Chapter Text
*
Morpheus could hardly believe his eyes. He had to blink to make sure he hadn't simply imagined her in his desperate state. But even as he did, the truth remained in front of him, stubborn and real like truths are wont to be.
Jessamy was here.
She was here, finally here, his trusted raven, his dearest companion, in all her white and black feathered glory, flapping between the rafters above his cage, as determined as a charging bull, yet as subtle as a spider in her mission to save her lord. She craned her neck to survey her surroundings, stilling entirely and hiding in the shadows when she heard a noise coming from beyond the heavy iron gate. When the guards didn't appear, she jumped off her perch and onto the sphere. Eyes wide and growing wet at the edges, Morpheus stood up, reaching out his hand for her. She pecked the glass where his palm rested and cawed silently, looking right back at him with her beautiful raven eyes, so black he could see his own emaciated reflection in them. He couldn't feel her; the glass kept their physical forms separate, while the binding circle refused to allow the connection between the Lord of Dreams and his raven to rekindle. But in those eyes, he could see every facet of every emotion she felt, from grief to joy, from apprehension to hope glinting like a separate jewel, so familiar to him he could barely stop himself from trembling.
He could feel his eyes grow wet as he watched her flap lower and start pecking the orb. Against it, she looked as small as a sparrow, but her beak was sharp and hard, and her strikes as heavy and unceasing as a blacksmith's hammer. Morpheus knelt down in front of her, helpless to do anything but watch her efforts.
When he saw the first grain of glass chink away, his heart doubled its pace, hope, clear and young reigniting in his chest. Their eyes met again for a brief moment, triumph meeting triumph, and Morpheus almost smiled. She could do it. She would save him.
But then…
He heard footsteps coming from beyond the gate. Then came a clang of keys and a creak of old metal opening. He averted his gaze, and his heart leapt from his chest and ceased to beat entirely.
Alexander Burgess stood there, shaking like a leaf, aiming a rifle straight at Jessamy. She hadn't seen him and was still religiously pecking the glass, another crumb falling away. There was something cold in young Burgess' eyes, a fragile fear of a rabbit willing to hunt down a snake to win the wolf's favour. He placed his palm on the trigger.
Morpheus breathed in and didn't breathe out. Instead he fell forward and banged both his fists on the glass, right in front of Jessamy. She croaked in shock, falling away from the cage, and almost simultaneously–
Alexander Burgess took his shot.
The bullet exploded from his rifle, striking the glass right where Jessamy had made her tiny crater, and breaking through almost without losing momentum, only to bury itself straight in Dream's shoulder.
He gasped, more from shock than from pain. He grabbed his shoulder, and his hand came away shaking and wet and…
Red.
He looked back up, through the jagged hole in the glass. His gaze landed first on Jessamy, floating mid air, horrified beyond making a sound. Then his eyes slipped past her and settled onto scared brown ones. Alex's breath hitched, and the rifle fell to the floor with a clatter. The sound echoed through the cellar, entered Dream's cage and bounced off his walls and every second sounded more and more like another gunshot. Past it, he could barely hear new footsteps coming down the staircase, could barely register that Jessamy was back on the sphere, clawing at the hole as she tried and failed to widen it. She called to him, cawing and crooning with her lovely voice words he could now almost understand. "Stay with me, my lord," and "I'm not leaving you here." His vision began to swim as the sound of men shouting joined her croak. The mirror glass and the darkness of the cellar and the poppies staining his hand began to swirl and melt together.
"What is wrong with you?! I told you not to break the glass!"
He realised something hurt. Something hurt very very badly.
"You were supposed to shoot the bird!"
Things shifted, Morpheus found. The ceiling moved up and the shadowy figures of the men sailed down. Only when his head thudded against the glass did he realise that he had been the one who to fall down. He heard Jessamy's caw and met her terrified gaze.
He shook his head.
She just stared at him for a few seconds, and Morpheus was certain a tear would have rolled from her eye had she still been human. Then she screeched and pushed off the glass and flew away.
