Liz Parker

Fanfiction Writer and a Dreamer for lifetime. Occasional editor, mostly on https://www.tiktok.com/@liz19forever

[liz19forever]

→ Full Masterlist here

✨ Welcome to my Masterlist ✨

Here you’ll find all my stories — one-shots, series, and chaotic ideas that got out of hand. Updated regularly. Read at your own emotional risk 🖤

⚠️ Some works contain mature themes (+18), angst, emotional damage, and questionable life choices.

Your feedback genuinely means the world to me. Comments, reblogs, messages — I see them. I appreciate them. I hold onto them.

If you’d like to be added to the tag list, just tell me — I’d love to keep you in the loop whenever a new chapter is posted. 👀😉❤️

Thank you for being here. 💕😁

Last Update: 10/6/26

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RPF Fanfiction

– Tom Sturridge (Multi-Chapter Stories)

✦ Not Too Young—Just Old Enough for Me🔥

Tom / Reader

Status: Ongoing Rating: M | +18

Genre: Adult Romance ; Subgenres: Slow Burn, Age-Gap Romance, Erotic Romance, Domestic Drama, Psychological Tension, Celebrity Fiction, Reader-Insert Fiction Tags: mature female reader, older woman/younger man, female desire, mature female sexuality, divorced reader, controlling ex-husband, financial control, domestic tension, secret fanfic writing, emotional tension, sensual content, explicit sexual content, taboo-adjacent dynamics, perimenopause, hidden inner life, desire vs propriety, actor!Tom Sturridge, mother of his co-star, late-in-life longing, intimate character study

Summary: It is an adult slow-burn romance with eroticism, an inverted age gap, and strong psychological and domestic tension, centered on a 47-year-old divorced woman who maintains an impeccable life under the lingering financial control of her ex-husband while secretly writing erotic fanfiction about Tom Sturridge; when she discovers that Tom works with her son, private curiosity turns into narrative obsession, and what begins as a contained fixation—made of interviews, gestures, voice, hidden files, and lucid desire—ends up invading reality when he crosses the threshold of her home, forcing her to confront not only the difference between fantasy and physical presence, but also themes such as mature sexuality, female freedom, shame, power, intimacy, and the right to desire outside the roles expected of her.

→ Chapter 1

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

✦ Tales of a Fame Like This (Series) 🔥

Tom / Reader

Status: Ongoing Rating: M | +18

Genre: Dark romance · Psychological drama · Slow burn · Erotic tension · Moral conflict · Angst · Intimacy-focused · Character-driven

Summary: What began as late-night encounters—no promises, no explanations, no place in the daylight—starts to change. After a night charged with jealousy, desire, and a dangerous game of control, they are finally forced to admit something they have both been avoiding: what exists between them is no longer just sex or habit. It’s something deeper. But admitting it is only the beginning. Now that their connection can no longer live only in the shadows, a new challenge emerges—surviving the world around them. The attention, the rumors, the expectations, and the pressure that come with fame. Because loving each other in secret was easy. Learning to do it while the whole world is watching… will be the real test.

→ Chapter 1 (That girl is better than your dreams)

→ Chapter 2 (Boyfriend)

→ Chapter 3 (You know I got your heart unlocked.)

→ Chapter 4 (God Damn.)

→ Chapter 5 (A Little Bit Dangerous.)

→ Chapter 6 (I Know what you want)

→ Chapter 7 (The morning after / Good night from nowhere)

→ Chapter 8 (Berlín / Green eyes)

→ Chapter 9 (Jealousy/What you nerver told me)

✦ Old-Fashioned Love

Tom x Reader

Status: Ongoing Rating: R

Genre: Single parent stress · teenage conflict · emotional tension · slow-burn connection · airport meet-cute · old-fashioned romance vibes.

Summary: They met on a plane. Eight hours talking as if the world were never going to land. No numbers exchanged. No social media. No guarantees. Just one improbable sentence: “See you in fifteen days. At the airport.

→ Part 1

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

✦ The wreckage you leave behind 🔥

Tom / Reader

Status: Ongoing Rating: M | +18

Genre: Dark romance · Emotional drama · Psychological tension · Slow burn · Angst · Moral conflict · Intimacy-focused

Summary: What begins as a professional connection quietly crosses a line neither of them is willing to name. He knows exactly what he feels. You pretend you don’t. Between shared beds and shared sets, secrecy becomes a habit, control an illusion, and silence the most dangerous choice of all. This is not a love story about beginnings—it’s about damage, denial, and the slow unraveling of two people who keep choosing each other while pretending they don’t. Because some relationships aren’t a mistake. They’re a disaster—and walking away hurts more than staying.

→ Chapter 1

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

✦ Everyone loves to sin 🔥

Tom / Reader

Status: Completed Rating: M | +18

Genre: Forbidden romance · Psychological drama · Slow burn · Moral tension

Summary: Tom returns to London believing his life is on pause: a recent breakup, an unnamed emotional exhaustion, the feeling of surviving rather than living. Then there’s you. Young, reserved, impeccably well-behaved. Too proper for his world. Too contained not to awaken something dangerous. What begins as a silent attraction turns into something darker and deeper—marked by guilt, institutional control, an age gap, social judgment, and the question that haunts the entire story: What happens when the body says yes, but the world demands you say no?

→ Prologue

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

✦ Tales of a Night Like This (Series) 🔥

Tom / Reader

Status: Complete Rating: M | +18

Genre: Dark romance · Psychological drama · Slow burn · Erotic tension · Moral conflict · Angst · Intimacy-focused · Character-driven

Summary: You work. He appears. Always like this. No warnings. No agreements. No clean goodbyes. There’s no innocence here. No easy redemption either. Because some relationships don’t break. They turn into habits. Into relapses. Into choices you keep making even when you know exactly how they end. And still, you come back. Because the body remembers. The night doesn’t judge. There are bonds that can’t survive in daylight… but in the dark, they burn better.

→ Chapter 1 (Night Like This)

→ Chapter 2 (Silent Night)

→ Chapter 3 (Middle of the Night)

→ Chapter 4 (Bad Idea right?)

→ Chapter 5 (Somebody That I Used to Know)

→ Chapter 6 (Princesses don't Cry)

→ Chapter 7 (Lady, touch yourself)

→ Chapter 8 (Your Tongue Says What You Don’t)

→ Chapter 9 (I’ll show you what I’m made of)

→ Chapter 10 (So make a mess of me)

✦ An Absurd Apocalyptic Comedy

Tom x OFC (Emma)

Status: Complete Rating: R

Genre: Absurd comedy · Apocalyptic satire · Dark humor · Existential comedy · Chaos-driven · Character-centric

Summary: The world ends. No warning. No instructions. Emma and her best friend Karl decides to survive the apocalypse by finding her favorite actor: Tom Sturridge. Between sarcasm, chaos, and resurrections nobody asked for, Em, Karl, and Tom are forced to confront the biggest mystery in the universe: why do we keep searching for meaning when the world has already gone to hell? A chaotic story about love, memory, and laughing at the end of the world—because if everything’s ending, it should at least have a good script.

→ Prologue

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

– Sandman / Dream (Multi-Chapter Stories)

✦ Lectio Difficilior (ONE-SHOT)

Dream x Reader

Status: Completed Rating: Teen and up

Summary: You never meant to summon anything. It wasn't a ritual — it was a reading. A philological exercise. Something innocent that ended with the King of Dreams standing in a chalk circle in your living room, asking what you've done. Freeing him should be simple: reconstruct one missing word from a damaged folio. The problem is that you found it three days ago.

Warnings/Tags: accidental summoning, captivity, post-season 1, morally grey reader, dark academia, obsession, the reader is the dangerous one here, references to canon-typical sleeping sickness, mutual fascination, dark romance undertones, open ending.

→One Shot

✦ INHERITANCE

Dream / Reader (Johanna Constantine's Daughter)

Status: Ongoing Rating: M | +18

Summary: Your mother (Johanna Constantine) died without explaining anything. She left you a list of unfinished jobs, four words written on hospital paper, and a vibration in your bones you don't know how to name. Three weeks after the funeral, an exorcism goes wrong. That night you enter the Dreaming without meaning to — and discover you can't leave. The King of the place would prefer you didn't exist. The Dreaming itself, however, seems to have a different opinion. Johanna Constantine signed something before you could speak. A deal with clauses neither of you fully knew about. Seven nights to resolve it. An eternal being who operates with the calm of something that hasn't been told no in centuries. And the Constantine name, which never knew when to stay quiet. A story about inheriting something you didn't choose, in a place that recognizes you before you recognize it.

Warnings: Power imbalance, slow-burn tension, grief, dark relationship dynamics, eternal being × mortal reader. Enemies to lovers · dark · gothic · power imbalance · slow burn · reader insert

→ Prologue

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

✦ This Dream is not over

Dream / Reader

Status: Ongoing Rating: M | +18

Summary: A human dream refuses to end. When Dream is pulled into a nightmare that will not obey him—and then expelled from it—he discovers something that should not exist: a dreamer he cannot see, a dream that cannot be closed, and a presence that moves through the Dreaming without leaving marks. As time begins to run out, Dream is forced to search beyond his own realm, tracing the echoes of a human who knows how to cross where she should not—and who may be changing the nature of dreams themselves. Some dreams end. This one doesn’t.

⚠️This story is a Dream x Reader work featuring dark themes, psychological tension, power imbalance, and morally ambiguous dynamics. The Reader character is not idealized and is written with full agency, complexity, and darkness of her own. This is not a fix-it, not fluff, and not a soft portrayal of Dream. Romance, if and when it develops, is intended as slow-burn, unsettling, and mutual, not redemptive or comforting. Content warnings may include: psychological manipulation, surreal dream logic, loss of control, obsession, and emotionally intense situations. Please read responsibly. If these themes are not for you, this may not be the story you’re looking for.

→ Chapter 1

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

✦ A Christmas Night When Everyone Comes Back (Series)

Dream x Reader (Alternate Universe)

Status: Completed Rating: M | +18

Summary: On a Christmas Eve where everyone returns to a house that never learned how to be a home, Dream makes a mistake that isn’t technical, but human: he leaves a dream open that should have been closed, and in doing so, creates a bond with you—someone who cannot fully wake. Through that fracture, you both become suspended between waking and dreaming, forcing him to confront something he was never taught: how to stay without controlling, how to hold without absorbing. As his family’s fractures surface—jealousy, favoritism, emotional absence—and Desire exposes what has always been broken between them, your connection shifts from dependence into something chosen. The world doesn’t break, but it changes shape: what began as an error becomes the beginning of something neither of you yet knows how to live without losing yourselves.

→ Prologue

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

✦ Tales From The Waking Word (Series)

Dream x Reader

Status: Completed Rating: M | +18

Genre: Dark Fantasy / Gothic / Morpheus POV / Canon-Divergent/ Dreamlike horror · Psychological horror · Slow-burn

Summary: Narrated in the first person by Morpheus, this story follows the Dream King’s quiet obsession with an impossible anomaly: a woman who, since falling into a coma at seventeen, has never entered the Dreaming. For thirteen human years, he visits her in the waking world and tries—without success—to reach her, until he discovers that her absence is not emptiness but confinement: a fracture predating the accident has left her trapped at the threshold of a place where even the language of dreams begins to fail. As he investigates ancient records, echoes of her waking life, and the strange dissonance between her sleeping body and her failure to arrive in his realm, Morpheus comes to understand that the coma was not the beginning, but the visible consequence of something older and far more unsettling. Then, on the night of her thirtieth birthday, he learns they intend to disconnect her. Contemplation ends, and a race against time begins: he must cross a border that does not answer to his laws, confront the possibility of a consciousness trapped for years in a formless prison, and break the order that has defined him in an attempt to wake her before she vanishes forever.

