Younger Gods: III
Younger Gods Master List Dream x fem!reader
Chapter 2
Dangerous magic and old friends lay the foundation of a fate foretold, and Morpheus spends too much time in the library.
Warnings: language, briefly referenced suicidal ideation, self-neglect/harm, extreme sleep deprivation, Dream is still his own damn warning
A/N: First - THANK YOU ALL. Seriously. You're amazing, I love you, and I'm working on catching up on comments. Now for the bad news. Ya'll broke chapter 2. Like, literally. I went to edit the tags list and Tumblr said nope. Imagine a small, family car with dozens of people stacked inside and hanging off the roof. It just won't go. The chapter also didn't show up in the story tags, at least whenever I checked. So...
*The taglist is officially discontinued*
I am making that up with something special, though, so make sure to read the A/N at the end!
Chapter 3: Darker Fates
“Gracious, darling, you look dreadful.”
She collapsed into the rickety café chair. Across the laminate table sat her oldest friend. Her one friend. And she immediately wondered how much to tell him. Only two days stood between her and her involuntary trip down memory lane, between her and the Sandman. She’d seen dark birds from the corner of her eye once or twice, but they always turned out to be crows and magpies. That didn’t mean Matthew wasn’t following her, of course.
She hadn’t escaped the consequences of her actions yet, and she didn’t want to drag one of the precious few people she cared about into the muck.
“What happened to your courtly manners?”
“What happened to your face?” He shuddered delicately, burying the real concern she caught in his sharp grey eyes with dramatics. Signaling the waitress behind the counter, he added, “We’ll need another pot of tea, please.”
The woman blushed and hurried off to fill the order. Doubtless, he’d been flirting while he waited. Damn silver fox. Although he was over one thousand years old, he wore it well. His greying curls and tidy beard looked playful rather than unkempt.
“Do you have what I need?”
He nodded. “Tea’s on it’s way.”
“Not the damn tea, Taliesin.”
The twice-born bard sucked on his teeth, glancing from the front windows to the back counter. Only spilled coffee stains and a sticky smear of jam occupied the other tables. He acted like this kind of deal might draw attention, and he had good reason to think twice about handling magical items in public, but no one cared what two people meeting up at two in the afternoon in a cheap café shared over a cup of tea.
He slipped his hand into his coat pocket and retrieved a small, stoppered bottle. The liquid inside moved like tar, oozing up the side of the glass as Taliesin angled it in the light. Even caution couldn’t banish his instincts as a showman.
“Understand.” He looked her in the eye, his scintillating smile packed away for a stone glower. “This is a cruelty, not a blessing. Now, I won’t ask why you need it. I wouldn’t insult you like that. But it’s my responsibility to tell you this is a bad idea.”
She could think of worse.
Before she could explain herself, the waitress pranced over with the tea. She set the pot between them and provided a fresh cup and saucer. Taliesin grinned, winked, and sent her on her way again with a word of thanks.
“One day your philandering will get you into trouble, old man.”
He sniffed and poured the tea, adding the slightest splash of milk, just the way she liked it. “I never begin something from which I cannot safely extricate myself. And, besides, a little teasing will make her day.”
He slid the cup across the table, and she wrapped her hands around the porcelain to drink in the heat through her chilly palms. She couldn’t seem to stay warm these past few weeks. Anyway, tea wasn’t what she’d come to drink.
“Will it keep me awake forever?”
“Nothing is forever. Nothing you can taste, touch, or smell.” He sounded both chiding and nostalgic. “But this will last seven years and seven days.”
“Good enough. What do you want in exchange?”
Tutting, he tucked the potion back in his jacket, and she sagged in her seat. “Tea first. I have grand and patronizing cautions to give.”
She lifted the cup, maintaining eye contact as she took the biggest, loudest slurp she could manage. It tasted nice, and its warmth felt even better in her stomach and throat than it had on her skin. Why did the bastard have to be right about everything?
The twinkle in his eye suggested he knew what station the train of her thoughts had left, and he slurped from his own cup in merry retaliation.
“First,” he licked a drip from his mustache, “and foremost: this is vile magic. It doesn’t gift wakefulness – it steals rest. The fae designed it with little prisoners like you in mind, to be taken in spaces where time melts and enchanted food will cheat the body’s need for sleep. Since – I dare presume – you do not have those safeguards, this could kill you.”
