Hello, I am Lady Layla of the Lagoon and I am the Dreaming's scribe. Come and stay; listen carefully, and read thoroughly ₊ ˚ ⊹ ⋆
I can’t control the media you consume, only you can. That being said, most of my fics are 18+ and NSFW and are clearly labeled, don’t be a twat and don’t complain to me for not following instructions.
Meet me at the Lagoon under moonlight and good drinks ~
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ Dream/Morpheus (The Sandman)
One Shot Masterlist
☾ Drabbles, thoughts, requests galore!
26 Ways of Taking You (18+)
☾ 26 Worlds, 26 ways of pleasure
Lady Luck Is Smiling
☾ When the Fates leave Morpheus' call unanswered, he gains insight into another goddess that may be able to help regain his lost tools. Lady Luck, as you go by now as opposed to Fortuna nor Tyche, is the second youngest of the Four Ladies. Morpheus is determined to learn how and what makes you smile, for your smile will allow luck to be on his side, and with any of it, will he find his tools.
Destined Dreams of Love
☾ As no stranger to arranged marriages, your parents excitedly marry you off to the king at his request. He is contradictory, cold yet caring, strict yet liberating, it's all too much! He said he could never love another for reasons you do not understand either, didn't he just meet you? Perhaps in time, you can learn to love him, too.
Expectation Subversions
☾The Prince of Stories and his unbridled ability to avoid all possible clichés.
A Pirate Queen For Me
☾ Captain Fortune, pirate queen of the seven seas. What adventures will you lead aboard your ship?
Do you mind being tagged at all? I want to start reaching out with my art but I also don’t want to bug anyone :(. I made a Morpheus drawing recently and am in the process of making another if you want to see them <3
Summary: Morpheus spends a summer afternoon in the park feeding the birds, looking entirely too dramatic for the weather. What begins as teasing ends up more dreamlike between the two of you.
Warnings/Tags: Morpheus x GN!Reader, fluffs and whatnots, holding hands for the first time
Notes: ~1.7k words, I literally cannot be bothered to study for the finals worth 50% of my grade. Not edited past spellcheck.
Main Masterlist || One Shot Masterlist
“Don’t you get hot wearing black all the time?”
Morpheus looks up from where he sat on the grass, a stale loaf of bread in his hands and a swarm of pigeons and robins swirling his still body.
A pigeon pecks at his shoe lace as he ponders an answer. He’d been sitting at the park for a good few hours now, his still and calm nature making the birds fearless of him. Or perhaps it was the 3-day-old bread loaf he took with him from The Dreaming. A robin perches on the toe of his black boots, chirping a series of notes as it waits for a few more crumbs.
He, ancient and terrible though beautiful as midnight, regarded the question and you with the expression of a king being interrupted at court.
“I am not uncomfortable,” he finally mutters, the slightest suspicious eyebrow twitching upwards.
“That’s not what I asked.”
His gaze leaves you as he returns to feeding the birds. A breeze moves through the park, soft and bright, carrying the sound of childhood laughter with it. Grass was freshly cut, and the nearby lake glimmered like the gems of a hoard guarded by a fearsome dragon, all while the air felt slightly heavy from the melted sugar of the nearby food vendors.
None of it did anything to Morpheus, who sat there in his long, black coat despite the day being aggressively sunny; it almost made him light up like a beacon.
“You asked whether I become hot,” he restates, as if repeating the question slower would make you realize how absurd it is. “I do not.”
“Sounds like a fake answer.” You narrow your eyes at the back of his head.
“It is not.”
“You’re telling me you don’t feel temperature?”
“I feel many things. I am the entire subconscious of the human mind, king of dreams, and can feel the emotio–”
“But temperature?” You cut him off.
“Not as you do,” he finally answers after a dramatic pause.
You sit down beside him on the grass, close enough that your shoulder almost brushes his. The birds all but scatter at the movement, but then second-guessed their judgment before fluttering back. The fat pigeon that was pecking at his shoe laces gives you a look before returning to eating a fresh wave of crumbs.
“I just didn’t expect you to show up in the park, in the middle of summer, dressed like you’re ready to star in a teenager’s emo garage band.”
His brows draw together, and his lips pucker with displeasure. “A what?”
“You heard me.”
“I am Dream of the Endless.”
“Soooo edgy,” you teased.
Morpheus looks away first, crushing the loaf up to its last crumbs, and you count it as a victory.
The birds once again descend in a flurry of wings and tiny, bickering chirps. For someone who could summon nightmares and could walk through minds like doorways, he fed birds with a startling sense of tenderness. His fingers moved carefully, making sure some of the larger pieces were broken into small enough pieces.
Morpheus always looks out of place in the waking world. Not necessarily because he failed to blend in, but because people passed him without staring too much, though a few did glance back with that unconscious human awareness of something beautiful and strange. But, he seems less like a man sitting in a park and more like a shadow that just learned manners.
Yet, here he sat. Grass and pigeons and robins.
“So then… why black?” You lean back on your hands.
He stills for a second and you wonder whether you had asked something too personal. Morpheus didn’t always understand casual questions as casual. Sometimes the smallest human curiosity became an excavation, sometimes a joke lands too close to an old wound.
But, he answers. “It is familiar.”
You tilt your head at him. “That’s it?”
“It is sufficient.”
“That’s not an answer,” you scoff.