→ Chapter 1 (She Who Never Dreamed)

→ Chapter 2 (The One Who Never Came)

→ Chapter 3 (The Boundary He Had Never Known)

→ Chapter 4 (What Should Not Exist)

→ Chapter 5 (The Room That Was no Longer a Sanctuary)

→ Chapter 6 (In Search of the Moment That Broke)

→ Chapter 7 (The Part of Her That Resists)

→ Chapter 8 (Against the Order)

→ Chapter 9 (Where She Has Been)

→ Chapter 10 (The One Who Did Not Know Me)

→ Chapter 11 (Before the Silence)

→ Chapter 12 (A Soul for a Kingdom)

✦ The dream that becomes reality

Nada/ Darian (Dream)

Status: Complete Rating: M | +18

This story includes an original character, canon-derived and created for this story. This fic explores a post-canon divergence and does not seek to replace or overwrite canon events.

Summary: In the plane that exists before all form, Night and Time contemplate the dissolution of their son’s body — Dream. He has died by his own choice, after renouncing his place in the cosmic order. Then Night proposes the unthinkable: to let him return, not as an Endless, but as a man. Not to restore his power, but to grant him, for the first time, freedom.

→ Chapter 1

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

✦ The Gift

Dream / Nuala

Status: Completed Rating: M | +18

Canon-Divergent AUSummary: A gift. A cage. A choice. When Titania sends Nuala to the Dreaming as a gift, she expects obedience. But stripped of her glamour, Nuala begins to discover something forbidden: her own Voice. Morpheus saw only a burden. But in the Dreaming, even silence can change a god.

→ Chapter 1

Each chapter includes a link to the next chapter for easy navigation.

Thank you for reading, reblogging, and screaming quietly in my inbox 🖤 Your comments keep these stories alive. This masterlist is a living thing. Like me.

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

INHERITANCE (+18) Chapter 17

⚠️ Disclaimer: This work is a transformative fanfiction inspired by The Sandman. All canon characters, settings, and related rights belong to their respective creators and rights holders. I do not claim ownership over them. ⚠️ Content Warnings: Terminal illness, hospital setting, death of a parent, grief, secrecy, magical bargains, coercive supernatural contracts, emotional isolation, inherited danger, psychological manipulation, surreal dream logic, loss of control, obsession, and emotionally intense themes. ⚠️ Audience Notice: This work is intended for readers 18 and older. Reader discretion is advised. ⚠️ Story Note: This is a Dream x Reader alternate universe story in which the Reader is Johanna Constantine’s daughter.

Previous Chapter Masterlist

Chapter 17: Seventh Night: Final Gravity

Tonight Morpheus shows you the terrace.

He had not mentioned it before — not on any of the six formal nights, not on any of the nights before the agreement, not on any of the walks through the Realm that constituted the geography of these weeks. It was there. The Realm has spaces that have always been there regardless of whether anyone visited them or mentioned them or chose them as a destination. The terrace was there. Morpheus chose not to show it until tonight.

You register it. You do not mention it.

Because the choice to show it now — this night specifically, the seventh, the last — says something that does not need to be pointed out in order to exist. Both of you know it. Pointing it out would add nothing except the discomfort of having turned into a declaration something that works better as fact.

The terrace has the quality of something that exists on the edge between the sky and the space where the sky stops being only sky and becomes something else — the place where Dream is most completely itself, where the layers that make it habitable for the things that need to inhabit it thin until they almost disappear. From here, the sky of Dream does not have a single quality but all of them at once — winter night and summer dawn and autumn daybreak and all the hours in between superimposed with the transparency of something that did not choose which one to be and decided to be all of them simultaneously.

Hence the name.

You stay at the end of the terrace farthest from where he stands. Not out of hostility — that no longer exists as an available structure, you no longer have the materials to build it, even if you wanted to. But because of the acute awareness of what is about to happen. Because of the specific weight of this night, which exists before anything has been said yet, which settled with the first moment in the Realm and will remain settled until Dream releases you back.

Morpheus at the other end. Both of you beneath the sky of all simultaneous nights.

You talk about unimportant things for a while.

Not because you have decided to — there is no conscious decision to postpone what this night has to bring. But because it is what two people do when they have reached the last available moment and need to inhabit it before it ends. To speak of the trivial with the attention of someone who knows the trivial is not the point — that the point exists and is waiting and will arrive — but that every minute before it arrives has its own specific weight and deserves to be inhabited as what it is.

Tonight, neither of you has any defenses available.

You register that too — that you have spent weeks learning the difference between the layers Morpheus keeps over what he shows and the layers you keep over what you feel, and that tonight the layers cost too much for the time that remains. The cost of maintaining them exceeds what they offer. So neither of you maintains them. And what remains when the layers are not there has a quality of honesty that none of the previous nights had — not because the previous nights were dishonest, but because this is the honesty that comes when there are no more comfortable options left.

The conversation drifts.

It drifts toward a point where Morpheus says something you hear with the attention of someone who has already learned that the things Morpheus says without having planned them are the ones that carry the most weight.

“The Realm is different with your presence.”

He says it while looking at the sky of all simultaneous nights. He does not look at you when he says it — he says it toward the sky, with the quality of something offered to a space more than to a specific person, as if the space could receive it with more equanimity than you could.

“It should not be.” Pause. “I do not understand why it is.”

The silence that follows has the texture of something that has just been said and cannot now have not been said. Morpheus does not say things without authorizing them — this came out before authorization, or authorization arrived exactly on time, but without the usual margin of control, without the distance that normally exists between what he thinks and what he says.

“Does it bother you?”

The question comes out with the same naturalness — without the filter that, on other nights, would have held it back until it had verified whether asking it was useful, until it had established what information the answer might offer and whether that information was worth the risk of asking.

Tonight, the filter is not working in either of you.

Morpheus takes a moment.

“Before, yes.”

Two words. The before that contains everything — that implies a now different from before, that establishes something changed without specifying what changed or when or how, that leaves in the space between the two words exactly the right amount of ambiguity for each of the two people on this terrace to fill that space with what they know and what they intuit and what they still do not know with certainty but can no longer pretend does not exist.

You file it away with the care reserved for definitive things. Morpheus explains the options.

He does it as he does everything — without softening, without the elaboration that would make the information easier to receive at the cost of making it less exact. With the honesty of someone who considers complete information the only available form of respect for someone who has to make a decision.

Dissolve: the bond breaks. The dissolution process will take days to complete across all the layers where the bond exists, not only on the level of the document but on the level of the fabric of Dream, where the thirteen formal nights were recorded. The Realm’s memory will blur — not all at once, gradually, at the speed with which dreams that are not given attention come apart. Eventually what remains is the impression that there was something, the quality of a place you recognize without remembering exactly where you knew it. And you will be free of what Johanna gave you without asking you.

Seal: access to the Realm becomes permanent. Not the coercive access of the first nights — not the pull of the active bond, not the impossibility of leaving halfway through the night. But the permanent permeability of someone who can enter when she wants and leave when she wants and carries that forever. With everything that implies: visibility on the planes where the seal of the King of Dreams is legible, the reality of being mortal before something eternal, the specific complexity of what exists between you existing without a time limit while you do have a time limit.

You listen to all of it. With the attention of someone who knows this information matters in a way that exceeds the decision she is going to make tonight — that it matters for understanding what this time was, for understanding what Johanna’s bargain truly was, for understanding the full dimension of what dissolves or what is sealed.

When he finishes, there is a silence.

“If I dissolve the bond,” you say finally. “What happens to you?”

Morpheus does not answer immediately. In that instant there is something you perceive with the specific clarity of someone who has spent thirteen nights learning to read the intervals between what he says and what he does not say — the quality of something evaluating not the answer, but whether the complete answer is the one this question requires in this moment.

“Nothing. I am eternal. I was here before. I will continue to be.”

“That is not what I asked.”

The silence that follows is the longest of all thirteen nights.

Longer than the silence after “it was for me too, hearing it.” Longer than the silence after “and what do you want?” in the archive. Longer than any silence you have measured in the inventory of all Morpheus’s silences, which you have been building for weeks with the attention of someone who knows the things that matter live in them.

“No,” he says finally. The voice has its usual economy, but beneath the economy there is something it did not have before. “I suppose it is not.”

He does not answer the question.

But you have spent thirteen nights learning that, in his particular language, not answering a question that could be answered with nothing or with the same as always is admitting that the answer exists and that the answer is not nothing and that the answer is not the same as always.

Not answering it is the answer. There is a moment before you say what you are going to say.

Not of doubt — the Constantines do not doubt in this way, not with the back-and-forth of someone who has not yet made the decision. But of recognition. Of the moment when the brain verifies that it has reached the point where the decision is already made and what comes next is only saying it.

The decision was made at some point during these thirteen nights — you cannot point to exactly when, there is no moment you can identify as the moment it happened. It was the accumulation. The garden of memories and Johanna afraid and fierce and choosing. The childhood dream preserved in the archive for reasons that were not administrative. Identical to her, said without compliment or criticism. The sky that changed color with your emotions on the fifth night. Morpheus’s face in the second before he controlled it when he returned to the distorted space.

The decision did not happen tonight. Tonight it is only said.

“I dissolve the bond.”

Directly. Without ornament. Without drama. With the same voice with which you said I accept in the room with the two chairs and the table — the flat voice of someone saying something inevitable, something that already existed and only needed to be named.

But this time there is something beneath the voice that was not there the first time you accepted. Something you do not name — that you do not yet have the correct category to name, or that you do have the category but naming it tonight with this decision upon it would carry a weight the moment cannot yet bear.

Morpheus reads it anyway.

On the scale on which he reads everything, in that compressed scale where minimal movements say what would be declarations in others, he reads it. Something in his expression makes the minimal movement you have learned to register — that variation of a fraction that does not become any recognizable emotion but is, unequivocally, real.

Then you say: “But for the record, I still do not forgive Johanna completely.”

“That is reasonable.”

“And this does not mean I am going to stop contradicting you.”

Something in his expression makes another movement — even smaller, the size of something that, under normal conditions, would not have reached the surface but tonight, with the layers gone, does.

“That is reasonable too.”

“And I do not know what this is.”

Morpheus looks at you.

For the first time in thirteen nights — for the first time in all the time you have spent learning to read the compressed scale in which his states are visible, fighting with the neutrality that is always decision and never natural state, deciphering the millimeters that equal much more on any other scale — his expression has no layers.

It is only what it is.

Not administered neutrality. Not calm existing over something moving beneath. Only what is there — without the usual distance between what exists and what is shown, without the interval of control that normally mediates between the two.

You see it for the second it lasts before it returns.

