Summary: It all ends with a stubborn sapling in a ravaged forest…
Fandom: The Sandman (Netflix/Comics) | Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Thalia Callaghan (OC), Zoē (OC) Relationships: Dream of the Endless/OFC | Rating: M over all, but this is T | Navigation: Bottom of post
Content Warnings: I hope none. This is the last chapter, it’s hopeful…
Author’s Note: It’s a long one, sorry, because this is it. I’ve spent nearly four years (from first idea to last chapter published today) on two full length novels and a Christmas one-shot for these idiots, and I’m ready to let them go (for now anyway). But it’s bittersweet, and I just want to say: Thank you to everyone who’s been reading. The atmosphere has changed so much between writing TLoS and this one, for a million reasons (the creator being a pos, S2 coming to an end an the interest waning/the fandom somewhat dying, my locking down my fics because of AI scraping…), so it felt more difficult to publish in many ways. But that’s why everyone who still stuck with it regardless meant the world to me.
When I edited this last chapter (it’s been written for a long time, so I just got it ready to publish), I cried, and I don’t even know why. Maybe it’s a bit about letting them go, but I don’t think that’s it alone. There was something about the images and symbolism in this chapter that had come to me so naturally when I first wrote it that I don’t think I ever truly let it in while writing. But reading them back with a bit of distance just hit me out of the blue. And while I won’t share the reasons, I will share my feelings around it because that’s something AI fics will never connect with (and what makes them soulless)—all the parts of you that find their way into a story even if none of the characters are you. But before I get emotional again, I’ll leave it at that and will once again say thank you for reading. You rock 🖤
GIF by @gifs-by-renegadesstuff (the original Tumblr attribution didn’t work because it wasn’t the first gif in the set)
Thank you for reading. Comments (here or on Ao3) and reblogs are always appreciated. And asks, too! I love yapping about my fics 🖤
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I wasn’t exactly a cry because Zoē rarely cried in the way that human children did. What she made instead were smaller sounds. But of course Thalia had learned to hear those sounds anyway, and she suspected she would be able to hear them from the bottom of the ocean, or any distance the universe chose to put between them for that matter.
Morpheus was already sitting up. He didn’t say anything, he simply left, and Thalia followed him…
Zoē was still asleep when they reached her.
Other children, woken by nightmares, eventually surfaced. They cried but gradually let the dream go when they were held and not alone. Zoē did not surface. She stayed, and her small face moved through expressions like fear and frustration, and then something that looked as if she were attempting to negotiate with whatever she had found in the dark.
She was her father’s daughter, that much had been clear from the start.
Morpheus stood at the side of her bed and looked at her with an expression Thalia knew all too well: It wasn’t worry, because worry implied a kind of helplessness that he permitted himself only on very rare occasions, and this wasn’t one of them.
“What is it?” Thalia asked quietly.
“She has gone further in than she should be able to.” He said it calmly, but Thalia could hear the slight alarm. “She should not have the reach for this. Not yet.”
“Well, guess who’s her father.”
Morpheus glanced at Thalia, amused and slightly exasperated. “She is also yours. May I remind you that you are not particularly prone to stay… boundaried either? You dreamed your way into my castle and never took no for an answer.”
“And aren’t you glad?”
He looked at her with a smile. “Perhaps.”
Zoē whimpered again.
“I would like to go after her,” Morpheus said, and Thalia nodded…
— — —
They were standing at the edge of a forest. Or what had been a forest. What surrounded them now were trees that were leaning, angles all wrong, stripped of their leaves by something that had moved with force, and the ground underfoot was full of broken branches and scattered bark.
Thalia recognised the scent immediately. It was the smell of autumn she had loved when she was still alive, but that was what worried her, because it was the smell of death she had once found comforting. Earth and dead leaves, the smell of something ending that once had been beautiful. And it was hard to tell what it meant here.
Zoē was standing ahead of them at the tree line, her back turned and her nightgown very white against the grey-brown wreckage around her.
Thalia instinctively took a step forward, but Morpheus touched her arm gently to hold her back. “Let us see what she does.”
What Zoē did was reach out and touch the nearest fallen tree.
She put her small hand against its bark with the intensity that she brought to everything she was genuinely interested in. Thalia watched her daughter standing very still and with the focus of someone paying attention so hard that she had temporarily forgotten everything else.
Then Zoē said something that was too quiet to hear, in that voice of children when they are talking to themselves but also to the things around them. Thalia had been watching her do it for almost a year: Zoē talked to everything as if it were capable of replying. And in the Dreaming it was of course.
The bark under Zoē’s palm changed very slowly. Thalia watched a strip of bark that had been grey turn a colour that was closer to brown. Zoē took her hand back and looked at it. Then she put it back again, with greater confidence.
Thalia heard Morpheus exhale. Well, it might have been a sound if he had given himself permission.
“She’s fixing it,” she whispered to him.
“She is asking it.” Thalia took a quick glance at him. “She is not commanding.”
She looked back at her daughter, at her little hand pressed against the bark like someone making a promise.
Zoē had heard them. She turned, and for a moment her face did that thing it sometimes did when she was between sleeping and knowing she was sleeping. Then she truly saw them, and she just said, “The trees fell down.”
They walked toward her. “Yes,” Morpheus said. He crouched in front of her so that they were level. “Do you know what happened to them?”
Zoē considered it with very apparent gravity, and it nearly made Thalia laugh because she looked so like her father with her serious little face, but she bit back her smile. “Something was scared,” she said.
Morpheus was very still for a moment. “Yes. Something was scared, and when it moved through here, it moved without meaning to hurt the trees.”
“But they got hurt anyway.”
“They did.”
“That’s sad,” Zoē said. Such a simple statement, yet so to the point.
Thalia often thought that her daughter had an almost aggressive relationship with accuracy, and she wondered whom she’d got that from.
“It is sad,” Morpheus agreed, and he didn’t add a but. “What were you trying to do, when we came in?”
Zoē looked back at the tree she had been touching, and then at her hand. “I thought maybe… if I asked it to remember…” She sounded as if she were working it out as she was saying it, the way she always did when she was reaching for something not quite within the vocabulary of a three-year-old yet. “If it could remember what it was like before. It might… want to go back to that.”
Thalia crouched down too, and the three of them formed a triangle in the wreckage. “Did it work?”
