Chapter Text
Three weeks had passed since their reconciliation, though time felt different now. The days and nights stretched not in loneliness but in presence, measured by the rhythm of Nell’s life. She worked nights, so he bent himself to her schedule. He learned the patterns of her city not as a distant observer but as one who chose to walk beside her.
Most afternoons she woke to him already there, his arms steady around her, his chest rising beneath her cheek in a rhythm that had become familiar. She would burrow closer for a lingering moment, inhaling the cool scent of night air and rain that clung to him, before the day pulled her upright. And always, when she lifted her face, his gaze was waiting, filled with a quiet recognition that steadied her more than any alarm clock.
Most evenings he rode with her to the hospital or back again, folded into the strange, mortal intimacy of commutes. On crowded trains, his hand brushed hers at the sway of the car. In dim stations, he placed his palm at the small of her back, steady as an anchor. On breaks, they shared sandwiches on benches, laughing quietly at pigeons who were bolder than they had any right to be. These moments were small, ordinary in scale. To him they felt monumental.
On a rare day off, she had taken him to Drunk Shakespeare, where actors delivered verse with wine-loosened tongues. He had laughed until his composure nearly broke, an unguarded sound that drew stares even from the stage. Another evening they ran along the lakeshore in pouring rain until they were soaked through and doubled over with laughter, mud streaking her leggings, water plastering his hair to his face. Between those larger nights were a thousand small permissions: bagel sandwiches on the beach after her shift, the hiss of coffee poured from a thermos while gulls circled overhead, her laughter caught mid-swing in an empty playground before he leaned down to kiss her with infinite care.
The Dreaming answered in kind. Where his will had once been a coiled thing, it now unfurled into motion, and the realm responded as if it too had been waiting to exhale. Threads that had hung limp lifted into pattern. Colors returned where they had dulled. Dreams regained their fragrance and vitality. Roses bloomed in lovers’ gardens with scent again. Children’s playgrounds sparkled with joy rather than flattening into sterile corridors. Even the library’s vast shelves seemed more patient, their rhythm restored.
In the creation chamber, his hands moved through raw matter like a musician finding a long-lost refrain. He shaped new dreams with ease, not out of grim necessity but because creation itself once again felt like joy. A nightmare took form beneath his fingers, not designed to terrorize but to teach: a mirror of cruelty that left its dreamers not shattered but changed. He placed mercy where once he might have placed only consequence. It was a small alteration, yet everything about it pleased him.
The rhythm broke when Lucienne appeared at the threshold. She held two objects in her arms with the care one reserved for relics: a book bound in deep navy leather, constellations of silver thread stitched across its cover, and a folded sheet of parchment sealed upon itself.
“My lord,” she said, her voice even but carrying a quiet awe. “Something remarkable arrived in the library this morning.”
He let the half-made dream dissolve back into mist and crossed to meet her. The leather was warm beneath his fingers, its surface faintly scented with ink and rain. When he tilted it, the stitched stars shifted, not like simple embroidery but like memory stirring itself into new constellations. The title caught the chamber’s low light, silver and certain: The Queen of Dreams.
He opened it. On the first page, written in his own hand, stood his name: Dream of the Endless. His brow tightened. “This is my script… yet I have no memory of setting it down.”
Lucienne inclined her head. “The Dreaming fashions books not only from deeds, my lord, but from desire. What is unspoken in you still finds its way to parchment.”
He turned the pages slowly. Every line bore the shape of his writing, though none lived in his memory. Midway through he paused at a passage describing the queen’s charge: to guard the dreams of the sick and frightened, to bring peace to minds trapped in pain, to stand as curator of rest for those too broken to find it themselves.
The words settled into him like something long awaited. Not invention. Not prophecy. A truth his heart had admitted before his mind would.
Lucienne’s expression shifted, and she drew the second object forward. “And I uncovered this as well.”
She set the parchment into his other hand. It unfolded like a river of names, inked in careful script. At its head stood Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry. Down the centuries the line threaded, narrowing and branching, until at its end it landed: Penelope Alexandra Carter, daughter of James Carter and Margaret O’Brien.
Recognition struck him like a chord vibrating through his bones. He heard, behind his thoughts, the faint tune Nell sometimes hummed when exhaustion blurred her voice, the way her presence steadied even him. “The melody she hums,” he murmured.
