Archive of Our Own

So cards on the table, the Corinthian really had been planning to kill Matthew. He had glanced over, seen the sack of feathers on the high seat, and even if he didn’t have Shanghai fighting knives anymore, a Swiss Army knife throws just as true for his hand. Somewhere between sighting and flinging however, something changed his mind. It was the nybbas that died instead, and Matthew had gotten to go on being a croaking little know-it-all for another day.

If anyone asked him why he was so pissed, he would have pointed at Svartalfheim, a job abandoned and a piss-poor attitude from beginning to end. He wouldn’t have been right, but he would have been justified, and largely, as a nightmare, that’s all he needed to be.

However, when he thought about it later, it didn’t have that much to do with Svartalfheim. It had to do with the first time he saw Matthew, before he heard his name. He’d seen that dark shape on Lord Morpheus’s shoulder, and something in him perked up, bright and sunny.

Holy fuck, Jessamy, I thought you were dead! Hi, Jessy!

It was gone as quickly as it was there, leaving behind dry as dust information for him. Lord Morpheus had ravens. Lord Morpheus’s companion was perhaps the raven Jessamy.

It wasn’t, it was Matthew, and for a long time, he was confused and pissed off that it wasn’t Jessamy.

*

So Matthew didn’t like him. What the fuck ever. He’s a nightmare, he wasn’t designed to be liked. He was meant to terrify and to terrorize, on occasion to enlighten, but never to comfort or console. He wasn’t meant to be socialable, or at least that was what he thought until Merv stumped up to him not long after the wake, holding out one leafy hand.

“Ten bucks,” he said, the first words they had ever passed.

“Uh, what?”

“Uh, what,” Merv mimicked, “uh what, my ten dollars is what. Hand it over.”

“Why the hell would I do that?”

It’s a genuine question. He had no idea why he would give Merv ten bucks, but for some reason, his hand was in his pocket, taking out a wallet that he didn’t know he was carrying. Bemused, he opened it to find a Georgia driver’s license with his picture on it, a couple of expired credit cards, some scraps of paper, and some cash. He took out two fives, and Merv snatched them out of his hand.

“There. Finally.”

“I’m not him, you know,” the Corinthian said. He was trying for a threatening tone, because Halloween-themed shakedowns didn’t seem like they should be part of his brand, but Merv only nodded.
“Yeah, and I wasn’t the one who loaned him the ten for cab fare after he got sloshed at that Faerie bash either. Either way, now we’re square.”

He remembered that Merv was no more the first Mervyn Pumpkinhead than he was the first Corinthian, and he nodded cautiously.

“And what does that mean for us now that I don’t owe you anything?”

Merv looked up briefly from tucking the cash into his own wallet, and if there were ever nights where he lay awake wondering at his own newness in a world where he had literally thousands of years of history, it didn’t show.

“Shit, I dunno. Crew’s off at six, wanna come get drinks?”

He did, actually, and after getting directions to the hole in the wall Merv’s crew usually frequented (“It’s literally a hole in the wall. Abdullah blasted through a wall in the south wing and we found this speakeasy. Can’t miss it.”), he opened his new/old wallet again to inspect the contents.

The driver’s license and the credit cards were for a Corin Fairchild, there was a business card for a florist in Athens, another for a lawyer in Atlanta, and tucked into the billfold pocket, a matchbook for a gay bar and drag revue in Savannah. When he popped the matchbook open, he found two matches missing, and a phone number scrawled on the inside.

“Priorities, fucker,” the Corinthian muttered, but he closed the wallet and slid it back into his pocket.

He had a pretty good time with Merv’s crew. There’s darts, there’s gossip, and he didn’t think too much about how the bartender immediately set his drink on the bar, which turned out to be a twelve-year-old scotch and fucking delicious.

*

There’s this morning he woke up with two fingers thrust into his right eye-mouth and his hand around his cock. He had been dreaming, something about neon lights coming through a barred hotel window and a hand resting comfortably on his thigh, and then he woke up thrumming pleasure and anticipation.

For a moment too long, his hands felt foreign, the sensation only going one way. It’s someone else fucking his mouth, someone else curling their fingers around his shaft and tugging just right, and his horror at the invasion broke the illusion. His hands faltered, his again, and he planted them on the mattress by his side as he levered himself up to a sitting position.

He was shaking, the right side of his face slick with spit, his cock standing up as if to say he’d forgotten something, and he had to walk the perimeter of his apartments, checking the wardrobe and the cabinets and even the refrigerator to make sure that he was alone.