Zoē’s expression hovered between annoyance and excitement. “A little bit. But it kept forgetting.”
“The remembering takes time,” Morpheus said. “But the asking was right.” Thalia could see the slight change in Zoē’s expression. “The asking was exactly right…”
They walked further in, and it was Thalia’s idea. She had looked at Zoē’s face, and then she had thought of every late October afternoon of her life, every walk she’d taken in autumn when her world had felt like something being put on hold, and she’d thought: Let her have all of it. Give her the whole of it so she can understand it.
She took Zoē’s hand, and Zoē took Morpheus’, and they kept walking.
The forest began to adjust; Thalia knew the difference between the Dreaming being directed and the Dreaming being responsive. And right now, it was responsive because of Zoē. Even the sky started to look a bit warmer. Under their feet, the branches broke like they did in real forests. Thalia remembered her own childhood, the small satisfying cracks followed by a bit of give. After a particularly crunchy one, Zoē looked down at Thalia’s feet with great interest.
“Again,” she said with a little giggle.
So they found her branches to step on. And Thalia couldn’t help but find it hilarious: Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, walked slowly through a forest that was healing itself around a three-year-old who was now extremely focused on finding the branches that would make the best sound when you stood on them. And when Zoē found a particularly… resonant stick and then made him stand on it too, Thalia caught his eye, and he looked at her with an expression that she had only seen on him in moments like these. Moments that could be considered so ordinary, but to him, they weren’t. He looked a bit helpless and overwhelmed in the way only happiness overwhelmed him, because he had less practice with it than with anything else. She reached over Zoē’s head and put her hand against his face, and he turned his lips into her palm for a moment. Then he looked away.
“Daddy.” Sometimes, Thalia wondered if that was a word Morpheus had ever been called despite his fatherhood, but she dismissed the thought quickly.
“Yes.”
“I want to show you something.” She stopped walking. They had come to a clearing, and in the middle of it there was a tree different from the others. It hadn’t fallen, it wasn’t leaning. It was tiny, a sapling almost, and it looked like something that had only recently understood that it is supposed to be growing and had taken this information very seriously.
Zoē put both hands around it. She stood there with her feet planted on the forest floor, her dark hair a mess and her nightgown getting the hem dirty, and Thalia stood and watched her daughter… talk to a tree.
And she didn’t know why, but she had to think about that small corner of her flat when she was still alive, that corner where the light was good, where she had spent years in front of canvases with the kind of attention she had not been able to bring to anything else. She had loved painting with her whole body, the same way Zoē was now doing this, completely absorbed, entirely gone into the thing. She had never been able to explain it to people who didn’t do it, because creating something required surrender. She recognised her daughter in this and she recognised herself.
Sometimes, she thought that she might have given her only ordinary things, like parts of her face or her stubbornness. She had not imagined she might also have given her this. Then again, being entirely in the place where the work was happening was also he. Thalia’s throat tightened, and she couldn’t stop looking.
The sapling put out another leaf. Really slow, and it took long enough for Thalia to wonder if she had imagined it and it had already been there. But it was a small, perfect thing that had not existed before, and now it did.
Zoē took her hands back and looked at the leaf with the pride of a, well, three-year-old. “I asked it what it wanted to be. And it showed me.”
Morpheus was quiet, but Thalia knew without even having to look at him that he was navigating something difficult.
“There is something I want to tell you,” he finally said while sitting on the ground with his legs crossed. And Zoē came and nestled herself into his lap without being asked. Or asking, for that matter. But he smiled briefly and held her with both arms before he turned serious again. “This dream frightened you.”
Zoē looked as if she were contemplating denying it for a second before agreeing. “Not very. But a little bit.”
“And so you came to fix it.”
“I wanted it to not be sad.”
“You cannot always do that.” His voice sounded measured, the way it was when he was telling her something he believed she was capable of understanding. “Some dreams are scary or sad because the person dreaming them is scared or sad, and those feelings are important and belong to them. The dream has purpose, and some things stay broken for a while. You will not be able to ask every tree back to life.”
Zoē looked at the leaf on the sapling. “But some of them I can.” And that was definitely not a question but a statement to set the record straight.
Something moved across Morpheus’ face, and he looked at Thalia while pressing his lips to the top of Zoē’s head. “Yes,” he said very quietly with a smile. “Some of them you can. I am sure your mother knows a thing or two about that.”
“Really?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you about it one day.” Thalia sat beside them, and her shoulders were touching Morpheus’, and Zoē immediately reached out to take her hand without looking, like someone who had never in her short life reached for a hand and not found it.
She will keep reaching like that, Thalia thought. And she wanted it that way. She wanted Zoē to know that whenever she reached out, her parents would reach back, for as long as she needed it. And as she thought it, Morpheus looked at her, and he just nodded, and his eyes were pooling with tears, and for once he wasn’t trying to hide it.
The sky seemed to finally make up its mind and turned golden. The leaves on the remaining trees, the ones that had fallen and been stepped on, the single new one on the small stubborn sapling, all did the thing that leaves did in actual late autumn in the actual waking world:
They caught the light and held it for a moment before they let it go.
It was everywhere, ending and not ending, like it had always been since the first thing had ever changed.
And Zoē breathed it in with her eyes closed. “I like it here.”
Morpheus took Thalia’s hand, and Zoē briefly opened her eyes when he kissed it. “So do I…”
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Summary: Saoirse is half-fae and half-human. When she stumbles through the wrong door in autumn, she finds herself in a dead philosopher’s library, face to face with the Dream King. She expects to be removed. She is not.
What follows is quiet, and careful, and longer than either of them planned…
Fandom: The Sandman (Netflix/Comics) | Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Saoirse (Fairy OFC) Relationships: Dream of the Endless/OFC | Rating: T
Content Warnings: Themes of loneliness & isolation | Brief mention of a parent’s death | Emotional repression
This is a standalone oneshot I wrote for @reyjakestherapist for my prompt fills (request attached at the bottom of this post), but it lives in a loose collection of works that you can find here on Tumblr or on Ao3. If you’d like me to write something for you, hit me up!
Set a long, long time ago, when Faerie and the Dreaming were much closer than they are today…
— — —
The dream had not been made for her, and Saoirse understood immediately that it was a human dream, or a dream made for humans (which isn’t one and the same). Perhaps even a dead human’s dream that still existed in the Dreaming.
