#pohlepen

[cardiomyapathy]

facetimes kelly, but then immediately asks him why he called her. 😊❤️

he hangs up.

[nightmarecountry]

"We've hurt each other plenty, and I still like you." ( frankie vc: remember when you smacked me... which i thought was funny by the way– morpheus don't be mad )

"When have you ever hurt me?"

When she knocked an eyetooth loose flailing to try and get him to let go of her so she could beat another girl's ass, maybe.

Or when she dropped Alex halfway through the slow unsteady crawl upstairs to her apartment, both of them loaded beyond articulation but Alex much worse off for it, and something in his ankle and knee went bad and he limped for a week.

Or,

when she kept a secret from him and he had to drag it out of her,

and then when she told him she wasn't going to stop seeing Morpheus.

Shake the memory off. Forget about it, as much as you can forget anything. Things are what they are and nothing you do will save her.

He lets her cuddle into his side. Nips at her fingers and thumb when she tries to feed him a Cheeto, but takes it anyway, letting his eyes talk while his mouth is occupied.

"I think you prefer it when someone hurts you. It just makes you like them more."

In this, as in so many other things, they are very much alike.

[asoulofstars]

Frankie: -sexualizes the nightmare-

Riona: -found families the nightmare-

Dream: I need you both to stop.

[wolfclad]

✶ @pohlepen

It was not duty alone that compelled him to follow, to watch as she waded into the glassy waters of the forest pool, nacreous as a spectre in daylight. Farkas, who had stared down siege and steel, could do naught but obey the quiet, damning ache that stirred within him.

Around them, birch trees shivered, their thin white limbs casting fingers of shadow upon moss-slick stones. Sunlight filtered through their boughs like candlelight through lace, every droplet that fell from her hair seeming to sparkle with profane clarity. The Queen Consort had cast off her gown and it lay now, forgotten upon the fern-lush bank – a pool of crushed velvet and gold thread.

The queen, Farkas reminded himself, though his breath had gone shallow in his chest. Vilkas’ wife. My brother’s bride.

Oh, but how the world seemed to conspire against his senses as she stepped deeper into the pool, her moon-pale limbs cleaving the water. No sound save the rippling hush of her movement, the low hum of insects, the slow thud of his own heart – traitorous, insistent.

Farkas had known her in the dark and in the shadowy corners of candlelit halls. In moments stolen behind closed doors where silk tapestries softened the sound of her moans, where they were shadows, not people, devouring each other in breathless hunger.

Never like this.

Never in the white-eyed sacrilege of day.

He shed his armour with reverence, not haste. The steel breastplate, the swordbelt, each gauntlet, all laid down like offerings. Beneath all, his body was scarred and forge-kissed, but it felt crude, lewd, in contrast to her luminous beauty.

Still, he stepped into the water, and found it cold. Its bite sent a shock through him that set the apple of his bearded throat to bob, steadying him – but the current was soft, and she was near, and he swam out to her like a man chasing a dream.

There, amongst the reeds, where dragonflies hovered and the scent of wild thyme lingered thickly in the air, he came to her. Not touching, not yet, just close enough to see the beads of water on her collarbone, to watch how sunlight dappled across her bare shoulders, her back, the swell of her breasts half-submerged in greenlit shallows.

Farkas stared as if seeing her for the first time. No longer draped in jewels and duty but in nothing save herself, and that – the stark, impossible beauty of it – was almost too much to bear.

“Gods,” he murmured, voice low, hoarse with awe. “Frankie…”

She was forbidden. She was the weight of guilt and want made flesh, gleaming wet and fearless before him.

And still, he could not leave her.

Somewhere beyond the woods, bells rang faintly from the city. The people would be rising soon. Servants might wander the edges of the forest for firewood or wild greens. One sighting of her, like this, would be enough to fell kingdoms.

He moved closer. The water closed around his waist.

“If they see you,” he said, his voice melodic and low. “They’ll call you mad. Or worse, a whore. And me – ” A smoky, mirthless chuckle. “I’d not live to see the gallows.”

