The Dream that becomes reality Chapter 12
Disclaimer: This work is a piece of transformative fanfiction inspired by The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. All canonical characters and concepts belong to their respective creators. This story includes an original character, canon-derived and created for this story. This fic explores a post-canon divergence and does not seek to replace or overwrite canon events. Written for creative and non-commercial purposes only. Content Warning This chapter contains adult themes, including emotional intimacy, sensual and erotic content, and psychological intensity. It is intended for mature audiences only (18+). Reader discretion is advised.
Chapter 12: Tear in the Dreaming
The heart monitor emitted soft, steady beeps. The evening light filtered timidly through the vertical blinds. It was not a private room, but in that moment, it seemed suspended in its own time. Darian opened his eyes.
He felt the stiffness of the mattress beneath his back, the dry crust of the IV on his arm, the sterile air that smelled of plastic and chlorine. He shifted slightly, blinking, expecting to find Nada in the chair beside the bed. But it was not her.
“Good morning, sleepyhead.”
The voice was soft. Familiar, though he did not know from where. The woman sitting beside him had her hair gathered in a low bun, a dark coat draped over the back of the chair, and a thermos of coffee on the small side table. She smiled at him as if she had known him forever.
“Mom…?” Darian murmured, his throat rough.
“Present,” she said, lifting the water glass toward him just a little. “How do you feel?”
He sat up slowly. His body ached, but it was not physical pain. It was something else… internal. As if he had stretched too far during the night.
“Weird,” he admitted. “As if I hadn’t slept, but had dreamed something… too big to remember.”
Night nodded, as if talking about dreams were as ordinary as talking about the weather.
“That happens sometimes. Dreams don’t always fit inside the body when we return.”
Darian looked at her more closely. She had soft under-eye circles, the kind that do not betray exhaustion but time. Her hands were slender yet firm. There was nothing supernatural about her. Only a certain pause in her gestures. Like someone who had lived slowly enough not to forget something important.
“And Nada?” he asked.
“She went home for a while. She didn’t want to leave, but I insisted. She needs to rest. You do too,” she added, as if the change of subject might protect him.
Darian took a sip of water. Then, in a low voice:
“Were you here all afternoon?”
“Not from the beginning. I came when they called me. They gave you something to sleep. They said it was… a nervous breakdown. Do you want to talk about it?”
Darian shook his head.
They stayed silent for a few seconds. Then he asked:
“What was I like… when I was a child?”
Night looked at him.
She didn’t blink. She didn’t change her expression. But she took just a second longer than usual to answer.
“You were curious. You liked to take clocks apart. And to hide things in your pockets. Your shoes were always dirty.” She smiled. “Not from playing, but from walking more than was expected of you.”
Darian watched her closely.
“And did I cry a lot?”
“Sometimes,” she said, looking at the glass. “But you learned to do it in silence. Not out of fear, but out of… modesty.”
“And I… was I afraid of the dark?”
Night paused again. Not long enough to sound deceitful. Just long enough to sound like someone choosing her words carefully.
“No,” she said at last. “Not of the dark. Of what came when you closed your eyes… perhaps.”
Darian nodded, as if that confirmed everything. He lowered his gaze. He gripped the blanket between his fingers.
“And what did you tell me to calm me down?”
Night parted her lips. But she didn’t answer. She didn’t have that scene. She didn’t have those words. She had never said them. Nothing she had said, she had ever done.
“Mom?” he insisted, without raising his voice. “You… who are you, really?”
The woman set the glass down carefully on the side table. She didn’t look at him right away. Then, with unfeigned calm, she replied:
“I am the one who waited for you before you arrived. The one who believed that even something broken could blossom if offered enough love. I am the one who stayed when the others left.”
“That’s not an answer,” Darian said, without anger. “That’s… a poetic definition.”
Night smiled, sad.
“It’s the only thing I can give you… for now. Because the full answer… still doesn’t fit in your body.”
Darian closed his eyes.
And for an instant, he didn’t need to know more.
He only felt that, even if just for a moment, he wasn’t alone.
Suddenly the hospital room fell back into silence after the conversation. The echo of the unsaid still floated among the sheets. Darian, still lying down, felt something begin to move inside—not in the body, but in a deeper place that had no name.
