[ scared ] sender scares receiver / scary del hours

she elongates. stretches her form until it's unrecognisable, starburst colours spiralling from her pores until even the corinthian has to look away, its eyes burning. it isn't the physical transformation that jars him--he's a nightmare, after all--but the way she warps time-space around him. warps his sense of sound, sense of smell. his sight. there's nothing he can do about it and it freaks him the fuck out.

"stop it," he starts to say, but his voice comes out wrong. or he hears it wrong, anyway. like he's suddenly forgotten every language he's ever known. he starts to bristle, disliking the feeling that she has the upper hand over him, knowing that any defence he might muster is a poor defence indeed against a riled Endless, and turns on her--

--only to flinch back when a twisted facsimile of his late creator looms over him. limbs all wrong. bleeding colour. it looks nothing like Morpheus, objectively, but it still represents him. for a nightmare, creature for whom symbols have unimaginable power, it is as good as a mirror image of him. he doesn't have room in his aching skull to wonder why she's doing this to him, or how she feels about her late brother--who still lives, in another form, but is utterly changed.

the current dream is the corinthian's master, but he does not always feel like its creator. does not inspire the same screaming dread in his heart that morpheus did. does.

the corinthian clutches its own head, snarling. voices in triplicate when it begs: "stop."

@ohsunshine

❝my ghost won’t associate with your ghost.❞ / from del for dream

The faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. He observes his sulking sibling; she has hidden herself to the side of his throne, arms around her knees and chin resting on them, pouting. A puddle of colour surrounds her, like spilled gasoline in sunlight.

"You and I will not have ghosts, little sister," says Dream calmly, and crouches down at her side. He extends his hand to her, palm-up: from his fingertip a butterfly unfurls, plain white, a blank canvas for her to play with. It flutters its wings and seems to wait for her.

"But... if we did, my ghost would be much grieved to be disowned."

Del's giving him a new pair of glasses: heart-shaped sunglasses 🕶️

He looks incredible.

" you have a fairly scary reputation. " / from del to graves!

"as i should," graves deadpans, sinking his shovel deep into the soil. he doesn't know why he does this. even when he's not working, he does it: digs up dream-graves, dream-bodies, like fucking sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill. it's not even that there's nothing else to do. it's the Dreaming, after all, containing all of imagination. he could be doing anything else. but then, cats have to scratch; dogs have to dig; rats need to chew. maybe this is just what he does.

up comes the shovel again, dirt flung over his shoulder, the gravedigger huffing with the strain of it. "folks know i shouldn't exist, probably. that's what does it."

@ohsunshine: ❛ i scare you? ❜ / from delirium — WYNONNA EARP STARTERS

yes, emphatically. all the endless do, in the way it scares people to peer over the side of a boat at sea and perceive the fathomless inky black of simultaneous nothing and countless unknown many. but most only frighten up to a point: dream is concerning in concept but comfortingly tangible, the usual dread of nightmares padded with the familiarity of interaction and the memory of an all-too-human show of mercy. death crowds every corner of his life, unseen but felt, and though he's never met her in person, the gory aftermath of her presence never fails to paint a shape that terrifies him.

and those are the two he knows are real; the rest he's only ever read about or heard rumors of. distant possibilities, whimsical embodiments of qualities he's always known to be inherent in life, in living — scary not because of their power, but because of how impossibly far away they are from the key contexts in which their domains take root. the superiority of gods with all the moral clarity of kids.

but HER — delirium is different. she's too close. the spiral of her speech tastes like bitter medicine and sour wine, crowds his mind's eye with long-forgotten faces and makes his train of thought do a whirlygig off the rails and take to the bleedin' skies. she looks like astra, looks like mercury, looks like both and neither, and the thing is, she scares him the most out of all the endless because when she's near, he can't tell the difference between where his mind starts and delirium ends. ( and isn't that hauntingly familiar. )

he squeezes his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. kick the fear, constantine, that slimy coiled thing twisting knots in your gut; it's not doing you any sodding good. ' don't take it personally, luv, i'm sure yer a fine gal. ' she caught him off-guard, is all. they do that, the endless: not a group for social niceties, like phoning ahead. or knocking. or . . . anything. ' lovely, er. hair you've got. used t'do mine like that, back in the seventies. though i don't s'pose you lot are in much need of box dye, eh? '

Am I annoying you yet? Am I annoying you yet? Am I annoying you yet? / from delirium!

