his arm felt like a half forgotten memory. Like his head was held underwater and the sounds of people calling out to him were muffled, even if he knew they were trying to save him.

“You called me.” Despair crooned and he wished the hook would go in deeper. 

“ No, I didn’t…”

Despair sighed and her hook stilled against his skin.

“Where despair is, I am. People need a place to go, and sit with their regret before they… swim up for air.”

“But I don’t want you here.” Dream sounded small and plaintive to his own ears, like a child. If this was the child Time and Night were forced to deal with, he could hardly blame them for hating him. 

But he couldn’t imagine crawling out of the pit he was in. Something told him he wasn’t meant to. It would have been easier to drown when he was alone.

But Despair just sighed again. “You never do.” 

For a short and strange moment, her fingers brushed the hair off his forehead. Like she was comforting him. Like they were siblings, as they had been when they were born to parents who never really bothered to love them, never really bothered to even like them.

He wanted to cry harder. His lips trembled and it was awful and painful but that was Despair. That was what she did.

But if he wanted comfort, he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t have sought the hook that dug through skin and psyche and bone. Comfort had given him nothing.

“ Give me that.” He gritted out, and Despair placed the hook in his waiting hand, already spotted with his own blood. 

Dream held it up, examined it. It was so red, so human. 

He held his hand in front of him, the fine muscles flexing around the pale knuckles as he steeled himself against the shaking.

And forced the hook through the back of his hand.

Dream worked fervently, determined as warm and dark blood steadily trickled from the ever-opening wound. Despite the piercing fire through the center of his hand, sending shocks like lightning through his body. He didn’t stop.

Only now did sounds become clearer, like the hook pulled him out of the haze of a grey lake and back onto land. Matthew’s cries as he flitted around him, the gusts of air as his wings beat grew horribly real. 

The hook hit bone and Dream bit back a scream, the scrape of metal on dream-ivory like nails on a chalkboard. Skin was torn around the thin metal, muscle twitched. But he kept going. 

“Boss!”

“ Quiet-” he clenched his jaw against another cry as he tugged the hook harder and an awful crunch sounded. The pain was gratifying, it was a relief to feel it physically. It felt deserved, like hurting himself carried the same satisfaction as hurting someone he hated. 

The hook now hung from his hand, pulled through like it would be through a fish’s jaw. Hot waves of pain throbbed through his hand, up his arm. Sharp piercing agony had turned dull and warm. 

“ Quiet, Matthew,” He finished through pants. His arm, now dripping with dark blood, hung limply off of his throne. Crimson drops fell to the floor and formed a morbid puddle. The person reflected in the blood had dull eyes. Hollowed cheeks. Draped over an undeserved throne like a corpse in the place of a king. 

Matthew hopped next to him and suddenly the puddle showed another reflection. 

“Fuck- thats, that’s a lot of blood. Oh, my god.” 

“ It is.” Dream smiled again, a small and satisfied one. One someone gave before laughing. 

He pulled himself upright on his throne, Matthew perched on his lap and staring right at him. He had given up his squawking. 

The little bird croaked. “Why - why would you do that to yourself, man?” He gave an indignant flap of his wings when Dream knew he was anything but. 

Matthew watched as Dream examined his hand, curious at it, curious at his own blood and for being the one to draw it. 

“ I only wanted relief.” 

He slumped back on his throne, smiling softly to himself, as if it was a personal joke. 

A lot was a joke on him, lately.

 

—---------------

 

Matthew stared at his boss’s dripping hand and they sat there, for a very long while. He was kind of afraid to speak, especially with the guy in such a rough state. 

Lucienne had told him of the Kindly Ones, of the death of Dream’s son. What that meant. He only saw Dream for the first time that morning, and the boss was doing a very poor job of pretending he was fine. Maybe now showed just how ‘not fine’ he actually was.

“Relief from.. from what?” Matthew cocked his head and something told him he really wouldn’t like the answer.

“ Everything.” 

Well, he was right. That was upsetting.

This was the first time Matthew had ever seen Dream like this. He’d followed him into the throne room, stayed when his boss had sealed the doors and didn’t have any wish to go. And Dream let him.

But more so than his boss, or his king who he needed to ask permission to speak from, Dream was his friend. And they were both stubborn, anyway. But something was very wrong. He’d just shoved a hook into his hand for fuck’s sake, after talking to who-knows what. Matthew had to try to help, even if he was just a bird. 

“Listen, man, I know you’ve lived, for like, ten thousand years -”

“ Since the beginning of consciousness.” Dream corrected, still a stickler for facts despite his hand still dripping with blood.

“Right, yeah. But you’ve been - going through some stuff, lately, y’know? No one’s gonna blame you for… freaking out about it.”

Dream’s face turned sour and he turned away, like Matthew said something he really shouldn’t have. 

“ I’ve already grieved my son,” he muttered.

Like it was just something to do and get over, not like it was an everlasting wound in his boss's life or whatever.

“That’s not what I was talking about.” Matthew offered gently, but Dream did not look okay. His face was turned away again like it had been when he first came here. Matthew stepped closer to his hand, cautiously, and nudged it with his beak. Like he’d hoped Dream would pat him, stroke his feathers and let him know he was doing a pretty good job. But he just pulled his hand away ever so slightly, and Matthew’s heart sank. 

“Speak, Matthew. You rarely ask permission any other time.” Dream snapped, and he got the sinking feeling he’d make it worse.

“I don’t wanna… make any assumptions, but when Lucienne made me, made me into a bird, she told me to be careful.” Matthew had hopped back onto the arm of the throne and tucked his head down and close to him, like a scorned child, remembering that time not less than a year ago. He’d just died, a car crash apparently, and suddenly this lady in a posh waistcoat with a British accent was telling him he was to become the new messenger of the Dream Lord. A lot to take in, given that he was still trying to get over his loss of opposable thumbs.

His train of thought was interrupted when Dream’s hoarse voice asked, “Of what?” 

Matthew had a feeling Dream really wouldn’t like the answer. He tucked his head closer to himself. 

“ Speak.”

Dream said it in that voice he used when he was giving orders, serious ones, and for the first time since they’d gone into that throne room, he sounded like his old self again. 

It was the voice that never failed to compel Matthew, even if he didn’t want to do something. He supposed that’s what it was like, having a bigger-than-a-god being as your boss.

“Of you. She said you’d just been like, imprisoned for a hundred years and the guy who did it killed the bird before me, and stole your stuff. So. She said it had been rough on you. And like… I agree. I think it’s still rough on you.” Matthew blurted out, and suddenly became very afraid that Dream might snap at him for daring to suggest he had feelings. The guy was fun like that.

But Dream only sighed, and spoke like he was very old and very sad, like he was stating something he’d said a thousand times before. Maybe to other people. Probably to himself. “ I regained my tools. I regained my power. You saw that, Matthew.”

Matthew, after thinking for a few milliseconds, hopped back down onto Dream’s lap, feeling a twinge of guilt when the guy winced.

“Well, yeah. But that’s not how these things work.” 

Dream sat up straighter, injured hand still dangling off the side of his throne. Matthew tried and failed not to look at it.

“‘ These things?’” He didn’t do it, but Matthew sensed the air quotes.

He took as deep a breath as his bird lungs could before he spoke. 

“Like, when I was alive, like, a human, before all this, I had this friend. And one day, cops threw him in prison and it was like the world forgot all about him. Took five years to prove to them that he didn’t kill that guy. And he came out, he was as happy-go-lucky as he was before, never spoke a word about it and we thought… We thought he was fine. But a year later, and we were all giving speeches about what a happy guy he was while he was being lowered in the ground.”

Matthew didn’t talk about his time as a human much. It was great, except in parts it was terrible. That was one of those parts. He didn’t want to think about the worst of times even in the best of times, and he’d bet Dream was the same.

But the boss didn’t speak, and Matthew was fairly sure he didn’t understand the moral there.

“And it was like, it took him hanging himself for us to realise what it did to him.”

Dream winced again, but Matthew didn’t know whether it was from his story, or the fact that the hook was still lodged in his hand. 

Dream brought the injured hand back up and turned it over, looking intently at the wound. His blood was a dark red, yet still didn’t look quite normal. Maybe it was too dark, maybe it was a fake red, too purple, like it carried the essence of red rather than the true colour.

“ I’m sorry, Matthew, about the death of your friend. But I am not mortal. A rope around my neck will do nothing.” 

Matthew rolled his eyes, hopping away from the blood drop on Dream’s thigh. 

“Wow. Again, not what I’m saying.”

Dream rested his injured hand in his lap before asking, frustrated and characteristically petty, “Then what are you saying?” 

“I’m saying that when something really shitty happens to you, you act like it's fine when it's not, cos how could someone be fine after that? That’s just… that’s trauma, man.”

Matthew didn’t know how to describe the concept to someone like Dream, but surely he’d come across it in his infinite existence.

“ Again, Matthew, I do not feel things like you.” Dream sounded bored, like he was tired of saying it.

Matthew added that to the list of super upsetting things he’d heard his boss say. Anger stirred in him not for the first time that day, but he didn’t know who it was meant for. Maybe everything. For making his boss like that, making him believe he was like that.

“Not even remotely true, Boss. I’ve seen you act far more human than most of the people I knew when I was human. Like… you grieve. You get hurt. You say you don’t but you do. I know it. Lucienne knows it. Fuck, even Merv knows it. Anyone with fucking eyes sees it except for you.”

It was silent for a good amount of time. Dream leaned his head back against his throne with a soft thud, and Matthew watched his eyes flicker shut, like the night sky disappearing.

“ Then tell me, Matthew - is it human to murder your child? Murder your lover? Is it human to curse a man to eternal sleep and unmake your finest creation and burn every bridge you cross, scorn your allies and let your enemies fester for eons?” Dream’s voice broke on the last word, and Matthew would have hugged him if he still had arms. But Dream wouldn’t even touch him, beyond perching on his lap. 

But Matthew was getting pretty annoyed at his weird boss’s insistence that he was horrible, when, for the most part, he’d been the only thing keeping Matthew sane. Except for Lucienne, of course.

“Other than all your god-business, I’d say, well, the mistakes you make are like those everyone else makes.” He retorted.

Dream huffed, shoving himself to his feet, prompting Matthew to caw and hurry to perch on a nearby candlestand mounted on the wall. The nick in his sleeve, near his shoulder, was dragged away for a moment and revealed a crimson smear, a light cut, though deeper than the one he originally saw. Matthew saw it a while prior, but still didn’t know how it magically popped up.

  “I am cruel, Matthew. I am cruel in the way only an immortal can be.” Dream rarely shouted, but he was close to it now. He stared back at Matthew coldly, tears in his weird cosmos eyes. It wasn’t strange to see him teary, it was strange to see him hunched like that, when he usually stood so ramrod straight. It was strange to see him shove himself off of his throne, like he didn’t deserve to be the one sitting on it. 

“Well, I don’t agree with that.” Matthew said matter-of-factly.

Dream just sighed like there was no use correcting him, and slowly sat on the highest step, black coat sprawled out next to him. He held up his bleeding hand again, hook still firmly lodged.

“That looks nasty, I’m sure if we go to the healers, they’ll have it out like it wasn’t even there.” 

But the way Dream looked at Matthew told him that wasn’t the point. “ No need.” He said simply, before Matthew could do anything, he brought his other hand to the hook and began tearing it out.

It would have only lasted a second, but the piercing, ragged scream that came from his boss was so unlike anything Matthew had ever heard from him that it might as well have lasted hours.

“Boss!” Matthew cried as he flew down to Dream’s hunched form, curled closer in on himself as he gripped his wounded hand to his chest. 

The bloody hook hit the floor with a soft plink and Dream sighed, like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, like it really was a relief. 

They sat there in silence for what could have been minutes or hours until Dream spoke again.

“ You linger, Matthew. Unwise of you to linger near me. It doesn’t end well, for most.” Matthew didn’t want to think about what that meant, but it wasn’t hard to remember. Nada. Orpheus. It was like people he loved were geared to hate Dream. But whether that was fate, the universe, or just Dream himself, Matthew didn’t know. “How much did Lucienne tell you about how my previous raven died?” He asked, voice strangely devoid of emotion and Matthew’s heart felt like it was in his throat.

“Not much. She said it wasn’t her story to tell.” The raven ventured cautiously, because Dream seemed to be in a pretty volatile state and he sure wasn’t gonna be the one who upset him again.

But Dream only smiled slightly, one that didn’t reach his eyes and that only worried Matthew more.

“ Well, she was right. Lucienne suffered too. I’m not surprised she didn’t tell you of her time alone. But… that is not my part of the story to tell.”

Matthew had heard only bits and pieces from Lucienne of what happened, that her library fell while Dream was… “away”. 

But curiosity was always a primary trait of Matthew’s.

“Then what is your part?” He asked, hopping closer to Dream, but avoiding the blood spots.

“ You know the Corinthian?” 

Matthew shivered at the memory of the three-mouthed, eye-ball eating nightmare.

“Yuck, of course I know that guy,” he croaked.

Dream shot him a look, and Matthew suddenly remembered the Corinthian was supposed to be his masterpiece. 

“He’d escaped. I left for the mortal world in search of him. I was foolish. I was… recuperating from an earlier battle, but I thought… I thought the mortal world was safer than the battleground. I… trusted it. I trusted them.”

