Pairing: Dream of the Endless x Virgin Reader
Warning: Angst, AU-Fic, Eventually Smut, Graphic Scenes, Death Tag List: Please comment below if you wish to be tagged.
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The Dreaming always knew when Calliope came to him.
It remembered her footsteps.
Long before she reached the palace, white flowers appeared along the paths beneath her feet. Unwritten verses stirred inside the library. The fountains began singing melodies that had not been heard since the age when mortals still believed poetry came directly from the mouths of gods.
Matthew watched the distant gates open from his place upon the library balcony.
Calliope crossed the bridge alone, her dark hair unbound and her pale gown moving gently around her ankles. She did not walk like a guest uncertain of her welcome.
She walked like someone who had once known every passage in the palace.
Someone who had slept in its king’s bed.
Matthew tilted his head.
“Do you think them shagging means they’re getting back together?”
Lucienne continued writing.
Her pen did not hesitate.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me.”
“Regrettably.”
Matthew hopped along the stone railing, following Calliope’s progress towards the palace.
“She’s been here four times this month. Twice she stayed until morning. Last time, His Darkness cancelled the council meeting and came down three hours late looking marginally less miserable than usual.”
Lucienne turned a page.
“That proves very little.”
“It proves they weren’t discussing poetry all night.”
“Calliope is the Muse of epic poetry.”
“Even epic poetry has to take a break eventually.”
Lucienne lowered her pen at last.
“I doubt their renewed physical intimacy means that Lord Morpheus and Calliope have reconciled.”
Matthew’s beak fell open slightly.
“You know about it?”
Lucienne looked over the rims of her spectacles.
“Matthew, the palace knows about it. The palace changes the sheets.”
A nearby bookshelf shifted with what might have been embarrassment.
Matthew glanced at it.
“Right. Fair point.”
Lucienne returned her attention to the ledger.
“Since returning from his imprisonment, His Lordship has occasionally demonstrated a greater willingness to acknowledge certain personal needs.”
“You mean sex.”
“I mean that he has become marginally less committed to denying himself every comfort until the denial becomes unbearable for everyone around him.”
“So, sex.”
Lucienne sighed.
“Thus far, he has separated physical desire from the question of reconciliation with an impressive degree of discipline.”
Matthew stared at her.
“You’re impressed that he can shag his ex-wife without proposing to her again?”
Lucienne’s mouth tightened.
“Given His Lordship’s history, yes.”
Matthew considered that.
“Actually, that’s fair.”
The great doors opened below.
Calliope entered the palace.
The flowers along the bridge vanished behind her.
Lucienne watched them disappear.
Her expression became more serious.
“Whatever exists between them, it is not simple.”
“Nothing involving him is simple.”
“No.”
Lucienne closed the ledger.
“It rarely is.”
************
Dream waited for Calliope in his private solar rather than upon his throne.
That alone spoke of the altered understanding between them.
The room lay beyond the formal chambers of the palace, where there were no petitioners, no subjects and no need for ceremony. A low fire burned beneath a dark mantel. Tall windows opened upon a quiet sea beneath a moonless sky.
Calliope found him standing before one of those windows.
He did not turn immediately.
“You came sooner than expected.”
“Would you prefer that I leave and return at a more inconvenient hour?”
The faintest suggestion of amusement touched his face as he looked towards her.
“No.”
Calliope crossed the room.
Her hand moved briefly against the front of his coat before she kissed him.
It was neither tentative nor tender.
It was familiar.
That was more dangerous.
Dream placed one hand at her waist and drew her nearer. For several moments, Olympus, the Dreaming and every old wound between them ceased to matter.
When Calliope pulled away, she remained within his arms.
“You did not summon me.”
“You require no summons.”
“That sounds dangerously like welcome.”
“It was intended as such.”
Her expression softened.
There had been a time when such words would have come easily between them.
There had also been a time when Dream would have allowed pride to choke them before admitting that he had wanted her company.
His imprisonment had changed him.
Not completely.
Calliope doubted anything could accomplish that.
But he reached for her now when once he might have remained motionless and expected her to understand.
He admitted loneliness occasionally, though never in that exact language.
And on certain nights, when neither of them wished to speak of Orpheus, their marriage or the centuries that had passed between them, he allowed desire to become simpler than memory.
Calliope had not decided whether this was healing or merely a more graceful manner of reopening the same wound.
Dream released her slowly.
“Something troubles you.”
“My father.”
His expression cooled.
“Zeus has troubled me since well before our marriage.”
“You never liked him.”
“No.”
“You concealed it more carefully once.”
“I loved you.”
The words stopped her.
Dream appeared almost as surprised by them as she was.
He looked away first.
“My regard for you made certain tolerances necessary.”
Calliope watched his profile.
“Loved?”
He was silent.
The old answer would have angered her.
Tonight, it merely hurt.
Dream turned from the window.
“What has your father done that troubles you?”
Calliope understood the change of subject for what it was and allowed it only because the matter had brought her there.
“He has sent invitations to the principal courts of Olympus. He is gathering the gods tomorrow evening.”
“For what purpose?”
“He claims he intends to settle the dispute over the processional roads. But I fear that he has several motives.”
Dream’s eyes darkened.
The ancient roads between divine realms had once passed safely through the dreams of mortals. Worshippers had slept inside temples and dreamed their way into the presence of gods. Oracles had received visions. Priests had crossed symbolic landscapes which existed only within the Dreaming.
Most of those roads had faded with their worshippers.
Several had recently reopened.
Without permission.
One now connected an abandoned Olympian temple to the borders of Asgard. Another descended into Delirium’s realm. A third had torn through the dreams of hundreds of mortals, leaving them with memories belonging to dead worshippers.
The damage had not begun within the Dreaming.
That did not make it any less Dream’s responsibility to repair.
“Zeus requested my presence earlier today,” he said.
“Will you attend?”
“The breach must be contained.”
“That was not what I asked.”
Dream looked at her.
“Yes.”
Calliope walked towards the fire.
“Then you should know why the roads opened.”
“Olympus has refused to provide a satisfactory account.”
“Because the satisfactory account embarrasses my father.”
“How so?”
Calliope glanced at him.
“My sister opened them.”
Dream regarded her in silence.
Calliope waited, but he offered no immediate response. His expression remained unchanged, save for the faint deepening of the shadows beneath his eyes.
At length, he said, “You possess eight sisters among the Muses alone, Calliope. Zeus has fathered considerably more children than even he appears capable of counting. You will need to be specific.”
“Not one of the Muses.”
She gave him your name.
Dream searched his memory and found little attached to it beyond fragments gathered from Delirium’s occasional, disordered accounts: an Olympian girl who kept the company of Váli, who disappeared into the Waking for years at a time and who had once, according to Delirium, taught a mountain to dance because it had looked lonely.
“She is the bastard child of my father and a mortal woman,” Calliope said. “At least, that is the account Olympus accepts.”
Dream’s gaze sharpened.
“Accepts?”
“Zeus has never named her mother. He claims she died shortly after the birth.”
“And you do not believe him.”
“I do not make a habit of believing my father when a lie serves him better than the truth.”
“A prudent habit.”
Calliope moved closer to the fire.
“She has always been difficult. Impulsive. Unpredictable. She wanders where she pleases and rarely considers what may follow her.”
Dream remained still.
“You describe temperament. Not power.”
Calliope looked towards him.
“No one is entirely certain what her power is. Perhaps she has none.”
That answer displeased him more than any certainty might have done.
The flames in the hearth bent away from him.
“Yet she possesses the ability to reopen roads between divine realms.”
“Apparently.”
“That is concerning.”
The quietness with which he said it lent the words greater weight.
Calliope folded her arms.
“You need not make it sound like an accusation against me.”
“It was not.”
“It sounded remarkably like one.”
“Then you have mistaken precision for reproach.”
“A distinction only you would expect another person to find comforting.”
Dream inclined his head slightly, conceding nothing.
“How did she open them?”
“I do not know.”
“Did she perform a rite?”
“No.”
“Invoke an ancient compact?”
“Not knowingly.”
“Was she attempting to enter the Dreaming?”
“I am uncertain she was attempting anything.”
Dream’s mouth tightened.
“Things of consequence are frequently done by those who insist they intended nothing.”
“She danced.”
His gaze settled upon her.
“She danced.”
“That is all I have been told. Apollo had sealed several ancient songs and prophecies within one of his sanctuaries. She entered with Delirium and Váli and let them free. Something was disturbed. She began to dance, and the roads answered her.”
“Apollo stored mortal dreams and prophetic works within a sanctuary beyond the authority of the Dreaming.”
It was not phrased as a question.
“He would argue that they belonged to him.”
“Apollo has long mistaken inspiration for ownership.”
Calliope regarded him for a moment, then shook her head.
“Let us discuss this no further.”
Dream’s gaze remained upon her.
“You came to warn me of a breach within my realm and your father’s intentions.”
“I have warned you.”
“You have provided an account notable for its uncertainty.”
“It is the only account I possess.”
“Then there are questions still unanswered.”
Calliope moved away from the fire and came to stand before him.
“And they will remain unanswered until you speak to Zeus.”
Dream looked down at her, his expression grave.
She reached up and adjusted the collar of his coat, though there was nothing wrong with it.
“Despite, politics is not why I came here tonight.”
Silence settled between them.
Dream’s eyes lowered briefly to her hand.
“No?”
“No.”
Understanding entered his face slowly, followed by something quieter and considerably less guarded.
“Then why did you come?”
Calliope’s fingers curled into the black fabric.
“You are the lord of dreams, Oneiros. I should not have to explain everything.”
“Dreams are rarely improved by careless interpretation.”
“Then perhaps you should stop speaking long enough to be certain.”
She drew him down and kissed him.
For once, Dream offered no further questions.
***********
You had not intended to start a war.
That should have counted for something.
Váli disagreed.
“Intent ceases to matter after the third armed division becomes involved.”
You leaned against the side of Apollo’s overturned chariot and inspected the damage.
One golden wheel had broken free and rolled into a fountain. Two of the sun-horses had taken shelter behind a row of marble statues. The third stood upon the roof of Athena’s temple, refusing every attempt to coax it down.
“There were only two divisions.”
Váli looked across the courtyard.
A company of Ares’s soldiers fought one another near the gates, each apparently convinced that the others had betrayed them. Several of Athena’s warriors had formed a shield wall around a group of frightened nymphs, though no one seemed certain whom they were defending them from.
Váli pointed towards the western colonnade.
“The archers constitute a third.”
“They stopped shooting.”
An arrow struck the chariot beside your head.
You looked at it.
“Mostly.”
Delirium sat cross-legged inside the ruined chariot, feeding pieces of sunlight to a small purple creature she had produced from one of her sleeves.
The creature had too many mouths and appeared deeply dissatisfied with all of them.
“Maybe the arrows are only trying to get somewhere else,” Delirium said. “Sometimes sharp things have destinations, but they forget to tell the people standing in front of them.”
Váli folded his arms.
He appeared almost mortal beside the Olympians surrounding you. His clothing was dark and practical, his fair hair braided away from his face. A narrow line of runes marked one wrist. His sword remained sheathed at his side.
He did not need to draw it to appear dangerous.
Váli had been born for vengeance. The purpose remained within him even when he stood perfectly still.
At present, he looked irritated rather than murderous.
That was encouraging.
“Tell me again,” he said, “why we entered Apollo’s sanctuary.”
“We were minding our own business.”
Delirium looked up from the creature.
You continued.
“And then something started crying.”
Váli’s expression shifted.
“You heard it as well?”
You nodded.
You had been sitting with Delirium beside one of the fountains while Váli attempted to explain why stealing Odin’s ravens would create more difficulties than amusement.
Then the sound had reached you.
Not through the courtyard.
Through your bones.
A thin, desperate cry from somewhere beneath Apollo’s sanctuary.
You had first mistaken it for a wounded animal. Delirium had gone still beside you, all colour draining from her hair until it became nearly white.
“It was yellow crying,” she had whispered.
You had not understood what she meant.
You rarely did immediately.
But you had understood that something was asking for help.
“There was no person inside,” Váli said.
“No,” you replied. “There were dreams.”
Your gaze moved towards the sanctuary.
Its great golden doors hung open now, one torn from its hinges. Apollo’s seals still smouldered across the threshold, broken from within rather than without.
Behind those doors, Apollo had hidden hundreds of things taken from mortal dreamers.
Songs composed in sleep and forgotten upon waking.
Dances dreamed by people whose bodies had never been able to perform them.
Visions sent to oracles who had died before they could speak.
Unfinished prophecies.
Nightmares mistaken for divine warnings.
Dreams offered in worship by mortals who had believed Apollo would carry them safely into the future.
He had kept them after their temples fell and their worshippers forgot his name.
Apollo called it preservation.
You called it imprisonment.
When you, Delirium and Váli had entered the sanctuary, the crying had grown louder.
The dreams had been confined inside golden vessels lining the walls. Some trembled behind glass. Others beat against sealed amphorae like trapped birds. Words moved soundlessly across their surfaces.
You had placed your hand against one.
The vessel had been warm.
Something inside had recognised you.
The golden seal split beneath your fingers.
You had not broken it deliberately.
You had barely touched it.
But the dream trapped within had rushed out and circled you in a streak of colour and music. Others had begun throwing themselves against their containers.
The entire sanctuary had filled with pleading.
You could not leave them there.
That was the part Apollo would neglect to mention.
You had opened a second vessel.
Then a third.
After that, the dreams had begun freeing one another.
Songs poured from shattered jars and took visible shape beneath the golden dome. Prophecies uncoiled themselves from sealed scrolls. Forgotten dances filled the air with rhythms no living musician knew how to play.
One of those rhythms had entered you.
You had followed it without thinking.
Only a few steps at first.
A turn beneath the dome.
One bare foot sliding across warm marble.
Your body answering music that seemed older than the sanctuary, older than Apollo and perhaps older than Olympus itself.
Then the world had moved with you.
The statues lining the walls had stepped down from their pedestals and begun to dance.
Apollo’s arrows had lifted from their cases and flown without bows.
The freed dreams had poured through the sanctuary doors and spread across Olympus, seeking the mortal minds from which they had once been taken.
Some had mistaken gods for dreamers.
Ares’s soldiers had been seized by dreams of battle and turned upon whatever stood nearest.
Athena’s warriors had found themselves defending people who existed only within abandoned prophecies.
Aphrodite’s attendants had been overwhelmed by the desires of mortals who had died centuries earlier and begun embracing strangers, statues and, in one unfortunate case, one of Hera’s peacocks.
The confusion had spread through half of Olympus before Váli managed to drag you from the sanctuary.
You remembered only fragments after that.
Váli catching your arm.
Delirium laughing as gravity changed direction.
Apollo’s chariot passing overhead without Apollo inside it.
The sensation of another heartbeat awakening beneath your own.
Older than yours.
Larger.
Hungry.
You rubbed one bare foot against the back of your calf.
Blood darkened your heel where the skin had split during the dance. It was already knitting itself closed.
“I did not mean to release all of them,” you said.
Delirium climbed out of the chariot and approached you.
She placed both hands against your cheeks.
Her eyes did not match.
They rarely did.
“You were dancing like the red mother.”
The courtyard seemed to grow quiet around you.
Not truly quiet.
Soldiers continued fighting beyond the fountain. Horses screamed. Somewhere inside the sanctuary, Apollo shouted threats involving the destruction of Asgard and the dismemberment of Váli.
But the noise reached you as though through deep water.
“What red mother?”
Delirium’s expression changed.
Confusion slipped beneath her delight.
“The one who is not there anymore because she broke herself into a present and nobody read the little card.”
Váli’s attention sharpened.
“Delirium.”
She released your face.
“I forgot.”
“Forgot what?” you asked.
“That it has not happened when you know it yet.”
You stared at her.
“That sentence means nothing.”
“It means lots of things.”
Her hair shifted through several colours at once.
“That is the problem.”
A blast of thunder shook the courtyard.
The remaining soldiers stopped fighting.
Zeus appeared at the top of the sanctuary steps.
Hera stood beside him, her expression carved from disgust. Athena followed, carrying her helmet beneath one arm.
Apollo emerged last.
His golden robes were torn and smoking. Half his hair had been burned away, leaving one side considerably shorter than the other.
You pressed your lips together.
Váli glanced at you.
“Do not.”
A sound escaped your throat.
Apollo pointed at you.
“She laughs.”
That made it worse.
You covered your mouth, though your shoulders continued shaking.
“She desecrated my sanctuary,” Apollo said. “She shattered sacred vessels, stole divine prophecies, crippled my chariot and turned my own arrows against me.”
You lowered your hand.
“The dreams asked for help.”
“They belonged to me.”
“They belonged to the mortals who dreamed them.”
Apollo’s face twisted.
“Those mortals are dead.”
“That does not make their dreams yours.”
His remaining hair caught fire.
You looked towards Váli.
“Was that me?”
“Probably.”
Apollo lunged forward.
Athena caught his arm before he reached you.
“Do not make the situation worse.”
“She has already made it intolerable.”
He pulled against Athena’s grip.
“She must be confined.”
You lifted your brows.
“Again?”
Zeus descended the stairs.
The humour left you.
He did not look like your father when he was angry.
He looked like a king who had discovered that one of his possessions no longer functioned as intended.
“You brought a son of Odin into Olympus without leave.”
Váli’s posture changed.
“I came at her invitation.”
Lightning moved across Zeus’s fingers.
Váli did not flinch.
You stepped between them before sense could intervene.
“He did nothing.”
“He assisted you.”
“He stopped me.”
Apollo laughed bitterly.
“After she had already turned the court into animals.”
Hera’s voice cut across the courtyard.
“This cannot continue.”
You looked at her.
“I agree. Apollo should apologise.”
“You will be silent.”
Power entered her words.
Your jaw locked.
The force pressed hard against your tongue, demanding obedience.
Something inside you rebelled.
The paving stones beneath your feet shifted.
A rhythm passed through the courtyard.
One beat.
Then another.
Every soldier straightened.
Every weapon lifted.
Desire, anger and anticipation rushed through the gathered court with such force that several gods stepped backwards.
Zeus raised one hand.
Lightning struck the ground before you.
Váli pulled you away before it landed.
The impact split the courtyard.
Delirium clapped.
“Again.”
“No,” Váli said.
He caught both your wrists.
Not painfully.
Firmly.
The rhythm faltered.
You dragged in a breath.
“Let go.”
Váli’s gaze lifted to the weapons circling above you, their blades trembling in time with the pulse beneath your skin.
“No.”
Zeus surveyed the ruined courtyard. Whatever anger had filled his face receded, replaced by something colder and more decisive.
“Enough.”
The word struck every wall of Olympus.
Divine authority crashed through the courtyard. The weapons dropped from the air, clattering across the marble. Soldiers fell to their knees or collapsed where they stood, their borrowed fury extinguished at once.
Even Delirium stopped smiling.
Zeus turned towards her.
“Leave Olympus.”
She tilted her head.
“Why? We were having fun.”
“Because your presence has encouraged sufficient disorder.”
Her hair turned black.
For a moment, she appeared much older.
Much sadder.
Zeus dismissed her with a glance and addressed Váli instead.
“Take her with you. You may both depart freely, provided you leave now.”
Váli’s hands remained firm around your wrists.
“And her?”
Zeus looked at you.
“She remains.”
“Then so do I.”
You turned towards him.
“Váli.”
“No.”
It was the voice he used when vengeance settled into his bones—quiet, certain and far more dangerous than anger.
Zeus recognised it as well.
“You would provoke conflict between Asgard and Olympus for her?”
Váli’s expression remained calm.
“You mistake the direction from which that conflict would begin.”
Athena stepped between them before Zeus could answer.
“This serves no one.”
She turned towards you.
“The roads you opened already continue to widen. The dreams you freed are crossing into divine territories, and the borders between realms are beginning to fail. The breach must be repaired before it spreads further.”
“Then repair it.”
Athena’s expression tightened.
“We cannot.”
You gave a short, incredulous laugh.
“That sounds like an Olympus problem.”
Apollo stepped forward.
His damaged robes were still smoking at one shoulder.
“You are the Olympus problem.”
There it was.
The accusation none of them usually dared to speak in open court.
You had heard it whispered in corridors, muttered at feasts and implied each time Zeus confined you somewhere no one would need to see you.
You were the mistake.
The illegitimate daughter without a mother.
The uncontrolled power no one could name.
The embarrassment who spent more time with Delirium and Norse gods than with her own family.
Hera looked at Zeus.
“She must be removed.”
Apollo nodded.
“Permanently.”
Ares approached from the far end of the courtyard, blood running from one temple.
“Give her to me.”
Your stomach turned.
“No.”
Ares smiled.
“I could teach her control.”
“You could not teach a dog to bite.”
His smile disappeared.
Athena spoke before he could answer.
“She cannot remain upon Olympus without restraint.”
“Then I will leave.”
Zeus looked at you fully for the first time.
“No.”
The word landed with the force of a locked door.
“You have caused sufficient trouble in other realms. You trespass where you please, disturb powers you do not understand and leave others to contend with the consequences. No one can control you.”