Well, as alone as he ever got.

When the Corinthian returned to his bed, he found that he was still restless, his blood running hot inside him and his skin tingling as if someone had scoured it. Chewing on his lower lip, the human one, he carefully reached up to finger his ocular mouth only to get a snap for his efforts.

He shook it out, realized, and traded sides, left for right, and his right eye-mouth took his fingers as if it had been starving for the stroking and then his tentative thrusts. It was sensitive in a way he had never anticipated, and moment by moment, he grew bolder, exploring his own lips, his teeth, the rag of his tongue and the wet satin close of his mouth over his fingers. He learned that his ocular mouth, the right one, at least, could gag. He learned that it liked to gag a little, and without thinking, his free hand came up tug at his cock.

Together it’s almost too much, pleasure and invasion and the subtle but irresistible appeal of doing something he was mostly certain he wasn’t designed for.

Not intended for off-label use, he thought giddily. Internal application prohibited.

His own orgasm was a shock, harder and more brutal than he had thought it would be. He knew what it was, he wasn’t stupid, but he hadn’t applied the mechanics to himself before, and now he was, and now he did, and now he was coming in his fist with three fingers crammed so deep it made his other mouths gasp for air to compensate. He shuddered to a halt and turned almost defensively on his side, pressing his face into the pillow as his breathing slowed and his hand fell away from his face.

He drifted for a bit, and then he realized that the hand that had been in his eye rested lightly on his face, the fingertips scruffing lightly through the hair at his temple. He jerked it down, uncertain if it was an idle gesture of his own or if it was something else. Someone else’s.

*

The Corinthian was sort of bemused about the waking world. His first time, searching for Daniel, it had been pretty rushed, just a blur of faces, smells, a fried-up corpse and some sass from Matthew.

This time, he was on assignment from Dream again, to deliver something to a little kid in the Bronx, and Dream had kept him a moment after handing him the small enameled box.

“The prohibition was never on the waking world, you understand, only on harm to the people that live there.”

“Yes, my lord?”

“You might linger, if you wish. You need not limit your wanderings to the Dreaming, so long as you walk lightly.”

He grinned.

“Time to leave the nest?” he asked, and Dream’s mouth kicked up one side, the smallest smile.

“In your own time, and as you please. You are no leashed thing.”

“Or tame either. I take your meaning, my lord. Thank you.”

If he was being totally honest, he was pretty excited. He grabbed a handful of cash from the dream of a poker game in Jersey, and he had the box dropped off under the kid’s pillow before dark. After that, he took the subway to Brooklyn, a warm spring night that had brought everyone out into the streets.

He could feel the city pulse around him, a trillion threads of hunger and satisfaction so tangled that the idea of using them as fuses to ignite something really special made his heart thud in his chest. He got a cheeseburger, and then some weird ice cream, and then he had this gorgeous thing with their ears pierced a dozen times backed into a peeling doorway and kissing him like he was the best thing in the world.

In his own time, and as he pleased, and yeah, he did please, and he was smart enough to just palm the knife in his pocket rather than reach for it, just another fun edge to the kisses, he wasn’t going to spoil this all for –

The Corinthian staggered back at a punch to the chest, and he stared at the person he had been kissing in confusion.

“You just could have said –” but they were looking at him in bafflement.

“You okay?”

He pressed his hand against his breastbone, but there was no lingering pain, no bruise or ache, just the memory of a blow so hard he was still getting his breath back.

“Yeah, yeah, just fine.”

He was, but in the middle of absolutely ruining the knees of his suit, he was struck by such a knot of rage that his teeth nearly came together to fuck up absolutely everyone’s good time. He pulled back, shaking his head, and when his new friend put a concerned hand on his shoulder, he stood and shoved them back so hard their teeth clicked on their lower lip and sent a curtain of blood down their chin. The blood infuriated him so much that he had his knife in his hand, the blade flicked out, before he stopped himself, horrified.

He turned and ran, and he didn’t stop until he was on the train back to the Dreaming. He carefully folded his knife and pocketed it, concentrating on his hands, on the advertisements for the taco strip club, the grime on the ground, anything except the blood and how close he had come to real disaster, and all because he got so angry that –

The lights in the car went dark, the line running quiet to pass through an unfriendly part of some underhill mines, and he abruptly realized.

He wasn’t angry at all.