And then it happened.
It wasn’t a jolt. Nor a summons. It was a sudden shudder, as if someone on another plane had spoken his name too loudly.
Darian closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to contain. But instead of darkness, the void opened.
And on the other side…
The Dreaming trembled. Not with an earthquake. Not with collapse. With something graver: a silence that did not belong in the Realm of Dream. Lucienne’s shelves bent slightly, as if the books did not wish to be read. The doors did not open onto any new dream. The Orb… was opaque.
Lucienne was the first to feel it. And just then, Delirium appeared.
“Dani is not okay!” she cried, more desperate than confused. “I knew it before I thought it! Before I dreamed it! Before! He’s unraveling inside as if the threads that held him… got bored.”
She ran to the throne room, where Daniel sat… but absent. He was not sleeping. He was not speaking. He simply was. And yet not entirely.
“He hasn’t gone!” Delirium shrieked, tears falling like confetti in reverse. “But he isn’t here either. He’s… suspended.”
Lucienne tried to draw near. The Orb vibrated with an erratic note. The throne itself seemed misaligned with the plane on which it rested.
Then Desire appeared, wrapped in silk and danger. “What a spectacle,” they said, but without mockery. “It wasn’t me this time. I swear it by my mirror. This… does not bear my signature.”
“Then whose?” Lucienne asked, her tone more pleading than defiant.
Destiny arrived unannounced. His book opened itself as he walked. Though he read, uncertainty marked his face.
“This was not written.”
Death came next. She entered without casting a shadow. She approached the throne. Daniel remained motionless, but his skin seemed to absorb light.
“He’s not on my list,” Death said, low but firm. “He shouldn't be. Yet… he is dimming. Something inside him is failing to hold.”
She looked at her siblings. “This is more than a crisis. More than a waning dream. It is… a fissure in the vibration that binds us.”
“What do you propose?” Destiny asked, though he already knew the answer.
Then Time came. Not as salvation. As debt. His presence weighed on every corner. He was not loved, but he was necessary.
“What is happening?” Death asked, almost like a child again. “What’s wrong with our brother?”
Time approached Daniel. He observed him like one remembers a newborn… or someone who never should have died.
“It’s not his body that is tiring,” he said. “It’s his center. His pulse. Not Daniel’s… but that of the fragment that inhabits him. A part that never should have fully been born. An echo…”
Desire stepped back. Delirium covered her ears. Destiny simply closed his book.
“So Darian is Morpheus?” Desire asked, curious and serious for the first time.
“No,” Time replied. “But he is what Morpheus did not allow himself to be. What he hid, what he denied, what he destroyed before allowing it to blossom. He is a vibrational echo born of unexpressed love. Of sacrifice. Of what he never wanted others to see.”
Death whispered, “And is that why he is dying?”
“Because that echo… is remembering. And it does not know whether it wants to live as a human… or die as a fragment.”
Time lowered his gaze and added, “What comes cannot be predicted. Not by books. Not by maps. Because it will be his choice.”
At that instant, the Orb flickered. Like a heart still unsure whether to beat or stop.
Daniel’s body arched upon itself as if something invisible were tearing him from within. The tremor of his vibration was not physical, yet books fell from the shelves. The walls of the Dreaming rippled, like a reflection on water about to break. Lucienne ran to him, but could not touch him: his skin burned with a dull light, a kind of inverse echo.
Delirium stepped back, for the first time with no laughter in her eyes.
“He isn’t dreaming. He is being dreamed,” she said with a trembling voice. “He’s feeling something that doesn’t come from him… but that is his.”
Then Desire stood, pale even beneath their gilded presence. Their voice carried none of its usual playfulness, but a serene, dark edge:
“This shouldn’t come from me, but… we must intervene. Whatever Darian is doing, or desiring, or dreaming cannot go on like this. Not if it keeps rending the one left with the realm. Not if it drags Daniel toward an abyss he did not ask for.”
Death looked at them in surprise, but said nothing. Destiny narrowed his eyes, as if every word sketched a new thread in his book.
“Darian… he will be on my list if this is not balanced.”
Lucienne closed her eyes. She felt the weight of centuries fold upon the word “if.”