Something about the boss’s tone had become very… off. He was silent for a long time after that, and as Matthew looked at him, he couldn’t help but realise how pale he looked, nearly clammy and shivering. That wasn’t normal. 

“Fuck, man, what happened to you?”

Dream was still silent for a good bit after that, breathing small breaths and staring off into some unnamed spot of the throne room. 

“ I was captured. A binding circle meant for Death, but they got me instead. It took stripping me of my tools and tearing off my clothes for them to realise. How disappointed they must have been.” 

Matthew’s stomach dropped as Dream laughed, and it was not a pretty laugh, low and grating and unamused, a short huff of irony.

“But they still had…uses for me. I was left stricken on their floor, in that dungeon, that ice-cold, hell-forsaken dungeon.” 

The image of that horrified Matthew, of the boss, who was usually so proud and above-it-all, left like… that. The implications of what he was saying. 

But he kept going, even as Matthew closed his eyes, the words echoed in his head.

“And they were terrified of what would happen when I awoke. Rightfully so. I heard everything they muttered amongst themselves. Every yearning desire of what having me at their disposal might bring. Every whisper of what they wanted from me, what they wanted to do to me.”

The temperature had dropped since he’d started to speak, frost formed on the stairs under Matthew’s feet.

“So they bound me. In a prison of iron and quartz, no air and spikes that cut my skin every move I made. Put on display like a taxidermied prize. Like an animal.”

Dream’s voice was turning venomous, and now he really sounded like a vengeful god. But each word he spoke made Matthew more sick with dread. 

“I didn’t speak a word to them. I only sat for ten years while they made their demands, before Jessamy made her attempt to save me.”

Matthew had heard that name before, a memory cutting through the haze of horror at his boss’s words.

“Jessamy… the raven before me?” He asked tentatively, ignoring the fact that Dream just said he sat for ten years, as casually as someone might say they had a boring weekend.

“She snuck in, one day. She got as far as tapping the glass before he blew her to smithereens.”

Dream was very still. He hadn’t moved since he’d started speaking. Maybe he couldn’t.

“He?”

“Alex Burgess.” Dream spat the name like it was a poison he was ridding himself of. “ Son of Roderick Burgess. A coward in his own regard. Beat his father to death and still did not have the wherewithal to free me. Burgess was not a kind father. But Alex was not a kind man.”

Dream would know that well, Matthew thought. 

“Maybe he would have been if his father was not who he was. Perhaps I would have been kinder if my father was not who he was. Perhaps Orpheus would have been alive if I was not who I am.”

Matthew almost interrupted, to comfort him and say that wasn’t true. But the worst part is he could have been right. Dream knew it. Matthew was starting to realise just what people meant when they said his boss was doomed from the start.

Dream’s voice had gone bitter and quiet. Lacking in the anger he had spoken with just sentences before. “But we don’t choose our fathers. And Alex was a hurt child, watching them hurt me. But he killed Jessamy.”

“So I grew weaker and the Dreaming starved as Alex aged. I had nothing but the memory of Jessamy’s blood, of Lucienne’s voice, of the sounds of my world. So I sat there, after her death, mute and burning for another ninety-six years.”

Not for the first time, Matthew was hit with the scale of it all. His grandfather, the longest living in the family, lived to ninety-three. And Matthew couldn’t even imagine that , much less someone remaining in a dungeon for longer and not even aging a day.

“Eventually, Paul, Alex’s husband, smudged the circle. I don’t know if he did it out of pity. Fear. Maybe he just wanted me out of Alex’s life. He had never asked for it. No one did, save the occultists and their leader.”

Dream’s voice had taken on the same venom it had when he began speaking. 

“So I escaped, and did exactly what Alex feared. I slaughtered the guards. The remaining occultists. Left their blood splattered on the same stone floor they had me on.” His voice caught and he stopped for a moment, breathing hard. When he spoke, it sent chills down Matthew’s spine, because it didn’t sound like Dream, it sounded like some monster in his skin. “ And I enjoyed it.”

Dream was wearing a strange kind of smile now, and it wasn’t the small kind he usually offered. It was bitter, almost amused. Matthew didn’t like it, and not for the first time, he was growing afraid of the man who wasn’t really a man. 

When he spoke again, his voice demanded attention, like it was coming from the back of Matthew’s mind, and he couldn’t block him out even if he tried. 

“ But for Alex… I gave him eternal sleep. Eternal nightmares of being kept in a quartz prison with iron spikes. Paul awoke and the love of his life never has.”

A low, sardonic laugh trickled from Dream’s lips, soft but it echoed through the room. 

“I have never hated humanity. I never could. But I came very close after what they did to me.”

And Matthew couldn’t find a single part of himself that blamed him.

It was unsaid, it was implied, at least, that Dream meant, what you did to me.

Matthew wasn’t human anymore, but he sure felt guilty over once having been one. 

He hopped closer to Dream, pushing down his own memories of friends in this state, revisiting a trauma again and again and completely unsure. Because that's how Dream looked. For once, he just looked so unsure of himself. That scared Matthew.  

“That’s horrifying,” he murmured, standing close to Dream now, though he kept his head low, avoiding his boss’s eyes.

“That was the point of such a punishment.” Dream said flatly, voice lacking that venomous tone it had before. 

But it was frustrating, sometimes, when Matthew would try to tell him things, and he just wouldn’t understand. Dream looked like a scared kid again, thinking the worst of what people said to him. 

“Not for them. For you. I don’t give a shit about them. You might, but I don’t.” Matthew said it gently, but Dream’s head shot up. 

“Matthew.”

Of course, it was probably some great offense to shit talk humanity when Dream served them, but still. 

“No, seriously. If I could curse people in that way you can, I would’ve done the same.” Matthew pressed, and he expected Dream to come down on him for saying that, but he didn’t. He just sighed, a barely there exhale, and hung his head. 

Then Matthew tried something, something which was either going to get him unmade or something that would actually help Dream. He hopped up onto his boss’s knee, and nudged his hand with his beak. 

Slowly, Dream’s pale fingers brushed the feathers on the top of Matthew’s head, and they both loosed a breath. 

When Matthew spoke, it was in a whisper. “I’m sorry, Boss. For what they did to you. But you don’t have to pretend that it’s alright because no one’s gonna blame you for not being alright after… that.”

Dream’s fingers trembled, and his hand stopped at Matthew’s neck, his touch feather light.

He was silent, as if in thought, or maybe just dissociated. Matthew thought there was a fair chance of either. 

But Dream murmured, so softly Matthew had to strain to hear it. “ Perhaps you’re right. But… there was something… wrong, perhaps, even before that.” Matthew nudged his hand with his head, and Dream ran his knuckles over his wings. It felt good, in a way, to help him. Matthew could pretend it actually mattered. “My capture wasn’t a cause, it was just a symptom of something that had festered for far longer. Still festers.”

Matthew didn’t say anything. Didn’t have anything to say really, because he had no idea what would help. What did you say to an infinitely old cosmic being who honestly though he was made wrong? 

It was probably whatever was wrong about him that was going to kill him. 

Dream was going to die, Matthew thought. And there wasn’t a thing he could do to change that. 

The raven closed his eyes, and he wondered if birds could even cry. 

 

—------------------

 

So Dream returned to the Library that night as he had a night prior. Hopeless with the weight of family blood on his hands. 

But now he’d gone numb. Unfeeling. He’d almost returned to his usual self, bitter and cruel, as people put it. 

It was almost funny. That his family’s rot had finally spread to him, he was riddled with it, a terminal but painfully slow condition.

“My Lord?” Dream started when Lucienne called from behind a bookshelf. 

He stared at her for a moment, the memory of her hands on his, wiping the congealed blood of his son, wiping his own tears, haunting him at the sight of her face. 

To her credit, Lucienne didn’t seem as embarrassed by it as he was. At least he wouldn’t have much longer to feel so mortified. 

She did seem pained, though. Dream noted the deep bags under her eyes, even as she didn’t need to sleep, she still became overworked. 

Lucienne didn’t wait for him to ask, though. “Were your… travels successful?”

Dream couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth, not there, not now, maybe he never would be able to. Each word she spoke was still a pressing reminder of how little of her voice he had left to hear. 

He gave the slightest shake of his head, and Lucienne closed her eyes, breathing hard like she was trying to keep something contained. 

Dream was past tears, now. Judging by her slightly puffy face, she was too. Later, he would grieve the fact that she cried for him. He was half grateful at the thought someone cared for him, and half wracked with guilt at what caring for him did to people. 

“Will you come with me?” She asked softly, after wiping her face with her sleeve. “To my quarters?”

It was selfish, to accept her offer of goodwill, but he wanted her company. He wanted the same company he’d had for eons. He wanted a friend.

Lucienne’s quarters were far better than where Dream had travelled to previously, but it felt… wrong to walk in them. Like he was bringing in the stench of decay wherever he walked. 

But he was left with no time to ponder as Lucienne closed the door behind him. It was raining outside, he noticed. It didn’t start on purpose. 

She brought him to sit in the windowsill that was only really theirs, in the little living room that was only really theirs. Dream let her take him by the arm and guide him down, for he didn’t think he’d have the abilities to do much else. 

“What did your parents say?” Lucienne asked gently once the little table in front of them had been set with tea neither of them were going to touch, and they sat across from each other, leaning against each side of the wall. Lucienne’s leg sat propped up, the other hanging languidly off the side. 

Dream smiled softly, to reassure her, in a way. He didn’t know what for. “ They said many things, Lucienne. Yet nothing I wanted them to say.”

He was not so relaxed as he sat, knees propped up to his chest. 

Lucienne sighed, and wrapped her waistcoat around herself even though it was hardly cold. The rain still roared outside, hammering the circular window and rendering the view grey and violent. 

“There are some parents, you know, who actually love their children. Who… take pleasure in their company, who would do anything to see them happy. As you did, for your son.”

That struck something painful within him, an unhealed wound getting opened again.

“ Those are not my parents,” Dream murmured, and leaned his temple on the glass of the window, hating what it reminded him of, gaze still focused on the rain as it turned to hail. 

“No, I know that,” Lucienne huffed, and he felt her eyes focus on him. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.” 

“ So am I.” Dream said honestly. Lucienne’s gaze was perhaps the only one he didn’t feel studied under. She looked at him and she saw him as he was, even as painful and mortifying as it was, he was never judged. 

He closed his eyes and let her take one of her hands in his, warm against the ice of his own. 

“ My mother believes all I want is love,” Dream muttered, not knowing why he did so. 

“ But I don’t think I am an… easy creature to love.”

Lucienne’s grip tightened around his hand. “I would not be so sure, My Lord.” Her voice was unsteady, not unsure of itself, but thick with emotion. Dream just didn’t know what emotion. 

“Many people have loved you. Still love you. Myself included.”

Dream lied to himself when he thought he was out of tears. “ I am glad… that the feeling is returned. But those who love me do not have kind fates.” 

“Yes, well,” Lucienne made a strange sound, a scoff mixed with a sound of frustration. “I’m learning that. I knew that.”

Guilt wracked him at the thought of Lucienne being one subjected to a fate like others had. She had not only grown to be his raven, his librarian, his advisor, his second, but now, he would call her his best friend. It was a humiliating thought. It was a selfish thought. Especially now. It was one he’d never say out loud. 

Only now did Dream open his eyes. Lucienne had tears in her own, they glimmered as she stared out into the rain. “ It is no coincidence that all those I love grow to hate me, or I grow to hate them, and it ends in blood.” Gently, he pulled his hand out of hers, and pulled himself away from her, standing. She sat up, and moved to follow him, but he stopped her.

“Lucienne, I do not want the same fate for you,” Dream’s voice shook as he warned her, stepping away as he made a move to leave. 

But now it was Lucienne’s turn to stop him. 

“Morpheus.” 

He kept walking. 

“Morpheus!” 

She snapped it so harshly that he really did stop, even if it was a selfish thing to do. Dream turned to her, and she stood in front of the windowsill, waistcoat still wrapped tightly around her as she folded her arms tightly. 

“What do you want from me, Lucienne?” Dream pleaded, not for the first time. He was helpless and desperate, yet he couldn’t stand to see her drag herself along for him when he was hardly alive. 

“If it is my love you want,” he stepped closer to her, playing the role of a prideful king again even when all his pride had long since been stripped away, “ then you can have it. Take it and use it however you like, in whatever way you like, and when it has run its course, I would not be in a state to smite you, or curse you, or even hate you. Take it, and it’s yours.”

That felt like a kinder trade off than dragging her along with him while he rotted from the inside out. At least dying, he’d still have something to give. Especially something to give to his most loyal friend.

But Lucienne did not seem appeased. “I do not want your love if I have to take it.”

“It’s already yours.” Dream whispered through a small, sickly amused smile. 

“Come here,” she spoke, voice soft and certainly not sounding as firm as she intended it. 

Dream ducked his head, torn between leaving her on a painful note and sparing her the pain of losing him to death, or going to her, and making his inevitable end so much worse for her. 

It was selfish, but he went to her. So many of his decisions had been selfish, as of late. 

But she wrapped her arms around him, and he hugged her back, her shoulder growing damp with his tears. 

As they pulled away, he whispered, breathless and ashamed, “ This will not end well for you, Lucienne. You will lose me.”

