#mayfair au

[cdroloisms]

here have the j!awesamdreamies in early mayfair bc i've been thinking about them again

[cdroloisms]

in mayfair c!dream and j!dream get to escape the sams? like i jnow it's the bad end but im curious if they get to be escape and be happy

they do :] in the original mayfair+ ending, jmahverse techno and punz actually find em and merc j!sam LMAO. they get a kitty

here's an old art i made of 'em cuddling

[cdroloisms]

I wonder how the cdreams in the birdhouse shave? like I dont think jam and ffsam would trust them with sharp objects. So does they shave them? c!dream seems like he'd probably freak out if jam brings a razor blade close to his face

yeahhh. same thing happens with hair--when it gets too unkempt (c!dream purposefully lets it get gross and matted) he gets tied to a chair and his hair cut. when the dreams are amab then shaving would likely go the same way, though at a certain point j!sam would probably get tired of the hassle and just supervise him as he shaves in the morning--give him the razor, watch him do it, have him hand it back kinda deal.

[cdroloisms]

hi your art is so gorgeous I’m obsessed with how you shade and texture hair especially. Also can you tell us more about spaghetti strap collar dream (j!dream??) starting with Why is he dressed so fruity

OMG THANK U :D hair drives me a little nuts to draw i wont even lie

j!Dream ... my j!Dreamogie...

j!Dream starts with the JMAH AU, which involves our favorite mans sam awesamdude getting to do a good old do-over of the prison. Which he takes gladly, of course, with a good heaping measure of god has sent me back to do what's right and this is the warden's duty to bear and other related such sam-isms

of course, things go awry with him, but not before a year of (title drop!) just him and dream in the prison and all of the horrid intimacy and violence that came with it. sam wallows in his failure (and his successes...he did things better this time, right? it wasn't his fault, right? he did everything he could...maybe now he can enjoy true freedom...) while dream relearns how to be free (in the belly of the prison that had swallows him whole and spit him out different. the dispensers are a row of teeth above his head.) it hardly matters at the end, though, because XD has other games to play--this brings us to Four Square, which is the prison-themed crossover meetup with canon of their dreams (heh, Dreams) !! All your best hits are here: the clock! Blood! Drama! More blood! Sam giving the Dreams over for Quackity to torture! Sam threatening Quackity for Dream's sake! Technoblade! Camraderie! Betrayals! Gossip sessions! Raw potatoes! Dream grilling Sam about his reasons! Even board games! Four Square really has it all.

(a lot more. under the cut.)

in four square, a certain point, both prisontrios (jmah edition and canon) get to play monopoly together. in the regular version, the dreams manage to win monopoly, (j!dream does, specifically) and quite a bit happens in the aftermath of this--after getting trolled by XD a bit an having to fight for their lives a lot more, they do (with. some complications) manage to win themselves the upper hand eventually. it kinda brings four square to the more "daedalus" era, with the LN confrontation next (we never finished writing that, though: it probably would've ended quite a bit messier than the LN confrontation, with nowhere to run, but i feel like it probably would've ended with the quackitys hogtied in some corner of the prison while the dreams waited for them to get tp-ed out.)

in the bad ending, though, j!sam wins. and there's a lot about four square that does demand...a level of introspection, for better or for worse, and sam has been on quite the roller coaster of emotions (here, you have him: but only for a day.) dream is in the prison, but sam is really no more its warden than anyone else here--four square is first and foremost a game, and that in and of itself is a mockery. more than anything, he's finding that he wants dream and dream alone; he misses the days of just the two of them in this prison, just the two of them and dream is safe and perfectly under his control. when he wins monopoly and XD gives him a wish...well.

enter mayfair. four square had taken a lot out of them both, dream especially--he was told for a year that sam was protecting him from Worse, that sam wasn't really torture wasn't really that bad, and 24 hours with two Quackities each with a Lays family size bag of chips on their shoulder sure has him pretty damn convinced. sam and him and a new prison only this one has brick walls instead of obsidian and wood flooring instead of blackstone...a little cottage with an impenetrable barrier surrounding them. he's more trapped than he's ever been but look, here's a house and here's sam and here's the sun. here's table set with a vase of roses and a candlelit dinner for two.

in a lot of ways, what happens after is the natural progression of jmah, and then four square, and all their combined horrors. dream isn't even sure that they're on their server (they weren't for four square, after all.) he's tired. he's genuinely, wholly, so fucking tired of it all and sam isn't that bad, when it comes down to it, not as bad as he's been having nightmares about for the last few months--not as bad as he expected, should sam ever recapture him. this is his world now, this clearing and this house and this sam. it would be foolish of him to not try and make the most of it.

for a year and a half, they had been dancing around each other. for the entirety of four square, they had been grilled on the nature of their relationship with no satisfactory answers. there is so much about this house that is just so damn unambiguous, and honestly? honestly, dream just wants to know.