"Kill the bird, kill the fucking bird, you imbecile!" yelled a voice that sounded a whole lot like the elder Burgess. There was an agonised scream and a wet sound of tearing skin, followed by a litany of curses. All the while, the sound of her wings grew more and more distant until at last, it was gone. And Morpheus was left alone.
He stared at the blood spreading from his shoulder to form a lake at the bottom of the sphere. As darkness began to envelop him, he wondered whether his captors would allow all of it to seep from his body until it filled his cage to create a grotesque parody of an aquarium. And leave him to drown in it.
"What do we do now?"
Then someone turned off the lights and the cellar went dark.
*
Blood, red and stinking and human dripped from Jessamy's talons as she flew into the sky, away from the manor. In the canopy of a black alder, she spotted a young squirrel jumping from one branch to another. She narrowed her gaze, folded her wings and dove straight at it. The stupid creature hadn't noticed her and barely squeaked when claws dug into its neck. It was dead within seconds. Jessamy tore out its tiny heart and liver with far more force than was necessary and ate them, then left the corpse for a nearby murder of crows. She was up in the air again, flying off to a place she couldn't name with furious beats of raven wings, and now blood dripped from her beak as well.
*
It hurt.
"Careful, careful."
It hurt as if there were a red hot poker stuck in his shoulder, prodding and poking and stabbing him like a piece of meat.
"Don't disturb it."
And there were new voices around him, just as male and husky as the guards' but new. Tinkling accompanied them, alongside the occasional hammering and whirring. The cold surface beneath his body shuddered when either of those joined in.
Glass cracked.
"Careful!"
What were they doing?
"We're dead meat if we take it apart the wrong way and the whole thing collapses."
"Think I don't know that?"
Morpheus tried opening his eyes to see what was happening, to see what they were doing to him but found the task impossible. He could feel something else, he found. Past the pain and the disorientation. Something in his shoulder, something foreign and sharp and metal cold. He would have shivered had he possessed the strength to move.
"Are you done yet?"
The whirring and the hammering stopped abruptly as a third voice joined the other two. It was that familiar voice that had spent fourteen years demanding favours of him that were not his to give. It was more a bark than a series of human words, sharp and filled with barely contained violence.
"No, boss, four panels left to go."
No answer came aside from a set of footsteps approaching, accompanied with a steady tap of a cane against cement, as deafening in the cellar as church bells announcing a funeral.
Tap
Tap
Tap
Then they stopped. The cane scraped the floor and came to rest on the glass with another soft tap. Morpheus could feel the hate in his bones when that gaze landed on him.
"Try not to spill the blood when you pull him out. It could disturb the circle."
The words were so casual. So simple. As if Burgess were instructing them to put honey in his tea instead of milk.
"Yes, boss."
The whirring continued and the glass cage began to shiver again. Something cracked again and came off with a tinkle as the sound of the cane striking floor drew away.
Tap
Tap
Tap…
There was another crack, and Morpheus felt cold musty air gush into his face where a glass panel used to prevent it from entering. They were disassembling the cage.
He shivered as dread settled into the pit of his stomach.
And passed out again.
*
What should she do?
Jessamy was perched on a lone rock sticking from a cliff face that stretched from one side of the horizon to the other, its roots sunk in a sea of mist, its topmost edge too high up for anyone to see, let alone reach. It was one of the many borderlands of the Dreaming, the mists below leading to any realm one might imagine, from the Waking World to Faerie, from the Garden of Destiny to Hell. That is if one could navigate their treacherous currents.
Jessamy could. And would, had she any idea where she should go.
Foolishly she'd considered herself strong enough to save Lord Morpheus by herself, but she knew better by now. She'd failed and he had paid the price. Now she had to fix it. It was simple. It should have been simple. But she couldn't ask Lucienne or the Guardians of the Gate or Gault or Mervyn for help. They were no ravens, they were not made to find their way in the Waking World. Some of them might not even be able to leave their posts. Back in the day, she might have asked the Corinthian for assistance; he was the most well-versed in the rituals of men after all. But she knew where him and Lord Morpheus stood, so that was firmly out of the question. Along with the rest of the Endless…
But without them, who was left?