“I know, and I don’t care. I don’t care if you try to make me despise you because in some twisted way you believe that it will make this easier. The only thing that will make this easier is being here with you. So let me be here for you.” Lucienne insisted, like she was repeating the same thing she’d heard time and time again. It was probably exhausting, he had to admit. 

“I already lost you for a hundred years, my friend. I will not have you back for eight months before you leave again. Permanently.” 

Dream couldn’t use the excuse that Lucienne didn’t know what she was talking about. She knew plenty well. She did not take a stance unless she knew everything there was to know. Yet she stayed with him.

So he wrapped his arms around her again. And she would tell him that she did not want to see him go, and he would agree. Even if he knew what would become of him, and accepted it, she did not do so. She never would. 

Dream couldn’t bring himself to stay for long. Eventually, the weight of the day settled on him, and he took himself away, hid himself in his throne room, to grieve in ways Lucienne did not deserve to see.

Chapter 3

Summary:

Hi guys!

In which Dream finalizes his amends, comes to terms with his trauma, and dies.

Hope you enjoy this next chapter, in which Dream is a sopping wet cat and is angsty! Hey what's new. Also please be aware of the themes this chapter as there are heavy suicide themes and trauma. Like Dream's past is it's own warning at this point.

 

Making amends was never supposed to be easy. 

But Dream didn’t know it would be terrifying, too.

He had never really seen the outside of Fawny Rig. 

Just the cellar.

Just the dark, rank cellar. 

It was almost funny, how beautiful the grounds were, like they were covering what truly lay underneath the blooming gardens, and cobbled paths and willow trees over shallow streams, glimmering even under the shade of night.

Unlike the daily maintenance inflicted on the garden, the dungeon below had remained untouched. Entirely untouched. 

Dream tucked his hands into his coat pockets, the brisk wind whipping his hair as he strode down the gravel path towards the driveway. On his last visit, he didn’t have the luxury of walking into the house. 

It felt like walking through a memory as fresh as an open wound. Like he was sticking his fingers in the flesh and prying it open again, and even as he wanted nothing more than to stop, he couldn’t, and just dug his fingers deeper. 

A gardener was bent down, working even as the moon had risen, knees pressed into the ground as they tended to the over-manicured front lawn, clipping a blade of grass that was a centimeter too long for the landlords’ tastes.

No groundsmen would see him here. No servants. No guests. 

Dream slipped like a ghost inside, just behind a postal worker carrying a far too large package. 

It occurred to him, when he stepped into the foyer, that this was the first time he’d ever really cared to see the rest of Fawny Rig. 

Perhaps, if it didn’t carry the memories that it did, he would have appreciated the aged beauty of the house. Dark wood and thick rugs, winding staircases reaching up to higher levels, grander rooms. 

All it needed were some more windows. 

Did Jessamy fly through one of the few windows there, risking everything before Alex dashed her brains against the glass?

Drifting through the halls, Dream really was the spirit that haunted that house. Maybe he would never really go, not even in death. Some part of him was left behind in that basement. Torn away and cast on the floor, laying there limp forever. 

A plague seemed to have struck the manor in his absence. Servants who never really slept quite right at night, gardeners whose plants always turned up brown, no matter how much sun they got. Even guests seemed to toss in their hopeless insomnia, complaining of headaches and strange sights when they closed their eyes to sleep.

No servants tended to the wing Dream now stood in. A gaping stone corridor stretched before him, open like the maw of some starved creature. He didn’t move. 

No lights lit the walls, no candles mounted and he held no lantern, but he knew what would meet him if he reached the end, what would greet him if he went down those stairs. 

And Dream went anyway. 

Rusted iron gates blocked his way, but not his view. But they couldn't have gated him from that cellar even if they tried. 

The metal was rough on his fingers as they brushed over it, letting the lock drift into sand and drift over his hand. 

It was no bother to push the gates aside, to step into the damp stone room that Dream couldn’t have forgotten even as he wanted nothing more than to purge it from his memory. 

Every smooth window, drinking glass and cracked pane snapped Dream back to the century when he was nothing more than an animal rendered on display. 

Because that's what he was. In that glorified bauble Dream now circled, that's what they made him. An animal, an attraction. Stripped naked like a flayed corpse. His skin still pricked even months later, in some unwashable memory of the iron spikes that cut into him every move he made. And he’d hardly moved. 

Dream froze when he could walk no further without stepping onto a stain on the rank brick floor.

Black like tar and long since congealed, Dream’s fingers brushed the damp floor as he crouched closer. 

Not one of his captors had bothered to clean Jessamy’s blood after Alex murdered her. It was kept as a reminder, rather, of what could happen if he ever tried to pry himself out of Fawny Rig’s grasp. 

How foolish they were, to think that their bullets and gunpowder would ever hurt him. How foolish he was to think they’d never be able to hurt him in the first place. 

Dream looked up at that cage, a mass of quartz and glass looming over him and he’d never really escaped, not really. He’d been there ever since 1916, and he’d be there forever. 

He could die, but that shred of him, made of blood and broken glass and fear that people could smell, would never leave. He’d be there forever. 

Just like he’d forever be made of the stone that made Orpheus’ tomb, the ink that stained the pages of Destiny’s book.

The stench of blood, still lingering after months, was suffocating him. That cellar wasn’t what he came for. It didn’t even matter if he saw it one last time, not when he saw it so often, in some way, anyway. 

Dream had lingered too long. He rose on unsteady legs, peeling himself away from the bloodstained floor and half-shattered cage. He stepped over a small pile of shattered glass, the only remnants, saving the blood of Jessamy, left from his time there. The guards' bodies were all that they bothered to remove. It must have been difficult, given the state that they were left in. 

For the first time, Dream felt something like remorse. Regret, that it had happened how it did. It was circumstance that left those guards' corpses on the floor, murdered by his own hand. It was coincidence that he’d been captured. But it couldn’t have been any other way, because Destiny’s book was cruel, and the Fates themselves were crueler. 

Perhaps there was no such person who Dream hated quite as much as the man he came to see.

Alex Burgess, of course. He came to see the man who’d been asleep for eight months. 

—-----------

Asleep was too kind a word for the state Alex had been left in. A mound of blankets did little to hide the frail body of a man whose life had been artificially extended, and was only now wasting away. Mercy was what came to mind when Dream saw him. It was a mercy to have left the man who did what he did to him like that. 

A cliched thought, but Dream thought it anyway, how small Alex looked. Hard to believe it was the same man who shot Jessamy, dashed his father’s head against that cage. Hard to believe he’d really been hurt by a man who was rendered so weak by an inconsequential fraction of effort.

Breath came to Alex in short hiccups, screams for help that would never reach the surface. Dream’s fingers drifted over the linens as he made his way to stand over the sleeping man, leaning down as he studied his face.

Alex’s brows were creased in what might have been worry, or fear, but Dream didn’t care. It would have been anything he wanted it to be.

Steps creaked on the hardwood floor behind him, but no-one would see Dream there.  

Perhaps only the indentations of his fingers in the sheets, where they rested next to Alex's dying body.

Paul, aging himself, circled around the four poster bed which caged Alex’s body, to stand there, simply frozen with a strange expression on his face. 

Some poor mimicry of a pulse quickened at the sight of the lover of the man who’d kept him in that basement, motivated by nothing but cowardice. If someone loved a coward that much, perhaps they were one themselves, Dream thought. But Paul was the one who freed him, whether he knew what he was doing or not. 

Dream couldn’t hate him as truly as he hated Alex. 

Paul would have been facing Dream, if he’d been able to see him. But he just looked down at his lover with a tired, forlorn expression. It was the face of someone who was devastated, but not surprised. Dream knew that look well. 

The man turned away, blinking back tears in what was surely a familiar action, and Dream had no desire to stay watching. Ever the concerned husband, Paul had been doting over Alex since the eternal sleep had taken him. 

He would just do what he came there for. 

Dream rose, and stepped through the fabric separating their world from his. 

Somewhere, on the outskirts of the Dreaming, in a place no one really visited but Dream himself, there lay a desert. It was a place he discarded things that were no longer useful, or didn’t want to remember. It was a place he didn’t need to think about. 

Stone spires stretched from the gale-beaten black sand, reaching into a perpetual night sky they’d never touch. Scattered and sparse as they were, the twisting quartz was sure to cut the skin of whoever touched it. 

Perhaps that was why Dream had placed Alex there, in that cage, surrounded by that stone. If he was to ever escape - and Dream put little effort to ensure he never could - he’d be greeted with nothing but a hostile landscape, sand made of shredded black glass and stone, smooth as it looked, that would slice down to the bone. 

Alex, now in the body of his teenaged self, started as he saw Dream approach, crawling backwards to the far wall of the cage, softly crying out as an iron spike hindered his attempt to curl in on himself. Some part of Dream would never stop being repulsed by him, his pathetic attempt at self preservation. Some sick part of him was amused at being the one to put his captor in that state. 

But he said nothing, instead circled around the cage, eyes raking over it as he had the one in the Waking. Alex shifted uncomfortably, perhaps he now understood what it was to be put on display. 

“I’m sorry,” the man murmured in a small voice, head ducked like a child afraid to be hit. Roderick beat his son far too liberally, Dream remembered well. But he said nothing in return, just as he had those one-hundred and six years, and simply continued his path around the cage, eyes burning into Alex’s skull, perhaps trying to gauge if he truly was as sorry as he painted himself as. 

“I don’t - I don’t know what to say. What do you want me to say?” Alex’s voice was trembling now, maybe it always was. In dreams, he remained as he had been in waking. Perpetually unsure and afraid. 

Alex just shook his head hopelessly, tucking it into his arms like a child crying at night. “What do you want?” He pleaded in a broken voice, Dream stopped, standing only inches from the glass, ice-cold even as his skin didn’t touch it.

“I’m sorry, I am,” Alex, to his credit, raised his head, but only slightly, to look at Dream as he remained frozen and rigid where he stood. Alex’s lip trembled, and he had no desire to watch him cry over this. “I’m so sorry, for everything, please… please, I didn’t mean for-”

“ Enough.” Dream growled, his tone cruel enough for Alex to jump, curled form pressed further against the glass as his head shot up. Perhaps he was just surprised to hear Dream speak again. 

Alex took a few shaking breaths as Dream resumed his path around the cage, shifting uncomfortably as he tucked his knees higher to his chest in some meagre form of protection.

“Are you… going to hurt me? ” He asked it like he already knew the answer.

Dream slowed again, leaning against a spire only a few feet from where Alex’s back was pressed against the glass. “ I could,” Dream murmured, and Alex slowly turned to face him, craning his neck and never standing, hunched as if that’d make any difference. “ If I wanted to.”

That answer clearly did nothing to comfort Alex, which was the intention. 

“And…” The boy shifted uncomfortably, eyes always flitting away from Dream’s stare. “Do you want to hurt me? For what I did?”

Even after months, and Alex didn’t understand. “ I should hurt you. Far worse than I already have.” He still enjoyed the way his words made Alex squirm, how it felt to finally be the one on the outside of the cage. But it was a cruel feeling, to himself as well as Alex. It was eating him from the inside out. 

“ But I won’t.” Dream slumped further against the spire, only the inches he allowed himself. He wouldn’t be seen as weak, not by someone like Alex. “ I should hurt you, but I won’t.”

“Why?” Alex was sitting straighter now, eyes rounder and drier. 

“ Because that is not what I came here for. I came here to free you. Not slaughter you.” 

Alex’s brows shot up, lips parted. Then he gave a small, relieved smile at that, but Dream didn’t offer one back. Alex’s face dropped. 

“My father once said that to me. That if you were to ever get free, you’d slaughter us all.” 

Dream suppressed a wince at the memory. He was good at that. Suppressing things. 

“ He was right, in a way” His gaze never dropped from Alex’s, and for once, he looked back at Dream. 

“No, he wasn’t.” Alex said it like he was sure, but Dream had come to learn that you could never really be sure of anything, not really. 

He raised an eyebrow. “ Are you sure of that, child?” Alex winced at his scowl, but Dream’s heart wasn’t in it. Even Alex could see that. 

But Dream wasn’t there to intimidate him. Or try to. He wasn’t there to hurt him, no matter how much he deserved it. 

Instead, Dream reached his hand out to the glass, fingers grazing it and letting it fall as sand to join the rest of the desert. “ I didn’t come here to hurt you.”

Perhaps now Alex could see that. For one short and shimmering moment, he simply stared at where the glass used to be. At Dream’s outstretched hand. 

Maybe it would be as it had been decades ago, his hand outstretched but Alex lacking the incentive to take it. 

But he had plenty of reason to now. Tentatively, Alex stood on shaking legs and took Dream’s hand, stepping from the metal scaffolding of the cage and onto black sand. 

“ You are free.” Alex smiled, though Dream still did not. “ It’s time to wake up .”

And so Dream did what he did best, what he loved doing and what he would sorely miss after death came for him. He led Alex to the Waking, promising soft dreams and a softer place to land.

—------------

Paul was not there when Alex awoke, spluttering and gasping for water. But he heard soon enough. 

He staggered into the room, having just risen from bed himself, sleeping clothes ragged and dishevelled even in the low light of night. 

“Alex!” Paul’s eyes fell on his awoken husband first. But he froze when he saw Dream, half corporeal and rendered a silhouette in the dark. “You. It’s you.”

Dream simply tilted his head, but said nothing. Paul, to his credit, did not seem afraid. 

Voice still thick with sleep, he snarled, “Get away from him.” 