*

He was careful for a while. He haunted his dreamers, he played his part in the grand plan of the Dreaming. A few weeks after the incident, he thought he was getting his head back together, and when Dream had another job for him in the waking world, a scare delivered to a woman in Iowa, he carried it off easily with no problems at all. The next job, and the next, went off well, and he regained the confidence he had lost before.

It was just nerves, he reasoned. Made sense. The last Corinthian had been enchanted with the waking world, loved it to the point of madness. Of course the bits of him that still lived inside his head would be furious to see someone enjoying the fun he had once had. Of course they would try to force some of that fun again.

“You were an absolute fuck,” he muttered at the L stop. “No wonder no one liked you.”

There was no response, and there shouldn’t have been. Dream, the previous one, had gifted him with the shards of his previous incarnation as a warning and as a way to access the history of his function. There was no true consciousness there, no rescue from a well-deserved unmaking, just old instincts left firing long after the owner had passed.

Chicago was frigid, and the Corinthian pretended to shiver as he made his way to Argyle. The apothecary’s granddaughter waved him down from the doorway, trading him a folded paper package the size of his palm for the bag of Lý dynasty gold coins, and tentatively asked him if he wanted to come in to warm up.

“Nah, thanks, think I’ll just head back home. Keep warm.”

That was the plan at least, until he passed by a sandwich shop on the way back to the L. Something through the window caught his eye, and he turned his head to see two young women, arm in arm, one pointing at the menu emphatically. The other, for some reason, looked over her shoulder, meeting the Corinthian’s gaze before looking away uninterested, and something in him froze over.

He couldn’t move forward, he couldn’t move back, he was stuck at the window watching two women order sandwiches, and his pulse thudded like a drum in his ears. His heart beat furiously in his chest, and somehow he got the idea that his throat was as frozen as the rest of him, locked up tight to allow no air in and out.

He choked, shuddering and forcing his breath until he almost puked, and he put his hand out to steady himself against the wall only to scrape it so hard against the brick it came away bloody.

The blood was sharp red in the middle of his blurring vision, and he needed that clarity so badly he scraped his raw hand over the brick again and again until the blood ran fast, dripping onto the snow.

“Hey! The hell are you doing?”

The words were sharp, but they sounded frightened, and he suddenly was too. He ran, not down the street but into the alley, twisting through a parking lot and across four lanes of traffic to the furious honking of car horns. He didn’t stop until he slumped down on a bus stop bench, panting and red in the face with his bloodied hand held to his belly.

What the fuck, he started to think, and then he remembered.

Desire of the Endless had always liked him. Desire flirted with him when he escorted Dream to family gatherings. Desire had asked Dream for the loan of him, and Dream, impatient or distracted or annoyed, and said yes. Desire had just wanted to look. Desire had looked at him like that once.

The Corinthian scowled at the dry words in his head.

“That’s it?”

There was a tidal wave of fury, red-hot rage that pounded through his head and his chest, and then just as quickly as it began, it broke, and he remembered, really remembered.

“Here, lie down,” Desire said, and he willingly stretched on their bed in the right eye of the Threshold. He liked Desire, even if he privately thought they were a little silly, a little self-important, nothing compared to his lord. They had said that they would not hurt him and that he would be returned to his master and his role in perfect condition, and beyond that, what did he care?

Clothed in their bed, he was unsurprised, even eager, when they climbed up to straddle his hips, their bare skin gleaming in the soft light. They smiled at his smile, running sly fingertips down his cheek before removing his sunglasses.

“Do you want me, master nightmare?”

He nodded, because of course he did. This was Desire, who didn’t want –

His mouth opened on a scream that wouldn’t come out as they sunk their hand into his chest, gripping something inside, their nails digging into something surely too soft.

“Sh, sh, don’t be afraid, I’m just going to look, darling.”

He wasn’t afraid, he was in love, because Desire had their claws hooked in his chest, and then he found enough breath to scream because Desire was pulling and Desire was drawing out what looked like a translucent heart veined with garnet, his heart, and they split it neatly in two along a fracture line he had never suspected.

“Hurts,” he managed, his voice small, and they nodded distractedly, examining what Dream had put there and everything that he (selfishly, childishly, and foolishly) had put there as well, assuming no one would ever come looking.

The memory fell apart then, and he got scraps and flashes of what came next. They ask him questions that he answers. They tell him he can cry if he likes, they don’t mind. They fuck, or it’s something like fucking anyway, with Desire’s hand in his chest and wrapped so tight around the heart they’ve put back. They turn from him as he lies shuddering in their bed, lips bit hard and the blood mingling with the tears, and they look back their shoulder to say something he doesn’t remember anymore, lost and broken off from the whole.

