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"So, is sending that guy nightmares every night the Endless equivalent of pulling pigtails?"
John slouched deeper in his chair -- he resolutely refused to think of it as a throne -- and glared at Matthew, trying to put all the weight and gravitas that Morpheus would have managed but only succeeding in making the raven caw in laughter.
"I'm not the one sending the nightmares his way," John argued. "I don't know why he always ends up in that part of the Dreaming."
"The Wraith sure seem to like him," Matthew rolled his wings in the approximation of a shrug. "Poor guy. I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy."
"You told me I had to create a new nightmare," John bristled, defensive. "I didn't ask for any of this, you know? I - -" John broke off and ran his hands through the spiky mess of black hair that he'd inherited from his predecessor. Or that he'd always had. Becoming the newest incarnation of Dream of the Endless was confusing.
"And a very good nightmare they are too," Matthew soothed. "Best since the Corinthian himself."
John flicked Matthew's tail feather, causing him to squawk in outrage. "Don't pander to me," he cautioned. "I'm not a kid."
"You're not," Matthew agreed. "Like it or not, Daniel, you're one of the Endless now."
John hated being called Daniel, that was the name that he had given him, not the one his mother chose for him and the fact that Matthew was using it now showed him just how badly he'd fucked up.
Matthew continued. "And if even I can tell that this poor guy is in need of a good dream or two, that another few nightmares like the ones that he's attracting is going to kill him, then you sure as hell should know it too. So, tell me, Dream? Why aren't you doing anything about it?"
John sighed, fiddling with the black cuff he habitually wore around his wrist, the only change he'd made to Morpheus' wardrobe of black jeans and black t-shirt. He knew that Matthew was right. He, of all people, knew better than to underestimate the power of dreams and he could tell that Meredith Rodney McKay was close to drowning in his nightmares, crossing that line from John's own realm to one of his sisters. At the minute it was a toss up whether it would be Despair, Delirium or Death who claimed him. John didn't want that to happen. When it came to Meredith Rodney McKay, John wanted more than he was comfortable with.
If his memories of Nada wasn't caution enough, what happened to him, to his mother, would have been. Mortals and the Endless didn't mix.
"You like him," Matthew said in slow amazement. "Huh, that's new. Morpheus was all about the..."
John glared and he must have fared better at channeling Morpheus this time as Matthew shut his beak with a roll of his beady eyes.
"Relationships have not gone well for him, for me, in the past." John thought of Nada again, of Calliope, of Killala, Thessaly...Matthew had a point. His tastes had changed. As if his life weren't confusing enough.
"You're not him," Matthew said. "Or maybe you are but you're a different version of him. What the hell do I know, I'm a raven. But you have the power to help him and if you don't..." Matthew shook his feathers out and flew away, leaving John to think on what that would make him.
Not the man -- or the anthropomorphic representation of an abstract construct -- that he wanted to be.
John stood up from his chair and conjured himself a pair of aviator sunglasses, hiding the black galaxies of his eyes from view. It was time to pay Meredith Rodney McKay a visit.
-*-*-*-
John winced as he watched the Wraith feed from Meredith. He'd watched it happen for countless nights now but seeing it up close, smelling the blood, and hearing the screams made it more real. They really were amongst the best nightmares he'd constructed.
"This one is ours," the Wraith -- John hadn't named them properly, that would give them too much power but he thought of this one as Todd -- hissed. "He comes to us of his own accord, we are within our rights."
John drew himself up to a height beyond any mortal, letting the weight of his realm bolster his power and his appearance until the Wraith shook before him. "Your have no rights that I cannot take away with the snap of a finger," he intoned. A snap of his fingers caused Todd's brother -- Steve -- to disappear in a flash of light. "You would do well to remember that."
Todd's face paled, the green hue turning almost luminescent. He bowed deeply to Dream and spoke to his remaining brother in their own language. The other Wraith -- John decided he looked like a Walter -- withdrew his hand from Meredith, leaving the man panting in his bonds, insensate with fear and pain as his body tried to close in on itself.