Dream, having no desire to follow orders from him, did not oblige. Paul rushed to Alex’s side anyway, pulling the man’s frail body up and gently tilting a stale glass of water between his thin, cracked lips. 

“What did you do to him?” Paul demanded, still crouched at his husband’s bedside. His frantic hands drifted over Alex as if to ensure he hadn’t been harmed. 

Alex, for the first time in eight months, spoke. “He didn’t hurt me, Paul… he… he woke me up. I’m awake.” Alex was babbling, like he couldn’t believe he was hearing his own voice, relief tinging his words. Paul looked close to tears as his arms wrapped around Alex’s thin shoulders, and for a moment, they almost seemed to forget Dream was there. 

But with great difficulty, Alex pushed himself straighter, sitting against the bedframe as he gripped Paul’s hand. “Why… why would you do this? Why would you help me?”

Paul turned around too, but slower, more cautious. His glare was half-hearted from where he sat crouched on the floor. “I thought you wanted us dead,” he hissed. 

Now Dream stepped closer, though not to scare them as they so clearly expected. “ I didn’t do this to help you, Alex.” He stared down at him for a moment, before turning his gaze to Paul. 

“ I did this for the people who love you.”

Dream didn’t want to be there any longer, in that room, in that house, in that world. Slowly, in some poor act of calm, he turned on his heel to leave. 

“Wait.” Dream paused as Alex croaked that word, anger briefly flickering as Alex believed himself able to demand such a thing of Dream. But he stopped anyway. And he didn’t really know why. 

“You still didn’t tell us why.” It was not the question that bothered Dream, but the thought that Alex and Paul didn’t deserve the answer. 

As if they should know what happened to him. As if they should know how he inched closer to his death every moment. A hundred years captive by their hands, and only allowed to live for eight months after freedom. 

Perhaps what they did to him was like holding a moth in their hands. Brushing the dust off his wings so that he’d never fly again. Held down for a century, and when allowed a brief flight, only came fluttering down in a torn and faulty heap. 

Ensuring his death the moment they touched him. 

So Dream did not answer them, did not allow them to question him again. He simply stepped through the worlds again, his final amendment made, ensuring his successor would never need to atone for his own sins. 

Because he meant what he said to Alex. He didn’t free him out of guilt, or charity. He freed him because of those who loved him. 

Just as Dream went now, to those who loved him. Though it wasn’t so much a reunion as it was a goodbye. 

—---------------

The air in the throne room was tense, like the whole world was holding its breath. 

Dream could already feel the scarred dream-earth beneath his feet, wounds as tangible as if they’d fallen on his own skin, and he knew the Kindly Ones had arrived to take him.

Lucienne stood rigid as a pillar at the base of the stairs, flanked by Matthew and the Corinthian, a defanged iteration of his predecessor. How hopeful Dream had been to make him, as some defense, when in truth he knew there was nothing to defend him now. 

Merv stood a few feet behind them, lingering like some shadow, unsure of what to do with himself. They’d never seen eye-to-eye, as was the case with all of Dream’s creations, yet he was helpful. He was constant. Dream appreciated consistency, and was only ashamed that he’d be the one to break such a well-lived routine. 

Nuala stood by him, dishevelled and red-eyed, though she wouldn’t cry, not now. Dream nodded a greeting to her as he approached, and she pressed her lips together in a tight half smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“My Lord,” Lucienne began, cutting through the thick silence which was marred only by the sounds of Dream’s steps echoing through the hall. She opened her mouth to speak again, but Dream stopped her. 

“ Don’t,” he said softly, and she looked at him then with tired eyes, glimmering in the perpetual twilight of the throne room. He softly smiled at her, hoping she knew that she was one of the very few people he did that for. “ I will not be your lord for much longer, Lucienne.”

Lucienne swallowed as Dream looked away, from her, from them, they who would be mourners in the days to come. He’d come to terms with his death, no matter the way he wanted nothing more than to avert it. 

But as Lucienne spoke again, he knew fate was as inevitable as it was cruel. 

“Matthew has… spotted the Kindly Ones on the outskirts of the Dreaming. They’re here.”

Her lip trembled and it was an effort to stop his from doing the same. Dream just nodded, still not breaking in a poor attempt to reassure her. To reassure them all. 

Dream raised his head to address the rest of those gathered, few as they were. 

“ I trust Daniel Hall is ready?” 

Despite his best effort to sound assured, commanding, his voice had a fractured quality it so often did of late. 

The Corinthian nodded, bloody smears barely hidden by his glasses showing a poor attempt at hiding his tears. “He’s playing in the library, I’ve set him there with some toys, and… Fiddler’s Green is with him.” His voice trembled, like he’d really miss Dream in the way only a creation could love their creator, despite their short and wasted days. 

So many days felt short and wasted now, as Dream looked at the assembly and their faces already painted in some premature grief. 

He addressed the Corinthian first, nodding at his words like he was proud. Because he was. 

“ Thank you… for doing what you did. You were always my masterpiece. You will not become less than that even when I am gone.”

Dream inclined his head and the Corinthian only looked away, before returning the nod, lips pressed together like the rest of them. 

“ Mervyn,” Dream called sharply, causing the pumpkin-headed dream-thing to start, surprised he’d been called on at all. 

“Uh… yeah, boss?” He asked, scratching the back of his stick neck as if to appear unbothered. But pumpkins couldn’t cry, so Merv was perhaps doing the best job out of all of them to appear undistressed. 

Dream stepped slowly towards him, boots sounding on the marble floor. “ You were always helpful, Mervyn. Well…” His lip quirked and he couldn’t help it. “ Most of the time.” 

Merv chuckled to himself, but didn’t reply. What was there to say? 

So Dream moved to Nuala, who stood furthest away, about a foot closer to the ground than the rest of them. She didn’t smile as she looked to him with eyes full of nothing but regret, and he remembered how she dreamed of loving him, ever since she saw him. He used to pity her for that. Now he didn’t know what to feel.

“My offer to build you an army still stands.” There was a dark kind of humour to her voice, and Dream pressed his lips together. Nuala loved him, yes, but she didn’t deserve to. Not because he was better than her, but because she was so much better than him. She wouldn’t have deserved anything that befalled her because of her misplaced love.

“ And it was as I said, my lady,” Dream lowered his head in some strange bow. “ No army should meet such a futile fate.” 

Nuala raised her chin, and said nothing. But she nodded slightly, like a general giving a soldier the signal of approval. Of good luck. The last look Dream left her with was a mournful one. 

“ Lucienne,” Dream murmured, head lower than it had been before, gaze fixed on the floor. “ I…”

For once, he didn’t know what to say. What could he say to her? They’d spoken of his son’s death, of his own death, and yet he’d never thought what they could speak of when it finally was time to say goodbye. 

“ Thank you, Lucienne. For staying, even when I could not.” His voice was barely a whisper, and he stepped closer to her, she was the only one he needed to hear his words. “ I would have met this fate long ago, if not for you.” 

Dream would have said more, perhaps Lucienne would have said more, if not for the piercing screech which ripped through the walls from the outside of the palace. 

Dream started towards the doors, but she clutched his hand. 

“Morpheus,” she spoke hurriedly, as every second slipped from them like grains of sand in an hourglass. “There will always be a chair for you in the Library. There will always be a book waiting.”

Dream gripped her hand back, though he turned away, not letting anyone see the terror and grief marring his face. “ Trust that I will be there to read it.”

And he stepped out of the palace to greet the Kindly Ones, vanishing those who loved him in a swirl of pale sand. 

The Kindly Ones stood at the top of the stairs to the palace, before the crumpled body of the Griffin. 

Dream hardly noticed the Three against the wasted half-corpse of his gatekeeper. Shallow breaths were all the movement her form could manage, and as he rushed to her, he saw her iris’ were white, hazed with blindness and age. 

Dream knelt beside her, running a hand over the feathers of her head, fingers ghosting over them as the Griffin shivered.

A low groan echoed from her as he cradled her in the little way he could, standing over her in some poor protection. 

“ What did you do to her?” Dream growled, no longer fearing for his own life against the Kindly Ones, simply his gatekeeper’s. They had no reason to do that to her, not when he was the life they were to take. 

The Three laughed as the Crone’s cackle cut through the air. “The Griffin is very old now, Lord Shaper. Her bones are dust and her eyes are unseeing.” 

The old woman said this with some satisfaction, as if her actions were absolute. 

Ignoring them, Dream turned back down to the Griffin, who stared up at him with plaintive eyes laced with pain. The sounds emanating from her were growing quieter, weaker as age wrapped her in its unnatural embrace. Dream pressed a hand deep into the dusty brown feathers of her forehead, his other hand stroking her beak as if to comfort her. 

“ Wake, Griffin,” he murmured, closing his eyes as he felt his own energy pulled from him as she healed, feathers lengthening and eyes growing clear like a fresh water lake clear of algae. Yet even as she was healed, he was not. 

Dream staggered to his feet as the Griffin stood, and resumed her post. He really did smile then, as much as he could manage, looking up at her where she stood proudly at the doors of the palace once more. 

Weakened as Dream was, life now sapped out of him like a trepanned tree, like a corpse barely animated, he stood as his final act, a restoration of his creation. 

Yet his satisfaction was short lived, as the Mother scoffed, unimpressed at such a display. Lashing towards him, she raked a nail down his face, gouging a thin scratch across his cheekbone. Dream didn’t cry out as his knees cracked against the stone, only raised a hand to his cheek, unsurprised when it came back bloody. 

“ If we are to fight, ladies,” He murmured as he stood, the blood on his fingers falling into aether, “ then let us at least do it in a more dignified place where you are not so tempted to… harm those who I’ve brought into being. You have no fight with them.”

Dream spoke as he thought a king ought to, clear and dignified despite feeling none of those things. 

Yet the Kindly Ones only laughed again, the sound cutting into the hazy night sky, storm clouds gathering no doubt because of their presence.

“Then choose your battleground, Dreamlord. We do not care where. Only that it ends in your death.”

Dream inclined his head, a subtle resignation they seemed pleased by. “ So I’ve heard. But at least take my life on the outskirts.” A strange way of begging them not to let his subjects see his death. He had come to terms with it. Bitter terms that made him resent fate, made him think it was cruel and unfair and perhaps, no matter what the stories said, unescapable. 

The Maiden now stood between the other two, and smiled softly, like she was comforting him. A ruse which perhaps worked on those not well versed in the Kindly Ones. “Where you are, we will be.” She mused, smooth voice in contrast to the harsh laughs of the others. 

Dream nodded, desperately trying to ignore the sensation of warm blood dripping down his cheek, his jaw. “ Very well, then. I will meet you there.” He raised his chin, as he’d seen Nuala do. “ Allow me a moment to gather my affairs.”

“Of course, child. We aren’t cruel,” the Crone chided, and the others chuckled to themselves like it was a private joke. 

But they didn’t hurt him again, and made no moves to hurt his gatekeepers. So Dream returned to his throne room for the final time as the Three disappeared in a swirl of smoke. 

The hall was deserted, or at least Dream intended it to be. Matthew did a poor job of hiding amongst a candelabra mounted to a pillar. Was Dream not allowed even a moment of solitude before his death? 

He must have said this out loud, because Matthew came flying down to sit on Dream’s knee, now pulled to his chest. Dream could not have stood for long, at that point. He brushed his hand over the cut on his face, vanishing it from view, yet not healing it.

“You’ve had nothing but solitude for a good while, boss. I’m not leaving you alone.” He nipped Dream’s finger, and he stroked the feathers on the raven’s head. 

“ You’re a stubborn bird, aren’t you?” Dream rasped, voice a pale echo of what it used to be. His bones felt heavy, straining and tired like the scaffolding of a falling building. 

Healing the Griffin had taken something out of him, will to fight or perhaps just energy. Perhaps it was some semblance of a lifeforce. Whatever it was, he was tired. He was very tired. 

Matthew ruffled his feathers. “That’s me, boss.” When Dream didn’t reply, he piped up again. 

“So, where do we go from here?” 

Dream stifled a groan as he pulled himself to his feet, barely standing as unseen chains seemed to pull him to the ground. “ I will… go to meet the Kindly Ones. You will remain here.” 

He gritted out, wrapping his coat around himself as he made a move to leave. 

“Uh-uh,” Matthew snapped, and Dream glared down at him. “You never said good-bye to me, you know.” 

A twinge of guilt stopped Dream for a second, but it was only for a second. “ Goodbye, Matthew.”

He really began to leave now, but Matthew nipped his ankle like a petulant child. 

“I’ll leave when you give me a better one than that.” Matthew said pointedly. 

Dream snapped then, kneeling before the bird so fast Matthew hopped away from him. “ Would you like to be useful, Matthew?” 

The raven nodded. “ Good,” Dream snarled, not angry at Matthew but the circumstances, at their goodbye having to be like that. He didn’t really want to say goodbye to him. Just as he didn’t want to say it to anyone else. 

“ Go and retrieve my sister. She is waiting at the Gates of Horn and Ivory. Find me, and bring her to where I am.”

Matthew paused, as if considering Dream’s words. “Your sister…”

Dream nodded. 

“ Death.” 

“Boss, no - You can’t -” 

But Dream had already begun walking away. “ We will say our dues when you bring her, Matthew.” 

As he disappeared in a swirl of sand, he nodded back to the raven. “ Thank you, my friend.” 