He left the words to sink in, trying to scare her off the purchase. When she reached out to see if he knew someone willing to make this potion, he’d leapt at the opportunity himself. It was his way of protecting her, and it gave him a chance to interfere with what he clearly saw as self-harm.
Since she wasn’t sure she could survive another nightmare like the one Dream hauled her through, she’d take her chances with death by her own hand.
“Consider me warned, but it doesn’t change anything.”
Taliesin bowed his head over his teacup, groaning. Any fantasies that he could talk her off her current path finally cracked. “You really are stubborn, rain cloud.”
“I learned from the best.”
“Oh, no. That you found all your own.” His smile grew back, wan but alive. His hand settled on the table, palm up, and she abandoned her tea to settle her hand over his.
“Just promise,” he said with a gentle squeeze, “that if you feel anything going off, if you even suspect something’s wrong, you’ll call your old friend Taliesin. Okay?”
She squeezed back, trying to smile for him, but she was too tired to make the expression stick. “Okay.”
Nodding to himself, he echoed the agreement again, “Okay,” and reached into his pocket. He slipped the bottle between their joined hands, and she pulled away to put it in her sweater.
“What do you want in return?”
“Well!” He smacked the table with both hands, grinning in a way that promised trouble. “I thought long and hard about it, but rather than jewels, or secrets, or power, I think what I would most like from a lovely young storm god is…” He paused, glancing meaningfully out the window at the dreary, grey-yellow afternoon. “A walk in the rain with my favorite little cloud.”
He sounded so damn happy about it he infected her with the feeling. It was nice to be needed. Wanted. Even if she’d just lied to his face.
A friendly rain gathered and fell as Taliesin got up to pay the bill. He left the waitress looking pleased with herself – and probably a generous tip. Then he came to meet his rain cloud at the door. An umbrella appeared from some hidden pocket and he grinned, holding out his elbow for her to link arms with him.
“I always come prepared,” he bragged as they stepped out into the shower.
“You say that like you don’t live in Wales.”
“I never said you were the only thing I came prepared for.”
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Given the mother’s name to track, Lucienne did eventually find the record of the little storm god’s dreams, but they were useless to Morpheus. He studied the handful of pages warped by the curse she wore around her neck with mounting frustration. Apart from reports of which nightmares feasted on her pain during her brief, forced rests, they gave him nothing.
Her mother’s dreams proved more illuminating. They, at least, gave him a line of inquiry to follow.
The woman dreamed about her child from the moment it was born, from the minute the father tore her away to trade. The mother wandered endless rooms, following a crying child’s voice while she slept. She dreamed of little coffins and wailing infants she couldn’t find in nurseries dripping with gore.
Arcane shapes and dead languages shadowed her sleeping hours as she learned magic. In the waking world, she became a capable witch. There, as in the Dreaming, every hope and wish bent to finding her baby.
She never gave up her pursuit.
But in the end, it was the daughter who found the mother.
Her favorite dream grew out of a memory. A rainy afternoon, a crack of lightning, and a knock on the door. A painfully thin teenager stood on the steps, dripping in a thunderstorm, looking up with wondering eyes. If Morpheus had any doubts as to the girl’s identity, the scars around her neck put them to rest. She still had blood in her hair, rusty smudges caught in the grooves of old scars, fresh hurts and healed wounds calling to the mother’s instinct to protect and care for.
Although she had plenty of nightmares about losing her daughter again – finding her bed empty, losing her in a crowd – the nature of her somnolescent musings shifted. Softened.
And a familiar face came to call. The Welsh bard, Taliesin, whom the demi-god child kept safe at the cost of her hands, brought little gifts to the old woman and her young daughter. His winks brought warm flushes to the mother’s dreams, and she rested easier at night knowing that her little girl would not be entirely alone in the end.
She had sacrificed ten years of her life to a fairy bargain that won her nothing but a hand-sized portrait of her baby girl during her long search. By the time the child returned, her mother had grown old. They only had twelve years together before the lost child lost her mother.
The woman died. The record ended. But Dream knew where to look next.
Abandoning his throne for the library, he wrestled against a growing sense that he was running out of time. Time for what? Time for whom?