If Severen had any indication of what else might linger in the place the Corinthian had come from (although it had told him these "Endless" were present everywhere and always), he may have had second thoughts about keeping its company. The bright, exuberant girl of many colors had been dancing about him, blinding him for what seemed an eternity--or perhaps that was his waning patience. How she had found him was a mystery, though likely she had tracked the path of his sometimes hunting companion. What caught the nightmare's attention, had somehow ensnared her own. "Yes", he growled between his gritted teeth, thinking his daughter in her infancy had not even been this jubilantly irritating. Maybe he should introduce them, maybe it would give this horrid sprite something else to do. "Sonuvabitch!" He winced again as she passed by his eyes, pupils contracting to pinpricks. The nocturnal creature reflexively tucked his chin, throwing a sleeved arm over his face. That was when he noticed his trophies looked different. Forgetting her intolerable radiance, Severen hurriedly shrugged out of his jacket, gaping at it slack jawed. All of his medals, service patches, stolen medallions, and memories of kills of past were now a random mishmash of flowers, strangely colored animals (some of which were alive), and buttons displaying child-like illustrations . Horrified, he stared up at her; never before so stricken. "Whad'jyou do..."

let's go down the slide together. / from del! the slide is a big wriggling tongue that goes down into a ball bit (the balls are eyeballs). just for him!

With true and genuine enthusiasm, and no small amount of appreciation for the effort Delirium put into this, the Corinthian's reaction is best summarised thusly:

YIPPEE!!!

“Look, you’re either going to help, or you aren’t. Which one is it going to be?” / from del. Time to prank dream.

"Del..."

As if it will help, the Corinthian pinches the bridge of his nose, sunglasses pushed up to his eyebrows, teeth gritted behind his eyelids. There's always a sort of pseudo-headache involved when Delirium is around, the same way being around Desire makes him hungry or looking at Destruction for too long makes him want to quit the Dreaming forever--but this one feels almost like a mortal's headache might. Like the kind you'd get if you were so, so tired of someone being a pain in the ass.

There's a long silence. At least, there's a long silence on his part while he weighs the pros and cons of assisting Delirium in her latest... endeavour.

Cons: Dream's disapproval, potential uncreation. Pros: It would be so, so funny, and doesn't the Dreamlord like him too much to unmake him, really?

He throws up his hands.

"Fuck it. Fine."

[mistletoe] from del

A kiss is pressed to his cheek and his whole body bursts into colour: flamingo pink, sunflower gold, acid green and neon blue flare wild through his skin, his clothes, his hair. It makes him tingle like a carbonated drink, and it hurts too, like pressing his hand onto a hot oven.

Nothing about Delirium makes sense. She is governed by so few rules. It's part of why this Corinthian, just like his predecessor, finds itself pleased to be her friend, and not just another of her sibling's occasionally-interesting playthings.

"'Tis the season," drawls the Corinthian in three slightly dizzy voices at once, and kisses the top of her head. They both glow.

" please do not ruin my happy thoughts, your face is very... children will cry if they look at this face. " / from del to dream!

There is no response.

She's right, though. Children would cry if they could see him right now. If, of course, they could understand what they were looking at.

Delirium appears behind the Corinthian, floating two foot off the ground so she can cover his eyes with her hands. She's dressed as a pumpkin whose face is carved into an ever-shifting rictus of terror. "Trick or treat!" she screeches, dropping her hands and appearing in front of him. She holds out a hand, palm up. "Treat. Now. Or I'll trick you so bad."

The nightmare scoffs a little, his hands on her wrists the moment they cover his eyes, but there's no force behind it--save perhaps a little tightening of his fingers when she shrieks like a banshee in his ear.

