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ginoeh · 3 months

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This is the second part of three for my entry for @the-centennial-husbands-bigbang 2024! The awesome banners were done by @lalaithquetzallicaresi who is also on Deviant Art !

The story is available on AO3, where I will post chapters serialized!

To the Edge of Night

Explicit || Hob Gadling/Dream of the Endless || Part 2 of 3 || 14k

Part 1

Part 2

*** *** ***

Chapter Three

The reconstruction of the New Inn was coming along swimmingly. The tap room was nearly all done which was great, really, because that meant Hob was perfectly in time for the day of the planned grand opening. He’d set it, nostalgic fool that he was, for the 7th of June.

But on the other hand, there was this:

“Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to work behind the bar, Bobbie?”

Hob sighed and resisted rolling his eyes at Martin. The man understandably thought he was ‘Bobbie’s’ elder by several decades. But Hob could really do without his repeated attempts at motherhenning him into a healthier lifestyle. Which, according to Martin, included more friends and more social interaction.

Usually, Hob would agree. It was just… well, it was just that so far, his attempts at interaction had been met with mixed results. It wasn’t even that he didn’t want more friends apart from Emily and Oswin. The actual reality of that was turning out to be somewhat more difficult to achieve, though.

It was hard to be entirely genuine when he knew the fears and nightmares of every person he came across. He simply didn’t know how to work with that, yet. Maybe in time he’d get used to it all. So far, all he’d managed to do was inadvertently alienate a lot of people; his inborn sociable nature didn’t fare well when coupled with this new kind of knowledge.

Martin sighed as well but he wasn’t half as good as Hob when it came to hide annoyance and concern.

“Kiddo, you need to get out more. I kept telling the same to your uncle. Ya need friends and people to talk to! Bartending is exactly what you want right now.”

It wasn’t but Hob had to concede the point. He did need to get used to people.

“I can do the late shifts, if you absolutely insist.”

Hob made sure to sound as longsuffering as possible. Wouldn’t do to seem like he was giving in too easily, after all. Otherwise, next he turned around, Martin would try to ply him the sunday roast left-overs from his wife. It was very much enough that Emily kept trying to get him to eat.

Hob was perfectly aware that he didn’t necessarily need to eat, to stay alive. That didn’t mean that he enjoyed starving but the thing was, he simply didn’t. He wasn’t hungry because he didn’t need the food. He was not starving. He knew intimately how that felt, after all. Looking back, Hob was pretty sure it had started at the same time when his lucid dreams began to outnumber his normal nights, at the same time that he started seeing the shape of people’s fear in their eyes.

He wasn’t sure he liked the conclusions that could be drawn from this.

“The late shifts? That is a stupid idea if I ever heard one, Bobbie.”

Hob shrugged. He appreciated Martin, he really did, but he had to put his foot down somewhere. He wasn’t going to let the man dictate the schedule of his waking hours, after all, no matter if he’d usually find the caring nature endearing.

“That’s all I can offer right now. You do know that I have my coursework to do, right? If you say it would be good for me to get out more, then the late shifts it is.”

Martin levelled him with a dark glower that Hob was sure not to find too amusing, and set his empty glass of coke onto the table between them. For a guy in his seventies he sure had a lot of life in him yet.

“Three nights a week, tops.”

“Are we really haggling over this now, Martin? I’m still your boss.”

Martin crossed his arms on the table and kept his large hand on the signed papers that declared him manager of the New Inn.

“You want me in charge of the staff as well, Bobbie. And I take care of my staff, believe me. Three nights a week. Four during semester breaks.”

Hob smothered a laugh at the stubborn look his future manager shot him. Exactly that was why ‘Bobbie’ had insisted to employ Martin, his ‘uncle’s’ closest living friend.

“Okay okay. You win.”

Hob ginned and gamely shook Martin’s hand in agreement. There wasn’t really any reason to tell the other man that Hob hadn’t actually felt any real need for sleep in weeks - months maybe even - and therefore the late shifts wouldn’t impact him at all.

*** *** ***

The rise on which the forest ends slopes down gently into the valley. There is fog hanging around bare tree tops and over the houses and a pale sun lurks behind a thin white cloud cover. Hob becomes aware of the dream, or maybe steps into it might be a better descriptor at this point, at the edge of the forest, half lying between the tall stalks of damp, yellow winter grass. He appears to be wearing something like a cloak this time, its unadorned black fading away into wisps of smokey grey towards the frayed hem. Underneath, there might be just a normal jumper and trouser combo but Hob finds he’s entirely unable to concentrate his sleeping mind to look beyond the shadows of the ominous cloak.

It feels a bit like a game the dreamworld is playing with him and Hob is amused despite himself. He’s had the usual nightmares of being butt naked in the middle of the city so he’s a bit glad it’s not that.

The Gargoyle that he has glimpsed the last time gamboles around the shingled roofs and over a crooked chimney, dips playfully behind a barn and clips one wing on the branches of a massive oak tree before it rights itself midair and continues its dizzying game of hide and seek. Hob makes his way down, the nightmare Otter - and he thinks he should maybe find a name for it - contently lingering on his shoulders. It’s an unexpectedly reassuring weight even if it offers no warmth like a mortal creature might.

It’s when he draws closer to the two storeyed houses that a rather stately figure with carefully coiffed hair steps through one doorway. He’s in a three piece suit but bears an iron rake in one hand that gleams like polished steel knives.

Hob slows down when he approaches an old bridge that leads on into the yard between both houses. The man stands on its other end, one arm at his hip and the other tightly wound around the rake that he holds in front of him like a weapon.

“Who goes here.”

His voice is a nice baritone but it carries his mistrust as easily as his drawn brows do and Hob is, for once, thrown. This is the first time since entering this world of dreams that someone - or some-thing - isn’t naturally inclined to be friendly towards him.

It’s also the first time since his very first awakening that an inhabitant of his dreams speaks to him in an audible voice. This might be the chance he’s been waiting for to gain a bit more information about this strange strange world he’s in.

“I’m just… passing through,” he says and holds up both hands placatingly. In answer, the man grips the rake harder.

“To where.” It’s less a question and very much a demand.

“Um…I don’t know? On, I suppose?” Hob gestures vaguely into the direction of the valley behind the two houses, where he now knows a large part of the landscape centres around something like a palace.

The man frowns, annoyed, and levels Hob with a look that speaks volumes as to the intellect he thinks Hob possesses.

“So you come here, to the gateway of the Nightmare marshes, and you don’t know where you’re going? Are you mocking me?”

This is turning out to be one very unique dreaming experience, Hob realises. It’s not an unpleasant realisation at all. Hob is living for new experiences after all, and while he certainly loves the land he has for some reason been chosen to traverse in his dreams so far, this is a welcome interruption.

On his shoulders, the Otter lifts its head to lay a proprietary claw against Hob’s neck. The man startles at that and Hob looks a bit closer. There’s apprehension in his eyes, something that looks like anger but veers closely towards fear.

And quite suddenly, Hob has another epiphany. The strange mind-reading powers that he has gained while awake, the same thing that lets him feel his little nightmares intentions, work just as well on this different dream-creature. Because no matter how human he looks, Hob is pretty sure that the man before him is both less and more than simply a human man.

“Are you,” he starts and lifts one careful hand to cover the smile that threatens to break out on his face, “perhaps afraid of intruders?” Of old enemies, he wants to say, or rogue nightmares, because that is what he sees when he concentrates. But he’s not really looking to make the man more uncomfortable than he already is.

“I’m Hob,” he offers instead, when there is no answer, “And I think I’m on my way to… the palace.”

The man gears up to say something cutting, Hob can see the way his shoulders draw up and how his glower deepens when they are interrupted by a cheery yell.

“H-hey b-broth-ther! Is this a g-g-guest you’re holding u-uu-up there? Ca-can w-we inv-vite him in fo-fo-for t-tea?”

The man that turns around the corner of the leftmost house looks nearly exactly like the one barring Hob entrance - they are brothers, without a doubt, even if the way he eyes his much more personable sibling promises murder.

“Shut your jabbering gob, Abel. He’s a dreamer. He’s not supposed to be here. So no, we can not invite him for tea.”

The so-called Abel hurries closer, an amicable smile on his face for Hob and a fearful glance for his brother. In it, Hob sees flashes of blood and pain, shallow graves and wooden crosses. He winces. This is… not what he’d expected, really.

“B-b-but h-h-he’s a r-real my-my-my-mystery, r-r-right? Don-don-don’t y-you want to k-know it? Really?”

Despite his fear of violence and death by the hand of his brother, Abel rolls neatly past him and manages to make him lose his grip on the rake. He comes to stand in front of Hob, a hopeful smile on his face, and holds out a meaty hand.

“I-I’m Abel. And h-h-he’s C-cain. Welcome t-to- the H-house o-o-of Secrets! W-we have t-t-tea. An-and c-c-cookies.”

The vision of blood and murder flashes across Hob’s new sense again and Hob knows, intrinsically, that these are ‘the’ Cain and ‘the’ Abel. It’s all a bit much to swallow and he’s sure that if this weren’t a dream with all the ingrained suspension of disbelief he’s desperately been clinging on to since his journey started, he'd be much more pole-axed by this revelation. Instead, Hob shakes the hand of the first murder victim.

“And I have Earl Grey and digestives,” the biblical Cain, first murderer, interjects. He looks miffed but the threatening rake has been abandoned for now and he as well holds out his hand. “I welcome you to my house of Mystery. I’d be honoured to have you as my guest, dreamer. You can tell me all about how you came to be here.”

“B-but he was my guest f-f-first! A-and I can tell him nice s-s-secrets. Ma-maybe the o-o-one about th-th-the Thing in the b-b-b-basement!”

Hob does end up going with Cain first. He has the vague hope that it might avoid or at least postpone the clearly inevitable bloodshed that’s sure to be in Able’s future. There are a lot of crooked crosses and mounds of overturned earth that peek from the strip of land that borders the half-hidden backyard of the houses.

His nightmare, though, has no inclination of going with him. As soon as they reach the door, it nimbly hops off Hob’s shoulder. Cain casts it a long glance.

“If you don’t wish to come, you can visit Gregory. My soft-hearted fool of a brother insists that he’s getting lonely. You wouldn't owe me either way.”

The Otter bares its teeth in something that Hob thinks might be equal parts amusement and threat. Cain just scoffs and turns to step through the door.

The nightmare glances at Hob and if there were words they’d be a flippant ‘so long’ before it summarily abandons Hob for the first time since he’d arrived on these shores.

“Oh very well then,” he says gamely, “no one forces you to have tea, after all.”

Cain’s house is dark and warm and narrow. Everything is wood panelled, from the carved ceiling squares to the soft grey planks of spruce that make up the walls, and down to the unnaturally long and gleaming floorboards.

There aren’t many right angles in the house. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t seem to be built sturdy, quite the contrary even. But the angles are all just slightly off and despite the bookshelves, knick knacks and homely fireplace, there is something eerie to the place.

Cain is backlit by the glow of the fireplace where he takes a steaming pot of water from the hanger with a glowing poker.

“Gregory is the Gargoyle, I’m guessing?”

“Gregory the gargoyle, yes. He lives here.”

Hob thinks this is a paltry amount of information to give about an actual Gargoyle but then again, this is the land of dreams and nightmares. So maybe having a mythical creature as pet isn’t all that strange, all things considered.

“How did you come to be here,” Cain asks abruptly after they sit over sturdy mugs of tea.

“What do you mean, how?” Hob swallows around his digestives. They taste of nothing. Neither does the tea.

“You are a dreamer, a human one at that. You should not be able to traverse the Dreaming like you do.”

The firelight reflects eerily in Cain’s thin glasses. In the background the iron poker heats up in the open fire. This, Hob realises, is still a nightmare, after all.

“This is what the place is called, then? The Dreaming?”

“Don’t you know? These lands are the sleeping marches, the nightmare lands, where all dreams and nightmares dwell.”

Queen Mab’s country after all, after a fashion Hob thinks with a mixture of amusement and apprehension. No wonder his Otter had been so thrown by naming the offering he’d made. Hob’s wild guess had been close to the truth, after all. Though he’s reasonably sure that’s not all there is to it.

“Huh. I knew I was sleeping. Dreaming, as it were but - I didn’t know that there is a name attached to the place. Are you telling me that this isn’t just… in my mind, then?”

Cain stares at Hob and Hob can’t read his expression at all.

“Are you asking me if you made all of this,” he gestures around and to himself, “up in your sleeping mind?”

Hob has the grace to look chagrined. He’d been lucid dreaming for months now. Years if he wants to count the many times he’d been dragged into the sea of dreams and nightmares by the nightmare he now has as a travelling companion. He has developed strange insights while awake and he has had more than just a suspicion that these dreams hold more truth to them than mere figments of his imagination.

“No. No, not really, I guess,” he finally mutters. “I s’ppose this is as real as anything I experience when I’m awake.”

Cain looks at least marginally mollified.

“So you don’t know how or why you arrived here, I gather? That… is disappointing. Rarely do things like these happen without reason or will of our Lord.”

There are many things Hob wants to unpack here; so this isn’t the first time someone has gained access to the Dreaming in a way that resembles his; and there is a Lord - and not a queen - who holds the power of this place. He’d known that one already, considering that he’d been greeted once, so very long ago, by this Lord’s librarian.

“Who is this Lord,” he decides to ask, “and isn’t he… missing?”

Cain straightens and spears Hob with his glare.

“And how have you come by this information? Has your… nightmare blabbered? Talked about abandoning the realm?”

“Nothing of the sort,” though now Hob wonders; had many nightmares left the Dreaming? What then about those that he encountered? “When I first woke up - at that dock over the endless sea? - there was this woman, Lucienne. She told me.”

Cain doesn’t look convinced at all. He stands with narrowed eyes and leaves Hob at the table in favour of stoking the fire with the red-hot poker. Hob debates telling him about the neglected air of the places he’d travelled, about the feeling of bruised and yearning emptiness he'd seen in every world he’d rushed by on his mad dive through the nightmare sea. He decides not to, in the end. It feels… personal, somehow.

“Why would Lucienne travel all the way to the Dreaming Sea, just to greet a… dreamer. Now this is a mystery…”

Hob snorts. “Well, her greeting wasn’t all that enthusiastic. Was surprised to see that I wasn’t her Lord after all.”

It is silent for a while apart from the crackling fire. Hob discards the tea and digestives; he doesn’t know why he thought dream food would do anything for him, really. When he’s about decided to leave the brooding Cain to his own devices and instead go and try his luck with Abel, the man finally turns.

“Yes… there is something about you, dreamer. Hob. I thought for a moment at first, that you might be… but that was foolish, of course. You are nothing like Lord Morpheus, after all.”

“So that’s your missing Lord’s name?” It does have a bit of a ring to it, admittedly, even if it’s only due to Hob’s much longer memory of Morpheus the roman god of dreams that he doesn’t immediately think of the new movie that has just hit the cinemas. He doesn’t suppose Lord Morpheus looks quite like Laurence Fishburn in The Matrix.

“The Dreaming is the Realm of Dream of the Endless. Morpheus is one of many names he holds. And why he’s missing or where he’s gone - that is the greatest mystery of all, isn’t it?”

Hob leaves Cain’s house feeling not one jot more knowledgeable than when he entered it.

“The Dreaming is governed by Dream. Go figure.” He makes sure to keep his voice down but this one is a bit of a let down. At least he’s rather sure that Lucienne the palace librarian is something of a known entity. Which in turn promises the palace he’d glimpsed in the Ruby’s facets to be an actual place as well.

But this Lord… there is his missing Stranger in the waking world, there is a missing Lord on this side of dreams and between them, a deeply magical Ruby has found its way into his hands. Hob isn’t sure how much he believes in coincidences like that.

He’s nearly bowled over by a diving Gargoyle when he clears the awning of Cain’s house. Shingles shatter on the crooked pavement in his wake and a wildly gesticulating Abel rounds the corner.

“Gr-gregory, s-s-stop that!”

Abel hurries over on the beast's heels but doesn’t manage to deter him at all. The Gargoyle dances around Hob a few times, inspecting him, it seems like, before it comes to a stand squarely in front of him.

“Hello there,” Hob croons, enchanted.

Intelligent eyes consider him, before he bobs into the likeness of a shallow bow. Then, he buts up gently against Hob’s side.

“G-gregoy don’t bo-bo-bother our g-g-guest!”

When Hob’s hand comes into contact with Gregory’s rough scales, something like knowledge suddenly sparks between them.