“Neither do I.” A pause that has the density of everything the thirteen nights accumulated. “But I am eternal. I have time to discover it.”

“I do not.”

And there — in the two simplest words you have spoken in thirteen nights, in the most obvious fact of all the available facts about the difference between what you are and what he is — there, something happens in his voice that had not happened before.

“I know.”

There is something in his voice that, in any other man, would be called fear.

Not the fear of someone facing something that could hurt him. The specific fear of someone who fully understands an asymmetry that cannot be resolved — that you have a limit and he does not, that what exists between you has a horizon for you that does not exist for him, that time, which for you is finite, is for him the permanent condition of everything he is.

That he knows what that means, and knows it not as technical data but as something that reaches the layer that is not shown and that tonight, without the usual layers of protection, reaches the surface too.

“I know.”

The dissolution happens.

Morpheus executes it with the conviction of someone who knows exactly how the mechanism works — he drafted it, he knows the language of the contract better than anyone because it is his language as much as it is the language of the archive. He knows every clause, every term, the complete process of how a bond established in the fabric of Dream comes apart when both parties are present and conscious and the decision is clear.

There is no drama.

That too is consistent with what this time was — that the most important things that happened within it had no visible dramaturgy, that they happened in the layer where the things that matter happen, that they are legible only if you know where to look and with what attention. The dissolution has no light, no sound, none of the manifestations that stories use to signal that something irrevocable has just occurred.

Only the fact that it did.

With the same discretion with which things happen when they have already been happening for a long time and only needed to be recognized in order to complete themselves.

Not the debt. Dream releases you.

With the usual abruptness of that transition — the weight of the Realm yielding all at once to the lighter weight of the world that has gravity and clocks and Johanna’s floor and the bedside table with the notebook of conditions on top. The body mismanaging the difference between the two densities, needing a second to establish that the floor it is on is the correct floor.

The darkness of the room. London outside, with its sounds from when the night has not yet decided whether it is going to remain night.

The hands.

You look at them — the gesture already so automatic that it happens before your eyes are fully open. There is no black earth this time. The bond dissolved. The channel closed. The dreams of the Realm will no longer leave evidence under the nails of a body that no longer has access.

Only the hands. Clean.

Somewhere between the weight of the Realm that has not yet fully come apart and the weight of the waking world that has not yet fully settled — in that interval where you are on both sides simultaneously before being completely in one — the last thing you carry from Dream tonight:

“I know.”

Said with something that, in any other man, would be called fear. You stay in the darkness of the room with that.

With the terrace of all simultaneous nights still present somewhere between memory and chest. With the sky that contained all hours at once. With his expression without layers during the second it lasted before it returned.

With the dissolution that happened and that neither of you knows yet was not enough.

With all of that. You wait for dawn.

Previous Chapter

[liz19forever]

INHERITANCE (+18) Chapter 16

⚠️ Disclaimer: This work is a transformative fanfiction inspired by The Sandman. All canon characters, settings, and related rights belong to their respective creators and rights holders. I do not claim ownership over them. ⚠️ Content Warnings: Terminal illness, hospital setting, death of a parent, grief, secrecy, magical bargains, coercive supernatural contracts, emotional isolation, inherited danger, psychological manipulation, surreal dream logic, loss of control, obsession, and emotionally intense themes. ⚠️ Audience Notice: This work is intended for readers 18 and older. Reader discretion is advised. ⚠️ Story Note: This is a Dream x Reader alternate universe story in which the Reader is Johanna Constantine’s daughter.

Previous Chapter Masterlist Next Chapter

Chapter 16: Sixth Night: What Is Not Said

The space Morpheus chooses tonight has no ceiling. Not in the sense of the open space of the fourth night — that had the declared vastness of something that exists without limit because the sky of Dream stretches in every direction without anything containing it. This is different. It has walls — or something that functions as walls, surfaces that define the space without fully enclosing it, that exist on the edge between containing and letting go. What is missing is not exactly the ceiling, but the decision to have one. As if the space had been built — or simply existed, which in the Realm can be the same thing — with the intention of remaining open at that specific point. Not out of neglect. By choice.

A space on the edge between what Dream is and what it could still become. You file it away — that Morpheus chose this place, that he did not show it to you on any of the previous nights, that showing it tonight says something. You have spent enough nights learning that the spaces he chooses say things the words he uses do not always say. This one says: there are still things that have not been finished. That exist in that intermediate state between what has already happened and what could still happen.

There is one night left after this.

You both know it. Neither of you says it. But it is in the air of the space — in the specific texture of this night, in the way the Realm seems smaller than it did at the beginning of the seven nights, in the way the distance between two things that were never declared no longer has the extension it had during the first nights. Not because of comfort. Because of the accumulation of twelve nights — the six before the agreement and these six formal ones — that turned the space between you into something smaller, even if no one had deliberately measured it.

You talk about unimportant things with the intensity of people who know every minute counts.

You register that too — the paradox of the night, that the trivial occupies the space with the full attention of something that is not trivial. Morpheus says something about the functioning of the Realm — not the archive, not the garden, none of the loaded spaces of the previous nights. Something specific and minor, an observation about a creature from the margins that behaved unusually during the Realm’s day, something that on any other night you would have filed away as technical data without more weight than necessary.

Tonight you receive it with the attention you would give to something important. He offers it with that same attention. As if both of you had reached the same conclusion without saying it to one another — that tonight the point is not in what is being said but in the fact of saying it. That conversation is the form taken by the awareness that there is one more night left.

You answer with something equally minor. An observation about the space — about the specific quality of these walls that are not quite walls, about the way the open edge of the ceiling has a different texture from the open sky of the fourth night.

Morpheus listens with the full attention of someone who knows that what is being said is not what is being heard.

The nightmare escapes its container at the quietest point of the night. Not with warning — the nightmares of the Realm do not have the mechanics of problems that announce their arrival, that give time to prepare, that produce legible signs before producing consequences. It simply happens: the space where the two of you are takes on a different quality, a minimal distortion in the way the surfaces exist, as if the space were being viewed from a slightly wrong angle and that incorrect angle produced the impression that the rules that normally govern the place had stopped applying.

It is not dangerous. You establish that immediately with the speed of someone who has learned to distinguish between what is a real threat and what is discomfort — the difference has its own protocol, its own texture, and this has the texture of the second. Not danger. But yes, something not functioning as it should.

Morpheus perceives it at the same moment you do.

What happens next is fast — not dramatic, not with the spectacle that stories attach to moments when something powerful faces something out of place. Morpheus simply acts with the efficiency of something that knows exactly what to do because it is what he does, because the Realm is his in the way lungs belong to the one who breathes, and managing what happens within it is not a conscious act but a natural extension of what he is.

He tells you — with the economy of instructions given when time matters:

“Stay here.”

And he leaves. You are alone in the distorted space. The distortion is not static — it moves, with the slowness of something that is not in a hurry because it has no awareness of being in a hurry, that exists in the state in which it exists without evaluating whether that state is correct. The open edge of the ceiling has a different quality now — not the intentional openness that defined it at the beginning of the night, but something closer to an inconsistency, to an edge that does not know exactly what it is edging.

You do not move.

Not out of obedience — obedience is not the engine of any of your decisions during these nights and it is not going to become one on the sixth. But because the quick evaluation you produce in the first seconds after Morpheus leaves establishes that staying is the option with the fewest uncontrolled variables, that the distorted space with a known location is more manageable than the distorted space with an unknown one, that moving when the space is not functioning correctly creates more problems than it solves.

You stay.

In the space of staying — in the interval between Morpheus leaving and Morpheus returning, in that parenthesis where you are alone in a place that is not functioning as it should — there is a moment.

Brief. Specific. With the quality of moments that produce clarity not because the moment is large but because pressure reduces the space available for ambiguity. In that moment you notice something about yourself that you had not yet examined with that level of sharpness.

You do not examine it now — the moment does not allow time for a full examination, and a full examination requires more room than the distortion leaves available. But you notice it. You notice it with the specific clarity of things the body communicates when the body has no choice but to communicate them, when the situation removes the layers of mediation that normally exist between what you feel and what you know you feel.

What exists in that moment is not exactly fear. But it has the same physiology, and the physiology points in a direction that is not the distorted space.

Morpheus returns.

He is there with the same mechanics as always — the space deciding to contain him again, the transition without prior steps, the presence settling with the naturalness of what belongs to a place. He assesses the space with the efficiency of someone who knows exactly what to look for — the distortion dissolving with the same speed with which it appeared, the open edge of the ceiling recovering its intentional quality, the surfaces returning to the state in which the space exists in its correct form.

He finds everything in order.

In the moment before he assesses the space — the moment when he arrives and has not yet begun the assessment — you see his face.

A fraction of a second. Less. The time it takes to move from arriving to assessing, the instant of transition that normally has no visible content because transition in him is too quick for any expression to settle. This time there is something.

Not rage — you have already learned that rage in him has a specific temperature and this does not have it. Not the concentrated calculation of someone facing a technical problem — you know that too, it has its own quality, its own kind of stillness. What is there in that fraction of a second before the expression controls itself is something else.

His version of what, in any other being, would be called relief.

The specific relief of finding something intact when it mattered that it be intact. Not the relief of a technician verifying that the system worked correctly. The relief of someone who feared finding something one way and finds it another.

You file it away.

With hands that almost tremble — not from fear, you establish that immediately because fear has its own physiology and this is not that. From something else that does not yet have a name in the inventory. That exists in the space where the inventory has not yet managed to put words.

“Are you all right?”

The question comes out with the economy everything he says has — without ornament, without the elaboration that would make it sound like more than it is. But tonight what it is is already enough.

“Yes.”

Also without ornament. Also enough. The distortion has finished dissolving.

The space is in the correct state. Morpheus has verified it with his usual efficiency and the result was the expected one and technically this night could end here — it could, with some kind of logic, be the moment when the content of the night closes and what remains is waiting for Dream to continue its cycle and release you back.

It does not end here.

Because the distance left after twelve nights is minimal — more minimal than at the beginning of this night, more minimal than at any point during the seven formal nights. It has not disappeared, it has not been declared disappeared, there is no gesture you can point to as the moment when something changed the nature of what exists between you. But it has been reduced to something that can no longer be ignored without active effort.

Tonight there is no active effort. The conversation drifts. Not abruptly — with the gradualness of rivers that change direction because the terrain requires it, without announcement, without a moment you can point to and say here they stopped talking about what they were talking about and began to talk about something else. Only the quality of the space between the words changes — more charged, denser, with the specific texture of two people saying things with words that are not the words and expecting the other to read beneath them.

Morpheus speaks of the Realm’s memory.

“The Realm has memory.” A pause with the quality of something being chosen carefully. “What happens within it leaves a trace, even if the bargain dissolves.”

He does not look at you when he says it. He looks at the space — the open edge of the ceiling, the quality the place has of something unfinished. It could be a technical observation about the functioning of the Realm. It could be something else. The ambiguity is not cowardice — it is the precision of someone who cannot say more than he knows with certainty and who tonight knows exactly how far what he can say with certainty reaches.

You do not answer.

Because answering would require naming something that does not yet have a sufficient category in the inventory — not the inventory of what you know about the Realm or the bargain or the Constantine lineage debt, but the inventory of what you know about what happened over these twelve nights in the layer that is not the mechanism but what flows through the mechanism. That inventory still has an empty category where something should be.

