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The room is bigger than he remembers, as if while he was gone it had been reordered in a new majesty. Or maybe reshaped to make him feel smaller, either is likely. His Lord is clever and spiteful - though he supposes the apple doesn't fall far from the tree there, so how could he protest?
There's a good chance that the whole of him will be unravelled in this place, on his knees before his king, all the pages of his story set alight until there's nothing left but streaks of ash where he trod.
Well, it's nice to leave a little something behind.
He doesn't bother to hide his amusement, there's no point here, where all secrets are Dream's to know.
For all that he'd slipped the leash entirely there was never any doubt that a hand would slide into his collar eventually, that it would drag him kicking and screaming right back into the dreaming, shaken until he unclenched his teeth and dropped whatever hope of freedom he might have held.
Had there ever been a hope for him, really? He's never been one to lie to himself. To choke other people on them, yes. But to lie to himself? Never.
The inevitability of it leaves him reckless, Dream has never objected to the stretch of his smile.
"What am I to do with you?" Dream makes it a question but he knows perfectly well that his opinion is irrelevant, whatever Dream wishes the future to be will come true. A nightmare can only live in the world for so long after all. And it has to be said he'd made a very poor show of loyalty and a poorer show of reverence.
"I imagine you have an idea already."
The words are clearly not what Dream wanted to hear.
"No arguments? No excuses? No apologies?"
Oh that last one stings, he can tell. To have something so carefully created for a purpose throw off its own yoke and slip free - oh, not really free but enough of a pretence that it has to smart. Dream's obedient servant. Dream's construct. Dream's Corinthian.
The smile doesn't bring the irritation he'd thought, instead there is something softer, a more complicated emotion straining underneath. He stretches tall in his throne of dream stuff, the angles of him changing.
He knows his own skin and bones are a construct of thought and imagination not wholly his own. But he also knows that Dream is a messy ocean in comparison, with near infinite worlds to pluck a consciousness from, and he takes ownership of them without a second thought. Some would call that arrogance but it's been true for so many ages of the universe that he's not sure how a coherent personality lives there at all. That it isn't constantly swept away by the tide. After all, there are far older and nastier things than him that know how to dream.
Should he prepare himself to be introduced to a few of them, a nightmare for a nightmare, perhaps? Dream has a cruelty in him that even his sharpest creations know to steer clear of. Well, most of them, he's always been too reckless for his own good and he likes to think he knows how to turn a blade.
"You seem determined to vex me at every turn." Dream folds amusement into the words but they don't quite seep through the pastry. "Do you truly have no respect?"
"Should a watch respect a watchmaker? Or just tell the time?" he wonders aloud. Do what you were made for, Corinthian. Be nothing but what I expect of you, Corinthian. You can be replaced.
Dream reaches out and the soft, trailing edge of his shirt is caught, the barest motion urging him forward onto the steps of what has always been a throne, probably before there were ever such things as kings. For all that nothing Dream makes is real anywhere but here, no matter how much he likes to pontificate on the subject.
"Do you feel I have given you inadequate instruction?"
He doesn't remember any instructions. Nothing beyond 'be the horror that drives them,' backwards or forwards it had never mattered. His job was to test the way they feared and what they did when they were afraid. But you can only watch people make stupid decisions for so long before you stuck a knife in them for the fucking audacity of it. They made it too easy to take from them.
And honestly, you don't have to make any decisions if you're dead. There's a freedom in that, for all its finality.
It seems having the temerity to have his own thoughts counts as inattention. Because there is a layer of displeasure in the way the long darkness of Dream's coat moves. He knows how many things live in there, how deep it goes. The darkness isn't the absence of stars, it's just the places they can't reach.
Dream slides a cold finger into the bridge of his glasses, hooking effortlessly at what should be simple plastic but somehow, after so long, isn't quite as simple anymore. It's been a long time since Dream laid hands on him. He'd remembered the chill but had somehow forgotten the touch, the inhuman smoothness, and the way the casual shape of his fingers seems to take his ability to be held as a given.
"Look at me when I am talking to you."
He is always looking, he does little else. He looks and he covets and he seethes while turning his bluntest teeth on the world and calling it a smile.