He was still Dream of the Endless. He still had a realm and billions of dreamers to manage. The puzzle of the storm god who brought home his raven lingered like a toothache, but he could not abandon his responsibilities. Determined as he may be to remove the golden collar from both the Dreaming and the dreamer, the curse had lingered for decades without disturbing anything significant.
It had been months since he picked through her dreaming mind to discover more about her – more about the curse. Only now, as the things settled back into a comfortable kind of order, could he indulge his curiosity, his side-quest as Death mockingly called his interests. And he was more than interested. The longer the questions lingered, the more of his attention they consumed.
Perhaps it was the crossroads. The Fates said he’d already pushed the storm god towards a darker fate, but they never said it was too late to change that course, and the three often left the most important truths unsaid.
If only he knew what to look for. Perhaps that was why he spent so much time and energy researching the collar. It gave him a target. Without it, he felt like a dreamer caught in a pitch-black nightmare, groping blindly for anything with which to reclaim the light.
But he did not have to search alone.
“Lucienne.”
His librarian looked up from a stack of new, peering over the rim of her spectacles. “Did the mother’s dreams help you find what you needed, my lord?”
“In part. Though I need another volume.” He handed over the two records, the mother’s dreams and the storm god’s. Lucienne set down her tower of work and went to shelve the two immediately. They slotted beside each other, the mother’s name in curling script, the daughter’s blank.
“You know,” Lucienne said, “I only found the nameless one’s record because the mother’s kept reshelving itself with the daughter’s book. I fixed it twice before I realized. It’s rather sweet.” She sighed. “If vexing. What volume do you require, my lord?”
Morpheus spared the books another glance, wondering how much of the mother’s arcane studies had influenced her history of dreams. But she’d given him all she could, and now he must turn to the living for answers. “The bard Taliesin’s records, and anything else we have on his history.”
“That is more a section than a collection, lord.”
“Yes.” It wasn’t his first time encountering the bard. “I may need to speak with him, but he will be loathe to leave a story once he is introduced. I’d prefer to find answers in the records. Will you help me?”
“Of course. Give me a moment.” Lucienne paused. “Give me several moments, please, my lord.”
On Lucienne’s first trip, she retrieved the official record of Taliesin’s dreams. He’d lived a long life, and he dreamed vibrantly. The tome was several feet thick, and the library echoed when the librarian set it on the table.
“Thank you, Lucienne.”
“I’ll fetch the rest, sir.”
Taliesin’s early works, recorded on parchment and scrolls, sat between books published under a dozen nom de plumes in later centuries. When the librarian returned with a cart stacked high with history books referencing and theorizing over the man and his myth, Morpheus excused her.
“These should suffice, Lucienne. I will let you know if I do not find my answers here.”
“Of course, sir.” She brushed dust from her immaculate coat, checking the sleeves, before folding her hands neatly behind her back. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Already buried in the works of Taliesin’s unconscious mind, he shook his head. “Not at this time.”
She bowed and left. The library would be chaos without her. He could remember when it was. It was no mean feat, organizing a universe of stories. It made her wise in ways he had only just begun to appreciate.
The man whose dreams he searched enjoyed other kinds of wisdom. He’d gained a third of the world’s knowledge by accident, but he’d spent the better part of his life learning the other two thirds by choice. Advisor to kings, story-weaver, and a natural mage, he had the wisdom and craft to recognize some of the magic wrought into the storm god’s collar. He’d tried to take it off when they first met, and he studied for a means to free her after his escape.
Morpheus wanted to know what the bard found.
However, though his dreams in the past few decades often welcomed a shade of the storm god to play out adventures and tragedies as part of a colorful cast, Taliesin’s attention did not linger on the curse. It was little more than a bright shadow that pricked his conscience.
He sat back in the chair, glowering at the books that had failed him.
It seemed every whisper of progress led to more questions in this riddle, and not for the first time, he wished the library could offer more insight to the happenings of the waking world. He should not need to ask for help so often.
At least, unlike the storm god, the bard embraced his dreams. Like all great storytellers, he had explored his fantasies and fears ravenously. When he next slept, Morpheus would pry loose some answers. It shouldn’t be difficult. The bard dearly loved the sound of his own voice.
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Taliesin presided over a court of housecats.
He was aware enough to know the royal courtiers of Edward II did not, originally, have literal claws, but it made perfect sense in the moment. Edward and Gaveston were in the corner, playfully wrestling – maybe – while Isabella stalked closer with murder in her vertical pupils.