Dream trusted Matthew to complete that final task. It wasn’t a difficult one. 

—-----------------

The fringes of the Dreaming were barren and wasted, already razed by the Kindly Ones. 

Grey skies hung like a suffocating blanket, providing the world's slowest, dullest asphyxiation. 

A crumbling marble spire, the last remnants of a once-grand building, stood alone in the wasteland, before ravines and gouges in the once lush place. The damage hurt as much as an actual wound, Dream’s skin felt as flayed as the bedrock that once had a forest over it, and it was an effort to climb the stairs as they wound to the top of the spire. 

Dream clutched the sides of the tower and winds and rain buffeted him, threatening to sweep him away and rip him to shreds to join the shrapnel on the ground far below. 

As Dream reached the top, a flat stone floor canopied by a crumbling stone arch which did nothing to keep the rain off, he felt like an offering being given on the plate of a god, presented to the Kindly Ones to be burned and shown as a warning, a sacrifice, though he knew he was nothing so noble. 

Dream shrugged off his coat, peeling the soaked sleeves off his skin and leaving him bare and shivering. Holding it at arms length, it hung like the pelt of some extinct animal, long since dead and whose former grandeur had faded into morbidity.

A cloak of a king no longer a king. Dream let it fall off the side of the spire, and even as he sat, legs dangling off the overhang, he didn’t see where it landed. 

Lightning cracked through the sky like a glass being broken, and some part of him hoped it didn’t hit a part of the realm anyone lived. But it was a small part, now that most of him had been eaten by bitterness and apathy. 

A spiked black shape fell from the sky with a squawk, hitting the sodden stone with a hard thud. Even in the levity of such an entrance, Matthew’s previous playfulness had long since been leeched from him. 

Dream stood as his raven did, but knelt down to look him in the eye. Matthew’s feathers were ruffled and dripping, but Dream gently wiped a hand down his forehead to clear the bird’s eyes. 

“She’s here. Will you say bye to me now, boss?” Matthew asked, voice thick and lacking any of the humour he had just moments before in the throne room. 

Dream did not see Death, but knew that she’d show herself when he needed her. So he acted as mortals did, and ignored her presence, obvious as it was.

“ Matthew,” Dream began, but he stopped before he even really started. “ I… I am… sorry, that it had to end like this. You were a fine raven, while you served me as one.”

Matthew chuckled and nipped his finger like he did when he was trying to be funny, but it wasn’t really working. “Only a fine one, boss?”

“Don’t push it.” Dream shot him a look. “ But yes, Matthew. More than a fine one. You were…. You are willful, loudmouthed and lack respect for authority, but… I am… grateful that you were the soul Lucienne found for me that day in London. I would not have it any other way.”

“Dammit, boss,” Matthew chided, half faking being choked up. “Why’d you have to say something like that?”

Dream smiled down at him, blinking away raindrops. “ I only told the truth, Matthew.”

Another strike of lightning crashed against the horizon, closer now. “ Go.” Dream urged, again reminded of how little time he had, the danger that awaited Matthew if he stayed. “ Go back to the palace, it is far safer there.” 

Matthew paused, seemingly unstruck by Dream’s urgency. “And I’ll… wait for you there, right?” 

So Dream smiled what would be his last smile as he shook his head, because there was no point in comforting Matthew now. “ I doubt it, my friend.” 

Another lightning strike hit, only kilometers away from the spire now. Dream did not need to tell Matthew to go now, instead, the raven hopped away, and Dream hoped he’d find his way amongst the gale winds and rain. 

But before Matthew took flight, he paused, and looked back for the final time, before the night winds carried him back to the castle. 

So Dream sat back down at the overhang, legs swinging in the open air over a drop that would render any mortal smithereens against the ground. He did not hear Death approach, simply felt her as someone felt an inevitability.

She joined him there, and they sat side by side as they had so many times before, on park benches, on chairs at family dinners. 

“So.” 

“ So.” 

Death nudged Dream’s shoulder, like she did when she wanted him to talk. He was never very good at that. “You know I’ve been worried about you.”

Dream rolled his eyes, but it was halfhearted. She was always worried. “ The last time we had this conversation, you threw a piece of bread at me,” he muttered, barely loud enough to be heard through the rain. 

“I remember,” Death mused, like it was a pleasant memory. For her, it probably was, given that she wasn’t the one who took a baguette to the face. 

“...Here.” Dream handed her one, sodden almost immediately, and she took it like she didn’t really want to. There really was no point, given that any birds to feed had long since scattered, or been struck from the sky by the Kindly Ones.

“This isn’t funny, Dream.” Death muttered, and let the mushed bread fall from her grasp, adding just another piece of rot to the land.

“ No, it’s not.”

Death shook her head, splaying her hands on her thighs in a frustrated, helpless way. “You didn’t call me here to talk, did you?” It was a question, but it felt accusatory. Sharp and pointed like a knife behind her words. 

Dream sighed, still staring out at the barren land he wouldn’t be around to fix. “ You know why I called you here.”

Death shook, like a small sob with tears hidden by the rain. “I can’t… take my little brother, Dream. I have to, but I can’t.”

Dream didn’t reply. He didn’t want her to either. 

“Do…” Even shaking as it was, Death’s voice always sounded above the rain. “Do you want me to?” 

Lightning cracked just meters away from them, but neither jumped. “Doesn’t matter if he doesn’t want to!” A cackle came from everywhere and nowhere, the storm itself talking. “He’s gotta pay up!” 

Death never did take nicely to being interrupted. Not even by the Kindly Ones. She rose to her feet, standing rigid against the winds dashing the spire. 

“Quiet! All of you.” Death’s voice rang clear through the sky, and it wasn’t even particularly loud. The storm gales ceased, but barely, lightning evaporating even for that moment. “I’m trying to talk to my brother.” She growled, and none of the Three were to be seen. 

So Death sat back down, legs swinging like Dream’s, and they could keep pretending they were having a normal conversation. 

“ No, sister… I don’t want to die.” Dream admitted, and it felt like a curse to say it when he knew the Kindly Ones were watching, but he didn’t care. Not anymore. “ I know nothing else than being this. Being alive.” 

What he didn’t say is that he never asked to be Dream. Never asked to have the unconscious be his soul, never asked to bear his world the way he did. And it was torture, it was painful, but it’s what he was. 

“ Sometimes… I think I must hate it. When the weight of dreamers crushes me under the haze of their sleep and their fantasies. But other times… and that is most times… it is my role.”

Another thing he didn’t say. He didn’t admit he loved his world, a stupid thing to admit, but it was true.

Dream did not often admit to loving things. He’d loved Orpheus. His friends, Lucienne and Matthew, even the Corinthian as his masterpiece was loved. And he loved Death, of course. 

Death tilted her head, maybe out of concern, curiosity, sadness, maybe all of those things. “What do you mean?” She asked softly.

Dream thought for a moment, because to tell her what he really meant would take far too long, and the Kindly Ones were impatient beings. 

Dream splayed his fingers where his hand lay on his lap, trying to convey something he didn’t want misunderstood. They were so good at that. Misunderstanding each other. “ Did you know I freed Alex Burgess?” 

Death huffed a laugh, like he’d pointed out something obvious. “Kind of difficult not to notice, little brother.” 

Dream joined her in that little chuckle, and it was as sardonic as she made it. “ Yes, well. Even as I hated every moment of it, I did not so much mind… waking him up. Being the hand that comforted him across worlds. From waking to sleep. From sleep to waking.” By the end, his voice had turned into a little mutter, but Death heard him. 

Dream shrugged. “Perhaps that is how you feel, sometimes.”

Death rested her head on his shoulder, like she too was tired. “You aren’t wrong, Dream. But it just sounds like you don’t like being the guy in charge.” 

Dream scoffed. Of all his flaws, he was most aware of the fact that he never really could cede responsibility to anyone but himself. “ Me? Do you think I would have created such a kingdom if I did not like being in control?”

Despite his question, Death simply nodded against his shoulder. “Yes, I do. Maybe not when you were younger, but… it’s a lot to have on your shoulders. I don’t have anyone to rule, I’m just the ferryman. It must be exhausting.” 

That was maybe the kindest thing any of Dream’s siblings had ever said to him. For the first time, he was grateful for the storm, and the way it hid his tears. 

“ It is,” He sighed. “ But that’s the way it is.”

Death pulled her head off his shoulder. “Look at me, Dream,” she commanded, and he did. 

She reached out, brushing sodden hair off of his temple. “Is this what you really want? To accept this?”

Dream blinked tears out of his eyes, and wondered why she was asking questions he’d already answered. “ No, my sister. But what choice do I have? I’ve pleaded with our parents, I’ve scoured the laws, I’ve made my amends. My choices are worth nothing. My wishes are worth nothing.”

“That is not true.”

“It is!” Dream rarely cried out, or yelled, let alone at Death, but why she kept asking him such things, saying such things left him hollow and worse as it was. “ None of us, none of our family, ever made any choices worth anything more than a line in Destiny’s book.” 

Death looked stricken and hopeless, and he knew she couldn’t fault him there.

“You think Orpheus was anything more than a paragraph? You think I am anything more than a cautionary tale? The Prince of Stories can’t even make himself one worth telling.”

Dream’s voice sounded broken, cracked like a pot against a marble floor. 

And looking at Death’s resigned face, he already felt cruel and guilty. “ I’m sorry.” He muttered. 

“ Perhaps I am just… tired of it all.”

Death nodded, inching closer to Dream again. “I know, little brother. Believe me, I know.” 

“ I am tired of this. Being this. I am tired of being Dream, yet I don’t want to die.” He chuckled, half to himself and not at all humorously. “ If only you could take Dream, let Daniel be him, and leave what is left over of me.” 

A stupid thought, a child’s thought, playing on loopholes and word games like he’d just discovered a way to trick his elders and felt terribly clever about it. 

But Death said nothing, and Dream finally understood that as a confirmation that even that hope had been dashed.

“ You have to take me now, don’t you?” Dream murmured, and he sounded like he did when they were young, when Death had only taken the first beings that lived, and Dream still dealt with little sleepers. 

Death nodded and stood slowly, looking down on him like an angel mortals would carve to guard the cemeteries. “I have to take Dream of the Endless.”

Dream lowered his head.

“ Very well.” If those were to be his last words, at least they would be polite.

“Maybe you can tell a story good enough to get out of this one.”

“ Perhaps. But I doubt it.” All of his stories now were based on desperation and grief. And that never made for anything good, except when it did.

“I don’t.” 

Dream turned up to his sister. She still looked down on him, still with that blank expression. 

“ You aren’t suggesting…” 

“I am,” confirmed Death, stance as assured as it always was. 

And Dream, for the first time in a good while, felt a flicker of hope. “ What would become of me?”

If Death took the part of him that was Dream, what would be left over? Would it even be him? 

He collected names like trinkets, Morpheus, Oneiros, Lord Shaper. How many of those were as important to him as Dream? How many were Dream?

Death sighed. “I suppose we find out, little brother.” Though he wouldn’t be her little brother for long, no matter the outcome. 

“ Will I still… be me? Will I still be Orpheus’ father? Will I still be here?” Dream couldn’t help asking them as they came to him, but Death shook her head, and something told him she had as little idea about it as he did. 

But Dream stood anyway, still weakened by the Kindly Ones, still aching and creaking in his limbs, but for once, he felt sure. And it was a selfish feeling, because some part of him thought nothing other than that he deserved to die, and that it was natural to do so. 

But Dream was the Prince of Stories. Loopholes were in his nature. And he loved a good ending. Even if he wouldn’t be called Dream by the end. 

So Dream took his sister’s hand, and stepped into oblivion. 

And the person who stepped out, who let go of her hand, had many names. Morpheus, Oneiros, Lord Shaper. But not one of them was Dream. 

So Morpheus watched as the Kindly Ones, bitter but unfueled now, dissipated in a fine smoke. The storm did not clear, but it would, given time. 

Death gripped his hand now, as a way of good bye. Morpheus was left on that spire, staring out at a world which had only just begun healing. 

But he didn’t stay there for long, of course. 

Morpheus had a book to read. A king to crown. And a funeral to attend.

Notes:

Okay okay first things first just wanna say writers block got me bad so I'm sorry this chapter took so long!! This one is like 99% angst but I SWEAR the next one is literally just fluff and Morpheus having a well-earned day off. So. If you enjoy Morph being pressured into chilling out for once and drinking tea and reading in Lucienne's library then like. Yeah.

Thank you so much to everyone reading, and hope you enjoyed it!!

Chapter 4

Summary:

Fluff what plot??

Morpheus learns more from the people around him, heals from his dilemma and gets subjected to many upon many rounds of hugs. Like so many hugs. Somebody help that man he cannot breathe fr

Dream flexed his hand as Death let him go. No, that wasn’t right. Morpheus flexed his hand. 

He didn’t know what had happened. But whatever part of him that was Dream - and he didn’t know how much of him that was, or how much power it carried - was gone. Transferred to a new host like a king’s crown, or a chain welded around a leg. 

It hadn’t felt like death. Or whatever death was supposed to feel like. He didn’t know what it felt like, but it didn’t feel like dying. 

The storm had slowly ebbed away, like blood soaking into bandages. 

What little warmth had clung to him in the rain left with the clouds, the sun still gone and he suspected it would be hiding for quite some time. 