“So you’re a nightmare, too.” Hob strokes Gregory’s scales behind the spikes on his head. “Or were, at any rate. You like this better now, don’t you?”

Gregory puffs hot breath across his neck in silent bliss.

“Have you met my- the nightmare I arrived with, yet?”

Hob gets the impression of sleek black fur rolling between moss and stone and grins.

“G-g-gregory c-can you p-p-please s-stop destroying m-my house!” Abel looks forlornly at the shards of mossy green shingles he’s swept into a sad little pile. “It’s ge-ge-getting worse a-and worse e-e-either w-way. N-no need to ma-ma-make it g-go f-f-faster.”

Gregory looks repentant but Hob gets the sense that the Gargoyle, however much he might want to try, can't really stop destroying things in his wake. It’s in his nature to be disruptive and playful.

“I can help,” he offers instead.

“Th-that’s t-t-terribly n-nnice b-but the r-repairs ne-ne-never stick anyway.” He pokes the pile with the tip of his shoe. It’s so pitiful that Hob feels like it’s a kicked puppy and not a grown man.

“Why don’t they, though? Mine alway do.”

He kneels at Abel’s side and takes a few fitting pieces out of the shard pile. They slot together easily.

“I've repaired a lot of things on my way here. My repairs always go well.”

He swipes over the shingle in his hand and some of the moss comes off, leaving it a faded, dusty red. The breaks are thin lines still, but it all holds together. He’s really gotten better at this.

Abel watches him, something guarded in his jovial face.

“N-no repair ha-has stayed wh-wh-whole, since o-o-our L-Lord le-le-left.”

Hob thinks of the dock that regained its sturdiness, or the little bridges in the moor that repaired themselves with barely any effort from him. Then he glances back at the forest that rises over the valley’s far side and takes in the lush dark green it has become in his wake, teeming with lively nightmares.

“I don’t know,” he says and smiles, “maybe you need to have a bit more faith in this whole thing. It works fine for me.”

He holds up the shingle for Abel’s inspection. It’s unbroken again.

“I think most things here know what they’re meant to be. It’s a dreamworld, after all. Just help them get back to that. That’s all. Do you have a ladder?”

Abel does have a ladder, though it’s a rickety thing when Hob starts ascending it. He’s pretty sure that on his way down it will be much sturdier. It is not hard work to set the roof to rights again, Hob has had much more strenuous jobs over the centuries. Though admittedly he’d never been a roofer before.

“H-hob?”

Abel calls him over where he’s taken off his shirt - it does after all exists under that terrible cloak - because the sun has decided to peek out behind the thin white cloud cover. It fits his mood well; he has a goal now and something like a plan.

“I w-want to t-tell you so-something. I-it’s a se-se-secret.”

“What is it?”

“A d-dreamer who rem-m-members h-himself ca-ca-can ch-change th-their d-d-d-dreams.”

Hob thinks he knows all about lucid dreaming by now and this seems spot on, even if it’s not really a secret. Abel and Cain both aren’t really very inclined to part with useful information, it seems like. It does pose an interesting question though.

“And you and Cain, you aren’t dreamers, are you? But then, how does the upkeep of this world work? Only by the Dreamlord’s will?”

Abel shrugs. “The D-dreaming sh-shapes itself o-o-only for th-those that l-l-love it. B-but a-a-a few ca-can do th-things, w-w-with His b-b-blessing.”

It sounds as mystical as impractical - and this power imbalance surely has its drawbacks, considering the state the Dreaming is in with its Lord’s disappearance.

“Maybe he should consider sharing a bit of his power then,” Hob mutters and slips into his shirt again. It’s time to go on, he thinks. There’s the palace waiting for him and possibly, hopefully, answers to his questions.

“L-lord Mo-mo-morpheus d-doesn’t share. He i-is the D-d-d-dreaming.”

The strange emphasis Abel puts on the last sentence perlocates in Hob’s mind, sleeping and waking, long after.

***

He leaves the Houses of Mysteries and Secrets behind without mentioning the magical Ruby or the Stranger that used to wear it. Neither does he mention anything about his immortality or the growing suspicion that the Dreamlord’s absence and Hob’s presence in the Dreaming are intrinsically connected.

Instead, he finally starts to tell his nightmare companion a bit about his life. He starts, of course, with the greatest reget he holds. It’s a nightmare after all, and probably much more interested in the things Hob has had nightmares about than in the general comings and goings of a human life.

“He could just as well have simply left me hanging to prove a point, you know,” he tells the Otter when the Houses of Mystery and Secrets behind them are swallowed into the last wisps of fog. “I mean I was a bit of a berk, all things considered. Not that I wanted to be, but you know how it goes, don’t you? Wanting something so much that you just… overreach. And by doing so destroy what you try to build.”

The Otter doesn’t answer, of course. But it does clamber up Hob’s truly terribly threadbare cloak and settles again on his shoulders.

“Thanks, my friend. I really appreciate that. I hope one day I can apologise and make it up to him. I mean it’s been a hundred and fifteen years now since that cursed meeting. Who knows what happened to him in the meantime…”

Hob thinks of the invisible weight of the Ruby at his chest and wonders how or why the Stranger had lost it. Because there is no way he had gotten rid of it on purpose. Not with the way it had been the main and centre piece of each of his statement outfits. It was important.

The muddy path underneath his feet stretches into the far distance, where the cloud cover isn’t quite as heavy any more. There is the pink light of a friendly sunset that beckons him on in a perfect reflection of his own tentative hope.

Maybe he’ll meet his Stranger again. Maybe he’ll find answers at the palace. All he needs to do is make his way there. He needs to find Lucienne.

*** *** ***

His dreams were occupying Hob’s quiet hours more and more. Sometimes, after waking, he thought the reflection in his bathroom mirror mocked him - there was red and black in his eyes where there should be the browns he was born with, the shadows he cast looked like writhing masses of nightmares and the deepest waters, his face the same one he had seen when he’d thrown the flower crown into the cursed pond. And then, within the blink of an eye the illusions were gone again.

The Ruby was warm, as always these days, when he took it out of the box. He’d bought a new chain to match its delicate gold casing and wondered if it was normal for a magical jewel to seem proprietary and unwilling to leave its owners hands. All the same, it looked entirely unchanged in all other respects and he knew that if he looked closer, there’d be the same pictures, the same views in its facets as the last time he’d done so.

There hadn’t been any more incidents of surprise souvenirs from his dreams after that first time. Instead, the phantom sensation of wearing the Ruby as a pendant underneath his clothes didn’t stop with his dreams.

But there were two other things that reluctantly joined Hob’s mental list of changes that were most likely connected to the jewel:

Emily had kept up pestering him about eating - it was the thing that had started their friendship two years ago. But by now, Hob was starting to become suspicious of his lack of need for food. Usually, he loved eating. Physical pleasures were part of the experience, after all, and food was one of the many things that changed constantly, to Hob’s neverending delight.

And the newest and most concerning thing: Hob didn’t remember the last time that he had felt truly tired.

The Ruby, even though he was never wearing it, rested like an unseen weight on his chest.

*** *** ***

As if the Houses are a gateway that Hob has passed, beyond them the Dreaming feels like a different world. He finds himself in an endless landscape that looks like it's been well tended and designed but with harrowing signs of neglect everywhere. There are skeletons of trees where a lush forest once grew, dry earth and cracked stone in place of meadows and rivers.

Hob doesn’t see any paths or streets as such, at first glance but he discovers fast that wherever he steps, paths try to form or emerge from the debris.

The Otter on his shoulders grows quiet - Hob hadn’t noticed actively because of course the little nightmare has never made so much as a sound at him; but there had been, for lack of a better description, a sort of humming at the back of Hob’s mind, a susurration of unheard whispers that conveyed laughter and wit, disdain and hope and all things the nightmare wanted Hob to know.

It’s never been as clear to Hob as now when it is entirely absent, how the Otter has indeed talked to him in its own way.

“This is wrong, somehow, isn’t it?” Hob hushes his voice down to fit the horrifyingly despondent mood of his surroundings. He’s equally as horrified if he’s being truthful. This is not how it’s supposed to look, he knows that much without needing it explained.

“Where do I even start setting this to rights again?”

He can’t see what most of the landscape was supposed to look like so he doesn’t know how to start fitting things back into place. There are no structure for him to mend, only barren landscape.

“You don’t, “ says a high-pitched voice at his back.

Hob swivels around and feels his Otter’s needle sharp claws prick through his clothing to keep its place. Behind him are two androgynous figures, holding hands. They look like children at first glance, if children were monocolored including skin and hair.

“You can’t,” says the second one, voice nearly identical with the first.

They sound like children as well.

“And… why can’t I?” Hob gentles his voice even though he knows that these are, of course, not actual children.

They feel like nightmares as much as his Otter does and as Gregory did. Where their hands touch, their skin is the oppressing colour-leached grey of foreboding twilight; otherwise, one is entirely white and the other, entirely black.

The first one, black as a moonless night, shrugs.

“The power here,” they start.

“It’s gone back to the palace,” the other finishes.

“It’s needed there,” the white one whispers.

“Because if that place vanishes…”

They look at each other and Hob can sense their fear. But that means that he can probably help more at the palace or close to it, where there is something left to draw from and form. Here, he only feels the hollow phantom pain of a missing limb when he tries to look and see what the ephemeral path he’s on wants to become.

His own capability of repairing the Dreaming seems to be dependent on the power of the Dreaming itself, at least in parts.

“Then what about the other part of the Dreaming? The ones I came through?” Hob gestures to the far away reaches of the Dreaming, where he woke.

Again they shrug in tandem.

“Oh that’s a bit different…”

“...it’s nightmare country, after all.”

“They’re wild.”

“And know how to take…

“...and take…”

“...what they need…”

“...from the dreamers.”

The Otter shifts on Hob’s shoulder and Hob finally finds that its quiet stream of thoughts and feelings are back. What it projects feels to Hob a lot like dissociation - a loss of identity and directed thought, of watching from the outside, going under and only remembering in short glimpses when breaching through the surface of confusion. It’s helplessness and impotence and a strange kernel of hope when the little nightmare looks at Hob.

“And it takes from the nightmares, too,” Hob realises out loud and for the first time, dares to run a hand over his nightmare’s slippery fur, “you were once… something bigger, weren’t you. The Nightmare of Drowning. Until the sea swallowed you up.”

The Otter presses into Hob’s careful fingers and he understands more. The sadness and rage of being diminished, the knowledge of going back to what it was before its creation, the hope when it found, in Hob’s dreams, persisting memories of itself and then clinging to them.

The twin nightmares share a glance but don’t contradict.

“That’s why the two of you are here. Instead of there.”

“We didn’t want to…”, they begin.

“...disassemble. We like…”

“...how we were made.”

“So we came here,” they finish in tandem.

“We could have left,” white mutters, discomfited and black squeezes their hand. “No. We’re not Arcana. We’re not strong enough to last long.”

“I travel to the palace. Do you want to come with me?” Hob has offered the same to the nightmares of the nightmare country after all.

They share another long glance, a communication that Hob feels but doesn’t yet understand. He thinks he might, one day if he keeps trying. He rubs his chest and thinks of the Ruby in his bedroom.

“For a part of the way,” they finally decide.

“We can’t go everywhere here.”

“Lead the way, dreamer.”

Hob turns, leaving both of them in his shadow and walks for a few short steps before he suddenly stops. He can’t help the delighted laugh. He’s been thoroughly had there.

“I know who you are now,” his grin is so broad that it rings in his voice.” I used to know you well when I was still young.”

“Yes you did,” they giggle.

“C’mon then, you terrible two. Let’s get going.”

He doesn’t need to turn to know they are following. After all, behind him walk the Nightmare of Being Chased Through Empty Streets and the Nightmare of Being Too Slow. Hob grins quietly to himself for the better part of this dream.

***

Sometimes, Hob thinks he hears the churning waves of the sea of nightmares and dreams from the shadows of this scorched landscape. It takes him a while to realise that what he hears is an echo of a place within himself. He doesn’t know how it works but he knows that he’s hollowed out a part of himself to make space for that which is the foundation of the Dreaming.

He’s not sure if he can ever make that undone. And he doesn’t know if he even wants to. He loves the place, after all.

Sometimes, they come acrossother nightmares. All of those who cross their path are small. They might have been bigger once and found sanctuary in this powerless stretch of the Dreaming out of fear of being swallowed back into the sea. He talks to them, the many-eyed and tooth-limbed and creeping-fears, even if they can’t answer back like the twins do. The way he’s learned to listen to his Otter works on them as well. So he listens when they in turn tell of themselves.

They meet only two more of the bigger nightmares; where the rest is, Hob doesn’t want to know. There is the Nightmare of Empty Houses that Should Be Lived In and the Nightmare of Gone Loved Ones - both of them Hob recognizes at first glance - but other than them, it is empty here. He wonders where all the dreams have gone.

“Closer to the palace,” the Nightmare of Gone Loved Ones answers.

“It has been empty here for a long time now,” the Nightmare of Empty Houses adds.

They don’t walk with him far, not like the twins who still follow in his shadow, but they do offer their help if Hob needs them.

***

Hob doesn’t know how many nights and dreams he has spent traversing this part of the Dreaming. He’s never counted any of them and anyway, he can’t decide if he should count nights in the waking spent sleeping or rather the progress of time as it flows in the Dreaming. They are not at all the same, after all.

Rather, he measures his progress by how far he feels he still has to go to reach the palace. And that is, despite all of Hob’s attempts to measure the distance any other way, the only manner to do it: by some vague compass in his chest - if he had to put money on it, he’d probably say that it is the Ruby and its strange connection to the Dreaming that helps him out.

During one visit, he comes across the most wretched sight he’s ever seen. Or not seen as it were. Before him is a stretch of land that simply - isn’t. A place that has once been somewhere, but now exists only in broad strokes of bareness - like an artist colour blocking the barest shapes of a background; the reverse of an actualized idea.

“I can’t go through there.”

The words barely make it past his lips and after they leave them, they seem to vanish in the vague emptiness. His head hurts from looking at the stretch of - of bloodless heart-tissue. His own heart hurts as well.

“You must, if it’s the way,” says black, unimpressed.

“You are the one deciding on the path,” adds white.

“Can’t I go around?”

He knows before he speaks that that’s impossible. He knows the way and to detour from it is not a good idea. There are places here that he might get lost in and never leave again.

A suggestion of darkness and soft fur swims into his mind’s eye.

“Do you think that will work?” he asks the Otter, “Don’t you think that I should see where I’m going?”

The equivalent of a mocking ‘are you an idiot?’ tickles his ears without sound.

Hob sighs. “No, of course I don’t. This is a dream after all. Why would I need my eyes to see, really.”

The Otter stretches, satisfied in Hob’s answer. The twins, though, remain silent.

“We won’t go through here,” black finally says.

“It’s not a place any more.”

“It hurts to go in…”

“What is it then? Or, what was it before it became - this?”

“It was Fiddler’s Green…”

“...the Heart of the Dreaming.”

Hob shudders and averts his eyes from the stretch of horrifying bareness. The place left behind when a dream leaves, when a heart is gone…The Ruby he’s not wearing beats a warm and calming rhythm against Hob’s skin. What does one put in the place left empty by a missing heart, Hob wonders. It’s probably not so surprising that the Dreaming is so receptive to Hob's attempts to help - he’s grown to love the place after all and a thing without its heart… Hob wonders if he’s reading much into it. ‘Heart of the Dreaming’ might be an entirely metaphorical name after all.

The Otter, impatient as his little nightmare is, clearly decides that it has had enough of Hob’s woolgathering and puts its tail firmly across Hob’s eyes. It is unexpectedly soft but doesn’t budge one bit when Hob tries to push it down again. Bossy little bugger his nightmare is. He feels the tickle of laughter at the back of his mind

“Thank you for keeping me company, you two,” he says and gives up trying to dislodge the tail.

“You are welcome.”

“We will wait here and listen…”

“Incase you need us.”

Hob smiles in the nightmares’ direction, or he hopes at least that it’s the right direction, and concludes that he definitely won’t call for them if travelling closer to the palace is something they’re uncomfortable with.

“Take care.”

In his mind’s eye, the Ruby glows. Beneath his feet, a street starts forming in the dark of his imagination. He hopes the Otter can see it too and won’t lead him astray.