At that moment, Daniel’s body arched once more… and went still.
“Did it stop?” Delirium asked, as if afraid of having lost the only one who understood her dreams.
“No,” Time whispered. “Now it is Darian who dreams. And Daniel… is only feeling it.”
A long silence imposed itself at the heart of the Dreaming. And then, in the densest half-light, a faint murmur began to be heard.
As if a human’s dream were writing a new story… one no Endless could anticipate.
Night had fallen without ceremony
From the hospital window, the city seemed asleep but not at peace. Outside, sounds were muffled. Inside, everything was pause.
Darian still hovered between here and elsewhere. Something in his chest—not the heart, something deeper—beat with a rhythm he didn’t recognize.
First came a slight chill, like when someone walks over your memory. Then came the hum. Not in his ears, but in the marrow. A dull tremor, a sustained note that did not cease. His vision fogged for a second, and then… something tore.
Not outside.
Inside.
Darian brought a hand to his chest. A growing pressure, as if a nameless memory were trying to emerge.
He half closed his eyes.
And he did not see darkness.
He saw sand.
A windless, endless desert, where the sky was a motionless mantle. In the center, a figure—neither him, nor another—sat upon a floating rock. It did not speak. It did not breathe. Yet he felt it. He felt it with every cell, as if a part of himself were trapped there… dreaming him from the other side.
“Daniel?” he whispered, not knowing why he said that name.
The figure did not answer. But the echo did.
A word crossed him like a vibrating thorn: balance.
Darian gasped. He opened his eyes. He was back in the hospital, but the world was not the same. The walls beat faintly. The objects seemed to breathe with a rhythm that did not belong to time.
The woman who claimed she was his mother was not there; instead, she was there. Nada slept, in the same position as the night before, but her brow was furrowed, as if she were dreaming something he, too, was seeing.
“What are you asking of me?” he murmured to the air, not knowing to whom he spoke.
And then, the memory of the letter. Not the text, but the tremor it had left in her.
“If what should never have throbbed begins to do so again…”
Darian leaned back against the headboard. He was not ill. He was not weak. But something inside him had awakened and was not asking permission. He was not Morpheus. Not entirely. But he was not only Darian either.
He was the bridge.
And for the first time he understood what had been sown in him: not a destiny, but a heartbeat that had to decide itself.
He brought a hand to his face. His eyes were wet, but not from sadness.
It was vertigo.
He stood on the threshold of something he did not understand, but which recognized him from within.
And then he felt it again: a slight tug, as if someone—far away, on another plane—were dreaming him. Or needing him.
Daniel.
He couldn’t explain it.
He only knew that if he didn’t find a way to hold himself, they would both fall.
Not as punishment.
As warning.
Darian looked at Nada.
Then at the window.
And understood he could not wait any longer. If that crack opened fully, if the Realm split… there would be no choice left.
And he, for the first time, wanted to choose.
Hours later, with the discharge papers still warm in the cardboard folder, they crossed the threshold into the apartment together. The door closed with a barely audible click. They hadn’t brought much. Only the medical discharge, a prescription, and a silence that seemed to have settled between them as a third presence.
Nada set her bag on the chair. Darian walked straight to the kitchen, without asking. He took off his jacket, hung it clumsily, and opened the fridge with the resignation of someone who already knows there isn’t much, but wants to try anyway.
“May I…?” she began, voice low.
“Of course. The bathroom’s free,” he replied without looking at her, as if he knew what she was going to ask.
Nada nodded and disappeared down the hall.
Darian was left alone. He put water to boil. He chopped an onion, not very skillfully, but with focus. He moved like someone who had lived alone for a long time, unused to cooking for another. Every movement was an act of reconciliation with routine, as if saying “we are here” were easier with a pan than with words.
He lit the burner. The sound of hot oil was almost a relief. As if something real were finally happening.
Nada returned minutes later. Her expression was serene, but her eyes were still searching for something beyond objects. She sat at the table. She said nothing at first.
She watched him as he cooked. There was something almost beautiful in his functional clumsiness. As if each chopped onion were a way not to disappear.
“Darian…” she began, softly.
He didn’t turn. He just kept stirring whatever it was he was making.
“Mhm.”