His gaze shifted beyond you towards Apollo’s ruined sanctuary, the fractured marble and the weapons scattered across the courtyard.
His silence lasted only a moment, but something cold and deliberate settled into his expression.
Delirium reached for your hand.
“We can go to my place.”
“No,” Zeus said.
The force in his voice made the air fracture.
Delirium blinked.
Váli drew his sword.
Athena raised her shield.
For one breath, three pantheons stood upon the edge of conflict.
Then Zeus smiled.
It was worse than his anger.
“There will be no need.”
His gaze settled upon you with a satisfaction you did not understand.
“I have had an idea.”
**********
Dream accepted the invitation to Olympus because refusing would not close the roads.
He did not accept out of courtesy.
He did not accept because Zeus had invoked their former kinship through Calliope.
And he did not accept because Olympus deserved his assistance.
The breach crossed through to the Dreaming and several of his dreams and nightmares were now on the loose.
That made it his responsibility.
He arrived at sunset.
The gates of Olympus opened upon clouds stained gold and red. Marble palaces rose along the mountain. Music travelled across the courts, too polished to contain genuine joy.
Hermes received him at the outer colonnade.
“Lord Morpheus.”
Dream regarded him.
“Hermes.”
The messenger god offered a careful smile.
“Zeus awaits you in the great hall and I was instructed to escort you.”
“Then do so.”
They crossed the court in silence.
Olympians watched from balconies and temple steps. Some bowed. Others merely stared. Dream ignored them.
He had not walked these halls since before his imprisonment.
Too much remained unchanged.
The same ostentatious displays of power. The same golden statues. The same worship of hierarchy disguised as reverence for tradition.
Calliope waited near the doors of the great hall.
She wore white now, her dark hair arranged in the formal style of the Muses. Her expression revealed nothing to the court.
Her eyes revealed everything to Dream.
“You came.”
“I said that I would.”
Her gaze moved over him.
“You do not appear pleased.”
“I am upon Olympus.”
That nearly made her smile.
Then Orpheus stepped from behind one of the columns.
Dream became still.
His son wore a dark red tunic and carried no lyre. The absence of it seemed deliberate, as though he would not allow music to soften the encounter.
For several moments, father and son regarded one another.
Calliope stood between them without physically occupying the space.
“Father,” Orpheus said.
Dream’s face did not change.
“Orpheus.”
“You came to save Olympus from your nightmares?”
“No.”
Orpheus’s mouth tightened.
“Of course not.”
“I came to repair damage inflicted upon my realm.”
“There is always a distinction with you.”
“Distinctions matter.”
“More than people?”
Calliope closed her eyes.
Dream’s shadows stirred.
“This is neither the time nor the place.”
“It never is.”
Orpheus turned away before Dream could answer.
The rejection struck with a familiarity Dream despised.
Calliope watched her son enter the hall.
“You could have spoken more gently.”
“He did not seek gentleness.”
“He rarely expects it from you.”
Dream looked at her.
“Would he have believed it?”
Calliope did not answer.
The doors opened.
The court of Olympus waited within.
Zeus sat upon the central throne. Hera occupied the seat beside him. Athena, Apollo, Ares and the other principal gods arranged themselves according to rank.
Dream entered without bowing.
He stopped at the centre of the hall.
Zeus smiled.
“Morpheus. It has been too long.”
“Not long enough.”
A few of the younger gods looked away to conceal their reactions.
Zeus descended from the dais.
“You remain displeased by ancient matters.”
“I remain capable of remembering them.”
“Then let us create a more favourable memory tonight.”
Dream’s gaze passed over the assembled court.
He noted Apollo’s damaged hair, the bruising along Ares’s face and the cracks still running through several sections of marble.
“Your realm appears unsettled.”
Apollo’s expression sharpened.
Zeus lifted one hand.
“The disorder will be addressed after the treaty.”
“The disorder is the reason for the treaty.”
“One reason.”
Calliope took her place beside the other Muses, though she remained nearer to Dream than Olympus required.
Orpheus stood at the edge of the court.
He did not look at his father again.
Athena summoned the image of the processional roads above the hall.
They twisted through the air as threads of light and darkness, crossing borders that should have remained separate. Dream felt every point at which they had torn through his realm.
“Five roads have reopened,” Athena said. “Three pass through mortal dreams. One has entered Asgard. The final road has no stable destination.”
“It enters the realm of Delirium,” Dream said.
Athena inclined her head.
“Intermittently.”
“My sister’s realm possesses no fixed border. An unstable road through it may emerge anywhere.”
“We understand the danger.”
“You concealed its cause.”
Zeus spread his hands.
“The cause is less important than the remedy.”
“The cause determines whether the remedy will endure.”
A silence followed.
Zeus looked towards Athena.
She answered reluctantly.
“The roads responded to an uncontrolled divine force within Olympus.”
“Whose?”
Apollo spoke.
“A reckless child who has exhausted every tolerance extended to her.”
Calliope’s expression hardened.
Dream looked towards Zeus.
“Your daughter.”
Zeus did not ask how he knew.
“She opened the roads unintentionally.”
“You confined her.”
“For the protection of Olympus.”
“Or for your convenience.”
Lightning flickered above the throne.
“Take care, Dream King.”
The shadows behind Dream rose along the walls.
“You invited me into your hall because damage originating beneath your authority now threatens my realm. Do not warn me against naming what I see.”
Zeus held his gaze.
Then he smiled again.
“Very well.”
The formal negotiation began.
Olympus would relinquish all claim to roads passing through the Dreaming.
Apollo would send prophecy only through gates sanctioned by Dream.
No Olympian god would enter a mortal dream without invitation, function or explicit permission from the Dreaming.
In exchange, Dream would preserve the remaining sleeping temples of Olympus and prevent hostile pantheons from claiming the abandoned paths.
The terms were bitterly contested.
Apollo demanded unrestricted access to his oracles.
Dream refused and explained that those contained within dreams shouldn’t have been in his possession in the first place.
Ares demanded the right to enter the dreams of soldiers who prayed to him.
Dream refused.
Aphrodite argued that desire could not be governed by borders.
Dream informed her that desire was not the same as trespass.
Hour after hour passed beneath increasingly cold politeness.
Finally, Athena summoned the completed treaty.
The scroll hovered between Dream and Zeus.
“One matter remains,” she said.
Dream read the final clause.
“Olympus shall provide a living pledge through which the reopened roads may be sealed.”
“Yes,” Zeus said.
“Define the pledge.”
“A divine embodiment of Olympus capable of bearing the bond.”
“A flame?”
“Living.”
“A sacred creature?”
Zeus smiled faintly.
“Of a kind.”
Calliope moved forward.
“Father.”
Zeus ignored her.
Dream read the clause again.
The road could not be sealed through an ordinary artefact. Whatever had opened it had become connected to the breach and an equally strong force would need to anchor its closure.
He understood that Zeus was concealing something.
He did not yet understand the full obscenity of it.
“The pledge shall remain within the Dreaming,” Dream said, “until another means of sustaining the sealed roads is created.”
“Agreed.”
“It shall remain beneath my protection and shall suffer no interference from Olympus while within my realm.”
Zeus’s smile faltered.
“No interference without cause.”
“No interference.”
A long pause.
“Agreed.”
“The pledge shall not be used to weaken the sovereignty of the Dreaming.”
“Agreed.”
“Then I shall receive it.”
Calliope stepped towards him.
“Oneiros, wait.”
Dream looked at her.
Zeus spoke before she could continue.
“You have negotiated every protection required.”
Dream turned back towards the treaty.
“By my realm and by my function, I shall receive the living pledge of Olympus. I shall shelter it within the Dreaming and preserve the bond until the roads may be safely sustained by other means.”
The oath entered creation.
The scroll ignited with silver light.
Throughout the Dreaming, the reopened roads shifted.
They began reaching towards something within Olympus.
Someone.
Calliope looked at her father with naked horror.
“What have you done?”
Zeus sat back upon his throne.
“Bring in the pledge.”
The doors at the far end of the hall opened.
Two of Ares’s soldiers entered first.
Between them, restrained in gold and celestial bronze, you were dragged into the court.
Chains circled your wrists.
Another bound your ankles closely enough to prevent more than a short step. A collar rested against your throat, marked with runes intended to suppress divine speech.
Blood stained the pale gown someone had forced upon you.
Your hair hung loose around your face.
The moment Dream saw you, the shadows throughout the hall stopped moving.
For one terrible second, there was no expression upon his face at all.
Then appalled comprehension entered his eyes.
Calliope turned upon Zeus.
“No.”
Zeus lifted his goblet.
“The living pledge of Olympus.”
Dream looked from you to the chains.
“Release her.”
His voice was very quiet.
The soldiers hesitated.
Zeus did not.
“She is dangerous when permitted to move freely.”
“Release her.”
Darkness spread across the floor.
Ares stepped forward.
“She opened five roads and nearly began a war within Olympus. Those restraints are necessary.”
Dream’s eyes became black.
“You have brought a bound woman before me and named her a provision of treaty.”
Zeus smiled.
“Not merely a provision.”
He raised his cup towards Dream.
“A gift.”
The court erupted in whispers.
You stared at Zeus.
The collar prevented speech, but the disbelief in your face required no words.
Dream appeared carved from night.
“No.”
“You have already sworn to receive her.”
“You described a pledge.”
“And she is one.”
“She is your daughter.”
“Precisely. Olympus offers its own blood as assurance of good faith.”
You lunged towards him then.
The chain between your ankles caught.
You fell hard upon one knee.
Something in Dream’s expression broke.
The shadows struck the soldiers first.
They were thrown backwards without Dream moving a hand. One collided with a pillar. The other disappeared into darkness and reappeared at the far edge of the hall.
You remained kneeling, wrists bound before you.
Dream approached.
He stopped before touching you.
“May I remove the restraint upon your voice?”
You stared at him.
No one had asked permission for anything that night.
After a moment, you nodded.
Dream lifted one hand.
The collar shattered.
You dragged in a breath.
Then you screamed at Zeus.
“No.”
The word tore across Olympus.
Every flame in the hall bent towards you.
The marble beneath your knees cracked.
“You told me I would stand before the court.”
Zeus remained seated.
“And so you do.”
“You said nothing of this.”
“You would not have cooperated.”
“You are giving me away.”
“I am securing peace between realms.”
“By handing me to an Endless?”
Your voice shook.
“To be kept in his kingdom? To be owned by him?”
Dream turned towards Zeus.
The disgust in his face was no longer concealed.
“Is this how you treat your own blood?”
Zeus lifted his brows, apparently untroubled.
“You might show a little gratitude. You have always displayed a particular interest in my daughters, Morpheus.”
Calliope went rigid.
Dream did not move.
Zeus’s smile widened.
“After all, you married one before.”
The silence became unbearable.
“Calliope was not given to me,” Dream said.
“No. That arrangement was less orderly.”
Calliope’s face lost all colour.
Zeus gestured towards you.
“This one is young. Unwed. Untouched. Not a Muse, which should spare you the inconvenience of poets. She is beautiful when she is not dressed like a mortal vagrant, and her temperament may improve under firmer authority which, I have no doubt, you can provide.”
The horror upon Dream’s face became something colder than anger.
“You catalogue your daughter as though she were livestock.”
“I describe the value of a gift.”
“A person is not a gift.”
“You have sworn to receive her.”
“I swore to receive a living pledge. I did not consent to the ownership of a woman who has no choice in this matter.”
“Call it protection, guardianship or hospitality. The language is immaterial.”
Dream looked down at you.
You pulled against the chains around your wrists.
“Do not pretend you are different.”
His expression tightened.
“I have made no claim upon you.”
“Can you send me back?”
Silence.
The roads above the hall twisted towards you.
Dream looked at them.
Then at the treaty.
“Not without breaking the compact.”
“Then break it.”
“The roads would tear through the dreams of countless mortals.”
“That is not my fault.”
“No.”
His answer came without hesitation.
“It is not.”
That almost made it worse.
You struggled to your feet.
“Then refuse me.”
Dream’s jaw tightened.
“I cannot refuse the bond without abandoning my realm to damage I have sworn to prevent.”
“So you have no choice.”
“No.”
“And neither do I.”
He did not answer.
You laughed, but the sound broke halfway through.
“Then I am his gift, whatever word you use.”
“No.”
The force of Dream’s reply shook dust from the pillars.
He lowered his voice.
“You will not be my possession, consort, concubine, servant or wife. No claim shall be made upon your body or will. You shall be received into the Dreaming beneath my protection because I have been deceived into an oath I cannot honourably break.”
Pairing: Dream of the Endless x Reader (Hob's Daughter) Warning: Angst, AU-Fic, Eventually Smut, Graphic Scenes, Death Tag List: Please comment below if you wish to be tagged.
Please comment and engage! It means the world to me ❤️
You lasted until half past ten. That was considerably longer than anyone who knew you well would have expected.
The green book sat upon the bedside table while you prepared for bed. You brushed your teeth without looking at it. You changed into an old shirt, placed your phone on charge and checked that your alarm had been set for rehearsal.
Then you climbed beneath the covers and picked up the book.
This was not technically disobeying him.
He had told you not to read the final chapter before sleep. He had not forbidden you from reading the preceding chapters. There were twenty-three of those. You could read one or two, satisfy your curiosity and stop well before reaching the ending. The Drowned Orchard began with a woman returning to the country estate upon which her elder sister had drowned seventeen years earlier.
The estate possessed an orchard that produced fruit despite every tree having died. The servants refused to eat it. The heroine’s mother called the harvest a blessing. A neighbouring physician suggested that grief had affected the entire household.
The heroine began hearing her sister singing beneath the frozen lake.
By the end of the fourth chapter, you had forgotten the time. By the ninth, you had moved closer to the lamp. By the fifteenth, the heroine had discovered that the orchard’s roots extended beneath the lake and into the family crypt. The dead trees were not producing fruit. They were producing memories. Anyone who ate from them remembered the lives of the dead.
You read the twenty-second chapter with your knees drawn beneath your chin. The heroine entered the crypt and discovered her sister’s name carved into a coffin that contained no body.
The chapter ended with singing beneath the floor. You turned the page.
Chapter Twenty-Three. The heroine followed the roots into a chamber beneath the lake.
You looked towards the clock. Two seventeen.
The final chapter waited upon the opposite page.
You remembered your father’s strange friend standing inside the New Inn, the green book between his pale hands.
Do not read the final chapter before sleep. No explanation. No indication of what might happen if you did.
Merely a warning offered in that low, grave voice of his, as though your disobedience had been anticipated long before you had committed it.
You closed the book. Then you opened it again.
This was precisely why warnings within stories were irritating. They depended upon characters being given insufficient information and then blamed for acting upon entirely reasonable curiosity.
Do not enter the room. Do not open the box. Do not read the final chapter. No one ever explained why.
You placed the book face down upon the bedside table.
For several minutes, you lay in darkness listening to the rain against the window. Then you switched the lamp on again.
“This is ridiculous.”
You picked up the book and read the final chapter.
The heroine descended beneath the frozen lake. The singing grew louder. She discovered her sister alive within the roots, unchanged from the day of her disappearance. Her sister had not drowned. The orchard had taken her.
It had preserved every member of the family who had died upon the estate, feeding upon their memories while returning those memories as fruit. The mother had known. She had continued tending the trees because each harvest allowed her to remember the daughter she had lost.
The heroine cut through the roots and freed her sister. The orchard died. The lake thawed. The sisters left the estate together. It was almost a happy ending. Almost.
The final sentence read:
When spring came, they discovered that neither of them could remember which sister had drowned.
You stared at the words. A faint pressure moved through the room. Not sound. Not movement. Merely the sensation of something becoming aware of you.
You looked towards the dark window. Your reflection looked back. Nothing stood behind it. You closed the book and switched off the lamp.
Sleep did not come immediately.
The final sentence repeated itself in your mind. You imagined the sisters travelling together, each carrying memories that might belong to the other.
You wondered what happened when a person remembered a life they had not lived.
At some point, the rain disappeared. You found yourself standing within the orchard.
The trees were black and leafless. Their branches twisted against a white and depthless sky. Fruit hung from them in impossible abundance: apples as pale as bone, pears dark with bruising and small red plums that pulsed faintly as though each contained a beating heart.
Snow covered the earth. You wore no coat, yet you were not cold. The frozen lake stretched between the trees. Something moved beneath the ice.
You approached it. A woman floated below the surface with her eyes open. Her long hair moved slowly through the water. One hand pressed against the underside of the ice. You knelt. Her mouth opened.
Your own voice came from beneath the frozen lake.
“You were warned.”
You jerked backwards.
The woman disappeared. Someone stood behind you.
You turned.
Your father’s friend waited between the dead trees.
He did not look entirely as he had inside the New Inn.
His coat moved around him as though it had been made from the darkness between stars. His skin appeared almost luminous beneath the white sky. Within his eyes, distant lights turned through an immeasurable night.
He held one of the orchard’s apples.
There was something in his expression.
Not a smile.
He did not seem built for smiles.
But there was a minute softening at the edge of his severity that suggested he found the situation less solemn than you did.
“You read it.”
You rose and brushed snow from your knees.
“You knew I would.”
“I believed it likely.”
“Then the warning was pointless.”
“No.”
He turned the apple between his fingers.
“The warning was sincere. Your decision to disregard it does not alter that.”
“You sound pleased with yourself.”
His gaze lifted to yours.
“Do I?”
“Slightly.”
He did not answer.
That faint, almost invisible change remained in his face.
God, he was beautifully weird.
That was not an appropriate thought to have within a sinister dream orchard, but your subconscious had never been especially concerned with propriety.
You looked towards the frozen lake.
“Am I dreaming about the book?”
“You are dreaming of what the book awakened within you.”
“That was unnecessarily cryptic.”
“It was exact.”
He lifted the apple.
Its skin changed beneath his fingers. Red became green. Green darkened to black. For an instant, the face of a child appeared within its polished surface.
Then it was an ordinary apple again.
“The story concerns memory,” he said. “You have begun to wonder whether what is remembered must first have been lived.”
You frowned.
“I was mostly wondering which sister drowned.”
“Both.”
The answer made the orchard seem quieter.
“That is not what the book said.”
“The book said precisely that.”
“No. It said they could not remember which one drowned.”
His gaze moved towards the womanless lake.
“There are deaths from which the body rises.”
He placed the apple upon a bare branch.
The wood bent around it like closing fingers.
You watched him.
“How are you here?”
He looked at you.
“You are dreaming.”
“I know that. How are you inside it?”
He did not answer.
The wind moved through the orchard, although none of the branches stirred.
“My father said you would be in my dreams by choice.”
Silence.
“He also said you were not a vampire.”
His eyes returned to you.
“Your father considered that clarification necessary?”
“You meet several of the criteria.”
“I do not.”
“You are extremely pale.”
“That signifies nothing.”
“You dress entirely in black.”
“Nor does that.”
“You appear at night, know the private fears of strangers and enter people’s dreams.”
His expression remained grave.
“I do not believe vampires possess the ability to enter dreams. Nor do I consume blood.”
“Two points in your favour.”
He regarded you for a long moment.
It was impossible to know whether you had annoyed him.
That uncertainty was becoming oddly enjoyable.
“What are you, then?”
The singing began again beneath the ice.
He turned towards it.
“You are waking.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No.”
The orchard began to whiten around him.
Snow rose from the ground instead of falling from the sky, gathering between you.
“Will you answer next time?”
He looked back.
“Perhaps.”
“That means no.”
“It means perhaps.”
“What should I ask instead?”
The white air thickened.
His shape began to disappear.
“Ask what you truly wish to know.”
“I truly wish to know what you are.”
His eyes remained visible after the rest of him had faded.
“No,” he said. “You wish to know whether you should fear me.”
You opened your mouth.
The dream broke apart before you could answer.
You woke with the green book open beside you.
Morning light filled the room.
For several seconds, the orchard remained more vivid than your bedroom. You could smell frozen earth. You could hear roots shifting far beneath the lake.
You also remembered him.
Not vaguely.
Not as an impression that disappeared when you attempted to examine it. You remembered his face, his voice and the slow movement of stars inside his eyes.
You remembered asking how he could enter your dream. You remembered that he had refused to answer.
At seven twenty-three in the morning, you typed pale immortal dream entity not vampire into your phone.
The search results were not helpful. They included sleep paralysis, several role-playing games, a Scandinavian metal band and an alarming number of people who believed they had married supernatural beings on an astral plane.
You refined the search. Mythological beings who enter dreams.
That produced more promising results, including Hypnos. Morpheus. The Oneiroi. Baku. Mara. The Sandman. Several children stories.
None of them helped.
Some were gods. Some were spirits. Some brought sleep. Some carried messages. Several had wings, which your father’s friend did not appear to possess.
The Sandman was particularly inconsistent. Depending upon the story, he was benevolent, murderous or primarily concerned with persuading children to close their eyes.
You opened seventeen tabs.
By the time Hob came downstairs, you were seated at the kitchen table in your dressing gown, surrounded by the green book, two notebooks and a rapidly cooling cup of tea.
He stopped in the doorway.
“Should I ask?”
“No.”
Hob studied you for a moment.