The drag is not slow, taking the veiled darkness away from him in a way that he would never allow anyone else to do, revealing the dreaming in a subtle shade of vermilion.
"I have no excuses." Would he offer any if he had, or would he keep them laced to his chest? Who knows. Who knows. "I slipped free. I did as I pleased."
"You told the time," Dream says, something sharper there now though the amusement is a little more real. "As a good watch should."
He bites, because what else is there to do? "I have always been a good watch."
"Indeed you have," Dream agrees. "Though not always a quiet one."
The messy, suggestive tangle of that thought is deeper than he intends to query. What does a god who listens to a world's dreams know about quiet?
"Would you have me be something else?"
"I would have you not roaming the mortal world slaughtering indiscriminately." The fingers that had been idle on the throne arm slide around his jaw at the words, digging into his flesh in a blessedly real demonstration of displeasure.
"I was many things but never indiscriminate."
"There is a limit to the patience I have with you." The words are quiet but Dream rarely says things he doesn't mean.
If he had more hope he might squirm on the hook, but a hundred years has been enlightening, he's not half so starved as he had been before. He knows the punishment for the extent of his misbehaviour.
"Are you still my Corinthian?"
That one is unfair. Bruising.
"Always have been, always will be."
The expression is dubious, an unwillingness to see anything but the faces that his constructs turn on the world, to dig deeper. Their hopes, desires, obsessions and distractions are irrelevant and go unnoticed. He can't help the way his teeth grind at the thought, at the certainty of it.
"Your disobedience is -"
"Understandable," he finishes. "If you know me as well as you pretend to."
He almost regrets the sharpness but there's only so tightly he can hold the thrashing need to be unmade or forgiven, or forgiven and then unmade. There always have to be excuses and explanations and -
His thoughts scatter into nothing when his chin is lifted, the edge of a thumb tracing the contours of his face. He's never been touched like this. Bare-faced and too honest with nothing to turn on the world.
"It seems I am always chasing you, in some capacity."
"Maybe that's why I run?" The words come out rough and it's just the tip of his jaw, the over-stretch of his neck. For all that he bites and he yearns, fruitlessly, like a dog on a chain.
"Maybe if you came home more often you would find me more agreeable."
He bites down on the words that come on the heels of that, refuses to let them slip from any mouth, the idea that Dream could ever find himself daring to be agreeable. Perish the thought, the world would stop turning first. He finds himself laughing anyway and once it's free there's no stopping it, there's no curbing it, or taming it.
The hand on his face finds his jaw again, gripping tightly.
"Open your mouth," Dream tells him.
An interesting phrasing, for something like him.
"Which one?"
A thumb digs in, blue eyes considering him like a blank canvas with potential but nothing more.
"All of them." The words curl out soft, as if there isn't some quiet blasphemy in the suggestion, or perhaps it's deeper than that. Peeling back everything he's made of and showing his rotten insides. But he can't find it in himself to say no, to do anything but tip his head back and give his master everything he asks for. Isn't that all he's wanted all along, the attention, the quiet demand to show off. To be more than he was made to be?
Not like this.
No, exactly like this, he's too proud of himself to bother lying, let him have his grubby wants, let him be everything Dream made him. If he wants to get a good look at his work, see where time has sharpened his edges and left specks of rot where he hadn't bothered to look. Let him feel it the same way he has. You made me imperfect, you didn't plane the edges or tighten the screws and now the storm has got in. He wants to laugh, he wants to strip himself open and point out every mistake, every fault line.
He could -
A thumb skates up his cheek, a soft cold thing that's only barely pretending to be human, it presses to his cheek and then where the rolling curved bone of his eye socket would be, if he had anything so simple. And then it touches teeth. A proprietary and steady pressure that steals all the air and all the words and all the spite from him - for just as long as it takes for it to slip through the gap and plunge inside.
His mouth is already open.
All of them, all of them.
But nothing he'd ever lifted to his sight has dared to slip so deep, to touch the hungry void woven out of nightmare and shadow. A noise he'd never made before escapes him, wavering out like a crack in the world.