“I want to talk about what’s happening.”
Silence.
Only the crackle of the oil. Steam rising as if it, too, avoided looking.
“Do you mean what happened to me at the hospital… or the other thing?” he finally asked, without sarcasm or hardness.
“You. Me. The… tremor I feel when you’re near.”
Darian turned off the heat. He set the wooden spoon down slowly. Then he turned to her.
“I feel it too. I don’t know its name. I don’t know if I want to name it yet. But… it isn’t a lie. That I know.”
Nada took a deep breath.
“And what do we do with something we don’t understand?”
He thought for a moment. Then he served two plates. He set one in front of her, without ceremony.
“We eat it hot, before it gets cold. And then, if we’re still here, we talk about it.”
She laughed—barely.
Not out of mockery.
But out of relief.
“Do you know that’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me today?”
Darian shrugged.
“I’m not good with speeches. But if this is real… if this version of us can exist in some way… I want to start it here. With what I can do. Cook. Stay. Not run.”
Nada looked at him for a long time.
Not for what he said.
But for how he said it.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s start here.”
And both of them ate in silence.
As if those mouthfuls were somehow sacred.
As if, between the plates and the stillness, the world stopped trembling… for an instant.
The dishes were washed. Steam from the warm water still rose from the sink. Nada dried her hands with a linen towel while the water ran, but Darian wasn’t using it.
He was no longer in the kitchen.
He had walked in silence down the hall and shut himself in the bathroom.
He gripped the edge of the bathroom sink with both hands, his knuckles white with pressure. He had shut himself in without warning after clearing the plates. Nada hadn’t followed. She sensed this battle wasn’t with her.
The mirror before him didn’t reflect his face clearly. It wasn’t steam. It was something else. A tremor in the image, as if the surface resisted returning the same face.
“I am not him,” Darian whispered—more to himself than as any real assertion.
But the phrase had no echo. As if it were not spoken aloud, but absorbed inward.
A stab crossed his chest. Not physical pain. Something deeper. An emotional fissure. An ancient weariness that could not be explained with dreams or stories.
Then he felt it.
A presence.
It didn’t enter the bathroom. It didn’t touch him. It had no face. Only a pressure behind his eyes, a dense damp in his lungs, a formless anguish.
Despair.
There was no sound.
Only a dull murmur, like nails raking at a fabric too thin to hold a soul.
Darian closed his eyes. But that did not stop her.
He didn’t want to break.
Not again.
Eternal Plane · Outside of Time
Night stood in a space without shape or measure, wrapped in shadows that did not cast darkness, but origin.
Time arrived unannounced. Wherever he stepped, seconds bent.
“You knew this would happen,” he said, needing no greeting.
“I sensed it,” Night replied, without looking. “It isn’t the same.”
“Despair has already crossed. Her vibration forced its way into the human plane. He is near the limit.”
“He is being human, as he should be. Only from there can he choose without mirages.”
Time walked in invisible circles, as if trying to measure the imbalance with his feet.
“You cannot protect him forever. Not with shadows, not with love. The echo you gave him… is rending Daniel from within.”
“And what do you propose? Cut it out? Empty him? Take away the little that connects him to what he was?”
“I propose balance,” Time said, hard. “Not nostalgia. Not indulgence.”
Night looked at last.
“Balance like the one that made him die the first time?”
Silence.
Time lowered his gaze just a little.
“Darian is not Dream. But if he continues to embody Dream’s wound, the cycle will not close. And you know this.”
“I don’t want it to close,” Night replied. “I want it to blossom. Even if it hurts.”
“Despair can smell him, Night. She feels him. If he breaks… if he falls… not only Daniel will fall after him.”
“Then let them not break him,” she whispered. “Let someone choose him. Not as a god. Not as a dream. As a man.”
Time stepped back.
“That does not depend on us.”
“No,” said Night, with millennial sorrow. “It depends on him.”
Human Plane · Back to the Bathroom
Darian turned the tap hard. He splashed water on his face. Once, twice, three times.
Despair hadn’t touched him. But he had felt her.
And he knew she would return if he didn’t soon choose who he was.
He opened the door. Darian stepped out of the bathroom, paler than before.
