Title: The Creative Process
Fandom: Neil Gaiman's The Sandman
Rating: PG
Summary: The aging and stages of Del, through Dream's eyes. What does an amphigory grow up to be?
Word Count: 924
Disclaimer: Neil and Vertigo own. I do not. I make no money.
Author's Notes: I read the entire run of The Sandman straight through when I discovered it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, after spending several hours reading through it, Delirium was the one I found myself musing on the most. Eventually, thinking on her led to this.
***
Amphigory am'fi-ge-ree, n. (French amphigouri, of unknown origin)
1. A nonsense verse. Specifically, a poem designed to look and sound good, but which has no meaning upon closer reading.
***
Dream had no choice, really, but to hold his youngest sister while she broke.
She walked in his realm, while her own faded, and at the point she asked a question of him she was just beginning to be other. Just barely more Delirium than Delight, though not quite mad yet.
Or not so much she couldn't be sane for moments without her body—or what passed for a body, when she remembered to make it, which happened with less and less frequency—screaming in pain.
"Do you know what an amphigory is?"
She hadn't spoken for three generations of men, when those words came, and it took him a moment to answer. "I do, youngest sister." For all words were once dreamed into existence, and thus he knew them all.
And she said nothing.
Perhaps, Morpheus thought, watching her hair turn from pink to red to green, she had not even heard him.
***
"An amphigory," she said, eternities later, as she twirled in the library, "is a poem, you know. It is. It's a poem with verses and lines and sometimes even rhymes."
The being known as Dream who was once Daniel paused from where he was reaching for a book before nodding. "It is."
"Not just, you know. You know. Sonnets. The stanzas. It's not like bananas, because the peels are thinner. No. But." She nodded and smiled and watched as a book fluttered by, its pages made of tissue paper that smelled of moist dirt. "Pretty. It has to be pretty, you know."
"Indeed," he replied, taking her arm in his as they walked out of the room and down a corridor.
"But. But. The secret, Dream? The secret is that it doesn't mean anything. Pretty. Prettiest and lovely and sweet to the tongues and ears. But. Empty."
His movements were slow as his gaze turned to rest on her. "That is what an amphigory is, yes, my sister."
"I think. I think. I can do that, you see, even now, but it's hard to keep at it because they are so very loud. But I think."
He waited until she continued, his expression patient and hers twisted and caught between many things.
"I think I was an amphigory, Daniel Dream Brother Person. I was."
A slow nod is what he gives her first, as he considers that and his next words. "And what are you now?"
"Del. I'm. Just Del. But not. Del always is. Everything else is different. Suffixes mean a lot. Delirium. I'm the catalyst. I'm the process that isn't complete. Destruction was wrong. He was. I thought he wasn't, but he was. It's not my next change. The first one's still happening. This is the delenda and then the deligation has to happen, you know. It does. Get rid of the junk and wrap up the cuts and scrapes. "
His brow furrowed. "...And what will you be?" He was not truly expecting an answer.
She gave him one anyway.
"That...is not a word I know, Del." It wasn't even that he didn't know the word. He could hear the beginning—the Del, the sound a bell makes when rung—but the end blurred into laughter and screams in his ears.
"No. Not yet. It isn't one yet. It's still in the womb. Gestation." Then, almost as an afterthought, she whispers, "I am frightened, Dream." Almost calmly. Almost sanely.
Not quite, though.
Dream found he could do nothing but hold her again.
***
They hadn't known in advance, except for the eldest of them. There were no signals to miss, even for eyes that had seen more than most gods.
She simply appeared in Dream's garden, hands in her pockets and a dog leaning against her legs.
When he looked at her, Dream noticed that she had one blue eye and one green eye.
No specks of silver, though, obscured her vision in either.
"Hi." She said it with a smile, toeing slightly at the ground as she spoke.
She looked older, he thought, than he could remember seeing her before.
He wasn't quite sad at that thought, though there was a sense of loss. Or perhaps only change. "My sister. Your change is complete, then?"
"Guess so. Doesn't hurt anymore." Silence is between them for a moment, before she continues, almost musingly, "I need you to give me a name now, my brother."
Dream nodded slowly, pushing her hair—red, in a thousand different shifting shades, like a sunrise, or a sunset, or both—away from her face with one pale hand.
When the word crossed his lips, he was brother and friend, and, for a moment, father.
He did not expect the word to finish as it did, and yet...
It fit, and he found himself pleased, and she smiled at him.
"Do you know what an amphigory is when it grows up, Dream?"
"Must I wait another millennium for you to tell me?" he asked, voice polite but eyes teasing.
Del giggled. "No." Her eyes closed for a minute, listening to something that Dream knew he would never hear. And he thought that the song she heard didn't seem to pain her like it once did.
She smiled.
"It's a work of art."