"This one is under your protection?" Todd asked formally.
John didn't hesitate. Couldn't hesitate, not when Meredith's fear and pain were heavy in the air, the taste of it tart and unpleasant of John's tongue. "Yes, this one is mine."
Walter and Todd bowed deeply before disappearing, leaving John and Meredith alone in the living ship that was their dominion. John walked over to Meredith and dissolved the webbed bonds that held his form still with a thought. Meredith started to crumple without their hold and John rushed to catch him.
Meredith's skin was cold with shock and much too aged for John's liking. Restoring Meredith to his usual appearance, watching the lines fade and the pale skin grow taut and youthful once more, John thought of and dismissed a whole slew of dreamscapes to take him to. Indulging in his first instinct, John transported them both to the heart of the Dreaming.
He brought Meredith home.
-*-*-*-
John didn't have much use for beds but he made sure to conjure the most opulent creation he could imagine for Meredith. He hovered uncertainly at the foot of it as Meredith lay within, recovering from the damage inflicted by the Wraith. Meredith snapped into awareness again with a pained gasp and John felt himself act without thought, moving to the bed between one breath and the next, gathering a trembling Meredith into his arms.
"They're gone," John heard himself say, "I told them to leave you alone. They won't be back, you're safe." John rocked him gently until his breathing was under control, not caring about the damp stains on his black t-shirt where Meredith's eyes leaked.
It took Meredith four dozen breaths to calm down, but eventually he settled, looking around the room that John had brought him to with wide blue eyes. "This isn't my room," he said. "What are -" he took a long look at John and sighed, "I'm still asleep. Of course I am. Still," he looked appraisingly at John, "this is a hell of a lot nicer than my usual dreams. I mean, admittedly, you're not blonde, but you'll do in a pinch."
"I - no, you - I'm not your dream," John blushed. "I'm Dream."
"Failing to see the distinction," Meredith rolled his eyes. "Look, are you getting to the good stuff before my alarm goes off or - -"
Meredith blinked out abruptly as his time in John's realm ended. John sagged into the pillow, not sure whether he should be relieved or disappointed.
"Smooth, boss." Matthew's voice was tinged with amusement as the raven flew in the open window. "It's somewhat comforting to know that you're as awkward with the dudes as you are with the ladies. Makes me feel safe and warm."
John ignored Matthews squawking laughter as he stalked from the room, conjuring up the cloak that he usually eschewed in order to hide the effect that Meredith's presence had wrought.
Matthew just squawked louder and John started to draw up plans for a nightmare that fed on ravens.
-*-*-*-
John found Meredith a few nights later in a dreamscape that looked a lot like a laboratory. Meredith was writing at a whiteboard, four of them already filled up, back and front with his blocky writing. John made a mental note to check with Lucien at the library to see if any of Meredith's dream works were held on file.
Meredith looked up as John walked into the room and dropped the marker. "You again," he breathed. "Fantastic." His hands went to his belt and began to unbuckle it before John managed to fasten it again with a thought. "What the hell? Even in my dreams, I can't get laid? This sucks."
"I can bring the Wraith back if you're really unhappy," John made an attempt at a joke and promptly felt like an ass as Meredith's face paled in sudden fear. "No," he rushed, "I was kidding, I wouldn't...god, I suck at this."
Meredith frowned at him. "Who are you?"
"I told you last time, I am Dream. This is my domain."
"Really?" Meredith looked around, unimpressed, "it looks like my old lab at Stanford to me."
Maybe it was because he had the library on his mind but John answered the challenge in Meredith's voice by transporting them both directly to the science section.
"What about now?" John smirked.
"It's a library," Rodney deadpanned. "Wow. Never seen one of these before."