Naming it without the correct category would be producing a premature classification. Johanna taught you that premature classifications cost more than they are worth.

You remain on that edge — both of you knowing you are on that edge, neither of you taking the step that would cross it. The space between you has that quality of something on the threshold between what already is and what could still be, which is exactly the same quality as the space Morpheus chose tonight has in its walls that are not quite walls and in its ceiling that chose not to exist.

It is not a coincidence. You file that away too.

Morpheus steps away first.

Not dramatically — there is no gesture declaring the retreat, no visible movement of someone making a decision and carrying it out with the awareness that the execution will be registered. Only that the space between you, which was minimal, has several more meters again. That he is a little farther from where he was.

Not dramatically. He simply steps away.

You file that away — that he was the one who stepped away. That he was the one who decided tonight was not yet. Not with the rage of the first nights, not with the assessment of the interrogation, not with any of the things you would recognize as a reason to step away. With something more like the awareness of a limit — the limit of what can be said tonight with the certainty required for it to be said.

That the seventh night exists.

That what cannot be said yet has one more night to find the form in which it can be said.

Tomorrow is the seventh night. You think it while the unfinished space of the Realm surrounds you with its intentional openness and its texture of threshold.

Tomorrow I choose.

Johanna chose without asking me. I have to choose knowing everything I know now and everything I still do not know and everything I will probably never know about what it is to be close to something eternal that looks at you as if you were a problem it does not want to solve.

The distinction of the problem — which for weeks was the description you had of how he looked at you — has a different quality tonight. Not because the description is incorrect. But because does not want to solve can also be read another way. Like someone who does not want to solve it because solving it would mean the problem closes. That it stops being present. That it no longer requires the attention it requires while it remains a problem.

You file that reading away too. Without confirming it. Without discarding it. The difference is that I did choose to be here. I did not choose the last twelve nights. I chose this one. And tomorrow I will choose again. That should be enough to know what you are going to choose.

It is not.

Dream releases you before either of you is ready for it to release you. You file that away too — that the transition comes before the night has finished becoming what it could have been, that Dream’s cycle does not consult whether there are things pending, that the world with gravity and clocks claims its due with the indifference of something that has no opinion about what it interrupts.

The dark room. London outside. The bedside table with the notebook of conditions on top.

Black earth under your nails — the constant of every morning, the physical proof that Dream was real, even if the memory comes apart.

In your hands — which almost trembled, but did not tremble — something that is not earth and is not the mark on your palm and has no visible form but has specific weight. The relief you saw on his face before the expression controlled itself. The Realm has memory said while looking at the open edge of the ceiling. The step away he chose, tonight, in this moment, because the seventh night exists and what could not be said has one more night.

One night remains.

Only one.

Next Chapter

Previous Chapter

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

Lectio Difficilior (ONE-SHOT)

Pairing: Dream of the Endless (Morpheus) x F!Reader — Dream/Reader insert Fandom: The Sandman (Netflix / DC Comics) Word count: ~4.5k | One-shot | Second person POV | Rating: Teen and up Warnings/Tags: accidental summoning, captivity, post-season 1, morally grey reader, dark academia, obsession, the reader is the dangerous one here, references to canon-typical sleeping sickness, mutual fascination, dark romance undertones, open ending.

Summary: You never meant to summon anything. It wasn't a ritual — it was a reading. A philological exercise. Something innocent that ended with the King of Dreams standing in a chalk circle in your living room, asking what you've done. Freeing him should be simple: reconstruct one missing word from a damaged folio. The problem is that you found it three days ago.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fan fiction. The Sandman and all related characters belong to Neil Gaiman, DC Comics and Warner Bros./Netflix. No copyright infringement intended; no profit is being made from this work. The reader character and original plot elements are mine.

@dreamyhopes

There are things that happen like this: by accident. It is not that one sets out to do them. They happen the way consequences happen, at the end of a run of bad decisions. Or perhaps of very good ones. You still have not decided which yours were.

I do know. That is why I am going to tell you slowly.

This is the story of how you kidnapped the Lord of Dreams on a Friday night, with chalk, cold tea, and impeccable pronunciation. And of the nine days it took you to open your hand and give him back.

When you tell people what you do, they smile in a very particular way. The history of Western esotericism sounds like a joke until you mention the university, the master’s degree, the doctoral grant, and then it sounds like an expensive joke. After that always comes the same question: whether you believe in it. You give your usual answer: that the historian of the Crusades does not need to believe in God, and that you do not need to believe in demons to edit the manuals of those who believed they were summoning them.

You study the words people wrote when they still believed words did things. Grimoires, psalters secretly corrected, recipe books for angels, letters between magicians who owed one another money. Paleography of the impossible. You can date an ink by the way it eats into the paper and recognize a copyist by the way he closes his o’s. It is a small and arrogant profession, like all professions that deal with the dead.

It was a good answer, yours. It was.

The papers arrived in autumn, in grey acid-free cardboard boxes, with that polite dust auctions have. Provenance: a manor house in Sussex called Fawney Rig; a family called Burgess; an Edwardian sect called the Order of Ancient Mysteries, which is rather like calling yourself the Open Secrets Club. Your department received the lesser lot: notebooks, correspondence, account books with suspicious indentations, and sixteen loose bifolia from a much earlier grimoire, stitched into a notebook with the arrogance of someone binding what they do not understand.

You knew the anecdote. Everyone in the field knows it and nobody puts it in the bibliography: Roderick Burgess, the drawing-room Demon King, the magician who promised to chain Death and displayed for decades a crystal sphere with something inside it. Charlatanry with a budget, you said in the seminar, and everyone laughed.

You were assigned to catalogue his failure, and failure, you discovered, had a fascinating critical apparatus.

Three hands in the bifolia. The original copyist’s: Gothic, disciplined, iron gall ink eaten by its own iron. That of a seventeenth-century reader, arguing in the margins with the smugness of the dead. And a third, later one, in pencil: someone had annotated, syllable by syllable, how it sounded. Vowel lengths, stresses, pauses. Almost a score.

No one annotates how a text sounds if they do not intend to read it aloud.

The central verse of the invocation was also quoted in Burgess’s personal notebook. Wrongly. Badly stressed, badly divided, with a long vowel treated as short: the kind of error that turns an order into a babble. He read it wrong all his life. He captured something anyway —texts are generous to the arrogant— but he captured it crookedly, and that was why he needed glass, painted circles, and a century of vigils to hold what a well-placed stress would have held on its own. That was what you thought. You noted it down with the calm of someone describing another person’s damp gunpowder.

You did not want to capture anything. You only wanted to know how it sounded correctly.

Keep that sentence. You are going to need it later, when it is no longer enough. The decisions, then. Count them with me.

You took the facsimiles home on a Friday. The facsimiles, not the originals: you are responsible, let the record show. You wanted to finish appendix B of your thesis, the one about the ritual diagram, and the diagram had to be photographed at actual scale. Your table is small. Your living-room floor is large. So you copied it in chalk, symbol by symbol, checking the proportions with a piece of thread. Defensible decision number two.

The third: reading aloud. Meter does not exist in silence; any philologist will confirm it for you with a martyr’s face. So you stood where there was space —inside the diagram, naturally, because outside it was the tripod— and you read.

The rest was not something you decided. The text asked for symbols, not relics; the difference matters and no one warned you. An old coin: you had three, inherited from a numismatist grandfather. A feather: the fountain pen with which you correct proofs. A stolen song: you had spent nine days with someone else’s refrain stuck in your head, the kind that steals itself. A knife: the letter opener. Blood: folio fourteen had cut your thumb at six in the evening, the way important papers cut, with malice aforethought.

Magic, you were going to discover, does not ask about intention. Magic is a form. You filled it out completely, without meaning to, and in a clear hand.

The chalk stopped being chalk on the third stanza.

There was no thunder. There was precision: the sensation of a large lock turning inside a small building. The lamp lowered its voice. The air in the living room became ancient. And in the center of the diagram, where a second earlier your tripod had been, there was suddenly a figure the room did not know how to contain: tall in a way that argued with the ceiling, pale as the inner face of things, wrapped in something that could not quite decide whether it was smoke or a coat, and the eyes. Two cutouts of night with their own astronomy.

“What have you done?” His voice did not enter through your ears. It entered through the nape of your neck, the way memories do. “Where am I? Who are you?”

And you, doctoral student, excellence scholar, author of an article on ritual dialectology with two citations —one of them your own— said only:

“Oops.”

Elsewhere —which is not a place, but a realm, and is not far away because it lies beside every place— a librarian looked up from her acquisitions register.

The palace still smelled of new construction. They had not been rebuilding for long, raising again the gates of horn and ivory, and her lord was reviewing the plans for the east wing with that attention of his that looked like punishment. He was halfway through a sentence when she saw it: the edge of his coat was already mist, and the mist, in turn, was less and less his.

“My lord...” Lucienne said, watching him disappear.

“What is happening?”

“I am not sure. A crossing.”

“From where to where?”

“Not from where, my lord. But from whom.”

“Who?”

“You... my lord.”

She spoke the last word to a space where there was no longer anyone. “Not again.” Lucienne stared at that emptiness with her lips pressed tight, made a neat note in her register —incident; time; cause pending— and went to find the raven.

In your defense: after the oops, you recovered quickly. You lifted your hands halfway, in that universal gesture that means I am carrying no weapons, only footnotes.

“I apologize. This wasn’t... The ritual was not a ritual. Or that is what I told myself. It was a reading. Something innocent.”

“A reading?” he asked, incredulous.

“Philological,” you clarified.

He lowered his gaze to the chalk around his bare feet, with the expression of a king examining the chair he had been made to sit in.

“And this?”

“Appendix B.”

He walked to the edge of the circle. He did not touch it: he listened to it, almost, with his whole body, and you saw the exact moment he confirmed the boundary was real. Something crossed his face, cold and enormous, a fury with experience. When he spoke again, each word came wrapped separately.

“The last man who held me inside a circle wished he had never been born, and was obliged.”

“Roderick Burgess,” you said, because terror makes you precise. “Nineteen sixteen. I catalogued his correspondence.” You swallowed. “What he did deliberately for a century, I did by accident in one night... I know. But I intend to undo it.”

You tried the obvious thing: wiping away the chalk with your foot. The chalk was no longer chalk; it was an idea with calcium, and ideas cannot be swept away. He watched you with the mineral patience of someone who has seen centuries of people kicking circles.

“It is opened with verse,” he told you, “and closed with verse.”

“The counter-verse. Folio sixteen,” you exclaimed, returning to your books. “Of course. It’s obvious.” You turned pages with fingers that had not quite finished being yours. “But sixteen has a lacuna. Damp. The ink migrated. There is a word missing.” You looked up. Then there was silence.

The silence of someone who, among other things, owns all the sleeping silences in the world is interesting.

“I can reconstruct it. It is literally my job. Collation of hands, grapheme frequency, metrical context. Give me time,” you told him as soon as your eyes met his.

“How long?”

“A word can take an hour or a lifetime,” you said. “I’ll let you know which one.”

Write that sentence down too. You said it in good faith. That is the saddest thing I can say about it now.