Then he nodded and continued towards the kettle.
He did not intrude. You did not question him again either.
The last time you had asked about his strange friend, Hob had told you that the truth was not his to share. You had accepted that boundary, even if your curiosity had not.
Over the weeks that followed, you continued attempting to discover the truth yourself.
You read medieval beliefs about dreams, Renaissance treatises on prophetic sleep and Victorian accounts of shared nightmares.
You found stories about kings who entered dreams, gods who ruled sleep and spirits who carried messages between sleeping minds.
Nothing fitted.
Every tradition appeared to contain some small resemblance to him. None contained the whole.
Eventually, you stopped searching. Not because you had lost interest. Because you had begun to feel faintly ridiculous.
The stranger did not return to your dreams. Not visibly.
Occasionally, however, you sensed him there. You would be standing upon an unfamiliar stage or wandering through the corridors of an impossible house, and some instinct would tell you that you were being observed.
Not hunted. Not threatened. Merely watched.
When you turned, there would be nothing except shadow.
*********
Your concert approached.
The orchestra rehearsed almost every evening during the final week. The Mahler demanded precision bordering upon violence. Mendelssohn required the strings to remain light when exhaustion made every musician’s arms feel carved from stone.
Your own composition occupied only seven minutes of the programme. Those seven minutes frightened you more than the rest combined.
Professor O’Callaghan made no further personal approach. He also did not recommend you for Vienna.
You knew because the replacement was announced three days after you rejected him: a male composer in his final year whose work Professor O’Callaghan had previously described as competent but bloodless.
He did not acknowledge the decision.
During rehearsals, he treated you with faultless professionalism. His criticism remained precise. His gaze remained cool. If anyone else noticed a change, they said nothing.
You began to doubt yourself. Not about what had happened. You remembered his hand upon your waist. But each day that passed made reporting him feel more difficult. You imagined explaining why you had waited. You imagined him producing emails in which he had praised your music. You imagined being accused of resentment because you had not received the residency.
*******
On the night of the concert, the hall was full.
You learned that only five minutes before taking your seat onstage, when Maddy appeared backstage and announced that people were being turned away.
“That is not helpful.”
“I thought it might be encouraging.”
“It is not.”
She adjusted the collar of your black concert dress.
“You look beautiful.”
You checked your violin again.
“I wish Dad were here.”
Maddy smiled.
“He sent flowers. They are enormous and creating an obstruction near the dressing rooms.”
“That sounds like him.”
She hesitated.
You noticed immediately.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Maddy.”
Her smile widened.
“His weird, hot friend is here though, which must count for something.”
Your bow slipped in your hand.
“He came?”
“He is standing at the back like an omen.”
You looked towards the corridor leading to the stage.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes. It is difficult to mistake him.”
Something warm and alarming moved through your chest.
You attempted to dismiss it. He had said he would consider attending. He enjoyed music. Your father had encouraged him.
His presence meant nothing.
“Where is he sitting?”
Maddy’s expression became unbearable.
“You do not care, obviously.”
“I need to know where not to look.”
“Of course.”
“Maddy.”
“Balcony. Right side. End of the first row.”
You nodded as though this information had no effect upon you.
“Thank you.”
*********
After another fifteen minutes of emotional support from Maddy, you stepped onto the stage. The lights prevented you from seeing most of the audience. Beyond the first few rows, the hall disappeared into darkness.
You found him anyway. He sat in the front row of the balcony, motionless among the shifting audience. His black clothing merged with the shadows around him. His pale face appeared suspended within the dark.
His eyes met yours. Your pulse stumbled. He inclined his head. Only slightly.
You looked down at your music before the principal violinist could notice you staring into the balcony.
The concert began.
Mahler consumed the first half. There was no room within it for distraction. The music demanded everything: breath, movement, attention and submission to the force created when a hundred people agreed upon the same sound.
At the interval, you did not look for him. You told yourself this was because you needed to prepare for your composition.
Professor O’Callaghan appeared backstage before you could reach the dressing room.
He stopped in the corridor, leaving enough distance between you to make the encounter appear accidental.
“The Mahler was adequate.”
“Thank you.”
“Your intonation weakened during the third movement.”
“I will bear that in mind.”
His gaze travelled over your face.
“You appear nervous.”
“My composition is being performed.”
“You wanted this.”
“Yes.”
“Then you should learn to withstand it.”
You attempted to pass him.
He shifted slightly. Not enough to block you. But enough to return you to his office and the moment his hand had settled against your waist.
“I heard the Vienna appointment was announced,” you said.
His expression remained pleasant.
“It was.”
“I hope he benefits from your commitment to his development.”
Before he could answer, the stage manager called for the musicians to return.
O’Callaghan stepped aside and you walked away before he could answer.
Your composition began with the violin alone.
You had heard it performed in rehearsal many times. You knew every entry, every hesitation and every place at which the orchestra resisted what you had written.
That night, it sounded different.
Perhaps because the hall was full. Perhaps because the work had finally ceased belonging entirely to you. Or perhaps because your father’s friend was listening.
The first melody rose from the strings. The woodwinds gathered around it. The darker theme entered beneath them, patient and inevitable.
You remembered the black tree. The white moth passing through your fingers. His refusal to allow you to take what you had not yet created.
When the two melodies came together, you looked towards the balcony.
His gaze was fixed upon you. For eight measures, neither of you looked away. Then the melodies separated. The violin completed the final passage alone.
Silence followed. Then applause rose through the hall.
You stood when the conductor gestured towards you. The audience became a blur of movement. You bowed once and sat before your knees could weaken.
The stranger did not applaud. He remained seated, his pale face still within the dark. Yet something within his expression had altered. You thought he was pleased.
Afterwards, the backstage corridors filled with musicians, patrons and faculty members. You endured congratulations, questions and several people explaining your own composition to you.
Maddy found you beside the dressing rooms.
“You were magnificent.”
She threw her arms around you.
“You say that every time.”
“Usually I am lying supportively. Tonight I am entirely sincere.”
You laughed against her shoulder.
When she released you, she looked beyond you.
Her expression changed.
“He is waiting.”
You turned. Your father’s friend stood at the far end of the corridor. He had somehow avoided being approached by anyone. People moved around him without looking directly at his face, as though some quiet instinct discouraged them from drawing his attention.
You walked towards him. His gaze moved over you: the black dress, the violin case in your hand and the warmth still lingering in your face.
“You stayed.”
“Yes.”
“You also came.”
“You invited me.”
“You said you would consider it.”
“I did.”
“And?”
His gaze held yours.
“I came.”
The simplicity of the answer affected you more than it should have. You adjusted your grip upon the violin case.
“Did you enjoy it?”
He considered the question with enough seriousness to make you regret asking.
“The Mahler was performed competently.”
You stared at him.
“Competently.”
“The brass lacked restraint.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Your father believes music ceased to possess structure sometime during the twentieth century for which he is not entirely mistaken.”
You stared at him.
“I am choosing to ignore that.”
His eyes returned to you.
For a moment, he said nothing. The silence lengthened until you assumed he had no intention of speaking again.
Then, with the grave reluctance of someone surrendering something precious:
“Your composition was…”
He paused, as though the word itself resisted him.
“Beautiful.”
The surrounding corridor seemed to recede.
“Thank you.”
“It was also true.”
You remembered his judgement beneath the black tree. You had asked whether the composition was good. He had told you that you should have asked whether it was true.
“I hoped you would think so.”
His expression changed almost imperceptibly.
“You need not have doubted it.”
Before you could answer, a voice spoke behind you.
“Miss Gadling.”
Your shoulders tightened.
Professor O’Callaghan approached through the departing musicians. He offered you a measured smile, then looked towards the stranger beside you. His gaze became faintly irritated. There was no visitor’s pass upon the stranger’s coat. Nothing to suggest who had permitted him backstage.
“This area is restricted.”
Your father’s friend looked at him. For several seconds, he said nothing. Then:
“Samuel Carrow.”
Professor O’Callaghan went still.
You looked between them. The name meant nothing to you.
It plainly meant something to him.
“You are mistaken.”
The stranger’s expression did not alter.
“I am not.”
O’Callaghan’s face remained composed, but the colour beneath it had faded.
“Who are you?”
No answer came. The stranger merely regarded him.
The sounds of the corridor seemed to diminish. Conversation became distant. Footsteps softened. Even the lights appeared dimmer, though none had gone out.
“I have not used that name for many years,” O’Callaghan said.
“No.”
The stranger’s voice was low. It seemed to come from somewhere much larger than the narrow corridor.
“Not since you were convicted beneath it.”
O’Callaghan’s eyes flickered towards you.
“I do not know what you believe you have heard.”
“I have heard nothing.”
A pause followed.
“I have seen.”
O’Callaghan stared at him. The shadows behind the professor lengthened across the wall.
They formed narrow vertical lines. Bars. O’Callaghan glanced towards them before forcing his gaze back to the stranger.
“Three years imprisoned,” the stranger said. “Yet even now, you dream that confinement was the injustice.”
The professor’s jaw tightened.
“You know nothing of me.”
The stranger tilted his head.
“I know what remains when the waking world no longer assists you in lying.”
O’Callaghan’s breath caught. For the first time since you had known him, his composure appeared genuinely uncertain.
“You dream of your offices,” the stranger continued. “The old one. The present one. The doors remain locked in both.”
“Enough.”
The stranger’s gaze remained fixed upon him.
“That is the word they used.”
The shadows darkened. Within them, you thought you saw the outline of a room. A desk. A closed door. Young women standing upon the other side of it.
“You revise their refusals while you sleep,” the stranger said. “You grant them eagerness they did not possess. You call their fear desire and their silence consent.”
O’Callaghan’s face had become ashen.
“What are you?”
The stranger looked at him with an expression so remote that the professor appeared very small beneath it.
“You have no need to know.”
Then his gaze shifted to you.
“Did this man make an advance towards you?”
The question was asked without embarrassment or hesitation. Not loudly. It did not need to be.
O’Callaghan’s eyes snapped towards you.
“Miss Gadling, I would advise you to be very careful before repeating malicious interpretations of a professional conversation.”
The stranger looked back at him.
O’Callaghan stopped speaking.
“I did not address you.”
The words were quiet. Absolute.
O’Callaghan’s mouth closed.
The stranger returned his attention to you.
“Did he?”
Your fingers tightened around the handle of the violin case.
“He offered to recommend me for a residency.”
“Upon what condition?”
“He did not say it directly.”
The stranger’s gaze moved once towards O’Callaghan.
“He did not need to.”
O’Callaghan recovered enough to speak.
“This is grotesque. I praised a promising student and discussed the realities of her profession. Nothing more.”
The stranger regarded him.
“You placed your hand upon her.”
It was not a question. O’Callaghan’s face changed.
You stared at the stranger.
“How do you know that?”
His eyes remained upon the professor.
“Because he remembers it while he sleeps.”
The corridor became cold.
O’Callaghan stepped backwards.
“I will not stand here and be threatened by some deranged stranger.”
The stranger’s face remained still.
“You are not being threatened.”
The shadows gathered at his feet.
“You are being known.”
O’Callaghan looked towards you.
“You will regret this.”
The stranger moved. Only one step.
The professor recoiled as though something far greater had advanced upon him.
“You will not touch her again. Nor will you touch any other who has not freely consented to it.”
There was no anger in his voice. No raised volume. Nothing except certainty.
O’Callaghan’s mouth opened.
No sound emerged.
“Now leave,” the stranger said.
O’Callaghan went.
He attempted to walk with dignity. By the time he reached the end of the corridor, his pace had quickened.
The shadows withdrew with him. Sound returned.
You stared at your father’s friend.
“How did you know?”
He watched the corridor for another moment.
“He dreams.”
“That does not explain how you saw them.”
His gaze returned to you.
“No.”
You exhaled.
“You are not going to explain, are you?”
“Not here.”
That was, at least, not a refusal.
You looked towards the corridor through which O’Callaghan had disappeared.
“You frightened him.”
“He was afraid before I spoke.”
“Of you?”
“Of being discovered.”
Something in his voice made you look at him more closely.
He appeared composed. Too composed. The stillness around him no longer felt neutral. It felt controlled.
“Do not do anything to him.”
His eyes rested upon you.
“You believe I intend to.”
“I believe you could.”
He did not deny it.
“I left his office,” you continued. “I dealt with it.”
“You escaped him, which is not the same.”
His gaze moved briefly towards your waist, as though he could still see the place O’Callaghan had touched.
“It is my decision what happens next.”
A silence passed between you.
Something resistant entered his expression.
Then it receded.
“Yes,” he said.
The agreement surprised you.
“Yes?”
“The offence was against you. The choice is yours.”
You studied him.
“Then you will leave him alone.”
“If that is your wish.”
“It is.”
He inclined his head.
“Then I shall not act against him.”
The wording did not entirely reassure you.
“And you will not interfere with his dreams.”
His eyes darkened faintly.
“His dreams require no invention from me.”
His gaze moved once more towards the empty corridor.
“But if he approaches you again, you will tell me.”
You raised your eyebrows.
“Will I?”
“Please.”
Despite yourself, you smiled.
His attention returned to you. The coldness around him lessened.
“Okay. But only if you have a drink with me,” you said.
The change in his expression was minute. Still, you were beginning to recognise the small differences.
Surprise appeared as a sudden stillness around his eyes. Displeasure sharpened his mouth. Amusement softened something that ordinarily seemed carved from stone. This was hesitation.
“I do not drink.”
“Pretend.”
“To what purpose?”
“Conversation generally works better in a place that serves drinks,” you explained while a cellist carrying an instrument case moved around him and gave him an annoyed look.
The stranger did not appear to notice.
“It would be inappropriate.”
You blinked.
“Why?”
His gaze settled upon you.
“You are Hob’s daughter.”
“That’s no reason.”
Silence.
You waited.
His eyes lowered briefly towards your hand upon the violin case.
Then they returned to your face.
“And because you are—”
He stopped.
You raised your eyebrows.
“I am what?”
He did not complete the sentence.
“It is a drink,” you said. “I am not proposing marriage.”
A passing viola player made a strangled noise that might have been laughter.
The stranger looked towards him. The man immediately became fascinated by the floor.
You folded your arms.
“There is a bar around the corner. You can sit with an untouched glass and disapprove of mortal customs.”
“I do not disapprove of mortal customs.”
“Okay, name three mortal customs you don’t approve of then.”
He regarded you.
“Music.”
“One.”
“Stories.”
“Two.”
His gaze rested upon your face.
“Persistence.”
Warmth rose beneath your skin.
“Was that a compliment?”
“It was an observation.”
“Of course.”
You began walking towards the exit. After several steps, you looked back. He had not moved.
“Are you coming?”
He followed.
******
The bar occupied the ground floor of an old hotel opposite the concert hall. It was quieter than you expected, though several tables were occupied by members of the orchestra.
You selected a corner beneath a darkened window. The stranger sat opposite you. A server approached. You ordered wine. The stranger did not look at the menu.
“Water.”
You waited until the server had gone.
“Scandalous.”
“You told me to pretend.”
“A glass of wine would have been more convincing.”
“I have no wish to convince anyone.”
Two violinists at the bar looked towards your table and began whispering.
You smiled.
“You are doing an excellent job.”
The stranger turned his eyes towards them. The whispering stopped.
“Do people always behave strangely around you?” you asked.
“People behave according to their nature.”
“That means yes.”
The drinks arrived. He looked at his water but made no attempt to touch it. You took a sip of wine.
“You have been in my dreams three times.”
“More.”
Your glass stopped halfway to the table.
“More than three?”
He said nothing.
“How many?”
Still nothing.
“That is exceedingly creepy.”
His brow moved faintly.
“Creepy.”
“Entering a woman’s dreams without announcing yourself is rather invasive where privacy is concerned.”
“Then perhaps dreams are not as private as mortals imagine.”
“That makes it worse.”
“It was not intended to comfort you.”
You studied him.
“Are you one of those beings I found in the books my father kept?”
His expression became still.
“What beings?”
“I don’t know. Gods. Spirits. Things said to rule over sleep and dreams.”
“I am neither a god nor a spirit.”
“But you enter dreams.”
“Many things enter dreams.”
“That is not reassuring either.”
A pause followed.
“Perhaps not.”
You leaned forward.
“I just want to know what you are.”
His gaze held yours.
“I know.”
“Then tell me.”
“No.”
The direct refusal startled you more than another evasive answer would have.
“Why not?”
“Because knowledge has consequences.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It is factual.”
“Are you dangerous?”
A pause followed.
“Yes.”
Your fingers tightened faintly around the stem of your glass.
He watched you.
“Does that frighten you?”
You considered lying.
“A little.”
“Good.”
You frowned.
“That is a very strange response.”
“Fear is not always an enemy. It warns. It preserves.”
“You sound as though you think I should stay away from you.”
Something changed in his expression.
Only slightly.
“Perhaps you should.”
You watched him.
“But you came tonight.”
“Yes.”
“You entered my dreams.”
“Yes.”
“You gave me the book.”
“Yes.”
“You are doing a poor job of discouraging me.”
He said nothing.
You took another sip of wine.
“What should I call you?”
His gaze moved towards the dark window.
“You require a name.”
“Most conversations become difficult without one.”
“Names reveal more than those who speak them often understand.”
“You know mine.”
“Yes.”
“That seems unfair.”
“It is.”
The blunt agreement made you laugh.
His gaze returned to you.
“Fine,” you said. “I will invent one.”
“Will you?”
“Dream Man.”
A faint line appeared between his brows.
“Dream Man.”
“You appear in my dreams. It is accurate.”
“It is imprecise.”
“Then give me something better.”
He regarded you in silence for so long that you began to think he would refuse.
At last, he spoke.
“You may call me Dream.”
“All right, Dream.”
You studied him.
“Does my father know what you are?”
“He does now.”
A faint heaviness entered his voice.
“I owed him that much.”
Something close to affection passed across the stranger’s face.
It disappeared quickly.
“My father said you met at a tavern in 1389.”
He looked towards the other patrons.
“I did.”
“And?”
“I believed him to be arrogant and a fool.”
You laughed.
“He loves you, you know.”
His gaze lowered towards the untouched water.
“Your father has known me a long time.”
“That was not what I said.”
“It is what I shall answer.”
You smiled.
“You avoid personal questions.”
“You ask a great many.”
“I have a curious mind.”
His eyes lifted.
“Yes.”
The word settled strangely between you.
“You possess a very curious mind.”
“You make that sound dangerous.”
“Curiosity has opened many doors that should have remained closed.”
“And yet you gave me a book.”
“I did.”
“Then warned me not to read the ending.”
“You required no assistance in disobeying me.”
“Was the orchard a punishment?”
His expression sharpened.
“No.”
The answer came with more force than the others.
“Then why were you there?”
He looked at your hand beside the wine glass.
“You called.”
“I did not.”
“Not knowingly.”
“How does someone unknowingly call a mysterious man into her dreams?”
“By wishing strongly enough to be heard.”
You remembered the woman beneath the ice speaking with your voice.
“Do I do that often?”
“Increasingly.”
The answer unsettled you.
“And do you answer everyone who wishes for you?”
“No.”
You smiled.
The surrounding voices seemed to fade beneath the silence between you.
You became aware of how closely he watched you.
He did not look at people casually.
His attention settled with almost physical weight. When he looked elsewhere, the absence of it was equally noticeable. You wondered how many people throughout history had mistaken that intensity for affection. You also wondered whether you were about to become one of them.
“Why did you attend tonight?” you asked.
“You invited me.”
“You must receive many invitations.”
“I do.”
“From important people?”
“Importance is relative.”
“That sounds like yes.”
He offered nothing more.
“And you refuse them.”
“Often.”
“Yet you came because a woman you had met twice gave you a concert programme.”
“We have met more than twice.”
“In my dreams.”
“They are still meetings.”
A smile pulled at your mouth.
“You wished to hear the music.”
“Yes.”
“And you wished to see me play it.”
His expression became unreadable.
You waited.
He could have avoided the question. He could have given you one of the oblique answers you were beginning to expect from him.
Instead, he said:
“Yes.”
Your heart made an embarrassing attempt to escape through your ribs.
You took another drink.
“No further questions.”
A faint line appeared between his brows, as though he did not entirely believe you.
“Then I shall value the reprieve while it lasts.”
You laughed.
The sound drew several glances from the bar.
He watched you as though laughter were another form of music he had not anticipated.
His expression softened. Only slightly. But enough.
You remained at the bar for another hour.
The conversation moved from music to books, from books to history and from history to the peculiar experience of being raised by a father whose personal recollections frequently contradicted accepted scholarship.
Your father’s friend knew every book you mentioned.
Not merely their contents. He knew which authors had woken with stories almost complete and which had spent years attempting to recover endings lost before morning. He spoke of unfinished poems as though they still existed somewhere, waiting to be remembered.
He never boasted. That made the impossible extent of his knowledge more unsettling.
“Have you read everything?” you asked.
“No.”
“What have you not read?”
He looked towards the dark window.
“That which has not yet been written.”
“Do you know what will be written?”
“Sometimes.”
“That was almost an answer.”
“It was precisely an answer.”