“Calliope’s Lament,” Lucienne confirmed. “It threads through the bloodline. Muse-blood is not miracle but tendency: less sleep, a steadiness with trauma, quicker healing than most.”
He nodded slowly. “Her recovery after injury. Her stamina. Her presence that steadies others. The blood is awakening.” His gaze grew distant as he remembered. “The trauma of near-death was the catalyst.”
Lucienne’s eyes softened. “Her lifespan will be longer than most mortals. Though not unending.”
Morpheus’s gaze lingered on the parchment. “Such limits may not hold, if she remains with me,” he said quietly, almost to himself. His eyes followed the inked line from Calliope to Nell, but his thoughts moved elsewhere. Heritage explained her resilience, her gift for meaning, the way the Dreaming opened to her, yet none of it required her to stay. She could have turned from him a hundred times. She had not. Again and again, she had chosen. That truth carried more weight than prophecy.
“This explains her nature. But not my choice. She could have carried her inheritance in full and still walked away. What exists between us is not duty, not destiny, but something wholly new.”
“The heart wants what it wants,” Lucienne said simply.
He lingered on the book’s silver constellations. They shifted into patterns he did not know. “Every book that has been, is, or will be has its place within these shelves. Yet this volume is new to me. I did not summon it, though the hand is mine. That is what troubles me. If not my will, then what gave it form?”
“Perhaps the same that placed her name in Destiny’s margins,” Lucienne suggested gently. “Or perhaps love writes itself into being, whether we notice or not.”
His shadows stirred low at his feet. He closed the book carefully, as though it might change again beneath his touch. “Then somewhere in me, I have already imagined her future. My mind need only admit it.”
Lucienne inclined her head. “The genealogy you must share. The book…” she let the thought linger, “may serve you better as surprise. Let her choose when to open it.”
He set the parchment in his drawer and placed the book by the hearth, where the afternoon light would find it. “Yes. She will choose.”
Lucienne studied him for a long moment. “You are changed, my lord. Not softened. Not diminished. But… content.”
The word struck him oddly, as if it did not belong to him. Contentment was a mortal luxury, fragile and fleeting, something he had observed in others but never worn himself. His ages had been defined by function, by creation and duty, by grief and its aftermath. Never this. Yet now the truth of it pressed against him, undeniable. He thought of her laughter softening the edges of his world, of the way her presence had stilled the hollow places he once believed unfillable.
He startled faintly at the word, then let it settle into him like something earned. “I am,” he admitted. “For perhaps the first time in any age.”
She gave a small nod. “Then the Dreaming has reason to be glad. As do you.”
When she had gone, he lingered. The library felt different, as though it too were listening. Shelves breathed more slowly, spines easing against one another in quiet patience. Dream-forms hovered at the edge of sight, attentive as birds in the rafters. Even the constellations set into the vaulted ceiling shifted their arrangement, drawing new patterns that suggested paths not yet walked.
He thought of Nell. Of hours stolen on trains and benches, her laughter breaking the city’s noise until the edges of the world seemed less sharp. Of the pier with its lamppost lit for her hand alone. Of her voice, steady and fierce, refusing to be written by anyone else. Of her choice. Always choice.
Happiness was strange, fragile, perilous. Yet he carried it like a treasure close to his chest, and it changed him.
Her laughter was the sound he wanted to measure centuries by. The warmth of her hand in his was the anchor he had never known to seek. For all his dominion over dream and night, it was this mortal woman’s presence that steadied him, that made eternity seem not vast but bearable. She was not an interruption to his purpose. She was the shape it had been waiting to take.
Still, beneath the quiet of contentment, something stirred. Mortals tied themselves with vows. He had seen those vows falter, shatter like glass too thin for the weight it bore. But fragility did not strip them of meaning. Perhaps it was what gave them meaning. To vow was to speak into uncertainty and still decide to remain.
His gaze lingered on the book by the hearth, constellations shifting in the low light. He did not yet know what shape his desire would take, only that for the first time in longer than he could measure, he longed for something more binding, more lasting. Not duty. Not prophecy. Not obligation. Something chosen.
He folded his hands and let the Dreaming breathe with him. The realm gathered itself in quiet anticipation, not in frenzy but in patience, as though it too was waiting for the moment when choice would become vow, and vow would become truth.