(one week, one week and a half into their new living arrangment, dream sinks to his knees in front of sam in their living room.)

(you want this, a question or a statement? you want this, and it goes both ways.)

the walk-in closet attached to their master bedroom had a little selection of clothing when they were tp-ed in. the whole damn place was kind of a practical joke, a picture-perfect romantic getaway. there's like, sex toys in the drawers. stuff like that. the closet itself is also a mess of different things--some copies of sam's clothes from home, some tunics and hoodies for dream...but also suits, and ties, and dress pants, and dresses. croptops and lingerie. a prisoner's jumpsuit tucked in some corner.

their sexual relationship is ummm UMMMM. it's a little dubious. for flavor. in a weird way, both sam and dream are on the same page of wanting to move past the prison? sam in particular is in an awkward position because...dream escaped! he literally Left, he Got Away, and now that sam has him again he's obligated, as his warden, to Do Something About That. at the same time though, he's giddy from the fact that he does have dream again. that he has real, tangible proof that dream is better, that he does need him and knows that he needs him, that he. Wants Him. the house didn't come with a cell--there is no place that is sam's, and then a separate place that is dream's. they are meant to exist together...and sam is finding that he. quite likes the idea of that.

they're also pent up as hell after uh going well over a year without any sexual activity for them both, and they've spent so much damn time thinking about it and dreaming about it and fearing it and wanting it on both sides without being able to admit any of it. so once the line is crossed, things start snowballing pretty damn fast. it's not something either of them can take back, so they. don't. and there's really nothing that exists to put a real boundary on any of it, any brakes to make things slow down or stop, anything that either of them can cling to as an excuse to force them to pull back. sam is pushing limits (how far will dream go to obey him--) and dream is pushing limits (how much can he use this to change what they are--) and neither of them are in a position where they can afford to back down. So They Don't.

birdhouse, or the timeline where we just get Really Silly With It, is where other variables are added in the form of different Dream AUs that kind of interrupt jmah duo's mutual decision to swan dive to hell. the outfits kinda start from mayfair and progressively get more extreme if dream + sam go unchecked--they're a natural consequence of j!Dream going hey how far can i push this to make sam lose his mind because if he's too busy thinking with his dick then he's probably less likely to get mad at me and other such lines of logic. in the version of birdhouse that begins to involve ff AU, the addition of ff!Sam (eventually) to the sexual dynamic does put another added layer of strain on j!dream in terms of the whole. There's Two Of Them Now. that's also where you kinda see more of him embracing uhh sex as the end-all be-all solution to most of his problems, as a means of getting some power back with regards to Sam and making the best out of his situation and the best (and only) leverage he has and the tool that's both the most pleasurable for him to wield and the most effective in making sam treat him better. Etc.

so he's doing great.

[cdroloisms]

I know j!dream uses dresses and that kind of clothes bc of the thing he has with j!sam on the bird house and in one of the good endings were he escape we see him still using them so is it that this was a from of dressing and expression he already had from before all j!sam madness or he find a way to reclaim it as something for himself now?

yeah--the clothing tends to be something he views positively in the birdhouse, honestly. (does conditioning play a part? yes. but a lot of that is um, how do you say,,, self-designed? i guess? wearing pretty clothes by his own volition encourages sam to treat him better which encourages dream to wear more pretty clothing etc.) it's not all dresses/skirts, obviously--j!dream tends to be the one that assumes that j!sam wants him to dress fem more than the other way around (j!sam has wanted this man carnally for two years while wearing a prison jumpsuit in various states of being beat up and/or looking like a drowned rat. kind of safe to say that this man's standards, as long as it's dream, are not particularly high.)--but a lot of the clothing no matter what specific gender presentation is umm somewhat revealing, when he's in the birdhouse

a lot of this from j!dream's pov is about like, power. getting sam to be attracted to him is the greatest power that he has in their dynamic, something he had tried for in the prison and didn't achieve until mayfair. getting sam to stare is something that makes him feel safer. and there's a big part where he's trying to combat how he felt in the prison, alone and in pain and wondering when the hell sam would next come back to make the stupid dispensers stop. he felt abandoned and alone and unwanted and undesirable, by himself at the back of the cell with nothing but sam's torture machine and his own tired, pain-addled thoughts to keep him company. in comparison, the power to make sam stay through his body is another kind of high.