“You enjoy saying that.”
“Because you frequently accuse precision of being obscurity.”
“Because your precision is obscure.”
He regarded you.
“Perhaps the failing is not mine.”
“That was rude.”
“It was an observation.”
“You enjoy saying that too.”
Something at the corner of his mouth shifted.
When the staff began stacking chairs, you realised how late it had become.
You checked your phone.
“I should go.”
He rose immediately.
“I shall accompany you.”
“You do not have to.”
“I am aware.”
You smiled despite yourself.
Outside, the city had become quiet. Rain glistened upon the pavement, though none fell. Your breath clouded in the cold air.
He walked beside you. He made almost no sound. No obvious footfall. No rustle of clothing.
Had you not been able to see him, you might have believed yourself alone.
“You are extremely unsettling to walk with.”
“Why?”
“You move like a ghost.”
“I am not a ghost.”
“Or a vampire.”
“No.”
“Or any of the things I found online.”
“No story you found contains me entire.”
You looked towards him.
“That is the closest you have come to answering.”
“It is not an answer.”
“Of course not.”
The street leading towards the Inn was empty. A bus passed, filling the wet pavement with light before disappearing around the corner.
You stopped outside the entrance.
“This is me.”
“I know.”
You became aware of the intimacy of standing beneath your own doorway with him.
“Thank you for walking me home.”
He inclined his head.
“You are welcome.”
Neither of you moved.
You placed one hand upon the door.
“Good night, Dream.”
His head tilted faintly and the air between you changed.
For one irrational moment, you thought he might step closer.
He did not.
“Good night, Y/N Gadling.”
You entered the building.
The door closed between you.
You resisted the urge to look back through the glass until you had climbed the stairs.
When you finally did, the pavement was empty.
You reached your bedroom in a state of profound irritation with yourself.
You changed clothes. Removed your makeup. Placed the violin carefully inside its case.
Then you lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.
Of course. Of course the first man you had found genuinely interesting in years was a nameless, possibly immortal creature who dressed like he was attending a funeral, appeared inside dreams and had been friends with your father for an unknown but evidently considerable period of time.
You had dated normal men. Or attempted to.
There had been Daniel, who spoke almost exclusively about cryptocurrency and asked whether orchestral musicians required sheet music because they had failed to memorise their parts.
There had been Oliver, who described himself as a feminist and then interrupted every time you spoke.
There had been Marcus, who seemed pleasant until he explained that female composers were less successful because women lacked the necessary emotional detachment.
There had been several others whose names had already disappeared from memory.
None had made you feel anything resembling this.
Your father’s friend had appeared in your sleep without permission, refused to answer basic questions and frightened a professor by revealing that he knew the contents of his dreams.
He was also beautiful. Painfully so.
Not in the warm, immediate way attractive men generally were. His beauty appeared constructed according to laws that belonged somewhere other than earth.
Too pale. Too still. Too severe.
Beautifully weird.
That remained the only accurate description.
You turned onto your side and pulled the blankets higher and thought about it again before pushing those thoughts away.
Because there were the obvious complications.
He was your father’s friend.
He was not human.
He might be older than your father, which was an alarming thought in itself.
He had called sharing a drink inappropriate, then accompanied you to a bar, watched you across a table for two hours and walked you home.
He had said you were—
Because you are—
Then stopped.
You stared into the darkness.
What had he intended to say?
Young?
Human?
Annoying?
You closed your eyes.
“This is a terrible idea.”
Sleep took you before you could determine precisely what the idea was.
Dream remained nearby while the waking world moved around him.
Water passed beneath the street. Cars travelled along distant roads. Hundreds of sleeping minds flickered behind brick and glass.
He felt each of them at the edge of his awareness, but none drew his attention as yours did.
A raven landed upon the streetlamp above him just as he was about to get on with some other business.
“Okay,” Matthew said. “This is weird.”
Dream looked up.
“Why are you here?”
Matthew opened his wings and descended to the pavement.
“Lucienne asked me to check on you.”
“I require no checking.”
“Yeah. That is generally what people who need checking say.”
Dream began walking.
Matthew hopped after him before taking flight and settling upon a low wall beside the pavement.
“You have been spending a lot of time in the waking world lately, boss.”
“I have duties here.”
“You always had duties here. You did not usually attend concerts, spend two hours in bars and walk pretty women home.”
Dream stopped.
Matthew shifted his feet.
“I am just saying.”
“She is Hob’s daughter.”
“I know who she is.”
“Then your observation was unnecessary.”
Matthew studied him.
“Lucienne thinks it is strange too.”
“Did she say that?”
“Not in those exact words.”
Dream looked at him.
“What words did she use?”
Matthew hesitated.
“She said your increased interest in the waking world, after being imprisoned here for more than a century, was noteworthy.”
“And she sent you to spy upon me.”
“Check on you. Different tone.”
Dream resumed walking.
Matthew flew after him.
“Also, boss, in case you failed to notice, the girl you just walked home has a crush on you.”
Dream stopped.
The nearest streetlamp dimmed.
He turned his head slowly towards Matthew.
“A crush?”
Matthew shifted awkwardly on the railing.
“You know. She likes you.”
Dream continued to stare.
“Not just as her dad’s weird friend,” Matthew added. “She thinks you’re attractive. She gets nervous around you, talks too fast, tries not to look at you and then looks at you anyway. A crush.”
“You are mistaken.”
“I’m really not.”
“She is the daughter of an old acquaintance.”
“And yet she still has a crush on you.”
The shadows surrounding Dream deepened.
“This conversation is over.”
Matthew lifted both wings slightly.
“Okay, boss. Where are we going now?”
Dream resumed walking.
“To see another old acquaintance.”
Matthew flew after him.
“Who?”
“Johanna Constantine.”
“Why?”
Dream’s expression became distant.
“Because the manner of my release from the Burgess residence was… unusual.”
Matthew landed upon a nearby sign.
“Unusual how?”
Dream was silent for several steps.
“The bindings did not fail as they should have. Something interfered with them.”
Struggling a bit with writing at the moment because my motivation keeps pulling me in two completely different directions.
I want Morpheus because he gives me mythology, yearning, darkness, impossible romance and enormous tragic stakes.
But I also want Tom because that world gives me intimacy, humour, domestic chaos, messy relationships and characters I already know inside out.
The problem is that the Sandman fandom feels so quiet now, and sometimes writing Morpheus feels like putting an enormous amount of effort into building a beautiful room nobody is going to enter.
I know a quieter fandom does not mean the story is not worth writing. The people still there are often the ones most desperate for something new. But it is hard not to think about engagement when you are already struggling for motivation.
So I think I am going to stop forcing myself to choose.
I will write Tom when I need something familiar to get the words moving again, and write Morpheus whenever a scene, image or piece of dialogue becomes too loud to ignore.
Pairing: Dream of the Endless x Reader (Hob's Daughter) Warning: Angst, AU-Fic, Eventually Smut, Graphic Scenes, Death Tag List: Please comment below if you wish to be tagged.
Please comment and engage! It means the world to me ❤️
Over the four months following your first meeting with your father’s strange friend, you busied yourself with work and music. There was always enough of both. The orchestra’s winter programme required longer rehearsals, additional sectional work and several evenings spent beneath the conductor’s increasingly unforgiving stare. Difficult passages were repeated until your shoulder burned and the skin beneath your fingertips hardened further. A fractionally early entrance could condemn the entire string section to another twenty minutes of repetition.
You attended lectures between rehearsals, accepted private work whenever it appeared and continued taking shifts at the New Inn because orchestras paid considerably less than people imagined. When you were not performing music, you were writing it. The melody you had first recovered in dreams remained with you in perfect detail.
You played it often, although never casually. There was something within it that refused to become ordinary. No matter how frequently you returned to the opening phrase, the final passage still carried the same weight. Grief lived within the notes—not the immediate violence of new loss, but something older and quieter. Grief preserved so long that it had become part of the person carrying it. You did not understand why it made you think of your father’s friend.
You remembered his presence in the dream only indistinctly. A pale figure dressed in black. A voice confirming that you had finally found the correct ending.
Sometimes, when you played the final passage, you remembered impossible eyes filled with distant stars. Then the image vanished. You began writing another piece several weeks later.
Unlike the first melody, this one did not arrive complete. It came in fragments. A sequence for the violins appeared while you were travelling on the underground. You wrote it across the back of an old receipt before it could disappear.
A passage for the woodwinds occurred to you while you were behind the bar. You wrote that one on an invoice and nearly caused Hob to submit half a musical movement with the monthly accounts. At night, the piece followed you into dreams. You dreamed of an enormous chamber built from dark stone. Its ceiling rose so high that it disappeared into mist, and the music did not come from musicians but from the architecture itself.
The strings lived within the walls. The brass sounded beneath the floor. Voices moved among the arches overhead.
At the centre of the chamber stood a black tree. There were no leaves upon its branches. Instead, sheets of music hung from them, turning softly in a wind you could not feel. Some contained passages you had already written.
Others held music you had not yet discovered. You reached for one of the pages. A pale hand removed it before you could touch it.
You looked up. Your father’s friend stood on the opposite side of the tree. He did not look entirely as he had in the New Inn.
His black clothes moved as if they had been cut from smoke and shadow. His skin appeared almost luminous against the darkness, while his eyes contained not merely points of light but vast, turning skies. You should have been frightened. Instead, you were annoyed.
“I was about to read that.”
He held the page between long white fingers.
“It is not yet written.”
His voice seemed to come from the stone around you.
“Then why is it hanging from a tree?”
“Because you have dreamed it.”
You moved around the trunk, but he remained opposite you.
“May I have it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you must find it yourself.”
You frowned at him.
“You gave me the ending of the other melody.”
For one instant, something entered his expression. Pain. It was ancient and immense, but gone so quickly that you were uncertain whether you had seen it at all.
“That song was not yours to create,” he said. “You merely found it again after it had been lost for a very long time.”
“And this one is?”
“Yes.”
You looked up at the pages shifting among the branches.
“Is it good?”
His gaze settled upon you.
“Why does that matter?”
“Because I am writing it.”
“You ask whether it is good because you wish to know whether others will admire it.”
His voice remained calm. That made the judgement in it worse.
“You have not asked whether it is true.”
You stared at him.
“That is unnecessarily severe.”
“Is it inaccurate?”
You opened your mouth. Nothing came. He extended the page towards you.
You reached for it. Before your fingers touched the paper, it folded in upon itself and became a white moth. It flew through your hand and vanished among the dark branches.
“That was irritating.”
“You will remember what is required.”
Silver light split the trunk of the tree. The music inside the walls grew louder. You looked at him through the widening fracture.
“Will I remember you?”
The chamber began to collapse into mist. He watched you as the darkness drew him away.
“Perhaps.”
You woke with your arm extended above you and your fingers closed around nothing. You remembered the black tree. You remembered the moth.
You remembered speaking to someone, although his face faded the moment you attempted to hold it. The music did not. You wrote until nearly midday.
By the time Hob entered the kitchen, you had covered the table in manuscript paper. He stopped in the doorway with a cup of tea in one hand.
“Another one?”
You did not look up.
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“This one is being difficult.”
Hob crossed towards the table and looked down at the pages. He had never learned to read music fluently despite possessing seven centuries in which to do so. He claimed he understood enough. You suspected this meant he could identify when the notes moved upwards.
“Is it like the other melody?”
“No.”
You tapped the end of your pencil against the page.
“The other one felt as though I was remembering something. This feels like I am searching for something that has not happened yet.”
Hob’s mouth tightened.
“Peculiar.”
You glanced up.
“What is?”
He gestured vaguely towards the manuscript.
“All these songs coming to you in your dreams shortly after my immortal acquaintance surfaced again.”
You stared at him.
“You think he has something to do with it?”
Hob hesitated.
“Not purposefully, probably.”
“Probably?”
He sat opposite you.
“His return may have had something to do with you dreaming.”
You lowered your pencil. The suggestion should have sounded ridiculous. It did not.
“I saw him in two of my dreams. Possibly more.”
Hob became very still.
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“Which ones?”
“The music ones.”
His expression changed in a way you could not interpret.
“Did he speak to you?”
“Only in the last one. I think. I cannot fully remember.”
You frowned, attempting to recover the memory.
“He helped me finish the first melody. In another, he would not let me read a piece I had not written yet.”
Hob stared at you and chuckled.
“What is he?” you then asked.
Hob looked down at your manuscript.
“That is not for me to share.”
“So he is not like you?”
A strange sound escaped Hob. It might have been a laugh.
“No.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he is slightly more important than me.”
You leaned back in your chair.
“Slightly.”
“Considerably.”
“Is he a vampire?”
Hob looked at you in disbelief.
“What?”
“I am merely asking.”
“No.”
“He is pale, dresses entirely in black and apparently enters dreams.”
“He is not a vampire.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
Hob rubbed one hand over his face.
“And let’s just say that, if you see him in your dreams, it is not as random as you think.”
You frowned.
“What does that mean?”
“It means he was there by choice.”
You stared at your father.
“That is not how dreaming works.”
Hob held your gaze.
“It is when it concerns him.”
The room became strangely quiet. You thought of the pale figure at the edge of the rehearsal room. The black tree.
The voice that had known precisely which piece of music you were trying to find.
“He chose to enter my dreams?”
“It would appear so.”
“Why?”
“That,” Hob said slowly, “is something I intend to ask him.”
You studied his face.
“Should I be concerned?”
Hob did not answer immediately. That concerned you more than an immediate denial would have. At last, he reached across the table and turned one of the pages towards himself as though he understood anything written upon it.
“He is not careless with those who dream.”
“That was not an answer.”
“No.”
His gaze returned to you.
“But if he intended you harm, I doubt he would have helped you finish a song.”
You thought of the sorrow in the final passage.
“It was not merely a song.”
Hob noticed the change in your voice.
“What was it?”
You shook your head.
“I don’t know.”
You gathered the pages together.
“But I think it belonged to someone he loved.”
********
The new composition developed over the weeks that followed. You did not see the stranger again. Not in waking life.
Not clearly in dreams. Occasionally, you sensed someone at the edge of them. A figure standing beyond the range of the stage lights.
A shadow beneath the arches. A presence listening without interrupting. Whether it was truly him or merely your imagination, you could not tell.
You completed the composition without further help. The final movement emerged one rainy morning while you were walking towards rehearsal. You stopped beneath the awning of a closed shop and wrote it with the paper pressed against the brick wall. By the time you reached the conservatoire, the ink had bled in several places and the sleeve of your coat was soaked.
The music remained. Maddy heard the first orchestral reading two weeks later. She sat in the otherwise sparse recital hall holding two coffees and a paper bag containing pastries. She was not musical, beyond a few childhood piano lessons she described as psychological warfare, but she attended almost every performance you gave.
She had strong opinions regarding composers. She liked Tchaikovsky. She tolerated Brahms.
She claimed Wagner made her want to invade a neighbouring country. Your composition began with a violin alone. The other strings entered gradually, forming themselves around the melody without consuming it. Woodwinds followed, hesitant and searching. Beneath them, the cellos introduced a second theme—warmer, darker and somehow older than the first.
The two melodies circled one another. At times, they appeared to argue. At others, each seemed to exist solely because the other was present.
They came together for only eight measures. Then they parted. The violin continued alone until the final note disappeared.
Silence followed. The conductor did not immediately lower his baton. The musicians remained still.
Professor Steven O’Callaghan sat in the third row with your score open across his knee, his pen motionless in his hand. At last, the principal cellist exhaled. The sound seemed startlingly loud.
Maddy waited until you reached the corridor before catching both your arms.
“What the hell was that?”
You nearly dropped your violin case.
“Good afternoon to you too.”
“No. You do not get to behave as though that was normal.”
“It was an orchestral composition.”
“It was five minutes of emotional devastation.”
You took one of the coffees from her.
“That seems excessive.”
“The horn player cried.”
“The horn player cries frequently.”
“Professor O’Callaghan looked impressed.”
You glanced towards the closed doors.
“Professor O’Callaghan always looks as though he is deciding whether someone deserves to survive.”
“Today he decided you did.”
You laughed softly and began walking. Maddy followed.
“Where did it come from?”
“I wrote it.”
“I understand the basic principle. Where did you get the idea?”
You adjusted your bag over your shoulder.
“A dream, mostly.”
Maddy stopped.
“Again?”
You continued towards the courtyard. She hurried to catch up.
“Was he there?”
You looked at her.
“Who?”
“The weird, hot one.”
You nearly walked into the door.
“What?”
“Your father’s strange friend. The pale one who looks as if sunlight personally offended him.”
“I only vaguely remember it.”
“But he was there again? Just like in the last dream?”
“Yeah.”
Maddy stared.
“You have dreamed about the same man twice?”
“Apparently.”
“And what was he doing?”
You pushed open the courtyard door. Cold air moved around you.
“Listening.”
“That is either romantic or deeply sinister.”
You laughed despite yourself.
“It was odd. It felt as though he already knew the music and was waiting to see whether I could find it.”
“Perhaps your subconscious chose him because he frightened you.”
“Perhaps.”
You took a cautious sip of coffee.
“Dad said—”
You stopped and bit your tongue. Maddy’s eyes narrowed immediately.
“Your dad said what?”
“Nothing.”
“That was not nothing.”
You hesitated. Hob had not expressly forbidden you from telling anyone what he had said. He had merely made it very clear that the truth belonged to his strange friend and was not his to share. Besides, telling Maddy that the man had possibly entered your dreams deliberately would lead to questions you could not answer without revealing considerably more about Hob than she had ever been permitted to know.
So you lied.
“Dad said dreams are sometimes strange and that I shouldn’t overthink them.”
Maddy stared at you.
“That was the dramatic secret?”
“It was not a dramatic secret.”
“You stopped halfway through the sentence and looked as though you had nearly revealed a state conspiracy.”
“I momentarily forgot how unhelpful his advice was.”
“It is extremely unhelpful.”
“Exactly.”
Maddy continued to watch you suspiciously.
“Did he say anything about his friend?”
“Only that he has always been peculiar.”
That, at least, was true.
“How long has he known him?”
You concentrated upon replacing the lid on your coffee.
“A long time.”
“That was evasive.”
“I don’t know the precise answer.”
Also true.
“Your father is extremely odd about that man.”
“My father is extremely odd about many things.”
“Fair.”
You continued across the courtyard. Maddy remained beside you.
“But your father is right. Dreams can be strange,” she said. “I dreamt something entirely absurd last night.”
You glanced towards her. Her expression changed.
“Actually, never mind.”
“No. You cannot introduce an absurd dream and then refuse to explain it.”
“It was inappropriate.”
“Even better.”
Maddy groaned.
“It involved Sven.”
You stopped. Sven Dahl was the orchestra’s assistant conductor, a broad-shouldered Swede with an austere face and an unnerving ability to silence an entire brass section merely by removing his glasses. He had spoken to Maddy perhaps six times.
Four of those conversations had concerned where she was permitted to sit during rehearsals. You stared at her.
“Sven?”
“I told you it was absurd.”
“What happened?”
“I am not giving you details.”
“Were there details?”
Maddy covered her face.
“Unfortunately.”
You began laughing. She struck your arm with the pastry bag.
“Stop it.”
“Perhaps your subconscious is trying to tell you something too.”
Maddy glared at you.
“Like what?” she asked. “Unlike your father’s weird friend, Sven isn’t exactly scary.”
“I don’t think Dad’s friend is scary.”
Maddy’s expression changed immediately.
“So you think he’s hot too.”
“I did not say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
You took another sip of coffee and decided to change the subject before she could become any more insufferable.
“That old book I was reading when Dad’s friend first appeared—I dreamed the actual ending.”
Maddy lowered her hands.
“The house with the people in the walls?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know it was the actual ending?”
You thought of the sentence that had appeared beneath the final printed paragraph. The house was gone, but what had lived within it had learned her name. You had never told anyone about that.
“It matched what he described.”
“He might have invented it.”
“I found a surviving letter online confirming that the ending had been changed.”
Maddy considered that.
“That is strange.”
“I also found out the author was delirious for several days before the final manuscript was submitted.”
“Clearly.”
“He apparently kept talking about voices moving through the walls.”
Maddy stopped walking.
“You might have mentioned that part sooner.”
“It was probably the fever.”
“Or your father’s terrifying friend knows far too much about obscure dead authors.”
“Both possibilities are equally comforting.”
Before you could say anything more, the door behind you opened. Professor Steven O’Callaghan stepped into the courtyard. He wore a dark wool coat buttoned neatly over his suit. His silvering hair had somehow remained untouched by the wind.
His gaze moved first to you and then to Maddy.
“Miss Gadling.”
You shifted your violin case against your hip.
“Professor.”
“May I speak with you?”
Maddy looked at you.
“I can wait.”
Professor O’Callaghan’s smile was professionally polite.
“It may take some time.”
Maddy hesitated. You nodded towards the gate.
“I’ll call you.”
She squeezed your arm before leaving. Professor O’Callaghan waited until she had gone.
“Walk with me.”
*********
Steven O’Callaghan had taught at the conservatoire for nearly eighteen years. His reputation extended far beyond the institution. He had discovered soloists, secured grants for composers and introduced promising musicians to patrons whose approval opened doors throughout Europe.
