A Brief, Biased, and Mildly Disrespectful Rundown of the Hell Bidders
Order & Chaos
Show up like philosophy undergrads who just discovered Kant and Nietzsche and want to “spice up” your party. One with a cardboard box, the other with a balloon. Both somehow make less sense than Delirium on any given Tuesday.
The Norse Gods
Odin: “I’m very wise and mysterious and definitely not desperate.”
Loki: “I’m already plotting three betrayals and a musical number.”
Thor: “Do you even lift, bro?” (but with worse manners)
Susanoo-no-Mikoto
Radiates quiet strength. Has main character energy actually. Honestly a king for being the true philosopher in the room (not the undergrad).
The Demons
Want to gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss their way back into Hell. Azazel is the cautionary tale in overconfidence and therefore gets the time-out bottle. Oops…
The Angels
Duma: says nothing, radiates dread.
Remiel: talks too much, crumbles into existential horror by the end.
Together: the embodiment of “This Is Fine”, but with wings.
The Fae
Cluracan: Here on royal orders but treats the whole event like a pub crawl with slightly higher stakes. Also: Every good night out has to end with sex...
Nuala: pure, polite, deeply uncomfortable and crushing on the host.
Together: “We brought diplomacy and vibes.”
Bonus: Bast (because they cheated us!)
Mainly purrs suggestively. Tries to seduce Dream but honestly just might have wanted a nap in the throne room. Would rule Hell purely for the open fires she’d like to lounge in front of.
Dream
Technically not a bidder, but still the most terrifying person in the room. Says maybe four sentences, stares people into submission, and leaves everyone emotionally destabilised. Also: Provides snacks and entertainment, and that’s the most important thing. For me anyway…
Sketch, I couldn't find an screenshot with her clothes from Seasons of Mists or otherwise so it's just... bullshitting off vague remembrances and the Wikipedia page.
This is for @dreamarakne (love the new name btw. I screenshot your ask because the formatting for replies always gets wonky). And can I just say: I want to kiss you because this is the first prompt I’m fulfilling, and it’s straightaway for one of my absolute favourites. I insist Bast and Morpheus should have had a litter of adorable kittens, half of them black and glittering like starlight, the other half blue-grey and glittering like quartz in the desert. But the prompt was “I wasn’t supposed to care about you”, and the kittens didn’t quite fit. Platonic with tension or romantic with a lot of restraint—you decide. I hope you like it 🖤 (and I’m also stealth-tagging @duckland because we are both the resident presidents of the Morpheus x Bast fan club on here)
I’m taking more requests right now, you can find everything there is to know here.
And Yet…
Bast finds him, as she usually does, when she is not searching for him.
Look for the Lord of Dreams and he is certain not to appear, but let attention wander and the mind drift? Let it slip into the memory of once ample offerings left at the feet of statues that have become much more scarce in recent times, and lying on warm sandstone after a meal she didn’t need to hunt for herself?
There he is, at the edge of her oasis like he was there all along.
“You’re brooding,” she says, settling beside him with her legs tucked beneath her.
He doesn’t look at her, and his eyes stay fixed on something apparently only he can see.
“I am thinking,” he says. Bast has known for a long time that thinking and brooding mean the same thing when it comes to Morpheus.
Her ears briefly tilt toward the sound of distant jackals (and those ones are really wolves, but things have been called different names over time), and then she looks at him the way she has looked at him forever. “You’ve been thinking for three days. My worshippers, few as there remain, are starting to worry.”
He briefly throws her a sideways glance with a raised eyebrow. “Your worshippers cannot see me unless I choose they can.”
“You’re right, but they have noticed I am not eating their offerings, and they’ve come to their own conclusions about me.” She leans back and tips her face up to the stars. “They think I’m in love.”
Of course they think is a lie (not the love though). And of course he says nothing, and she knows that this is often his way of speaking. But his mouth moves in a way one might call a smile. A very small one. And a thing about Morpheus that no one who hasn’t known him for a very long time understands is:
He is actually quite funny.
Funny in the way that tragedies can sometimes be amusing, or saying the desert is beautiful because it will kill you. He does not tell jokes, he simply is one, dark and mostly unintentional, this being who has mourned a Nubian poet whose name the waking world forgot within a generation. She isn’t supposed to know that because he had thought himself unobserved, and to this day, he still hasn’t figured out that she did observe him. Or maybe he has. No matter.
“Something is wrong,” she says, and it definitely isn’t a question.
“Many things are wrong,” he states with a frown. “They usually are, it is the way of the world.”
“Something is wrong with you.”
He is quiet for long enough that she can hear the Nile. But that would make no sense, so perhaps it’s only the wind, and she is too sentimental. Then again, she is allowed to be sentimental, because it reminds her of love. And she’d had love in abundance from her people before it began to fade.