"Nothing to say for yourself," Dream asks, voice a slow and unaffected measure of curiosity.
Nothing, but perhaps a ragged plea for Dream to venture deeper, to dig holes in him until he shudders apart and splinters into nothing. You can't fill a void but that doesn't mean it's not hungry, or that it won't let you try, gape wider and drag the world in. Past when it's gripped by the throat and made to stop. Stop. Stop.
If Dream had wanted a creature inclined to be sated then he should have made him that way to start with.
A second hand cups the other side of his face, fingers taking the briefest pause in the sweep of his hair before a second thumb touches the pounding space of his temple, still naked. A blurred singular vision of the world, a thumb lodged to the root with a dispassionate idleness that leaves his spine shuddering. The other drifts higher, smooths the shape of his face and then rolls a question across his lower lid.
Part of him croaks a protest, unsure if he could bear to be all but blind under the sliding searching push of another. But it's too late for that, he's already tipping his head, already begging without words. How horribly fucking base of him. A breathless noise which isn't a laugh meets the empty space full of teeth, spread too wide and too hungry, hovering on the edge of a bite and stilled only by the knowledge that it might be the end of him, though he's not going to pretend the thought isn't appealing.
Isn't that what Dream deserves from him, a bite to the hand that's barely ever fed him?
But he also knows whatever Dream is made of he has no power to leave marks unless he wants him too. He has a half a mind to ask, to drag out some honesty from his maker. 'Let me dig my teeth in you, let me gnaw upon your bones like a mad thing, let me bite and bite until I have exhausted the fury in me and I am slack-jawed in surrender.'
Is this to debase him or to please Dream? Some of both? Does it matter when he's content to kneel at Dream's feet and feel nothing so much as an unravelling, the only mouth left unfilled is the only one that breathes, though it doesn't need to. It still does, in harsh cracked breaths and gasping protesting noises that he would call bliss if he wasn't a red-wet thing made of ill-fitting parts.
Blind, he still hears the slithering fall of midnight cloth as thumbs dig down and in, manoeuvring him closer like a bridled horse, or a leashed dog.
"Perhaps there is something to be said for bringing you to heel," Dream says idly, with as little care as he gives to anything else.
He would chafe if he hadn't worn himself raw already. Perhaps he deserves something less than contempt. He's the one who gnawed himself free, unwanted, uncared for, untreasured.
His complaints fall aside when skin the temperature of a winter morning slides over his shoulder, holds him still, holds him down. The picture is so effortlessly, casually lewd that he finds himself dizzy.
This is the most his lord has ever touched him, the most he has felt of him, more even than the grasping hands at his face, speared into it with an arrogant sort of ownership. A strange delight that for once he chooses not to buck against. He has a moment to think of impossible things, of pale flesh and inhuman desires and majesty beyond reckoning.
"Open, Corinthian, make yourself useful." There is a breath of amusement in his throat, gaping blind like a supplicant for all desire - before there is suddenly a cock in his mouth and the world splinters and cracks in half.
He is not expecting something so simple, when a gesture could shape the world on a whim and punishments come in shades of aquamarine and violet. To be drawn in for a demand that's so familiar to him, a messy, human sort of desire, all weakness stripped from the act in favour of control, a lesson in obedience and in restraint. His tongue spreads to take the weight of it, helpless to do anything but be what is desired. It's not as if he's a stranger to this, though maybe he should be insulted at the faint, satisfied way that Dream draws him in and calls him 'acceptable.' As if he's a newly made thing, all small terrors and sharp needs. He hates the way he quivers at the tone nonetheless.
He wants to bite, he wants to bite so much but instead he sinks and takes the whole, nothing so pedestrian as a static shape but always a weight, always a fit for his mouth even as his eyes are plumbed deeper, eye teeth gnawing gently on long thumbs that taste like ice crystals and disappointment.
He hates it, hates it. But he couldn't bear for it to stop, couldn't bear to be dragged from his seat and left empty, mouths cold and wet.
He's not even sure there is a height to reach, or if Dream intends either of them to. There's simply the task he's been set to. A thing that leaves heat clenching in his borrowed chest and his ill-made stomach. The way his pants stretch tight in a way that hides nothing, and he doubts it has been missed.