"Hey." John was absolutely not getting irked by Meredith's unimpressed manner. "This isn't just any library. It contains every single book that had ever been dreamed. Da Vinci's, Einstein's - -"
"The erotic gay fantasy that my assistant has been plotting when she should be running simulations?" Meredith snarked. "Is this the best that you could - -"
Meredith disappeared back into the waking world mid sentence again and John sighed heavily. Turning to leave he saw Lucien hovering quietly at the end of a nearby stack. Of course.
"Just. Please," he pleaded, "don't tell Matthew."
-*-*-*-
John was avoiding the sigil room. He knew that Desire had been trying to get hold of him but he wasn't interested in listening to what they had to say. Despair was so much harder to keep out than Desire ever was.
"You need to see something," she said, holding out her hand for him to take.
John stepped into a world of windows and wondered again how Despair could stand it. Despair led him to a round window and John knew what it would show him before he saw it.
Meredith.
"Is he yours?" he asked quietly.
"For moments," Despair answered. "Although the moments grow longer. His thoughts turn to me more and more with each day, the feelings of never being good enough, how it feels to lose the people he is supposed to lead. It's beautiful."
John felt his jaw twitch in irrational anger and Despair showed her teeth. "I forget sometimes how different you are now, but, when it comes to matters of the heart you are not so different at all. If you do not wish to lose this one, brother, you should act quickly. Consider this your only warning."
-*-*-*-
Meredith looked unsurprised to see him again that night.
"Dream, wasn't it? You know, if you really are the head honcho here, I have a few complaints to make."
John's mouth twitched in an approximation of a smile. "The clowns? I can get rid of them if you'd like but I didn't bring them here, Meredith. That was all you."
"If you're going to stalk my dreams like this, the least you can do is get your facts right, dream boy. It's Rodney, not Meredith. Do you have any idea what it was like growing up with the name Meredith? Not good is an understatement."
"I like it," John admitted. "Meredith. Welsh. Guardian of the Sea." Meredith -- Rodney -- glared at him and John huffed a laugh. "Rodney's good too, though."
"Hmm, well, I'm not sure what I expected from someone called Dream," Rodney looked appraisingly at John as the clowns disappeared one by one. "You know, I didn't think I had the imagination to make you up."
John transported them onto the balcony of a floating city and leaned his arms against the ledge, letting the sea air move through his hair. "Who says you're making me up?"
Rodney breathed out through his nose in frustration as he moved next to John. "What? I'm supposed to believe that there's a Sandman? And that he visits me every night?"
"Not every night," John corrected. "There are some nights that you don't visit this realm at all." He looked at Rodney -- he had decided he liked that name -- over his sunglasses. "I was under the impression that humans needed more regular sleep than that."
"Yes, well, I'm a very busy man."
"Too busy for rest?"
"Sometimes." Rodney tilted his chin upwards as if daring John to argue with him.
"The nightmares won't bother you again," John assured him. "I've seen to that."
"How could you - ah, of course, I forgot. You're Dream." Rodney sneered the name, making John chuckle.
"If that's too out there for you, you can call me John."
"John? Seriously. The supposed king of the dream world is called John."
John smiled sadly. "I used to be," he said. "And believe me, I'm no king."
Rodney didn't answer. He stayed quiet, looking out over the sea, his body solid and warm at John's side. It was nice here. John thought. Peaceful. He could almost see the tension bleed out of Rodney's shoulders and it made him smile. Despair had no hold over anyone here.
"What is this place?" Rodney asked eventually.
"Would you believe me if I told you it was the lost city of Atlantis? Or at least the memory of her."
"I would." Rodney looked as surprised by the answer as John was. "I don't know why. I mean, lost cities? The personification of Dreams? Maybe they're right and I have cracked." Rodney sighed heavily. "All I know is, it's nice here. Easy. No labs to blow up, no frozen wasteland outside," he glanced shyly at John. "I'm not alone."
"Consider this place yours," John heard himself say. Lucien was going to be so mad that he'd gave Atlantis away but...Rodney needed it. And John was slowly beginning to realise that he needed Rodney. Or wanted. It was the same thing really.
