it's been a while since i've written something that could be described as "literally just hurt/comfort" but well. here it is. i guess XD
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It amused Hob endlessly that Dream never seemed to sit on his throne. Perhaps he did when welcoming official delegations of visitors, or conducting official business, but Hob had never witnessed it. Every time he had been to Dream’s throne room, Dream had been sprawled on the stairs instead, long limbs all askew, coat flared out dramatically below him, like some kind of panther reclining on its tree branch. Moody, petulant, dramatic thing. Hob loved him so.
He pet up and down Dream’s side as he sat beside him, and Dream, panther-like indeed, purred, pressing his nose into Hob’s throat. He had been about to show Hob something, take him to some new corner of the Dreaming he had created, but as usual they had gotten distracted, necking on the steps like insatiable teenagers. And now they were just talking quietly, one of Hob’s legs slung over Dream’s, Dream’s arm around his waist as Hob kept stroking up and down his rib cage under his cloak.
“I did intend to show you the new gardens,” Dream murmured, but made no move to leave Hob’s side. “You will enjoy them.”
“I’m sure I will,” Hob said, pressing another kiss to his hair. “Enjoying this too, though.”
“Would you like to enjoy more?” Dream asked, suggestion in it now, and Hob laughed.
“If you’re feeling committed enough to get up and lead us to your quarters. I don’t think Lucienne deserves to get an eyeful.”
“I could close off the throne room and have you upon these here steps,” rumbled Dream, grip tightening on Hob’s hip.
“And I could have you over your throne, if we’re doing that,” Hob countered, and a shudder ran up Dream’s spine.
He managed to disentangle himself from Hob and stood, offering a hand. “Come. We will retreat— this time.”
Hob chuckled, letting Dream pull him up. “Not in an exhibitionist mood today?”
“I’d like you to myself.” So saying, he strode down the steps, already summoning a swirl of sand to take them away— back to the waking world, maybe—
when something struck him.
Only there was nothing there. But Dream lurched backward the way the soldiers of Hob’s youth would fall back when lanced through with an arrow on the battlefield—he stumbled on suddenly weak legs, clutching at his chest, and with a cry of pain just—
—dropped
just fell in the middle of his throne room, the very seat of his power. Landed on shaking arms that were already giving out, shoulders curved and head hanging.
It was fucking terrifying.
Hob rushed over to him, fell to his knees by his side. Hands hovering for a moment as he tried to decide if it was safe to touch him. Safe for Dream, that was. Hob hardly cared about what might happen to him. “Dream,” he said, but Dream didn’t respond. He seemed barely able to hold himself up. As Hob watched, blood trickled from his nose and dripped onto the marble floor.
Hob abandoned caution and took him into his arms. Dream wiped at the blood streaming faster from his nose with a limp hand, but only succeeded in smearing it everywhere. “Dream,” Hob said. “What’s happening, love?”
Dream just closed his eyes. “Something…” he murmured, the word slurred and nearly unintelligible, “terrible. Silence. And. Death.”
A tremor rushing through him like an electric shock, and the Dreaming… separated.
Hob felt the schism go through it, felt his own body separating from itself like an earthquake right through the center of existence, the very air trembling. He looked at his hands and saw them in double, looked at the throne room and saw its colors refracting outward in layered planes, and then Dream, in the center of it all, dense as a neutron star.
Then it all slammed back together.
The force of the impact flung Hob across the room, away from Dream. He hit the floor hard, struggling to catch his breath as he scrambled upright, dizzy. Everything seemed to have congealed back into one layer again, but the hall was shaking, and on the other side of the room Dream was trying to push himself up, and failing as his limbs kept giving out on him, blood puddling on the floor from his nose and mouth.
What could possibly make Dream bleed? In his own realm?
Hob raced back over to him, skidding to a stop and crouching by his side so fast he almost fell over. Dream was on his knees, eyes screwed shut, hands pressed to his temples. Hob laid his hands over Dream’s. “Hey. Can you hear me? Can you look at me?”
Dream just let out a pained whine. And then Hob was very glad he was holding onto him because the whole room spun.