Students he favoured received opportunities. Students he disliked tended to find those opportunities disappearing. You had attended two of his courses. His criticism was merciless, precise and usually correct, which made it difficult to dismiss.
You followed him into his office. Scores covered one wall. Framed photographs showed him beside celebrated conductors, composers and musicians whose biographies you had studied. He gestured towards the chair opposite his desk.
You sat.
“Your work today was exceptional.”
You looked at him. Praise from Professor O’Callaghan was ordinarily followed by an insult.
“Thank you.”
“It lacks discipline in places.”
There it was. He removed his coat.
“The transition preceding the final recapitulation is indulgent. Your use of the horns is emotionally effective but structurally unjustified.”
“I can revise it.”
“You should.”
He moved behind his desk.
“However, the central idea is gifted.”
The word landed harder than you expected. You lowered your eyes briefly.
“Thank you.”
“Do not become embarrassed. False modesty is tedious.”
You looked up.
“It was not false modesty.”
“Good.”
He sat.
“You are talented, Miss Gadling. More talented than several people who already possess the career you imagine for yourself.”
You remained quiet.
“But talent is rarely enough.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
His gaze remained fixed upon you.
“The profession is crowded. Institutions release hundreds of competent musicians every year into an industry without enough space for them. Most will teach children, play weddings or abandon performance.”
“There is nothing wrong with teaching or playing weddings.”
“No. But that is not what you want.”
You did not respond. He leaned back.
“You want to compose.”
“Yes.”
“You want serious orchestras to perform your work.”
“Eventually.”
“Eventually is what people say when they do not know how to proceed.”
His voice softened.
“I know how.”
Hope entered you before caution could prevent it. Professor O’Callaghan possessed connections you could not create for yourself. A recommendation from him could accomplish more than years of applications.
“There is a residency in Vienna next spring,” he said. “Four composers. Full funding. Professional performances at its conclusion.”
You knew the programme. Every student composer did.
“Applications closed months ago.”
“Officially.”
You looked at him.
“One of the successful candidates has withdrawn.”
“And you select the replacement?”
“I advise the committee.”
Your fingers tightened around the strap of your bag.
“Would you recommend me?”
Professor O’Callaghan smiled. It was not a kind expression.
“I might.”
The hope cooled.
“What would you require?”
He rose from his chair.
“Commitment.”
“To the residency?”
“To your development.”
He came around the desk. Something in your body understood before your mind did. Your shoulders stiffened.
He stopped beside you. Too close.
“You are young,” he said. “You have not yet learned how often careers are built outside formal auditions.”
You stood.
“I should leave.”
He placed one hand against the back of your chair, obstructing the easiest route towards the door without quite touching you.
“You misunderstand me.”
“I do not think I do.”
His expression hardened.
“Do not be childish.”
Disgust moved through you with such force that it became physical. You were suddenly conscious of the closed door and the quiet corridor beyond it.
“Move.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“You should think carefully before choosing indignation.”
His other hand settled against your waist. You stepped away so quickly that the chair struck the desk.
“Do not touch me.”
He removed his hand. His composure made it worse.
“Nothing has happened.”
“You offered me a residency in exchange for sleeping with you.”
“I did no such thing.”
“Then recommend me without this conversation.”
Silence. His eyes cooled.
“You are gifted, but difficult.”
“Meaning?”
“You lack patience with authority. Your manner is abrasive. You are too quick to interpret correction as attack.”
“This was not correction.”
“This tendency to dramatise discomfort will not serve you.”
You reached for the door. His voice followed you.
“Vienna would change your career.”
Your hand stopped upon the handle. For one terrible moment, you saw everything he was offering. A residency.
Professional musicians performing your work. Access to a world you had spent years trying to enter. Then you remembered his hand on your waist.
You opened the door.
“Then I will have to change it myself.”
You stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind you. You did not run. You wanted to.
Instead, you walked through the conservatoire with your back straight until you reached the street. Only then did you breathe. Your hands were shaking.
Maddy answered on the second ring.
“How did it—”
“Where are you?”
Her voice changed immediately.
“The café opposite the station. What happened?”
“I’m coming.”
**********
Maddy wanted you to report him. She also wanted to return to the conservatoire and pour coffee over his head. You prevented the second plan.
You were less certain about the first.
“He will deny it.”
“Of course he will. Men like that practise denying things before they do them.”
You stared into your untouched tea. Maddy sat opposite you in the corner of the café. Her anger had made her frighteningly calm.
“Did he lock the door?”
“No.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“Not directly.”
“Did he touch you?”
You swallowed.
“My waist.”
Maddy closed her eyes.
“I am going to kill him.”
“You cannot kill a professor because he touched my waist.”
“Watch me.”
“That would cause additional administrative difficulties.”
She opened her eyes.
“You are making jokes because you feel sick.”
You looked towards the window.
“Probably.”
“Tell your dad.”
Your answer came immediately.
“No.”
“Why not?”
You imagined Hob hearing what had happened. He would believe you. He would not ask whether you had misunderstood, what you had worn or why you had entered the office.
That certainty should have made telling him easier. Instead, it made you imagine what he would do afterwards. Hob had adapted to modern laws.
He had not entirely abandoned older ones.
“Because Dad would do something.”
“Good.”
“Something bad.”
“Also good.”
“He occasionally abides by laws that stopped existing in the fourteenth century.”
Maddy considered that.
“Can he frighten O’Callaghan without committing a felony?”
“I am not confident he distinguishes between those activities.”
She reached across the table and covered your hand.
“You cannot do nothing.”
“I know.”
“Write down everything that happened.”
You nodded.
“And never meet him alone again.”
“I have no intention to.”
“Good.”
You drew in a slow breath.
“Do not tell Dad.”
Maddy’s mouth tightened.
“For now.”
“Maddy.”
“For now,” she repeated. “But if O’Callaghan threatens you, harms your work or comes near you again, I am telling Hob. Then I am helping him select the most appropriate medieval punishment.”
You nearly smiled.
“Thank you.”
“Do not thank me. I am still considering the coffee.”
**********
You did not tell Hob. You wrote down every detail. You sent a copy to Maddy and saved several more.
Then you changed for work. The New Inn was quiet that evening. Rain had discouraged most customers. A two-person folk band occupied the small platform beside the fire, playing for several regulars, a young couple sharing wine and an elderly woman who appeared to have fallen asleep.
The musicians were siblings named Niamh and Conor. Niamh sang and played guitar. Conor moved between a bodhrán, mandolin and fiddle with the relaxed competence of someone who had learned music in crowded rooms rather than formal lessons.
You had heard them before. They were good. You preferred classical music. You liked structure, discipline and the intimacy created when dozens of musicians surrendered themselves to the same written intention.
But folk music possessed a freedom you envied. Nothing remained fixed. A tune could change according to the room and the people playing it.
You were wiping the bar when Conor approached during their break. His gaze dropped to your left hand.
“You play.”
You looked at your fingers.
“Is it that obvious?”
He held up his own callused fingertips.
“Fiddle?”
“Violin.”
“Same thing.”
“Do not say that near anyone from the conservatoire.”
He grinned and held out his fiddle.
“Play the next set.”
You laughed.
“No.”
“Why?”
“I’m working.”
Hob spoke from the other end of the bar.
“You are not working especially hard.”
You looked at him. He had been distracted all evening, glancing towards the door every few minutes. Someone was expected.
You knew who before the door opened. The room changed. The flames sank slightly in the fireplace.
The elderly woman woke, looked towards the entrance and promptly closed her eyes again. The stranger stepped inside. He wore black.
His pale face was as severe as you remembered, his hair untidy above eyes that caught the dim light in an impossible way. Recognition moved through you. Rain against tall windows.
A black tree. A white moth. Then it was gone.
Hob straightened.
“You’re late.”
The stranger approached the bar.
“We agreed upon no hour.”
“I said evening.”
“It is evening.”
Hob looked pointedly towards the clock.
“Barely.”
The stranger glanced towards the quiet table Hob had reserved for them. Then his attention moved towards the stage and the fiddle in your hands.
“I thought we could sit over there,” Hob said.
“No.”
Hob blinked.
“No?”
“I shall remain here.”
Conor extended the fiddle towards you again.
“One tune.”
You looked at Hob. He shrugged.
“Go on.”
“You pay me to work.”
“I pay you poorly enough that I cannot reasonably object.”
You took the fiddle. It was heavier than your violin, its varnish worn where countless hands had held it. You tested the strings.
Conor’s eyebrows rose.
“Classical?”
“Mostly.”
“Try to forget that.”
“I have spent fifteen years being told not to.”
Niamh laughed from the stage. You stepped onto the platform. Maddy emerged from the back carrying clean glasses.
She saw you holding the fiddle. Then she noticed Hob’s friend at the bar. Her eyes widened.
She mouthed, the weird hot one. You ignored her. Niamh began with a familiar tune.
You listened through the first repetition and entered on the second. Conor watched you closely at first. By the third repetition, he stopped. He moved to the bodhrán and allowed you to carry the melody. The tune quickened.
You followed. Niamh changed the rhythm. You answered.
Without a conductor or written score, the music loosened beneath your hands. Nothing existed except the next phrase and the certainty that the others would meet you there. At the bar, Hob poured himself a drink. Dream stood beside him and listened.
Hob watched you for a moment. Then he turned towards his friend.
“She told me you appeared in her dreams.”
Dream’s gaze remained upon the stage.
“Did she?”
“Twice.”
“Yes.”
Hob waited. Dream offered nothing more.
“Did you give her melodies?”
Dream looked towards him.
“No.”
“Then why is she dreaming music no one else recognises?”
“She found them herself.”
Hob frowned.
“You helped her complete a piece she had thought about.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
The fiddle tune ended and another began almost immediately. Dream watched you adjust to the unfamiliar melody.
“She came seeking answers within my realm.”
“She was asleep.”
“Nevertheless, she sought them.”
“Once?”
“Again and again.”
Dream’s voice remained quiet.
“She returned to the same melody. She rejected every ending her own mind attempted to create because she knew none of them were true.”
Hob looked towards you. You were smiling as Conor called out a change half a moment before making it.
“So you gave it to her as a favour, because she is my daughter?”
Dream’s eyes returned to Hob.
“No.”
The answer came without hesitation. Hob’s expression changed.
“Then why?”
For several seconds, Dream said nothing. The room seemed to recede around him.
“Because she possesses a gift I have not witnessed in a mortal for thousands of years.”
Hob stared.
“What sort of gift?”
Dream’s gaze shifted back towards you.
“Music does not merely occur within her. She perceives what lies behind it. Memory. Story. Truth. She hears what has been forgotten and sometimes what has not yet been created.”
Hob’s fingers tightened around his glass.
“You have seen this before.”
“Yes.”
A pause followed.
“The last mortal in whom I witnessed such a gift was my son.”
Hob turned towards him. Surprise briefly overcame his concern.
“You had a mortal son?”
Dream did not answer. His gaze remained fixed upon you. The tune had slowed. You stood beneath the low stage lights, your eyes half closed as you followed the melody into a quieter passage.
After a moment, Dream said:
“Her gift will mature in time.”
Hob studied his face, recognising the deliberate change of subject but choosing, for now, not to challenge it.
“What does that mean?”
Dream considered the question.
“Often, nothing.”
Hob looked at him.
“Nothing?”
“Some mortals are simply gifted. They create works that outlive them. They touch the dreams of others and never understand how.”
“And the others?”
Dream’s face became unreadable.
“Some are something else.”
Hob lowered his voice.
“Are you concerned?”
Dream looked at him.
“If I were concerned by every gifted mortal in every galaxy, Robert Gadling, I would have little time for anything else.”
“That is not the same as saying no.”
“No,” Dream agreed. “It is not.”
Hob watched him.
“And you do not know which she is.”
“Not yet.”
On the stage, you completed the song. Applause moved through the room. Dream did not look away.
*********
You remained for the rest of the set. By the end, several more customers had gathered near the fire, drawn by the music from the rain-dark street. The trouble began shortly afterwards.
Four men entered already drunk. You knew it from the volume of their voices and the exaggerated care with which one of them leaned against the bar. Hob served them a single drink each.
He refused the next round. The largest man stared at him.
“We’ve only had one.”
Hob collected their glasses.
“You had several before you arrived.”
“You following us?”
“No. You smell like a distillery fire.”
Maddy turned away to hide a smile. The man struck the bar with his palm.
“Get another round.”
“No.”
“We are paying.”
“Still no.”
Conversations quietened. Hob remained calm.
“Time to leave.”
One of the man’s companions pulled at his arm.
“Come on, Dean.”
Dean shook him off.
“I said we want another drink.”
“And I said you’re leaving.”
Dean reached across the counter. Hob caught his wrist. The movement was so fast you almost missed it.
“Let go.”
“Gladly, once you agree not to swing at anyone.”
“I wasn’t going to swing.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“You don’t know what I was thinking.”
Hob’s mouth curved without humour.
“I have been in more tavern fights than you have eaten dinners. I know exactly what you were thinking.”
Dean tore his hand free. His elbow struck a glass. It fell and shattered across the floor.
Beer spread between the fragments. Maddy swore. You stepped from behind the bar with a cloth and dustpan.
Dean looked at you.
“You work here?”
You looked pointedly at the cloth in your hand.
“Plainly.”
“Tell your boss to stop being a prick.”
Hob moved between you.
“Leave.”
Dean laughed.
“What, she your daughter?”
Hob’s face became still. Of every possible question, the man had chosen the worst one.
“Yes.”
Dean looked you over. Your skin crawled.
“Could do better than working in this dump.”
You crouched to collect the glass.
“I am beginning to understand why you require three friends to accompany you into public.”
Conor made a choking sound from the stage. Dean stepped towards you. Hob blocked him.
“Enough.”
“She said—”
“I heard her.”
“Teach her some manners.”
“I attempted to. She resisted.”
You looked up.
“Consistently.”
Dean shoved Hob. It was a poor decision. Hob moved half a step backwards.
Nothing more. His face changed. For an instant, you saw the older man beneath him: violent, experienced and entirely unsurprised by confrontation.
He seized the front of Dean’s coat. Before he could do anything else, your father’s friend spoke. His voice was quiet.
Everyone in the room heard it.
“You will leave this place.”
Dean turned towards him.
“Who the hell are you?”
Dream stepped forward. The lights within his eyes appeared brighter.
“You have dreamed of a river for eleven years.”
Dean’s anger faltered. One of his companions went silent.
“Every night,” Dream continued, “you stand upon the bank and hear your brother calling from beneath the water.”
The colour left Dean’s face.
“Shut up.”
The flames bent low. Shadows lengthened.
“You tell yourself you could not have saved him.”
Dream’s voice did not rise.
“But in your dreams, you remember that he was still breathing when you left.”
Dean stumbled backwards.
“How do you know that?”
Dream’s expression held no mercy.
“He will be waiting when next you sleep.”
Dean turned towards the door. His companions were already leaving. He followed them.
The door slammed. Silence filled the pub. Maddy whispered:
“What the fuck?”
Dream looked at her. She lowered her eyes.
“Sorry.”
Hob released a slow breath.
“I did not need help.”
Dream regarded the broken glass and Hob’s clenched hand.
“Clearly.”
“You could have told him to leave without excavating his worst trauma.”
Dream returned to the bar.
“He required persuasion.”
Hob looked towards the closed door.
“Is his brother truly waiting for him?”
“Yes.”
“That seems cruel.”
Dream’s gaze settled upon him.
“The dead are not always cruel merely because they wish to be remembered.”
Hob said nothing more.
*********
The remaining customers left soon afterwards. Niamh and Conor packed away their instruments. Maddy disappeared into the back, though your phone vibrated almost immediately.
THE WEIRD HOT ONE IS A DEMON. A second message followed. OR PSYCHIC.
Then: STILL HOT. UNFORTUNATELY. You put your phone face down.
Hob took the dustpan from you.
“I’ll clean that.”
“You are terrible at sweeping.”
“I owned an inn before modern brooms existed.”
“That explains the problem.”
He crouched beside the broken glass. You wiped spilled beer from the bar. Dream remained.
You expected him to sit with Hob. Instead, he approached you carrying a book. You had not seen it in his hands before.
Its binding was dark green, old but carefully preserved. No title appeared upon the cover. He placed it on the counter. You looked at it.
Then at him.
“What is this?”
“An earlier work by the same author.”
“The author of the house novel?”
“Yes.”
You touched the cover.
“I could not find any others.”
“This was published under another name.”
You opened it carefully. The title page read The Drowned Orchard by E. L. Vane. Brown ink filled several margins.
“For me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
His gaze remained upon you.
“Because I believe you may enjoy it.”
The answer was almost ordinary. From him, it felt significant.
“Does it have another false ending?”
“No.”
“A happy one?”
“That depends upon what you consider happiness.”
“Does the heroine marry an untrustworthy solicitor?”
“No.”
“Promising.”
Something shifted faintly at the corner of his mouth. You looked at him more closely. The fragments of your dreams stirred again.
“I had a strange dream about the ending of the other book after you visited last.”
His attention sharpened.
“What did you dream?”
You described the house. The former inhabitants trapped within its walls. The solicitor feeding names to something beneath the cellar.
You did not mention the final sentence appearing in the waking book. Some instinct urged you to keep that part to yourself. Dream listened without interruption.
“When I woke, it felt as though I had actually read the ending,” you said. “Not invented it.”
“Perhaps you did.”
“In a dream.”
“Dreams preserve many things believed lost in waking.”
You studied him.
“You speak as though dreams are a place.”
His eyes appeared to darken.
“Do they not feel like one?”
You thought of the vast chamber. The black tree.
“Sometimes.”
You ran your fingers across the edge of the book.
“I have had other strange dreams.”
“About what?”
His question came more quickly than you expected.
“I dreamt about composing. About playing the violin. Entire compositions appear, or pieces of them.”
“Do these dreams frighten you?”
“No.”
You considered the first melody.
“One made me sad. I woke crying, although I did not know why.”
Dream’s face became utterly still. You remembered the final passage and the grief held inside it.
“There was someone in that dream.”
His gaze did not move from yours.
“Was there?”
“I think it was you.”
The words sounded absurd when spoken aloud. You looked down.
“God. Why am I telling you this?”
“You believe it was me.”
“Vaguely. You looked different.”
“How?”
You tried to hold the memory.
“Your clothes moved although there was no wind. Your eyes…”
For one instant, you saw them. Galaxies turning in endless darkness. The image vanished.
“They were not human.”
Dream said nothing. Behind you, Hob had stopped sweeping. You could feel him listening.
“You were watching me play,” you continued. “I could not find the ending, and then it appeared.”
Dream’s eyes lowered briefly.
“You played it.”
It was not a question.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember it?”
“Every note.”
Grief passed across his face. This time, you did not imagine it. It was too vast to belong to an ordinary man.
“Was the melody yours?”
“No.”
“Someone you knew?”
Silence gathered around him.
“You do not have to answer.”
His gaze moved towards the rain-dark windows. He said nothing. You watched him for a moment, but his expression had closed completely, leaving no indication of who had composed the melody or why it affected him so deeply.
Realising you had stepped too close to something private, you quickly changed the subject.
“Do you like classical music?”
His gaze returned to you.
“I do.”
You reached beneath the bar for your bag. Several concert programmes were folded inside the outer pocket. You removed one.
Then hesitated. Dream watched you.
“This may seem strange.”
You held out the programme. He looked at it without taking it.
“It is a concert next Thursday.”
“I can read it.”
“Yes. Obviously.”
You nearly withdrew the paper. Instead, you continued.
“We are playing Mahler and Mendelssohn. We are also performing the new piece I composed.”
His gaze moved to your face.
“The one you found amongst the leaves of a tree.”
The phrasing struck you as peculiar.
“Yes.”
You tightened your fingers around the programme.
“Please do not think I am being strange. I simply have this feeling you might enjoy it.”
Dream remained silent. That made you speak faster.
“I don’t know why. Perhaps because of the dreams. They felt too real, and you were listening, and now I am inviting you to a concert because my subconscious apparently has opinions. But please don’t read anything into it. I am only—”
“You are only what?”
You faltered.
“I don’t know.”
Hob straightened behind you.
“You should go,” he told Dream. “You will appreciate it. Most of the programme comes from the nineteenth century, when music still possessed structure.”
You looked over your shoulder.
“Music still has structure.”
“Some of it.”
“You are not qualified to hold that opinion.”
“I have listened to music for seven hundred years.”
“Mostly while drunk in taverns.”
“That remains listening.”
Dream accepted the programme. His fingers brushed yours. They were cold.
Not unpleasantly. Merely absent of the warmth you expected from living skin. He examined the details.
“You are not attending your daughter’s performance?” he asked Hob.
Hob grimaced.
“I attend many of them.”
“He does,” you admitted.
“I have a private function that evening,” Hob said. “It has already been postponed twice, and apparently the stability of a local charity depends upon my supervision of forty accountants with access to an open bar.”
Dream folded the programme once and placed it inside his coat.
“I shall consider it.”
You nodded.