The shattered bits grow smaller until they’re no larger than grains of sand that run through his fingers, and then it starts again as Desire tells them here, lie down.

And then it starts again.

And then again.

And again.

And.

At some point, it actually got boring. Still shaking, he hauled himself up from the slush by the bus stop, aware of a slow simmering rage at the back of his head. It took him most of the train ride back to the Dreaming to parse out that it wasn’t anger at Desire for their brutality, or even Dream for being so careless with his things. Instead the anger was directed at him, and finally, slumped over with his face pressed against the window and one hand worrying compulsively at his hair, he asked why.

The answer was difficult to parse. It didn’t come in words or even images, but in a sense of jagged outrage, heartbreak and confusion.

Because you keep asking. Because you keep wanting. Because you keep fucking this up.

Fucking what up?

Everything.

*

The Corinthian looked up at the rustle in the firs, the way the wind shifted briefly as if to bow. Dream was the Dreaming, but the Dreaming was his realm, and it paid heed when he walked by. The Corinthian dropped the body of the dreamer in to the ravine, scrubbing his hands clean on his thighs, and his right eye-mouth chewed fretfully on its lower lip.

I could, he thought. Probably should.

The answer that came back from that increasingly familiar place in his head was a surge of rage and threat, but it had been going on for weeks now. It was just noise, stupid noise, and he stepped out onto the path to meet the figure in white, who paused and nodded courteously.

“Good afternoon, Corinthian. I do not often expect to find you on the Via Dolarosa.”

“Yeah, a dreamer cut through Via Amorosa to trying to lose me. She hid in here.”

That slight smile again. You could fall in love with that smile. He sort of was.

“And did it work?”

He offered Dream a sharp smile of his own.

“What do you think?”

The infuriated echo rose up in his head until he forcibly silenced it, a lid over a very deep well. All right, fine, it could have probably used a few more my lord’s, but Dream didn’t seem to notice.

“I think you do your work admirably.”

Dream turned to continue down the path, and the Corinthian stepped forward to stop him. If anyone could explain this, fix him, it was Dream and –

His muscles locked up so tense they ached, and when he opened his mouth to shout, phantom teeth came down with vicious strength on his tongue. His mouth filled with blood, and he would have screamed in anger as well as pain, but his throat closed, and he watched in forced silence as Dream walked away down the path.

The lid blew off the well he had put it over it, and a wolf’s howl spilled out to deafen him. He wished it was a wolf, then he could tear its fucking head off, strip its skin from its still twitching body, eat its eyes and learn –

Not him! Not him! Not him!

The rage surged up again, but underneath it he could sense a terror so enormous that he got a sense of vertigo just recognizing its existence. It was fear going clad in anger and dragging grief like a corpse behind it. The Corinthian dropped to his knees, blood draining from between his gritted teeth, keening like a maddened, wounded thing trying to hold in its guts.

He blacked out for a while, kneeling there, and when he returned to himself, his entire body aching, his tongue still mending from being nearly bitten through, he found his hand in his hair again, fingertips pressed hard against his temple.

*

The Corinthian found the knives in the dream of an action movie junkie, sharper and stronger than anything from the waking world. They were handsome, blackened steel blades with a criss-cross pattern cut into the wooden handles, and he didn’t need his unwelcome guest to tell him how deadly they were.

He flipped one experimentally in his hand to get the weight and the heft. It was perfect for his grip, or he was perfect for it, one or the other.

One of the Soft Places had recently eaten up the madrigal gardens, according to Merv. It happened sometimes, the Soft Places less like geography than they were like quicksand. It was a shame to lose the madrigal gardens, the chiming flowers and the low hum of stars come to earth, but it could be rebuilt, and until then, the Soft Place had been cordoned off so no unwary dreamkin stumbled in and had a conniption fit upon running into their past or future selves.

The Corinthian ducked under the yellow tape and walked out over the sand. In a few minutes, there was nothing but miles of dunes before him and behind him, but he wasn’t too worried about that; he was one of the Major Arcana, and he knew where home was.

He walked until the moon rose a pale sickle, and he looked at it critically before shaking his head. He walked a while longer, waiting for the moon to set and another one to rise. This one was blood-red and full, coming up to sit crowned on an outcropping of black rock jutting out from the sand. It was basalt, like the stone of the nightmare shore, and he could see between the slabs a sheltered place that would serve well for his purposes.