The whole world stood still. Like trepidation before a new king, or shock at a wound being cleaved down its middle. Morpheus didn’t know. He just stood still with it. 

He felt… different, somehow. Himself but not himself, like he’d slipped into a new skin and lost something, something very dear to him when he did that. 

Like a weight off his shoulders, like a name lost. 

Morpheus did not remember the walk back to the castle. He didn’t even remember why he went there first.

But when he entered Lucienne’s library, it was a familiar kind of warmth, felt by an unfamiliar form. 

Yet it was entirely familiar as Morpheus turned his palm over in the lamplight, studying the way light reflected off his knuckles and panes of his hand. The same hand that had belonged to the same body for all the eternity he could remember, but it lacked something. That part of him that had died, and gone to Daniel. The part of him that was Dream. 

And he didn’t even know if he missed it. 

Morpheus had only walked around his library as a king before, never as unsure as he was in that moment. Unsure and entirely alone, now that Lucienne, along with all other denizens, was attending his funeral. 

So the Library lay deserted. Or, it was supposed to. 

He had wanted it to be. He had wanted to be alone, even for a little, when the taunting voices of the Fates didn’t ring in his head, when he didn’t have a kingdom to face and atone to. But it was as Matthew had told him, just earlier that day. Maybe he’d had too much solitude. 

Breaking through the silence, there was a distinct sniffing sound, quiet and suppressed, like someone really didn’t want to be heard but was doing a particularly poor job of it. 

Morpheus peered around the bookshelf, to the little enclave where what had been his favorite reading nook sat. 

“Matthew?” He murmured, voice shaky from disuse and cautious, he hadn’t heard himself speak since he took Death’s hand. 

The raven stood on the back of the chair, head bowed in some attempt to cry tearless cries. As Morpheus approached, he must not have heard, because he made no move in reply. 

He reached out a shaking hand to the little bird, not touching him so as not to startle him. “Matthew, why are you crying?” 

Now the raven started, jumping and swearing so loudly he ought to get kicked out of the Library, and probably would have, if Lucienne had not had a previous engagement. 

Matthew’s squawking didn’t stop as he cried, “Boss! You’re, you’re alive! You’re alive?” He flapped his wings frantically, and Morpheus had to steady him as he almost knocked himself to the ground. 

Morpheus smiled as Matthew panted frantically, still looking at him like he didn’t quite believe what he saw. “How… how…”

Morpheus' smile grew broader as he brushed his knuckle over the bristled feathers on Matthew’s forehead. “I told you I would return, did I not?”

Matthew had grown still and he clacked his beak, beady eyes narrowing as he cocked his head. “Yeah, but… you were humoring me.”

Morpheus slid into the nook, trying and failing to hide the way his legs shook. It wasn’t just the walk back to the castle, but everything that came before that. Any energy lost prior to… it felt strange to say his death, but that's what it was, wasn’t it? Any energy lost prior to his death had not been replenished, and he felt exhausted down to his fabricated bones. 

Resting his elbows on the table, Morpheus leant his forehead on clasped hands and loosed a breath he’d been holding for a very long time. “I was… humouring myself as much as I was all of you.” It felt strange to admit that; it was something he never would have gotten to say, if he’d been fully taken. But he’d said it anyway, and was glad of it, in some way. 

Matthew hopped closer to him, across the varnished wood table etched with scratches no doubt from his own claws. “How are you…”

He trailed off, but Morpheus understood his intention well enough. “Alive?”

He asked grimly, hands tightening. Any levity of a reunion that had carried the conversation previously was all but gone. 

Now they were both faced with the reality of Morpheus’ life, and a new king, and a funeral. And Morpheus was left to answer questions he didn’t know how to answer.

“I don’t know how I am here, Matthew. Alive.” He tapped his knuckles on the table, the only sound in that silent Library. “I only know that I am not what I was. I am not what I was but I don’t know what I am.” 

It felt so brutally honest to say that. Honest in a way Morpheus only had been upon his looming death. But by the puzzled look on Matthew’s face, it did nothing to quell his questions. 

Morpheus asked softly, “Does that make sense?” 

But Matthew only stared at him with shell-shocked eyes, no doubt mirroring Dream’s own. 

They were silent for what felt like hours, but was probably minutes.

“We have a funeral for you. People are here to mourn you and everything. We were supposed to mourn you.” Matthew murmured in disbelief. 

“Then why aren’t you?” It was a very forward question, Morpheus realised that as Matthew’s head shot up, almost annoyed. 

Matthew’s gaze was slightly accusatory as he snapped, “What?” And Morpheus remembered that he, too, had just been chewed up by fate and spat out. Perhaps now was not the time to be so literal. 

Morpheus took a softer tone as Matthew’s eyes became downcast and dim, like he was ashamed for daring to speak back. Had he really been so cruel as to convince Matthew that he cared about such a perceived slight?

“I find you here, in the Library. Is it not proper to attend the funeral of a friend?” Morpheus asked gently.

Matthew shuffled awkwardly, ruffling feathers on his back as he shifted from where he still stood on the tabletop. “Still getting used to you saying that,” he admitted, and it was true, despite Morpheus tentatively using it in life, he did not do so often.

“I didn’t… I didn’t want them to see me like this.” Matthew coughed, eyes still downcast, like he was guilty. A wretched pang went through Morpheus’ chest at the sight of Matthew guilty over his grief, no matter how much Morpheus didn’t deserve it. 

So he reached out again, an upturned palm. “I know.”

Matthew sniffled again, a strange sound with him being a bird, and tentatively stepped onto Morpheus’ palm. He didn’t raise his head, only stared numbly.

“Will you be there? At the funeral?” 

Morpheus looked away, staring out the stained-glass window at nothing in particular.

“You should go, Matthew,” he murmured.

The raven’s gaze burned into the side of his head. “You didn’t answer me.”

“Attend my own funeral? Rather unorthodox.” Morpheus cracked a smile, though it was sardonic and a poor attempt at levity. Matthew just stared, eyes blank. 

“You didn’t even die. There are people here, right now, who think you’re gone. Me and Lucienne, we thought…” His voice broke on Lucienne’s name, and he trailed off. 

“I’m sorry.” It was barely a whisper.

“I mean, I get it if you don’t want to come. They’ll be expecting me to say something, anyway. I’ll leave you be.”

And he hopped off Morpheus’ hand, though it was tentative, like he really didn’t want to go and Morpheus didn’t want to be alone, either. But what did it matter, when he had all the time in the world?

“Thank you, Matthew.”

—-----------

The Dreaming felt deserted. 

It nearly was, considering everyone had gathered in the main hall, now fashioned into a cathedral for his Wake. 

The paths were cloaked in deafening silence, even the wind quieted as if it, too, sat among the mourners. Undeserving of them as he was. 

Morpheus took a side path through a garden, through a small and dense patch of trees, twisting birches which reached into the clouds like very tall, spindly cloaked figures with scoliosis, trying to stand straight despite the advice of multiple medical professionals. 

Over a bridge, through a clearing, past a stream. Beaten steps he’d traced so many times before. Orpheus had loved this garden. Large enough for him to play, and run, and do what children did. Small enough so that even when he had hid from his parents, it was never too difficult to find him. 

He’d particularly favored hiding under a crumbling marble bridge, hiding amongst the piled stones at the river bank thinking he was very clever. He was always easy to spot. 

Even more so easy to spot was the figure now standing on the near side of the bridge, the only side which stood still arching slightly over the water. They were clothed entirely in mourner’s black, an odd choice for someone so clearly avoiding a funeral. Morpheus did not approach them.

It felt… like an intrusion, like he was witnessing something entirely private and something that should have remained that way. 

But they had already seen him, raising their head as he stepped back, retracing his steps, and in that simple movement he could not have mistaken who they were.

Calliope pulled the black hood off her head, warm curls tumbling down her shoulders as she regarded him with a measured expression. 

“I-” He lowered his head. “I apologise, my lady. I will leave you.”

Even in that small moment, he had resorted to the familiar, the way he used to speak to her. My lady had meant my love, my love had meant Calliope. 

“You will do no such thing.” Even after so long, her words made him freeze. He had no choice but to stop. 

The mother of his son stepped forward, a wraith in the light wind as the chiffon of her dress moved as if the goddess who wore it was underwater. 

“Is it not proper for the man we gather to mourn to be dead?” She asked with little humour in her voice, and it rang clear across the meters separating them.

A ghost of a smile echoed across his face, she did not smile back. “I find myself… equally as surprised as you are.”

Calliope tilted her head, the sinking sun behind her framing her face like a halo, and for a moment, she appeared like a saint etched on church walls, resembling paintings she surely inspired. “I am not surprised, Oneiros.”

She gathered her skirts as she stepped gingerly down the cracked marble stairs. 

“I am not surprised, but I am glad. To see you.” She was smiling properly, Morpheus noticed, and couldn’t help but feel slightly ashamed, though he didn’t know why.

That was a lie. He knew why plenty well. Because Calliope’s eyes were the same brown as their son’s. 

For a moment, the only sound was the wind, and the light falling of the creek. Then Morpheus spoke. 

“Calliope, I killed him.”

“I know.”

Morpheus turned away from her then, not because he hated to look at her, but because he didn’t want her to look at him. 

“Oneiros,” Calliope murmured. Morpheus froze as her hand brushed his cheek, cool in the evening air of the garden. “Please look at me.”

He never was good at saying no to her. Calliope smiled softly when their eyes met, her thumb brushed his temple. “I missed you,” she murmured. 

“As…did I.” Morpheus had missed her since the moment they parted. And then more so, when Orpheus’ eyes closed for the final time, and it was as if he could not remember the person who’d gave him them at all.

“As much as I could, I…” Calliope’s voice broke, and Morpheus pressed his hand over hers, even as her eyes fell and searched the cobblestone path at their feet.

“I…visited him. Spoke to him, even when he did not want to speak to me. That was most of the time.”

Calliope swallowed. 

“Yet, I always loved visiting him… because, in a way, I would see two people. My son… and the one who bore his face first.”

Her voice had grown thick and Morpheus swallowed, knowing that if he spoke, his own would sound the same. Calliope was looking straight at him now, not harshly, but with soft, round eyes that had remained that way through centuries of pain.

“I thought… that you would hate me.” What he meant to say was that she should hate him. Why didn’t she hate him? Now, she stood here, in their garden, a goddess weathering so many ages and lives. And he stood as a ghost, a memory, a shell of a monstrous creature that belonged to a monstrous past.

His hand fell from where it lay over hers. “How could I hate the one who was half of Orpheus?” Calliope implored in a hushed voice, thumb brushing his cheek in a featherlight touch. It was unfairly gentle.

“Calliope,” Morpheus’ mouth was full of sand, voice heavy. “I’m sorry… for our son. For what I did to him. And didn’t do. For his life and for his death.” His voice broke on the word death, remembering the many deaths his son endured. And the final one, the one which brought him peace far too late. Morpheus would always regret that. 

“I am not.” 

Morpheus looked up. Calliope’s gaze was as steadfast as the hand she kept on his face.

“He burned bright and he burned fast. I was mourning him the moment he was born, but I loved him all the same.” She said firmly, and her voice was a transcript etched into stone.

Morpheus was not so steady. “As did I,” he whispered, the slow breeze of the wind carrying the words. 

Calliope’s hand fell slowly from his face, and she turned her head to the trees in the distance, the ones Orpheus used to climb. “That’s all we can really do, I suppose.”

Morpheus followed her gaze, eyes landing on the lowest branch, the first one their son had learned to climb. “I suppose,” he murmured.

Calliope turned back, pulling her black hood back over her head. As the wind caught her dress, Morpheus saw a sliver of her white chiton, her favourite one, and smiled a little at that. 

“I will do what is proper now, and join the mourners,” she said gently. As she turned past him, she paused.

“Rest easy, now,” she said. 

Morpheus turned, he didn’t understand what she meant. He often didn’t. But she kept walking down that cobblestone path, soon to disappear into a birch grove now bathed in dusk light.

“Calliope?”

She stopped, and he’d seen her leave so many times before. “Yes?”

It was difficult to speak louder when his voice was clouded with something that might have been regret. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, built up over so many lives. “What is it you meant, when you told me you were not surprised to see me alive?”

Calliope tilted her head back to him, and he caught a curl falling from her hood. “I merely meant that it is not all that unusual for one to return in some way or another. I have inspired many stories which ended like that.” She made a small sound, curious and wondering. “You were stories. I would have thought you knew.”

Morpheus’ voice was soft. “No. I didn’t.”

Calliope hummed, still static as if she wanted to ask him something more. But she didn’t, and kept walking. 

“Fare you well, Oneiros,” she called from down the path. Soon, she disappeared down the winding paths, her form meeting the trees and tall grasses until he could see no more of her.

“Fare you well,” he called, though it was far softer. He doubted she heard him.

—-----------

Morpheus sat in that garden for far too long. On those crumbled steps, on that crumbled bridge. 

Exhaustion had crept into his bones, and they ached like pillars holding up a temple of a forgotten god. It was a memory, to be there. To sit at the steps his old love had stood on, to sit at the steps his son had loved to play on. It was a memory, once painful, now less so. 

Evening had enveloped the garden; the sun sank so much quicker in the Dreaming, and so uneven in comparison to the mortal plane. Now, beetles chittered in the grasses, fireflies flittered amongst the trees. They were going extinct in the mortal world. Soon, they would only exist in dreams.