Suddenly they were upside down, gravity reversed so down was up, up was down, and Hob was on the ceiling looking down at the endless void of space. They didn’t fall, though, and he wrenched his gaze back to Dream before the vertigo made him puke. And then the room swung upright again, but this time it took gravity with it— Hob grabbed a hold of Dream’s hand and just barely stayed in place but heard things crashing against the palace windows, trees and houses and god knew what else that had been uprooted in the spinning equilibrium.
“Dream,” he said, holding Dream’s face between his hands. “Can you focus? Come back to me, love.”
Dream finally looked at him. His eyes had lost their human veneer and gone starry, but one was utterly black edge-to-edge, like it was dilating wrong in its view of the universe. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but what came out instead was another gush of blood.
“Shit.” Hob hauled him upright, kept him in his arms as he choked and spasmed, blood coming up with each cough, streaming from his nose. The sky had shifted to a glaring red, the stars angry eyes against it, and screaming rose higher and higher from the distant woods outside the palace, a thousand animal voices rising in chorus. “Shit. Alright, it’s okay.” He pet Dream’s hair, kept his voice pitched low and soothing, though his heart was hammering under Dream’s ear pressed against his chest. It most definitely was not alright, but Hob didn’t know what else he could do, other than try to bring Dream back from wherever he was. There was no injury, there was nothing he could fix. “It’s alright, my darling. Come on.”
Dream whimpered in pain and jerked as a lightning bolt of energy raced through him, zapping each of his limbs. Blood had started streaming out of his ears now, too, and past the sleeves of his robe Hob could see bruising around his wrists and trailing up his arms. He yanked up the hem of Dream’s shirt, and found more on his torso, patternless marks of bleeding, and his stomach lurched.
“Alright, alright, let’s get you down,” he said, keeping his voice gentle despite the panic racing through his nervous system. He laid Dream down on the floor, taking off his own jacket and folding it as a makeshift pillow to put under his head. Dream immediately turned and curled up on his side, hands over his ears.
Hob leaned down to try to meet his gaze. “Dream. Hey.” He caressed Dream’s cheek. “Dream. Please. Anything you can tell me that will help. Come on, darling. Talk to me.”
After several long, painful seconds, Dream managed, each word a dragging, pained whisper, “It will pass. I prom—” this was cut off by a horrible scream, animalistic but all wrong, off-pitch, like he was being eviscerated by an electroshock probe.
Matthew careened into the throne room and landed at Hob’s side. “Holy shit, there you are. I thought he was dying in a ditch somewhere, the Dreaming’s going fucking haywire.” He prodded at Dream’s hair with his beak, hopping in distress. “Boss. Boss!”
Dream seemed totally lost to them now, clutching at his head and making an awful whining sound. Hob finally gave up on trying to get him to talk and just pulled him close, laying Dream’s head in his lap.
Matthew perched delicately on Dream’s hip. “Do you know what happened?”
Hob brushed Dream’s hair from his sweaty, feverish forehead. “Not a clue. He said it would pass?”
Matthew tittered nervously. “A whole wing of the library is burning.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Loosh can’t get the fire under control. And a whole mountain range fell into the sea. Is this the apocalypse?”
Hob let out a shaky breath. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But it this doesn’t get better soon I’m calling his sister for help myself.”
Dream sucked in a huge breath as if summoned back to life by Hob’s words and said, each word a heavy scrape, “She will be far too busy for that.”
Around them, the Dreaming seemed to stabilize, shivering back into place. Everything went quiet again. Hob’s exhale of relief shook his whole body. “Hey. Hey.” He took Dream’s face between his hands and tilted his head up to look at him. “Hey, love. Are you back with us?”
Dream nodded. He looked utterly exhausted, glassy-eyed and with tremors running up and down his frame, but no longer like he was being actively tortured. “That was. The worst of it.”
“The worst of what? Did somebody hurt you?”
