#zigzag-wanderer

[hanniballisticmissile]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Will Graham doin’ some serious pining. A mirror piece for @zigzag-wanderer’s insanely amazing Post-session notes, linked here. 

[zigzag-wanderer]

🌤️Share your favorite piece of dialogue from your WIP.

🌈 Share something soft/fluffy from your WIP.

🥰🥰🥰

Hello @tentoriumcerebelli my friend! sorry this took so long to reply to, and then only half an answer; for some reason i thought it said 'the last thing you just wrote that was soft/fluff' (?) so i was waiting to write something soft/fluffy!? Now i look i see it didn't say that at all lol, and also had two questions (omg i'm so sorry i'm useless!) Anyways... here's something at last i wrote for the final chapter of my Dreamling monster fic that i thought was maybe fluffyish? I will try to answer the other bit asap . loved your pumpkins btw xxxxxxxxxxxxx

1937. Bahamas.

''He wakes, and rises early, to check his home is still a sanctuary, and not a deathtrap, for his monster. Dream deigns to stay with him very often, now, and when he does, Hob worries away at the outside of his villa, checking for chinks in the armouring of shutters and tarpaulins, seeking out any broken slats or tattered edges, which might let in the devilish light. For the hurricanes here breathe fire, and claw at every element not their own, scarring the water and sandbars alike. Hob enjoys the privacy these storms permit him, and even the great, glowering weatherfronts themselves, because he has always loved dangerous things, and as he finishes his early patrolling, on this trecherously bright morning, he steps back inside, and naturally casts a loving look over to the unnaturality in his bed.

Our bed, he supposes, although they don’t talk about what they are to one another, and it infuriates Hob as much as it makes him smile, to think that his creature, scaled, and whip-tailed, and altogether ferocious, a being with animal cunning and human intelligence perfectly blended, can discuss and dissect any subject within history, and the realm of all creation, and yet cannot describe their deepening domesticity, or, it must be noted, cannot yet say to Hob; ‘I plight to thee my troth.”  

Hob tells himself it doesn’t matter. He’s always managed with what he’s been given.

And what he's got, in this instance, is a Nightmare, lying on his back, softly susurrating, his breath whistling slightly, in and out, through his fangs. One slender arm is flung out to fill the gap Hob left, and Dream’s hair, which is liquorice-black, yet spun fine as candy-floss, fails to fall across his sweet, sepulchral face, because nowadays he sports a natty short-back-and-sides, as is the fashion of the day. His bare chest and belly gleam with preturnatural pallor in the dimness. He looks boyish, is wearing Hob’s pyjama bottoms, and to Hob he is everything.  

“Good morning,” Dream says, sleepily, after a while, and rubs over his face with his taloned hands. He's been absent for a fortnight, this time, but then, when he’s bedded down tightly in his own cold, familiar tomb, Hob’s monster can easily forget the onward march of the living world. At least, Hob muses, he always, always returns.''

[zigzag-wanderer]

Seven line tag

Thanks @tj-dragonblade for tagging me -i was just writing so here is something i just put down on paper for the last chapter of my vampire dreamling fic

'The Nightmare finally caught Hob on the shores of a secret cove, daring to lay him down in the blood-hot, milk-mooned shallows, where they were soon circled by sharks that wanted Hob too, and thrashed at the scent of him, at the stand-staining spill from his coral-scratched feet. And the Nightmare hissed at the ancient predators, and showed his teeth at them, as he fondled Hob's puckered, saltwatered flesh, and Hob was surf-spattered, fanned by the tails of the mako, the hammerheads, and the blacktips, and yet he was safe, for none could come closer than his Nightmare allowed, and Hob knew the bliss of being claimed by his monster, surrounded by gnashing jaws and rolling bellies, the fish frenzied and thwarted in the frothing bay, for all of them knew that Hob belonged only to his Nightmare Lord.

As if woken by the loudness of Hob’s memory, Dream opens his eyes and sits up, and Hob thinks of deep, and bioluminescent seas.

“Breakfast?” he smiles, ruefully, caught staring. “The ferry brought canned milk? And there’s bread and conch with pepper and lime?” Dream does not eat, but he is a connoisseur of all the things that Hob tastes of, and he hums agreement at Hob’s menu, and then he rises, naked as Venus, from the foam of their rumpled bedsheets.

"How are your poor feet?" he asks, with a monstrously loving smile.'

( i don't really know many people, but maybe @chaosheadspace ?)