“This is not the way,” he huffed, plucking a kitten from the mob joining ranks behind Isabella, a gorgeous tortoise-shell with no interest in his opinion. The kitten sprang spread-eagle back to the floor.
Chaos. Absolute chaos.
His favorite idiot, his little rain cloud, curled under the steps to the dais. She’d found herself, once again, where she did not belong, and if her eyes didn’t reflect the torches set around the room, he never would’ve known she was there. It was the wrong court altogether, but she had a talent for trouble and a gift for surprises.
Dropping to his knees, he reached under the wooden platform to coax her out. She’d become a fetching little half munchkin, half Norwegian forest cat caught in the lanky middle ground between kitten and grown cat. A menace, to be sure, but too cute to ignore.
“Come out and play with your friends,” he said as she wriggled even farther out of reach. “It isn’t good to hide all the time. You need to do some seeking, too, lovee.”
But she was very determined and his arms just weren’t long enough, so he manifested a trail of nibbles to catch her attention. He could be patient. He could be tricksy. Good friends, he firmly believed, should be both, because sometimes people were just too stupid or too stubborn to accept the help they obviously needed.
He sat up to kneel below the empty thrones and clapped his hands on his thighs.
Well. He’d done what he could for now. Across the room, poor Gaveston was learning the price of being a king’s favorite. The yowls and cries almost distracted him to the point he didn’t see the massive black Maine Coon stalk into the throne room. The cat’s eyes glowed, both literally and metaphorically. In his kneeling position, Taliesin actually had to look up to see those eyes, and he gulped, wondering if he was about to be eaten.
“I have questions for you, bard.” The cat spoke with authority in a voice like honeyed night.
Taliesin recognized it, though it hadn’t come from a cat before, and he dismissed all thought of stupid whot, why, what, how demands.
It may be his imagination at work, but it was not his realm.
“Dream King.” He bowed. Then he remembered he was dreaming and squinted at the cacophonous mess of the long-dead king’s feline transformation. “Ah. This makes so much more sense.”
The cats blinked out of existence, or at least out of his dream, and he sat back on his heels. The stone chamber grew quiet. A plaintive meow from beside the stops, however, proved not all the cats had gone. The junior cat approached and let him sweep her into his arms, even purring when he scratched under her chin.
Still aware of the Endless – no longer in cat-form – Taliesin allowed himself a moment to enjoy this imagined pleasure. The little storm god made an adorable ball of fur. “You’d never make this so easy in the waking world, would you?”
She sized his finger with claws and teeth to prove she wasn’t easy in any world.
“There is unwelcome magic in the Dreaming.” The Nightmare King didn’t wait for Taliesin’s focus, confident as any monarch that his words would be heard, that the listener would take note and action. “You have studied it.”
Taliesin nodded, taking his word for it and stroking his friend the kitten as he picked through his long memory for anything of interest to the King of Dreams. “I have studied many shapes of magic, lord.”
“This one is close to you.”
Some darker note in the Dream King’s voice snagged Taliesin’s ear, and he looked away from the cat to study his face. Lips bent in a frown, brows pinched, the king had his starry eyes pinned to the creature in the bard’s arms. Taliesin looked back down to see a phantom of the collar growing around the kitten’s neck. She writhed against it, mewling in pain, staring up at him like he could do anything to help her.
He’d tried, and he’d tried again. He still hadn’t given up entirely.
Couldn’t the poor thing’s shade at least find relief in his dream?
She scratched him in her fit, and he bundled her closer, pinning her fast and safe as he’d failed to do when she was small and alone and willing to suffer in his stead. Even if he couldn’t free her, he’d never abandon her.
The truth of the matter struck him. He felt the cat shudder against his heart when she’d been so calm and accepting a moment ago, and he knew.
“So, you’ve met my favorite idiot.”
“Yes.”
The word betrayed nothing, not how they met, not how he felt. But he wanted to banish the collar once and for all, and Taliesin could get on board with that.
“It’s fairy-make,” he said. “Broken in the waking world, but still manifests in the Dreaming.”
“I know. What I do not know is why. What terms closed the circle around her neck? It appeared to suppress her godly half in life.”
