Author's Note
Hey! Fair warning this fic is quite sad. Trigger warnings for death, mild violence, and kind of assisted suicide? Not really sure because the character is semi-immortal and kind of cheated death to begin with so she should have already died. Almost like art is nuanced and complicated and cannot be captured by tags or trigger warnings. :) Anyway, don't want anyone to get sidelined by that so better to say. Also this is based more on the new Netflix show than the original comics. Hope you enjoy!
IDK if I even need to say, but its fucking tradition so cheers: I didn't make Sandman, but I do love it.
Aria was a song, and such things are not meant to last forever, though she received more than most. She needed not to beg Death for indulgence all those years ago, only to stand by her love's side.
They strolled together, a dream and a song. Their fingertips found each other's time after time on the beach. They stole kisses from each other's lips and murmured stories when the sun set and a peach haze rolled over the glimmering sea.
Death was a busy one, but she spared a moment for the lovers. She watched her little brother, his gaze firmly fixed on the human with raven black hair and a voice of silk over water. If he had ever fixed his eyes upon someone with such adoration she had not herself seen it, and she saw nearly everything. Death caught the eye of her brother and gave him a soft smile. She would never meet Aria for the last time, that she promised little Dream.
But sometimes we lie without knowing we are doing so. And sometimes even the Endless are as so.
Aria no longer slept, but she still dreamed.
Death kept her promise, for she was good at holding them tight. Aria lived long and youthful, just as the day she had first seen her. She lived long enough to marry her Dream, to assume a place beside him on a throne of sand. She lived long enough to become a Queen of Dreaming, and even longer to become a good one. She learned from her love, his hands over hers how to form daffodils from dirt and beckon sunshine from behind the clouds. His hands were cool and gentle and guiding, like a star in a pitch black sky. Though her power was just a sliver of his own, Aria wielded it deftly and with purpose. In times of rest, she would sing to her dream, songs of her childhood, of a life she was born into but never meant to live. The rhythms were simple and often sad, but she sang them anyway. Dream listened, curled against Aria, feeling her body reverberate as the words echoed within her.
"Do you ever ponder that which you left behind?" He asked one day when she whispered the final note of a melody he had heard pass her lips a thousand times. Clouds were rolling in the distance. A storm was approaching.
"No," she said simply and brushed a strand of charcoal hair from his face as she held him in her lap. "I have my Dream, and that is all I ever wanted."
The storm finally arrived in the Dreaming three days later, the Master of the realm no longer there to keep it at bay. The sky wept with his loss even when the queen did not. The absence of Morpheus was also the absence of the essence of the Dreaming. The clouds felt it and cried. Aria felt it and swallowed her tears. Her Dream needed help, and, perhaps more importantly, the realm needed its queen now more than ever.
Aria continued. She searched for her Dream by day and tended to the realm at night. She walked deserts and ice caps, cities and grasslands. Years later she found the Corinthian and followed him, wishing desperately that the nightmare that had narrowly escaped oblivion the night her love was ripped from her would lead her back to him, but it did not. Every time she entered her own world hopeful and every time she returned to the Dreaming despondent and empty-handed.
Aria did what she could and more in the realm. She summoned flowers from earth as Dream had taught her and parted the ever more sinister clouds that plagued the sky. With every shift, every change she beckoned, Aria could feel the ghost of her Dream; The smoothness of his hands, the brush of his long coat against her legs as they walked, the slight tickle of his hair on her cheek when he kissed her neck.
It drained her.
The magic without her Dream to sustain it. The constant searching to no avail. Her form which had once been vibrant and youthful became sallow. The journeys between the Waking World and the Dreaming one became ever more difficult. One day she tried to open a doorway between worlds, as she had done every day for thousands of days by now, and found that the fabric of the universe had stopped obeying her commands, her hands too weak to summon a long dying magic. She was trapped in the Dreaming without her Dream and for the first time in decades, the song let herself weep.
All she had left of her Dream now was the realm, and she gave her everything to it. She gave words of encouragement and strength to her subjects, even convinced some to stay long after they had resolved to leave. But in the end, all but Lucienne left. After all, what was a kingdom without a king or a Dreaming without he who crafts dreams. She sang songs to fill the shrinking meadows with any scrap of joy she could offer, trying to keep the nightmares at bay. Sometimes, on a good day, Aria would happen upon a lost dreamer, and show them the way to the waking world. They would be the only handful of people to survive the Sleeping Sickness, guided by the Queen of the Dreaming.
On the bad days, that is the days that were worse than simply bad because they were all marked by suffering, Aria would let herself wonder about her Dream. Nothing good ever came of it. An Endless could not be killed, but they could be hurt or captured, and the two tended to go hand in hand. Whatever her suffering was, Aria could not imagine a world in which his was not a worse fate. She still had the Dreaming, or what was left of it. Morpheus had nothing.