“No.” He looked to Hob for help, and Hob didn’t like it but he hauled him upright and helped him sit, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and letting Dream lean against him. “I am,” his voice was hoarse, each word a struggle, “the sum. Of all living minds in this universe. And when so many of those lives are ended at once. I. Feel it. That part of myself. Dying.”
Hob looked around before remembering that he couldn’t exactly see anything from here. “Something happened back home?”
“Your planet is not the only one with life,” Dream said. Hob shook himself before his brain could latch onto that—it was too much to be confronted with in the middle of a crisis. “I do not know exactly what transpired. I will have to ask Death. Only, it was significant.”
“What, like thousands of people? Er, beings?” Matthew said.
Dream’s gaze slanted over to him. He looked horribly sad, underneath the exhaustion. “Trillions. Not only intelligent species dream. Smaller creatures. Insects. Some plants. All eradicated.”
“That’s why that happened to the library,” Hob realized. All the books of all those lives.
Dream’s eyes snapped to him. “What happened to the library?”
“Apparently it was on fire—”
Dream tore himself from Hob’s grasp and staggered to his feet, rushed through a door that hadn’t been there a moment before. He was listing violently to one side, stumbling off balance, but didn’t stop, and Hob and Matthew chased after him.
They tumbled through the door into an inferno, the towering library stacks crackling and popping in the incredible heat. A surprisingly modern sounding alarm was blaring overhead, lights flashing. Lucienne had found a fire extinguisher and was valiantly attempting to put out the blaze, but she could do nothing against the sheer scale of it.
Dream careened into a table, caught himself just before falling, then thrust out his hands. The room plummeted to freezing in an instant, and Hob’s breath caught as all of the oxygen—to whatever extent that even existed in the Dreaming—whooshed out of the room. His chest went tight, and he was pretty sure it was only the nature of the Dreaming that kept them all from suffocating.
Dream held them in stasis like that until all of the fires had sputtered out, starved of air. Then his arms fell heavily to his sides and he dropped sideways into a chair, panting. Air swung back into the room, and Hob sucked in a deep breath.
“Lucienne,” said Dream, breathing heavily, “what— what is— the damage?”
Lucienne sat down beside him. She looked rather more concerned about the state of Dream himself than the books—his skin was still absolutely covered in blood, his face gaunt and hollow, limbs shaking—but she said, “We’ve lost most of this wing, my lord. What happened?”
Dream squeezed his eyes shut in dismay. “Too many lives felled at once.”
Lucienne laid her hand over his, gave it a squeeze. Hob knelt beside him, laying a hand on his knee.
“My fault,” Dream murmured. “I should have conceived of some protection against this. Or recovered myself. Quicker.”
“No,” said Lucienne, even before Hob could. “I don’t think you could have stopped this, my lord.”
"You can't prevent people from dying," said Hob.
"I can certainly prevent their books from being wiped from the library," insisted Dream, and then slumped, leaning his face on his hand, brow pinched in pain. "Too much strain on the Dreaming at once," he murmured, mostly to himself. "This should not have happened."
Hob squeezed Dream’s knee. “I’m sorry, love. I’m really sorry.”
Dream’s frown didn’t soften, if anything, his shoulders slumped further.
“I’ll see what I can salvage,” Lucienne said, standing upright again. “You should rest.”
Dream didn’t seem to have the strength to oppose this. “Matthew, will you find out if any residents were injured in the destruction?”
“Yup, on it, boss.” He landed on Dream’s shoulder for a moment, preened his hair, then winged away again, out of the library.
Then it was just Dream and Hob.
“Hey,” Hob said quietly. Now that they were alone, Dream had gone nearly as limp as a doll. Hob took both of his hands. “Let’s go rest, yeah? You must be knackered.”
That barely scratched the surface, but bringing up Dream’s moments of weakness—as he would see it—was rarely helpful.
“I am not tired so much as…” he plucked each specific word individually from the ether— “Stripped. To the bone. Like carrion.”
Hob’s heart hurt, doubly so for Dream having actually admitted it. “Let’s go rest then, yeah?”
Dream shook his head. “I do not wish to simply return to my quarters. I do not wish to simply return to my quarters. That is not what the Dreaming deserves after this failure.”