i kind of write j!dream to be a little bit ambivalent about his gender and expression--pre-prison, he would've focused more on practicality and survival, which meant that the way he looked was thrown mostly to the wayside. between the mask and the armor, the main aspects of self-expression boiled down to expressing himself as someone untouchable. in some ways, the big ass closet and its many different outfits and j!duo's whole...thing were the first time he really dressed for practicality of a...different sort, and he does have a measure of fun with it (when sam isn't choosing for him, anyway.)

for him, whether it's during birdhouse or after, he definitely likes feeling attractive and desired by others, whether that be sam or others, and while a big part of that is the super messy cocktail of emotions and conditioning that ends up happening surrounding sex in birdhouse, that stuff also isn't all that easy to untangle just because he's out of that environment, either. with the exception of a few more extreme cases (ff!sam. is a strange man.) j!dream never really internalizes the clothing as something that sam forces on him as much as choices he makes himself to seduce sam into treating him better, if that makes sense, so he'll continue to approach clothing and how he chooses it as ways to shape other people's perceptions of himself for his own safety and survival for,,, a long time.

so yeah, even post-birdhouse he'll still probably dress to look Attractive in a way that didn't matter to him the same way pre-prison, both as a self-comfort (this is something that keeps him safe) and as a means of appeasing other people (in his own head). that being said, there are some changes post-birdhouse in his wardrobe eventually; he'll start dressing more comfortable with time (a lot of his clothing wasn't really designed to be warm, and as such he was quite often pretty chilly in the birdhouse, which sam kept a little on the cooler side), and if he's actually going outdoors more then he'll have to dress a little more practically under armor, etcetera.

[cdroloisms]

c!dream getting tied to a chair bc he can't get still for cutting his hair or shave it's just so funny. It's like a scuffed cat. J!dream probably is the opisoted and idk if that's funny too or sad

c!dream in the mayfair house when sam gets on his ass for hygiene (real)

[cdroloisms]

would the Sams still love the dreams no matter what they look like or how bad their condition gets?

PD: i kinda find funny the idea of j!Sam saying to cdream that no matter what he's still handsome Even with the scars and cdream being like"i wonder who's to blame for that?" And probably getting yelled

[thinks about box!dream. dies]

i mean, this guy fell in love with dream while he was literally actively being tortured. twice. so yeah, once you've loved a guy unkempt locked in a box with no means of keeping up his personal hygiene being ripped to shreds daily in a hot disgusting little room with nearly no ventilation and amneities, physical condition is no longer the uh. most important factor, to say the least. that being said, sam has control now and would certainly prefer better hygiene, as he's sure the dreams would agree with. walking around like a civilized person is a privilege, after all. if c!dream doesn't feel like being grateful for everything sam has so graciously provided him with, then sam can certainly see how he feels about the matter after being returned to the basement cell for a few weeks.

j!sam's overt compliments to c!dream's appearance tend to be kept to a minimum, usually only in the heat of the moment. compliments during sex are kind of just, natural, right? polite. they don't have to mean anything. you look so good like this, and other vague statements that make c!dream's skin crawl. he tries to make himself a little less appealing after that, wearing the same stupid shirt (and getting stains on it) until sam gets irritated and tells him to take the damn thing off already.

(he still needs to get back into the bedroom to really get anywhere, anyway. it's a pointless rebellion and they all know it.)

[cdroloisms]

i want to hear about the jdream/cdream/jsam sex plz. how do we get you to talk about that

by asking, of course ;)

the first thing that has to come up is that, well. in four square, when c!Dream meets j!Dream and j!Sam for the first time, he. doesn't react well. he doesn't like the knowledge of how far sam can and would go to secure him, doesn't like the amount of abject conditioning that's plain to see on this other version of him, doesn't like to see his own weaknesses staring him in the face. so he's mean, they're both mean, neither of them want to be the one that folds, neither of them want to be the one that was broken in more. triggering yourself to trigger the other person to prove how not-scared you are is kinda the principle both of them go by for their interactions with each other. in this, though...well, obviously j!Sam and j!Dream's relationship is the most obvious weak point to go for, and c!Dream sure fucking goes for it. but that also forces him to wonder. did Sam--were they--? (he's not sure that his counterpart would tell him, if it was true, is the thing. he's pretty sure he'd keep his mouth shut.)

(much more under the cut. heavy dubcon warning--c!Dream is explicitly consenting and trying to convince Sam that he wants it, but, uh. He doesn't really.)