“That is all I meant. There is no obligation.”
“I am aware.”
Hob came around the bar.
“You are leaving already?”
“I have remained longer than intended.”
“You always say that.”
Dream regarded him.
“We have met twice within five months.”
Hob smiled.
“At this rate, people may assume we are friends.”
A stillness passed over Dream’s face. Then he said quietly:
“Perhaps they would be correct.”
Hob’s smile became softer. Dream turned towards you.
“Good night, Y/N Gadling.”
“Good night.”
His eyes rested briefly upon the green book.
“Do not read the final chapter before sleep.”
You frowned.
“Why?”
“You dislike it when characters ignore warnings in stories. I wondered whether you would be any wiser when given one yourself.”
Before you could respond, he crossed the room. The door opened at his approach. He stepped into the rain-dark street and disappeared.
Queen, I know you might not answer this but I'm stressing! so I'm asking in case! Morpheus and Reader had such a beautiful relationship in the original Chains of Reverie, they didn't break up at all! Which was really good especially for Reader who hadn't had a real love (or sex, at all) I know there needs to be drama, but are they still having that strong love dynamic at least?
Pairing: Dream of the Endless x Reader (Hob's Daughter)
Warning: Angst, AU-Fic, Eventually Smut, Graphic Scenes, Death Tag List: Please comment below if you wish to be tagged.
Please comment and engage! It means the world to me ❤️
After that night, something changed.
At first, you thought the change belonged only to you.
You dreamed.
You had never dreamed before.
At least, you had never remembered doing so. There had never been fragments waiting behind your eyes when you woke, no fading faces, impossible landscapes or lingering emotions without a source. Sleep had always been an absence. You closed your eyes, vanished, and returned several hours later with no sense that anything had passed between.
But that night, there had been somewhere.
You could not have explained where.
The place was vast and crowded, filled with people who seemed just as lost as you were. They wandered through a city whose streets rearranged themselves whenever you looked away. Doorways opened onto beaches. Staircases climbed into forests. A railway platform stood beneath a sky full of enormous fish moving slowly among the stars.
No one knew where they were.
Some people laughed.
Others cried.
A man in pyjamas insisted he had been waiting for a train since 1916. A woman wearing a hospital gown wandered through the crowd, touching walls and lampposts as though afraid they would disappear. Somewhere, a child was singing a song you almost recognised, although the words changed each time the melody repeated.
You asked someone whether this was a dream.
They told you they did not know.
Then the city folded in half.
You woke sitting upright in bed, your heart racing, the sheets twisted around your legs.
For several moments, you stared into the darkness.
Then you laughed.
It had been absurd. Not frightening, exactly. Simply chaotic. Nothing had connected to anything else. There had been no proper beginning and no ending at all.
It made absolutely no sense.
Apparently, that was what dreams were like.
The following morning, the news was stranger.
People who had been asleep for years were waking.
Reports appeared first from hospitals, nursing homes and private residences. Patients who had fallen into unexplained sleep decades earlier had suddenly opened their eyes. Some recognised their families. Others did not. Several seemed convinced only a single night had passed.
There were interviews with bewildered doctors.
Old photographs appeared beside images of grey-haired men and women sitting upright in hospital beds, staring at a world that had continued without them.
Then came stories of those who had been unable to sleep properly for years.
They slept too.
Some for twelve hours.
Some for nearly two days.
One man told a reporter he had dreamed for the first time since childhood and had awakened crying because he had seen his mother alive again.
The reports continued for several days.
Experts speculated.
Neurologists disagreed with psychologists. Psychologists disagreed with sleep researchers. Religious commentators announced miracles, punishments and prophecies in roughly equal measure.
You watched most of it while eating toast at the kitchen counter.
Hob stood behind you, holding a cup of coffee and frowning at the television.
“Odd,” you said.
“Very.”
“Do you think it is connected?”
“Connected to what?”
You glanced at him.
“To me dreaming.”
Hob lowered his cup.
“You think the entire world has reorganised its sleeping habits because you finally dreamed?”
“It would be quite flattering.”
“It would be extremely inconvenient.”
You looked back at the television.
A doctor was explaining that no known environmental event could account for the sudden change.
“People slept and couldn’t wake up,” you said. “Other people couldn’t sleep at all. I couldn’t dream. Now they’re waking, those people are sleeping, and I can dream.”
Hob was quiet for a moment.
“Perhaps something shifted.”
You looked at him again.
There was something peculiar in his expression.
Not fear.
Recognition, perhaps.
But it vanished before you could question it.
“You sound very mysterious.”
“I am seven hundred years old. I’m entitled to sound mysterious occasionally.”
“You usually sound like a man complaining about parking.”
“Parking in London these days is considerably worse than the plague.”
You rolled your eyes and returned to your toast.
For the next week, you dreamed every night.
The dreams were never the same.
Once, you stood on a theatre stage with no audience while an orchestra played beneath the floorboards.
Another night, you walked through a library where every book contained music instead of words. When you opened one, a violin began playing somewhere behind you. When you closed it, the instrument stopped.
You dreamed of houses you had never entered and faces you did not recognise.
You dreamed of your father young.
That one stayed with you.
Hob sat beside a river in clothes from another century, his hair longer and his face unlined. He was laughing with someone you could not see.
You called to him.
He did not hear you.
When you told him the next morning, he nearly dropped his spoon into his tea.
“What was I wearing?”
“Something ridiculous.”
“That does not narrow it down.”
“Brown doublet. Boots. Hair to about here.”
You gestured towards your shoulders.
Hob stared at you.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You owned a brown doublet, didn’t you?”
“Several.”
“That is upsetting.”
He did not explain why the dream had disturbed him.
You did not press.
Eventually, the novelty faded.
You still noticed your dreams, but they no longer felt like evidence of some great cosmic event. They became another strange thing the mind did when no one was watching.
You went on with your life.
You worked.
You rehearsed with the orchestra.
You spent long afternoons repeating the same difficult passage until your shoulder ached and the conductor finally stopped glaring at your section. You travelled between rehearsals, lessons and evening shifts at the pub, carrying sheet music in one bag and whichever book you happened to be reading in another.
Hob had owned the pub in one form or another since the eighties.
The building had changed names, owners on paper and almost every visible surface, but he remained behind it. Sometimes as manager. Sometimes as silent partner. Once, during a particularly complicated period involving tax officials and forged records, as his own alleged nephew.
You had worked there since you were sixteen.
By twenty, you could pull three pints at once, identify most regulars by the sound of the door opening, and tell which customers were going to complain before they reached the bar.
The evening before your twenty-first birthday was quiet.
Rain tapped against the windows.
Only five customers remained: two elderly men playing cards by the fire, a woman reading the newspaper beneath a wall lamp, and a couple sharing chips in a corner while arguing softly about someone named Elaine.
Maddy was in the back washing glasses.
You sat on a stool behind the bar with an old book spread open before you.
It had been left in a box upstairs years ago, its green cloth cover faded almost grey. Several pages were loose, and someone had written notes in the margins in brown ink. The story concerned a young woman who inherited an isolated country estate, discovered that the previous owner had been conducting occult experiments and then, after three hundred pages of increasingly elaborate supernatural warnings, married the handsome but entirely untrustworthy solicitor.
You disliked the ending.
It was too neat.
The solicitor was forgiven. The house was sold. The heroine moved to Bath and apparently never thought again about the voices beneath the cellar floor.
You were halfway through rereading the final chapter when the door opened.
The room changed.
Nothing visible happened.
The lamps did not dim. The fire did not go out. No sudden wind swept through the pub.
Yet every conversation faltered.
The woman lowered her newspaper.
One of the old men looked towards the entrance and forgot to play his card.
A man stood in the doorway.
He was tall and painfully pale, dressed entirely in black. Not the deliberate black of someone trying to look fashionable. His clothes seemed to contain every possible shade of darkness and, yet, they were just clothes. Just ordinary clothes.
His hair was untidy.
His face was narrow and severe.
He looked neither young nor old.
For one peculiar moment, you thought you had seen him before.
Not in the pub.
Not at the orchestra.
Somewhere without walls.
Then the impression vanished.
The stranger stepped inside.
The door closed behind him without his touching it.
You watched him approach the bar.
He moved quietly, but not cautiously. His gaze travelled around the room as though he remembered it differently—or perhaps did not remember it at all. There was something almost like surprise in his expression, as though he had expected to find something else.
You waited.
He did not speak.
You glanced towards the back, hoping Maddy might return.
She did not.
Finally, you closed your book.
“Can I help you?”
The man looked at you.
His eyes were extraordinary.
Not simply blue.
There were points of light within them, faint and distant, as though someone had cut holes through the colour and revealed a night sky behind it.
You stared before you could stop yourself.
His expression did not change.
“You are—”
You stopped yourself.
“Forgive me.”
He continued to regard you without blinking.
“What am I?”
Your face warmed beneath the weight of his attention.
“I was going to say unusual.”
“That is an imprecise word.”
“I considered saying unsettling, but that seemed rude.”
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. It was not quite a smile.
“And yet you have said it.”
“Yes.”
His gaze remained fixed upon you.
“Then perhaps you value honesty more highly than courtesy.”
The points of light seemed to shift.
You became aware that the entire room remained slightly too quiet.
“Can I get you something?” you asked.
“No.”
You waited.
He said nothing more.
“Right.”
You reopened your book.
The stranger remained at the bar.
After several seconds, you looked up again.
“Was there something else?”
“I seek an old acquaintance.”
“That sounds ominous.”
His gaze rested on you with mild disapproval.
“It was not intended to.”
“You came into a nearly empty pub dressed like you just came from a funeral and announced you were looking for an old acquaintance. There are limited ways to interpret that.”
At that moment, Maddy emerged from the back carrying a tray of clean glasses.
She stopped when she saw the stranger.
Then she looked at you.
“Jesus. I’m sorry. She’s terrible at customer service.”
“I am excellent at customer service.”
“You just told a customer he looked like he came from a funeral.”
“He doesn’t want anything.”
Maddy put down the tray.
She gave the stranger her brightest professional smile.
“What can I get you?”
“Nothing.”
Maddy’s smile faltered.
You looked smugly at her.
“See?”
She ignored you.
“Water?”
“No.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“We have a decent red open.”
“I do not drink.”
You leaned against the bar.
“You are definitely in the wrong place, then.”
His eyes returned to you.
For a moment, you had the strange impression he was deciding whether you were amusing or tiresome.
Perhaps both.
“I am looking for a man by the name of Robert Gadling.”
Your expression changed.
“Oh.”
Maddy glanced at you.
The stranger’s attention sharpened slightly.
“You know him.”
“He is my father.”
Something passed over his face.
Not surprise exactly. More like the quiet adjustment of a fact he had not expected.
His eyes moved over you again, more carefully this time.
You resisted the urge to ask what he was looking for.
“I’ll get him,” you said. “He’s upstairs.”
You stepped away from the bar, then stopped.
The sense of familiarity returned.
You looked back.
He stood motionless beneath the low lights, pale face framed by black hair, one hand resting against the dark wood of the counter.
“God, you look so familiar.”
His expression became unreadable.
“Do I?”
“Have you been here before?”
“Not precisely.”
“Then probably not.”
You disappeared through the door behind the bar.
Hob was in the small office upstairs, surrounded by invoices and looking personally betrayed by each one.
“There’s a man downstairs asking for you.”
“Tell him I’m dead.”
“I don’t think he’d believe me.”
“Why not?”
“He’s strange.”
Hob looked up.
“Strange how?”
“Tall. Pale. All in black. Looks like he hasn’t slept in centuries.”
The colour left Hob’s face.
His chair scraped against the floor.
“He’s here?”
“I assume so. Unless he dissolved into mist while I was upstairs—which, given how odd he is, would not entirely surprise me.”
Hob was already moving towards the door.
You followed.
He descended the stairs too quickly and stopped just inside the bar.
The stranger turned.
For several seconds, neither man spoke.
Hob looked shocked.
The stranger looked as he had from the moment he entered: still, remote, carrying some ancient sorrow that did not belong in an ordinary room.
Then Hob smiled.
It was not the smile he gave customers, neighbours or people whose names he had forgotten.
It was open and disbelieving.
“You came.”
The stranger inclined his head.
“I did.”
Hob stepped closer.
“I thought—”
He stopped himself.
His eyes moved over the man’s face, searching for injuries no one else could see.
“You missed our meeting.”
The stranger’s gaze lowered briefly.
“I was detained.”
Hob studied him.
There were a hundred questions in his expression.
He asked none of them.
Instead, he gestured towards the table in the quietest corner.
“Sit.”
The stranger did.
Hob turned towards you.
“There’s a bottle in the cupboard below the till. Burgundy. Nineteen sixty-four.”
Maddy stared at him.
“He just said he doesn’t drink.”
“Open it anyway.”
“That bottle is worth more than my car.”
“Your car should not be used as a measure of value.”
“It passed its roadworthy.”
“Eventually.”
You crouched beneath the till and found the bottle wrapped in cloth behind several less precious wines.
“Why do we keep this down here?”
“Because Dad keeps the good stuff hidden for special occasions.”
“Excellent cellar management.”
You carried the bottle to the table with two glasses.
The stranger looked at the wine but made no move to touch it.
Hob poured for himself. And then for him as well.
“My daughter,” he said.
The stranger’s gaze rose to you.
“So I was informed.”
“I adopted her,” Hob added.
You frowned.
“Yes, I know. I look nothing like him. I’m sure you were wondering.”
The stranger regarded you.
“I was not.”
“Not even a little?”
“No.”
“That is almost disappointing.”
His expression remained solemn.
“Should it be?”
“I had prepared an explanation.”
“Then you may offer it to someone who requires one.”
Hob looked down, disguising what might have been a smile.
The stranger’s attention was still on you. It did not feel unkind, but it was unnervingly complete. When he looked at someone, it seemed impossible that he might be thinking of anything else.
Then Hob gestured towards the bar.
“Go on. We need to talk.”
You looked between them and then nodded before, finally, you returned to the bar.
For the next hour, you heard very little of their conversation.
Their voices remained low.
Hob spoke more than the stranger did. Occasionally, he laughed, although the laughter was quieter than usual and carried something close to relief.
The man listened.
Once, you glanced over and found him already looking at you.
You immediately looked back at your book.
A few minutes later, the last customers left.
Maddy began stacking chairs.
Hob and his strange guest continued speaking.
You attempted to read, but the ending irritated you more with every page.
At last, the chair across the room moved.
The stranger stood.
Hob rose with him.
“You don’t have to leave yet,” Hob said.
“I have much to set in order.”
The words sounded heavier than they should have.
Hob nodded slowly.
“Will I see you again?”
The stranger regarded him.
“Yes.”
“In another hundred years?”
A pause followed.
“No.”
Hob’s eyebrows rose.
“Then when?”
“I shall arrange a time.”
Hob smiled and then the man turned towards the door.
As he passed the bar, his gaze fell upon your book.
He stopped.
“You find the ending unsatisfactory.”
You placed one hand over the page.
“Were you reading over my shoulder?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
His gaze lowered to the open book.
“You have read the final paragraph four times and, with each reading, your displeasure has become more evident.”
You glanced down.
That was true.
“It is a terrible ending.”
“It was not the ending its author originally intended.”
You looked up at him.
“You’ve read it?”
“I was present when the story was first conceived.”
You stared at him.
From behind you came the soft sound of Maddy dropping a spoon.
“Right,” you said slowly. “Of course you were.”
If he noticed your disbelief, he gave no sign of it.
One pale finger came to rest against the edge of the page.
“The author intended that she remain within the house.”
You looked down at the book.
“Why?”
“Because the voices beneath the cellar were not those of the dead.”
Your irritation with the novel vanished.
“Then what were they?”
His eyes met yours.
“The former inhabitants.”
“The ones who disappeared?”
“They did not disappear.”
You glanced towards the final chapter.
“She finds them?”
“She does.”
“Alive?”
A brief pause followed.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And the solicitor?”
“He knew what had become of them.”
You sat straighter.
“I knew he was awful.”
Maddy leaned on the bar beside you.
“You say that about every man in every book.”
“I’m usually right.”
You looked back at the stranger.
“Why did the author change it?”
“The intended ending was considered too upsetting.”
“By whom?”
“His publisher. His wife. Eventually, by the author himself.”
Dream’s gaze shifted towards the rain-darkened windows.
“He decided comfort would be more welcome than honesty.”
“Was it?”
“It is my understanding that the book sold well in its time.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
His eyes returned to you.
For the first time, he seemed genuinely interested.
Only slightly.
A minute alteration in the focus of his gaze.
“No,” he said. “It was not.”
You let your fingers rest against the loose final page.
“Then perhaps that is why it was never remembered among the great stories.”
His gaze remained upon the book.
For a moment, he said nothing. The silence around him seemed deliberate, as though even the room had paused to await his judgement.
“Stories are not made great merely because they are remembered,” he said at last. “Nor are they diminished because men choose to forget them.”
You looked up at him.
“Still, it probably did not help.”
Something almost imperceptible shifted in his expression.
“Perhaps not.”
Then he inclined his head.
“Good night, Y/N Gadeling.”
The words carried the weight of something older than courtesy.
Before you could reply, he turned and crossed the room. The door opened at his approach, and he stepped out into the rain-dark street.
A moment later, it closed behind him.
Through the window, you saw him standing briefly beneath the rain.
Then a bus passed.
When it had gone, the pavement was empty.
Maddy stared.
“He was a complete weirdo.”
You continued looking at the place where he had been.
“Yes.”
“Attractive, though.”
You turned.
“Was he?”
Maddy looked at you in disbelief.
“You stared at his eyes for about ten minutes.”
“They were strange.”
“His entire face was strange.”
Hob remained near the door.
His hand rested on the old brass handle.
You watched him come back towards the bar then, which is when you asked.
“Was that him?”
He turned.
“Who?”
“The man you told me about.”
Maddy looked between you.
“What man?” Maddy asked.
You ignored her.
She looked between you and Hob, then reached for the rubbish bag beneath the bar.
“Right. Fine. I’ll take this out and allow the two of you to continue whatever deeply normal conversation this is.”
She disappeared through the back door.
You turned fully towards Hob.
“The man you meet every hundred years.”
Hob’s expression changed.
The ease left his face, replaced by a wariness you rarely saw in him. He glanced towards the rain-darkened windows, although the stranger had long since disappeared from view.
“Yes.”
You lowered your voice.
“The one who made you immortal.”
Hob remained silent for a moment.
Then he drew in a slow breath and leaned one hand against the bar.
“About that.”
You waited.
His mouth tightened.
“It appears I was mistaken.”
You stared at him.
“Mistaken about which part?”
“The part where he made me immortal.”
“What?”
Hob looked towards the door again, as though the man might return and save him from having to explain.
He did not.
“Apparently, it was his sister.”
You searched his face for some sign that he was joking.
There was none.
“His sister made you immortal?”
“So he tells me.”
“Why?”
Hob rubbed one hand over his jaw.
“A wager.”
You blinked.
“A wager.”
“Yes.”
“You have spent six hundred years believing that man gave you eternal life, and tonight he simply informed you that it was actually the result of a wager with his sister?”
Hob’s expression turned faintly aggrieved.
“He did not put it quite like that.”
“How did he put it?”
“In the manner he puts most things. Very few words, no useful explanation, and the expectation that everyone else will understand.”
Despite yourself, you glanced towards the door.
“That does sound accurate from what I can tell.”
Hob gave a short, humourless laugh.
Then his expression grew more thoughtful.
“I believed he had done it. For centuries, I believed he had heard me say that I had no intention of dying and decided to test whether I meant it.”
“And you never asked him directly?”
Hob looked at you.
“Our meetings were once every hundred years.”
“You still had several opportunities.”
“They were not always pleasant opportunities.”
You folded your arms.
“You met six times.”
“Seven, counting tonight.”
“That is worse.”
Hob sighed.
“The first time, I did not know what he was. The second, I was too occupied with boasting about how marvellous life had become. By the third, almost everyone I loved was dead, my house was gone and I had spent years half-mad with grief.”
Your expression softened, but he continued before you could speak.
“The fourth meeting went badly. The fifth went worse. At the sixth, I accused him of coming because he was lonely, and he walked out.”
You stared at him.
“You accused that man of being lonely?”
“He was.”
“And you survived?”
A faint smile touched Hob’s face.
“Apparently, I am difficult to kill.”
The smile faded.
He looked down at the untouched second glass of wine.
“Besides, after enough centuries, the reason begins to matter less than the fact of it. I woke each morning. Everyone around me grew older. I did not. Whether he had done it himself or merely arranged it seemed an academic distinction.”
“Until tonight.”
“Until tonight.”
You were quiet for a moment.
“So what exactly was the wager?”
Hob’s gaze remained on the wine.
When he answered, his voice was lower.
“Whether a mortal man, granted endless life, would eventually beg for death.”
You felt something cold settle in your stomach.
“They made a wager over that?”
“They are not human.”
There was no humour in his answer.
You studied him.
“Did he expect you to?”
Hob looked up.
“To what?”
“Beg for death.”
For the first time since the stranger had left, something familiar returned to Hob’s face.