*** *** ***

Hob’s shift at the bar is long over, the New Inn empty and dark. He’s moved into the freshly finished upstairs flat only a week ago and already it feels more like a home than the apartment he’s had for nearly five years ever did.

He hasn’t switched on the light after coming in. It’s not really necessary, after all. While the streetlights are more than enough for navigating the space, he feels comfortable in the darkened shadows. He can feel them, like an extension of the Dreaming or doors connecting into it. They are the home of many nightmares. Hob wonders how many of them he’s gotten to know during his travels through the Dreaming.

He perches at the edge of his bed and stares listlessly into the London summer night beyond his window. He’s not tired at all, but strangely hollowed out even here in the world of the waking hours, where he’s nothing more than a human with a magical jewel. The ebb and flow of the sea of nightmares and dreams thrums underneath his breastbones at all times, by now. Something is missing but he doesn’t what it is.

The bed sheets are nicely cool underneath Hob’s bare thighs when he finally decides to settle. He doesn’t really feel like he needs the rest but all the same he’ll dream as soon as he’ll have closed his eyes. There have only been the lucid dreams for him, for weeks now.

Next to him the ruby sits on the bedside table, sparkling invitingly. He’s given up keeping it in the metal box. When Hob closes his hands around it, it beats in time with his pulse. In the mirror on his new wardrobe he thinks for a moment that he can see into the Dreaming, a bird’s view of a ravaged landscape yearning for its Lord.

The ruby screams in his mind and Hob flinches.

And then he realises that whatever it is he is missing - love, life, his heart maybe - it has come alive in the ruby, has fed it and given it power.

*** *** ***

On the other side of the missing Fiddler's Green, the palace suddenly looms closer than ever. There is a cobblestone road stretching from where he stands and into a quaint assemblage of houses and huts. To his right there are steep hills with the obvious ambition of becoming mountains at one point. To his left, there are swaths of burnt and grey meadows and dried out rivers but between them, the remnants of flowers and fields still shimmer like fading dreams.

The sound of a hammer being swung rhythmically onto wood drifts from the village. With the sound comes the smell of tobacco and the low scratch of off-key singing.

Chapter 4. → chapter 6?

There is a man with a pumpkinhead trying to fix a bullock cart. Or maybe it’s a pumpkin that play-pretends to be a man. He - it - he wears a simple white shirt underneath a worker’s overall. There is a cheroot cigar clenched in his gaping black mouth and puffs of its stinking smoke spiral slowly out from beneath the cut out lid of the pumpkin’s stalk. He hums a terrible rendition of ‘In the Army Now’ that has Hob’s toes curl in sympathy with his ears.

“Hi there”, Hob tries.

The Pumpkin man doesn’t react.

“Hello, good sir,” Hob begins again, several decibels louder and takes a step closer.

“Fer fuck’s sake what -” The pumpkin whirls around, angry words dying on his lips when he sees Hob. The hammer falls and narrowly misses the wooden sticks that serve as his legs and feet.

“Who’re you then?” He squints at Hob who holds up his hands placatingly. “And watcha doin here. Huh!?”

He rudely points a wooden finger straight into Hob’s face and leans closer.

“If ye’re an intruder then ye’re shit outta luck, my man. Cause I’m gonna flatten yer ass and feed ya remains to the birds. Ya hear me?”

Hob does hear and that’s the only thing he gets from the pumpkin man except for his general presence as part of the Dreaming; there are no flashes of fears, no general sense of what he wants or feels. This, Hob concludes tentatively, is probably a dream.

“Okay,” Hob says, “then it’s a good thing I’m not an intruder. I‘m here to see Lucienne the Librarian. Do you know her?”

It’s likely, after all, this close to the frankly enormous palace that looms behind the little hamlet.

“Sure do. What’ch want with ’er?”

“I need to ask her something that I’m sure she can help me with. See, I might have come across something that originally belonged to the Dreaming.”

“Something from here? But ye’re a dreamer. Dreamstuff doesn’t live long in the Waking ‘s far as I know.”

Hob shrugs. “So you see that I do need to talk to her, right? I’m Hob Gadling, by the way. Pleasure to meet you. Can you tell me where I can find her?”

The pumpkin-man spits his cigar onto the dry ground and stomps one of his wooden stick feet on it. Hob wonders if he’s ever managed to set himself smouldering on accident.

“I can do ya one better. I’ll bring ya to her. You’ll need a guide into the palace of the dreamlord. Not just anyone can come and go as they please.”

He puffs out his chest.

“Mervyn is the name and I'm the facility manager of this dump.”

He gestures around himself grandly and kicks the offendingly rickety ox cart. One wheel tilts sadly sideways on its frayed hub.

***

Mervyn prattles on and on as they make their way around the outer reaches of the palace. It’s forebodingly large this close to it. The onion domes, turrets and minarets he’d seen from afar tower so high above him that they might as well belong to the clouds. It probably was once a gleaming white jewel but now, there are signs of decay everywhere.

They detour around fallen remains of grand arches, climb over broken pieces of beautifully carved balustrades and take a shortcut through something that might have once been a rose garden.

“We gotta go all th’ way round to the front. Used to be doors here too but they’ve all vanished - poof - a while after Lord Murphy left. There’s only the Bridge now ‘n’ the main gate.”

The bridge is magnificent. Was magnificent and Hob sees only the sad echo of something fantastically great. There are hands holding it up over a ridiculously broad moat but they are crumbling, missing whole fingers that lay broken and shattered in the dried out basin like the remains of some grand beast.

The dereliction makes Hob’s heart ache. He wishes he could make it go back to how it was before but this… he eyes the broken balustrade and the deep drop where part of the bridge has fallen. Beneath his skin, he feels the Ruby like a physical weight.

Could he? If he tried - if he threw everything he has into it - could he repair this?

“There ya are,” Mervyn says and stops them before a pair of grand doors that hang askew on their hinges. “Used ta quibble with tha gate guardians. The pegasus is a right uppity li’l shit if ya ask me. They stopped movin’ though. It’s just Lucienne holdin’ down the fort now.”

There’s sadness behind Mervyn’s gruff words.

“Great woman, tha’ Lady. Must’a been an incredible raven to his Lordship back in the days.”

Hob is too close to his goal now to ask after either the fantastical gatekeepers or how Lucienne was once a raven. The only thing he wants to know is what the Ruby is, and how his stranger is connected to the Dreaming. The palace calls for him, or something in it does. He can feel it better, now that he’s closer but it is the same thing that helped him navigate the dead parts of the Dreaming after leaving Cain and Abel. Or maybe, it calls for the Ruby.

“So we just go in?”

“Nah.” Mervyn cups his hands around his mouth. “LOOSH! LUCIENNE! YA GOT A GUEST!”

He clears his throat while Hob’s ears still ring and adds, a bit awkwardly, “I don’t like entering the palace anymore. Haven’t been in there in forever.”

They wait in silence.

Once, Hob thinks the Pegasus - no matter how uppity it might have been - blinks but he’s not entirely sure. He is sure, though, that the Griffin on the other side of the door has turned his head towards them.

It doesn’t take long until a figure emerges in a brisk pace from the darkness beyond the gate.

Lucienne looks exactly as Hob remembers her from his very first foray into the Dreaming, sharp suit and sharper eyes.

“Mervyn. What are you shouting about?”

***

She notices him right away, of course, before she’s stepped far enough into the entrance hall to be seen. There is a dreamer at Mervyn’s side and he’s very clearly lucid. He is also familiar.

Much more familiar than he has any right to be, even considering that she once found him, aware of himself, on the dock to the dreaming sea. He’d been a strange case back then already. His arrival in the Dreaming proper had been felt by her in a swell of power that swept through her entirely unexpectedly. For a few painfully hopeful moments she had thought that the surge might herald Lord Morpheus’ return. She’d hurried to where it had come from, taking every shortcut the Dreaming could still provide for its last keeper. But even on the way there, she’d felt the quick decline. Still, she continued to hope.

Instead, she’d found a dreamer on the dock. Yes, he’d reeked of remnants of Lord Morpheus’ power but it was fading fast, becoming nothing more than a quiet little hum until it finally vanished from her innate raven sense for Dream of the Endless completely.

It is back now though, steady and strong, like a thread woven through the dreamer’s own soul.

“Ya know the guy, Loosh?”

“We’ve met before,” is all she says to Mervyn, “thank you for bringing him.”

Mervyn squints suspiciously at the dreamer who looks entirely nonplussed - there’s even an amused smile at his lips if she’s reading him right.

“She’s right. And thanks Mervyn.”

“If ya say so Loosh…” He grumbles and turns to the human, “if ya so much as put a toe out of place, I’ll find ya and mince ya.”

He leaves with the threat, throwing occasional glances back at her and the dreamer until he vanishes behind the broken southern hand of the bridge. The dreamer stays, eyes focussed neither on her nor on Mervyn but on the solid statues of the former gate guards. Lucienne remembers the grim loneliness that had settled once the both of them had grown back into stone.

“I think the Griffin turned his head,” the human says and tilts his own.

“That is unlikely. They have not moved for a long time now.” Still, when she turns around and follows his gaze, the Griffin indeed looks different.

His whole head is turned towards the dreamer, inclined as if the lifeless statue had tried for a bow.

Impossible.

She’s unable to keep the hope and fear contained completely and she knows it shows through her next words. They aren’t as unaffected as she wants them to be.

“Usually I wouldn’t have to ask but since these are the most unusual circumstances I am without a choice: What is your name, dreamer?”

He finally ends his appraisal of the Griffin and gives her a most charming grin. There are dimples at his cheeks and his eyes nearly sparkle. He looks … warm, all around.

“I’m Hob Gadling, my Lady. And you are Lucienne, the Palace Librarian.” He says the name like the title it is. “A pleasure to finally meet you properly. I’d apologise for taking so long, but it was a while until I realised that this is where I have to go.”

Not an unknown entity after all, she thinks, slightly validated in finding him familiar.

There has been talk about Hob Gadling the Immortal in the Dreaming, once long ago; the only connection close to something like friendship their Lord has ever had. The emotions his meetings with the human could evoke in Lord Morpheus had been rivalled only by those he expended for his lovers and family.

Hob Gadling, as far as she is aware, is neither.

That setup had lent itself to both positive and negative outcomes. There’d been bouts of furious creativity, begetting dreams of hope and nightmares for healing, there was April weather, capricious and bewildering, and of course the oppressive tension of 1789 where even decades later there had still been gossipy wondering whether that had been budding anger or another tension all together.

The dreary and awful weather that had persisted for a good while after his meeting in 1889 had prompted her to seek out Jessamy in a bid to find out what had gone wrong. Her Lord had been - furious and upset. More upset than furious if she was being honest but she hadn’t gotten a good enough look on him afterwards to ascertain if the tears in his eyes had been of hurt or of anger. With Dream of the Endless, it was often both at once if someone did manage to get close enough to truly hurt him - the kind of privilege rarely afforded to anyone.

When Hob Gadling bows, half in jest and half serious court manners that she knows are the genuine learned thing of a noble, she notices that what she’d thought was an odd patch of uneven sable fur on the strange clothes he wears, can move and nimbly clambers down from his shoulders.

The human doesn't look surprised in the least.

“So you don’t want to come with me?” he crouches down and Lucienne can’t see what it is he does but then he says, “I see. Take care and - thanks for … bringing me here.”

This is a nightmare, Lucienne realises and watches in disbelief as the human continues to hold a conversation with it.

“I’m glad I could help. You don’t owe – okay then. Anyway, you were a great guide.”

The nightmare in the form of an Otter gives her a mocking half-bow and a leer and then slinks into the shadows along the edges of the bridge until it vanishes through a gap between several broken columns. Hob Gadling seems absolutely unfazed and the smile with which he follows the curious form of the nightmare is fond.

“Sorry about that. That was the Nightmare of Drowning. It… found me, I guess you could say, and stuck around.” He grins quickly and Lucienne is sure that he has no idea about the unlikeliness of what he has just said. Nightmares do not ‘stick around’ dreamers like that. Neither do they converse with them or share their names. This one nightmare in particular, if the human has the right of it, she had thought lost or dissolved back into raw dreamstuff decades ago.

It is… heartening, to see that it is not so. There is one more dreamthing left in the Dreaming when she had feared that their number had nearly reached zero.

“I have a few questions for you, if you don’t mind? I think I … might have found something that came from here, originally. But I'm not sure. May I - come inside?” He gestures towards the shaded awning, and a bit of tension creeps into his shoulders. There might be something like a frown on his face as well.

“You are welcome,” she decides and hopes that this is not a mistake, “You may follow me.”

He crosses the threshold in front of her and then wavers. It’s a movement small enough that Lucienne nearly wouldn’t have noticed it if there hadn’t been at the same time a flash of red that ran across him and drawn her curiosity. Hob Gadling is half turned towards her and so she sees how he presses a hand against his chest where the light seems to gather for a short moment. The curious hum of Lord Morpheus’ power that seems to hang around him, grows stronger.

Before she can even blink the human straightens and keeps walking.

Lucienne hesitates too long then and before she can decide on a course of action - maybe it would have been better to bar Hob Gadling entrance after all - the man starts walking into the depth of the palace by himself, feet carrying him in a straight line towards the corridor that leads on the shortest route into its heart.

He could not have seen the corridor from where they stand, Lucienne is sure. Silently, she follows him. Maybe she should warn him about staying on the path - the palace isn’t any nicer about lost wanderers notwithstanding Lord Morpheus’ absence, after all.

She does not and stays behind him.

“You have come far since I last met you, Hob Gadling.”

“Just Hob is fine, Lady Lucienne. And yes, it was a long way. I suppose you took a shortcut to the palace?”

“Of course I did.”

She doesn’t offer him the same familiarity of using her given name and has no intention of using his but - Hob Gadling seems like the embodiment of friendliness, despite the strangeness of his presence.

He laughs. It’s a warm sound like the palace hasn’t heard in the longest time. Longer than the century Lord Morpheus was gone. She wants to believe that he is a sympathetic character. They walk in the dim light of the corridors, past junctions and up several stairs, around twisting bends - a spiralling, illogical maze that makes sense to exactly no one but Lord Morpheus and, at best, those that he allows to serve him in the palace.

It should be impossible for a dreamer to navigate it without following a clearly set path.

And yet… Hob Gadling does.

Lucienne takes care to stay just half a step behind him at all times, just to be entirely sure. He never hesitates, he never slows his steps or turns to Lucienne to take point. On the contrary, he seems entirely unaware that she is the one following, instead of him.

“Why did you seek out the heart of Lord Morpheus’ Realm?”

“I thought that title went to Fiddler’s Green?” The question sounds like idle small talk, not something Lucienne likes to indulge in normally, but it has been so long since things have been normal in the Dreaming.

“How do you know of Fiddler’s Green? Has the Drowning told you?”

“The Drow- oh yeah right,” he laughs sheepishly, “I suppose ‘The Nightmare of Drowning’ is a bit of a mouthful. And no, I met other nightmares on the way. A few of them fled to…”

He flounders for words for a moment and doesn’t seem to notice how the crumbling relief on the wall he musingly runs his fingers over while walking is glowing with a red sheen.

Everything about this human is ludicrously impossible.

“...hm that strip of scorched Dreaming that starts after you leave the Houses of Mysteries and Secrets in the direction of the palace? I don’t know what it’s called. It’s not the nightmares’ country any longer, though.”

There is no such thing as a direction in the Dreaming, least of all for dreamers.

The relief he has touched starts reassembling, stone chips and dust gently lifting from the floor he walks on and agglomerating in pristine shapes along the wall.

Absolutely, gallingly impossible.

She swallows a soft inhale and when her eyes start watering, she tries to tell herself that it is just the unexpected dust. This is a sort of power and care that she has last seen employed in the hands of Lord Morpheus.

“The Heart of the Dreaming - It is the title Lord Morpheus bestowed on one of his Arcana - Fiddler's Green, a long time ago,” she finally answers when she finds her voice again. “But this here, the palace, it is where Dream of the Endless resides. Without him, there is no Dreaming. It is all him.”

Hob Gadlings looks contemplative at that, as if the words remind him of something.

“…It empty though,” he finally says, some unnamable thing in his voice. “I know that Lord Morpheus is missing. You told me so already. But still it’s… empty.”

“So he does. I did not expect you to remember. Dreamers rarely do.”

They come to a stand in front of elegant double doors. And Lucienne realises that she hasn’t kept an eye on their path at all for a while now.

Despite this, Hob Gadling has unerringly brought them to the remains of the throne room.

