Chapter Text
it’s not what it seems in the land of dreams
It’s quiet – too quiet and the dust on the streets lays heavily on the Sandman’s mind. The street is too dark and that’s his fault, he knows, as the faces in the windows recede out of fear. The Sandman has come down, and he is angry – the slow sort of anger that has been boiling underneath the skin of this land for far too long. But now something has shifted, and Sandman can feel it in his bones. There is an old magic he cannot control, but he can read, and it is telling him that something is wrong, deeply wrong. So wrong that the very earth itself cries out.
Benzedrine lives in a tiny house on the outskirts of the village. He needs to be near the people, he always says. They need him, Benzedrine says. Sandman needs him, needs him in the way that feels like words whispered against skin in the darkest parts of the night, in a way that hasn’t happened yet.
The village air is cold, the night oddly dark, but Sandman cannot feel it. He needs to see Benzedrine more than he usually does. People may not dream tonight, but Sandman has a sudden fear that they may not wake up, either. His breath comes out as BenzedrineBenzedrineBenzedrine. Oh god, that man makes him high in the worst ways.
He finds Benzedrine’s shack dark, though such an occurrence is not unusual, especially if Benzedrine is cross with him. For one lovely moment, Sandman wonders what he did to anger him this time. Probably something small, that a smile can make fade. The thought warms him, this thought of Benzedrine looking up at him with exasperation and affection in those eyes of his.
He knocks on the door and hears the hollow sound echo throughout the house. He waits, rocking back on his heels, imagining Benzedrine grumbling as he sets his beakers down, leaving the lab while muttering to himself. But he won’t mind once he sees Sandman. Sandman knows this the same way he knows how to breathe.
Sandman exhales, and no one answers the door. He knocks again, but nothing. He knocks repeatedly, hoping to annoy Benzedrine enough for him to answer. Silence.
The worry rushes back into his stomach, and he suddenly feels sick. He tries to talk himself down, just as Benzedrine would. It’s nothing, there’s a logical explanation. He’s not dead, not gone. He’s sleeping. He’s working. He’s here.
Still, Sandman is impatient, so he threads the lock open with a thought and slips into the house. The front hall is dark, with only faint moonlight coming in through the window. He can see the outline of familiar objects lining the walls, the darkness of the familiar rooms to each side. It shouldn’t feel as wrong as it does.
The house is quiet – that’s the other thing. Sandman knows how to read the air of this world, and this sort of silence does not happen, a complete absence of noise, a complete nothing.
Benzedrine sleeps on a tiny cot tucked into the very back corner of the shack, and Sandman has fond memories of its hard edges digging into his spine as Benzedrine breathes against his neck, as he talks and talks and talks into the darkness and the cold of the shack never matters because Benzedrine is a real thing.
Sandman walks past said corner and sees nothing save the empty cot and the trunk where Benzedrine keeps his few personal possessions. He refuses to let Benzedrine’s absence fool him, tells himself that Benzedrine never sleeps there unless someone pulls him out of the lab. Yes, he is in the lab. Why should he be anywhere else?
The door to the lab is a thin, flimsy thing hanging by one hinge in Benzedrine’s unused kitchen. Sandman pulls it open with so much force that it almost snaps. The stairs are dark, descending into some sort of abyss perhaps, and at this moment Sandman cannot keep pretending that nothing is wrong. The lab is a veritable cavern, and Benzedrine always keeps it lit with thousands of lanterns dangling from chains that criss-cross the ceiling. Sandman only remembers the lab in flashes of dark shelves and herbs and chemicals. Benzedrine lets no one in, not even Sandman.
He takes the steps quickly, as the darkness does not phase him. There is an unfamiliar beat in his heart; he may know danger and foreboding, he may create both, but he does not know such foreboding as this. That Benzedrine could be – could be something else – he does not even know how to consider it, let alone handle it.
He almost falls over as he steps off the final stair and onto the lab’s floor. The air is cooler, with a general dampness that hangs in the air, like a feeling that the Sandman cannot shake. The darkness this far underground is absolute, and though the Sandman is at home in it, it still does not allow him to see.
He forces his vision into the shadows, ignoring the way his hands shake as though they are entirely their own creation. Slowly, the large table in the center of the room becomes visible, faint and grey against the blackness. As he approaches, he sees none of the chaos Benzedrine complains of, none of the mess of papers and beakers he remembers from his few previous visits.
The table is bare, save for one paper. Sandman tries to pick it up, but his fingers cannot grasp it if they refuse to stay still. His whole body is shaking. The world feels like it is turning upside down slowly; it is sinking, and Sandman cannot get away.
have you ever wanted to disappear?
He does not need the rest of the letter to know what it says. He can read it in the earth, in the sky, in the thickness of the air that he will choke on soon. Benzedrine has gone, and the world is imbalanced. Sandman is imbalanced.
He clutches the edge of the table. It is finished. He will die, by his own hand or by the inevitable fade of a half-god without a compliment.
Or, a voice like Benzedrine’s whispers, perhaps it has just begun.