And the trouble was that the borders between Faerie and the Dreaming grew thin, especially this time of year: One moment, you were walking in a forest, and the next your foot came down somewhere else. In this particular case in a library.
And here she was, right in the middle of it. It was a strange one though, spiralling upward without a ceiling, with shelves that only contained the covers of books without any pages. She took one of them in her hand and she felt something, but she wasn’t entirely sure what. Stories definitely, but…
That was when she heard the footsteps behind her, and she turned.
He was exactly as the old stories said, which meant the old stories were very good. They described him as tall and pale, with eyes as black as night. But what they had not prepared her for was that what you might find in that night could be either beautiful or terrifying, and she wasn’t quite sure yet what she would find.
Lord Shaper, Prince of Stories.
And he looked at her with those strange eyes and initially said nothing. She had the distinct impression she was being assessed, perhaps not unkindly, but it was hard to tell.
“You are not the dreamer,” he finally said, and his voice wasn’t loud, but still impossible to ignore.
“No,” Saoirse agreed, and she could feel the heat rising in her face. “I took a wrong turn. Autumn’s fault, or the thinning of the ways, or maybe carelessness.” She noticed how flustered she’d become and nervously pushed a strand of hair off her brow. “None of these options are very flattering, are they?”
His eyes moved across her face. “You are fae.”
“Half.” She tilted her head to let the light catch the slight point of her ear, and she felt like an idiot for it the very next moment. “My mother was human. She wandered into the wrong dream once, too. Perhaps it… runs in families?”
Something shifted in his face, but it was impossible to tell what it meant. The moment was short-lived, and his gaze moved past her to the shelves, then back to her face. “I know you.”
“I don’t think so,” she said carefully. “We have never met.”
“We are meeting for the first time then. Again.” He said it the way one states a simple fact, and she didn’t know what to make of it, so she did what she always did when uncertain: She smiled and said nothing…
He did not ask her to leave, and it surprised her. She had expected to be “removed” in some way. Probably politely but for definite, because he seemed the kind of being who did everything with cold precision. Instead, he simply walked deeper into the library. After a moment’s hesitation she followed, because the alternative was standing alone among weirdly empty books.
And without being prompted by her, he began to talk again. “This dream once belonged to a philosopher. He died four centuries ago, and he had dreamed, every night of his life, of the library he wished he’d built. He never wrote the books he imagined.” His tone seemed carefully neutral, not unlike the way you would talk about the weather to someone you didn’t know. “He spent his life writing about ethics and morality, but he never wrote stories.”
“And so the… outlines of those stories persist here?” Saoirse wondered.
“Everything that is ever dreamed persists in my realm, in some form.”
Saoirse looked at him directly, which fairies are warned against because it can go badly in either direction. But she knew how to look at him in the way her human mother had taught her. “That is a great deal to be responsible for.”
“Do you pity me?” His gaze locked in, and she felt suddenly very… visible. And it was uncomfortable.
“No. Should I? Fae are not especially prone to pity. We are, however, occasionally prone to… recognising things.” She wondered if she should really say the next thing. “You must find this a burden at times.” Too late.
He was quiet for long enough that she nervously began to count the library’s shelves in her head. Which was a pointless endeavour.
“You are unlike what I expected,” he finally said.
That made her raise her eyebrow. “I don’t think so. You expected nothing because I walked into your realm by accident.”
“That is… true.” And she could have sworn the corners of his mouth twitched…
— — —
She had found her way out of the Dreaming that day, or maybe he had simply let her go, and she had returned to Faerie. And she made an effort to think very firmly about other things for several weeks. She attended a revel that lasted nine days. She visited her mother’s grave in the mortal country and placed seven rowan berries there, as was customary.
She did not think about the library. She tried not to think about Lord Shaper, who had looked at her as though she were one of his unwritten books and then started to read her anyway, and maybe she had also read him.
But she came back in November, when the thinning was deepest, and this time, the wrong turn felt less like an accident.
He was there. Of course he was. Where else would the King of Dreams be? And this time, she found him in a garden, and there was a child’s dream of summer and an old man’s dream of a house, and the flowers looked real but also not, and the path beneath her feet seemed to change with every step.
He turned when she approached, and his expression gave away nothing.
“I came back.” She couldn’t believe she had really said this since it was, well, obvious.
The pause felt a bit longer than she was comfortable.
“I had not expected you would.”
“Had you… wished I would?”
Saoirse wasn’t sure if the garden began to move or it was just her getting dizzy out of nowhere.
“I have walked this realm long before Faerie’s oldest queen drew her first breath. There is… little that surprises.”
That seemed like a non-answer to her question, so Saoirse walked to stand beside him. “And… I surprised you?”
“You walked into a dream that was not yours and told me you had not decided yet which reason for your intrusion flattered you least. I found it… notable.”
She laughed out loud. “High praise.”
“Perhaps.” That almost-smile again…
They walked the garden for a while, mostly in strangely comfortable silence, and she found herself thinking what it meant to never be able to set things down. Her own two centuries and a half sometimes felt long enough to feel weary, although it never lasted long. But to multiply that weariness by a number too large to comprehend made her head spin.
When she eventually turned to go, he said, very quietly, as though a part of him wished she wouldn’t hear him:
“You may stay a little longer. If you wish.”
She stayed…
— — —
Saoirse visited frequently during winter. Sometimes when she was in that space between sleeping and waking, sometimes when she slept, sometimes when she walked the now bare forest and her mind began to wander. But there were no wrong turns any more. She would simply come through, and he would be there, or she would find him, or (she suspected) he would arrange himself to be findable, which was probably the same thing.
They walked. They talked about the philosopher’s library and about the nature of stories that outlive storytellers. They also argued, but only a bit, about the difference between a fairy’s immortality and that of an Endless.
“I think that’s mostly a matter of scale and stubbornness,” she said.
And that’s when he laughed for the first time. It was a small and quiet laugh, but a laugh regardless, and she found it strangely contagious.
Saoirse was not supposed to let it mean anything, she was completely aware of that. She was half-human, which meant she was also, well, “half-vulnerable” to the particular stupidity of caring about things too much. But she also considered herself pragmatic, and Morpheus was the Lord of Dreams. He seemed complicated and encased in solitude, no: loneliness so long-practised it seemed to be a part of him. She knew, and both the fae- and the human parts of her understood these things, that any softening toward her would be painful in ways she might not be able to predict or repair.