When she came, it was not a surprise. Nor was it expected. She came as she always did, out of complete inevitability. 

“Hey, little brother.” Death called from behind him, a poor attempt at a light voice. But he still smiled at hearing her. “Care if I sit?”

“Of course not,” he answered, though it lacked any humour. She joined him, grunting as the steps were not entirely comfortable. For a moment, they sat there, a familiar routine. 

Morpheus even considered summoning some birds to feed, before realising he didn’t know how. It was a strange shock to the system, before, any action in the Dreaming had taken half a thought. He could feel the world’s heartbeat in the winds and tides of the sea, in the slow growth of blades of grass. Now, he felt… disconnected. 

It wasn’t entirely unpleasant. A lightness had overtaken his body, like that weight of his world had been lifted from his shoulders. It was, of course, Daniel Hall’s burden to bear now. 

Daniel was Dream. And Morpheus was…

“You’re wondering what you are.” 

Morpheus’ head shot up, before a slow smile crept over his face. Seeing Death properly now, it felt like an easy waking to see a gentle face. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you guessed right.”

“I’m your older sister, I know things before you do.” Death grinned back at him, but his face had fallen into a furrowed brow.

“Are you?” He asked, voice tight. “Are you still my sister?”

Death reached over and gripped his hand. “Well, technically, no.” She squeezed his fingers so hard his knuckles hurt, but it didn’t matter. “But I’ll never stop being your sister. Screw what the laws say.”

Morpheus swallowed a lump in his throat. Perhaps that was why he felt so disconnected. From everything. From his world. From his family.

Morpheus would have mourned that fact for longer before realising that no longer being an Endless meant no longer being related to Desire. 

It was the greatest realization he’d ever had. 

But even that satisfaction was short-lived. “All I’ve known,” he began, “Is being an Endless. I don’t… I don’t know what I am without my responsibilities.”

Death smiled sadly at him. Like she was worried about him, like she was proud of him, like she missed him. She wore that face a lot. “Well, maybe it’s time you find out. You’ve got eternity to do it.”

“Eternity to do what?” Morpheus asked helplessly. Because he really didn’t know. He was sick of not knowing. “What did you make me? Am I anything at all?”

“Brother,” Death clapped her hands on her knees. “I just took the part of you that was Endless. Whatever is left over is you, now.”

Whatever is left over. Morpheus didn’t know how much of him that was. He’d always made his body out of dreamstuff, of sand and stars and dust rather than flesh and blood. Even now, that’s what he felt. Even the heartbeat flickering inside his chest felt more like a starburst than muscle and sinew. And he was sure that if he cut himself open and pried apart the building blocks, he’d find nothing but dreams for blood. 

“I don’t know what I am, if I am just the left overs.” His voice was quiet and tremulous in a way that made him think he was about to cry. The next thing he knew was Death’s arm over his shoulders. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should be grateful, I am grateful, I just…”

“Hey,” Death said softly. “Don’t be sorry. I know what you mean.” Her head rested on his shoulder and he felt her sigh shakily against him. “Taking you was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Even if it’s what I was made for. Even if it was just part of you. It still hurts.”

“I know. It hurts for me, too.”

They were silent for a long time, then. But it wasn’t so bad. They sat in silence so often, it had become a language of its own. 

“I think…” Morpheus thought a lot of things. What he knew was entirely different. “I think I am a dream, my sister.”  He lifted his gaze from the weeds poking through the marble to Death’s face. “Though I do not know what of.”

Death took his hands in hers again. “Like I said, little brother. You have eternity to find out.”

Then she stood, and he rose with her. The air seemed warmer now, not oppressive but simply comforting. 

“I have to go, now. I have souls to collect. And a speech to make.” There was that sad smile again. 

“Good luck with your life, little brother. Morpheus.” 

Death said the name like she wasn’t quite used to it, but she would be, given time. 

She made a move to leave, before pausing, like she’d forgotten something. Morpheus was about to ask what was wrong, before she pulled him into a bone crushing hug that surely would have broken his ribs if he had a physical body. 

“You have a heartbeat.” She chuckled against his shoulder. “I’ve never hugged you and felt a heartbeat.” 

He pulled away from her gently, but she kept him in place, gripping his arms as she studied him. 

“You look tired, brother.”

She said it like she’d expected it all to go. But the exhaustion that had gripped him wasn’t simply his Endless aspect. It was his entire existence. 

But at least now, he had eternity to rest. 

—-----------

The walk back to the castle felt entirely different from any walk before. 

Like he’d been walking for hours with his shoulders pulled down by bricks, and he’d just passed them to someone else. Of course, it was an entirely new feeling to not feel the hum of the Dreaming around him directly, but it was freeing, too. 

For the first time in a long time, he felt free. 

The bridge was lit up for the night, high and arching as golden globes, standing from the arching stone rails, shone like stars into the late evening sky. 

Illuminated by two of those globes as he stood between them, was a lone figure. Hunched over the railing as if he was enraptured by the water beneath the bride, as if it was the only thing keeping him up. 

Hob didn’t move as Morpheus approached. Strange, given that his steps were not quiet against the stone, he’d made no effort to be silent. 

 Though Morpheus wasn’t sure if he was ready to speak to his friend yet, it would be better to get it over with, he supposed. Especially since he seemed to be doing some form of death tour. 

But Hob just stood there, hands gripping the railing as his dark eyes burned into the water below them. 

Morpheus stopped, and finally, Hob jumped. 

And stood there. Frozen. Mouth agape and eyes wide. 

“Am I truly so hideous?” Morpheus asked, unable to help the slow smile creeping across his face at the sight of Hob so bewildered. His first time seeing his friend after his death, and it was incredibly amusing.

Some choked form of a word finally worked its way out of Hob’s mouth. “Dream?”

Of course. Any creature made of the Dreaming could feel the change, any immortal could. But not Hob. Not an immortal mortal, he was still a human, with dulled senses to anything not on the mortal plane. “No. I am not Dream. The man in the hall, who I trust you’ve met, is Dream,” Morpheus explained gently, knowing it was likely not to catch on. 

And it didn’t. “No - you told me your name was Dream,” Hob insisted, so sure of himself. It was equal parts hilarious and a deeply uncomfortable reminder. Though Morpheus supposed he’d have to get used to it. 

Still, the humour was gone from his voice as he said, “And now it is not. For there is a new Dream.”

“They said you were dead!”

Morpheus winced, at Hob’s anger and betrayal, the man walked a fine line between furious, hurt and relieved. He clenched his jaw, nearly about to scold Hob for speaking to him like that, a poor mask for his regret. But Morpheus only sighed, and regained the gentle levity he’d had before. To yell at Hob would be the opposite of what he wanted to achieve. 

So Morpheus set that small smile upon his lips again. “My death was far more temporary than you’ve been led to believe,” he spoke softly. 

Hob shook his head, and backed away to the railing, running a hand through his hair. 

“You told me that there was a possibility you’d die. And you did, I thought…”

Morpheus did not move to join him. “I thought so, too. But… as you can see…” He huffed a breath and held a hand in front of him, turning it over as he examined the skin and form he’d worn for eons. “I am still here.”

Hob scoffed a slightly disbelieving laugh, grinning slightly like he couldn’t believe his eyes. 

“I’m sure it makes for a good story.”

Morpheus frowned. Everything he’d ever done had been a story. It wasn’t as poetic as one would imagine. The pain came first. Only after, the words twisted it to make it beautiful. 

“Not as good as you’d imagine,” he murmured, turning to cast his eyes over the railing. 

Whatever change in his demeanor, from warm to offput, Hob did not detect. Instead, he’d regained his usual composure, turning from disbelief to excitement that was sure to exhaust Morpheus. 

“Still…maybe you’d tell me it? In the inn?” Hob asked hopefully, even as Morpheus scowled. 

“Perhaps,” he gritted out. Which meant, never happening. Not without serious amounts of wine. “In a hundred years, of course.” 

Morpheus smiled at him then, by way of goodbye, as the conversation had gotten long and he longed to leave now, to return home, painful as it was. 

He nodded to Hob, who stood frozen again, and began making his way across the bridge.

“Wait!”

Morpheus froze, and sighed. He never liked being the one called back, being the one not in charge of a conversation. Again, he reminded himself that he was not the Endless he once was. It was not his place to scold subjects. 

So Morpheus made sure his voice took on a gentler tone. “Yes?”

Hob stood there like a hurt puppy, arms down at his sides and leaning slightly forward like he expected to hear a secret. “You didn’t say what your name is, now,” he said plaintively. 

Morpheus’ lip tugged up, smiling that smile he knew said that he knew something others didn’t. Because, more often than not, he did. 

“Oh… perhaps you’ll have to wait to find that out, too.”

So he left, and Hob awoke, and Morpheus continued his walk back up to his castle, his home, and the place of the person he was most afraid of seeing again. 

—-----------

The wake was nearing its end when Morpheus arrived. 

Only a handful of the congregation remained. He didn’t look at them; they didn’t see him. Instead, Morpheus soundlessly stepped onto the stage before the lectern, looking out at the rows of seats arranged like a place of worship. 

A body lay there. On a stone altar, a slab like a table. Morpheus couldn’t see it, a black shroud draped over a shape that might have been an impression of his own form. He wondered, if he peeled back the fabric down to the neck, would he see himself?

Even as morbid curiosity snagged him, Morpheus didn’t want to know. 

“Morpheus?” 

As everyone else had petered out of the hall, Lucienne stood at the base of the stage, staring up at him. 

Wide-eyed and shocked frozen. She didn’t move, and neither did he.

After a beat, he started forward, a marionette on stilted and stiff legs. 

“Lucienne, forgive me-”

But Morpheus froze in her hurried embrace. She was warmer than he remembered, warm even through the layers of her coat. When he took her hands, they were warm and soft and so alive, so hopelessly alive and it reminded him he was, too. 

“There is nothing to forgive.” Lucienne’s voice was hushed, broken as she gripped his arm and brushed a wayward strand of hair, though it made no difference. The eyes she gazed at him with were full of tears she’d never shed, though one trickled down his own cheek and he made no move to brush it away. 

They had stood like this so many times before; when she’d first found him after his escape from Fawny Rig, when she’d found him bloody from losing Orpheus. A clinging embrace born from desperation, reaching across time and space for some hold of stability. 

Except now, it was in an empty funeral hall, empty save for the two of them, and the corpse still shrouded in black silk on the altar stone. 

Lucienne held him again. “I didn’t think you would return,” she murmured into his shoulder. “My lord, I didn’t know, I didn’t think-” 

“Lucienne,” Morpheus said, firmly and without room for question. She pulled away from him but he held on to her hand, gripping it to his chest. “You could not have known. Not when I did not.”

Lucienne’s lip trembled; he so rarely saw her like this. So often she fought to maintain a calm exterior, even in the face of the worst of circumstances. Here, now, she had dropped that.

Morpheus offered her a smile, a small and equally fragile one, as some form of comfort. “And you needn’t call me lord any longer.”

A shaky breath pulled itself from Lucienne’s chest, and she pushed away from him now. Not angrily, just… he didn’t know what to call the emotion on her face. 

“You’re alive,” she whispered, disbelief tinging her words. “You’re here, and you’re alive…”

“I am,” Morpheus murmured, closing the gap between them. “Though I don’t believe it either.”

Though Lucienne stepped further away now, careful not to reach the end of the stage. He didn’t reach out, now still at the sight of her avoiding him.

“Don’t lie to me, my lord. This is the dream world. Nothing is real here.”

“Lucienne,” his voice broke, and the words spilled out of him like dialogue already etched in Destiny’s book. “I am here. I am alive, as you are alive, as the dreams are alive. I am here.”

Slowly, skeptically, Lucienne stepped forward, as if investigating. “I am here.” Morpheus repeated softly. 

“Are you real? Or a ghost?” Lucienne asked, voice softer now. 

“I do not know anything but that I am alive.” 

Lucienne wiped her eye with a sleeve, sniffing quietly. Then she hugged him, tighter than before, so tight his ribs almost broke. 

He didn’t mind it, even as every inch of him ached. It was better than feeling numb. 

“Lucienne, listen to me.” 

Morpheus stepped only inches away from Lucienne’s and pulled her hand to the center of his chest again. Her eyes widened. 

“A heartbeat,” he whispered. “Irregular and quiet as it may be. It beats anyway.”

For the first time, Lucienne breathed a strange, soft laugh. “It feels like a bird, fluttering in your chest.”

That wasn’t his first thought, admittedly. More like a bird beating itself against the bars of his ribcage. It was an odd feeling, but less so when Lucienne liked it. He wasn’t used to having a heart, but at least she was.

For a while they just stood there, waiting as his heart settled into some form of a steady rhythm.

“You owe me,” he told her after what could have been hours. 

Lucienne’s eyes flicked up over her glasses. “What?”

“You told me that there would always be a cup of tea and a book waiting for me. I intend to hold you to that.” His tone was entirely serious, quiet and forceful among the echoing walls. 

Lucienne was not so careful. For the first time, she laughed a genuine laugh, fueled only by joy. “Oh, I’m sure you will.” 

And so she led him to the library, those towering mahogany bookshelves that smelled of fresh paper, and the reading nooks they’d spent stolen hours in, sitting across from one another reading the latest stories conjured up from dreams. 