"I - - I think I'm waking up."
Rodney disappeared.
-*-*-*-
They met every night in Atlantis after that, walking her corridors and discovering her secrets. John continued to ignore his family's calls, too wrapped up in learning everything there was to know about Rodney.
He should have known it was too good to last.
-*-*-*-
"I love it here."
John tilted his head to look at Rodney, sprawled out on his back next to him. Rodney's eyes were fixed on the constellations overhead, so different, John knew, from the ones on Earth. He looked peaceful, relaxed, a bright contrast to the frightened, on edge man that John had first spied months ago. John liked to think that he had a part in that.
Dream always had been a fool when it came to understanding the thoughts of mortals, something that John's own scant few months of mortality did nothing to change.
"I'm glad," he answered Rodney, meaning every word.
Destruction always had said he was a romantic fool.
-*-*-*-
"Hey, little bro."
Of all of his brothers and sisters, John liked Death the best. He knew that she, of all the Endless, had been closest to Morpheus and that fact should have rubbed him up the wrong way, the way so many of the reminders of Morpheus' time in this place did, but he could never quite not like her.
Of course, that didn't mean that he was particularly happy to see her right now. Not when Rodney was due in Atlantis any minute.
Death placed her hands on her hips and pouted, her actions so much more human than the rest of his family. Maybe that was why John liked her the best.
"You don't look happy to see me, John."
John also appreciated that she was the only member of their dysfunctional little family that called him by his preferred name.
"I am, sister," he rushed. "I always am. It's just..."
Death sighed. "Rodney," she nodded. "I know. We all know. And that's what I'm hear to talk to you about."
John's face closed off as he realised the reason for her visit.
She smiled at him, beautiful and warm, and held her arm out. "Walk with me, John. I promise not to take up too much of your time."
John grudgingly linked arms with her and they walked the banks of a flowing river, plucked from the dreams of a young man who liked to paint but didn't get the time. If the young man's next hurried sketch in the snatched few minutes between exercises and training featured two pale, dark haired figures walking arm in arm then it would be of no consequence.
Not like what he was doing with Rodney.
"John."
"I know," he said quietly. "The Endless and mortals don't mix."
Death shook her head. "We can mix, to an extent. But, brother, you are pushing that line to it's finishing point." She paused in their walk and reached up to brush her hand across John's cheek. "You have to let him go. I think you know that."
John leaned into her touch for just a second, enough that her eyes got misty and sad.
"John...Dream...he's slipping into your domain too often. The living are supposed to live. What do you want to do? Do you want him to give his mortality up? Because you know the only way to do that is for me to visit him, right?"
"No!" The word was expelled from John like someone had punched him in the gut. The thought of Rodney dead or dying, even if it meant that John could have him forever, was like a physical pain. But. "He's happy here," John knew he was whining like the toddler he used to be but he needed to make her understand. "His waking hours are bad. Despair, she said that he was visiting her and I - -"
"Dream," Death cut him off with a hand on his chest. "Mortals visit each of us over the course of their life. Destiny watches over everything, I am there in the end. You watch over their sleep, Desire lives in their hearts, Destruction, Delirium, Despair...we are all a part of the human experience." She reached up on her tip toes to kiss John's cheek. "You can't have a rainbow without a little rain."
John almost smiled at the epithet, and then did smile at the thought of how Rodney would react to learning that Death's favourite movie was Mary Poppins and that she regularly spouted cheery inspirational quotes that belonged on a poster with a determined puppy on it.
He knew what he had to do.
-*-*-*-
It rained every day for six months in the Dreaming after that.
Atlantis still belonged to Rodney, John wouldn't take that gift back. The city was closed to any other dreamers but, for six months, it lay empty.
The Wraith abided by John's command and left Rodney alone but Rodney was, as he'd professed to John many times, a genius and more than capable of producing his own nightmares. Rodney slept little and visited the Dreaming even less. But when he did, the nightmares feasted and John forced himself to watch.