The first two days were honest. I want that to be clear, because later it will be necessary: the first two days, you worked as one prays. Raking light for the relief of dead ink, transmitted light for its ghosts, the conservator’s magnifying glass, the notebook filling with ascenders and crossbars like an anatomy class for letters. You offered him tea out of the reflex of a civilized country; you left the cup beside the edge of the circle. He looked at it without touching it, and the steam —you swore afterward— bent toward him as if it wanted to tell him something.

You spoke. Little, at first: fear is a poor conversationalist.

“Why can’t you simply...?” you dared to ask the first night, turning your hand.

“Leave?” he finished, without moving.

“You are what you are,” you told him. “And this is hardware-store chalk.”

“The rules are not mine. They are older than I am.” He said it without complaint, the way one dictates a date. “I am, among other things, the keeper of certain laws. It would be unbecoming to begin by breaking the ones that bind me.”

You wrote that in the corner of your notebook without noticing.

Pay attention: that was where it began. Not in greed. In reflex. Noting down what matters is your nature, just as his is to guard what sleeps. Only your nature, that week, had before it the greatest primary source in the history of your discipline, seated in the middle of your living room, answering questions.

On the second night, a raven landed on your windowsill and tapped the glass with purpose. You opened it, because by then you were no longer arguing with reality. The raven looked at the circle, looked at the one inside it, and said, in the voice of someone who had been something else before:

“Boss. Are you...?”

“I am well, Matthew.” A pause. “Tell Lucienne: philology. She will understand.”

The raven looked you up and down, twice.

“Right,” he said. “Philology. Of course. Same as always.”

And he left, and you went back to folio sixteen, and pretended with reasonable success that this had not just happened at your window.

It was also on the second night that he said:

“You have not slept.”

“No.”

“You have my entire realm sitting in your living room and you do not sleep.” His voice sounded sarcastic, or so you thought.

“It seemed in poor taste. To dream. In front of yours. Without you in there to...” You stopped yourself, because the sentence was headed somewhere without railings. “It seemed discourteous.”

He looked at you for three seconds that lasted a season of the year.

“No one,” he said at last, “has ever considered it discourteous to dream without me.”

The first syllable of the word appeared on the fourth day, when you crossed the copyist’s grapheme frequency with the metrical pattern of the previous verse. You recognized it at once, the way one recognizes a face in a crowd. Your stomach flipped, and at the time you called it joy.

That night he asked:

“Progress?”

And you said:

“Slow.”

Which was true. The best-preserved lies are the ones that technically are not lies. By then you had two notebooks. In one, you were reconstructing the word that would release him. In the other —say it, it is all right, no one hears us here but you— you were archiving him. Observations, you wrote on the cover, in your filing hand. Observations. As if he were an ink. As if he were a seventeenth-century hand.

You asked him things. Some were useful for the lacuna: verbal usages, closing formulae, how old texts named those of his house. Others were useful for nothing except you.

“Do your siblings also...?” you began one night, and stopped, because that question did not reconstruct any folio.

He looked at you. He knew exactly what kind of question it was; desire is the raw material of his profession, and yours was right there, on the table, poorly disguised among magnifying lenses. He answered it anyway. Fully. With names no archive in the world possesses. And you did not write anything down, because writing would have been confessing, and you memorized it all, which is worse.

Every hour with him was worth more than your entire thesis. Than your entire discipline. Two hundred years of European chairs arguing over whether grimoires were literature or liturgy, and you had the living referent taking human form between your sofa and your Ikea bookcase. No one in the history of your field had ever had what you had. No one would ever have it again.

There was the other thing. The thing that did not fit in any notebook: it had been years since anyone had asked you questions and stayed to listen to the whole answer. Your life was archives, unanswered emails, an apartment where the kettle was the only one that spoke to you. Now your home contained a presence older than language, one who said the title of your thesis without getting it wrong and argued with you over the caesura of a verse at two in the morning.

If you let him go, the silence would return. The old one. The usual one.

You did not think of it like that, not in those words. No one thinks of it like that. One thinks: the second syllable must be verified against folio nine. One thinks: it would be irresponsible to close the reconstruction without collating all three hands. Rigor is an excellent hiding place. It has the advantage of being true.

On the fifth day, you nodded off over folio twelve. Forty seconds, perhaps less. Your own neck woke you.

“I saw it,” he said.

Your ink went cold.

“What?”

“Your dream. Forty seconds are enough. It is my realm: you entered it, not it you.”

You did not ask what he had seen. That is the difference between you and Burgess: Burgess would have asked, convinced his desire was presentable. You already knew yours was not.

“And?” you said anyway, with the flattest voice in your repertoire.

“You dream of a house that is not empty,” said Dream of the Endless, without cruelty, which was the cruelest thing of all. “You dream that someone asks you things and stays. You do not dream of me, if that comforts you. You dream of what I am covering.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do.” A pause with the weight of a slab. “You found the first syllable two nights ago.”

It was not a question. Nor an accusation. It was an inventory, and inventories cannot be argued with.

“I am verifying,” you said.

“Burgess verified too.” He said it softly, and there you understood that his softness is the blade. “It took him years to stop pretending he was verifying. You have taken two days. You are quicker at everything, it would seem.”

That dawn, you reread the letters, the ones from the beginning, the ones from 1916. You were looking for the monster and found something worse: a reasonable man. A few more days, Burgess wrote to Hathaway, until the phenomenon has been properly documented. It would be irresponsible to release him without understanding him.

Irresponsible. Properly.

You recognized the syntax. It was yours. The monster’s handwriting, at first, is always one’s own; the monster is what happens afterward, decade by decade, while the hand keeps saying a few more days and worsens.

You closed the folder. You did not sleep. Nor did you work on the word. That night, rigor gave you no hiding place, and you sat on the floor of your living room, outside the circle, with both notebooks on your knees, looking at the oldest being you had ever known and would ever know, calculating —because that is what you did, you calculated, forgive me, but this account came out honest— how many more questions could fit into a week. Into a month. Into an academic lifetime.

He let you calculate. That too was deliberate. There are battles that can only be won if the other fights them all the way through.

“Boss,” said the raven at the window on the seventh day, and this time he did not look at you, which was worse. “Lucienne says the west wing... The books, boss. They’re going blank. First the titles go, then the authors, and last night an entire section of...” He hesitated, like someone reading someone else’s note. “...of languages that no longer exist woke up as paper.”

Something fell inside you, slowly, several floors.

Languages that no longer exist. Your section. Your shelf of the world. Every hour he spent in your living room, a library beside all places was going mute, and it was going mute starting with what was yours, with the texts no one but dreamers preserved, the lost originals, the grammars the fires here had already eaten and that only there still remained whole.

It was not the only thing. That same afternoon, you crossed paths on the stairs with the daughter of the neighbor from the fourth floor. The old woman had not woken for three days; the ambulance had taken her away on Tuesday without a siren, which is how they take those who are no longer in a hurry. They say there are more cases, the daughter told you, with that need to tell anyone that belongs to people who are waiting. It was on the news. People who fall asleep and do not.

You climbed the stairs counting: you had had the word complete since Monday. You had verified it on Monday night. It was Thursday.

Count with me: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Three days with the key in your mouth. The same three it took you, at the beginning, to find it. Perfect symmetry, if that comforts you.

I know it does not. Let us continue.

The lacuna admitted two reconstructions. One was easy, grammatical, tame: a boilerplate let him be released. The other was stranger, older, less well documented. Lectio difficilior: between two possible readings, the difficult one is usually the true one, because copyists simplify and originals do not ask permission.

The difficult one did not say release him. It said name him. What was called blindly must be dismissed with open eyes: the closing verse demanded the exact name of what had been captured, and punished cheap titles. Burgess would never have been able to close it. He never knew whom he had. He wanted everything and looked at nothing.

You had looked for seven days. That was exactly the problem.

Because naming, by now you know this, is the opposite of archiving. The archive retains; the name releases. Saying the exact word meant admitting you knew exactly what you had —not a phenomenon, not a source, not a thesis chapter: a king in a chalk cage, a library bleeding out, a woman on the fourth floor who would not wake— and renouncing it in full light. Without the comfort of accident. The accident was the capture; the holding was your work, signed, with two notebooks of evidence.

You said it on a Thursday at three in the morning, standing at the edge, with a hoarse voice and your best prosody, and when you reached the lacuna you did not read what was written, because it was not written: you said what you had reconstructed. The exact word. It will not be in your thesis. It will not be anywhere: there are words that exist only while they are being spoken, and then go back to hiding in the throat.

The chalk became chalk again with a sigh of dust.

He left the circle with a single step, and your entire living room rearranged itself around that step like a court. Standing, free, he was taller, or the world was lower; you never resolved which.

“I know when you found it,” he said.

“I know.”

You did not add sorry. It would have been cheap, and both of you were good at appraising.

“Burgess never had the word,” he continued. “He would have used it to ask for more. You had it in your mouth for three days, knowing the hourly price, and you said it anyway.” He inclined his head, one degree, perhaps two. “I have condemned men for far less than three days. And I have forgiven worse things for smaller reasons.”

“And which of the two...?”

“The other notebook,” he said, instead of answering.

Your heart stopped with one hand raised, as if asking permission to speak.

“What about it?”

“Nothing.” His eyes did that thing they do, that astronomy. “I only wanted you to know that I know.”

And that was the whole punishment. I am telling you, and I am keeping count: it was enough, and it still lasts.

He was already less body and more threshold when he stopped, without fully turning back.

“Sleep. You have spent nine days being discourteous to me.”

There was no smoke and no door: the living room simply remained without him, the way a word remains without a voice. You stayed a very long while looking at the chalk, which could now be swept, and you swept it, and you did not burn the Observations notebook. You put it in the bottom drawer, the one that locks with a key.

He knows that too. That too is part of the punishment. Or of something else that still has no cataloguing.

You slept fourteen hours. And you dreamed, of course.

You dreamed of a library that ended in none of its six directions, with staircases leading toward books not yet written, and you noticed —because now you notice these things— that on some spines the ink was fresh, newly returned, like blood coming back into a sleeping hand. A woman with glasses and a tight braid found you in the wing of dead languages, with an open register under her arm.

“This way,” Lucienne said. “I have been asked to show you the collection. We have the originals of almost everything you study. I should warn you that the lord of this house argues over punctuation. And does not forget.”

“Do you say that as a warning?”

“I say it as a catalogue.”

You woke thirsty, belatedly hungry, and with a word safe in your throat. Life went on, because life has that habit: the thesis, the archive, the grey boxes. The woman from the fourth floor woke that same week asking who had let her plants die. You swept the chalk. The notebook remained in the locked drawer.

What you did not see was this. I am telling you, because I look from both sides of doors.

In the wing of dead languages, where the ink had returned to the spines the way blood returns to a sleeping hand, the lord of the house remained for a while after you woke. Lucienne found him there, hands behind his back, before the shelves that nine days earlier had begun to go blank because of his absence. Because of the cause of his absence.

“Why show her the library?” she asked, because she had had the question noted down since the day before, and noted questions carry weight.

“Would you have preferred I show her the nightmares?”

“No.” She adjusted her glasses. “But you... do not do things without a reason, my lord.”