He had acquaintances in the Waking World. A few stray gods, a ghost?, a fae, half a handful of mortals, most of whom had long died. She clicked her beak in frustration. She doubted any of them cared enough to risk their oh-so-precious life for Dream.
Then she remembered.
A day, back in 1789, when she had found the King of Dreams sat beneath a tree in Fiddler's Green, knees pressed to his chest, oblivious to her calls as he plucked one blade of grass after another from the meadow without thought. Only when she'd settled on top of his nest of raven hair and croaked straight into his ear, did he deign to tell her he'd just returned from his centennial meeting with the immortal Hob Gadling. He would divulge nothing more when she pressed, but he didn't need to. In her two hundred years of service, she had never seen the hard lines on his forehead smoothen out, his ever frowning lips twitching into something that could almost be called a smile and the black voids of his eyes filled with young stars.
Happy.
He'd been genuinely happy.
Looking down into the formless mist, echoes of Lord Dream's pained gasp filling her senses, she contemplated the name.
Hob Gadling then?
Could he still be alive?
"You better be a real one, Gadling," she muttered to herself as she shook the moisture off her feathers and dived off the rock, straight into the grey world below.
*
A loud metallic clang of the gates opening resounded through the cellar, throwing Morpheus out of his unconsciousness with the force of a battering ram. For a few moments, he just breathed, trying to calm himself. This all felt like that first night all over again when he'd been wrenched from his realm by that unceasing pull of human sorcery, bashed against the unforgiving ground only to wake up to the sight of mortals staring at his naked form. And in many ways it was exactly the same.
"Sleeping beauty awake yet?"
"Dunno, sir. He hasn't budged."
Opening his eyes, he found he lay sideways on the dirty cellar floor, curled up into an approximation of a foetal position, head resting behind his arms. His shoulder throbbed with distant pain, no longer bleeding, just a mess of filthy red and sickly black tissue. He knew the bullet was still inside. He could feel it.
"Can you hear me?"
But… there was something else. Something different. Something had changed. Then it occurred to him.
There was no more glass around him, no more metal beams holding it together. Just that oh so familiar circle, runes intact, strokes of a decade old brush as fresh looking as they had been on that first night. But no more glass. His breath caught in his throat.
He was free. He could climb to his knees, even with his hurting shoulder, and step across it, regaining access to his realm and all the power that entailed. Even without his tools, he could reach into its realm's deserts and put his captors to sleep in a blink of an eye. He forced his aching bones to move, to get his elbows and knees beneath him because at long last after fourteen years there was nothing stopping him, it was over, he was getting out, he was–
Something rattled.
Something metal.
And kept him trapped on the floor.
Barely daring to, knowing full well what he would see, he looked up, past the grains of dust on the floor, past the stained red skin of his arms and up to his hands only to find…
Two manacles wrapped around his wrists, a short chain connecting them to a metal ring in the ground he was certain hadn't been there before. They were hard steel, fear cold to the touch, stuck so close to his skin he could feel them already pressing a bruise to his joint. He tugged, once, with faint strength that did nothing but rattle the heavy chain. On instinct, he tried to curl his legs closer to his chest but found he was unable to do that as well. The manacles around his ankles were no less tight.
"C'mon, sleepy head, we know you're awake."
He stared at them. The chains might be long enough to perhaps allow him to sit up but not much more. That tiny spark of hope was squashed in his chest as the horrifying realisation dawned on him that he was still trapped, just the same as before, the only difference being that this time he wasn't sitting dignified in a cage but bound like an animal on the floor, Jessamy no longer with him and a throbbing bullet wound in his shoulder.
He shut his eyes, both against the pain and the water that was beginning to gather at the corners.
Then. There was laughter. Sick and raspy and malevolent and delighted , belonging to someone who saw him hurting and trapped and humiliated on the floor after a failed escape attempt, and found the sight a source of glee. There were no creatures in existence that could laugh a laugh such as this other than humans and the Devil himself. And Morpheus wished with his entire being that he hadn't allowed himself to forget in the last two hundred years just how cruel mankind could be.