[zigzag-wanderer]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 6/? Fandom: The Sandman (TV 2022) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus/Hob Gadling, Past Dream of the Endless/Calliope - Relationship, Past Hob Gadling/The Corinthian - Relationship Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Modern Johanna Constantine (The Sandman TV), Matthew, Other Character Tags to Be Added, Hob Gadling Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Professors, nightclubs, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Mutual Pining, Angst, Badly Processed Trauma, Hob in skimpy Outfits, Falling In Love, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Teaching Someone You Kind Of Like, Sad Orpheus Stuff, Endless family drama, Horniness, that's a tag, Other Sandman TV characters, Mentions of miscarriage, Historical Facts I Made Up, some violence, Mentions of bad relationships, POV Multiple, Fluff, Desire of the Endless - Freeform, Kissing Summary:

This is kind of a noirish My Fair Lady thing, mixed up with a black and white film I saw once about a Burlesque Singer that goes into hiding with a bunch of Professors or something? I'm sorry my tags are awful, there will be gangsters and swearing and academia and sex...and the plan is to put Hob in many, many skimpy outfits, because his body should be celebrated for the catnip it is!!

[mashumaru]

You liked the jumper for Hob then!? I'll put it in my fic then!

yess, yesss good

may i request a link if it's already being posted 👉👈

[zigzag-wanderer]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 2/? Fandom: The Sandman (TV 2022) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus/Hob Gadling, Past Dream of the Endless/Calliope - Relationship, Past Hob Gadling/The Corinthian - Relationship Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Modern Johanna Constantine (The Sandman TV), Matthew, Other Character Tags to Be Added, Hob Gadling Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Professors, nightclubs, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Mutual Pining, Angst, Badly Processed Trauma, Hob in skimpy Outfits, Falling In Love Summary:

So, for some reason I've started an AU while I type up some other stuff to post here? This is kind of a noirish My Fair Lady thing, mixed up with a black and white film I saw once about a Burlesque Singer that goes into hiding with a bunch of Professors or something? I'm sorry my tags are awful, there will be gangsters and swearing and sex I expect.

[zigzag-wanderer]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/? Fandom: The Sandman (TV 2022) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus/Hob Gadling, Past Dream of the Endless/Calliope - Relationship, Past Hob Gadling/The Corinthian - Relationship Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Modern Johanna Constantine (The Sandman TV), Matthew, Other Character Tags to Be Added, Hob Gadling Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Professors, nightclubs, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Mutual Pining, Angst, Badly Processed Trauma, Hob in skimpy Outfits, Falling In Love Summary:

So, for some reason I've started an AU while I type up some other stuff to post here? This is kind of a noirish My Fair Lady thing, mixed up with a black and white film I saw once about a Burlesque Singer that goes into hiding with a bunch of Professors or something? I'm sorry my tags are awful, there will be gangsters and swearing and sex I expect.

[zigzag-wanderer]

My Fair Gadling. Chapter one.

('My Fair Lady' crossed with 'The Professor and the Burlesque Queen' movie, I think. There's swearing among other noirish things.)

It is surely a descent into Hell.

Dream’s elbowed open a set of doors, halfway along a grimy alley, for no other reason than people are staring at poor, fainted-away Matthew, who hates to ever be the centre of attention. Dream carries his colleague down a set of stairs carpeted in a vulgar red, to match the blowsy, rose-patterned walls, and then hefts him along a corridor that smells of stale alcohol and staler aftershave. There’s also a faint, but vicious odour Dream remembers from his Father’s hunting parties, held at their country estate when he was too young to refuse to join in with the bloody chase.

He wrinkles his nose. It’s the scent of gun oil.

Then he hears it. Someone singing, a slow, sorrowful melody, that makes the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end, and his mind turn immediately to his ex-wife Calli, so full of grief and disappointment is the song.

Matthew thrashes in his arms. Dream blocks out all of his unhappy memories, which is something he’s grown very accomplished at doing.  

“A little assistance, if you please?” he calls out, in a voice well used to reaching the back of lecture halls, but somehow swallowed up in the hazy, Hadean depths of whatever the devil this place is.

The melancholy lament abruptly cuts off. A set of inner doors fly open, and Dream stumbles backwards, because Matthew may be a short man, but he’s also an extremely heavy one.

“God’s Wounds! What the fuck is this, then?”

Dream tries to push past the foul-mouthed man that’s emerged, even if he does have a pleasing turn of phrase.

“Hey, mate. Steady. You’re gonna fucking drop him!”

The singer, if that’s who it is, takes Matthew out of Dream’s arms, and pops him down on a nearby chair. “Fuck’s sake, what a lump of lard!” The man is shaking his head and grinning, as if smiling was the easiest thing in the world, and he brushes his long fringe back from his face and then looks Dream up and down, from his sensible brown brogues to his neatly side-parted hair. “Well, stranger, you’re stronger than you look, I give you that much.”

If Dream was alone, he’d go as far as to take off his tweed jacket and perhaps even unbutton his waistcoat. As it is, he merely removes his foggy glasses and polishes them on a clean corner of his handkerchief.