Taliesin tried to cradle the cat even closer without suffocating her. “If you do not mind my asking, lord, how do you know even that much?”
“I saw it,” the king said, casually, like it wasn’t one of the worst things the bard had ever heard, “in her dreams, in her recollection of the past.”
Closing his eyes, the bard took a deep, deep breath in through his nose. He had to hold it for a minute, because it desperately wanted to leave his throat with a string of curses Dream of the Endless would not enjoy. When he was sure he could exhale without heaping abuse on the dolt’s head, he let the breath go. He did it all one more time, and then he said, “I think I understand why she wanted to stay awake.”
Eyes still shut, he murmured to himself, “Why didn’t she tell me? Self-destructive little –”
When he finally looked, the world had changed. Gone was the castle, the throne, and the sweet little cat from his arms. He’d imagined a cheap bedsit in Cardiff, the kind of place the little storm god may stay on the run – and she was definitely on the run, from nightmares if nothing else.
The young woman lay sprawled in a puddle of moonlight, half dead, and fading fast. Her skin clung to her bones, eyes sunken, old wounds open and bleeding from malnutrition and scurvy.
The empty potion bottle sat on the windowsill.
Dream of the Endless studied the scene with clear interest, and Taliesin beat down his protective urges in the name of pragmatism. If she was running from Lord Morpheus, she wouldn’t turn to Taliesin for help when the potion dragged her to the brink of death. It wouldn’t be a life lesson she could grow through. It would be a life ended.
“She came to me a few months ago,” he said, hoping the Endless would care enough about the woman shackled to the curse to consider her in his grand schemes. “She wanted a potion to stave off sleep. I told her it was dangerous, and I thought she’d come to me for help soon, that I could teach her something, but –”
The body on the floor laid so still. How many months had it been? How close was this nightmare to reality?
“I said her dreams would be kinder when she next slept,” the king murmured.
He didn’t have to say he didn’t understand.
Taliesin crossed his arms and cleared his throat. Someone, at least, would learn something this night. “Well, she’s a storm, isn’t she? She isn’t capable of moderation. When she’s happy, she’s ecstatic. When she’s angry she’s electric. When she’s afraid she is very, very afraid. And she’s terrified of you.”
Dream looked over his shoulder at the bard, still looming beside the dying phantom.
“I neither wish nor intend her harm.”
“You don’t have to intend harm to hurt her.”
The Endless fully turned to him, and the bard spoke with all the confidence of being truly heard. Just as the king did upon entering this dream. “You, I presume, dug very deep in a very dark place. That hurt her. Frightened her. If you push her far enough she’ll chew off her own leg to get away, or didn’t you see the part where she nearly decapitated herself to escape the damn collar?”
Silence filled the room. An ugly, cheap place to die. Taliesin wondered how long it would take to find her if she really had gone to ground. He couldn’t trust the King of Dreams to care about anything beyond the Dreaming’s borders, and he wouldn’t trust her health with the one who pushed her to ruin in.
He had spells to find her, but he wasn’t sure he could hold her if she went into a panic.
In the stillness, they could hear her death rattle.
“What will your potion do to her?”
His potion. Yes, he supposed it was his fault. The girl really was like a stray cat, hiding under porches to die quietly rather than let someone help. He should’ve known.
“It keeps her awake. Eventually, she’ll feel too ill to eat. She may hallucinate. Her heart will fall out of rhythm and she’ll waste away until her body doesn’t remember how to function.” He smacked his head back into the wall, wanting punishment, hoping to jog some inspired idea free. “I warned her.”
Of all the Endless, and he’d met quite a few, Dream was the most inscrutable. Cold and detached, but prone to dangerous spikes of interest that spiraled into nearly obsessive passion. His vengeance came swiftly and his affection grew slow. But Dream was, usually, just. He didn’t enjoy undeserved suffering, and Taliesin had to hope that after walking through the little storm god’s dreams, he’d understand she’d earned none of her pain.
It wasn’t too late. He’d lost track of time, but a tableau this desperate wouldn’t come to pass for at least a year.
“If you are of a mind to assist, Dream Lord…” He pushed off the wall, suddenly and entirely desperate to move. “I have an idea.”
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Her fear grew bitter as her strength waned. She could taste it when she struggled to eat, and when she gave up meals, it poisoned the water she drank. Terror tasted like blood from bitten lips and dust on her dry tongue. Her hands shook, and her throat burned from stomach acid, but it wasn’t bad enough to call on Taliesin again. She knew what he’d say.