She also has… what do you call it exactly when an Endless has been regularly sitting beside you for five thousand years to argue philosophy? And once, only once, in a moment neither of them has ever mentioned again, reached out and touched her face with the back of his hand?
“I saw,” he says finally, “a future.” She waits. “It was not…” He stops again. And this, she knows, is vexing him, because he does not like to be imprecise. “It is difficult to explain. There are moments when I…”
“When you are not entirely in control?”
He finally looks at her with eyes as unsettling and beautiful as the night. And she has looked into them more often than she can count, and they still do something to her that she doesn’t have a name for in any of the languages she knows.
“I saw myself,” he says. “Ending… and beginning.”
The oasis seems too quiet all of a sudden.
“Dream…”
“I do not say this to distress you.” His voice is measured, but she can hear things underneath in the way all cats can. “I say it because…” Another long pause during which she watches his hands, which are so very pale and so very still, and she wants to… She doesn’t let herself finish the thought. “Because I found that I was not distressed for myself. I found I was…” He looks at the water again. “I found I was thinking of who would notice an absence. Or a change. I found that I was thinking of…”
He does not say her name and he doesn’t have to. Bast has been alive long enough to recognise dying things. Gods and humans and the small brave animals that were later brought to her temple wrapped in linen. She knows what it looks like when something, or someone, is trying to put themselves down quietly.
She has also never wanted to scratch someone so badly in her life.
“You are not allowed,” she hisses, “to feel guilty about it.”
He blinks. It is, she thinks, genuinely possible that no one has ever said that to him before.
“I did not think I…”
“You’re sitting here with me, in my desert, feeling guilty for caring whether I would grieve you. Which is, let’s say, the most you thing you have ever done. And I have known you for a long time.”
His expression is very controlled and she knows, knows, that underneath it all, he is doing the thing he always does: He is trying to file himself away neatly. The Lord of Dreams doesn’t occupy the same space as the being who feels. No doubt very inconvenient things, at least in his mind. Bast spent thousands of years deciding, on and off, whether to do anything about that, and she is beginning to think she made the wrong call.
“I was not supposed to care… about you,” he says quietly. And it sounds like it’s a thought he didn’t mean to say out loud. “That was not… I did not intend…”
“I know. I wasn’t supposed to care about you either.” She reaches out and puts her hand over his, and she feels him go very still. “And yet…”
Over the millennia, people have seen her in many ways and called her many names: Lady of the Flame, Eye of Ra, Devouring One, She Who Comes in Peace. She was all of these things, still is some of them. She is also, right now, simply a goddess sitting with her hand over the hand of someone who has been her friend for longer than anyone, and who is apparently having feelings he is… very unhappy about. She finds, to her own surprise, that she doesn’t mind.
“I will not always be here either,” she says. “You know this better than anyone.” She feels his hand turn beneath hers. Slowly first, like he’s deciding, and then all at once, until his fingers close around hers. His grip is careful and very light. “But I am here now. And so are you. And I think…” Her ears twitch and she tilts her head, listening to the jackals who have started up again. “I think now is what we have, and it isn’t nothing.”
Morpheus doesn’t answer because he is infinitely better at silence than talking. But his thumb moves, very slightly, against her knuckles. She leans her head against his shoulder, which feels surprisingly solid, and she watches the water until the stars begin to disappear and the sky in the east changes colour.
He stays until the sun is fully up. This, she knows, means something. He usually has things to do, because he always has things to do.
When he finally stands, his shadow is very long and very faint.
“Bast.”
“Dream.”
He looks at her for a moment, and she looks back with eyes that have, she is told, the unsettling quality of seeing through things. Or people.
“I will endeavour,” he says, with much deliberation, “not to end.”
And she knows it is both a lie and the truth, but she smiles. “Good. I would be very put out.”
He inclines his head with the courtesy she has long known to be his kind of saying he cares, and then he is gone. And she is standing by herself in the early morning light with the feeling of his hand still against hers.
All of a sudden, she begins to feel unsteady, and she needs a moment to sit back down by the water. One of her cats comes and winds around her ankles. She reaches down and strokes her, and the cat purrs like something that has finally found its frequency and will not let it go.
I wasn’t supposed to care about you, she thinks, in the direction of wherever he has gone. And yet...
The morning bustle rises, and she listens, and she cannot stop smiling despite feeling like crying...
You know, the placement of “Death talks about Life” in the original single issue comics (once again excuse my crappola photo) is gold:
I mean, Bast tries to pull Dream over several pages, and then they get interrupted by Death and John Constantine, who talk about the importance of safe sex.
[And once again I shall wait for the AI to censor the banana]
I still think they should have. Morpheus and Bast, that is 🐈⬛🌙🤣