Farkas reached for her all the same, as Frankie surely knew he would. His hands trembled in their reverence. He did not touch her breast, or waist, but instead traced the barest line along her forearm. He needed only that much. Proof that she was here, in the light, and not just some fever dream he had conjured from the scent of her flame-coloured hair on his brother’s skin.

Brother. The word stung like a nettle.

And yet, the feel of her skin beneath his palm buried every vow he had sworn to him.

[miidnighters-a]

@pohlepen liked for a small starter

"Now, I am not a self conscious woman," Interesting way to start a conversation. "But I am so envious of your figure."

[recursiveimpulse]

"you look hungry." ( for vamp!viktor <333 you didn't ask for this but MWAH. )

baby i am ALWAYS asking for asks. especially from you. random asks: accepting! always!

Hungry didn't cover it. Viktor knew how he looked. Rake-thin and exhausted, dark circles under his eyes that had been there long before he ever passed from living to dead. Usually when women told him he 'looked hungry', they were old and kind and stern, the kind of woman who if fortune had allowed it would have bundled him into her handbag and carried him home to feed him an entire pot of soup. They didn't know what he was. They simply saw him as a young thing in need of rescuing.

This stranger wasn't old. She was probably only thirty, thirty-five at the latest. She didn't look particularly kind, either, nor did she look stern. If anything, she looked--

Viktor's fangs lengthened in his mouth quite suddenly. He wasn't the hungry one here: it was her. He could smell it on her, a kind of starvation that went beyond the physical: sweat and nicotine and adrenaline, like she'd just come off a bender but she'd been on that bender for years. He didn't know how he knew it. The same way dogs knew things, he supposed. A human's sense of smell was just so weak.

His fangs were still hidden behind his lips, but he knew he had to be careful not to smile. To speak but barely move his mouth in doing so. Did she suspect what he was? Did she see his hunger just as plainly as he saw hers?

"Do I?" Viktor had slowed, stopped. Turned to her like he'd been pulled in by a string. What was he doing? He wasn't quite smiling, but his expression was open; interested. "How can you tell?"

[kxllerblond]

“Right. There will make it easier to knock them out and empty his pockets. What should our signal be?”

❝ I mean, yeah-—sure. I guess. Or I could just like...probably literally buy his bank information from some dweeb in a basement and we could just empty that. ❞ he sounded like someone trying to see from another perspective, failing, and still trying to be polite about it.

❝ No one even carries cash anymore. I think you just want to knock someone out and commit a semi-violent petty crime...❞

[formshaper-a]

“I’ve realised that I’m never going to love you.” ( sorry dream, alex is her only friend she's gotta hold onto him :/ )

In the wake of this confession, terrible things begin to happen. No waking soul sees it, but they must feel it: countless dreams shattering at once as discord rips through the Dreaming proper, a maelstrom of hurt, tearing up everything in its path. A palace torn up by the roots and thrown so high that the steps leading to it now touch the stars above; a thousand romantic notions broken into pieces, falling in tatters over the glades and valleys of Fiddler's Green...

These things will, in time, have consequences for the Waking at large.

But not yet. For now, the only difference in the Waking is that Dream of the Endless is staring at his lover with eyes that are suddenly brimming with unshed tears: dark and star-bright at once, blazing with fury. Searing with hurt. This is what she wanted to tell him? He had known something was wrong, had felt it in the shift of her dreams and fantasies. But this...?

It is a testament to his recent personal growth that he does not immediately throw her into the grips of a nightmare too terrible to ever truly wake from... or perhaps he is simply in too much pain to think of it yet.

"But you do love me. You... This is why you have brought me here?"

Dream is aware that he sounds petulant, desperate, weak. He cannot help it. He is standing stock-still and staring at the woman he loves and realising he has made an old mistake, falling for a mortal.

An even older mistake, falling for anyone at all. As if it would ever end any differently. As if anyone or anything could withstand him, match him.

The Dreaming is on fire. Soon it will flood.

The Waking, and Frankie's apartment, are just as they have always been.

"Why? I have given you all of myself. I have loved you as best as I am able. Where have I failed you?"