***

There is power in every stone, every filament and tapestry. It suffuses what he breathes as air, and the hollow part in him that has been replaced with the Sea and the Ruby vibrates. It’s a high pitched humming at the back of his mind that nearly makes him want to scratch at the inside of his skull.

It’s hard to keep still, to not try and touch everything. It crackles under his fingertips, the power he associates with the Ruby, like the prelude to a storm. The palace is empty, yes, and it is yearning, screaming, pleading for its missing Lord. And Hob isn’t it; what it wants is not Hob and his power but it’s rightful ruler.

“What would happen if Lord Morpheus never returns?”

He’s curiously pushing at the double doors. They are finely wrought in carvings of illusive fairytale scenes and end in a pointed arch that makes him think of the gothic architecture of the Minster of York.

“The Dreaming would decay entirely. The waking world as you know it would descend into chaos.”

What is left in the absence of a dream; or Dream, in this case. Weren’t dreams and hopes two sides of the same coin?

“That sounds… awful, actually.”

“Very. Yes.” Lucienne steps up beside him. “So far, his absence has caused an ailment called Encephalitis Lethargica in the Waking. We still have dreamers here that have not left the realm in decades, and some who do not even reach us. I dare not imagine what would follow were the Realm to collapse entirely.”

Hob… can, actually. There were friends with him in the trenches that never woke up after falling asleep in 1916. He remembers the confusion and horror vividly. A new weapon of the Germans, they’d feared. More though, never found true rest again. They’d called it shellshock and yes, trauma was surely a large part of it but…The onset of the Sleepy Sickness was followed by the worst stretch of the First World War.

Nausea churns in his stomach. To imagine that the impact has already been felt in the Waking - it’s hard to swallow that a world of dreams might have such an influence on the Waking. What would the world look like if its access to respite and hope was - restricted; or gone entirely. He doesn’t want to remember the Second World War at all. If it got to be even worse…

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, right?” He hopes his grin isn’t as shaky as he feels.

Then, he finally pushed open the doors in front of him.

Lucienne slips past him, when he can’t manage to gather his wits fast enough in the face of what lies beyond. There’s something curious in the press of her lips, something between disapproval and naked hope.

“This is the throne room of Dream of the Endless, Hob Gadling. Will you not come in? You have led us here, after all.”

The room is grand.

Or rather, it was grand but the decay has not left even this innermost room of the palace untouched. The room stretches long before him, debris strewn in columns and shards up to the foot of winding stairs that rise unsupported towards three magnificent stained-glass windows.

The windows are unbroken, filtering colourful beams of ambient light into the cavernous room. It illuminates the remains of enormous arches that reach up high above him like the skeletal ribs of a slain beast. Beyond them, there is no ceiling. Glittering stars and nebulae make Hob feel as if he’s falling into space.

Hob doesn’t have a lot of time to take it all in.

The moment he has crossed into the room, a wave of power expands within him. It’s the nightmare sea’s full weight, it’s the ruby’s unfiltered heat and it drowns out every other sensation with him. He’s vaguely aware that he stumbles and manages to barely catch himself against the wall beside the entrance. His visions swims and he thinks he might lose consciousness if something like this was possible inside a dream

Under the hand he uses to support himself, marble carvings, once finely wrought like thinnest porcelain but now broken and chipped, regains their pristine edges and shapes. He hadn’t even meant to repair this.

He takes a deep breath and then another, trying in vain to pull the power back underneath his skin and into himself. It’s there to stay.

Lucienne, the only orderly thing inside the chaos of the throne room, observes him with sharp eyes.

When he finally manages to right himself and steps between the debris and shards of glass to join Lucienne, dust starts to swirl around his feet and the insistent pull of the ruby’s power has him stumbling like a newborn foal. He’s too small for it, not enough by far.

“Lady Lucienne? I think… I think we really need to talk about what I came here for, now.”

It’s hard to swallow around the words, his teeth and tongue are unwieldy.

“Indeed, we should.” Her voice is quiet and barely makes it above the insistent sound of crashing waves and static humming he hears. There is a careful hand on her shoulder and he finds himself led to the set of impossible stairs where he sits heavily.

“I found something in the Waking,” he forces out and does his best to calm the grip the ruby and the nightmare sea have on him. It’s… exhausting, and his stomach churns uneasily under the greedily pulling sensation.

“A jewel. I think. I think it might have come from here.”

“A jewel you say?”

“A… ruby. Or at least it looks like one. Since I found it, I have started this - this dreaming journey. It has… a strange power to it.”

Lucienne’s face is shuttered and her glasses make it hard for Hob to evaluate her ecpression. She’s taken a step back from him, tense and straight but her words are gentle.

“There are many magical stones and artefacts in the Waking, Hob Gadling. Some of them, in the right hands, might even allow you some measure of control over yourself in this realm. They must not necessarily have come from here, to let you dream lucidly as you do.”

That would explain the very beginning he guesses but nothing of the rest of it all.

“This here is not exactly the same as lucid dreaming, though, is it?” He makes sure that he’s as gentle as she is, that nothing of his fight to stay above the pull of the ruby gets out. “This is not really my dream at all, am I right? This is the place where dreams and nightmares dwell and I don’t think I should be able to perceive it like I do.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. Before she unfolds her staunchly crossed arms.

“You are not wrong, Hob Gadling. There is a way to prove it, once and for all. If this jewel is truly of the Dreaming, then you should be able to take it with you when you come here. If it is of the Waking, it cannot cross into your dreams with you and retain its properties.”

“Just like that? I could have proven-”

Hob breaks off. There’s no need to make himself look even more foolish. If he’d just dared to wear the ruby after all…

“Yes. Just like that.” The small crinkle of her nose and eyes is silent laughter. There’s unexpected warmth to it.

Hob grins self-deprecatingly and braces himself for having to wait out his time in the Dreaming. He’ll have to leave the palace before long; he doesn’t think he can sustain himself against the power of the ruby very long any more. He feels as empty as the palace, hollowed out and scraped clean by the tides of the Dreaming Sea and the jewel. There’s not a lot left for him to give without getting something, anything really, in return. Otherwise there’ll be nothing left of him.

He shudders and makes to stand with trembling knees.

“I need to wait until I wake.” It goes without speaking, that in Dreaming time that could take a long long while, still.

There’s something considering in Lucienne’s gaze before she turns and walks towards the part of the wall he’d accidentally repaired when coming in. She runs a hand over the intricately carved wall cornice musingly and looks between him and the broken stairs to the throne.

“Try willing it,” she says quietly.

“What?”

“Try it. Tell yourself that this dream is over and will yourself awake.”

“I don’t think that’ll really work.”

It couldn’t be that easy, could it? He could just -

***

Hob opens his eyes in the dark of his bedroom and rears upright with his heart rabbiting against his ribcage. It did work; and it was truly that easy.

“Fuck.” He runs a hand over his face. He’s not sleepy but wide awake. Like always.

“What the actual -”

It worked. How has that worked? Granted, he’s never before tried to actively make himself wake up - why would he after all - but this was just… this was too easy and too real. The power he’d felt in the palace tingles in his fingertips like static. It’s not gone entirely but for now, in the Waking, it’s manageable.

He disentangles himself from his bedsheets and plants his feet squarely onto the cool floorboards. It doesn’t help much against the feeling of waves crashing against his insides.

The ruby glows where it sits innocuously on his bedside table, hypnotic as always. It resonates somewhere within Hob’s mind and makes his head ring faintly. It stays, no matter how hard Hob rubs his face.

“You’re the real thing then.”

Dread pulls at his stomach. This has terrible implications for his Stranger. If he even is a stranger any longer. Because if this ruby is of the Dreaming - what are the chances that his Stranger isn’t. There are many dreams and nightmares missing, as far as Hob has seen, but there is not a particularly large likelihood that someone who holds a power that belongs to the palace of Dream of the Endless is a mere dreamthing.

It’s… a staggering thought and Hob shies away from it. Waking up on purpose is not enough proof. He needs to bring the ruby back to Lucienne. It’s the only way to be absolutely certain about what he fears.

The gem is warm to the touch and slips around Hob's neck without second thought - as if it belongs there. It’s unexpectedly heavy and the fine gold chain he’d bought seems suddenly insufficient to carry its weight in the long run. The moment the stone settles on his skin the ringing in his head stops. So does the staticky feeling. Instead, it’s just the deeply thrumming growl of waves breaking against waves.

It fills him, every nook and cranny and pore of him until he feels he might burst with the sheer might that suddenly runs through his much too human body.

He’s too small, too tiny in the scope of things to hold this power without it changing him irrevocably.

He doesn’t know what is different this time; it's by far not the first time he touches the stone. But maybe it's not mere physical contact at all, he realises slowly, thoughts nearly sluggish under the weight of the Dreaming Sea and the ruby combined. He is now actively acknowledging its power, after all; for the first time he accepts it in a way he has never dared to before.

He’s always felt it reaching for him, surely. It’s only now that he is reaching back. He’s made space for the ruby and its power after all. It’s time to accept what it gives in return.

Hob only realises that he’s closed his eyes, when he finally deigns to open them again. He’s still sitting on the bed in his flat above the New Inn. It’s still the night hours of a new day. Around him, there is a spread of awareness that reaches out into the world. It starts small but he can feel it expanding with every heartbeat.

His neighbour is still sleeping, as is the old couple one floor up. Their visiting grandson teeters on the edge of waking. Across the street a man is in the last throes of a nightmare, its presence a brush of warm water to Hob’s cold black sea. Fears, old and new, linger in the wake of the shadows.

There is a shimmer to the world, a curtain behind which he glimpses the Waking in strands of truth and story and fears.

He becomes aware, mind reeled back into himself, at the window. London is sleeping and Hob can feel all those dreamers like little pebbles sinking through the Dreaming sea. And beyond the humans, beyond London and England - he snuffs the thought, suddenly nauseous, his unspooled awareness like the sting of a rubber band that has been stretched too far before snapping back.

Is this how his Stranger had felt when he’d worn the ruby? Because this is more than just a paltry bit of magical power. This is responsibility and duty. Hob could decide hold them all, those Dreamers, and guide them … or clench his hand mercilessly and -

This is inconceivable.

He falls heavily into his armchair. The ruby needs to go to Lucienne, as fast as possible. Natural sleep, though, feels a million miles out of his reach at the moment. On the other hand, he did will himself awake once already. Curiously, he prodds the veil that sits ephemeral somewhere at the back of his too small mind.

He might just as well try the reverse of waking up and will himself to sleep. Slowly he leans back and gets comfortable in the armchair.

“Sleep, Hobsie,” he mutters as he reaches into the power of the stone and pulls at the veil.

He doesn’t even have to close his eyes before he appears in the throne room between one heartbeat and the next, the ruby hanging heavily around his neck.

Beyond the palace, there's the raging sound of heavy rain and booming thunder.

***

Interlude

Dream cannot stop the shudder that runs through his crafted, cold body when it happens. He carefully unfolds his limbs until he is upright again and sitting in his temporary prison.

Where the warm flow of stories had settled underneath his skin, there is now the gentle hum of power. He cannot reach for it, not through the bindings of the circle but it is there nonetheless - the ebb and flow of his might and his realm as he hasn’t felt it in longer than a century.

It is the culmination of a development the true reason of which he can only speculate on. The warmth that had burrowed unbiddenly underneath Dream’s skin has persisted. No, not persisted. It has grown - steadily and unnoticeably at first until it flowed nearly like mortal blood though every part of him.

But it’s not only power and warmth he feels.

He has bent his whole focus on it, dissected its flow, its cause, its effect. What he has found is gentle care shown to the Dreaming that has grown into something more. So much more that it changes him even in his prison. He is the Dreaming, even here, even cut off from it.

There is endurance in his limbs where there was the strength of rage before. The colour of faith is a new blush on his cheeks and lips, a trickle of spring that contrasts the winter of his cell. He has - grown used to it, over the months. Cherished it. Awaited each increase.

This, now, is more than that. It is a surge, a rising wave that blazes through him without an inkling of remorse. He tilts his head up and smiles at the painted ceiling. A large part of his power has just been fully returned the Dreaming.

Someone has brought his ruby back and restored it to its primary purpose.

He wonders how long it will be until he finds an opportunity to leave. He wants to see for himself who serves him undaunted and bold like this.

***

It’s worse than wearing it in the Waking.

Much much worse.

The jewel is heavy, chain cutting deeply into his neck. It's bright, nearly too bright to look into and it hums with the voices of millions, billions of Dreamers all vying for Hob’s attention at once simply for being there. When Hob closes his eyes, he’s swimming in a dark, endless sea, lost in between all the beings that make up this realm.

Quickly he slams his eyes back open, panting as if he’d really been caught in the deep sea. For the longest moment he can’t differentiate between the thunder crashing around the palace and the booming waves of power pounding inside him.

There‘s too much in his head. His skin is wrong, his body is wrong.

In the many facets of the ruby, he can see his own face - thinner than he's used to, black-bleeding eyes staring back at him. There’s no trace of the brown he’s used to, only the same black he knows from the eyes of the nightmare of Drowning.

“I knew it,” he pants, out of breath simply from trying to hold on to his sense of self, “I knew it was from here.”

The grin he shoots at Lucienne is probably more a grimace.

She doesn’t return it anyway. She has a hand in front of her mouth and there are unmistakably tears running down her cheeks even if she’s quick in wiping away the evidence. She’s not looking at Hob at all, though. She’s entirely fixated on the ruby that lays heavily on his chest.

“Yes,” she breathes, voice thick, “this is a thing of the Dreaming. It is Lord Morpheus’ Dreamstone.”

She brushes new tears away before they fall. “He would never be parted from it of his own will. It is an extension of his power, a sign of his sovereignty.”

“Lord Morpheus’... Dreamstone.”

He’d known it, hadn’t he? At one point, he thinks, he must have realised the possibility that his Stranger and the missing Lord of the Dreaming were one and the same, right? He’d simply - decided to ignore it.

“Do you want to know why I kept it at all after I came across it? It wasn’t for any kind of power I felt from it. To be honest, I didn’t feel shit at first.”

Hob hears himself laugh but it’s an ugly, self-deprecating sound.

“I kept it because it reminded me of my Stranger. The one I met up with over the many centuries of life he gifted me with. One century, one meeting. I kept it because it reminded me of the stupidly large gemstone he would wear each century. Except he didn’t show up last time, did he? And I… missed him; miss him now even, more than a decade later.”

His eyes are hot and he doesnt think he could stop the tears if he tried. He doesn’t even know why he’s feeling so betrayed by this. He’d come here purely because he wanted to know about a magical stone. He was an idiot. An utter and complete fool.

“You’re telling me- What you’re telling me is, that the man - being - who I owe my immortality to, who is most likely missing in action, is your Lord Morpheus, Dream of the Endless.”

A foolish human meddling with forces beyond his imagination. Why is he so angry that this is the way he learns about his Stranger? It’s not as if it makes a lick of difference. Hob still misses him, still wishes he could have had a chance or a way to show him that he’s come to care for him.

“Yes, of course that is him.”

“What do you mean, of c- “ He breaks off at the curious expression she looks at him with. It’s nearly apprehension. It dawns on him at once “… You knew. You knew who I was the moment I said my name, am I right?”

“I did. There has been a lot of talk in the palace about you over the centuries, Hob Gadling.”

The storm outside howls against the stained glass windows and Lucienne frowns uneasily.

“Then why didn’t you say anything?” But why should she have? Hob himself had given no inkling of recognizing her Lord��s name or station after all. He’d given her no reason - he’d only asked for advice.

“I… apologise,” she says, “I should not have held back the information.”

Again she throws a tense glance at the windows. She says more but Hob can't hear her over the howling inside his dreaming body and the winds battering the palace noisily. He’s angry - at himself mostly or at fate maybe. Why hadn’t he wanted to wear the ruby? If he had, would he have found out earlier? He hurts, everything hurts and bends and stretches in ways that are impossible even in his worst nightmares.

His Stranger hasn’t come to their meeting, Dream of the Endless doesn’t freely part with his Dreamstone, has been missing since 1916 if Lucienne is to be believed - something horrible must have happened. And Hob has squandered precious years by dithering, pitying himself, by being to much of a coward to-

He grips his arms with nails that are much too long to belong to him. They shimmer, black and shiny and sharp. He feels thin and hollow and angry. Something in him hungers. He hasn’t felt hunger in so long.

“Sir! Hob Gadling! Hob!” Lucienne’s hand on his too pale arm rips him out of his spiral.