He did not answer at once. He ran a finger over a spine newly restored to its title, as if checking a scar.

“She knows a word she should not know,” he said at last. “It is wise to watch where that word sleeps.”

“And where does it sleep?”

“In her throat.”

Lucienne looked at him over her glasses, with that patience of hers that has a founding date.

“I meant the woman, my lord.”

“So did I.”

The silence that followed was one of the good ones: library silence, with suspended dust and everything. Lucienne, who has spent centuries cataloguing her lord’s silences and knows every edition, chose not to note it down. There are mercies like that.

It was then that she saw it. On the reading table beside the window —that window that looks out onto all twilights at once— there was a volume that did not appear in her register. Fresh ink. No title yet; titles arrive at the end. She recognized it by profession: her library keeps all the books their authors have not yet written, and this one was writing itself, page by page, at the rhythm of someone who, every night, on the other side, fell asleep again without fear.

“That book is new,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Have you been reading it?”

“It is my library, Lucienne.”

“It was not a reproach, my lord. It was catalogue.” Quill, register, neat handwriting: recent acquisition; living author; work in progress. “And is it good?”

He took as long to answer as a season takes to turn.

“It is difficult,” said Dream of the Endless.

And Lucienne, who has known him since before the word before existed, knew that in that mouth, it was not a complaint. It was the highest praise he grants.

Before leaving, he placed something between two pages that had not yet been written: a black feather, as a bookmark. To find the exact point, you suppose. So that the exact point might find him, I suspect.

You know nothing of this, of course. You only know that you sleep as you have not slept since you were a child, that the thesis is moving forward, and that some mornings you wake with a sensation found in no dictionary of symptoms: the feeling of having been read. Slowly. Attentively. By someone who does not skip the footnotes.

You keep his name in your throat. He keeps your book in his house. Call it debt, call it mutual archive, call it whatever you can: the catalogue still has no word for this, and the day it does, I suspect it will be difficult to pronounce.

For years, you thought the lectio difficilior was in the manuscripts. No. The difficult reading was never in folio sixteen. It was you, and you said it anyway; that is why the library lets you in.

But understand what that means, now that he knows: among all possible readings, he too always chooses the difficult one.

Sleep well.

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

[liz19forever]

Your Private Hell: Choose Your Obsession (+18)

⚠️ Content Warnings: obsession, stalking, kidnapping, sedation/drugging, captivity, coercive dynamics, psychological manipulation, fear, unhealthy attachment, emotional dependency, and dark romance themes.

🚫 This is dark fiction and does not endorse, romanticize, justify, or encourage these behaviors in real life. 🚫 No practical instructions, methods, or actionable details related to harmful acts will be included. 🚫 This work is transformative fanfiction created for non-commercial entertainment purposes only. 🔞 18+ only. MDNI.

⚠️ Disclaimer: This is a reader-insert dark fiction story written in second person using “you/your” as a narrative device to place the audience inside a fictional role. The use of second person does not imply, represent, or reflect the reader’s real desires, actions, beliefs, fantasies, or intentions. This work includes a fictionalized version of a real public figure within a fictional dark romance framework. The portrayal is entirely fictional and should not be interpreted as a representation of the real person’s actual personality, relationships, private life, experiences, or behavior. This story explores obsession, distorted attachment, and unhealthy dynamics through fiction. Its purpose is narrative exploration, not endorsement.

Prologue: The Man in the Trunk

You never thought you would do something illegal. Not really, or at least that’s what you believed, because people always say things.

You stare at a photo for too long, repeat something stupid under your breath, laugh to yourself because it doesn’t mean anything. Because there’s a safe distance between desire and action. Between looking at a screen at three in the morning and crossing a line you can’t come back from.

There’s a particular kind of math to obsession that nobody explains when it starts. Nobody tells you the first step doesn’t feel like a step. It feels like staying still. Like doing nothing. Like simply opening another tab, saving another image, listening again to that interview where he speaks slowly and looks down before answering, that gesture of his so peculiar, so distinctly his, that someone on the internet catalogued and named and turned into a gif that circulates as proof of something nobody quite knows how to name.

Adoration. Hunger. The difference doesn’t matter at three in the morning. And you know it. You knew it then. You know it now, your hands on the steering wheel, the dark road opening in front of you like a mouth.

He is so painfully handsome it should be illegal, you said once.

Quietly. Almost laughing. As if it didn’t matter. And maybe that’s where it all started.

Not with a plan. Not with a decision. Just with a small, ridiculous, poisonous idea lodged somewhere in your head as if it meant nothing. Like seeds that fall into cracks in concrete and nobody notices until they’ve already lifted the pavement.

There should be an exact moment. A clear scene, a before and after, something that explains how you go from being a normal, functional, invisible person to being this. But there isn’t. There were months. There was a slow accumulation of small things that separately meant nothing. The video you watched twelve times in one rainy afternoon. The afternoon you spent reading everything anyone had ever written about him, old interviews, press articles, comments from people who had seen him in a theatre in London and described the experience as if they had touched something sacred. The day you calculated, without meaning to calculate it, how many flight hours separated you from the city where he would be that week.

Just calculating it. Nothing more. That’s what you told yourself. That’s what you always tell yourself. You can still regret it, you tell yourself now. You can still turn around. You can still open the trunk, call emergency services, invent an impossible explanation and accept that your life ended before it became something worse.

You think about that phone call. You build it in detail while driving, as if the exercise itself could save you from something.

Hello, yes, I’m calling because there’s a person in the trunk of my car. No, they’re not hurt. Well, asleep. Well, not exactly asleep. Yes, I understand that’s a problem. Yes. Yes. I understand.

The problem with imagining that phone call is that in no version does it end well for you, and you know it. You’ve known many things tonight that you pretend not to know. But you don’t turn around.

You keep driving.

The road is almost empty at this hour. One or two trucks in the opposite lane, headlights like huge blind eyes looking at you for a second before disappearing. The wet asphalt reflects the lights in a way that, another time, you would have thought beautiful. Now it only confirms that you can see clearly. That you’re not going to drift. That your reflexes work.

That worries you a little, if you’re being honest.

That your reflexes work. That everything works. That there’s nothing broken in you that explains this from the outside.

Your hands are steady on the wheel.

That’s the most terrifying part. They’re not shaking. They’re not sweating. They don’t look like the hands of a woman who just destroyed everything she once believed she knew about herself.

You look at them for a moment, just a moment, before returning your eyes to the road. Normal hands. Normal fingers. The same hands that made coffee this morning, signed paperwork at work last week, sent your mother a message on Tuesday saying you were fine, that everything was fine, that she shouldn’t worry.

She isn’t worried. That’s the strange thing.

Nobody is worried. That’s part of how you got here too. Invisibility has practical uses.

You think about that. About how many times you wanted to be seen and couldn’t. How many times you took up space in a room and nobody registered it. You’re good at that, at passing through without leaving marks, existing in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone because it doesn’t interrupt anyone either. A presence so soft it’s almost not a presence.

Until tonight. Tonight you interrupt. There’s a body in the trunk of your car. He isn’t dead.

You repeat that to yourself as if it were absolution. As if the distance between what you did and the worst thing you could have done were enough to build something resembling innocence. He isn’t dead. He isn’t hurt, not really, not in a way that matters. He was breathing when you settled him into place. You checked his pulse with two fingers against his neck, with what care you had learned to do that, and it was steady. Regular. The calm rhythm of someone who is simply asleep.

You checked three times. Not because you didn’t trust what your fingers felt. Because you needed the contact.

Three times your fingers against that warm, constant pulse, and all three times something in your chest loosened a little, something tight that had been tight for hours and that can be named in ways you would rather not name.

Just asleep.

Enough not to scream. Enough not to fight. Enough for you to reach the place before the world puts itself back together and he realizes he’s no longer in his.

You think about how he’s going to feel when he wakes up. You’ve thought about it many times, abstractly, in that hazy place where thoughts exist without consequences. But now it’s concrete. Now it has weight.

First there’ll be disorientation, that second of harmless confusion before the body registers that something is wrong. Then the cold, or the heat, or the texture of whatever is beneath him. Then darkness or light, depending on what time you arrive. Then his hands searching for something familiar and finding restraint.

Then he’ll understand. And you’ll be there when he does.

That’s new.

That’s what separates tonight from all the years before. You were always the person on the other side. The one who watches. The one who waits. The one who exists on the edge of something that never quite becomes real.

Tonight you’re the person in the room.

Tonight, when he understands, his eyes are going to find something. They’re going to find you. It’s not just any body.

That’s the problem.

If it were any man, maybe this would be simpler. More brutal. More unforgivable in an ordinary way, the way unforgivable things usually are, without nuance, without the strange extra layer of something that almost resembles logic.

But it isn’t.

That complicates everything in a way you still don’t fully understand, even though you’ve spent miles trying.

It’s him.

Tom Sturridge.

The name sounds different in your head than it does out loud. Out loud it’s just a name, two words, the kind of combination of syllables that could belong to anyone. In your head it has weight. It has history. It carries the density of years of accumulated attention, of hours you added somewhere inside yourself without meaning to.

Or meaning to.

You’re not sure of the difference anymore.

The man thousands of people look at from a distance believing they adore him in a harmless way. The man whose face appears in interviews, red carpets, stolen photographs, edited videos set to sad songs and comments saying exactly the same thing you thought too many times.

How beautiful. How impossible. How unfair.

That last word always felt the most honest to you. Unfairness. As if someone’s beauty were a personal debt.

As if existing that way, with that face, that voice, that way of moving through the world with the apparent discomfort of someone who doesn’t quite know what to do with what he creates in people, were something owed to the world.

Something owed to you. You know it. You know how absurd it sounds. You think it anyway. You’ve been thinking it for years and nothing has changed, and that tells you something about yourself too, something you chose not to hear.

I didn’t want to hurt him. That’s the lie you like best. You settle it carefully inside yourself, as if you could still save something. As if kidnapping someone weren’t already a form of violence.

As if choosing him, following him, waiting, studying him for so long and with such attention that you could describe his verbal tics, the particular cadence with which he pauses before answering a question that makes him uncomfortable, the way his hands search for something to hold when he’s nervous—as if all of that didn’t say more about you than any confession could.

You didn’t want to hurt him. You wanted him to see you. That was all. You repeat it to yourself.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

As if repetition could make it smaller, more manageable, more like something a sane person might have felt. You were never going to do it.

Not really.

There’s a version of this story that ends differently, that always ended differently, years of a different version where you were someone who felt things intensely and didn’t act on them because that’s what functional people do.

That version existed. It was real. You were that person for a long time. But time does strange things to desires that have nowhere to go. It compresses them. Concentrates them. Makes them dense as stone.

He could walk past you on a street, sign something without remembering your face, smile with that perfect politeness famous men learn in order to survive other people’s devotion.

He could look at you and not see you. That’s the unspoken contract. You don’t sign it. Nobody explains it. But it exists:

You look at him.

He doesn’t look at you. And that’s fine. That’s correct. That’s the structure that keeps everything in place.

You broke it.

That’s what keeps turning somewhere behind your eyes while you drive. Not fear of punishment, not yet.

That will come later and you know it and you calculated it with the same coldness you calculated everything else.