Whatever happened, she would not fall asleep.
Besides, she wasn’t dying yet. She was only sick. If the Dream Lord pulled through her bloody history again, she wouldn’t survive. If she had a choice, she’d pick a death in the waking world, free of the collar and safe from the Dream Lord who dragged her through horrors so callously.
She wasn’t convinced he believed in her innocence, either. If he knew he’d threatened someone trying to rescue his damn raven, surely he would’ve apologized.
Better to stay awake and ignore the cramps in her belly.
The rain soothed her. Fitful storms plagued the town she’d chosen as a hiding place, and the old folks grumbled to each other at the grocery store about the weather. Maybe they’d gotten used to it in the past few months. She hadn’t been out in a while.
She didn’t sleep, but she still rested. Her eyelids didn’t grow heavy when she sat by the window and watched the drops racing down the pane. She remained awake, aware, and as close to peace as her racing thoughts allowed.
The window became her favorite pastime, and she spent days studying the changing clouds as angry squalls rolled up the coast, how the grey sky trapped the light during gentler showers.
And she grew weaker. Quietly flirting with the line between sick and deathly ill.
She saw impossible things beyond the glass. It took her a few days to realize they were hallucinations, not a fae spell or some petty apocalypse.
When his reflection appeared behind her in the window, she thought she was seeing things again. And then he spoke.
“You are killing yourself.”
She jerked around, stumbling on numb feet to face the monster. The Nightmare King. Her hand wandered her neck, looking for the collar to prove this was a dream, but she found her scarf instead.
“You are in the waking world,” he confirmed. “You hid yourself well.”
He took a step towards her, and she lunged back. The same game in the wrong realm.
“You still think I’m some kind of threat?”
Another step towards her, another step back – she nearly tripped on the leg of a chair, but she refused to look away for an instant, even to save the scraps of her dignity.
“No.”
He moved the way he spoke, aware of every nuance, every shift, slowly drawing closer. Sure and smooth as a stormfront.
What did he want? She abandoned her home, gave up the precious little sleep she could tolerate, and he still pressed her. He didn’t look angry and cold, like he did on the beach. Something sharp glittered in his eyes, though, a keen edge ready to cut her.
They passed through the living room, through the kitchen, and she only had a few more steps before this slow chase met an abrupt end.
“I’m running out of ground to give, Dream Lord.”
“Good.”
A final step, and her heel met the wall. He closed the distance, keeping the same predator’s pace as she pressed herself flat against the peeling wallpaper.
“Do you want me to fight?” Her growing storm raged. Lightning sheered over the sleepy town, turning the evening bright as noon. Thunder rattled the windows, but the Dream Lord didn’t so much as flinch. “Do you want an excuse to hurt me?”
He stood inches away, eating up her personal space until she felt his shadow had already swallowed her.
“No.”
“Then what do you want?” A whisper with the desperation of a scream.
His razor eyes cut deep, and she quaked in place, afraid to move but wishing she could shrink, become so small he wouldn’t notice her.
“To turn you from a darker fate.”
He raised a hand, and she cowered from the expected blow. When none fell, she peeped at him sidelong. His palm hovered between them, like he was holding up a gift.
“Sleep.”
Stooping ever so slightly, he blew over his hand, sending a gust of sand into her face. She bucked against him, flinging one arm up to cover her face, the other to shove at his chest. But it was no good. By the time he curled his fingers back, she could feel her grip on the world slipping away.
“Poor little storm god.”
Her knees buckled, and she slid down the wall, losing herself by inches to the inescapable lure of the Dreaming and its master.
She slept.
Chapter 4 A/N: I've never done prompt requests, but I've never had 500 FOLLOWERS EITHER (holy shit). I'm celebrating, and you're invited. The rules are a little convoluted, I won't be able to do ALL the things, but you'll all get a say in what makes the cut by voting. To join the fun and check out the rules, go here. Even if you don't join in, there will be one-shots aplenty for you to browse.
I'll be working on a chapter each for my other two active fics while I wait for replies, so you may not see another Younger Gods chapter til next week. For those clamoring for more interaction between the reader and Morpheus, it will be well worth the wait.