“L-Lucienne. What is-”

“I apologise,” she says again, more softly this time and despite the howling in Hob’s ears he hears her easily, her touch on his skin a steady grounding point. “I should have been frank with you from the moment I recognized who you are.”

“It’s- it’s fine. I’m mostly angry at myself,” he grits out and then closes his mouth again. There is something wrong with his teeth.

“What is happening to me?”

“I do not know, Sir,” Lucienne's voice startles him despite having expected it. She’s much too close now, nearly hovering. “But whatever it is that the Dreaming is doing to you, it is trying to help you fulfil the purpose you set for yourself. It… is partial to you. Very much so, I fear.”

“It’s the ruby, though. Not the - not the Dreaming.”

“There’s no difference. None that matters at least,” she says, “The Dreamstones are as much a part of the Dreaming as they are a part of Lord Morpheus. Here, in his Realm, it is the Dreaming’s tool. Just as it is Lord Morpheus’ when he wields it.”

Hob's smile is a shaky thing as a long overdue realisation slowly takes shape.

“The purpose I set myself, huh… What I wanted…”

What had he wanted, at first? He’d wanted to see his stranger again when he first found the ruby, wanted to find him and apologise. Then, when he began his journey in the Dreaming, he'd been curious, and enchanted.

But after that, he'd just wanted to help - help those sadly decaying things of beauty he’d come across - full of teeming possibilities but slowly falling prey to hopeless dereliction - help that fantastical landscape who’s scorched bones screamed for something that had been ripped away.

And he’d wished to help that depthless sea that had hummed and whispered underneath his skin and in the shadows of the world he had so easily come to love the longer he had walked in it…

“I wanted to help this place,” he whispers, “because I've… grown to love it.”

The Dreaming and Dream of the Endless are the same, he remembers. He doesn’t think it makes any difference at all to disentangle which one he’s fallen in love with.

It’s okay, though, he thinks as he considers his nails and feels his teeth. He’d given freely of himself and he doesn’t begrudge the Dreaming for trying to give something back. It’s only fair. He’s not going to eschew the gift it offers in reciprocity.

#hob gadling #dream of the endless #dreamling #centennialhusbandsbigbang #centennial husbands big bang #ginoeh writes #lucienne the librarian

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the-common-cowgirl · 7 months

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Something Wicked This Way Comes

Summary: Alicent and Rhaenyra set up a fun little weekend Halloween trip for the cousins to reconnect since they have drifted apart after the incident on Driftmark. All the kids are in University now (even Aegon who has changed his major three times). Things are awkward when they all arrive at the supposed ��haunted” mansion AirBnB their mothers rented. Tension is high and when spooky things start happening, disagreements occur. In the end, everyone realizes apologies are in order and not just for what happened this weekend.

Rating: Teen

Warnings: Angst, animal death, swearing, mentions of diet culture, mentions of absent father, hints at infidelity.

A/N: This work is apart of the @hotd-bigbang !Thank you so much to @ice-mint for creating the art for this fic! Thank you @ewanmitchellcrumbs for putting on such an amazing writing event!

***

“The children have been distant for too long,” Alicent paced the kitchen with the phone snuggled tightly between her ear and shoulder as she stirred the pumpkin bread mix in the large bowl she was holding. “I just think that after their father - your father - passed that they all need some family bonding time,” she set the bowl down and readjusted the phone closer to her ear as she added, “without parental figures present.”

“Their grandfather too,” Rhaenyra added on the other end of the line. She was sitting on Dragonstone, nursing her wine glass, watching the sun set in the direction of the very person in which she was speaking.

Alicent gave a breathless, slightly annoyed laugh at Rhaenyra’s correction, “Right, Jace and Luke’s grandfather.” Rhaenyra’s end remained silent. “Anyway, I was thinking-”

“Oh, how you love to do that Alicent.”

She wouldn’t give in to Rhaeyra’s bitterness, oh no, not this time. This time she’d set toward the goal at hand and if Rhaenyra refused to send her horrible boys on a weekend holiday trip, all expenses paid, then that was her own doing. At least Alicent had offered.

“I was thinking,” she continued on, “that I could rent a large house that the kids could stay in over Halloween weekend. I’d pay for it all of course, Viserys would be thrilled knowing his children and grandchildren are spending time together.”

There was more silence on the other end of the line that felt like an eternity. Finally, Alicent could hear Rhaenyra exhale a long sigh, “Are we not worried about any safety concerns?”

Alicent grasped the edge of the counter subconsciously, harshly, nearly breaking her freshly manicured nails. She worried Rhaenyra would make an implication such as this when she first dialed her, yet, she’d hoped in the back of her mind that Rhaenyra was past this. Maybe had even seen where her son had done wrong, not Alicent’s; clearly, that was still not the case.

“If yours are on their best behavior,” trying hard not to grit her teeth together, “mine will be.”

“Trust me, Luke is ever the gentleman.” Rhaenyra’s voice was cold, cool. Alicent pictured her smug face as she must have known she had made a proper dig at Alicent. “But that sounds like a wonderful idea, Alicent. Where is the house you’re renting?”

Alicent felt her tension slowly fade as gratitude filled her at the fact Rhaenyra was at least considering Alicent’s idea at mending the broken family bond. “It’s in the Stormlands, half an hour drive from Storm’s End along the coast. I, uh- Well, it’s a beautiful old manor home but supposedly, it’s haunted. I don’t believe in that sort of stuff, however, if I’m sending my children away for Halloween weekend, I’d rather them be spooked than wasted.” Rhaenyra laughed from the other end of the line, making a smile creep up on Alicent’s face. It was good to hear her old friend laugh again and for a moment, her heart warmed at the sound.

“I think it would be a good idea to include Baela and Rhaena as well,” Rhaenyra stated. “They’ve been lost without Laena…and Daemon,” she nearly trailed off, not wanting to speak too badly of her uncle, “He’s not a very close father. I’m sure the girls would enjoy some time with their cousins.”

Alicent nodded into the phone as if Rhaenyra could see her, “No, yeah, absolutely. The house will definitely sleep two more but uh,” she began fidgeting with a loose thread on her apron, “I’m not on the best terms with Daemon, so if you could-”

“Extend the invite? I’m sure."

Alicent chewed bitterly on her bottom lip, “Thanks.”

***

Full fic can be found here.

#fanfic #house of the dragon #a song of ice and fire #gameofthrones #a03 #hotdbigbang #hotd big bang #hotd modern au #hotd fanfic

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kiestrokes · 10 months

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Welcome to our first public, DeluHrs:

DeluHrs - a silly little question asked by a moot that makes you go a little delu trying to answer.

Sometimes they're a NSFW, but we do quite a few SFW. It's just to feed the already manic k-pop delusions floating around in our brains. Tagging other moots is optional and nobody is obligated to play!

@chans-room asked me ➚ and my answers are below the cut because it ended up being insane. Thanks to the amount of groups I have multiple songs from that I don't exactly stan/have a bias, in addition to the groups I do stan. Please don't perceive me from the size of my list 🫥

ASTRO: Butterfly Effect

ATEEZ: All About You / Treasure / My Way (WHY IS THIS SO HARD -insert Felix rage quitting "I'm not going to play anymore"-)

BIGBANG: LOSER

BTOB: Pray (I’ll Be Your Man) ...I can’t even type this with a straight face

BTS: Like (Slow Jam Remix) / Whalien 52 / Magic Shop

ENHYPEN: Not For Sale / Fever

EXO: Paradise (honestly, I think this is my ult kpop song)

FIFTY FIFTY: Lovin’ Me

GOT7: Don’t leave me alone

GOT the beat: Rose / Outlaw

LE SSERAFIM: Sour Grapes

MAMAMOO: Egotistic

MONSTA X: MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

NCT 127: Baby Don’t Like It / Designer NCT DREAM: Quiet Down NCT U: Make A Wish (Birthday Song)

NewJeans: Hurt

NU’EST: WHERE YOU AT

ONEUS: LIT

OnlyOneOf: nabi

Red Velvet: Bad Boy

SF9: Love Colour

SHINee: Replay 😅 / Tell Me What to Do / Gravity

SKZ: WOLFGANG / Mixtape: Time Out

SuperM: Wish You Were Here

SVT: Don’t Wanna Cry / Crush

THE BOYZ: WHISPER

The Rose: RED ❗️❗️❗️

TXT: Blue Hour (though it should be Anti-Romantic)

VICTON: nostalgic night

WayV: Good Life

WEi: TWILIGHT

WINNER: FAMILY

XG: LEFT RIGHT

No Obligatory Tagging: @minisugakoobies @minttangerines @sugalaritae @seokjinger-ale + anyone else that I'm unsure of if you're a multi-stan, you can say I tagged you ❣️

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pastelwitchling · 1 year

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Malex au The Other Side chapter 3 teaser.

***

Michael had never before given thought to the whole “I must’ve done something terrible in a past life” joke, and then he found himself lying awake on his own living room couch, staring once again at the ceiling with the knowledge that his Alex was lying somewhere inside, and he knew he must’ve very much literally done something terrible in another life.

He’d spent the past two hours racking his brain for what he could’ve said that would have Alex looking at him in a way he’d never done before, and the problem wasn’t a lack of answers. In truth, there were plenty of things he could’ve said and done that would hurt Alex, each one making him flinch where he lay at the very thought of spewing anywhere in his husband’s direction. But if he was going to really be honest with himself, there was one thing, just one, that he knew would turn Alex away from him for good. One thing he couldn’t come back from.

One thing he’d teetered dangerously close to in the past, but managed never to cross that line. Because he’d always loved Alex too much and known in his heart, no matter how hopeless their situation had seemed, that if he’d really said anything like it, it would truly shatter any chance he and Alex had of getting together. So he hadn’t said it.

Except now, he feared that some version of him had. That some version had given up completely on the idea of him and Alex together, and so had said the one thing that he was sure would send Alex away for good. The one thing he’d never believed, but knew had the power to destroy.

The very idea of it made Michael push himself off the couch and head into Alex’s bedroom. His and Alex’s bedroom. He stopped at the doorway, watching Alex lie there with his eyes shut tight, shifting in bed as quietly as he could, trying to get comfortable and being unable to.

His fists clenched and unclenched, his heart hammering at the thought that the furrow in his Alex’s brow was because of him, and he stepped forward. Alex’s eyes fluttered open and he snapped to attention almost at once, sitting up and looking Michael up and down for injuries.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need another blanket? Are you cold?”

Michael’s lips quirked. That was his Alex, always more worried for him than for himself. Then the thought of what he might’ve said made any semblance of a smile vanish and he came to sit on the edge of the bed. Alex looked confused and wary and curious despite himself.

***

My dentist told me yesterday that I could have regular food and coffee again, so I'm celebrating with a mocha and some fanfic! Finally! Full disclosure, there was a complication with my surgery that had my mental health in tatters, but not being able to write and be creatively productive was making things soooo much worse. SO. With coffee comes more malex content! Yaaay!

I wrote quite a bit of the final chapter this morning and wanted to share some of it with you guys. I will keep working as hard as I can to get this out soon so that I can start working on my rnm bigbang. You guys aren't ready.

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beautifulpersonpeach · 2 years

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Ask on Lizzo and Supporting Problematic Faves (Repost)

Anonymous: Hello BPP!!! I saw an ask mentioning Big Bang and you also commented in one of your asks that you don't care about Lizzo being problematic. I'm curious what you think about "separating art from the artist"?

I'm still in the fence on it, as I'm quick to drop artists when they do something questionable and I usually lose any enjoyment I have for their music. But as an Army, I feel like I'm hypocritical because I'm aware that the boys aren't entirely clean either, mistakes were made, stuff happened, but I still thoroughly enjoy their music too. I guess what I'm asking is, where do we draw the line?

Because even thinking of possibly monetarily supporting an artist like Chris Brown makes me recoil, idols who have had bullying scandals also make me eek because who knows if they've really changed? Sometimes I wonder if BTS is as good hearted (in a reasonable, human, way) as we think they are, but since we have plenty of evidence that they are, I want to believe in good faith that it's true. Worrying about it would drive me crazy but my brain can't help it, haha!

Hi Anon,

First of all, I think there’s a fair amount of false equivalences going on here and honestly, in a lot of discourse around certain artists. It would never occur to me to place BigBang’s Seungri who was convicted for what are basically sex crimes, and Chris Brown who was convicted for domestic violence and assault, in the same sentence within any context with Lizzo who appropriated Asian culture in a photoshoot where the entire direction of that set was by LaChappelle who himself came under little to no fire, and the well known music magazine it was in, Rolling Stone, was also unscathed.

In my opinion it shows an absolutist mindset seen in hyper-religious people who believe all sin is equally bad. When of course, I think that’s nonsense.

So I guess, I’m not the sort of person to stop being interested in an artist the minute I see something I don’t like because I never approach artists expecting perfection. They’re real human beings with all the vices and virtues available to them. And I’ve said this about BTS in several places on my blog. There’s no hard and fast rule as we’re all different and can tolerate different things. Usually, for me, criminal actions are a hard pass. Nothing BTS has been accused of, even in theory or in rumors, comes even close to any of that, obviously.

There are several idols already toeing that line though, but BTS isn’t one of them, at least so far. And by the way, I honestly don’t believe those people who claim to be blindsided when unsavory/criminal news comes out about their idols because in almost every case it should’ve been plausible because of how those idols behaved. BTS is a bit different from most other k-pop idols or groups for a few reasons. The first is that (at least before COVID), they were always being filmed or moving between locations for touring. They’d be recording material for their new albums while on tour and were at some point functioning on less than 3 hours of sleep because of how busy they were. And were almost always together. Like k-pop stans used to make fun of BTS for always being together, saying that they had no life outside of BTS. It was unlikely to even catch them in compromising situations, so nobody was surprised that it was during their first ever long vacation in summer 2019, that we got ‘scandals’ for the first time from the group.

Another reason is the consistency of reports from people who work with them for the first time, those who have worked with them for years, people who are their peers and competitors, people of all races who have consistently vouched for how the boys behave in their personal dealings with them. It will be weird AF if a bullying scandal comes out for Jimin for example who even before BTS blew up, had almost every report from his old school comment positively on his character. There’s already a track record with BTS that has been corroborated from everyone from random fans and non-fans to even their own competitors. Of course it’s always possible we learn tomorrow that Taehyung is a pimp and Namjoon is a drug dealer. If that happens, I’ll rethink what I know of them now.

Something to always remember with BTS is that they are men, born and raised in a hierarchal, homophobic and patriarchal society. Over the course of their career I’ve noticed some of the members’ behaviors and professed beliefs become more progressive, but we never really know what they’re like. All that said, so far, there’s been no need to separate artist from art for me, in the case of BTS.

You’ll draw your line at a place that makes sense to you, and I’ll draw mine in a place that makes sense to me, which for now hovers somewhere around physical violence and/or criminal activities.

Originally posted: March 25th, 2022 12:22pm

#bts #fandom behavior #problematic faves #repost #lizzo #bangtan #fandom behaviour #kpop #kpop music

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nicanicani · 1 year

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TREASURE HELLO TOUR LIVE IN MANILA DAY 2 [04152023]

South Korean boy group TREASURE just held a 2-days concert plus a fan signing event here in the Philippines last April 13 to April 15.

I am one of the Filipino treasure makers (teume - fanclub name) who are blessed to witness these 10 boys performed live on big stage for their first ever Asia Tour.

And as a big fan I can't help it but to volunteer for the fan projects, been doing this volunteer thing ever since Super Junior by the way, so this is not new to me. Being a volunteer is tiring for sure but there's a fulfillment and happiness after it. I was appointed to distribute banners on queue and pink stickers for Upper Box ticker holders on section 417. The stickers are for rainbow ocean fan project before encore performance.

Concert haven't started yet but I'm already sweating and my arms and legs hurts from too much walking.

After waiting for hours TREASURE finally enter the stage and performed their first song for the night and it's JIKJIN. I was in Upper Box so my view isn't the best view. But hearing them live is more than enough.

They performed old songs such as Slow Motion and Orange their best ballad songs, Boy their debut song, and Going Crazy their pre-debut song.

Hyping the fans more with their cover of their labelmates songs like Bang Bang Bang by Bigbang and Rhythm Ta by iKON. TREASURE members especially their leader Hyunsuk was in awe that Filipino fans can sing along to these songs loudly.