"How do you like your new accommodations, Dream King?"
He pretended he could not hear the human approach. Pretended he could not hear the tap tap taps of his cane, the sound filled with such foreboding it would have made him shiver had he lacked the strength to resist the reflex. Then proceeded to pretend he couldn't feel the stinking breath on his face when Burgess stilled barely a couple of feet away from him, so terribly close and yet ever so careful not to disturb his precious circle.
"Are you even listening to me?!"
He'd come this close before, but there had always been that barrier to separate them. An angry man with his endless demands and requests and pleas and insults kept at a distance from the Endless being he kept trapped, just as foolishly stubborn as his captor, by a thin panel of glass. Before, it had always been something for Morpheus to hate, something through which he was stared at, something that trapped him. But now as he lay, naked and wounded and manacled on the ground, it seemed as if all this time, the sphere had been a source of protection rather than entrapment.
"Look at me!"
Without a word of warning, a hand shot out and grabbed his hair, yanking it from its hiding place behind his arms. Morpheus grit his teeth against the pain but refused to open his eyes.
"You think you can just keep on ignoring me, don't you? Think I'll croak soon enough and leave you in Alex's hands? Think he'll let you go after I'm dead?"
The grip tightened, bending his head so far back his neck began to hurt. Morpheus made no indication he was in any way inconvenienced.
"He'd want to fuck you first you know that, right? I'm well aware of his preferences. " He hissed out the last word as if it were poison. Morpheus did not wish to dwell on those words, not after seeing the younger Burgess aim a rifle at Jessamy. Not when he could no longer tell what he was capable of–
"Say something!"
It took a few moments to register and for his ears to stop ringing. His cheek stung and the grip on his hair was gone.
Burgess had just slapped him.
The shock of it alone was enough for Morpheus to finally open his eyes and look directly at Burgess. He was closer than he'd thought, leaning over the circle with his cane. There was a white cotton patch covering his left eye but failing in its task to hide the three deep gashes that went as high as the eyebrow, stitched together but still inflamed red. Morpheus didn't care to imagine the damage Jessamy must have done to the eye. But that didn't matter.
What did matter though, was the thin, almost white line the human's lips were pressed into, the wrinkling of old skin around his nose, the pulsating vein on his neck.
Roderick Burgess was seething.
"Think I have any more patience left in me after fourteen years ? After that fucking bird?!" His good eye narrowed and glinted with murder. Morpheus didn't want to keep watching him but dared not be the first one to look away.
"One day. One more blasted day of silence I give you, then mark my words," Burgess whispered as he raised his cane and very gently placed it on Morpheus' naked waist with a soft little tap. "If you refuse to speak, I won't stop beating you until you beg me to let you do anything but scream."
The cane lifted and fell again, the tap just as soft, just as innocent, but in the feel of hard wood against skin, Morpheus could sense a threat so great and inevitable it could only be likened to the explosions of grenades around the shaking forms of those soldiers unlucky enough to be stuck in the trenches of the Great War, who knew deep in their hearts it was only a matter of time before one of those far away bombs landed at their feet. And made slaughter of their bodies.
"Have I been clear enough?" Burgess hissed straight into Dream's ear. When he got no answer, he huffed and stood up, grunting like an old man.
"We will continue this tomorrow."
And with that, he walked away, with that dreadful rhythmic
Tap
Tap
Tap
Morpheus breathed in an imperceptible sound of relief and made to close his eyes. Then, inches away from his face, he noticed a single remaining puddle of blood the workers had forgotten to clean. In it, Morpheus could at first only see the reflection of his one wet blue eye, then his own features melted away only to be replaced by the unwashed, unkempt face of his sister Despair. She smiled a pleasant smile as she stabbed her fish hook ring into her bottom lip and pulled, ripping the flesh away with a squelch. Morpheus shut his eyes tight and hid his head behind his arms and pretended he had seen nothing.
He shuddered when the gate slammed closed and started counting the seconds until the sound of the cane returned.
*