Not recklessness.
Not quite pride.
Something steadier than either.
“Perhaps.”
“And have you?”
His answer came without hesitation.
“No.”
You held his gaze.
“Not once?”
Hob considered that more carefully.
“I have wished for pain to end. I have wished for people to return. I have wished I had made different choices.”
His eyes lowered briefly.
“There were years when I did not know how I would endure another day.”
Then he looked at you again.
“But I endured it.”
You said nothing.
Hob’s mouth curved, only slightly.
“Life has been brutal to me. It has also been generous beyond anything I deserved. I have seen wonders. I have loved people I would never have known if I had died when I was meant to.”
His gaze settled on you.
The meaning was unmistakable.
“So no,” he said. “I have never asked for death.”
Your throat tightened.
You looked away before he could notice.
“Then I suppose you won.”
Hob followed your gaze towards the rain-streaked window.
“I was never told the terms.”
“You are still alive.”
A faint, stubborn smile appeared.
“Yes.”
He reached for his glass.
“I am.”
********
After this strange encounter you did not know what more frequent meant to beings who considered a century a reasonable interval between drinks.
You discovered the answer four months and twenty-one days later.
But before then, there were dreams.
That same night, you fell asleep with the old book beside you.
You had searched for the original ending online.
You found nothing.
The author’s surviving papers had been destroyed during the war. No early manuscript existed. The only reference you discovered was a letter mentioning that the ending had been changed at the insistence of several readers.
You went to bed irritated.
Then you opened your eyes inside the house from the novel.
It stood exactly as you had imagined it.
Almost.
The hallway was narrower.
The wallpaper was dark blue rather than green. Rain struck the tall windows, and the portraits along the staircase had turned their faces towards the wall.
You wore the heroine’s white nightdress.
In your hand was a lamp.
From beneath the floor came the sound of whispering.
You knew what waited in the cellar.
You also knew you could turn away.
The front door stood open behind you. Beyond it lay a road, a waiting carriage and a comfortable life in Bath beside a husband who would never tell you the truth.
You went downstairs.
The cellar door opened before you touched it.
Below, the missing inhabitants stood in a circle around a black well.
They were not alive.
They were not dead.
Their bodies had become part of the house. Fingers emerged from the stonework. Eyes opened between the bricks. Their voices travelled through pipes, floorboards and the hollow spaces within the walls.
The solicitor stood among them.
He had fed them names.
He had promised them the heroine’s.
The dream did not become a nightmare.
You were frightened, but the fear felt deliberate. Necessary.
You watched the heroine refuse the solicitor. You watched her burn the papers that bound the inhabitants to the estate. You watched the house collapse around them while dawn entered through the broken roof.
She did not escape unchanged.
She did not marry.
She did not move to Bath.
She remained among the ruins and wrote down everything she had seen, knowing no one would believe her.
The final line appeared before you in the air.
The house was gone, but what had lived within it had learned her name.
You woke before sunrise.
For several moments, you lay perfectly still.
Then you reached for the book.
The printed ending remained unchanged.
You turned to the final page.
Beneath the last paragraph, in ink blacker than the old type, stood a single handwritten sentence.
The house was gone, but what had lived within it had learned her name.
You touched the words.
The ink did not smear.
By breakfast, they had disappeared.
You told no one.
Not even Hob.
*******
Meanwhile, far from the waking world, the Lord of Dreams stood within his kingdom.
After granting you that dream, he thought of you only rarely.
There was far too much to be done.
The Dreaming had suffered greatly in his absence. Vast halls stood empty, their splendour dimmed by neglect. Forests had grown wild beyond their appointed borders. Dreams and nightmares had abandoned the purposes for which they had been created, and some had caused considerable harm among mortals.
His tools had been scattered across the waking world, and he had spent the first weeks after his escape seeking their return.
His power had once been diminished almost beyond recognition. Now, with his helm restored, his sand reclaimed and the power of the ruby returned to him, he was stronger than he had been in aeons.
Yet strength alone could not repair what a century of absence had broken.
The rebuilding would take time.
His subjects required judgement, reassurance and command. Gates had to be restored. Boundaries had to be redrawn. The damage inflicted upon the realm had to be understood before it could be undone. Escaped creations remained to be found, and beyond them waited a vortex, family obligations, ancient grievances and the consequences of choices made long before you had entered the world.
You were one dreamer among billions.
The adopted daughter of Robert Gadling.
That fact was mildly curious, but not alarming.
Hob had spoken of you during his visit to the New Inn.
He told Dream that you had been found as a young child following a plane crash, that the circumstances were strange, and that no ordinary search had revealed where you had come from.
Dream listened.
He did not offer an explanation because he had none.
During his imprisonment, there had been no Dream Lord seated at the heart of the realm to witness every new dreamer properly. Records existed, but they were damaged and incomplete. Lives had unfolded beyond his reach. Some dreams had wandered without guidance. Others had vanished into places even Lucienne’s books could not fully recover.
Your life was one of those absences.
Twenty-one years of blank pages, for throughout those twenty-one years, you had never dreamed.
What little Dream knew of you had been preserved within the dreams of Robert Gadling.
Hob had dreamed of you.
Often.
Dream found those dreams eventually, woven among the countless memories returning to the library.
Hob dreamed of holding you as a child.
He dreamed of losing you in crowds.
He dreamed of you falling from a horse at eleven, despite the fact you had never owned a horse.
He dreamed of your first orchestral performance, in which every member of the audience had Hob’s face because he feared no one else would attend.
He dreamed of you leaving.
Of you dying.
Of you growing old while he remained unchanged.
And, during the long years of Dream’s imprisonment, Hob sometimes dreamed of simple things: you sitting across from him at breakfast, complaining about burnt toast; you asleep on the sofa with a book over your face; you laughing so loudly in the pub that customers turned to stare.
Dream was pleased that his old friend had found comfort in those visions.
Nothing more.
When you began to dream for yourself, he noticed only because Hob had named you and because he had met you, which made him mildly curious.
Your dreams were lively.
Creative, but many mortal minds were creative.
Music occupied much of them.
You dreamed in sound more often than images. Entire landscapes formed from orchestral movements. Rivers changed direction when a cello entered. Rooms expanded with crescendos and contracted into narrow corridors during moments of silence.
You dreamed of books.
Of stages.
Of forgetting your instrument before a performance.
You dreamed of arriving at work without trousers.
That dream was extremely common.
You dreamed of Hob being injured, although he could not die. You dreamed of your unknown parents without faces. You dreamed of standing before locked doors and knowing that whatever waited beyond them belonged to you.
None of it marked you as exceptional.
Dream did not linger.
He watched for a moment, as he watched countless dreamers, and then continued with the endless work of restoring his realm.
Until, one night, you dreamed of a melody that had not been heard in the waking world for thousands of years.
Dream heard it from the palace.
Only a fragment at first.
A handful of notes rising through the Dreaming, faint enough that another might have mistaken them for the remnants of some ancient dream. Yet Dream knew them.
He knew each note.
He knew the hand that had first drawn them from the strings. He knew the voice that had once carried the melody over mountains, through forests and into places where even the dead had paused to listen.
The sound stopped.
Dream stood motionless within the throne room.
Lucienne, who had been speaking to him about repairs to the eastern wing of the library, fell silent.
“My lord?”
He did not answer.
The melody began again.
This time it came more clearly.
A violin.
The notes were imperfect. Several were misplaced, and the rhythm faltered before the phrase could complete itself. Yet the shape of the song remained unmistakable.
Dream turned his head.
The Dreaming opened before him.
He stepped through.
Your dream had formed itself into a concert hall.
It was not one Dream recognised. It appeared to be assembled from several places you had known: the stage from your orchestra, the ceiling of an old theatre you had visited as a child, the red velvet seats from a cinema Hob had taken you to years earlier.
Every seat was empty.
You stood alone beneath a single light.
A violin rested beneath your chin.
You wore the black clothes you used for performances, although your feet were bare and the hem of your dress dissolved into drifting sheet music whenever you moved.
Dream remained in the shadows at the rear of the hall.
He did not reveal himself.
He allowed the dream to continue in the form your sleeping mind had given it.
You lifted the bow.
The melody began once more.
The opening phrase was uncertain.
You found several notes by instinct, then lost them.
You stopped.
The empty hall waited.
You tried again.
This time the first passage came more easily. The notes rose into the darkness above the stage, and the chandeliers stirred although there was no wind.
Dream listened.
The song was Orpheus’s.
Not one preserved in mortal memory.
Not one repeated in poems, translated imperfectly by scholars or reconstructed by musicians from surviving fragments.
It was a song Orpheus had composed in his youth.
A song he had played only a few times.
Dream had heard it first beside a river beneath an evening sky, when his son had still been young enough to look towards him without grief or accusation.
No mortal living should have known it.
You reached the end of the first phrase.
Then nothing came.
Your bow hovered above the strings.
You frowned.
You played the last three notes again.
Then again.
The melody refused to continue.
“No.”
Your voice echoed through the empty hall.
You lowered the violin, irritated.
“That isn’t right.”
You began again from the opening.
The first notes were clearer now, but when you reached the same point, the song broke apart.
You tried another progression.
Wrong.
A higher note.
Worse.
The entire orchestra appeared behind you without warning.
Rows of empty chairs filled the stage. Instruments lifted themselves into position, held by invisible hands.
You turned towards them.
“Do any of you know how this goes?”
The instruments remained silent.
You looked back at the sheet music.
The page was blank.
Dream watched from the darkness.
He could have completed the melody.
The Dreaming remembered it. All songs imagined, forgotten or never performed existed somewhere within his realm.
Yet he did nothing.
Not then.
He wished to see what you would create in its absence.
You raised the violin again.
You played the opening passage and forced the melody beyond the point where memory failed.
The notes that followed were yours.
They were not Orpheus’s.
They were less elegant. Less inevitable. They wandered where his had moved with certainty.
But they were not without beauty.
Dream listened until you stopped in frustration.
“No.”
You lowered the violin.
“That is not how it ends.”
Your gaze moved across the empty auditorium.
For the first time, you noticed him.
A pale man standing at the back of the hall, dressed in black, his face partly obscured by shadow.
Your expression changed.
“You.”
Dream said nothing.
You stared at him, trying to place where you had seen him.
Then recognition entered your face.
“It’s you.”
The stage lights flickered.
Dream stepped no closer.
“What are you doing here?”
Before he could answer, the dream dissolved.
The theatre vanished.
The violin disappeared from your hands.
You awoke in darkness with the melody still turning restlessly inside your mind.
By morning, you remembered only fragments.
The empty theatre.
The frustration.
A man at the back of the hall who looked like someone you had met but had no reason to dream about.
You dismissed it.
Three nights later, the melody returned.
This time, you dreamed of playing beneath an open sky.
The stage stood in the middle of a lake. Black water stretched in every direction, reflecting stars that moved too slowly to belong to the waking world.
You sat alone on a wooden chair.
The violin was already in your hands.
Dream stood on the distant shore.
Again, he remained unseen.
Again, you played the opening.
The melody faltered at precisely the same place.
You stopped and closed your eyes.
You hummed the first phrase beneath your breath.
Then you tried to continue it.
The next notes were closer this time.
Not correct.
But closer.
The water responded to each sound. Small ripples moved outward from the stage, carrying pieces of the unfinished melody across the lake.
Dream followed them with his eyes.
No dream should have preserved the fragment so faithfully after a single night.
You had not heard the song in the waking world. There was nowhere you could have heard it.
Yet your sleeping mind returned to it as though attempting to recover something it had once known.
You played again.
The wrong ending.
Then another.
You swore softly and lowered the bow.
The stars above the lake dimmed with your frustration.
Dream left before you could see him.
The following night, you did not dream of music.
Nor the night after.
Dream returned to his duties.
He considered the melody an anomaly.
Nothing more.
The Dreaming contained countless anomalies. Fragments passed from one sleeper to another. Songs moved through collective memory without names. Mortals sometimes touched things older than themselves and carried away pieces they could neither explain nor reproduce.
There was no reason to assign greater meaning to it.
Then, on the seventh night, the melody returned for a third time.
The dream formed a smaller room.
No theatre.
No audience.
Only an old rehearsal studio with wooden floors, tall windows and rain moving softly against the glass.
You stood near the centre of the room.
The violin rested beneath your chin.
Dream appeared in the corner, concealed within the shape of the shadows.
You played the opening phrase.
This time it was exact.
Every note.
Every pause.
You reached the place where the melody had always abandoned you.
Your bow stopped.
Your frustration entered the room like a pressure.
The windows trembled.
You tried one note.
Then another.
Both were wrong.
You lowered the instrument.
“I know there is more.”
Dream watched you.
“I can feel it.”
The words were not addressed to anyone.
You looked down at the violin.
“Why can’t I hear it?”
For a long moment, Dream did nothing.
Then he raised one hand.
The missing melody entered the dream.
Not loudly.
It came from no single place.
The final passage moved through the room like breath, carried in the rain, the floorboards and the trembling strings beneath your fingers.
Your head lifted.
You listened.
The song continued beyond the point where your memory had failed, unfolding with a grief so profound that the room itself seemed to bow beneath it.
Your fingers moved.
The violin answered.
At first, you merely followed.
Then you played.
The final passage was more difficult than the opening. It demanded precision, but also restraint. The melody should have broken beneath its own sorrow, yet it did not. It carried the grief carefully, refusing either to deny it or be destroyed by it.
Dream listened.
For an instant, the rehearsal room was gone.
He stood again beside the river.
Orpheus was young.
The world had not yet taken everything from him.
Then the memory passed.
You reached the final note.
It lingered.
The rain stopped.
The silence that followed was complete.
You lowered the bow slowly.
Your face had changed.
There were tears in your eyes, although you appeared not to understand why.
“That was it.”
Dream remained in the shadows.
You looked around the room.
“Wasn’t it?”
He should have left.
Instead, he answered.
“Yes.”
You turned sharply.
He stood near the windows now, pale against the darkness.
You stared at him.
“You again.”
Dream inclined his head.
“You were here before.”
“I was.”
“Did you give me the ending?”
His gaze moved to the violin.
“I returned what had been lost.”
You frowned.
“That sounds like a very dramatic way of saying yes.”
Dream’s expression remained solemn.
“It is the truth.”
You studied him.
“Whose song is it?”
He was silent for so long that you thought he might refuse to answer.
“It belonged to one who understood that music may preserve what memory cannot.”
“That isn’t a name.”
“No.”
You waited.
Dream offered nothing more.
“You are very strange.”
“You have told me so before.”
You looked at him more closely.
“What are you?”
The room began to fade.
The walls softened into mist. The floorboards disappeared beneath your feet.
You tightened your grip on the violin.
“Wait.”
Dream looked at you.
“Will I remember the song when I wake?”
He could have taken it from you.
Perhaps he should have.
The melody belonged to a life long ended, to a son whose memory remained a wound no passage of time had healed.
Yet the song had already found you.
And you had pursued it across three dreams.
“Yes,” Dream said.
The dream collapsed.
You woke with tears drying against your temples.
For several moments, you did not move.
Then you reached for your phone and hummed the melody into a recording before it could disappear.
It did not.
The notes remained with perfect clarity.
Dream’s presence did not.
You remembered him only vaguely: a pale figure dressed in black, standing at the edge of the dream. It was absurd that he should have appeared there at all. You had met him only once, and briefly.
Then again, dreams rarely troubled themselves with sense.
*******
The following afternoon, you arrived early to rehearsal.
Only a few musicians were present. The conductor stood near the front, speaking with the principal cellist, while others tuned or arranged their music.
You opened your case.
The melody had followed you throughout the day.
You had written as much of it as you could remember, though the notation felt inadequate. The phrasing seemed to change depending upon how you approached it, as if the song resisted being fixed to paper.
You lifted the violin.
Without announcement, you began to play.
The opening phrase filled the rehearsal room.
Conversations stopped.
The conductor turned.
You continued.
The other musicians watched you with expressions ranging from curiosity to confusion.
When you reached the final passage, the room became utterly still.
The last note faded.
No one spoke for several seconds.
Then the principal cellist lowered her bow.
“What was that?”
You looked down at the violin.
“I don’t know.”
The conductor stared at you.
“Who composed it?”
You thought of the pale man standing beside the rain-darkened windows.
“I’m not sure.”
“Where did you find it?”
You hesitated.
“I dreamed it.”
Someone laughed uncertainly.
The conductor did not.
He stepped closer.
“Play it again.”
You did.
Far away, within the Dreaming, the Lord of Dreams paused beneath the arches of his palace.
The melody reached him faintly through the sleeping minds of those who had heard you play it and would dream of it later.
He stood motionless until it ended.
Then he continued on his way.
But from that day forward, when your dreams appeared among the countless others passing through his realm, he no longer looked away quite so quickly.
Warnings: Age Gap, Enemies to Lovers, Secret Relationship, Possibly Unexpected Circumstances, Playboy Tom, Bi Tom, Bi Reader
The following day, Jess arrived at the café twelve minutes early.
She chose a table near the back, positioned where she could see both the entrance and the street through the front windows. She ordered coffee and left it untouched.
At precisely four minutes past four, Denise entered.
She looked much as Jess remembered her: polished, carefully dressed and carrying herself with the confidence of someone accustomed to entering other people’s spaces as though invited.
Her dark coat was belted neatly at the waist. Her hair had been styled despite the wind outside. She held her phone in one hand and scanned the room before spotting Jess.
Jess did not stand when Denise approached.
Denise hesitated beside the table.
“Jess?”
“Denise.”
“Thank you for agreeing to meet.”
Denise removed her coat and sat opposite her.
A server appeared before either woman could continue.
Denise ordered tea. Jess said she did not need anything else.
They waited until the server had moved away.
Jess folded her arms.
“What’s this about?”
Denise glanced around the café.
Jess watched the movement and immediately disliked it.
“You know Y/M and Tom are engaged.”
Jess stared at her.
“That is not news. It’s online.”
“I am aware.”
“Then why are we starting there?”
A faint line appeared between Denise’s eyebrows.
“Because what I saw happened less than a week after the engagement.”
“What did you see?”
Denise placed her phone on the table but kept her hand resting over it.
“You know that photographer Tom was with in the past?”
“Frank Conner?”
Yes?”
“What about him?”
“He was staying at the estate for Arthur’s wedding as well. Him and Leo are friends.”
“And?”
Jess waited.
Denise lowered her voice.
“And I saw him leaving their bedroom suite the morning of the wedding.”
Jess did not move.
The reaction happened privately, sharp and immediate beneath her ribs.
She kept her expression neutral.
“You watched him walk out of their room?”
“Yes.”
Denise’s mouth tightened.
The server returned with the tea.
Denise thanked her, waited until she was gone and began pouring milk into the cup.
Her hand remained steady.
Jess watched her.
“What time?”
“Shortly after seven.”
“Why were you there?”
“One of my children woke early. I had gone to ask whether breakfast could be sent up.”
“And Frank?”
Denise placed the milk jug down.
“He was barefoot in a hotel robe.”
Jess said nothing.
“Did he see you?”
“No.”
“Did anyone else see him?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Did you take a photograph?”
For the first time, Denise looked away.
“Not at that moment.”
Jess leaned back.
“So you did not actually photograph the only thing you claim proves that there is some kind of story.”
“I was surprised.”
“You were apparently not surprised enough to stop thinking about it.”
Denise lifted the teacup but did not drink.
“I know what I saw.”
“That is not evidence.”
“It is evidence to me.”
Denise met her gaze.
“And I thought you might know whether it was likely.”
There it was.
The real reason for the meeting.
Jess took a slow breath.
“Why would I know?”
“Because you were involved with Tom.”
The sentence was delivered carefully, disguised as fact rather than accusation.
Jess still felt it.
“Previously.”
“Yes.”
“And what does that have to do with Frank?”
“You may know whether Tom and Frank continued seeing one another after Y/N entered the picture.”
Jess’s eyes narrowed.
“Why would he have told me?”
“Perhaps he didn’t need to.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Denise stirred her tea even though the milk and tea were already thoroughly combined.
“You knew him intimately.”
Jess gave a short laugh.
“That is not the same thing as knowing him well.”
“You sound angry with him.”
Jess recognised the satisfaction Denise tried to hide. It appeared briefly at the corners of her mouth.
Jess held her gaze.
“I am.”
Denise relaxed almost imperceptibly.
“Then perhaps you may wish to help me.”
Jess nearly laughed.
“Help you with what?”
Denise glanced around the café before lowering her voice.
“Selling the story.”
Jess stared at her.
“Selling it?”
Denise’s fingers moved along the edge of her phone.
“Your experience with Tom would add credibility. Along with what I saw, it could be a strong story. Perhaps even a little revenge after the way he treated you.”
“Are you insane?”
Denise’s expression tightened.
Jess picked up her coffee and forced herself to pause.
Walking away now would mean never knowing what Denise actually had. Better to let her believe she was interested.
Jess slowly set the cup down.
“All right.”
Denise watched her cautiously.
“All right?”
“Show me what you have.”
Hope flickered across Denise’s face.
She unlocked her phone and opened a folder. The photographs had been separated from the rest of the wedding pictures and carefully organised.