One of the memorable segment was when the members were trying to deliver their tagalog pickup lines to fans. Junkyu's line was "Teume there's something in your face, cute maganda at sexy" it's cringe but boy it's Kim Junkyu so I won't complain 🤣

Before encore the boys stood in the middle to take group photos together with fans. 💙

After that they performed their last song MY TREASURE. And after that song was our cue to start the Rainbow ocean light project. The whole arena shine in different colors as fans open their phone flashlights while singing the bridge of TREASURE's Everyday.

IT WAS A SUCCESSFUL PROJECT because the happiness was shown on their faces. And we got two additional encores after that which was not part of the original plan. TREASURE ended up cancelling their flight back home to extend their time with us Filipino fans.

Hyunsuk's reaction when he saw our fan project 🥺

It was hard to say goodbye to these lovely boy. Definitely one of the best concert I've been to, not being biased, their live performance was superb, their fan service was heart warming, their appreciation towards their fans is genuine. I will never regret supporting and loving these boys. 💙

I will figure out how I can make my videos a short vlog. As you can see my section is not the spot. But I'll try.

I would like to thank Vampedia admins for helping me make this possible. Thank you! 🫰🏼

#TREASURE #vampedia

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nooradeservedbetter · 1 year

Note

Hi! What sort of fanfics do you write?

Hi! I'm not sure how to respond to such a broad question, honestly. The stuff I have written is all here at this link, spans five fandoms (plus one Italian satirical piece written on politicians), and I'd say it varies? Of course I'm not the same person I was in 2015 or 2017, but that's still a good sample of my writing.

Right now I have four quite ambitious projects in my works, and I'm trying to do everything without getting discouraged. It's three for the 1d fandom and then the SKAM bigbang, I do talk a bit about them here, if you needed some more context. (Blff author sign up opens in a little more than four hours and I need to get my first choice prompt of I'll cry really hard, but I'm not getting my hopes up because as far as I've seen it's going to be a bloodbath. Also the prompt is in the list of a very famous author and she's surely better prepared for the bloodbath than I am).

I don't know, I like plotty stuff, but I don't always write plotty stuff, it depends on what characters are telling me. It also depends heavily on the fandom I'm writing for, because my plots and my conflicts are all imagined around the source material. In the case of 1d of course it's more "imagined around my menthal characterisation of them" (I'm a huge sub Louis fan, for example, because of the way my mind shapes his character), but, yeah.

Thank you for this question, and sorry for the messy reply, ha!

#i love writing and i hate writing and i hate not writing even more #anon!#replies #my writing

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muselin · 3 years

Note

finally I see someone +25 y.o talking about slightly younger ppl. i'm on my early 30s and always feel ashamed of myself when i think someone younger is attractive. how much of an age gap is ok for you? also, i'm a switch and i don't have daddy/mommy kinks, but if there's someone who can make me call him daddy is top of bigbang. i stan suju, leeteuk n hyukjae give me the chills, but none of them give me dom vibes enough. i'd mostly like to tie them down and make them whine bc of overstimulation.

To give you a reference, I'm the same age as Taemin.

I know what you mean lol, I had the biggest mental block when 4th gen kpop ramped up, i couldn't get over the hurdle in my head of the age gap. I have different "thresholds" for different things. I used to think it was weird to write smut for idols who were so much younger than me but i got over it. Look at all the smut I've written for TXT lol. I have a 9-year gap with their maknae line.

But it's okay, you know why? Cause Heechul dated Momo, and he is 13 years older than her. Shim Mina's husband on the other hand is 17 years younger than her. IU dated Kang Jiha who is 11 years older than her. The actress Han Hyejin married footballer Ki Sungyeong who is 8 years younger than her. Not to mention that in Korea it's definitely a THING for a guy to date a noona.

Age truly is just a number my friend. Especially if we're talking about good old straight up sex and not marriage.

TMI for my own age gaps:

1. Had sex with - 10 years older than me

2. Dated casually - 4 years older than me

3. Serious relationship - 3 years older than me

4. Made out with - idk, probably 3 years younger or more? We didn't get to know each other much lol

5. Felt attracted to IRL - probably 10 years younger than me? I see cute university freshmen all the time. Sue me.

T.O.P. definitely gives daddy vibes, I agree! And as much as I love SuJu, I agree that there don't seem to be any straight up dom vibes in there. My bias is Hyukjae btw, love him so much 💙

SuJu definitely have a bit of a Great Gatsby, forever-young kind of vibe. Personally I can't see them as daddies and I can't really see myself domming them either, I view them mostly as equals.

Now, Shinhwa definitely give me daddy vibes, absolutely. Minwoo, Dongwan and Eric especially.

#bigbang #bigbang hard hours #bigbang top #shinhwa #shinhwa hard hours #muselin shinhwa asks

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sansbabygirl · 5 years

Quote

I'm in soft hours mood. I love him so much. I just want to cuddle him and squish his cheeks.

me, after looking at a cute picture of a bias one second after having major hard hours because my mood changes faster than the speed of light

#my mood changes are so fast #i have trouble keeping up #kpop #mood #soft hours #hard hours #shinee #ateez #the boyz #exo #BigBang #stray kids #ikon #got7 #sf9 #nct

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ginoeh · 3 months

Text

Welcome back to the third part of my entry for @the-centennial-husbands-bigbang 2024! All the beautiful art was done by @lalaithquetzallicaresi !

Due to a technical mishap a couple hours ago, gdoc decided to swallow my penultimate chapter. I haven't managed to convince it yet to spit it back out, so you'll have to be content with only chapter five of seven for tonight! I'm so sorry for the delay, I swear I will post the rest of it tomorrow even if I have to rewrite the whole next chapter!

The story is also available on AO3 where I'll post it chapter by chapter!

To the Edge of Night

Explicit HobGadling/Dream of the Endless Part 2 of 4 6k

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

*** *** ***

Chapter Five

They leave the throne room in haste.

There’s no less debris and decay on the balcony Lucienne brings him to than inside but at least it's under open sky and the overwhelming press of power seems easier to bear than in the throne room, less magnified. The feeling of freedom held in fresh air, no matter how saturated by rain, clears his head breath by breath.

“You may want to make the storm stop, Sir,” Lucienne shouts over the din of the whipping winds. They’re under the awning of the large opening that leads out onto the balcony.

“That’s a thing I can do now?”

Lucienne smiles a little.

“Is this truly the first time you have influenced the weather here?”

Hob thinks back over the months he spent travelling the distant shores. Maybe he could. Maybe he'd simply not noticed the connection because there's been no reason to suspect anything. The sky hadn't ever inconvenienced him after all, it had always been -

Ah. It had always been the perfect weather for the kind of travel he'd done.

“I suppose not.”

Lucienne watches as Hob tries to concentrate. It’s hard to gather himself in the face of the day he’d had.

Slowly, the rain slows to a drizzle.

“Don’t think I can do anything about the thunder, though,” he says apologetically over the ominous rumbling in the distance. “I’m… pretty upset to be honest. I’m glad we’re at least not getting drenched anymore.”

“Understandable, Sir,” she says as they cautiously leave the awning’s shelter.

Hob leans against the balcony railing, trails his hands over it and watches, fascinated, as the broken pieces of masonry slowly start to come together again. It’ll take time to become used to the excess of power, he thinks, in contrast to the insistent and slow care he’d expended before, when reassembling the broken things of the Dreaming.

“What next? My Stra- Drea- Lord Morpheus is still gone.”

And there’s the thing that has been hanging unsaid between them since Lucienne had confirmed what Hob had feared.

“You said he’d never freely part with the stone - I definitely got the same impression there. So that means he-”

“It must mean that our Lord hasn’t left by his own free will.”

There’s an excited hope in Lucienne’s voice that Hob doesn’t understand at all until finally, she starts talking.

*** *** ***

Hob wakes in his armchair in the exact same position he'd taken before willing himself to cross over into the Dreaming. Morning has already risen, foggy and dreary, and the hub of London’s morning rush hour is a quiet drone in the background.

Hob feels unreal.

His body is a too tight jacket, not at all big enough to house what he now carries. The mirror isn’t his friend when he mechanically starts to make himself presentable for the tasks he knows he has to do here in the Waking. There are shadows hollowing out his cheeks that don’t have anything to do with bathroom lighting; his eyes are too dark by far, nearly black and on every second blink he thinks his pupils bleed into the whites. He furiously wills them back into the gentle brown he knows. They comply only grudgingly.

Hob can’t do a single thing about the too sharp, black nails.

The Dreaming tugs at him insistently now, a pervading longing to return to it that makes him uncomfortable with his own, human world. Unfortunately, there is no way to find his Stra- Dream from within the Dreaming.

Lucienne had tried at first, back when it was clear that her Master wasn’t coming back and the Dreaming was still nearly at its full power. Nothing had come up in any of her searches.

The Dreamstone is the first trace of him that has appeared in all the years since he vanished. They need to find out how it had come into Hob’s hands, they need to trace it back to the moment when it left Dream’s possession.

There used to be books, Lucienne had said, the possibility to trace every dreamer but it’s long since gone and vanished back into raw dreamstuff. Hob hadn’t been able to find it despite Lucienne’s hopeful insistence that he try. He hated having to disappoint her.

So old-school legwork in the Waking is what it has to be. Hob'll have to go back to Mayham Storage's paperwork. If worse comes to worse, he’ll have to show up in person. But contrary to Hob’s expectation it’s a simple, unexciting phone call that yields the first success.

It’s nearly too easy to be true.

“A Mister John Dee,” says the voice of Riodan Laughlin, once scrawny emergency manager of Mayham Storage. His voice is tinny over the long distance call and tired besides.

“There’s no current address, of course. I don’t know which prison he was sent to. Will you come and terminate your lease? You’re one of our biggest customers.”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“Is there a reason you asked about that one storage unit after so many years?”

Hob frowns at the phone. Such a weird question.

“Not really. I’m simply writing some things down these days, for the grandchildren, you know? Getting maudlin as I get up there in years, I suppose.”

Riordan grunts affirmatively and then audibly hesitates. “He’s been convicted in Springfield, Clark County, it says here.”

“Thank you, Riordan. I’m glad to see that you managed to work out your troubles back then.”

“Thanks Sir. Same back, really.”

Hob ends the connection and stares at his phone for a long while. All the power at his fingertips, all the fantastical possibilities of the Dreaming and yet it’s his existence as a mere human that makes, for the first time in over a century, headway into solving the mystery of the Dreamlord’s disappearance.

It’s nearly ironic.

He could have done that at any time in the preceding years. He could have simply investigated on his own once he’d realised that the ruby was more than a simple gem. His body aches with the storm his anger makes of the ruby’s power. He doesn’t want to look into the mirror now; he’s not sure he’d recognize the reflection.

It’s a mundane task to organise tickets for the next flight to the US. There’s nothing Hob needs to pack, nothing he needs to take with him but a wallet and his passport. He forces himself to slow down once his flight schedule is clear. He makes himself a coffee and throws together a cheese sandwich with the pitiable contents of his fridge.

Both taste like nothing.

The churning emptiness in his stomach isn’t hunger. He forces the food down anyway and just hopes that it won’t make him nauseous in the long run.

When he’s already nearly out the door he remembers, with uncomfortable apathy, that he should probably inform at least his friends about his disappearance.

‘My uncle died’, he writes, ‘might be gone for a week or longer.’

Hob sends the message two times, for Emily and Oswin, then forces himself to be more mindful when writing another one out on paper for Martin. If he leaves it in the New Inn’s staff room, the man will find it easily. Then, he sets the phone onto the kitchen counter. He doesn’t think he’ll need it for the rest of his mission; and in any case he isn’t sure if he’s in any state to field condolences over the death of an old part of himself.

When he leaves he closes the door behind him noiselessly. Bertholt Grant has reached the end of his mostly fictional life.

***

Travelling turns out to be… interesting.

The waking world seems to bend around him. He draws eyes, more than he usually does, and he doesn’t know if that’s due to visible changes the ruby and the Dreaming have wrought or if there’s something else, as well. He feels as if he’s trailing fears and nightmares and all those things he can’t rightly contain underneath his too tight skin.

But attention is the last thing he wants and as soon as he tries to stay undetected and be forgotten, nobody notices him at all. As if he’s a centre of gravity and his mere presence and wishes influence the reality of those around him.

It doesn’t help at all with making the Waking seem more real to Hob.

No one questions it when he slips unhindered past the security officers at Heathrow Airport. No one notices or cares that he has a gem worth more than their yearly salary around his throat. They don't see it, don't see him because Hob doesn't care to be seen. He wonders if that is how his Stranger always felt. Alone and untouched in the middle of humanity. Among them, but separate. He's not sure he cares for it all that much. For now though, it serves him well.

So this is how Hob finds the protocol of John Dee’s arrest officer, standing in broad daylight in the middle of Springfield’s police station, a mere 36 hours after leaving London, and going through their arrest protocols from late 1993 backwards.

The constant use and control of the Dreaming’s power to bend the world around is taxing, though, exhausting on a level more than bone deep. It takes something that he can replenish by neither sleep nor any of the food he forces himself to eat on the way. For now, he’s strong enough. He’ll see this through to the end, at which hopefully Dream of the Endless, his old friend, regains his Kingdom.

Hob finds the protocol without any problems and no one the wiser and while it doesn’t help him in finding John Dee immediately, it gives him the name of the involved officer. Finding him is absurdly easy.

It’s what comes after, that turns his world on its head once more.

***

It’s early evening when he finds himself in Springfield’s suburbia. It’s a middle-class dream of picket fences, well-kept lawns and clean streets. Hob hadn’t thought something like this still existed in the 2000s. It feels stifling, somehow. A leftover of a time that reminds Hob of the anguish of many of his lovers and friends, of sad tales of a childhood home in denial, of being cast out of families for the sin of loving wrong. He’s aware that he’s likely inferring too much and too indiscriminately - he doesn’t know the people who live here. Not without letting himself fall into the crashing waves of power he contains and searching out their sleeping minds. But that isn’t what he’s here for.

The house he observes is no different from the others. There's a well-kept pick-up truck in the driveway, abandoned garden tools lean against the veranda balcony and through the living room windows he can see the blue flickering light of a TV.

A cartoon is on; a kid’s bike leans against the garage wall. There is a kid where Hob had expected only an old, pensioned officer and at most a wife. This complicates things.

“Eric Watson?”, he asks when the man he’s looking for opens the door.

“Can I help ya? We don’t buy anything.”

Hob smiles but judging by the way Eric Watson narrows his eyes, it looks threatening more than charming. He’s really off his game.

“I wanted to ask you a few things about an arrest you made in the late eighties.”

The man’s eyes rove over Hob, evaluating and then disregarding him as a physical threat - not something Hob is used to. He knows the figure he cuts; usually at least. He doesn’t know exactly what the ruby makes him appear like at the moment that he seems physically nonthreatening to a mid-sixties pensioner.

“I’m not talking about old police cases. Please leave.”

“It’s about a man named John Dee-”

Eric’s face shutters instantly.

“Get off my lawn.”

“Mr. Watson-”

“I said,” the man repeats quietly and leans in, clearly thinking he has the upper hand, “get off my lawn or I’ll make use of my right to defend my house and property.”

Hob retreats. It might be easier once his wife and the grandchild are asleep. He’s not here for violence after all and the thing Eric Watson fears are the ghosts of his police work coming to haunt him and claim the lives of those he loves. He has many, many nightmares about it.

Time moves at a crawl afterwards.

Hob waits and waits and then, finally, he slips into the sleeping house, unseen only due to the power he employs and not the care with which he moves. He’s much too impatient for any kind of caution at this point.

His Stranger, his friend has had to wait much too long already.

The night embraces Hob like a blanket, a caring extension of the Dreaming. He feels like wisps of the Dreaming's power escape from under his skin and diffuse into the dark of the quaint house. He feels blurred, only half-real. The ruby throws its ominous glow across the interior and makes his own skin shimmer eerily red.

He’s gentle when he wakes Eric Watson where he has slumped on the couch. There is a can of beer and a gun on the couch table. The man rears up, wide awake within a second. He’s not amused at all and Hob really can’t fault him for it. If this were him, he’d take no prisoners.

“How did you get in?”

He’s tense, frozen on the couch but he clearly reconsiders the danger Hob poses to him and his loved ones. His fear is bright and loud and Hob feels discomfited.

“Who- what are you?!”

Hob doesn’t like this. Not at all. It feels like violence, after all.