She came back anyway…
— — —
One evening (or rather, it was evening because he had probably chosen it to be), he said, “I cannot… am not supposed to care about you.” He looked at the sky of the Dreaming, which was currently doing something really improbable with clouds.
Saoirse understood that it had cost him something to say it, simply because he struck her as someone who didn’t easily admit to his feelings.
“No. I don’t imagine that was the… plan.” Her smile felt laboured.
“I make no plans for attachment. I have found that it… historically does not serve me. Or those I attach to.”
“That,” she said, “is a very lonely way to manage a very long life.”
He turned then, and she could see it behind his carefully contained demeanour and his rigid posture and those eyes: The part of him that was not king or realm or entity or concept but simply someone who had been walking alone for an incomprehensibly long time. But it was only there for a moment before it was gone again, the way something incredibly fragile is put back into a case with far too many locks. “Perhaps.”
She knew she might regret it, but she reached out. She had learned from her human mother (not her fae kin) that sometimes, the best thing to communicate something is a simple touch. So she placed her hand against his arm, very briefly, because she wanted to avoid any sense of claiming something that wasn’t hers to claim.
He went very still. Stiller than usual, which was fairly impressive. Then, after a moment that felt very, very long, he took a step. It was just one step, but it widened the space between them…
— — —
Spring arrived in the waking world, and Saoirse had lost her way back. She tried several times in April and thrice in May. She walked every path she knew, at every liminal hour, and she used her fae senses like a woman possessed, but she still found them closed to her as though it had never been otherwise.
So she told herself this was fine and the way it was meant to be. She had never been intended to find her way into the Dreaming, and she had certainly never been intended to find him. And definitely not whatever that particular thing between them was. And maybe it was a feeling best allowed to dissolve at a comfortable distance. She was very good at convincing herself, and she almost believed it…
In late September, when the first true cold came, the rowan berries had already begun to ripen and the veil between things grew thin again, she set out one morning with no particular destination and walked until she found a gap in a hawthorn hedge. She stepped through, and she was back. Just like that.
And he was standing, not sitting, looking as if he had planned to go somewhere and then deciding otherwise. He looked at her, and she could not read his expressionless face, which she had learned by now was akin to something wound up so tightly that it needed a bit of time to unwind itself.
“You came back.” He didn’t sound relieved, but rather like someone naming the thing he had not permitted himself to expect.
“Maybe the season was… uncooperative before.”
He looked at her steadily. “Perhaps the season was not entirely to blame.”
She held his gaze, which was difficult but also clarifying. “Maybe a part of me was deciding whether it was all that wise to return?”
He raised one eyebrow. “That part seems to have… lost?”
“It seems wisdom is a quality I respect more than I practise.” She cocked her head. “I missed the library. And the garden. And the conversations that take twice as long as necessary because neither of us will say the direct thing.”
A tiny something moved across his face, and she half expected him to lecture her on the vulgarity of directness. Instead, he just asked, “You missed… only those things?”
Saoirse wrinkled her nose, and it wasn’t even on purpose. “I missed you,” she said, because she was half-human and humans had to say the plain thing or they risked losing the moment, and this was not a moment she was willing to lose. “Specifically you. Not the library as a proxy for you, or the garden as a metaphor for you. You.”
Morpheus took one step toward her. Then another. It was strangely moving in the literal sense because it seemed so deliberate. “There is,” he said quietly, “something I wish to show you.
She smiled. “Then show me.”
He led her back to the garden, the one with the child’s dream of summer and the old man’s dream of a house. She had not seen it since winter, and she expected it to be as she remembered. But the sight of it stopped her in her tracks:
The garden had changed. It had grown, not wildly or because it had been neglected. New paths, a pond edged with small stones. And the flowers were definitely real this time.
At the centre grew a cluster of rowan that had not been there when last they had met.
“I researched its significance,” he simply said. “Among your mother’s people, who believed that it grows where the veil between worlds is thinnest. And they place its berries on the graves of those who are mourned, of those… they wish to return.”
“You planted it?” she asked.
He did not look away. “When I found that the garden was… I did not know what to do with… an absence that has a name.”
She crossed the distance between them and placed her hand against his arm, except this time she did not remove it. “You missed me.”
He smiled that impossibly small smile again. “Specifically.”
The rowan stood in the middle of a dream-garden, mortal and stubborn and looking completely out of place. And all Saoirse could think was, This is what it looks like when he loves something. Or someone.
Morpheus offered his arm. Formal, as always. And she took it. Outside in the waking world the season turned toward the dark, and the world prepared to rest and to dream and to find again whatever it had stopped looking for…
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Here is @reyjakestherapist ‘s original request. I tried them all, friend, it… sorta worked? Maybe? 🙈 In any case, I hope you like it. Also, I made a card just for you (even if I’m not good at them—and yes, Saoirse Ronan was somehow my face claim here) because I decided that us OC writers deserve them… and then some (if we don’t do it ourselves, no one else will 😉). Also, you can decide if the “gifted to…” applies to the story or Morpheus 🤣
Summary: If you survive things that should have unmade you, sometimes this is what comes after. No tragedy, just light…
Fandom: The Sandman (Netflix/Comics) | Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Thalia Callaghan (OC) Relationships: Dream of the Endless/OFC | Rating: M | Navigation: Bottom of post
Content Warnings: Sexual content | Emotional vulnerability | Brief reference to death | Grief processing
[read previous chapter “Katharsis” on Ao3]
Thank you for reading. Comments (here or on Ao3) and reblogs are always appreciated. And asks, too! I love yapping about my fics 🖤
Light
She watched his face and would have given everything to know what he was thinking, wishing he would let her in. And then she realised he didn’t need to because she could see it, stripped of every defence. Something that he had clearly not prepared himself for, was not yet finished being undone by, and was making no effort whatsoever to contain.
He didn’t think he would be here.
And of course she had known this in some way because he had… not quite resigned, but arranged himself around some peace with an ending.
But knowing it and seeing it were different things.
She cupped his face with her hands and brought him back to look at her.
“Hey,” she said softly.
“Hey,” he said, which was not a thing he said, just like those swear words she occasionally coaxed out of him that were her words, worn slightly strange in his mouth, and it undid her completely.