Time blew away like the black sand on the wind. It was only her and Lucienne now, who knew the time by her books and told Aria of the century passing. It was all Aria could do to mend the cracks one by one that had started to form in the great hall. It was on one of these loathsome days that the storm finally reached the palace, the one that had been brewing since before the absence of its master. a hundred years in the making. Aria snapped her head to Lucienne, the most movement she had shown in days. In her eyes Aria saw the same raw fear as hea own. A contorted mirror that only reflected emotion. The palace would not survive a storm. The roof was already weak and caving in places and the foundation was littered so thoroughly with faults that the floor and stairs had split entirely in places.
An understanding passed between the two. Aria lifted herself and her long cotton dress off the floor. She and Lucienne met in the middle of the palace. The little song was coming to a close. Death had vowed not to take her but there were many fates that cheated Death and still ended poorly. This was one of them.
"I must go," Aria stated simply.
"And if our king returns?"
"He must first have something to return to. I do not know what has befallen my Dream nor does it much matter now. I can only hope to preserve of him that which lies in all creatures alike. Dreams must live. As long as I have breath in my lungs and blood in my veins it belongs to the Dreaming." She extended her hands for Lucienne to take and they stood, the last guardians of a dying realm. They stayed like that until the next clap of thunder shook the palace and dust settled heavy in the air. Aria broke away, and moved towards the towering doors that shielded the great hall.
She breathed.
In and out.
The doors opened before her, a morose gesture. She did not have to walk far to reach black sand and storm. The wind lashed at her cheeks and tore the supple fabric of her skirts. To stand in the face of it, of swirling clouds and bruising rain, was a feat. Her form had grown frail just as the realm had and she willed her legs forward. The drenched sand was a sinking and unforgiving mass that swallowed at her feet with every step.
Still Aria continued.
She remembered her early days with Dream, walking at the edge of her world and his, where an ocean swam up to meet the land. Her feet had sunk into the ground there too, but Dream's hand in hers kept her steady, and his words kept her moving forward. She imagined that touch now, with a roaring thunder in her ears, soaked in the fury and sorrow of a nightmare. Perhaps it was not so scary after all. It too simply longed for a king that had once been.
Aria reached the middle of the storm. The darkness was consuming but at least it was quiet. She looked up, meeting the great red eye of the nightmare. It stared at her and she at it. Her heart hurt as the watched it weep in confusion and anger. She watched its ugly, bulbous tears spill into the wind that circled around her, watched them be ripped apart to make raindrops. Thunderstorms were often nightmares, but they never intended maleficence, they simply felt too much too intensely.
"I am sorry," she said simply. She raised her hands to a long darkened sky and called upon every ounce of power she still had. She called upon the long dried-up fields of daffodils, the small creatures she had buried with her own two hands when the sickness of the realm set in. She called upon the dirt and sand, sun-warmed and soft and the rich words in happy books that had since faded away. Most of all she called on her Dream; his ocean eyes and graceful body.
The storm screeched and writhed against her efforts to quell it. It thrashed and spit hail and struck at her with lightning. She jumped, dodging a bolt that arched for her, but pressed on, conjuring the dreams she had as a child when sleep still nipped at her eyelids and she called the waking world home. The storm began to shrink beneath the force. It threw another bolt of lighting and did not miss this time. Aria fell to her knees but kept her palms to the sky. Pain consumed her, and the acrid scent of burned flesh filled her nostrils. She screamed, in defiance and agony, longing and power.
The cold stung her eyes but she kept them open. She watched the storm crumble, the rain dry and the wind calm. The blackest clouds cleared away and only then did she give in. Her throat was raw and ripped along with the rest of her and she crumpled onto the wet sand. Somewhere distantly she thought she heard her name, someone calling for a song. But she was finished. Aria's eyes closed.
Death did not come for her then. Death kept her promises.
She woke some time later. The storm was gone and the palace still stood. The arches still curved above her, and the floor was still marble below her, smooth and steady. It was still crumbling and weak, but alive. A smile played at Aria's lips.
And then the pain came. A cry escaped from the little song, and within moments a kind face emerged above her. Lucienne. With her aid, Aria shifted to half-sitting, her dress pooled around her like spilled oil. The librarian unwrapped a red, soaking cloth from around her midsection. A wound gaped in her middle, angry and red, with spider web cracks seeping out into her skin.
Lucienne spoke in hushed tones, though there had not been someone to hear their conversations for a long while. She explained how the days had passed slowly, like butter through cloth, and the wound showed no signs of healing though somehow Aria still breathed.
"I used all my power to quell the storm." It was hard to speak. "Nothing remains of me that is of the dreaming, no power left to heal."