Morpheus realised they had eternity to talk about what had happened. To reorganise the Dreaming, prepare Daniel Hall. For now, he wanted to rest. And read a book, and drink tea. 

And he did hold her to her promise. There, against a window as night finally fell, they tucked themselves in a nook with felt cushioned chairs and a scratched wood table between them. 

“What flavour would you like?” Lucienne asked as she rummaged through her desk drawers, pulling out several tins of tea leaves and unceremoniously thumping them on her desk. 

“I have…wait-” She pulled out a final, particularly beaten brown tin. “I appear to have all the teas that have ever been dreamed of, minus chamomile.” She gestured to an empty, pale green tin with flower embellishments.

Morpheus had cracked open a particularly heavy book and was already settled across from her against the window. “Would you recommend the peppermint?”

“I’d recommend them all. Excluding toothpaste, though that does have its days.” Lucienne looked at him, that twinkle in her eye that often replaced a laugh, but then she really did laugh. Again. And so did he. 

And Morpheus did hold her to her promise. There, against a window as night finally fell, they tucked themselves in a nook with felt cushioned chairs and a scratched wood table between them. 

It felt good to be like this. Their whole time together had been as King and Librarian. Now, with the ‘king’ part stripped away, they were simply friends. Though there was nothing simple about that. 

Lucienne wasn’t lying, the peppermint was very good, though the part of it burning his mouth was… strange. 

Though they read separate books, and sat in silence, it was not an uncomfortable time. After a while, Lucienne’s hand crept across the table, and Morpheus reached out to her, lacing their fingers together against the cool tabletop. It was a living memory, and it was entirely new. 

She was still so much warmer than him, and it served as a good reminder, in a way, that she was alive, and so was he. When he found himself uncertain, he would grip her hand tighter. 

Morpheus took to laying curled, leaning against the window with his temple to the cool glass. He hugged a quilt close, now realising that cold did very much affect him, but he didn’t mind it so much, when he learned what feeling warm was. 

Morpheus didn’t sleep in any way; he didn’t think he could. But he closed his eyes and freed his mind - his mind which now seemed so small and so lonely, now that it was only him inside it - of any thoughts as he grew entirely silent. 

Occasionally, Lucienne or Matthew would come, Lucienne doing her rounds, Matthew taking a break from whatever he did as a bird. Lucienne would always take a moment to pull the quilt higher on him, sometimes wake him and force him to eat food, even though dreamthings didn’t really need to eat. Matthew would tuck himself under Morpheus’ chin, to warm him or to be warm himself. 

Eventually, even though Morpheus was sure it would take him an eternity to leech that aching tiredness from him, he took to wandering the Library, occasionally assisting Lucienne or filling out census sheets. Helping in small ways, before he got the courage to leave finally breath air that didn’t weigh on his shoulders to create.

The residents of the Dreaming didn’t seem to mind, though. As well as Lucienne and Matthew, dreamthings like Merv and Taramis had come to see him, and other residents like Nuala, taken aback as she was. 

One day, though only a week had passed after his death, Morpheus had approached Lucienne, asking for more tasks, asking for responsibilities. Perhaps it was a craving born of habit. 

But he’d been growing listless, feeling useless, not because he didn’t find rest in doing nothing in particular, but because he didn’t know what exactly he was, with no purpose. 

Morpheus told Lucienne this, and she simply led him back to the nook, and handed him an old leather tome. “Your purpose is to read this book,” she said firmly, a command with no room for loopholes. 

“Stay here as long as you need, and let us take care of you. For once.”

With that, she had left, and Morpheus had taken his time reading that book, flitting between turning the pages, dwelling on certain phrases he’d found particularly wonderful, skipping the ones he didn’t like so much. He took his time making tea, trying all the flavours in Lucienne’s drawers, even toothpaste. 

If that was his existence, it wasn’t so bad to be alive, even as a dreamthing. It wasn’t so bad to be taken care of. 

Epilogue

Two months later

Lucienne stood hunched over her desk like a war general, leaning on her fists as she examined proposed floor plans for the throne room. “They are certainly… ambitious.”

Morpheus hummed in agreement, leaning over the desk next to her with his hands clasped behind his back. “Our new king… has many ideas.”

He was doing a poor job of appearing supportive, really, Daniel’s ideas weren’t bad at all, it was simply that they had very different design tastes. 

Matthew squawked from where he perched on the lampshade. “C’mon, Morph, he might be different to how you ran things, but entirely rose quartz? In the throne room? Really? You can’t seriously be agreeing to this.”

Morpheus shot the raven a look, though that hardly worked these days. “I would remind you that you’re talking about your king.” He scowled, though he didn’t really have the same intimidation tactics as he once did. 

Matthew didn’t seem to care for it, he was about to snap something back at Morpheus before Nuala interrupted, fiddling with her suspenders as she too peered over the floor plans, though they were upside down to her. “Am I the only one who thinks it looks nice?”

“Yes.” Matthew snapped.

“No!” Lucienne and Morpheus cried in unison.

Any further arguing (which there certainly would have been) was halted as Merv crashed into the gathering, holding a block of rose quartz, a bucket of paint, and several rolls of wallpaper underarm. “Alright Loosh, I got the samples you ordered me to order.” He did a double take as he saw Morpheus, then shook his head like he was ridding himself of a bad dream. “Still getting used to seeing you all… normal.”

Morpheus raised an eyebrow and held out his hand for the block of quartz. Turning it over to examine it, he said, “And I am still getting used to having to work with you.”

It was strange, having to cooperate with his creation when so often he could have just ordered him around. Now he had to ask politely. It was extremely annoying. 

Merv scoffed, much to everyone’s chagrin. “Wouldn’t wanna inconvenience you, Morph.” The pumpkin had taken extreme delight in calling Morpheus anything but boss, as had been the norm before. Morpheus did not care to repeat those nicknames. 

But Morpheus only tilted his head. He had to admit, it was fun making fun of people on equal terms. It put his pettiness to good use. “Everything you do is an inconvenience to me, Mervyn, so I wouldn’t worry.”

Nuala snorted from where she was swatching paint colours, though Lucienne was not so amused. “Did you come here for a reason, Mervyn, or was the reason just to annoy us?”

She asked pointedly, looking over her glasses and any gravitas that the pumpkin had previously possessed had leeched away. 

“I would like to remind you that not only am I the janitor of this here castle, but I am also the contractor,” Merv tried to sound sure of himself, but failed under the piercing stare of the Librarian. Morpheus had tried and failed to replicate it over the past two months. 

Lucienne seemed unimpressed, and Morpheus was sure he could literally see Mervyn shrinking. “And also,” Merv swallowed. “I have a message for him.” he turned back to Morpheus, probably glad not to see Lucienne’s glare face to face. 

“Some chick claiming to be your sister is here. She’s in Fiddler’s Green, and she really doesn’t wanna wait up.”

Morpheus was already leaving, gathering his coat as he disappeared in a swirl of sand, glad that he could still do that. He'd have to break that habit, someday, of disappearing without a word.

Death was sitting under a tree in the green, dressed in her usual black. Ever since becoming a dreamthing, she’d seemed… older, to him. More tired, but infinitely more powerful. He’d come to see her as an Endless, not just a sister.

“Hey,” she half-grinned as Morpheus sat down in the soft grass next to her. In the past two months, he’d come to appreciate environments, textures, temperatures so much more. The soft grass rather than hard roots, the gentle breeze rather than gale winds. Even the smell of pre-spring blossoms in the air. He took a deep breath. Death didn’t. 

“You are always welcome here,” Morpheus murmured, “But is there a reason you’ve come?”

Death laughed, her shoulder moving against his. “Can’t I visit my little brother for no reason other than to see him?”

Morpheus laughed too, softer, but he’d done much more laughing in the two months than he’d done in his entire life. “I suppose so.” But what he really thought was that her time was precious, she didn’t go to him unless she was worried, usually. But she didn’t have so much to worry about, not anymore. 

“I just wanted to check up on you. Seeing how you are, after… everything.”

Morpheus sighed, turning the question over in his head like a puzzle with fifty different answers. He chose the honest one.

“I am… comfortable. Somewhat without direction. Or purpose. But I am not lacking comfort. Or love.”

Death smiled, a knowing one. “That’s what I expected. Never thought you’d last not doing anything.”

Morpheus scoffed. “I’ll have you know that I am very proficient in the world of interior design. And bothering Librarians. And pumpkin-headed Janitors.” 

Death didn’t seem to think he was serious, because he wasn’t. He loved the Library, and the castle, and the Dreaming, but he felt like a ship with no anchor. Morpheus was… bored. 

“I have an offer.” There it was. 

“In what world would I say no to that?” Morpheus nudged her shoulder back. As much as rest had done him wonders, he was… lacking purpose. He missed wandering the worlds, he missed having a duty. Perhaps he just wanted one less soul crushing. “Alright then. Tell me.”

“It was something you said to me.” Death murmured, eyes uncharacteristically cast off in the distance. “Long ago. You said, even the dead must dream.”

Her voice was carried by the wind, distant even as she sat next to him. 

“I remember. It holds true.” Morpheus said softly, wondering where she was going with this.

“Yes, well. I find myself struggling,” Death admitted, and Morpheus was ashamed to find himself taken aback for once. Of course she struggled with things, she just so rarely admitted it. 

“The Sunless lands find it difficult to reach dreams. Or, vice versa. There are some there, who have not gone to any afterlife, so wander the lands for eternity. They are dreamless. They are… lost.”

Death trailed off, but Morpheus nodded. 

“And you would want me to… go to them? Appear in their dreams?”

It was a kind thought, freeing in a way to know he was helping those who did not dream. 

But so easily could the purpose of helping others turn into a responsibility so crushing you could not help anyone at all. 

“Yes,” Death admitted quietly, and again he found himself taken aback by her tone. 

“My sister, are you alright?” Morpheus asked, turning towards her. For once, he was the first to take her hand, to grip it as she looked uncertain. 

Death shook her head. “Sometimes… I feel like I failed them. I give them over to the afterlife and I can’t control what happens after.” She shook her head again, splaying her hands helplessly. 

“You never failed them,” Morpheus insisted, knowing the path she walked well. It was a path they all walked, wondering if they performed their functions as well as they could. 

“You could never.” Such simple words, though he meant to say so much more. 

Death pressed her lips together in a tight smile, shrugging off any uncertainty. “So, do you accept?” She asked, lighthearted as ever now. But Morpheus furrowed his brow. 

“I would help you, of course,” Morpheus answered. “But I… cannot repeat my previous responsibilities. Ever.”

Death nodded. “I would never tell you to do so. Which is why… I brought you help. From the Sunless lands.”

She stood slowly, and produced a small candle from her pocket, already alight. 

Morpheus stood too, and for once, he had no idea where she was going.

“What?” He asked incredulously. 

Death shrugged, smiling like she had a surprise. “After all, what's a dream without his raven?”

She swiped her hand over the candlestick, through the flame and it grew, flicking like feathers. Beating like wings, Morpheus realised. 

Because out of the fire emerged a bird. A raven, with black feathers and a sheet of white on her chest. A raven who he hadn’t seen since she was shot trying to save him. 

“Jessamy?” Morpheus whispered, reaching out to the bird as she perched on a willow bough. She looked the same as the day she died, healthy and clean of any blood or wounds. 

For a moment, Morpheus looked around to Death. But she was gone, disappeared into aether after saying her piece. He smiled, and turned back to Jessamy.

The little raven began to lower her head, she was never one for speaking. But Morpheus stopped her. “You do not bow to anyone here. Especially not to me,” his voice cracked, and he blinked away tears. “I missed you.”

Jessamy couldn’t smile, but if she could, he felt she would have. She perched on his shoulder, like she had done for hundreds of years. It wasn’t the time to discuss her death, to reminisce. It was time to head back to the castle, and drink tea. Never mind Matthew’s jealousy which was sure to come up. 

It was time to rest, before they began new journeys. 

So they did just that, for many days, before leaving each night for the Sunless lands, bidding the dead kind and soft dreams of their lives, or of new ones. Dreams were soft places to land, Morpheus ensured that. 

So Morpheus became the dream that the dead dreamed of, and he didn’t mind it one bit. So long as there were few of them, he and Jessamy walked the perpetual twilight plains of the Sunless lands for all eternity. 

Though every dawn, they’d return, and stay around for Morpheus to bother Lucienne, and for Jessamy to bother Matthew. 

It was a home that Morpheus longed to return to each day. It was not so bad to be taken care of. It was not so bad to be alive. 

It was a good dream, when the dead dreamed.

Notes:

FINAL CHAPTER LETS GOOOOOOOO

First things first I have to say once again I am so sorry for the late chapter release, combination of life and writers block I fear
That being said tysm!! to everyone who kudos'd or commented throughout this!! It was so helpful for motivation and just honestly writing it as a whole
I hope the angst and the wait was worth it for the very fluffy and cheesy final chapter, I have to be honest that epilogue opening scene was PURE self indulgence. Anyway. Can you tell that Lucienne and Morph make me absolutely insane. Honestly by the end of this their relationship is open for interpretation but I'm obsessed with Lucienne truly A Character of All Time.

And justice for my girl Jessamy!! She deserved to be brought back okay. I swear.

and once again TYSMMMMM to everyone who supported this!!! I hope yall liked the fic and the final chapter, ik this fic is over now but seriously ty and HAPPY READINGGG AHHH