What won’t stop is this: You broke the contract.

You crossed over. The person you thought you were, the one who watched from a distance and settled and sublimated and functioned, wasn’t the whole story.

There was something underneath. This. You.

You thought, with a clarity that feels almost offensive given the circumstances, about all the times you came close without reaching this point.

The first time you were in the same city as him, three years ago, and convinced yourself that simply existing in the same space was enough.

It was. For a while it was.

You walked the same streets without knowing if you stepped where he had stepped and it felt sufficient.

Then it wasn’t. Nobody explains escalation either. How obsession redraws the map every time you cross a threshold. How what once felt unthinkable becomes merely uncomfortable, and then understandable, and then inevitable. At no point is there an alarm.

At no point does the world stop and tell you: Here. This is where you should have stopped. There was a moment, you think, maybe six months ago, when this was still only thought.

Hypothetical planning.

The kind of control fantasy people have and never execute because reality is complicated and risks are real and most people—the overwhelming majority—live and die with their obsessions intact and private.

You are not most people. You understand that now with a precision that hurts a little.

The part that hurts most, the part you still don’t know how to name, isn’t fear. It’s something closer to relief.

Something warm and terrible that’s been settled in your chest for hours as if it has the right to be there.

Finally. Finally you did something real.

Now only one question remains, the one you haven’t been able to remove from your head since you closed the trunk.

What are you going to do when he opens his eyes? What is he going to see first? The room? The restraints? You? Or the truth?

You stop at that last one.

The truth.

As if there were only one. As if what he’s going to see when he opens his eyes could be described simply. He’s going to see you, yes. But he’s also going to see something you’ve spent years looking at without fully recognizing: the shape desire takes when it has nowhere left to hide.

Because it’s one thing to be desired from a distance. There’s almost an aesthetic to that. A distance that makes it tolerable for the object of desire. To know you’re being watched without being touched. To know you’re loved by people who will never be in the same room.

It’s abstract. Manageable.

Famous people learn to metabolize it, you assume, to turn it into something compartmentalized, something you can leave in the car before going home.

It’s another thing entirely to wake up and discover someone turned that desire into a cage.

That the distance that made it tolerable disappeared. That the person on the other side of the screen has hands and a car and a room prepared and a plan that has been under construction for months.

You wonder if fear will come first or anger. If he’ll negotiate or scream. If he’ll recognize you, if your face means anything in the catalogue of people he’s met, or if you’ll be entirely new to him, a problem without context, a danger without history.

You wonder if that’s going to hurt.

Probably.

Probably that’s the moment when everything you built in your head over the years collides with what he actually is—not the image, not the recorded voice, not the version that exists in carefully edited twenty-minute interviews, but the man made of flesh and fear and confusion who will be on the other side of this.

And you, who spent years believing you knew every gesture, every inflection in his voice, every way he lowered his gaze before answering a question that was too personal, realize something absurd when the road darkens in front of you.

You know nothing about him. Nothing real. Nothing that matters. You know his public surface with pathological precision. You know what he chose to show and what cameras captured when he didn’t mean them to.

You know secondhand anecdotes and statements filtered through publicists and the collective interpretation of millions of people projecting onto him whatever they needed to project.

You know him the way you know a painting: You can describe every brushstroke, but you know nothing about the brush. You don’t know whether he sleeps on one side or the other. You don’t know if he has nightmares. You don’t know what actually makes him laugh—not that smile you learned to recognize as the polite smile, but the other one, if it exists, if one day you’ll ever be close enough to see it. You don’t know if he’ll be able to forgive you. You don’t know if you care whether he can.

That’s the most honest thought you’ve had all night.

And still you keep going.

The road narrows. The city lights remain behind like a broken promise. The road ahead is dark and you know it by heart. You’ve driven it enough times over the past months as part of something you used to call planning and now have to call by its real name.

Preparation.

There’s something almost ritualistic about that. About the difference between words. Planning is what anyone does before a trip, before a project, before something normal. Preparation carries different weight. Preparation implies that what comes next requires readiness.

That it isn’t only logistics.

That something can go wrong in ways that go beyond the map. You know it. You’ve known it for months. Your hands remain steady.

He hasn’t moved.

You register that in a way that is no longer entirely conscious, that particular silence from the trunk becoming part of the noise of the night, part of the rhythm of all this.

Every time there’s a sharp turn, every time the car gives slightly against uneven asphalt, there’s a second of involuntary attention.

You listen.

Nothing.

You keep driving.

Every time nothing answers from behind you, that terrible relief returns for a moment. Finally you did something real.

You keep driving toward the only possible ending to a story that began, without you realizing it, the first time you said quietly, almost laughing, as if it didn’t matter: He is so painfully handsome it should be illegal. You should have stayed with that thought. You should have let it remain only that.

A small sentence. An idea without consequences. A safe distance between what is felt and what is done.

But you didn’t.

Now he’s in your trunk, and soon he’s going to open his eyes. And you, finally, are going to exist for him.

Reader’s Choice

Before you reach the place you prepared, you pass a police station. The lights are on. For one second, the world gives you a way out. A normal door. A legal door. A door that still belongs to the person you were before tonight.

But he is in the trunk.

Not dead. Not safe. Not yours.

Not yet.

So tell me…

What do you do before he wakes up?

A. You accelerate. You don’t look back.

You have already made your choice.

There is no confession. No hesitation. No last-minute mercy.

By the time he opens his eyes, something in you has gone cold.

When he wakes up: He stays terrifyingly calm. As if he understands immediately that fear will not save him from you.

B. You slow down without meaning to.

Your foot hovers over the brake.

For one second, you almost become someone else. Someone who could still stop. Someone who could still say: I did something terrible, but I stopped before it became worse.

But you don’t.

By the time he opens his eyes, guilt is already sitting between you.

When he wakes up: He tries to manipulate you. Not because he is cruel. Because he sees the crack in you. And he knows cracks can become doors.

C. You watch the building disappear in the rearview mirror.

You don’t stop. But you look. You keep looking until the lights vanish behind you, and something inside you understands that this is the last time the world will feel simple.

You are not only driving away from the police station. You are driving away from yourself.

When he wakes up: He says your name. And that is worse than screaming. Because you wanted him to see you. You never thought about what it would do to you if he did.

Your choice defines how much of you can still be called innocent. And how he will understand you when he opens his eyes.

⏳ Choose fast before the obsession chooses for you. 🖤 Then reblog and let more people pick their obsession. 🔪✨

What do you do before he wakes up?

A. You accelerate. You don’t look back.

B. You slow down without meaning to.

C. You watch the building disappear in the rearview mirror.

Voting ended onJun 6

[liz19forever]

⏳🖤 Vote before the countdown ends… and if you already voted, reblog so someone else can choose their obsession. 🔥

[liz19forever]

Your Private Hell: Choose Your Obsession (+18)

⚠️ Content Warnings: obsession, stalking, kidnapping, sedation/drugging, captivity, coercive dynamics, psychological manipulation, fear, unhealthy attachment, emotional dependency, and dark romance themes.

🚫 This is dark fiction and does not endorse, romanticize, justify, or encourage these behaviors in real life. 🚫 No practical instructions, methods, or actionable details related to harmful acts will be included. 🚫 This work is transformative fanfiction created for non-commercial entertainment purposes only. 🔞 18+ only. MDNI.

⚠️ Disclaimer: This is a reader-insert dark fiction story written in second person using “you/your” as a narrative device to place the audience inside a fictional role. The use of second person does not imply, represent, or reflect the reader’s real desires, actions, beliefs, fantasies, or intentions. This work includes a fictionalized version of a real public figure within a fictional dark romance framework. The portrayal is entirely fictional and should not be interpreted as a representation of the real person’s actual personality, relationships, private life, experiences, or behavior. This story explores obsession, distorted attachment, and unhealthy dynamics through fiction. Its purpose is narrative exploration, not endorsement.

Prologue: The Man in the Trunk

You never thought you would do something illegal. Not really, or at least that’s what you believed, because people always say things.

You stare at a photo for too long, repeat something stupid under your breath, laugh to yourself because it doesn’t mean anything. Because there’s a safe distance between desire and action. Between looking at a screen at three in the morning and crossing a line you can’t come back from.

There’s a particular kind of math to obsession that nobody explains when it starts. Nobody tells you the first step doesn’t feel like a step. It feels like staying still. Like doing nothing. Like simply opening another tab, saving another image, listening again to that interview where he speaks slowly and looks down before answering, that gesture of his so peculiar, so distinctly his, that someone on the internet catalogued and named and turned into a gif that circulates as proof of something nobody quite knows how to name.

Adoration. Hunger. The difference doesn’t matter at three in the morning. And you know it. You knew it then. You know it now, your hands on the steering wheel, the dark road opening in front of you like a mouth.

He is so painfully handsome it should be illegal, you said once.

Quietly. Almost laughing. As if it didn’t matter. And maybe that’s where it all started.

Not with a plan. Not with a decision. Just with a small, ridiculous, poisonous idea lodged somewhere in your head as if it meant nothing. Like seeds that fall into cracks in concrete and nobody notices until they’ve already lifted the pavement.

There should be an exact moment. A clear scene, a before and after, something that explains how you go from being a normal, functional, invisible person to being this. But there isn’t. There were months. There was a slow accumulation of small things that separately meant nothing. The video you watched twelve times in one rainy afternoon. The afternoon you spent reading everything anyone had ever written about him, old interviews, press articles, comments from people who had seen him in a theatre in London and described the experience as if they had touched something sacred. The day you calculated, without meaning to calculate it, how many flight hours separated you from the city where he would be that week.

Just calculating it. Nothing more. That’s what you told yourself. That’s what you always tell yourself. You can still regret it, you tell yourself now. You can still turn around. You can still open the trunk, call emergency services, invent an impossible explanation and accept that your life ended before it became something worse.

You think about that phone call. You build it in detail while driving, as if the exercise itself could save you from something.

Hello, yes, I’m calling because there’s a person in the trunk of my car. No, they’re not hurt. Well, asleep. Well, not exactly asleep. Yes, I understand that’s a problem. Yes. Yes. I understand.

The problem with imagining that phone call is that in no version does it end well for you, and you know it. You’ve known many things tonight that you pretend not to know. But you don’t turn around.

You keep driving.

The road is almost empty at this hour. One or two trucks in the opposite lane, headlights like huge blind eyes looking at you for a second before disappearing. The wet asphalt reflects the lights in a way that, another time, you would have thought beautiful. Now it only confirms that you can see clearly. That you’re not going to drift. That your reflexes work.

That worries you a little, if you’re being honest.

That your reflexes work. That everything works. That there’s nothing broken in you that explains this from the outside.

Your hands are steady on the wheel.

That’s the most terrifying part. They’re not shaking. They’re not sweating. They don’t look like the hands of a woman who just destroyed everything she once believed she knew about herself.

You look at them for a moment, just a moment, before returning your eyes to the road. Normal hands. Normal fingers. The same hands that made coffee this morning, signed paperwork at work last week, sent your mother a message on Tuesday saying you were fine, that everything was fine, that she shouldn’t worry.

She isn’t worried. That’s the strange thing.

Nobody is worried. That’s part of how you got here too. Invisibility has practical uses.