“Pardon the intrusion,” Dream says, in a tone meant to convey that it was a mission of mercy and therefore no such apology is necessary. “My colleague here lost consciousness just outside your…” Dream has already taken in the clusters of tables and chairs, and the small, spot-lit stage, on which sits a decent-sized piano. Trashy chandeliers hang from a lowish ceiling. Now he glances at the walls, with their black, glittery paint, and large, gilt-framed nudes, men and women both, glowing in baroquely fleshy colours.

“…your…establishment,” Dream finishes, thinking that if the glossy prints are the first thing Matthew sees when he wakes up, he’s likely to have another angina attack.

The man must read disapproval on Dream’s face, because his handsome grin slides into something a lot less friendly. He strolls to the bar and picks up a crystal tumbler, big as a preserving jar, filled with sloshing, liquid gold, and he drains half of it, and smacks his lips, despite it being a shade shy of three o’clock in the afternoon.

“It’s a nightclub, stranger. A right regular den of sin.” The man lights a cigarette with a swagger, and points it at Dream. “Although I bet you’d be happy enough slinking in the front door with the rest of your sort, ogling the waitresses and asking me to sit on your lap and sing you some sexy little number? Begging me to rub my bum all over your Marks and Sparks slacks?”

“My sort?” Dream frowns. It has not escaped his notice that his helper is wearing some kind of sheeny negligee, because every time he moves, it flutters open, like black butterfly wings, showing that underneath, he’s naked, but for string-sided black briefs. Dream closes his mouth, recalling that he is, after all, a gentleman, as well as a scholar, and technically he is the interloper here, with no right to judge anyone for being at ease in their own realm, as it were. “You mean other language historians frequent this place?”

The man snorts, then leers, perhaps in response to the blush Dream can feel unfortunately flooding his face. Not for the first time, Dream wishes he was not so pale, but since the alternative would involve being outside of his study, and therefore his comfort zone, for prolonged periods of time, he decides simply not to look at the half naked man again.

“I mean punters, darling,” the man drawls, getting up in Dream’s face. “We get all sorts here, and welcome all, as long as your money’s good.” He deliberately draws a slow hand across the thick hair on his broad chest, and his smile changes again, this time to a cold one, pretending to be something hot. “Respectable types, you know, just like your good self.” The man plays idly with a ring that’s glinting evilly from one, apparently hardened nipple. It even has a little ruby hanging down, like a drop of bright blood.

Dream resists a pathetic urge to mop his brow.

“People like you, happy to cop a feel of my crotch in the wee small hours, with a bottle of overpriced Krug inside you, but if I was to pass you in Tesco’s you’d sooner die than acknowledge I even exist.” The man’s eyes, that Dream had thought looked so soft and kindly, narrow now, with calculating, whiskey-laced contempt.

Dream bristles. “If you are insinuating that I would lay an unwanted hand upon you, even in the unlikely circumstance of being drunk…”

“Gif ðu hwæt on druncen misdo...” The man mutters under his breath, and Dream startles so hard he drops his hankie.

Reflexively, Dream responds, “ne wit ðu hit ðam ealoþe..” and thus completes the other half of the centuries-old proverb, although he’d admit his cultured, academically-trained accent isn’t anywhere near as good as this brawny peasant of a man’s fluid pronunciation.

The singer stops his sleazy, mocking seduction. He looks as if he doesn’t know what to say, and also as if that doesn’t happen very often.

“That was Old English,” Dream states, staring once again. Which is rude. But the man has possibly the most expressive face Dream has ever seen, so different from his own, closed-off countenance. He translates softly, “If you do something wrong when drunk…”

“…don’t blame it on the ale...” The singer tilts his head, smiles, properly, and tugs on his beringed earlobe. The word ‘adorable’ springs into Dream’s head, pushing all other words, more important word, words he’s spent a lifetime accruing and cataloguing, right out of his skull. “Yeah…well…It seemed kind of…”

“Right?” supplies Dream.

“I was gonna say…pertinent, but yeah.” The singer crinkles up his face. Adorably, crows Dream’s brain. He crinkles up his face adorably. “Uh, that is a word, right? Not one I’d usually use...Must have read it on the back of a cornflake box somewhere. Or did I just make a fucking idiot of myself in front of, what did you say? You’re a language historian..? Shit. If pertinent isn't a fucking real word, well, I'll bite my bloody tongue off...”

“Oh. It is a word. A perfect word. Most definitely,” Dream is dimly aware he’s babbling. “A brilliant word. I like it very much.”

“Oh. Well, cheers…”

Then a movement at the doorway brutally breaks the moment apart.  

“Robbie?”