When four square ends (the bad ending), j!Sam and j!Dream end up in the mayfair house. c!Dream eventually ends up back in his own timeline, bruised and angry but whole. For a year, things progress as is relatively normal with him (minus the finale) and for a year, j!Sam and j!Dream live together, alone. Based on the last things c!Dream saw from the two of them, he's pretty damn sure that they, uh, had a relationship--but a sexual component of the jmah duo dynamic doesn't start until very shortly into mayfair, in large part as a consequence to four square. four square was so uniquely awful and he's fucking terrified of and tired of being fucking terrified. j!sam seems happy with him--he should do everything in his power to keep it that way. everyone had seen it, how they...wanted it. how sam wanted this. (how he wanted it, too.) so--he has to try. this'll be the key that works, this'll be what secures him his...everything.

when c!Dream arrives in mayfair, he's immediately confronted with the fact that yeah j!dream and j!sam are 100% for sure fucking. the initial introduction, therefore, kinda puts them on opposite sides--even for as much as they argued in four square, they were allies. now...it's harder to say. c!Dream is immediately captured and j!sam begins to work on a subbasement to secure him. j!Dream is so fucking scared.

j!Sam has a few points to prove. especially to c!Dream, who shows no inclinations towards being willing to listen or obey him in any capacity. the contrast is nice, though, makes him more willing to be sweet on j!Dream--he's so good, evidence of j!Sam's successes. the house isn't soundproofed, yet. j!Sam has zero desire for it to be. he's not going to do anything toooo explicit in front of c!Dream, that would be crossing a line...but.

c!Dream is sick. Sick and scared and hateful, sure that j!Dream isn't really a person anymore, just something for j!Sam to use. His introduction to the house is miserable, involves restaints and dispensers and starvation and whittling him down into something handleable. The existence of j!Dream prevents him from being willing to cooperate in any way. He's seen what giving into Sam got this other him--like hell he's going to become the same thing. For awhile, he's very violent, trying to kill Sam, trying to kill Dream, trying to kill himself. Anything to get out of this hell, anything to prove that he's not fucking broken. His relationship with j!Dream is stilted, nearly nonexistent...but time passes. The cell is awful. Faced with the option to suck it up and do as he's told or to endure more torture, c!Dream eventually finds himself picking the former more and more. He's set to chores around the house, mostly. He and j!Dream aren't allowed to talk to each other alone at all, but they start spending more time around each other. (c!Dream's screams and j!Dream's moans are both reminders for the other, through the walls.) Then...a specific incident occurs, a failed escape attempt, and it's kind of a nail in the coffin. c!Dream still rebels, but the in ways that threaten j!Sam less and less--a lot of his efforts become pettier. If j!Sam says that the sky is blue he'll say it's red. Pointless, you know?

Despite. Everything. j!Dream and c!Dream bond. They're still mean to each other openly, hardly ever able to communicate honestly (and still not really meant to talk to each other directly without Sam supervision), but for better or for worse they're stuck here with each other. And they're...tired. The ff!duo bring their own complications, the most glaring of which being that ff!Sam rather quickly gets added into the sexual relationship in the house, being involved with both j!Dream and j!Sam. c!Dream, for a long while, has been totally opposed (and OPENLY opposed) to j!awesamdream sex. He's an awesamdream anti. It's on his dni.

And a lot of this has to do with j!Dream being here--if it was him and Sam alone, then maybe he would've tried it eventually as a means of getting a handhold of autonomy in this place. But he's unwilling to give j!Sam an inch after seeing him take a mile--fuck it, fuck that. Oftentimes, c!Dream ends up being characterized here by completely idiotic disobedience, pissing the Sams off more because he's scared of obeying than anything, doing so when it's really in his best interests to keep his mouth shut. A lot of his disobedience is purely petty and meaningless, which confuses j!Sam to no end--it would literally be easier for him to obey? Why isn't he?

But when ff!Sam joins in...look. This man is repressed. Like, insanely repressed. He turned his Dream into a fucking child for god's sake. He's dealing with everything by acting like Faith is a completely different person. When he joins, he's doing so after like 2 years of almost no action whatsoever, j!Sam is having some of his kinks indulged with a third party, both of them are lowkey having a power struggle. Control issues, thy name is Sam. j!Dream has a lot more to keep up with in maintaining his "anytime anywhere i'm insatiable i just need you sooooo baddddd" thing with the Sams, and c!Dream is left standing there with another person here to protect (ff!Dream horrifies them both.) while knowing that the Sams are going to just keep taking without being satisfied.