Nada sat on the sofa. She didn’t look at him with judgment. Only with a calm that suddenly seemed stronger than all the shadows in the universe.
“I’m fine,” he said, his voice trembling.
Nada sat on the sofa, her legs tucked under a light blanket, asked nothing. She only nodded and shifted a little to make room for him at her side.
The lamp cast soft shadows on the walls, barely grazed by the murmur of the night city. There was silence, but not the calm kind: a dense one, as if something still unsaid hovered between them.
Darian simply sat beside her, with that mechanical gesture of one who needs to feel weight in his feet not to dissolve into thought.
Minutes passed without words. They only breathed in a faint synchrony.
Nada turned her face slightly toward him. She looked at him. The sweat on his neck wasn’t from heat. The slight tremor in his fingers wasn’t from fatigue.
“Are you all right?” she asked, without urgency.
Darian nodded, though not fully. He stared ahead. As if he still saw something beyond the wall.
“I was in the bathroom… and I felt someone watching me. Not from outside, but from inside. As if something… something broken were waiting for me on the other side of the mirror.”
Nada didn’t answer right away. She only set a hand on his leg, without pressure, a silent anchor.
“It’s over,” she said at last. “You’re here. With me.”
Darian turned to her. His eyes were reddened. Not from weeping, but from wear.
“I don’t know how much longer I can hold this,” he murmured. “I feel that if I fall asleep again… I’ll open a door I won’t be able to close.”
She slid her hand up his arm to his shoulder.
“Then don’t sleep alone,” she whispered. “Not this time.”
They lay back together, without agreed-upon words. Only with a need older than both of them.
They did not move from the sofa. The body yielded first: shoulders lowering with exhaustion, the edge of the blanket sliding over their legs like a silent concession. The table lamp beside them stayed on; its warm light left the rest of the apartment in half-shadow, and the faraway murmur of the city arrived muffled, as if the world respected that pause.
Darian leaned back, still rigid, still on guard. He wore the wrinkled hospital shirt beneath the jacket he hadn’t fully taken off; the collar grazed his skin with a minimal, constant discomfort. Nada, by contrast, was barefoot, still in her afternoon clothes, but loosened in her gestures: her hair loose or half gathered, the linen towel abandoned in the kitchen, the fatigue collected in the way she hunched slightly into herself before choosing him.
She settled first, not theatrically, but with precision: a slow shift of her hips, a knee finding the hollow between his legs, the weight of her body meeting his as if it had always known where to go.
Nada settled on his chest, feeling his heartbeat—fast, but real. Darian let an arm fall across her back, like someone holding what he doesn’t want to lose again. His hand stayed open at first, uncertain, as if afraid of breaking her—or breaking himself. Then it closed carefully over the fabric of her blouse—not a grip, but a confirmation. He felt Nada’s warmth through the clothes, and that simple detail undid him more than any vision.
Her breathing brushed his neck, warm, uneven at times. He swallowed. He tasted the metallic edge of tension still lingering in his mouth. He thought—without meaning to—of the word balance, as if the body remembered it without understanding it, and still, his chest held her.
Nada slid her palm over his sternum, slowly, as if counting his beats one by one; then she moved up, barely grazing his collarbone, the edge of his throat, and stopped there, in that place where the pulse betrays itself. Darian closed his eyes for a second. Not to flee, but to feel. Nada did not move. Her weight stayed there, exact. The heat of her body kept anchoring him to the sofa, even as something inside him began to slip outside of time.
She felt him tense. He murmured something, almost inaudible. They weren’t names. They were fragments. Echoes. As if his body were trying to explain what his mind still couldn’t translate.
Nada lifted her face, very slowly, searching his expression the way one searches for an exit in a room with no doors. The light drew soft shadows along her cheek. Her gaze was not interrogation: it was permission.
He felt the slight damp along his hairline, the cold sweat left from the bathroom, and he was ashamed of his own fragility. He also felt the brutal simplicity of having her on him: the exact weight, the gentle pressure, life. It made him want to stay.
“Darian,” she whispered, raising her face to see him.
He opened his eyes abruptly. Sweat on his brow. His breathing uneven. He looked at her as if he had just returned from somewhere too far away, and her image were the only possible bridge. The fingers of his free hand moved, nervous, looking for something to hold. They found the blanket. Then they found her: her forearm, her side, the curve of her waist above the fabric.