“Somewhere else? You can’t just go and try to fix it all now, Dream. Please.”
“Somewhere else,” Dream agreed, at length. "For a time." He interlocked his fingers with Hob’s. Then the library was swirling out of view, and they reemerged in a familiar grassy dell, sitting in the long, soft grass. Fiddler’s Green, Hob thought. Of course.
Gilbert—for since learning that Fiddler’s Green was a he, Hob couldn’t help but call him the more human name he’d chosen—seemed unharmed by the damage that had plowed through the Dreaming. Dream sat cross-legged on the soft ground and brushed his fingertips through the grass, a self-soothing motion. A warm breeze tumbled through his hair, as if Gilbert was trying to comfort him.
Hob gathered Dream into his arms, and as he did a tree sprung up from the ground behind him, growing from a sapling to a massive oak in moments. Hob leaned back against it, holding Dream close. “You’re a gem, Gilbert.”
The leaves rustled in response.
“Has something like this happened before?” Hob asked quietly, lips brushing Dream’s hair, and Dream nodded.
“Yes. Hence why I should have been more prepared.”
“Not what I meant. I wanted to know how to help.”
“There is… little to be done,” Dream said. “In time, the Dreaming will integrate the loss. Any acute damage, I will fix. It simply requires some… patience.”
“And what about you?” Hob said.
This time, Dream didn’t say something about how the Dreaming was him. He just didn’t respond at all.
Hob held out a hand. “Do you want to help me out here, then, Dreaming?”
A soft, wet towel appeared in his hand. “Cheers.”
“Hob,” said Dream uncertainly, as Hob budged him up.
“Let me see your face.” He took Dream’s chin in one hand, and began scrubbing away the blood with the other, wiping clean his lips, and the corners of his eyes, his chin, his throat.
Dream watched him silently. Hob was still wiping clean the sharp hinge of his jaw when the first tear slipped from his eye. “So many dreamers,” he murmured.
Hob pulled him close and pressed Dream’s head to his shoulder. He still didn’t know exactly what had happened, in some far off corner of the universe. But Dream’s pain was plain enough. “I know, love. I’m sorry.”
“I am used,” Dream said, “to the normal cycle of life and death. I have never considered it a tragedy; it is the way of Time. Death herself is kind, but not all ends are, it is the way of things. But such sudden, and widespread destruction. This feels. Like a tragedy. Not only lives were lost. But whole species. Cultures. A history, too. And its remembrance.”
“And normally you’re the one that remembers it,” said Hob, and Dream nodded.
“Now… I can only remember fragments about those civilizations. Whatever survived in the library, or on the fringes of my realm. I can feel the loss in the fabric of dreaming—but I cannot see what was once there.”
Hob kissed the top of his head. “You care so much,” he said, as Dream’s tears wet his shoulder. “Oh, darling. I’m sorry.”
There was really nothing more to say; he couldn’t make it any better. He could only hold Dream while he processed and regained his strength. And so he did just that, leaning back against the tree in the warm, calming breeze of Fiddler’s Green, and kept Dream close to him. And when it came time for Dream to fix the damage done to the Dreaming, Hob would stick by him then, too.
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overblot! Riddle nonconning you in front of Ace and Deuce while going on about how this is the only thing a magicless nobody is good for 👍🏼
Omg yes,,,,,,,,
(cw: yandere, gender neutral, nsfw, non-con, humiliation/degradation, public sex)
Amidst a ruined, debris-ridden rose maze, a monster looms. No one dares stray close, lest they find themselves maimed and sent to the grave, and so they can only watch helplessly from the safety of overturned chairs, tables, and uprooted rose trees. The scene was once serene, an almost-perfect Unbirthday. Now it is desolate and bleak, a nightmarish reality that leaves thick, discomforting silence blanketing the grounds.