His eyes flicker to yours, a swarm of galaxies under a fan of soft eyelashes. Stars lived in them when he let them, an impossible distance to travel when you meet his gaze with purpose, and looking directly into them felt like standing at the edge of sleep before falling forever into the abyss.
“You are persistent today,” he says.
“You like that about me.”
“I have not said so.”
Yikes. “You haven’t denied it either.”
He looks back at the birds, who now wander further now that the bread is all gone. Your hands grow slightly sweaty, awaiting your doom.
But then you see it. The smallest shift to the corner of his mouth. Tiny and almost nothing, but you see it, and your heart does something frankly embarrassing in your chest.
“I wear black,” he finally says, slowly as he often does, “because it is the color of the space between stars. Of ink before it is shaped into words, and of the moment before sleep takes hold.”
You blink at him. “Well damn. That was annoyingly poetic.”
“Merely the truth.”
“Yeah, well, there’s your problem.”
“My problem?” He asks, his eyes returning to yours.
“You make everything sound like a prophecy. I asked if you were sweaty.”
“I am not sweaty.”
“Again,” you shrug, “suspicious.”
Morpheus’ expression turned long-suffering, though you were beginning to suspect he enjoys this more than he admits. With anyone else, he might have risen in a swirl of coat and offended dignity, leaving behind only a cold breeze and the faint feeling that reality had been judged and found lacking. With you, however, he stays.
A child runs past along the nearby path, laughing wildly as a parent calls after him. A dog barked at the pigeons and was promptly ignored by every bird except for one robin, who hopped back and forth with theatrical disdain. Somewhere in the distance, bicycle wheels clicked over pavement.
The world was painfully ordinary.
Well, until it wasn’t.
At first, it was nothing obvious. Nothing grand enough to split the sky open or to make the ground tremble beneath your hands. It was only a soap bubble drifting from somewhere near the path, likely blown loose from the sticky plastic wand of a child’s new toy. It floated lazily past the two of you, catching the sunlight in its thin iridescent skin.
But when it passes in front of Morpheus, the reflection inside it changes. Instead of seeing a warped version of your surroundings, you see the stars. A whole field of them, deep and endless, scattered across the inside of the fragile little sphere as though someone had trapped a piece of night in a breath.
You’ve stopped talking, the next witty quip dying at the back of your teeth and getting stuck like taffy.
The bubble bobs once in the air between you before popping into nothing. For a moment, neither of you moved.
Then the robin, who was still offended by the dog, hopped closer to Morpheus’ boot again. Its shadow stretched beneath it, too long for the angle of the sun. For half a second, the shape on the grass wasn’t a bird at all, but something winged and vast, made from smoke and starlight.
Then it was gone.
Just a robin again. Just grass and the park and the summer afternoon.
You slowly turned your head towards him.
Morpheus’ face remains composed, but there was a slight tension at the corner of his mouth now. Not exactly irritation, something closer to embarrassment (though you’re sure he’d rather turn into sea foam than admit to something so mortal.)
“Forgive me,” he says.
“For what?”
“The Dreaming is…” he pauses, his gaze drifting to the place where the bubble had burst. “Nearer than I intended.”
You look around but the park continues as if nothing happened. The child laughs, the dog barks, and the pigeons resume their petty war over imaginary crumbs. A breeze moves thorugh the trees and for a strange second, sounded like distant bells.
Morpheus looks at you carefully, as though bracing for unease. “Are you not disturbed?”
“No,” you smile. “I like it.”
“You like it,” he repeats.
“Yeah.” You lean back on your hands again, trying very hard to seem casual despite the way your pulse suddenly picks up. “For someone who rules dreams, you’re weirdly good at making real life feel less boring.”
“And you,” he says quietly, “make the waking world less foreign to me.”
Oh.
Your fingers curl into the blades of the grass, green and warm from the sun. “That’s… a very intense thing to say in front of a pigeon.”
“The pigeon is indifferent.”
“He’s nosy.”
As if summoned by insult, the pigeon puffed up and waddled between you two with the entitled confidence of a landlord.
You glance down at it. “See? Nosy.”
You expected Morpehus to say something grand. Something old and devastating, the kind of sentence that sounded like it belonged written in silver across the inside of a tomb.
Instead, his hand shifted beside yours, knuckles brushing yours in the grass.
It could’ve been an accident if it were anyone else. But he was Morpheus, and Morpheus did very little by accident.
You glance down, and his hand remains there. For all his titles, all his power, all the endless darkness folded into the line of his coat, the gesture felt almost shy. A question without words.
And you answered by moving your hand the rest of the way, fingers sliding against his.
Morpheus did not immediately close his hands around yours. For a second, he simply let the touch exist, as if learning its shape. Then, slowly, carefully, he laces his fingers through your own.
The world did not become less ordinary.
The child still shreiks with laughter, the dog stil strains against its leash. The pigeons are still fat, the vendors still sell sugary confection. But the grass near your joined hands shimmers faintly, dark as midnight beneath the bright afternoon sun.
You flex your hand in his, looking down at the intertwined fingers.
“It’s sweaty,” you murmur.
Morpheus looks down at your joined hands.
“I am not hot.”
You sigh.
Ohhhh you want me to update my ongoing series? Umm... bye.
idk i just feel like "it is more acceptable and in fact encouraged to mock anything enjoyed primarily by women" and "being enjoyed primarily by women does not make thing feminist and righteous" are thoughts that can and should coexist