She kissed him again. He kissed her back and the light came up fully then, pouring through the tall windows across the floor and across them both, and Thalia felt it on her skin like something she hadn’t asked for but was receiving regardless. It caught the angles of him, and she briefly thought of all the darkness that had found them both and would no doubt find them again. She had never been naive about it. But she let the thought go because he was here, and there was light in every sense of the word, and this was their life, their impossible life, and she was in it with him, and they were both forever changed.
[continue reading on Ao3]
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Navigation
← Previous Chapter | AO3 Link (account required) | Tumblr Masterlist | “The Pillars of Creation” is part of “The Light of Stars”-Series | You can follow for updates or subscribe on AO3
Summary: Morpheus finally says out loud what he couldn’t say to Orpheus while there was still time. And then someone arrives, loudly and apparently with opinions, and everything gives way…
Fandom: The Sandman (Netflix/Comics) | Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Thalia Callaghan (OC), Matthew the Raven, Zoē (OC) Relationships: Dream of the Endless/OFC | Rating: M | Navigation: Bottom of post
Content Warnings: Grief (loss of a child referenced throughout) | Guilt (around the Orpheus storyline) | Birth of a child (referenced, not graphic)
[This is mostly third person limited/Dream’s POV, which it had to be. But it was so hard to write because the Morpheus I usually hear in my head is decidedly… not changed 🙈. But this one is, which was the whole point, but it gives me excruciating cognitive dissonance 🤣]
Thank you for reading. Comments (here or on Ao3) and reblogs are always appreciated. And asks, too! I love yapping about my fics 🖤
Dream often caught himself simply watching her, and it was startling in a way he could not explain. Perhaps the reason was that he had told the Kindly Ones he was terrified of joy, and that he had not known how… terrifyingly accurate the word would be. Joy was not the distant thing any more he had once conceived it to be. It was closer to alarm, to being fully awake, and the irony of perceiving it as such was not lost on him. And whenever he found her asleep in the library chair, which had begun to happen more frequently of late even though she was a dream and quite strictly did not need to sleep (he chalked this down to her memory of being human, but he did not feel any need to linger on the thought), he felt something he could not name. And he did not, in truth, want to examine it too closely.
But the word for it eventually found him:
Tenderness.
Fragile and painfully wonderful, or wonderfully painful, he could not say. But what he could say was that it was somewhat inconveniently persistent.
“You look different whenever she’s in the room, boss,” Matthew, who had not been asked to comment, cawed one morning.
“That is none of your concern.”
“Just sayin’.”
“Of course you would.”
“All I’m trying to tell you is… well, you look less like the world is ending, you know?”
Dream considered this for a moment. “Perhaps. Thank you, Matthew.”
“You’re welcome. I guess…”
— — —
But there were hard days and even harder nights, too.
The visions came without warning. Mid-conversation, or just while he was standing in the throne room, and then he was somewhere else entirely without transition. And Orpheus was suffering, and it was because of him, because of choices he had made with the certainty of someone who could not conceive that these choices had been wrong or cruel or simply not what his son had needed.
Thalia did not try to pull him back or talk him through it. She simply stayed. Sometimes she put her hand on his if they were close enough. Sometimes she just remained in the same room until it was over. And she never asked what he saw…
One particular night he found himself speaking before he had fully decided to.
“He loved music.” Dream found it difficult to look at her, so he looked out the window, but truthfully, he looked at nothing at all. He just needed time to breathe before he could proceed. “I believed I was teaching him something when I refused to go to Hades. I thought I was showing him the nature of things. That…” He shook his head. “No matter. Perhaps I simply wished to protect him.” He felt her hand on his. “I told myself it was… that I was sparing him further pain.”
“Did you believe that?”
Dream considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. “I believed it was true, but perhaps that is not entirely the same thing.”
Thalia did not speak. He had somewhat expected her to because she always talked, and no matter how much it drove him to distraction at times, he had come to miss her voice in ways he would never have imagined whenever he did not perceive it. And yet, he was profoundly grateful for her silence at this moment.
“When the visions come,” he continued when the words found him again, “I am fully there, and I feel what he felt. I understand why, and I understand that I should as penance. And yet…” He could not continue and looked at her hand covering his.
“Do you think he knew? That you loved him?”
It was not a question he had permitted to ask himself before. “I think that love, when it is expressed poorly, becomes indistinguishable from its absence. And I was… very poor at expressing it.”
“That’s not a no.” She turned her hand over, laced her fingers through his and said nothing else.
“I think he forgave me.” It was not something he had expected to hear himself say. “He wanted to die, and he had wanted it for a very long time. He asked it of me as a boon, and I granted it. And he was….” Something caught inside his throat, and he tried to shift it. “He was grateful. But it does not make it any easier.”
Thalia seemed to understand that she was not meant to help him find his words, agonising as the silence might have been.
“He missed me,” he continued after a while. “And I… knew that he did. I told myself we would not meet again because I had said so. And so I did not go. And when I finally did, it was because I needed something from him. He was still glad to see me. That was…” He needed to take a break again, and he was unsure whether he could continue.
“You think you didn’t deserve it.”
“Because I did not deserve it. I did not… I could not give him what he needed when he needed it. He came to me the day Eurydice died, and I turned him away.” He looked at their twined hands. “I told myself that I was showing him something true about loss.” He laughed wearily. “I have since had some cause to reconsider whether I am always the best judge of what is true about loss.”
Thalia smiled. “What do you think you were actually doing?”
“I think I was frightened. Not only of losing him, but also of… what it would mean to help him. To bend would have meant admitting that I was wrong. That he was right to want what he wanted and I was wrong to refuse him. And I was… I found the thought very difficult.”
“You still find it difficult now?”
“Yes. But…” He felt as if all air had left his lungs, which was an entirely foolish notion.
Thalia raised their hands to her lips and just kissed his. He found the gesture both slightly incomprehensible and yet he needed nothing more right now.
“He said he missed me,” he said again, and that repetition was not careless because it was the thing he kept returning to, the thing that still hurt and probably would never stop doing so. “He had told an old friend that he did not even see me in his dreams. And he did not dream of me for all that time because I made it so. My only son could not dream of me, and I think that was the truest measure of how much I had…” He was unable to finish the sentence.
“But he forgave you.”