Riddle casts a grotesquely bone-chilling shadow, and his appearance mirrors that of a creature torn from the pages of a classic horror; that's the only way to describe him: cruel and cold, all sharp, vicious edges and thorns, dripping blot. He's on the verge of a supernova, toeing the line of life and death, a monstrous mage who has reached the consequences of a culmination of excessive magic, spilled over into bitter negativity. The aura that clings to him is, in a word, utterly terrifying.
And you're right there in his shadow, a fragile, caged thing bent down on your hands and knees. Your fingers curl into the grass, tearing clumps. No one dares to speak up, to demand he release you, to fight for your safety and dignity. Hopelessly collared, Ace and Deuce, your closest companions in all of this mess, look on in horror even though they don't mean to.
It's like a tragedy spun right before their eyes. They want to look away, but they can't. It's morbidly ensorcelling.
"Observe!" Riddle's voice booms, commanding absolute obedience and attention. His pallid hips press against your ass while clawed hands dig into your hips, holding you perfectly still. Blood is drawn; it seeps beneath his sharpened nails, leaving painful indents. You feel filthy and fearful, cut down to something small and insignificant and weak. Droplets of blot speckle your backside each time he shifts. It's warm like candle wax, but it doesn't burn.
The betrayal does, though—stains through to your very soul.
You grit your teeth, squeezing your eyes shut in hopes of drifting off elsewhere. Anywhere that isn't here, speared on his cock for all to see, forced into the grass like you're bowing apologetically before the Queen and her card soldiers.
"You lack the key capabilities all mages must possess, and yet you thought it wise to challenge my rules? Here? When my word is law?" He barks out a laugh, sickly amused. Scarlet eyes narrow with disdain. "Perhaps you're as slovenly as you are disobedient. As expected of a disrespectful, magic-less fool who knows nothing! Absolutely nothing of the order I so carefully uphold!"
He pulls back, seething through grit teeth, and snaps his hips forwards. You collapse on shaky arms, gasping in pain.
It hurts more than heartbreak, more than a bruise, more than a slap. Tears spot your lash line, threatening to fall with one more well-aimed, brutal thrust. Spidery fingers dance along your waist, tracing a line towards your neck. He grips your chin and forces you to look upon a crowd of terrified faces, all ogling with bated breath. Ace is watching and so is Deuce, albeit through the cracks in his hands.
"What did you hope to achieve—to prove—by defying me?" he demands, his grip a deadly vise. "That I could be in the wrong? That all I've worked tirelessly for, all that I've done, is wrong?"
"Riddle..." You wince in your futile attempt to pull away. "Riddle, please... I... I'm sorry, but please... You're hurting me..."
He turns your head towards him, eyes ablaze with a furious tempest, and he leans closer, pinning you with startling ease. His cock presses up against your insides, enveloped tightly in your walls, and you shudder through the discomfort and the agony. A single claw traces dangerously close to your jugular.
"Speak up if you have something to say!"
"It hurts!" You gasp again, outright sobbing now. "It hurts! Please..."
"It's a punishment," he sneers, glaring disapprovingly. "It's meant to impart a lesson—one learned through pain. If you understand this, stop sniveling and respond appropriately."
You're not sure which is worse: humiliation at the hands of someone you considered a friendly acquaintance or the fact that, no matter how villainous he may be, you only wish for him to return to himself. You'd never wish this fate on anyone, but maybe it's your too-big heart that makes it impossible to hate him. You don't hate him. You can't.
And perhaps that's the worst part of all this.
You hang your head, defeated and devoid of hope. "Yes, Dorm Leader..."
And so he teaches you and all those who witness the devastating spectacle a lesson neither will ever forget.
Red is passionate and fiery, a reflection of roses and redamancy. But it is not a pleasant color. Not anymore. Not in the aftermath.
Red is the color of Riddle and Heartslabyul and blood and pain and anger. And every time you spy the slowly healing marks from that day, you feel it all over you. Red everywhere, inside and out. Externally, you may heal with all matter of magical cures, but internally it's not an easy fix.
So red is no longer a comfortable color. You wish you could look upon it and admire it for what it is: a color. But that proves impossible, for a color that is so highly revered as pretty does not evoke pretty feelings for you.
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