You think about that. About how many times you wanted to be seen and couldn’t. How many times you took up space in a room and nobody registered it. You’re good at that, at passing through without leaving marks, existing in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone because it doesn’t interrupt anyone either. A presence so soft it’s almost not a presence.

Until tonight. Tonight you interrupt. There’s a body in the trunk of your car. He isn’t dead.

You repeat that to yourself as if it were absolution. As if the distance between what you did and the worst thing you could have done were enough to build something resembling innocence. He isn’t dead. He isn’t hurt, not really, not in a way that matters. He was breathing when you settled him into place. You checked his pulse with two fingers against his neck, with what care you had learned to do that, and it was steady. Regular. The calm rhythm of someone who is simply asleep.

You checked three times. Not because you didn’t trust what your fingers felt. Because you needed the contact.

Three times your fingers against that warm, constant pulse, and all three times something in your chest loosened a little, something tight that had been tight for hours and that can be named in ways you would rather not name.

Just asleep.

Enough not to scream. Enough not to fight. Enough for you to reach the place before the world puts itself back together and he realizes he’s no longer in his.

You think about how he’s going to feel when he wakes up. You’ve thought about it many times, abstractly, in that hazy place where thoughts exist without consequences. But now it’s concrete. Now it has weight.

First there’ll be disorientation, that second of harmless confusion before the body registers that something is wrong. Then the cold, or the heat, or the texture of whatever is beneath him. Then darkness or light, depending on what time you arrive. Then his hands searching for something familiar and finding restraint.

Then he’ll understand. And you’ll be there when he does.

That’s new.

That’s what separates tonight from all the years before. You were always the person on the other side. The one who watches. The one who waits. The one who exists on the edge of something that never quite becomes real.

Tonight you’re the person in the room.

Tonight, when he understands, his eyes are going to find something. They’re going to find you. It’s not just any body.

That’s the problem.

If it were any man, maybe this would be simpler. More brutal. More unforgivable in an ordinary way, the way unforgivable things usually are, without nuance, without the strange extra layer of something that almost resembles logic.

But it isn’t.

That complicates everything in a way you still don’t fully understand, even though you’ve spent miles trying.

It’s him.

Tom Sturridge.

The name sounds different in your head than it does out loud. Out loud it’s just a name, two words, the kind of combination of syllables that could belong to anyone. In your head it has weight. It has history. It carries the density of years of accumulated attention, of hours you added somewhere inside yourself without meaning to.

Or meaning to.

You’re not sure of the difference anymore.

The man thousands of people look at from a distance believing they adore him in a harmless way. The man whose face appears in interviews, red carpets, stolen photographs, edited videos set to sad songs and comments saying exactly the same thing you thought too many times.

How beautiful. How impossible. How unfair.

That last word always felt the most honest to you. Unfairness. As if someone’s beauty were a personal debt.

As if existing that way, with that face, that voice, that way of moving through the world with the apparent discomfort of someone who doesn’t quite know what to do with what he creates in people, were something owed to the world.

Something owed to you. You know it. You know how absurd it sounds. You think it anyway. You’ve been thinking it for years and nothing has changed, and that tells you something about yourself too, something you chose not to hear.

I didn’t want to hurt him. That’s the lie you like best. You settle it carefully inside yourself, as if you could still save something. As if kidnapping someone weren’t already a form of violence.

As if choosing him, following him, waiting, studying him for so long and with such attention that you could describe his verbal tics, the particular cadence with which he pauses before answering a question that makes him uncomfortable, the way his hands search for something to hold when he’s nervous—as if all of that didn’t say more about you than any confession could.

You didn’t want to hurt him. You wanted him to see you. That was all. You repeat it to yourself.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

As if repetition could make it smaller, more manageable, more like something a sane person might have felt. You were never going to do it.

Not really.

There’s a version of this story that ends differently, that always ended differently, years of a different version where you were someone who felt things intensely and didn’t act on them because that’s what functional people do.

That version existed. It was real. You were that person for a long time. But time does strange things to desires that have nowhere to go. It compresses them. Concentrates them. Makes them dense as stone.

He could walk past you on a street, sign something without remembering your face, smile with that perfect politeness famous men learn in order to survive other people’s devotion.

He could look at you and not see you. That’s the unspoken contract. You don’t sign it. Nobody explains it. But it exists:

You look at him.

He doesn’t look at you. And that’s fine. That’s correct. That’s the structure that keeps everything in place.

You broke it.

That’s what keeps turning somewhere behind your eyes while you drive. Not fear of punishment, not yet.

That will come later and you know it and you calculated it with the same coldness you calculated everything else.

What won’t stop is this: You broke the contract.

You crossed over. The person you thought you were, the one who watched from a distance and settled and sublimated and functioned, wasn’t the whole story.

There was something underneath. This. You.

You thought, with a clarity that feels almost offensive given the circumstances, about all the times you came close without reaching this point.

The first time you were in the same city as him, three years ago, and convinced yourself that simply existing in the same space was enough.

It was. For a while it was.

You walked the same streets without knowing if you stepped where he had stepped and it felt sufficient.

Then it wasn’t. Nobody explains escalation either. How obsession redraws the map every time you cross a threshold. How what once felt unthinkable becomes merely uncomfortable, and then understandable, and then inevitable. At no point is there an alarm.

At no point does the world stop and tell you: Here. This is where you should have stopped. There was a moment, you think, maybe six months ago, when this was still only thought.

Hypothetical planning.

The kind of control fantasy people have and never execute because reality is complicated and risks are real and most people—the overwhelming majority—live and die with their obsessions intact and private.

You are not most people. You understand that now with a precision that hurts a little.

The part that hurts most, the part you still don’t know how to name, isn’t fear. It’s something closer to relief.

Something warm and terrible that’s been settled in your chest for hours as if it has the right to be there.

Finally. Finally you did something real.

Now only one question remains, the one you haven’t been able to remove from your head since you closed the trunk.

What are you going to do when he opens his eyes? What is he going to see first? The room? The restraints? You? Or the truth?

You stop at that last one.

The truth.

As if there were only one. As if what he’s going to see when he opens his eyes could be described simply. He’s going to see you, yes. But he’s also going to see something you’ve spent years looking at without fully recognizing: the shape desire takes when it has nowhere left to hide.

Because it’s one thing to be desired from a distance. There’s almost an aesthetic to that. A distance that makes it tolerable for the object of desire. To know you’re being watched without being touched. To know you’re loved by people who will never be in the same room.

It’s abstract. Manageable.

Famous people learn to metabolize it, you assume, to turn it into something compartmentalized, something you can leave in the car before going home.

It’s another thing entirely to wake up and discover someone turned that desire into a cage.

That the distance that made it tolerable disappeared. That the person on the other side of the screen has hands and a car and a room prepared and a plan that has been under construction for months.

You wonder if fear will come first or anger. If he’ll negotiate or scream. If he’ll recognize you, if your face means anything in the catalogue of people he’s met, or if you’ll be entirely new to him, a problem without context, a danger without history.

You wonder if that’s going to hurt.

Probably.

Probably that’s the moment when everything you built in your head over the years collides with what he actually is—not the image, not the recorded voice, not the version that exists in carefully edited twenty-minute interviews, but the man made of flesh and fear and confusion who will be on the other side of this.

And you, who spent years believing you knew every gesture, every inflection in his voice, every way he lowered his gaze before answering a question that was too personal, realize something absurd when the road darkens in front of you.

You know nothing about him. Nothing real. Nothing that matters. You know his public surface with pathological precision. You know what he chose to show and what cameras captured when he didn’t mean them to.

You know secondhand anecdotes and statements filtered through publicists and the collective interpretation of millions of people projecting onto him whatever they needed to project.

You know him the way you know a painting: You can describe every brushstroke, but you know nothing about the brush. You don’t know whether he sleeps on one side or the other. You don’t know if he has nightmares. You don’t know what actually makes him laugh—not that smile you learned to recognize as the polite smile, but the other one, if it exists, if one day you’ll ever be close enough to see it. You don’t know if he’ll be able to forgive you. You don’t know if you care whether he can.

That’s the most honest thought you’ve had all night.

And still you keep going.

The road narrows. The city lights remain behind like a broken promise. The road ahead is dark and you know it by heart. You’ve driven it enough times over the past months as part of something you used to call planning and now have to call by its real name.

Preparation.

There’s something almost ritualistic about that. About the difference between words. Planning is what anyone does before a trip, before a project, before something normal. Preparation carries different weight. Preparation implies that what comes next requires readiness.

That it isn’t only logistics.

That something can go wrong in ways that go beyond the map. You know it. You’ve known it for months. Your hands remain steady.

He hasn’t moved.

You register that in a way that is no longer entirely conscious, that particular silence from the trunk becoming part of the noise of the night, part of the rhythm of all this.

Every time there’s a sharp turn, every time the car gives slightly against uneven asphalt, there’s a second of involuntary attention.

You listen.

Nothing.

You keep driving.

Every time nothing answers from behind you, that terrible relief returns for a moment. Finally you did something real.

You keep driving toward the only possible ending to a story that began, without you realizing it, the first time you said quietly, almost laughing, as if it didn’t matter: He is so painfully handsome it should be illegal. You should have stayed with that thought. You should have let it remain only that.

A small sentence. An idea without consequences. A safe distance between what is felt and what is done.

But you didn’t.

Now he’s in your trunk, and soon he’s going to open his eyes. And you, finally, are going to exist for him.

Reader’s Choice

Before you reach the place you prepared, you pass a police station. The lights are on. For one second, the world gives you a way out. A normal door. A legal door. A door that still belongs to the person you were before tonight.

But he is in the trunk.

Not dead. Not safe. Not yours.

Not yet.

So tell me…

What do you do before he wakes up?

A. You accelerate. You don’t look back.

You have already made your choice.

There is no confession. No hesitation. No last-minute mercy.

By the time he opens his eyes, something in you has gone cold.

When he wakes up: He stays terrifyingly calm. As if he understands immediately that fear will not save him from you.

B. You slow down without meaning to.

Your foot hovers over the brake.

For one second, you almost become someone else. Someone who could still stop. Someone who could still say: I did something terrible, but I stopped before it became worse.

But you don’t.

By the time he opens his eyes, guilt is already sitting between you.

When he wakes up: He tries to manipulate you. Not because he is cruel. Because he sees the crack in you. And he knows cracks can become doors.

C. You watch the building disappear in the rearview mirror.

You don’t stop. But you look. You keep looking until the lights vanish behind you, and something inside you understands that this is the last time the world will feel simple.

You are not only driving away from the police station. You are driving away from yourself.

When he wakes up: He says your name. And that is worse than screaming. Because you wanted him to see you. You never thought about what it would do to you if he did.

Your choice defines how much of you can still be called innocent. And how he will understand you when he opens his eyes.

⏳ Choose fast before the obsession chooses for you. 🖤 Then reblog and let more people pick their obsession. 🔪✨

What do you do before he wakes up?

A. You accelerate. You don’t look back.

B. You slow down without meaning to.

C. You watch the building disappear in the rearview mirror.

Voting ended onJun 6

[liz19forever]

⏳🖤 Vote before the countdown ends… and if you already voted, reblog so someone else can choose their obsession. 🔥

[liz19forever]