“He forgave me.” He exhaled. “And it changes nothing about what we lost. That is… Perhaps I did not understand that those two things could be entirely true at once.”
“As they usually are,” Thalia said.
He looked at her. “So you keep telling me.”
“Yeah,” she said with a smile. “Because I’m right.”
He pulled her into his arms, but if he was honest with himself, he needed to feel her close to him so he would not fall apart. When he felt strong enough to speak again, he still only managed to do so while holding her. “I keep thinking about what he was. Before. At his wedding… he was so…” His voice threatened to break, and it cost him everything to stay in control, “…he was so very alive. And so certain that everything was going to be alright. He got that from his mother, I think.” He swallowed. “I wish I had told him I was proud of him. While there was still… while it would have been…”
Thalia still did not jump in to finish his sentences as she so often did. She just held him and let him carry what was his to carry, and that was, he found, the most graceful thing she could offer him right now.
“‘I wish things had been otherwise.’ That is what he said to me before I took his life. And all I could say was, ‘Yes’. And… I truly do not know how to want anything more specific than that. I simply wish, very much, that things had been otherwise.”
Thalia just wrapped her arms around him tighter and whispered, “I know.”
And he found that was enough…
— — —
Then the other time came.
It was not the first time he was going to be a father, but it was the first time he felt compelled to read about it. Everything he could find across every library in every realm that had anything to say on the subject, and Lucienne had begun leaving books on his desk with her usual discretion. And there were moments when he wondered why he wanted to read about it. He who had access to every living being’s subconscious had no practical need for reading. But it was not someone else’s experience, it was hers. And his. And it all felt painfully close and yet so far away. Until it didn’t…
He stayed. Of course he had asked her if she wanted him to, and she had just called him an idiot for even asking, in that way she always did. Perhaps he would get used to it one day. And he laughed at himself inwardly because he knew he already was used to it and would perceive things as terribly wrong should she ever stop throwing her little insults at him.
So he was present for every moment of it. A certain helplessness began to creep in at his inability to intervene in any way he perceived as meaningful.
And he was not entirely certain whether he had somewhat shown it, communicated it in any way he knew he would have avoided had he only been aware because Thalia just said, “You’re doing enough,” before returning to address the universe and her body with the kind of swearing even Johanna Constantine would have found impressive. No, that was inaccurate. Even Johanna would have been mortified.
Thalia could have broken his hand with her grip were he not who he was, but he decided to stay silent, which she seemed to prefer anyway.
And then, there was… a child. Without any ceremony, and not at all like the last time he had become a father.
A daughter. Thalia had been right.
And that daughter was small and… apparently outraged and so very, very real.
He had been prepared for love because it had announced itself for much longer than he had initially let on. But he had not been in any way prepared for the way it came fully into being now. Not carefully or quietly but all at once and loud and… furious, like the child who had just entered the Dreaming, and something inside of him just gave way.
And for a moment, he just stood and looked at his daughter, and she looked back at him with the unfocused indignation of a newborn. And he had no idea what to say because he could not think. There was only feeling, and that feeling made its way to the surface, again not measured or slow, and it took the shape of a desperate need to touch her head. More indignation followed, this time not entirely unfocused but rather ear-piercing, but it changed nothing, and all he could do was look at her and listen to her loud protestations while Thalia just seemed to instinctively know what to do and quietly laughed when she held her closer to her chest. And she looked exhausted and beautiful and happy and peaceful all at once, and something else inside of him, something he did not even know had existed, gave way because again, he had no words for it. And there was more terror at, and more gratefulness for, feeling it, and it was like suffocating and being able to breathe freely for the very first time at once, and it made no sense how much sense it made.
And then he became aware Thalia was watching him. “Lie down with us.”
He did not understand, and yet he did, and he carefully lay down next to her and the slightly less protesting little being.
“You should hold her.”
And the fear was immediate because yes, he wanted to, but she would surely scream again, and perhaps he would hurt or upset her in some way, and he immediately thought of The Kindly Ones and all they made him promise and…
“Take off your shirt.” His brow furrowed, and it made Thalia laugh. “Trust me on that one please.”
And he did, because it occurred to him that he was usually well advised to listen to this woman whom he loved more than he would ever find words for, and he definitely did not find any now.
She just placed the still protesting child on his chest, and she was warm and smelled like… life and love and presumably the way newborns do, which was a different affair, and the happiness and the ache of only experiencing this for the first time now, when she was not his first child, were overwhelming. He held this little miracle who should have never come into being and yet she had, and he could not even imagine how it could ever be another way from this moment on.
And then another miracle happened: the protestations stopped. She just turned quiet and breathed.
“She… stopped being angry,” was all he could say.
“I don’t think she was angry, she just needed to feel you. It’s how humans do it, you know? Newborns need to feel your skin.”
“I… think I knew this, but…”
“Not from experience, I know. But you have it now.”
And it became so crystal clear to him that no one would ever have to remind him that he had to love this child unconditionally, because he already did. But he was still terrified. Terrified of loving too deeply, terrified of turning that love into something that would destroy rather than…
Thalia put her hand on his shoulder just as his thoughts began spiralling. “She needs a name.”
“Yes,” he replied, grateful as always for her ability to pull him out of his darkest thoughts. “I think she does…”
— — —
Matthew had been studying the colours of the sky above the castle perched on a windowsill for the last hours in complete silence. Which was probably a record.
“Well?” he cawed when Dream appeared briefly in the doorway. Shirtless. “Jeez boss, no need to run around half naked.”
Dream looked at him. “There is, apparently. Or so I am told.” His expression was not one Matthew had seen before, and Matthew had seen probably most of them by now.
“O-kayyy,” Matthew croaked nervously. “And?”
“Zoē has arrived…”
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Summary: Johanna Constantine wasn’t planning to spend her night in the Dreaming. Matthew, apparently, had other ideas. Ancient purification rites were never supposed to be comfortable. But then neither was confessing, out loud, the things you have spent millennia refusing to name…
Fandom: The Sandman (Netflix/Comics) | Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Thalia Callaghan (OC), Johanna Constantine, Matthew the Raven, The Kindly Ones Relationships: Dream of the Endless/OFC, Johanna Constantine & Dream of the Endless | Rating: M | Navigation: Bottom of post
Content Warnings: Grief and mourning | Guilt, shame, and forced emotional confession | Fear of joy and intimacy | Fear of child loss | Involuntary channelling | Explicit emotional pain | Suicidal ideation referenced obliquely
Thank you for reading. Comments (here or on Ao3) and reblogs are always appreciated. And asks, too! I love yapping about my fics 🖤
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“Didn’t think I’d see you again. At least not in circumstances like this.” Johanna’s hands were surprisingly steady despite the magnitude of the undertaking.