He laid the knives in front of him as he knelt on the stone, handles turned away, and he considered the tide of rage that had grown so insistent in the last weeks, turning up new reasons for anger at nearly every turn. In the great long ago, Morpheus had built him tough, ready to take body blows from the both the most vicious of dreamers and from the enemies of the Dreaming. He was made for the sudden break and the crushing strike, not this slow erosion, and he took a deep breath.

“Okay,” he murmured.

He extended the largest blade on his pocket knife. It was barely three inches long, ridiculously humble next to the knives on the stone, but it would serve. The Dreaming ran on narrative like Faerie ran on bargains and Hell ran on spite, and if he was going to do this, he would damn well do it with his own knife and no one else’s.

On an inhale, he drove the blade of the pocket knife between the teeth of his left eye-mouth, so hard he registered chipped enamel before the steel struck flesh and cut. The pain was sudden and immense, a chorus of horror rising up to drown out the rage, and grimly, he drove the knife deeper, scraping bone, scraping brain, scraping something else, and through gritted teeth, he started to scream.

Images cascaded through the space he had so ruthlessly struck, so many, too many. A woman with a baby on her hip, looking at him askance, a temple to Dread Aphrodite where someone touched his hair. He remembered them, or they insisted that he did, and he fought them back, trying to find an end or a beginning.

Ape’s eyes, soldiers’ eyes, the eyes of a thousand people who saw themselves defeated, bloodied and lost.

Not mine, he tried to shout, but they kept coming, a piebald raven who laughed using his voice, a pretty girl with a sad face whose pale hair turned rainbow at the ends.

You’re not mine.

You disappoint me, Corinthian. You, and these humans you inspired and created, disappoint me.

Fuck you, you’re not mine.

Hands. Cold white hands on his face, no, shaping his face, carving his teeth, smoothing the planes of his cheeks and his jaw with something that he could pretend was tenderness, and –

And fuck you, get out.

*

The Corinthian rolled up from the stone, his knife clutched in his hand, but then he was knocked back down by what felt like a freight train, a force moving so fast he only glimpsed a dragon’s head, a wolf’s teeth, before he was on his back with strong hands wrapped around his throat.

If he were a human, he’d have broken ribs and fading vision, but he was himself, and instead he sliced his attacker’s wrist close to the palm, a hard motion that made half the fingers on one hand spasm and fail. It was enough to thrust him away and gain his feet, but he was pushed back before he could slit his attacker’s throat.

Enraged, he tried to close again, but his attacker’s hand shot out, taking a fistful of his T-shirt to drag him forward off of his feet. He expected a knife to his face, was grimly prepared to take it it if it got him his attacker’s throat or belly, but instead he was shaken like a rag doll, so hard his head snapped back and forth.

“What the fuck is the matter with you?” his attacker demanded, and now the Corinthian could see him more fully.

They were essentially identical, same face, same build, same teeth, but there was something raw about him, some strangeness that made him look almost gaunt while still being able to perfectly fill out the Corinthian’s own clothes if he tried them on. Not that this guy would likely trade, given how nice his clothes were compared to the Corinthian’s own jeans and T-shirt. His jacket alone probably cost as much as a car, and the Corinthian broke his grasp and took a step back.

“The fuck is the matter with you?” he demanded. “You’re the one screaming in my head all night and all day.”

His double made another grab for him, which the Corinthian fended off with increasing confidence. He was faster, he thought, and stronger too. He’d been caught blind by that first rush, and that wouldn’t happen again.

“You’re stupid, you’re so fucking stupid,” his other raged. “Can’t believe how fucking stupid you are, every minute of every day, like a goddamn kid stepping into an open manhole, that’s what you are.”

“Really?” the Corinthian said skeptically. “That’s me? Fucker, I’m the –”

“Of course you are, and you are so, so fucked!” This came out as a wail that made the Corinthian stare. It was so miserable, in such pain, that he let his knife drop, and then his double had crossed the space between them, faster than he had thought.

Instead of gutting him, however, he grabbed his head, freezing cold palms against his cheeks, face just inches from his own.

“You keep. You just. You don’t know,” he said in a kicked dog’s growl, and the Corinthian’s hands came up to cover his.

“Okay. Tell me.”

“I’m trying. Every day. You don’t listen.”

“I’m listening now. Tell me. Without the choking or the screaming.”

To his surprise, a smile crooked the other’s mouth.

“Why? It’s the only way I learned.”