So. He's been holding out for. A long time. But...he knows what Sam wants. And his stubbornness isn't granting them any favors. Eventually, he decides to give in.

This is easier said than done. j!Dream does NAWT approve and is getting in his way, being caustic, trying to trigger him. (c!Dream acting like he has to do this feels both like a personal failure and...admitting more than he wants. He doesn't want to think about how much this other him hates it and is doing it anyway. Doesn't want to think about how Sam will react.) c!Dream keeps at it, though, largely away from j!Dream--but there's quite a barrier to jump over with the Sams, too, particularly j!Sam, who knows that c!Dream was against this before. Why's he changed his mind now? He doesn't want c!Dream to--use this to prove something. Or act like, like he's--! He never asked for this. c!Dream is the one that's offering. j!Sam rebuffs him at first--obviously, Dream doesn't actually want him, he's just trying. Something. Which means that c!Dream has to keep at it, continue to keep up a desperate persona and wear at Sam until he cracks without seeming overtly manipulative. It takes...time. j!Dream resents all of it, especially when it can make j!Sam more insecure about the sex with him too.

(Sometimes, though, it makes him more eager. Which--he doesn't know how he feels about that either. Why cant c!Dream just leave it alone?)

(All of this is happening while both of them are easily triggered by intimacy between the two of them because of the aforementioned incident, btw 😭)

All of this to say that when c!Dream finally, finally joins the polycule, it's complicated. My god is it complicated. The first time is just c!Dream alone with j!Sam. The aftermath is...well, not awful. Not great, either. ff!Dream is upset, betrayed--he doesn't understand the sexual component at play (refuses to let himself think about it, he's just a kid now. He doesn't know anything.) and just feels like c!Dream has chosen "the other side"--j!Dream had always been distant, and he's afraid that j!Sam will take c!Dream from him too. j!Dream is upset at what he perceives as personal failure. c!Dream wouldn't have to do his job, too, if he was handling it better.

At the end of the day, though, j!Sam is fixated on having both Dreams at once. Has dreamed of it since before c!Dream came to Mayfair cottage (hell, maybe he even dreamed of it during jmah.) It's just a fantasy, for a long while, but then that fantasy becomes reality...and. And. This isn't to say that foursomes don't happen, but honestly for j!Sam they're not ideal, necessarily--fun, sure, but both j!Dream and c!Dream are from his timelines. They belong to him.

The sex is--well, j!Sam doesn't want to scare off c!Dream, who is still kind of tense and skittish. He wants him to relax (to realize that this is what he wants, needs...), he doesn't want him to be like. Traumatized by it. (Yeah, about that buddy.) Whenever c!Dream is there, j!Dream subconsciously is trying to prove how much he can take to j!Sam--taking off the heat, a little, or trying to direct most of Sam's intensity his way. c!Dream is far more unfamiliar with both sides of their dynamic than j!Sam and j!Dream both, and j!Dream takes advantage of his experience largely by trying to make himself into the most appealing target to go for in sexual matters 90% of the time.

As far as positions and stuff, I mean, they're kind of flexible. j!Dream in general is going to be pushed further than c!Dream because c!Dream, despite his best efforts, will freak out more easily. Otherwise...they do a lot. Sam has ideas. Sometimes he just wants to watch, sometimes he wants to be directly involved, sometimes he wants one of them to watch. Sometimes toys are incorporated, sometimes he takes pictures. He asks for consent to all of that, of course, checks in frequently. If one of them looks like they're uncomfortable, he might cut it short for them--he's a good partner! Obviously. He's not forcing any of them to do anything, they both want it. And he knows that they can be...nervous sometimes, c!Dream especially, so he takes special care to make sure that he doesn't freak out.

When the threesomes begin, j!Sam actually starts with j!Dream and c!Dream together while he uh, watches. And directs. Just to ease c!Dream into it. (If it weren't for a certain situation, then he probably would've started them off with j!Sam and j!Dream doing things while c!Dream watches, tbh.) Both of them are kinda on edge, honestly--again, sexual contact with each other is a little fraught. j!Dream hides his discomfort better, but both of them also kinda have to convince j!Sam that they're into it. (At this point, j!Dream knows that sex involving c!Dream is going to happen--no undoing it, when j!Sam and c!Dream have already had time one on one. He has vested interests in making sure he won't be shut out of the room when c!Dream is involved, and c!Dream of course is still trying to convince Sam that he actually really wants this when he. Doesn't, tbh.)

i've also run into the image limit because of mayfair+ff polycule infodump. so we will continue this in the reblog