A ghost of a smile hushed over his face, but the moment was short-lived. “What are you doing here, Constantine?”
“Matthew sent me.” His face immediately dropped. “Well, no, quite strictly speaking, he didn’t send me, he just yapped to me in my dreams. Came across him in the waking world last when he was running errands with that nightmare of yours, so I didn’t really expect him to get on my nerves when I’m sleeping. Anyway, what happened? Thought that little quest of theirs went well?”
Dream looked at her from the corner of his eye. “It did. But apparently the scales are not balanced.”
Johanna snorted. “No shit. You killed your son, mate.” His face contorted. “Sorry, didn’t mean it that way,” she mumbled.
“You always had a rather… direct way with words, Johanna Constantine. Something you share with someone else.”
“Yeah, heard about your lady friend.”
“She is not a ‘friend’.”
“Lady love then. So how’s that going?”
“That is none of your concern.”
“Well, it is now.”
His brow knitted itself together tightly. “Why?”
“Because your raven told me about your predicament when he found me in my dreams. Made a big fuss about it, too, and that I couldn’t wake up under any circumstances because I had to find you in the Dreaming. Seems I can’t get away from you, and it annoys the fuck out of me.” Her grin said it all. “Congratulations, by the way.”
“What did he tell you?” There was a dangerous edge to his voice that Johanna recognised all too well.
“Calm down, just here to help.”
The laugh came out of nowhere. She had never heard him laugh before; he didn’t seem the kind of guy who ever laughed at all. “How could you possibly help?”
“You don’t have a lot of trust in me, do you?”
The casting down of his eyes came as unexpectedly as the laugh. “You should know by now that I always trusted you and your kin. I apologise.”
“No need to apologise. Well, you should remember what I told you when you got back your sand? We’re not to be trusted.”
“Then whoever planted that seed in your head is wrong.”
She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. “Is it not you who holds domain over our subconscious?”
He blinked. “I…”
“Right, I’m not here for idle chit-chat. I’m here to kick your arse into gear.”
“How so?
“Because you’re stupid.”
He straightened his back. “What have I done this time?”
“Well, are you just going to lie down and let the Kindly Ones walk all over you without even trying to atone?”
Johanna had to strain to hear his voice. “Do you not think I regret what happened?”
“I said ‘atone’, not ‘regret’. There are ancient purification rituals for this. The Kindly Ones need to be invoked. No way out of that any more because you apparently hacked off some people enough to take care of that. But you can also atone, and I thought you, of all… people, would know? Provided you want to know?”
“You are the second person who has doubts.”
“Well, then maybe we’re right?” Silence. “For the ones who are slow on the uptake, then: Do you want to live and at least give this a shot?”
The eye-roll would have been comical hadn’t the reply come so swiftly and with a hint of desperation. “Yes.”
“Okay, but you understand this will cost you, right? The Kindly Ones don’t balance scales, or whatever you call it. It’ll hurt like a bitch.”
Dream's silence lasted longer than Johanna could stand at the moment. When the reply finally came, his voice sounded thin and stretched. “Everything I have done since… granting my son release cast ripples. Now…” He swallowed. “Now there is another life, and…” His voice gave in.
Johanna had never seen him so broken and put her hand on his shoulder. “Just let me do this, okay?” He barely nodded. “But to make this very clear: What I’ll do next will require confessions that are more than just nice words. They’ll need to come from a place a bit deeper than that…”
Johanna began her incantation in old languages most people didn’t even remember before she changed back. And that was the way it had to be because his atonement was not simply for the past, but also a negotiation for things to come.
The moment arrived, and it had to be acted upon swiftly. “Say his name,” she commanded.
The last bit of Dream's composure finally cracked. "Orpheus. My only son and my greatest failure."
“What else?”
He looked up at her. “What else is there to say?”
“Reach for it.”
Dream closed his eyes, and nothing came forth.
“Fucking reach! You know the answer!”
When he finally found his voice again, it was hardly that but rather a whisper. “There is another. Unnamed. Unborn.”
“That’s not enough. What else?”
“Loved already in ways that terrify me beyond reason.”
Johanna felt the shift, but she pressed on. The Kindly Ones had their job to do, but so did she. And this was her craft. “Tell them why. Tell them what drove you to break the law, and what you fear might drive you to break it again."
"Orpheus asked for release. I could not watch him suffer any longer. I gave him what I was unable to give myself…” His voice broke yet again.
Johanna really wanted to give him space, but it was hard for her to keep the channel open. “This is like pulling teeth, bruv. What couldn’t you give yourself?”
His breath caught. “An end to pain.”
“Finally we’re getting somewhere. Keep going, this isn’t exactly fun for me,” she pushed out through gritted teeth.
“Thalia had to bear the full weight of my grief, and now she bears what terrifies me more than I have words to contain.” His voice was raw. “I am terrified of loving this child completely. I am terrified of feeling joy because joy makes loss unbearable. I am terrified of becoming whole for even a moment because that which is whole will break more completely than what is already broken. I am broken. But I want to love with the totality of my being, even if it will cause me the deepest pain. I wish to be whole again.”
Johanna finally felt things settle. “Jesus Christ…” She already knew the price would be steeper than she had imagined, and it would cut to the very heart of what Dream feared most.
Johanna’s head thrashed back within an instant. The takeover came at the least opportune moment, if there had ever been such a thing anyway. Her voice was barely hers any more when she said, “An Endless who has learned to love as mortals do? Well, that requires… adjustment.” Hoarseness set in, and the effort of channelling their verdict nearly had Johanna at breaking point. “We offer you this, Dream King. You will viscerally remember your son’s suffering for ten thousand years, and you will have no control over when it happens. And believe us, it will happen more often than you fear. The pain shall remain to remind you that should you fail the child Thalia carries, should your love destroy once again, we will hound you, and you will become nothing more than a cautionary tale.”