"You want a treat? Okay." From his pocket (which contains a great many things, not all of which would reasonably fit inside a real living creature's pocket) the Corinthian withdraws a single small, fleshy organ. He drops it into Delirium's palm with a wet squelch, grinning. "I was saving this for later, but since it's you..."

@ohsunshine (Delirium) is making grabby hands.

He takes the little plastic teeth, not having much choice in the matter, but her words make something cold slip up his spine. It settles at the back of his neck: a cool, unyielding pressure, like a pale hand resting there, a silent threat.

Go on. Chatter like them.

He laughs, but it doesn't feel like a joke. The sense of cold deepens. He thinks of marionettes and circuses, feeling dread in his heart, and wonders if she knows. It never feels like his thoughts are his own, these days, and he always wonders if that's how it felt for his previous self, before he--

Maybe I'll make one of you like that.

"Ha," the Corinthian half-says, half-barks. He watches her swallow the box, chilled not by the monstrous warping of her physical manifestation but by the reminder that by most accounts, he is a thing. A tool at best, a toy at worst: he can be reshaped, remade, repurposed. He can be copied, by his master's hand or another's, and changed to suit anyone's fancy.

He imagines himself with comical, chattering teeth, and shudders.

"I don't think the Dreamlord would like you copying his work."

SLAP OR KISS / del & graves

a bull-like snort, steam curling from the nostrils of the skull.

"like i'm stupid enough to slap one of the Endless. here." he presses two fingers to the mouth of his skull and makes a little mwah sound, then touches delirium's forehead with the same two fingers. "best i can do."

why don’t we spend the day together tomorrow, just you and me? / del @ dream!

The King of Dreams sighs, rubbing a pale hand over its eyes.

If Death were here, he might confide to her and only to her that exhaustion still ebbs and gnaws at his spirit. That he is more powerful than he has been in eons, his kingdom restored and renewed, his subjects in their proper places, and yet...

And yet.

No matter. She is not here. There is only Delirium and the fish that float around her, dream-fish infected by her presence. Morpheus does not change them back. He watches them roll and bubble in their changing forms, adjusting to the transition, their new colours striking and wild. They are not what they were. Is he?

"You know why. I have responsibilities..." It is neither the first nor the last time they will have this conversation. Dream does not like to disappoint her, though he knows he does, as he does all of his siblings. He searches, unhappy, for a solution. Something to ease the sting, to keep her company instead of himself.

The Corinthian? No. It has been given far too much freedom already, and is rarely a good influence on anyone, whether it claims friendship with Delirium or not. Another dream, then. Something harmless, conscientious. Less inclined to feast on anything it's given.

No. She will know he is only trying to placate her.

He offers nothing, then: only his decision, and his silence, and his stubborn refusal to reconsider.

you... brought this here for me? from del!

The second Corinthian's expression is hard to read. It doesn't smile very often, unlike its predecessor, and it carries itself with a kind of permanent guarded air that even Del can't always get past, for all that the nightmare is obviously attached to her.

"Yes," he says finally, hands pushed into his pockets. The standing black mirror he'd brought is already starting to warp, to become something more fitting for Madness. He watches it shift as he talks, feeling familiarity in the way its smooth surface warps and fragments. "It isn't a part of me, but it came from my... place. I think it will let you call for me, if you need to."

I think it might function as a doorway, he doesn't say. And I have its reflection.

“Come watch the sunset with me.” from del! it's a Madness sunset.

Sunset is a generous word for it: to the Corinthian, it's a kaleidoscope of old newspaper clippings, the feeling of stepping on gravel barefoot, the smell of a bright orange shag carpet someone had chewed and spit out, and the deep, dusky red of blood spilling into water. It's interesting, but the only part that evokes real feeling in him is the red, the thing he can see (or taste, depending on how you look at it). It makes him feel--

Hm. Like he's losing it. Surprise surprise.

He's probably been here too long already.

"I have to get back," Corinthian tells her once the newspaper clippings start getting shredded by violent bursts of eels and bad Yelp reviews. There's a headache forming behind both eyemouths, which is impressive, considering he can't really get headaches. "I'll be missed."

They both know that isn't really true.