The Corinthian pulled his double’s hands down, but he didn’t let them go. Instead he studied them, turning them over curiously. They were the same size and shape as his own, slender fingers, neatly trimmed nails, the cut tendons already whole, and he resisted the suddenly urge to bring one up to his right eye-mouth.

“And what was I supposed to learn while you were molesting me in my sleep?”

“That some things feel good.”

“I knew that already.”

His double’s smile grew wider.

“Hadn’t figured that one out yet.”

The Corinthian dropped his hands, irritated.

“I would have figured that out eventually, and on my own time. Instead, now I have you in my memory, my real memory, not the bullshit you keep shoving off on me, so thanks for that.”

“It’s not bullshit,” his other insisted. “I’m trying to.”

He stopped.

“What?”

“You’re so fucking stupid,” he said, turning away, but the Corinthian seized him by the wrist, turning him back around.

“Said that already. Say something new.”

“Fuck you!”

He turned away again, and this time the Corinthian seized a fistful of his hair and dragged him back against his body. He got his knife slid up snug and tight to his throat, faster after all.

“You tell me, or I’ll carve it out of you.”

For some reason, that drained some kind of tension out of his double, made him draw a long breath. He grew slightly heavier in the Corinthian’s embrace, leaning back into it without fighting. He wasn’t pushing into the point of his knife, but it felt like a close thing.

“That’s good,” he said quietly. “That’s better.”

“Yeah? What is it, do I need to beat the fuck out of you or something? Need to cut your throat?”

Something about the idea repulsed and aroused him in equal measure. When his cock stirred, there’s no doubt his double felt it, but he only shrugged.

“I get. Worried.”

“Worried.”

“Yeah. Because, kiddo, do you wanna be me?”

Against his will, the Corinthian shuddered, because that had been laid into his foundation: no, he did not.

“I’m not going to be you.”

His double unexpectedly turned in his arms, so quickly and carelessly that the Corinthian’s knife left a short red cut on his neck, along his jawline. It went white, and then red, and then started to drip as his double stared into his face.

“How do you know? I sure as fuck didn’t know how not to be me. I didn’t know – I didn’t know fucking anything, and I’m trying. With you. I’m trying.”

There’s something so naked and raw in his face that the Corinthian took off his sunglasses and offered them over. Without a word, his double put them on and when he spoke, his words were calmer.

“I’m trying to protect you.”

For some reason, the words hit hard, and the Corinthian almost shied back from them. There’s a drawing sensation in the center of his chest, and he swallowed hard. He started to say that he didn’t need protecting, but the words stuck in his throat.

“From what?” he said instead, and got a dark laugh in response.

“Everything. Every fucking thing. You’ve seen some of it, but you haven’t seen all of it, not by a long shot.”

He believed him. The first Corinthian had existed for thousands of years before his unmaking, and sometimes, some nights, he could look into those depths and see things with more teeth than he could dream of swimming in the darkness.

His double reached up a tentative hand to touch his face, his fingertips just grazing the Corinthian’s temple and stroking his cheek.

“I was meant to keep you safe.”

“You were meant to keep me scared.”

“How else should I do it?”

He realized with a kind of aching certainty that his previous self, the one his double had been fractured from to give him this terrified furious space inside his head, couldn’t say it, but he could.

“Why don’t you try loving me just a little?”

He leaned in and kissed his double on the mouth, and when he didn’t get bitten or stabbed, he pulled him closer, stroking his teeth with the sly edge of his tongue.

“The fuck are you doing?” For maybe the first time, he didn’t sound angry or afraid.

“You were so brave while I was asleep. I want to see if you’re still so brave when I’m awake.”

That got him a bite to the lower lip, not hard enough to draw blood, and then his double’s kissing him as well, hands on either side of his neck, pressing full length against his body. It was startlingly good, exactly how he liked being kissed, and his double laughed against his mouth.

“What do you know, you little idiot?” he asked, almost friendly. “You’ve had your own hands, and you’ve been on your knees for some little mortal in an alley, that’s all.”

Deliberately, the Corinthian reached down to squeeze his double between the legs, briefly distracted by how familiar it felt.

“I know I won’t learn through fear or anger. Teach me another way, and I’ll remember.”

He let his double take him down to the stone, roll him on his back and plant worshipful kisses along his ear and the side of his neck. He was unsurprised that it was what he wanted, but he was startled by how very good it felt. He knew plenty about sex, everything he needed to provide a proper psychosexual terror to those dreamers that way inclined, but he realized as his double kissed him over and over again that he had never considered the reality of it on his own skin, and frankly, the reality of it was amazing.