Destruction, Despair and Delirium all saw more of Rodney over those six months than John did. Sometimes John wondered if Rodney even knew what he had lost, what John had given up. Did he remember his time with John or was it all a hazy dream that could be washed away by a hot shower.
("He knows, boss," Matthew said once, shaking the persistent rain futilely from his feathers. "Can't you see the way he looks around for you every time before the whale gets him?"
Matthew avoided John for a month after that little exchange as John created a bleak nightmare that feasted on ravens.)
But Death was a better study of mortals than John ever would be. One day, six months, two weeks and three days after John had made his decision, Rodney walked Atlantis' corridors once more. His sleep pattern started to regulate and the whales, while they never disappeared, became a less frequent occurrence. The library in the Dreaming started to accumulate a few more works by Dr Meredith Rodney McKay PhD PhD, including but not limited to the grand unifying theory of everything and an erotic romance novel featuring a cranky, brilliant scientist and the personification of Sleep. Matthew laughed himself sick when he caught John reading that but John couldn't bring himself to care.
Death was right.
It can't rain all the time.
-*-*-*-
"Hey little bro, I have a surprise for you."
John rolled his eyes at the intrusion. Death never waited for an invitation, she always just showed up, usually at the most inconvenient of times.
"I'm a little busy right now, can it - -"
John's words froze in his throat as he turned to the door and saw Rodney.
It had been forty two years but Rodney hadn't aged a day, looking as solid and beautiful as John remembered him being during their time together. John knew that he hadn't looked like that the last time he saw him, from afar, in the Dreaming and his eyes widened as the realisation set in. "No," he turned begging eyes towards his sister. "He's too young. Put him back."
Death laughed. "It doesn't work like that and you know it. I'm gonna leave you boys to get reacquainted. Unless," she turned to Rodney, "you've changed your mind?"
Rodney's eye never left John. "Not a chance," he breathed, barely blinking as Death waggled her fingers in farewell before closing the door behind her, leaving John and Rodney alone in the middle of a half finished dreamscape.
"Rodney, you - -"
"Shut up."
John's mouth snapped shut.
"Just, shut up, Dream, Daniel, John, whatever the hell your name is. I've spent the past forty two years waiting for you to show up in my dreams. A lot of it spent wondering if you were just a figment of my imagination. But then I learned about wormholes and other galaxies and did you know I found the real Atlantis? She was amazing and incredible but she wasn't my Atlantis. She didn't have you. Not that my Atlantis had you much either. Damnit John, forty two years!"
John swallowed heavily. "Three months and sixteen days," he said.
"What?"
"Forty two years, three months and sixteen days," John replied.
"Oh my God."
"Rodney, I - -"
"Shut up." John found himself with an armful of Rodney, Rodney's hands tangling in his mess of black hair and looking at the constellations in John's eyes. "Shut up and kiss me."
Afterwards, they lay on one of Atlantis' balconies looking out across the ocean, John's hands mapping every inch of Rodney's body.
"My sister," he murmured. "When is she taking you away with her?" He didn't want this to end but knew that it would. Nothing was endless, after all, not even them. John was proof enough of that.
"I died in my sleep, you idiot." Rodney's mouth tipped upwards in a smile. "After the momentary freak out, the nice goth lady finally calmed me down enough to tell me that since I died in your realm..."
"You're staying?" John knew his voice was filled with hope, with want, but he didn't care; couldn't. Not if Rodney was saying what John thought he was saying.
"As hot as your sister is," Rodney teased, "I'm staying."
John grinned, delighted. "Good, there's a book I want to show you. "Enter Sandman" by Meredith McKay. I've always wanted to recreate page three hundred and fifty two if you're up for it."
Rodney blushed beautifully and John laughed as a rainbow appeared in the sky above Atlantis.
Death would never let him hear the end of this but John didn't care.
He was happy.