The light of the ruby pulsates slowly, threateningly. Eric Watson’s fear hightens, blares across Hob’s senses and for a moment he loses all sense of where he is.

Next, the man has the gun pointed at his head and Hob just reacts.

Or maybe it’s the Dreaming that reacts and the ruby. He throws himself forward, throws his power with him and then Eric slumps, suddenly lax, gun falling to the side and Hob falls as well. He tumbles onto the end of the couch, barely aware of himself at all, teeters at the edge of something and then he gets pulled into a cold current.

He knows the feeling intimately. It’s the same cold and wild current that had drawn him into the Dreaming. This time, it's not the Dreaming at the end of the ride. Or, it is but it's a part of it Hob has never seen or interacted with before. With the mental equivalent of his ears popping he steps into a nightmare he knows.

“Hello Sir,” says the Nightmare of Lost Loved Ones. “I thought I’d offer my help. The twins are keeping the child and wife under. They are gentler than I am.”

“What- what is this,” Hob breathes but even as the question leaves his lips, he already knows. The emotions, the distorted sounds, the amalgamation of unlikely scenes of unimaginable sorrow - and Eric Watson in the middle of it, moaning voicelessly.

This is the man’s dream, his nightmare and fear. And Hob is a spectator to it all.

More than a spectator.

“I can influence his experience, can’t I?” He asks the nightmare at his side but the answer is clear in the threads of the power he feels around him. This is what the ruby can do.

No, this is what Hob can do with the ruby.

***

It is…nearly easy to get the information he seeks. It is a nightmare after all, perfectly willing to help and bend to Hob’s needs. In his nightmare, Eric Watson complies to Hob’s demands and answers his questions.

But manipulating dreaming minds is taxing, he finds - more than just physically exhausting.

Hob comes to in the darkness, a headache blooming behind his eyes. He’s still kneeling on the end of the couch. Eric Watson’s skin gleams with the sweaty sheen of fear. Hob feels detached, lost, more shadow than human. The strain of bending his power in such a way has taken something from him and like an athlete who doesn’t replenish the lost calories, Hob feels weak, empty.

He’s hungry.

***

Hob enters the facility that holds John Dee unseen.

It’s a high-security institution, more of it underground than above, both in the literal and in the metaphorical sense. It’s where the truly dangerous go - and those that could be truly dangerous to someone in a multitude of ways, but where that someone has enough money to make sure it doesn’t get that far.

Hob’s not entirely sure where John Dee falls on that scale but given what he’d seen in Eric Watson’s nightmares, he’s sure that with a woman like Ethel Cripps as the orchestrator of his committal into this institution, John Dee will have little chance of acquittal.

“Who’re you?”

John Dee sounds hostile. He lays on a plain bed, bolted to the floor like everything else in his brightly lit room. There is sterile white and surgical steel and not much else inside it.

He is old. Older than Hob expected.

There’s something uncanny about him. Something less and more than human. To Hob’s senses he’s… hollow. And too full at the same time - too many nightmares, not enough dreams, too much power, not enough strength. The ruby burns where it hangs on its chain. An eerie familiarity seizes Hob, a resonance that feels sinister and hypnotising. It’s entirely repulsive.

Hob is glad that there is glass and steel between him and John. The ruby’s power swirls wildly, disturbingly undirected. It’s a far cry from the focussed intent he’d felt just hours prior in Eric Watson’s dreams.

Yes, this man has had the ruby in his possession. Maybe he’d even tried to use its power. Hob doesn’t like the thought and neither does the ruby - or so it feels like. There’s anger there, hurt and a sort of longing that strikes Hob as artificial and fake.

“You have it, don’t you? I can feel it from here. It’s mine. I made it into my tool. For my perfect world.”

Yes, Hob is unbelievably glad for the security door that separates him from John Dee. He doesn’t want to know what would happen if the ruby fell into John Dee’s hands.

“You made it? It isn’t yours, John.” He knows the man can hear him even though he whispers.

“I made it mine. It’s my birthright.”

John Dee rages against the cuffs he’s restrained with.

“It’s mine,” he hisses again and pulls so hard on the cuffs that Hob can see his shoulders distorting under his flimsy pyjamas where he’s on his way to pulling them out of the sockets in his rage.

Somewhere an intercom crackles and then alarms start blaring with flashing red lights.

There’s not much time left until the wards will arrive and sedate the frothing man. He needs the information and he doesn’t know if induced unconsciousness is a state he can even feel with the ruby much less access like he did with officer Watson.

There’s not much choice. John needs to sleep.

Hob feels along the ruby and into the place where the Dreaming Sea laps at his empty insides. He’s had no trouble falling into Watson’s dreams. An accident, yes, a reaction born of anger and discomfort but still something the ruby had leapt at eagerly to do.

Now, it is nearly reluctant.

But John Dee needs to sleep and so he will. Hob pulls hard at the ruby, throws its power at John and pushes him under. John slumps, hanging off his bed with his shoulders painfully stretched.

It works but it doesn’t feel natural. Pulling people from one realm to the other isn’t something that the ruby and the Dreaming can easily do, Hob realises. Maybe… maybe the ruby isn’t the right tool for that.

Still, it is done now and time is of the essence. There are the sounds of footsteps coming closer through the labyrinthine corridors that lead to John’s holding cell. He needs to finish this before either a sedative might take John out of his reach or he is woken up and taken out of the Dreaming.

This time, he doesn’t need to be pulled to find John’s sleeping mind.

When he enters John’s dream, Hob immediately wishes it hadn't worked. He wishes he could unsee what John dreams about what he hopes for. He wishes the man hadn’t ever been subjected to the power of the Dreamstone. There is no sanity left in John Dee -there hasn’t been for the longest time.

It’s nearly too easy to find the information he’s after, a name and a location. John raves about it, after all, about his power and his dream and his birthright. He’s spewing the name and the location at Hob with the barest of prompting and that’s all he wants and everything he needs.

The rest, though, Hob would rather forget.

John Dee has made a nightmare into his perfect world and if given a chance, Hob knows that he would make that dream come true. When he exits the dreamscape, horrified and numb at once he’s deep within the currents of the Dreaming Sea and the bubble of John Dee’s dreamworld glimmers darkly before him.

“Sleep well, John,” he murmurs as he reaches for the waters around him.“Your dreams will be your ultimate truth. A world like you envisioned, for the rest of your life.”

Then he presses the bubble down and down and down until it is swallowed up by the endless darkness of the Dreaming Sea. He can feel it still faintly, buffeted by the gentle but unrelenting pressure of the deep sea. It won’t leave any time soon.

John Dee will likely never wake up again.

***

Hob manages to keep it together until he’s finally far enough away that he dares to stop the rental car and tumbles out. He heaves but there’s only bile in his stomach and so he waits on his knees at the roadside until the worst of the shaking has stopped.

“What the fuck did I just do?”

Hob doesn’t regret it, not at all. He’s still incandescently angry and horrified in equal measure whenever he thinks of the nightmarish vision John Dee had created. His perfect world - no lies, no hopes, no dreams. He’d been so close to achieving it as well with the ruby. It would have been a perversion of unspeakable level.Hob is infinitely glad that instead he was the one who had found it.

When he finally feels steady enough to at least make it to the next motel without crashing the car, he heaves himself back behind the wheel. He only makes it another few miles before he gives up - he’s nauseous, trembling, the ruby beats a furious tattoo of screaming power against his insides and he has nothing but the roaring of the sea in his stomach.

He’s so hungry.

He doesn’t remember checkin in at the sorry excuse of a motel that he finds himself in. As he stumbles along the badly lit corridors he tries to think whether he talked to anyone at all or if he just snatched a random keycard from the counter. He doesn’t care either way.

His head hurts. He’s angry. There’s a black haze across his vision and when he rubs his eyes, his hands come away with smears of black tears.

Something is terribly, horribly wrong.

The room the key card opens is stiflingly small. The floral print of the musty bedsheet swims before his eyes. There’s gnawing hunger eating at his insides, he needs to eat - something, no matter what.

Hob nearly bashes his head open on the edge of the wardrobe when he staggers to the tiny fridge and haphazardly throws its contents onto the bed. The crisps taste like nothing; neither do the peanuts. The chocolate bar makes him nearly throw up from its consistency alone and still - there’s no taste to anything, nothing makes him feel less hungry.

He’s still ravenous. He’s still angry. He’s still so very afraid for Dream, for his friend.

In the end he gives up and falls bonelessly between the torn wrapping papers, stomach churning and twisting with the push and pull of the Dreaming Sea. He’s given so much, he thinks. He’s given so much and is willing to give much more to help his friend but he suspects that he might not have a lot left to give after all. He’s hollowed out and scraped clean and he knows on some level that he needs to replace that which he has given with something else.

“Sleep,” he rasps around too sharp teeth and wills himself to Lucienne’s side with a gentle flex of power.

She’s waiting for him in the cavernous room that leads onto the balcony. There’s apprehension in her eyes and hope when she hurries to Hob’s side on his uncoordinated arrival.

“I have a name,” he gasps and pushes himself upright where he’d nearly fallen.

“Are you alright, Sir?”

Hob shakes off her hand. There’s no time to lose; impatience and anger itch underneath his skin. On the balcony, the dreary weather unloads in a deluge of rain and lightning.

“I have a name and a location,” he repeats,” The ruby was originally in the possession of Roderick Burgess of Wych Cross, Fawney Rig, London. A magician who summoned and captured the devil in his basement.”

Lucienne rears back and Hob is vindicated in the rage and burning hope he sees mirrored in her.

“You found him,” she whispers, something unnameable in her voice. “You really found him.”

He’d been so close. All these years Hob had been so close. He wants to scream or cry or maybe both. The Dreaming screams for him instead with booming thunder. If only he’d looked, if only he’d thought to search for his friend after he’d found the ruby. His vision wavers in a black edged haze and he knows that his fury that runs through him is black as tar.

“I need to go back to England. I need to get him out, Lucienne.”

And fast, he thinks. If Dream had been held and captured at Roderick Burgess’s manor for more than a hundred years… He shudders with rage and nausea. Lightning strikes and static runs in bright arcs across Lucienne’s skin. She doesn't seem to notice at all.

“Travelling will take so long.” Hob can’t fathom the horror Dream might have gone through in the magician’s house. He shouldn’t have to wait even one more second. “And I’m not sure I can - corral this power for long enough to go back, right now.”

It’s hard to admit but Hob feels weak with the exertion he’s expended.

“You could try to travel across dreams. Or even nightmares if that's easier for you. But there is still your human body to consider.”

Hope is fever-bright in Lucienne’s eyes. This is loyalty, Hob thinks, loyalty and love. This is all for his dear Stranger and Hob wants so much for him to see it, to feel it, how brightly it burns in Lucienne. They haven’t left him in the magician’s hands willingly, no matter how wretched and guilty Hob feels for not acting sooner.

The pull of the ruby suddenly gets harder and the Dreaming Sea roars deafeningly in his ears. His hollow insides gape emptily in ravenous hunger. All three conjure up the image of the Dreaming Sea.

“I think there is another solution,” he whispers. “Using the Dreaming's power is … exhausting. To do even more, I’d need to… to regain some of the energy I’ve spent. I'm… hungry,’ he finally admits, defeated,”but the food of the Waking world hasn’t helped at all.”

The Ruby glows brightly where it hangs on its golden chain.

Lucienne’s eyes narrow and she looks him up and down, considering.

“You are right, Sir,” she finally says slowly, “Your story isn’t only one of a journey but it’s also one of metamorphosis. And those like to go full circle. To be of help, you need to finish changing.”

“What are you saying, exactly?”

“I think you might know that better than I do, Hob Gadling.”

He does. He has accepted the ruby and it has taken the place of his heart. He’s yet to fully accept the Dreaming Sea, the nightmares that have brought him here and guided him.

“How fast can we reach the Dreaming Sea from here?”

Lucienne smiles and it's a ferocious, joyous thing. “With the power you brought back into the Realm? Very fast. Follow me.”

***

They step out of a nondescript door at the end of a winding corridor. It vanishes the moment Lucienne closes it behind her. Before Hob lies a welcome, nostalgic sight: endless water, endless sky and between them both a well-worn walkway. The sea is completely still underneath the planks, as smooth as the surface of a mirror.

Lucienne next to him inhales softly. “It’s awaiting you,” she whispers. “The Dreaming… it has waited for you to come back to its very source, can you feel it?”

Hob nods mutely.

There is a strange resonance; the power beneath his breastbone lies quietly waiting. Within moments they are at the end of the walkway, where Hob had once woken so many years ago.

Hob kneels and bends over the edge to peer into the beckoning darkness of the sea.

“Sir?��

“It’s alright,” he hears himself say distractedly, “you were right, Lucienne.”

There is a figure rising from water’s depth, a reflection that slowly gains shape as it emerges. Hob knows it already. He’s seen it before, once, when he’s offered a crown to the Monarch of Dreams. Only this time he’s not so sure if it’s a distorted image at all or if it’s him, Hob Gadling, in the form the Dreaming and the ruby have made him take.

It is wearing the flower crown and a sharp, wild smile.

Then it flickers and wears the face of his Stranger instead, high cheekbones under black-dripping eyes and a sharp-toothed slash of a smile. It stretches both hands towards Hob, and on a paper-white palm it cups a small heap of obsidian black pearls.

Hob mirrors the motion until they nearly touch at the water’s surface.

“You are hungry,” the sea, the Dreaming, its Lord croons softly.

“I am,” Hob whispers, “ravenous.” And the sea shudders where his fingertips gently breach the water.

“We do not share,” the sea whispers back. “This is forever. There is no compromise.”

Hob smiles. He hasn’t expected one. After all, nothing about his Stranger has ever spoken of compromise. Neither has his ruby in how it has nestled itself into the place that belonged to Hob's heart and taken it over.

“I know.”

“Then eat your fill.”

He's Persephone, this is Hades. This is the last choice.

He’s Kore and in love with the sea and there is no choice worth considering.

He takes the pearls one by one, rolls them between his not-quite human fingers, contemplates the stains they leave, the black smears that sink into the groves of his skin where they run and flare like darkest ink. When he brings them to his lips, the reflection smiles, the sea hums and sings and churns.

Waves flood over the dock. Behind him, he hears Lucienne shout something but it is drowned out by the sudden storm.

The pearls taste like the sea itself - of the salt of tears, the sharp cut of high winds, of dreams and cruelty and heedless adoration - condensed into them lies all the purpose and weight of the Dreaming Sea. They are cool on Hob’s tongue. He chews slowly, deliberately even as they lose consistency, expand and fill his whole mouth. It forces him to swallow fast and then faster to keep from choking.

“Sir!”

This time he hears Lucienne’s anxious shout but he’s unable to answer. It’s impossible to draw enough air in between the gulps he takes to even think of talking, the water runs down his chin, his hands - it’s black and cold and heavy as the deep sea.

Hob swallows and swallows but he doesn’t try to stop.

His body burns. The dilapidated motel room flickers before his eyes, and is instantly replaced by dripping shadows. He feels his hands meet the wood of the dock and the sheets of the musty motel bed at the same time. There is water in his mouth and nose, it travels down his throat, lines his stomach and lungs and veins.

He can’t breathe.

he can’t breathe-

he can’t breathe!

‘Yes,’ the sea croons with the voices of a thousand and Hob feels it lap at his insides and hollow him out until there is nothing but black endlessness between a vast sea of blinking stars. He exists, for a mere second, lying in a bed that reeks of mould, in a hotel on the east coast of the US and then -

He is gone.

There is darkness and water, a current that cocoons him, runs through him, as it propels him forwards, down and down and down until worlds float by in shining bubbles full of impossibilities.

He is spat out at the dock, on his knees, while around him black waves crash back into the sea of nightmares and dreams. Before him stands Lucienne, something adjacent to shock fading from her eyes.

“Welcome to the Dreaming, Hob Gadling. Sire.”

He stands slowly, unused to limbs that should be familiar but aren’t. Where Hob is expecting strong, tanned hands with chipped nails, there are pale fingers - his own but not quite, tipped with black claws that look like the ones his little nightmare has. It’s fitting, he thinks, for he has drowned himself willingly to finalise this metamorphosis.

His legs are shaky, tangled in something that looks like clothes but feels like an extension of the Dreaming woven through with shadows. The fabric is warm and comforting, his favourite jumper and the manifestation of nightmarish fear at the same time.

He's not hungry anymore. There is nothing in him that feels hollow. Finally, he has replaced that which he has given with what the Dreaming has offered in recompense.