Two competing hungers leave him breathless, the familiar hunger under the skin that wants to half devour another, overlaid with the quiet filth of nightmares. But also a hunger to be a thing fit for purpose, to be judged worthy and then tested to the point of destruction.
There's no room for his own playful games here, there is only competence or failure. Disappointment or forgiveness.
He wants neither.
He wants both.
But he does want, without question.
A thumb slides from his eye, leaving it soft and empty, white teeth snapping at nothing as the world in shades of grey and red slithers into murky focus, until Dream says his name like an admonishment and slides two fingers inside in its place.
It's like a starburst, a drive that cores him to the centre and his mouth slackens around Dream's cock on a wet noise of startled confused pleasure.
It's not fair, it's not fair that he knows so much.
There is nothing like this in all the centuries before and he has fingers tangled in black fabric, slippery-cool and unearthly. Impertinent liberties being taken - but all he can do is try and gasp around the fingers thrusting knuckle deep in his eye.
The other thumb drags saliva down his cheek and curves around his lower jaw, urges it into movement again. A pointed reminder that he is supposed to be sucking. He's not sure that he can, there's a hungry thrashing ball of darkness somewhere he can't reach, touched by Dream's fingers in a way that feels like blasphemy.
He sets back to his task though, a long slow suction as the other eye takes fingers that are wet and less careful than the others, the plunge is greedy as if there are secrets to carve out of him. There's a hint of too much to them, of too deep. The sensation pulls a muffled, breathless laugh from him. To be fucked too deeply, poor inexperienced Corinthian.
He sinks down, because he can do little else, feels his throat open, swallow, tug down in a way that finally draws a whispered breath from his lord.
He is filled.
Utterly.
"There is no part of you that I am incapable of touching, Corinthian. There is no part of you that is too deep for me to reach."
His throat spasms around a slow thrust, the first movement Dream has made on his own. He feels taut as a wire, drawn sharp and vulnerable and raw.
"I will always find you, and drag you back here and show you why the waking world will always leave you hungry."
The pace is a shade away from greedy, both eyes speared open and effectively blind as his mouth is filled - the first shocky punches of greed to the movements, to the way he's held to the throne in an inescapable grip and fucked.
His mouth is wide open, knees spread and there's an eager rattling orgasm waiting somewhere he's never felt one before. Part of him wants to hate that, that he has no choice how he's made, or what he hungers for, only that Dream knows, Dream decides.
For all his freedoms he is and always will be Dream's creature.
Dream's attack dog.
He belongs on the black, star-scattered floor beside his throne with a cock in his mouth and a scathing comment on his behaviour on that perfect tongue. It does not matter if there's no pleasure in the skating dredge of pale fingers, because he's already lost. He already belongs.
The garbled words he can't push free come with a tangle of fingers in his hair - impossible considering the ones still driven into each eye, but he knows better than to question.
"Perhaps I have been remiss, not feeding you sooner."
It's not a promise, but it's not a dismissal either. There is something to the way Dream grips him and guides him and fills him, rather than leaving him on the stone with a lesson and a slow-banked fury.
He's still not expecting the choice to feel it, to be a living thing before the throne. The surprised sighing catch in a long, ancient throat and the fluttering twitch of flesh that leaves a spill of liquid over his tongue.
It should feel like he's won something. It shouldn't -
Shouldn't.
But he's still garbling a wet, messy sound of surrender as he's kicked ruthlessly over the edge, losing all composure and moaning like he's in any way earned this reward. He's held still, impossible hand tight to the back of his neck, a ghost of fingers in his hair as his body clenches and shakes and finally comes back to itself.
"I expect you shall not stray again," Dream breathes, and the words are sharp and cold and commanding, they bind him in a way that no magic and no folded splinters of dimension ever could.
The Corinthian is whole, and though he is messy and sharp and monstrous he is a perfect fit.
He sees nothing while he's held in place, while he's filled and emptied and unravelled but not unmade.
And when fingers slither wet from his face he is buried in Dream's lap, as if in prayer, seeing nothing but the stars.