The singer leaps backwards, away from Dream, as if scalded. A person in a linen suit that perfectly matches his straw-blond hair walks across the wooden floor. He’s wearing sunglasses. Indoors. “Did I just hear you complain about my mark up on champagne, sugar?”

Dream thinks of sharks, of teeth and cartilage, and chilly deeps.

“No, Corin. Course not. As if.” Dream sees Robbie immediately fold his arms around himself, closing the negligee. “Top rate bubbly here, well worth the dosh.”

“Because that would be really funny,” the man waves a hand, and a monolithically silent figure blocks the double doorway behind him. “Seeing as you soak up quite a bit of my profits, don’t you, my sweet little slut?”

Dream wonders briefly if it is he who fainted, and that this is all some wretched hallucination.

“Corin, don’t be daft.” Robbie puts out his cigarette with tense little stabs. “Anyway, thought you was out all day today, seeing your brief?”

“Ah, so that explains why you’re back here showing your tits to two men, does it?”

There’s a horrible silence.

Then Matthew groans, groggily, from his nearby perch. “This isn’t the British Library?” he exclaims.  

Robbie takes the opportunity to laugh, nastily. “These twats? Just little lost lambs, Corin. Interrupted my fucking rehearsal. Wanting help. This one’s pissed or summat.” He nods towards Matthew. “And this one’s a fucking nerd of some sort,” he sneers, but doesn’t look at Dream.

Corin stares. “Right. He’s a nerd who just happens to look like a catwalk model.”

Before Dream can protest at that ludicrous remark, Corin steps beside Robbie, and catches him by the wrist. “Maybe too much of my Balvenie forty-year-old scotch is making you forget who employs you, gives you a nice place to live, nice clothes? Who fucks you, when they can spare the time? Apparently, you think it’s someone who is…daft?”  

“Sorry, Corin, I didn’t mean that,” Robbie says, quietly, wincing.  

Dream feels his long, thin hands clench to fists. But clearly the tall woman blocking the door could snap him like a twig before he would be able to punch the blonde man in the face, like he very much wants to. So, instead, Dream plucks a business card out of his inside pocket and holds it out, because it seems obvious that this Corin is the type who will always take whatever’s there to be taken, simply out of habit.

“These are my credentials,” Dream says, in his Professor’s tone.

Corin takes the card, predictably, and then, pointedly, without glancing at it, tosses it onto the bar. But he’s let go of Robbie’s hand to do so, and that was Dream’s aim, for some reason he cannot for the life of him fathom, because like most things in the universe, these people are not his concern.  

“Lucy,” Corin says to his muscle. “Throw them out.”

The woman steps forward.

Robert rubs his wrist.

Dream stands in front of Matthew.

“No.”

“No?” Corin repeats.

“No,” Dream says, crisply, as if he was berating a student for shoddy research. “Matthew has a heart condition, and requires at the very least a glass of water to be able take his medicine. We will leave then, but I will help him to do so. Nobody will be throwing anybody anywhere.”

And so saying, he kneels in front of Matthew and gets a small pill bottle out of his satchel.

Robbie laughs. “See, Corin? They’re bit touched in the head. Pair of cunts from the university or something. Don’t have a clue who they’re talking to.”

Dream gently loosens Matthew’s tie.

“There, old chap,” he says, gently, as Matthew looks uncertainly around at their unusual surroundings. “You had a funny turn, but we’ll have you back up on your feet in a moment. Get you home then, and Ms Constantine can make you a nice milky cup of tea.”

Next thing Dream knows, Robbie is giving him his own whiskey glass, with a nod that it’s the best he can do.   

“Thank you,” Dream says.  

“Fuck off,” Robbie replies, scornfully, but possibly the liquor does Matthew good, because although he coughs fit to expel a lung, his colour returns and he is able to blearily stand upright, with Dream’s assistance.

The big, solemn woman glances at Corin, who signals to her that their guests can leave unharmed.

Robbie shoves Dream as he passes him, getting him to move faster.

So, Dream escorts Matthew away, and they hurry from the bustle of busy London town, and return to Dream’s large, silent house, in a leafy, silent suburb, where he does his obscure, important research, and lives his life, after a fashion, renting out some of the other empty rooms to a few other like-minded bachelor professors.

And later that evening, as Ms Constantine clears away their tea things, Professor Endless holds his china cup of earl grey in his long, white fingers, and listens politely to his colleagues discussing Matthew’s ordeal, and the awful denizens of the seedy nightclub.

And all he can think about is the feel of Robbie’s hand in the small of his back.

And he knows he should be glad to be out that shadowy place. That degenerate place. That nightmarish, unenlightened place. But Dream also knows, none better, that like the myriad words that describe them, there are so very many different kinds of darkness.....     

i will inflict more of this soon.