Johanna came to and saw how badly Dream’s hands trembled. The silence that followed was awful. “Don’t mess this up,” she hissed under her breath. “It’s only ten thousand years, that’s nothing for…”
“I accept,” and those two words were so heavy with surrender that even Johanna felt emotional for a moment.
And the very next moment, the Kindly Ones stood right in front of them.
“Well, thanks very much, could’ve made it a bit easier for me,” Johanna grunted.
“Your work here is done, Johanna Constantine,” the crone commanded before turning towards Dream.
But it was the maiden who spoke. “Your acknowledgement satisfies the requirement of justice. The blood-debt transforms into the choice to love fully."
The mother proceeded. “And while we are appeased, Dream King, your true test lies in the time ahead. We will watch you and your willingness to love completely. We will judge your commitment to raising this child and loving it unconditionally at all times, for as long as it lives.”
“Your journey is not complete, Morpheus. It is only just beginning, and if you misstep…” the crone added.
And then they were gone.
“Fucking hell,” Johanna quietly muttered to herself while quickly rubbing her face.
His voice brought her back. “You have given me a choice I thought lost forever, Johanna Constantine.”
She smiled. “A simple thank you wouldn’t be like you at all, would it?”
Dream smiled back at her. “Is that what you truly believe?”
“Nah.” Johanna tilted her head. “Thinking of it: A while back, maybe. But you’ve changed.”
“Perhaps.”
A slightly awkward silence stretched between them, and Johanna was not good with those. “Well, you’ve got work to do I guess.”
He blew out a gentle stream of air through his nose. “Ten thousand years of it, as it seems.”
“Yeah, sorry about that one.”
“It is quite alright,” Dream said softly. “There is something… freeing about loss transforming into the courage to begin again.” He looked at her. “Perhaps even for you, Johanna Constantine.”
Her laugh sounded more awkward than intended. “Yeah, not sure about that.” She quickly wiped her hands on her legs. “Right, I should probably run, shouldn’t I?”
He stepped closer, head bowed, not looking at her. “I owe you. If there is anything…”
“It’s okay. You already took those nightmares away, I’m fine.”
His eyes finally found hers. “But are you? Truly?”
A brief moment of recognition passed between them, enough to make her understand that he was in the process of overcoming something (well, hopefully) that she still hadn’t. But the moment passed, and she let it.
Johanna drew in a sharp breath and put on a smile. “Yeah, I’m alright, nothing to worry about.”
“I will find you in your dreams, Johanna Constantine. And perhaps, you will even listen to me. One day.”
“Just like you always listen to me? Aye right…”
Dream cocked his head to one side. “Then again, I did just listen to you, did I not?”
“Yep, and look what it got you,” she quipped.
“Life?”
— — —
Matthew sat on a parapet. He simply ruffled his feathers and said nothing, which was so unlike him that it stopped Dream in his tracks.
Matthew turned one eye towards him, then away. “Boss.”
“Matthew.”
Another pause. “Is it…”
“It is done.”
The sound Matthew made was not quite a word. Dream actually chuckled, left him to it and simply walked on because he had to be some place else…
— — —
The pain was so severe she couldn’t breathe. Like nothing she had ever felt before. Even the darkest moments she had shared with him paled in comparison. And she couldn’t even wail at first. All there was were silent screams she felt building, but they went nowhere. It was as if they were stuck somewhere between her chest and her mouth.
Thalia rocked back and forth, hoping for something she could hold on to, something to stop her from collapsing completely and writhing on the floor. Her arms closed around her ribs, and a sudden panic overcame her, so profound that her heart would have stopped had she still one.
What if the child was gone? If what never should have been real in the first place would disappear with him if he didn’t come back? Because it was only real since he had made it so. With him gone, what would prevent the child to turn into nothing again?
Thalia’s thoughts began spiralling.
And just in that moment, she felt it.
I’m still here.
And she sobbed. Quietly at first as her hands began to run over her abdomen. Louder then, until she let go. And she finally wailed, and the tears flowed, and all she could do was howl. Howl away twelve winters when there were another twelve on the horizon. And another twelve, and another.
And maybe her howl was a threat instead of a call for mercy. Maybe it was just the release of a pain so deep that she knew it would never stop for as long as she existed, however long that might be. Or maybe it was a reminder for herself to keep herself in line, with the same cruelty that Prospero had shown to Ariel.
“Both of us are still here as it seems.” His voice seemed to come out of nowhere. “The three of us would be more precise.”
Thalia wasn’t even embarrassed he saw her like this. The tears wouldn’t stop, neither would the sobbing, neither would the shaking. And yet, she somehow managed to get on her feet, but she didn’t need to start walking because it was he who closed the space between them first to just take her into his arms. Which seemed very unusual for this particular moment, but she didn’t care one bit.
“You’re back,” was all she could get out between sobs into his chest that felt just as annoying as hiccups.
“Yes.”
“Yes?! Is that all you have to say?”
He pulled back and looked at her for a long moment, and it was very clear that the reason for his monosyllabic reply was simple overwhelm because his eyes were brimming with tears. The expression on his face was completely devoid of any armour whatsoever.
“Matthew sent Johanna Constantine.”
“Did he?”
“It seems he was worried about you and apparently considers her an appropriate aim to… communicate his worries to.”
“He was worried about me?”
Something seemed to shift, and his tears finally began to fall silently. “I am… in certain ways, not the same as when I left.”
“Yeah, I can sort of see that.” Thalia didn’t wipe away her own tears, but she gently thumbed away his.
He tried to find his composure. “Perhaps… I owe you an account of what occurred.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Thalia, I…”
“Whatever happened between you and the Kindly Ones, and between you and Johanna, is yours. I don’t need a report right now. That’s not to say I won’t listen if you want me to.” She tilted her head. “Do you want me to?”
The silence that followed didn’t feel evasive for once.
“I should very much like you to,” he said at last. “Once I…” He looked at her. “If you will still have me, after everything I…”
“Morpheus…” She put her hand against his cheek. “I sent Matthew for Johanna Constantine. Does that tell you anything?”
His hand came up to hold hers. “Then I should perhaps confess that it was I who was worried about you, not Matthew. Well, I am sure he was, but that is not…”
“Will you shut up already?” she laughed, still trying to get her crying under control.
“You tell me to ‘shut up’? Oh how quickly the tables have turned,” he muttered before his lips closed over hers…
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