Darian breathed in, once, as if forcing himself back from the edge.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Did I wake you?”
“You weren’t asleep,” she said. “You were… crossing something.”
Her voice was low, almost a thread, but firm. Nada brushed his temple with her fingers, tucking the damp strand away from his forehead with a delicacy that asked for nothing in return. Then she left her hand there, resting, like someone holding the head of someone who has just survived.
He stayed silent. Then he admitted it:
“I was dreaming of you.”
He said it like confession and surrender at the same time. As if speaking it out loud left him defenseless. Nada looked at him without judgment. Only with a tenderness born of a certainty beyond time.
“You don’t need to dream me… if you can love me awake.”
As she said it, she didn’t pull away. She moved just close enough for Darian to feel the intention before the contact, and then the gesture happened. Without hurry, she rested her forehead against his. She felt his breath, ragged but alive. Their lips sought each other, and met. First it was a brush, a slow test, as if both were asking without words: “here?” “like this?” “still?”
Darian answered with a sigh that came apart in his mouth. His hand slid up her back, following the line of her spine through the fabric, stopping at the nape of her neck. He held her there with a fierce softness, as if he feared that if he let go, the world would split again.
Nada tilted her face slightly, deepening the kiss without haste, with the patience of someone who knows time and chooses to ignore it. Her lips parted with a care that wasn’t doubt but choice, and that care set him alight.
Darian felt, with almost brutal clarity, heat gathering in his chest and moving downward, a slow electricity that gave him back his body. He thought—like a flash—that he didn’t want to be saved, that that night what he truly wanted was to be touched. He wanted to be human in the only place where he could still learn it. There with her.
He pulled back only for a second, just enough to breathe, and his mouth lowered to the edge of Nada’s jaw, to the soft point beneath her ear. It wasn’t a mark. It was a recognition. Nada closed her eyes and let out a small sound—not a word—as if the body, at last, were speaking in its true language.
It was a kiss without fractures. Without visions. Without cosmic rupture. Completely human, present, chosen. A choice that grew more physical, more insistent between them: hands that linger, fingers learning the other’s shape over clothing, the blanket slipping lower, warmth trapped between them.
Nada moved, slowly settling onto his lap with an intention that was no longer only comfort. Her thigh brushed his, and Darian went still for a second, startled by the simple desire, by the clarity of needing her there, so close, so real.
“Nada…” he murmured, but his voice wasn’t a warning. It was a soft plea, as if saying her name were asking permission to stay.
She kissed him again to quiet him in answer, not urgently, but with a sweet firmness. Then her hands went to his jacket, to his wrinkled shirt, unfastening with that intimacy of people who aren’t acting: they’re simply there. The fabric gave. The apartment’s cool air touched Darian’s skin, but Nada’s body covered it at once, warm, alive.
Darian let out a small, almost incredulous laugh, and his forehead rested against her shoulder. He held her tighter. Not like someone trapping her, but like someone surrendering.
Time became strange: minutes that felt like seconds, seconds that felt like a lifetime. The bedside lamp stayed on, a domestic witness. The city remained out there. But on the sofa—in that small, human place—every gesture was a new promise between them: not to run, not to break, not to disappear.
Nada took his hand and guided it, without haste, to where she wanted to feel him: not an explicit map, but an intimate direction. Darian understood. His fingers trembled at first; then they steadied, finding the rhythm of her breathing.
He thought, without hesitation, that “this was balance at last.” Not the kind in books, not the kind on maps. The kind of two bodies holding each other so the world doesn’t fall.
When the kiss deepened again, and when the blanket finally covered them like a discreet curtain, what happened was a surrender without spectacle: skin seeking skin, breaths mixing, the sofa creaking softly under their shared weight, her name in his mouth like a low prayer.
No realm opened. Only reality—warm, imperfect—telling them that for an instant, they could choose to be two, and in that choice—quiet, warm, held by night and clumsiness—they knew something had been restored.
Not because the past had been corrected, but because, for the first time, it didn’t matter. What was coming would no longer be a repetition. It would be another story. Perhaps incomplete, but this time chosen
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