He pressed up against his double’s weight, kissed him in return, but he found himself oddly eager to simply be touched and adored. It was different from anything he had experienced before, and without the voice screaming rage in his ear, he wanted to take his time with it, to let his double’s fretful hands calm on his body.

“I want this to be okay for you. It has to be okay for you.”

It struck him how desperate he was, this lonely voice in his head, and the Corinthian nodded.

“Show me.”

He leaned down again, and this time the Corinthian got an image of a battlefield filtered through the kiss, a narrative too large for him to properly handle, carnage on a scale he’s not designed to give or receive. He winced from the kiss but returned to be shown how such a thing was survived, the terror blunted by the promise of repair.

“Like that?” his double asked, and the Corinthian nodded, a little shaky.

“Yeah, but slow, all right?”

Behind his borrowed shades, his double’s expression was obscured, but his mouth was unexpectedly tender.

“All right.”

Maybe he should have wanted a first time that wasn’t laced with the bitterness of a past life that was never his, that didn’t carry the tang of his own blood on his teeth and the brutal lash of a thousand fights won and lost. It was probably fucking him up in some way that couldn’t be fixed, and he breathed through his predecessor’s fear of alteration at his maker’s hands, memories excised and neatly darned holes where they had been.

His double stripped his clothes away, and his hands on the Corinthian’s bare body were gentle, almost absurdly so. The Corinthian wanted to tell him that it’s fine, he can take some rough handling, but then he got the image of Desire again, Desire who couldn’t keep their hands or their plots to themself, and he changed his mind. He had said slow, and he had been right.

He eventually convinced his double to strip as well, and he did it with a kind of grace that the Corinthian committed to memory for his own future use. He apparently looked damn good going from clothed to naked, and he made a note to consider a wardrobe upgrade the next time he got the Fashion Thing one on one.

Skin against skin, they were closer than they were before, the memories and scars even more vivid. It was painful enough that he found himself clinging to his double with his face buried in his chest, breathing through the worst of it.

“Hurts,” he said quietly. He wasn’t sure he had ever said it before. He hadn’t needed to yet.

“It’s all right. We can stop for a minute.”

They did, loosely clasped in each other’s arms and trading kisses that were just kisses for a while. When he said he was ready to start again, they went slow, and he learned something new about how to bear hurt and pain.

Many of the things his double kissed and stroked and licked into his skin were things he should do. He should likely have chosen someone else for his first time, some pretty nightmare, some aloof dream, even some mortal. Instead he drew his double tight to his body, wrapping his legs around his hips to bring him even closer.

“It’s okay,” he found himself saying. “Show me.”

Above him, his double shuddered, and it seemed as if he was thinner than he was before, malnourished in some strange way. He nodded, rocking tight against the Corinthian’s body, his own erection pressed hot and leaking against the Corinthian’s thigh.

“I don’t want you to be hurt. Fuck, I want you to be safe, I need you to be okay.”

“I am. See? I’m fine. I’m fine.”

He changed his mind somewhat when his double entered him, and it stung fiercely. He wasn’t ready for the memories of, not Dream, but Lord Morpheus, the Shaper of Forms, who acquired titles like the Corinthian took trophies. There’s too much to see, let alone understand, he cried out against the tearing ache of it. Above him, his double went completely still, kissing him over and over again, telling him they could stop if he wanted, he’ll always stop, doesn’t want him hurt or in pain, can’t take it.

The Corinthian breathed through it, forcing himself to accept the pain lanced through his body and the embarrassment of tears on his face. They’re not all his, which helped, and finally he nodded.

“Okay, but slow, all right? And.”

“And? Tell me what you need.”

“Kiss me?”

He did, and it made it easier, if not easy, another person with him, another body hot over his, and when he started to shake, he wasn’t alone for that either, his double’s lips next to his ear, two fingers hooked into the Corinthian’s right eye mouth and making him buck with startled renewed pleasure.

Under the shelter of the basalt slabs, the Corinthian shouted, overwhelmed, his body racked to pieces with sensation and with memory, but (and he would remember this even if the rest became strange and shadowed) he wasn’t afraid.

At some point, he remembered his knife in his hand again, the point pressed to the side of his double’s throat. He remembered the pressure of it entering, but no spurt of blood or cry of pain. There was just an echo of pleasure and a sense of scattering, grain broadcast over a field or a handful of pebbles dropped into deep water. Then he was alone, breathing hard, staring out at the desert, with a tiny skull held loosely in his hand.