“Sire.” Lucienne repeats, voice is deferring, and Hob becomes aware of more than himself in increments.

He is in the Dreaming; wholly and completely, for the first time. He has accepted the Dreaming’s offer, and has become complete again after giving and giving and giving to the ruby and the Realm.

“Lucienne. What am I now?”

He lifts his strange hands, pats over his strange clothes and wonders if there is enough of his human parts left to leave the Dreaming; if there’s anything that’s able to go back into the Waking and live there, thrive in it as he had done for centuries.

He doesn’t wonder whether it was worth it, though.

There is conflict in Lucienne’s eyes as she regards him over her glasses, hope and awe warring with apprehension.

“I don’t know, Sire. A transformation, of course - you are here now, after all. There is no part of you left in the Waking. But beyond that?”

She scrutinises him, eyes lingering first on the ruby and then on something on his head. When Hob reaches up, he nearly dislodges the object that has caught Lucinenes attention before he manages to grab it. He hadn’t even noticed it.

It’s a crown of flowers. The crown of flowers. It lies heavy in his hands, a promise and responsibility at once.

“What…”

Lucienne's eyes don’t quite meet his, in deference more than avoidance Hob thinks.

“No one but Lord Morpheus has ever dared to wear a crown in the Dreaming. For the Dreaming to give one to you…,” she trails off and suddenly bows, deep enough that it makes Hob uncomfortable just on principle.

“I don’t know what it means either,” he says and doesn’t mention how he’d offered that same circlet of thorny flowers to a too dark pond in the nightmares’ country or the words he’d spoken with it.

Instead, he brings them back to the most important matter.

“Tell me how to travel between the realms, now that I’m not bound to… to a human body any more.”

Lucienne obliges eagerly and with a vicious smile on her lips.

#hob gadling #dream of the endless #centennialhusbandsbigbang #centennial husbands big bang #the sandman fanfiction #ginoeh writes

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mycomplex · 6 years

Video

Happy birthday to this beautiful human inside and out. I’m so thankful for all the things you have accomplished so far and how you’ve affected parts of my life make me who I am today. I love you and miss you dearly 💕

Thank you for changing my life that day, I’ve cherished this moment for over a year now.

#yay my 23 second send off that I even cut out some lol.........#I wanted to finally share this with you all.#I suck at writing and probably sat here for the last hour figuring out what I wanted to write #But everytime I start thinking about some deep shit I end up crying so here is the not so deep shit #adding flower road music really kicked my feelings hard #I feel bad that I didn't prep anything :(((((((((((((((#But here you gooooooooo :((((((((#GD #Gdragon #G dragon #Kwon Jiyong #Jiyong #Ji #Kwonjiyong #bigbang #Happy818Gday #personal #051989

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gdragonandon · 2 years

Text

Compact Breakdown of Seungri’s Case

Hey guys, following BigBang’s comeback last week, I want to talk about Seungri's Case. It was hard for me since 2019, when the case first started, amidst public anger and not knowing what was true and what was false. After taking time to dive into the evidence presented in all 25 case hearing documents, I want to do my part as a VIP in helping people understand the case in full and not be misinformed by the misleading and false information that the media (articles you see on allkpop, koreaboo, etc.) have been throwing out. Seungri’s case is a complex one, but please take time to educate yourself on it before spreading hate and condemning him.

To start off, the Burning Sun Scandal is a highly publicized case that all kpop fans have most likely heard of. However, after the initial public outbreak of anger and condemnation of Seungri in 2019, not many people, major media sites included, kept up with the case's progression which lasted nearly 3 years. To this day, so many people assume that Seungri committed/facilitated prostitution and other sex related crimes, but the evidence presented in the 25 court hearings do not support this. There has been so much misinformation and media manipulation surrounding Seungri’s involvement in these crimes, to which they mixed 3 different cases and made Seungri the poster boy for all of them simply due to his high profile and buzz value that he brings.

Let’s look at the 3 different cases and see how they were mixed together by the media when they were really three totally separate cases.

1. Burning Sun Case

What the case was about/how it started:

Near the end of 2018, a person named Kim Sangkyo claimed that the club drugs and rapes women after being arrested for assaulting police outside the Burning Sun club. The incident occurred in November 2018 but came to media attention in January 2019.

Police investigated this suspicion that drug crimes and sexual assault were being committed under organized protection at Burning Sun Club, they also investigated police collusion and bribery.

CCTV footages revealed Kim Sangkyo was lying, as he was seen kicked out of the club after harassing women. (Kim is currently on trial for sexual harassment following the filing of criminal complaints from 4 women)

From a simple case of club assault, it became a massive issue due to the involvement of Seungri’s name (see more details below).

Seungri’s connection:

Seungri was a minor indirect shareholder of Burning Sun (through his 8% holding in Yuri Holdings, which had a 20% holding in Burning Sun), he had no involvement in the operations of the club and only lent his name as the face of the club and occasionally DJed there.

There were rumors that Seungri was involved/was present during Kim Sankyo’s assault, so police did an investigation and drug test on him. In fact, Seungri had left 3 hours prior to the incident and his drug test came out as negative.

Media portrayal/misinformation of Seungri’s involvement:

Media suggested that Seungri was the CEO/in charge of the club and facilitated drug and sexual assault within the club.

Media headlines stated the club as “Seungri’s club” despite him not actually running the club and only being a 1.6% shareholder.

What court evidence revealed:

Of the 9 charges Seungri is charged with, not a single one relate to drug crimes and sexual assault, to which he had no knowledge of. The only Burning Sun related charge is that of embezzlement of club revenues as a minor shareholder, totally unrelated to the main Burning Sun case regarding drug and sex crimes.

On July 10, 2019, police investigation concluded that there was no evidence of rape and drugs inside the Burning sun, that the allegations were unsubstantiated claims spread by Korean media.

Burning Sun co-CEO Lee Seong-hyun and ex policeman Mr.Kang were indicted for police collusion and bribery acceptance for mediation, the other co-CEO Lee Moon-ho was booked for personal drug usage. None of these crimes had any relation to Seungri.

2. Jung Joon-young’s Molka Case

What the case was about/how it started:

Amidst the Burning Sun case, another explosive case surfaced on March 11, 2019 when an anonymous whistle-blower (a phone technician) reported to lawyer Bang Jun-hyun about the Jung Joon-young (JJY) Molka (Korean for hidden camera) chatroom case.

JJY, a Korean singer distributed secretly filmed sex videos during a 6-7 month period in 2015 through Kakaotalk chats. The group chat where most crimes took place consisted of Korean idol/celebrities such as Choi Jong-hoon (ex. FT Island) and Lee Jong-hyun (ex. CN Blue). JJY admitted to all allegations of illegal hidden camera filming and distribution; more investigation result in JJY, along with Choi Jong-hoon and 3 others, arrested and charged with gang rape and sexual assault.

Seungri’s connection:

JJY had numerous chats in which he liked to distribute illegally filmed sex videos in. Seungri was in a restaurant business chat for Milddang Pocha with JJY, he was not in the molka (hidden camera) chat where illegal sex videos were being sent frequently and had zero involvement in the sex crimes that JJY took part in.

Media portrayal/misinformation of Seungri’s involvement:

Media claimed that Seungri was in the molka chat group and participated in taking/spreading/viewing unconsented sexual videos and sexual assault/rape

For weeks at the start of media reporting, only Seungri’s name was revealed, and so headline’s become “Seungri’s chat” even though he was not in the molka chat and it was Jung Joon-young’s chat. Lee Jong-hyun who was actually a part of the Molka chat was presented as “Mr. Lee” at the time media reported, implying that this was Lee Seung-hyun (Seungri’s real name).

The chats were in excel form, meaning that it was unclear who was in the group chat or private DMs, and so when media and journalists recreated chats, they edited certain DM messages into the group chat, manipulating out of context messages to best suit their story. They later admitted and apologized for it.

What court evidence revealed:

No victims have ever accused Seungri of sexual assault, rape, or spreading unconsented sexual videos. He had no involvement in the entire Molka case, and thus was not even called as a witness due to no knowledge regarding these crimes.

JJY, Choi Jong-hoon, Kim In-choel, and Kwon Hyuk-joon, and Heo Hyeon were accused by real victims for gang rape and sexual assault, in which the first four were found guilty and arrested (sentenced to 6, 5, 5, 4 year prison terms and 2 years probation respectively, later appealed to 5, 2.5, 4, 4 year prison terms and 2 years probation)

In the court documents from JJY’s case that show details of JJY’s chats, Seungri’s name is mentioned only once; Seungri said in his interview that JJY stopped sending any more videos after he told him to stop.

3. Seungri’s Case

What the case was about/how it started:

February 26, 2019, SBS reporter Kang Kyung-yoon claimed that chat messages in the business group chat showed Seungri arranging prostitutes for a Taiwanese investor at Club Arena in January 2016.

February 27, 2019 Seungri participates in voluntary investigation with regards to the prostitution mediation allegation.

Seungri retires from the entertainment industry on March 11, 2019 to protect BigBang’s name and better participate in the investigation (He isn’t allowed to hire his own lawyer under YG).

During this time, there were many groundless allegations that came and faded away from the media (E.g. His Halloween police costume that he rented in 2014 as evidence of police collusion, a witness reporting Seungri took cocaine but when Seungri’s lawyer demanded face to face interrogation with witness the police stated there was no witness)

There were a total of 25 trial hearings that took place from September 16, 2020 to July 1, 2021. Seungri dilligently and voluntarily participated in over 50 interrogations over 337 days.

Starting from the first hearing, Seungri denied 7 out of 8 charges, only admitting to violation of foreign exchange transaction act concerning overseas gambling. Seungri denies all allegations of prostitution and asks for the lie detector to test his innocence but is denied. An additional charge of special assault instigation was added in January 2021.

9 Charges (*Prosecution used strategy of charge stacking, in which multiple indictments are stacked up against the defendant to make up for a relatively weak case. Notice how all of the are victimless crimes, none of them have anything to do with the drug and sex crimes in Burning Sun, and #3 to #9 are relatively minor offenses):

Prostitution (for self)

Prostitution Mediation (for others between Dec 2015 - Jan 2016)

Embezzlement (hiring legal representative fee)

Embezzlement (528 million won involving Burning Sun revenues)

Violation of Food Sanitation Act (Seungri’s Monkey Museum cub being wrongfully registered as a restaurant instead of a club)

Habitual Gambling (One time Las Vegas gambling)

Distributing Obscene Material (a promotion photo for a Singapore adult entertainment establishment, not taken by Seungri)

Violation of the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act (illegal monetary exchange)

Co-Principle in Violence (Co-defendant in aggravated assault, in which Seungri led people who were being disrespectful out of a bar)

Read more here on the Explanation of the 9 charges against Seungri

Translations of all court hearings and evidence provided

Timeline of case hearings and evidence presented

Media portrayal/misinformation of Seungri’s involvement:

Seungri ordered prostitution services to his home, at his birthday party, and for overseas investors. He has a hefty 9 charges indicted against him (Not pointing out that only 2 are major and the rest a part of prosecution's charge stacking strategy)

Seungri was uncooperative with investigation and destroyed evidence/did not submit his phone (when in fact he voluntarily participated in all investigations and gave up both phones from the start).

What court evidence revealed:

The “Taiwanese investor” that media said Seungri arranged prostitutes for was actually his female friend from Taiwan in which he arranged a travel companion to shop with her during her stay in Korea. (Media reported messages omitted the initial conversation of finding travel companions and only included parts on sending them to the hotel they were staying at)

Police concluded there were no prostitutes at Seungri’s birthday party in Palawan in 2017.

Yoo In-seok, Seungri’s business partner of Yuri Holdings, admits that he paid prostitutes at Seungri’s 2015 Christmas party without Seungri’s knowledge. All witnesses, including the prostitute ladies, said that the prostitution was offered by Yoo In-seok and denied Seungri’s involvement. (FYI. there were no victims in this prostitution case, as monetary value was exchanged for voluntary sexual service from adult sex workers)

Several of the prosecutor’s witnesses also claimed under oath that investigators pressured them and altered their words in written statements.

Seungri had remained consistent throughout all 25 hearings, maintaining his innocence with no discrepancies or signs of insincerity. It was in fact the prosecution who presented a case with no material evidence, no victim, no witness statements against him, and no provable motives for commission of alleged crimes. You can read more on the law analysis of the court hearings here.

Final Verdict:

On August 12, 2021, the military court indicted Seungri for all 9 charges and sentenced him to three years in prison with a fine of 1.157 billion won. The judge focused his decision on the prostitution and prostitution mediation charges, on the basis that it is difficult to say that the defendant did not know, despite all witnesses denying his involvement (The main culprit Yoo In Suk was given 1 year and 8 months of prison terms that is SUSPENDED by 3 years probation)

The verdict was heavily morality based, with no citing of specific elements of the indictments and which criminal elements for the crimes were proven to reach the guilty verdicts on each. A big emphasis was on Seungri’s celebrity status to set an example and diffuse public opinion.

The Prosecution was able to create a strategic advantage through charge stacking, stacking multiple indictments which burdens the defense and tips the scale in the favor of the prosecution, a common strategy used to convict individuals for whom the Prosecution may have a weaker individual case. You can read more about the law analysis of the final verdict here.

As per Korean law and culture critics, the sentence was extreme as prosecution had not eliminated reasonable doubt. The principle of presumption of innocence was not even reflected 10%, with 90% being on the principle of presumption of guilt. The verdict reflects the degree moral views play in South Korea’s judicial system, in which the law places undue emphasis on punishment for these situations with the philosophy that “society cannot be allowed to be corrupted”.

South Korea has a conviction rate of 99 percent, meaning that once a case is indicted and goes to court it is more likely to deliver a conviction than an acquittal. There have been concerns in academic and international legal circles that such a high conviction rate may underscore serious issues with the justice system.

Seungri appealed to the High Military Court on August 19, 2021, admitting to all 9 charges, and his 3 year prison sentence was reduced to 1 year and 6 months. It was clear that the court had a strong bias to finding Seungri guilty in order to appease public sentiment, so after nearly 3 years of pleading innocent to 8 out of 9 charges, he gave in and admitted all charges upon appeal for a lighter sentence.

Out of the 9 charges, 7 are minor and Seungri only admitted to 1 regarding foreign monetary exchange in gambling funds; none of the charges have victims or relate to the original Burning Sun Case that was about drug and sex crimes, and the 2 that relate to prostitution were conducted by Yoo In-seok to which Seungri had no involvement or knowledge of. Choi Jong-hoon (ex FT Island) of the Molka case, who was convicted of serious gang rape and sexual assault crimes has already been released in November 2021, yet Seungri receives a 3 year sentence based mainly on moral principles against prostitution and gambling that he was not directly involved in and pleads innocent to. Do you realize how absurd this is? The media painted a picture saying Seungri was the central figure to the Burning Sun and Molka cases by mixing details of all three cases together and using Seungri’s name as clickbait headlines for buzz. “Seungri’s Case” eventually became synonymous for “Burning Sun and Molka Case”, neither of the latter which he had anything to do with. The public outburst of anger and a high pressure to eradicate it was directed towards Seungri who had become the face of the scandals. In the end, there was a clear agenda/goal to end the Burning Sun scandal through Seungri’s punishment. While the media was only shouting ‘Seungri! Seungri! Seungri!’, those related to the original Burning Sun drug and sexual crimes, if they even existed in the first place, were forgotten.

Thank you for taking the time to read through this breakdown of Seungri’s case. It would be greatly appreciated if you could spread this post to more people who don't know about the full case. I tried my best to fact-check everything and link all sources, but please comment/message me if anything is inaccurate and needs to be updated.

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All sources and useful resources referred to in this post:

*Most sources are translations of Naver and K-media articles that report directly from the court hearings, which are compiled on twitter. Please click into the twitter threads to view the original sources.

Addressing of allegations, evidence, & misinformation

Translations of the court hearings

Graphic timeline of the trial hearings and evidence

Brief explanation of charges put against Seungri

Masterlist of law analysis articles from a lawyer who has been following the case from the start

In-depth interview with Seungri explaining all the allegations

False Information vs Fact of Seungri’s Case: 1 2 3

Media Manipulation and Misinformation on Seungri’s Case

Rebuttals to Allegations and Misinformation

#seungri #justiceforseungri #seungricase #burningsun #burning sun #molka #bigbang #bigbangot5 #bigbang ot5 #vip #lee seung ri #apologize to seungri

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