The first showed Frank and Tom near the garden fountain. Frank’s hand was raised near Tom’s collar, and Tom was smiling.
Jess enlarged it.
“What am I looking at?”
“Frank touching Tom.”
“His hand is near his collar.”
“Look at Tom’s expression.”
Jess did.
Tom looked relaxed and comfortable. He also looked exactly like a man whose old friend was fixing his jacket.
“They have known each other for years.”
“And slept together for years.”
“Everyone already knows that.”
Denise swiped to the next photograph.
Frank stood near an archway in the guest corridor, fully dressed and holding his phone.
“This was near their suite.”
Jess looked at Denise.
“It is a photograph of a man standing in a corridor.”
“His room was in the opposite direction.”
“He was speaking to a member of staff.”
“Exactly.”
“Which probably means he was asking the staff member something.”
Denise’s mouth tightened before she moved to the third photograph.
You stood between Tom and Frank near the ballroom doors. Tom’s hand rested at your waist. You were touching Frank’s arm while he leaned closer to speak over the music.
All three of you were smiling.
Jess studied your face.
You did not look deceived, uncomfortable or excluded.
You looked happy.
She returned the phone.
“You have nothing.”
Denise’s eyebrows rose.
“You looked at that one for a long time.”
“Because Y/N is my friend.”
“You have not spoken to her for months.”
Jess went still.
“How do you know that?”
Denise hesitated.
“She mentioned that things had become difficult between you.”
“That does not mean I want to destroy her.”
“I thought you might want Tom exposed after the way he treated you.”
Jess picked up her handbag.
“I am still angry with Tom. I was baffled by the proposal, and Tom Sturridge suddenly deciding to settle down after behaving like a complete dick to me remains personally irritating.”
Denise leaned forward.
“Then help me.”
“No.”
“But you just said—”
“I said I am angry with him. I did not say I wanted to ruin his life or hers.”
Denise’s expression hardened.
“What if he is cheating on her?”
Jess nodded toward the third photograph.
“He clearly is not hiding Frank from her.”
“You believe Frank spent the night with them.”
Jess did not answer directly.
“Even if Frank is sleeping with Tom, that photograph suggests Y/N knows perfectly well what is happening and, knowing her, she’s probably participating.”
“That does not make it acceptable.”
“Acceptable to whom?”
Denise said nothing.
Jess stood and pulled on her coat.
“Do yourself a favour, Denise. Do not destroy your relationship with this family over three meaningless photographs and the possibility that Y/N, Tom and Frank might occasionally have a threesome.”
Denise’s face became cold.
“You do not understand my position.”
“As far as I know, Y/N’s parents have been good to you. They have treated you like family.”
“That does not mean—”
“And you are considering repaying them by selling a story about their daughter’s private life.”
Denise looked down at her phone.
“I know what I saw and ajournalist could investigate.”
“With what? A photograph of Frank adjusting Tom’s collar and another of all three of them talking at a wedding?”
Jess placed enough money on the table to cover both drinks.
“If it is money you are after, you will not get much for this.”
“There are publications that would be interested.”
“Then best of luck.”
Jess picked up her bag.
“But do not contact me again.”
*********
The cold struck her as soon as she stepped outside.
Jess moved quickly down the pavement, passing shops glowing beneath the grey afternoon sky. She did not stop until she had turned twice and the café was no longer visible.
Her anger carried her for several streets.
Then uncertainty replaced it.
Denise believed she had witnessed something.
The details were uncomfortably specific.
Frank crossing the corridor at seven in the morning.
In a robe.
Trying to move quietly.
Jess knew enough about Tom to believe it was possible.
She knew enough about you to wonder whether you had encouraged it. Because she could actually picture you watching Tom with another man.
The photograph of the three of you refused to leave her mind.
You had not looked deceived.
You had looked included but, even though you were included, did not change the danger.
Denise needed money.
Denise had already begun gathering photographs.
She had approached the person she assumed was most likely to hold a grudge.
If Jess did nothing, Denise would approach someone else.
Perhaps one of Tom’s former partners.
Perhaps a member of staff from the estate.
Perhaps a journalist willing to publish allegation as implication.
Jess stopped beneath the awning of a closed shop and opened her phone.
Your conversation remained exactly where she had left it months earlier.
Your final message sat unanswered.
I hope you’re okay. I’m sorry everything became so messy.
Jess had read it countless times.
She had never found a reply that felt honest.
She missed you.
She resented you.
She knew you had not deliberately taken anything from her.
She knew Tom had never belonged to her.
Knowing those things did not make them painless.
She began typing.
I met Denise today.
She deleted it.
Too abrupt.
Someone is trying to sell a story about you.
Deleted.
Too alarming without explanation.
She stared at the empty message field.
Then typed:
Congratulations.
It was awkward.
It was inadequate.
It was also the only beginning she could manage.
She sent it.
**********
You were on the sitting-room floor when the message arrived.
Scripts and rehearsal notes surrounded you in several untidy piles. Maddy’s wedding spreadsheet remained open on your laptop, though you had promised Tom you would spend the evening learning dialogue rather than comparing florists.
Tom sat on the sofa behind you, wearing glasses an optometrist had recently prescribed him for reading, and reading the latest revision of his script. One bare foot rested near your hip.
Your phone vibrated beside a yellow highlighter.
You picked it up without much interest.
Then you saw Jess’s name.
For several seconds, you simply stared.
Tom noticed the change in your posture.
“What is it?”
You turned the screen toward him.
His eyebrows rose.
“Jess.”
“Yes.”
He read the single word.
“What does she want?”
You looked over your shoulder.
“That is very suspicious.”
“She has not spoken to either of us for months.”
You returned to the screen.
Your fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Thank you.
You sent it.
Tom attempted to return to his script.
He lasted approximately eight seconds.
“Has she answered?”
“No.”
“You should put the phone down.”
“You are watching it too.”
“I am reading.”
You lowered the phone beside your knee.
Tom’s gaze followed it.
You smiled.
“Very convincing.”
The phone vibrated again.
Jess had replied.
I miss you.
The words tightened something in your chest.
You read them twice.
Then typed:
I miss you too.
The typing indicator appeared.
Disappeared.
Appeared again.
I didn’t know how to talk to you after everything.
You sat up straighter.
Tom closed the script over one finger.
“What did she say?”
“That she didn’t know how to speak to me.”
Tom’s expression shifted.
Guilt moved through it quickly.
You typed:
I’m sorry for how everything happened. I never wanted to hurt you or make you feel that you didn’t matter.
Jess replied:
You didn’t do anything wrong.
You swallowed.
It didn’t feel that way.
This time the response took longer.
I was angry with him.
A second message followed.
Sometimes I was angry with you because it was easier.
You looked back at Tom.
He watched your face.
“What?”
“She says she was angry with you.”
Tom nodded once.
“Fair.”
“And me.”
His eyebrows drew together.
“Less fair.”
You placed one hand on his knee.
“Tom.”
“It is.”
You turned back to the conversation.
Jess continued:
I’ve realised feelings are sometimes impossible to prevent. That doesn’t make them anyone’s fault.
Your eyes burned unexpectedly.
You typed:
I didn’t plan any of it.
I know.
Then another message appeared.
There’s something else.
The warmth disappeared from your chest.
You sat very still.
Tom noticed immediately.
“What?”
You waited.
Jess typed:
Denise contacted me.
Your stomach dropped.
Why?
The response arrived in several parts.
She asked to meet in Soho today.
She knows I was involved with Tom.
She assumed I might be willing to help her.
Your fingers tightened around the phone.
Tom placed his script aside.
“What happened?”
You did not answer yet.
Another message appeared.
She says she saw Frank leaving your suite at Arthur and Leo’s wedding.
The room seemed to contract around you.
Tom saw your face.
“What did she say?”
You turned the screen toward him.
He read the message.
All expression left his face.
His hand closed over the edge of the sofa.
“She saw him.”
You nodded.
The phone vibrated again.
She believes Tom and Frank are still sleeping together. With or without your knowledge. She wants to know what the story is worth.
Tom’s jaw tightened.
You stared at the messages.
For one strange second, your first thought was not of the press.
It was of that morning.
Frank leaving quietly.
Tom asleep beside you.
You half awake, warm beneath the sheets and unaware that someone was standing at the far end of the corridor constructing a weapon from what she had seen.
“Oh, God.”
Tom leaned forward.
“What else?”
“She wants to sell it.”
“Jess said that?”
“She said Denise wants to know what it is worth.”
You typed quickly:
Did she show you anything?
Jess replied:
Three photographs.
Your stomach turned.
Of what?
Frank with Tom in the garden.
Frank near the guest corridor.
The three of you talking at the reception.
Another message followed.
None of them prove anything.
You glanced at Tom.
“She has photographs.”
His expression hardened.
“Of Frank leaving?”
“No.”
He exhaled, but the relief was slight.
“Then she has nothing.”
“She has the story.”
“A story she cannot prove.”
“She does not need to prove it if someone wants the headline enough.”
Tom looked away.
You could see him thinking through every possible version.
Tom cheating on his young fiancée with his former male lover.
Tom maintaining a secret relationship with Frank after publicly becoming engaged.
You knowingly allowing it because you were too inexperienced, unstable or desperate to object.
Frank intruding upon a relationship the press already treated as scandalous.
The truth would not necessarily help.
The truth involved all three of you willingly choosing something the public would feel entitled to judge.
Tom reached for the phone.
“Ask Jess to send the photographs.”
You typed the request.
Jess answered almost immediately.
I took pictures of her phone. They aren’t perfect.
Three images arrived.
You opened the first.
Frank’s hand was near Tom’s collar. Tom was smiling.
You remembered the exact moment.
Frank had told him the collar was folded underneath his jacket.
Tom had accused him of behaving like a disapproving valet.
The second image showed Frank in the corridor.
The angle made him appear closer to your suite than he probably was.
The third showed the three of you near the ballroom doors.
Frank leaning toward Tom.
Your fingers around Frank’s forearm.
Tom’s hand at your waist.
Nothing happened in the photograph.
Everything could be suggested by it.
Tom studied the images.
“They mean nothing.”
“To us.”
“To anyone.”
“You know that is not true.”
His mouth tightened.
You returned to Jess’s messages.
I told her I wouldn’t help her.
Then:
I thought you should know.
You closed your eyes for a moment.
Thank you.
Jess replied:
I’m sorry.
You typed:
You have nothing to apologise for.
You hesitated before adding:
I’m glad you told me.
The typing indicator appeared.
I did not know whether you would want to hear from me.
Your throat tightened.
I always wanted to hear from you.
There was no immediate response.
You put the phone down.
Tom watched you.
“Are you all right?”
You stared at him.
“Are you?”
“I asked first.”
“She could expose you again.”
His eyebrows drew together.
“I have already been exposed.”
“Not like this.”
“You are the one Denise will humiliate.”
“I don’t care about me.”
Tom’s voice sharpened.
“I do.”
You stood from the floor too quickly and began pacing.
“They will say you cheated.”
“They will say you let me sleep with him because you were too young to stop me.”
You stopped.
Tom rose from the sofa.
“That is what she wants.”
“You do not know that.”
“Of course I do.”
His voice remained quiet, which made the anger beneath it more visible.
“She has already decided that any choice you made could not have been yours.”
You folded your arms around yourself.
“And Frank?”
Tom’s expression changed.
The anger gave way to concern.
Frank had already endured having his private history with Tom printed, photographed and dissected. The last scandal had affected his work, his clients and every old photograph he had taken of Tom.
This would not merely revive it.
This would attach him to your engagement.
Your wedding.
The film campaign.
Every interview in which you and Tom were asked whether you trusted one another.
“We have to tell him,” Tom said.
“Tonight.”
“Yes.”
“And Arthur.”
Tom looked at you.
“Why Arthur?”
“Because Denise was at his wedding. Because she is part of my family. Because she may have taken other photographs.”
He moved closer.
“You should sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“You look pale.”
“I am angry.”
“You can be angry sitting down.”
You looked at him.
Despite everything, the sentence nearly made you smile.
He took your hands.
“I am sorry.”
Your expression hardened.
“For what?”
“For bringing Frank into our room.”
“We brought Frank into our room.”
“It was my history with him that made this dangerous.”
“No. Denise made this dangerous.”
Tom looked down at your joined hands.
“I should have known someone might see him.”
“You were asleep.”
“That is not a defence.”
“It is when you are blaming yourself for corridor surveillance.”
His mouth twisted faintly.
You squeezed his hands.
“Do not turn this into something you did to me.”
“I do not want you humiliated.”
“And I do not want you made into a liar or a cheat because someone thinks your sexuality is an easy scandal.”
Tom’s eyes lifted to yours.
“You are worried about me.”
“Of course I am.”
“I am worried about you.”
“That is inconvenient.”
“Very.”
He drew you closer.
You rested your forehead against his chest.
For several seconds, neither of you spoke.
Then your phone vibrated again.
Jess had replied.
I miss you more than I wanted to admit.
You stared at the message.
Then typed:
Can we talk properly soon?
Her answer came almost immediately.
Yes.
You placed the phone down.
The friendship was not repaired.
Not yet.
But it had survived enough to warn you.
For the moment, that mattered.
***********
The following evening, you met Frank at Leo’s gallery after work.
The drinks had already been arranged before Denise became a problem. Frank was exhibiting a selection of new photographs, and the five of you had planned to view them privately once the gallery closed to the public.
By the time you and Tom arrived, only a few low lights remained on, illuminating the white walls, polished concrete floors and collection of large abstract paintings. The empty gallery made the conversation waiting ahead feel far more dramatic than it needed to be.
Frank had arranged five chairs around a low table near the rear office. A bottle of wine stood open beside several glasses, along with a half-finished plate of cheese and crackers.
Arthur entered a few minutes later with Leo. He stopped almost immediately and stared at the vast red painting hanging behind Frank.
“That looks like a nervous breakdown.”
Frank glanced over his shoulder.
“It sold yesterday for eight thousand pounds.”
Arthur looked at it again.
“An expensive nervous breakdown.”
Leo removed his coat.
“Can we please discuss the attempted blackmail before Arthur insults your inventory?”
“She has not blackmailed anyone yet,” Tom said.
Frank poured wine.
“Preliminary exploitation, then.”
You sat beside Tom and handed Frank your phone.
“These are the photographs Jess sent.”
Frank took the phone. He examined the first image in silence. Then the second. Then the third.
You watched his expression carefully.
His eyebrows rose. His mouth twitched. Then he began to laugh. Not loudly at first. A quiet exhale that turned into unmistakable amusement.
Tom stared at him.
“What is funny?”
Frank turned the phone around.
“This is her evidence?”
“She also saw you leave our suite,” you said.
“Yes. Not my finest exit.”
Arthur accepted a glass of wine.
“Why were you in their suite?”
Frank looked at him.
“No reason.”
Arthur considered that.
“Uh-huh.”
Tom leaned back in his chair.
“You all seem remarkably calm.”
“Would you prefer if we panic?”
“Concern would be reassuring.”
“I am concerned.”
Leo looked at him.
“You are smiling.”
“The conditions can coexist.”
Frank enlarged the first photograph and shook his head.
“And this…this means nothing.”
You took the phone and opened the corridor photograph.
“This one worries me.”
Frank studied it.
“I was asking a member of staff where I could charge my phone.”
Leo tilted his head.
“Near their suite?”
“The member of staff was near their suite. I did not position him there for dramatic effect.”
Arthur pointed at the archway.
“Your room was the other direction.”
“Yes. But on the same floor and my power point didn’t work.”
Tom took the phone.
“She followed you.”
The amusement faded from Frank’s expression.
“Possibly.”
Silence settled over the group.
You opened the final image.
“This was during the reception. The band was playing.”
Arthur looked at it.
“You are all standing very close.”
“We were trying to hear one another.”
“Your hand is on Frank.”
You looked at the photograph.
“I touch people when I talk.”
All four men looked at you.
You frowned.
“I do.”
“Constantly,” Tom said.
“Thank you.”
“That was not criticism.”
Frank took his wine.
“Again. The photographs prove nothing.”
“But they create a pattern,” Leo said.
Frank glanced at him.
“Only if accompanied by Denise’s account.”
“Which she will provide.”
The room became serious.
Frank placed his glass down.
“Jess was correct. Denise will not receive much from these images alone.”
You looked at him.
“But?”
“But someone may still publish the allegation.”
Tom’s fingers moved restlessly against his knee.
“On what basis?”
“On the basis that allegations involving sex, infidelity and people who have already been publicly linked are easy to package as questions rather than facts.”
Arthur frowned.
“Meaning?”
Frank’s expression became dry.
“‘Is Tom’s former lover threatening his engagement?’ ‘The mysterious wedding photographs raising questions.’ ‘Inside the unconventional relationship.’ They do not need to say anything definite.”
You closed your eyes briefly.
“Wonderful.”
“The more significant problem is not what she already has,” Frank continued.
Tom looked at him.
“What is?”
“What she attempts to obtain next.”
The words settled heavily.
Frank leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees.
“She believed there was a story before she had the photographs. The images have not proved it. If she needs money badly enough, she may continue watching.”
You folded your arms tightly.
“We are not doing anything now.”
Arthur looked at you.
You corrected yourself.
“Nothing she can photograph.”
Leo lifted his glass.
“An extremely reassuring distinction.”
Tom gave him a warning look.
Frank continued.
“She may approach other guests. Estate staff. Drivers. Anyone who saw us together.”
Tom’s face hardened.
“Jess will not be the only person.”
“Probably not.”
“Who else would she contact?” you asked.
Frank thought about it.
“People who dislike Tom.”
Arthur glanced around the room.
“That seems broad.”
Tom stared at him.
Arthur lifted one hand.
“I meant professionally.”
“That was not better.”
Arthur cleared his throat.
“Either way, we should involve Dad.”
You turned towards him.
“Are you high?”
Arthur blinked.
“No.”
“You want to tell Dad that Denise saw Frank leaving our bedroom at seven o’clock in the morning?”
“Yes.”
You stared at him.
“He will ask questions.”
“Then you answer them.”
“Saying what, exactly? ‘Yes, Dad, I enjoy watching my fiancé have sex with his former lover and occasionally participate’?”
Leo took a slow drink of wine.
“I knew it.”
You turned towards him.
“You knew what?”
Arthur looked faintly offended.
“We have known since game night.”
“You absolutely have not.”
“Not every detail,” Leo said. “But enough.”
“What does ‘enough’ mean?”
Arthur leaned back in his chair.
“You disappeared to Frank’s loft with Tom after spending half the evening making increasingly transparent suggestions.”
“We went to look at photographs.”
Frank lifted his glass.
“Technically, photographs were present.”
Tom closed his eyes.
“Please stop helping.”
Arthur continued.
“Then Tom could barely sit properly the next morning.”
Tom’s eyes opened.
“I was tired.”
Leo gave him a sympathetic look.
“Of course.”
“We had been drinking.”
“Naturally.”
Tom looked towards you.
“Why am I defending myself?”
“Because apparently my brother has been conducting a private investigation into your ability to sit.”
Arthur held up both hands.
“I did not investigate anything. It was obvious.”
“It was not obvious.”
Frank considered that.
“It was moderately obvious.”
Tom stared at him.
“Whose side are you on?”
“I was unaware there were sides.”
Arthur leaned forward again.
“The point is, this is not exactly shocking information to us. And we know how to keep things private.”
“It will be shocking information to Dad.”
“Perhaps,” Arthur said. “But Dad has the resources to make this disappear before Denise gets anywhere.”
You folded your arms.
“Dad cannot make everything disappear.”
“He knows lawyers, editors, publicists and at least three people who owe him significant favours.”
Leo nodded.
“He also understands how to frighten people without technically threatening them.”
Tom looked uneasy.
“Your father also owns a rifle.”
You turned towards him.
“What?”
“I have seen it.”
Arthur frowned.
“Why have you seen Dad’s rifle?”
“He showed it to me during the weekend at the country house.”
You stared at him.
“He showed you a rifle?”
“He said he was cleaning it.”
Frank’s mouth twitched.
“While his daughter’s much older boyfriend was staying under his roof?”
Tom looked at him.
“Yes.”
Arthur nodded thoughtfully.
“That sounds deliberate.”
“It was extremely deliberate.”
You rubbed your forehead.
“This is precisely why we are not involving Dad.”
Arthur shook his head.
“You are focusing on the rifle rather than the lawyers.”
“The rifle is difficult to ignore.”
Leo looked towards Tom.
“Did he point it at you?”
“No.”
“Did he discuss ammunition?”
Tom paused.
“Briefly.”
Frank began laughing.
“That man likes you.”
“I would hate to see what he does to people he dislikes.”
Arthur gestured towards the phone on the table.
“Which is exactly why Denise may reconsider if Dad speaks to her.”
But the dynamic with Frank feels way more intimate than just sex… Calling it 'friends with benefits' doesn't even feel accurate when he's so tender toward Tom. I really see the potential for a full poly dynamic.
Absolutely 💯 but this will also change once Frank meets someone and Tom and our reader won’t have that kind of relationship and trust with anyone else
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