"An yet you remain alive, my lady."
Aria heard the memory of Dream in her mind. My sister keeps her promises.
"A gift from Death perhaps, turned to a curse."
Lucienne understood and nodded so.
The time passed in a haze, agony lengthening the hours. Lucienne was dutiful and compassionate in the care of her queen, as she had been in all things. She changed bandages that only pulled away from the skin more bloody than the last. She tried to bring comfort to Aria, moving her to the library. The books were bare, but the room was still warm and there were cushions where the song could lay her head to rest.
It was precisely seven days after the storm that Aria's Dream returned home. He did not know he was too late. Lucienne rushed to meet her king, a heap of man and cloth in the obsidian sea beyond the gate. He was weak and bruised, but the same Morpheus nonetheless. Eyes still closed like a newborn kitten, her name tumbled from his lips in a prayer.
"Aria?"
"Lucienne, my lord."
The king of the Dreaming opened his eyes and echoed her name. He clumsily embraced her as she helped him to his feet. He was all angles and instability, like a birch twig stuck in shallow dirt. She helped him to the gate and paused. A warning drifted from her. His things were not as he had left them. His realm had changed. The queen's name left her lips tasting of fear and heartache.
"What of my Queen?" he asked, his voice a cello string plucked beneath deep water. A fear gripped him that he could not yet name.
"She too is changed." Lucienne recounted in wide strokes the disintegration of the Dreaming. She told him of the storm which threatened the heart of the palace, and the queen who walked herself to its center and gave herself over so that the realm may live. How she remained breathing but bloody, a snippet of the song he left behind. Lucienne brought her king to his queen, and left them there, in the skeleton of a once vibrant place.
Aria opened her eyes for the first time in three days, and gazed upon the face of a dream.
Her Dream.
"Are you real?" She wept. The words hurt, from the raw flesh that refused to heal in her throat and the deep fear that the being which kneeled before her would disappear once more, like sand to the sea.
"I am real, my love." Dream gazed upon his little song, let his fingers feel the soft skin on her arms, the silkiness of her inky hair. The kiss they shared felt like coming home. Aria's tears reached his lips and he kissed them away, drawing her closed to him. She was so small now, smaller than she had been when he met her. He ignored the blood that seeped into his cloak and lapped at his skin. He told her not to cry.
"I failed. The realm, the Dreaming-"
"Survives because of you. You have nothing to repent, my love."
Relief washed over Aria as spring water over rocks.
"More than a century." She whispered, her hand felt like lead and stone, but she lifted it anyway to touch his cheek.
"I was captured. Held powerless by a group of mortals who dove recklessly into forces they did not understand."
"I searched for you, walked the earth twice over until I could no longer make the journey." He could see it now as he held her, see her mind and memories of the present and the once was. He could see the pain too, feel the agony she had been enduring. Even if her had possessed his power or his tools or his realm as they had once been, he doubted he could heal the fissure that tore through his song's body and soul, and as it stood, he possessed none of them anyway.
An ocean danced behind his eyelids and an apology tumbled from his lips. "I cannot heal you."
"I do not expect you to." It was broken and resigned and all the things he never wished for her to be. "But perhaps you can convince your sister to break a promise?"
Her eyes were as grey as the storm that took her, and as wild with desperation although the words were steady. Dream nodded despite himself, for he could never deny her a request. No one had been able to free him from his suffering, from the confines of a prison molded of his own materials and the ignorant words of a madman.
But he could release her from this suffering, this pain without end. He stood in his crumbling gallery and held the Ankh in his hands, reciting the words that endured despite time's best efforts to destroy all.
Her second to last plea was for the ocean.
He fashioned the simple dream with ease, though it was not as thoughtless as it once might have been. He pulled seashells from the ocean and painted the sand with warmth. He dyed the water a royal sapphire and dotted the shore with anthracite. He made the beach where they spent their early days and carried his love to the shore.
Her last request was for a song.
She was always his music, so he hummed a melody he last heard over a century ago, when the skies were well and Aria sang with honey in her voice.
Dream felt his sister near, and he clutched his love tighter to his chest. "I am sorry," he spoke when the song was finished. "I could not give you forever." He felt like he was speaking through sand.
Aria smiled, crooked and perfect. "I never wanted forever. That is a wish that only ends in disappointment. My dream was you. Always."
"As you were mine." He gave her one last kiss and held her as his sister came for her. Death smiled softly as she always did, and held out her hand. Aria took it with all the grace and beauty of the song Dream remembered. He watched her leave, in the caring hands of his sister now to join the Sunless lands. What was once his Aria lay crumpled and broken in his arms, red with blood and wet with tears.
He buried his song on the short cliff overlooking the shore, and let her rest where the sea rushed up to kiss the land and two worlds collided.