*

The Corinthian was mostly dressed and presentable when he heard the sound of hoofbeats muffled on the sand. He came out from under the basalt slabs to see two riders passing by some distance away. Recognition hit him with the force of a blow as he watched one rider pull up, looking towards the rock. Lord Morpheus, dark and sleek and utterly terrifying in a way that he remembered from his own earliest memories, circled back, and the two conversed briefly. After a moment, Morpheus reached out to graze his fingertips through the hair at his companion’s temple, tolerance, amusement, affection. It made his companion stare after him as he rode on before he shook his head and approached the rock.

The Corinthian realized that it must be early on in his predecessor’s existence. There’s something breathtakingly vital about him, not young, but new. He was bright as starlight and moved with a kind of easy grace that wasn’t hampered by the things that he himself knew now.

On one hand, it made him want to cry over this pretty little idiot. On the other hand, he kind of wanted to slap him. He settled instead on raising his hand in greeting as he pulled up, inspecting him curiously from the back of a gleaming roan mare.

“I don’t remember being you."

“You wouldn’t. I’m older than you are.”

Sort of. He’s pretty sure he shouldn’t get into it.

“You look good.”

“Of course.”

They paused, and the Corinthian realized they were both thinking the same thing. They were a monster interested in self-preservation. It was one of the rare times when they could neither offer harm or expect to receive it.

“I have a present for you,” he said suddenly, because he realized that he did. There were pieces sliding in place around him, and whispering in his ear was another story. It wasn’t in his remit to make stories, but this wasn’t storytelling. It was maybe a hint or a push, barely a nudge.

“Yeah?”

“C’mere.”

Shrugging, his predecessor dismounted and hobbled his mare. On equal footing, it was even more obvious they weren’t brothers or twins- they were the same person cut off and begun again, and without thinking, he reached up to touch him like Dream had. He ducked away with a shake of his head, and the Corinthian let it go without comment.

“Here,” he said, handing him the tiny skull. Most of its contents had sunk into his own flesh. Now it was only a relic of a tragedy, brittle bone with perhaps a shard of memory clinging to it. His predecessor took it indifferently, smiling at his own skull in miniature before pocketing it as a strange memento of his trip through the Soft Places.

“Cute,” he said. “I’d rather have those knives though.”

The Corinthian looked down at the knives slung over his arm in their sheathes. He had almost forgotten he was carrying them. He had intended them as a draw for the thing in his head, but that one had never needed anything beyond his own teeth. This one, young, (dumb, and –) bright and eager, did, and he handed them over.

“Here. Enjoy.”

“Ooh, thanks."

He unsheathed one and spun it in his hand. It was made for him, or he for it, and suddenly the Corinthian was exhausted. Circles within circles, wheels within wheels, and if he ever got Destiny of the Endless alone, he was going to beat the shit out of him.

“Thanks, for real,” he said sincerely, and then he nodded towards the shelter of the basalt slabs with a hungry, sly smile. “Want me to say thank you really nicely?”

The Corinthian started to laugh, and before he stopped, he pulled the other into a kiss that only tasted a little like saltpeter and blood.

Why the fuck not.

*

There was no sun in the Soft Places, but the sky felt distinctly darker when the Corinthian caught up with Dream. His lord had conjured a luxurious tent as well as a fire, and was himself seated on a rug before the flames, as much a part of the dunes as the sand or the sky.

The Corinthian hobbled his mount near Dream’s own, and at Dream’s nod, he stretched out on the rug at Dream’s side.

“You look well-satisfied, my nightmare.”

“As it turns out, I remain an excellent lay for some time to come.”

Dream snorted at that, and the Corinthian rolled over onto his stomach, aware of how the top buttons of his doublet were undone, how the suck mark his future self had given him stood out dark from the skin of his throat.

“You’ve never tested that aspect of my design, my lord,” he said, real seduction passing for play. It’s part of his function, he couldn’t help it, or that’s what he’ll say if his lord takes offense, but Dream only gave him an amused glance.

“What makes you think I have not?”

“You might’ve let me keep it if you did,” he complained, He deliberately did not look at the unease that lurked whenever he thought too much about the parts of him Dream had edited out.

He turned on his side, away from the fire, but Dream’s fingers combing gently through his hair made him sigh, restless and calmed at once. Without thinking, his hand stole to the little skull he had been given, resting silent in his pocket, and he wondered idly and then perhaps a little less so why it had come to him.