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7-wonders · 4 days ago

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Meet Cute (String of Fate pt. 2)

Morpheus/Dream of the Endless x Reader

Summary: You meet a stranger in a pub, and (unbeknownst to you) everything changes.

Word count: 5.1k

A note from the author: I truly was not anticipating the avalanche of love that I received on part one—I am so grateful to you all for reading and wanting more. I'm very excited to write a fun, romantic soulmate fic for our favorite Endless lover boy! The Prince of Stories deserves a romance for the ages—on that note, if you have any romance tropes you’d like to see in this story, I’d love to hear them and see if they’re a good fit for the general outline I have planned :)

As always, I hope you enjoy reading, and would greatly appreciate hearing from you about your thoughts on this!

Part 1

Thursdays are typically one of your favorite days of the week, thanks to the history graduate students’ weekly happy hour. It was originally born out of a universally terrible week last semester, when everything was going wrong for everybody, leading you and your cohort to decide that the only way to cope was to get together, drink, and air your grievances. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be very therapeutic and just what a bunch of busy, stressed grad students needed. Thus, Thursday night grad student happy hours at the New Inn quickly became tradition.

The location of happy hour was chosen solely due to the proximity to campus and the desire to support a small business, and definitely not because it’s owned by the history department’s own Dr. Robert Gadling (inherited from his late grandfather), who always gives your crew 20% off on your weekly outings.

Though you’re at the New Inn early today compared to a regular Thursday, you’re also running late to the study group that a few of you decided to put together for today. Dr. Raquel Keller is just as brilliant as she is brutal, which means that the term assignment for her Archival Methods class is a bit of a doozy. It’s still fairly early in the semester, but you know if you don’t get started brainstorming for your project now, you’re already going to be considered as falling behind in Dr. Keller’s eyes.

You don’t mean to be late, of course, but the horror that is grading freshman essays will do that to almost anybody. One essay in particular was so rage-inducing that it forced you to stare at the wall for a few minutes lest you write feedback with your red pen that you’d surely regret, which is why you’re very happy to see your advisor sitting at his usual table when you walk in.

Robert Gadling (“Please call me Rob, no need for any of that Dr. Gadling business”) notices you almost immediately and raises a hand to wave, with his usual friendly smile on his face. Your group is tucked at the large table in the corner by the windows that they typically haunt, meaning you’ll have to walk by him anyway to get to where you’re going. Might as well rip the bandage off now, you think as you come to a stop at his table.

��Hey, Rob!” He has a friend with him tonight, a dour man in all black currently scowling at his drink. You’ll endeavor to be quick, then.

“Now, my favorite TA wouldn’t be taking advantage of my pub to work on homework for my class that you haven’t done yet, would you?” he asks, falling back on one of his favorite jokes of the new school year—the man’s full of dad jokes, and you’re usually who he tries them out on.

“I’m your only TA this semester,” you respond, as per usual.

Rob chuckles and waves his hand in the air. “Semantics!”

“But to answer your question, a couple of us are meeting up before the history grad students’ weekly happy hour to work on our term assignments for Keller’s Archival Methods class. I would never work on your homework in front of you!”

Rob’s friend has glanced up, and you wink at him to let him know that you have 100% worked on homework for Rob’s classes at the New Inn (What? You’d feel bad for completely ignoring this guy when you’ve just monopolized his time with his friend).

When your optic nerves finally reach the thinking part of your brain and you finally process who you’re looking at, you have to make a conscious effort to keep your jaw from dropping. The man sitting before you is devastatingly, otherworldly beautiful; with his high cheekbones, sharp jawline, and regal nose, he looks as though he’s gotten lost after leaving a runway and ended up among mere mortals. His skin, so pale that you wonder for a moment if vampires maybe are real, stands out in stark contrast to his messy, jet-black hair and matching black ensemble.

But it’s his eyes that truly captivate you, an arresting shade of blue that makes you feel as though you’re frozen under his icy gaze. They sparkle even under the ambient lighting of the pub, galaxies hidden within his irises that you could spend hours exploring.

Glasses clanking together as a bartender receives a crate of clean dishes breaks you out of the spell you’ve found yourself under, and you blink a couple of times in the hopes that it clears your head. Why are you here again? When you look at Rob once more, you’re reminded of the reason and can only hope that you weren’t staring at his friend for as long as it felt.

“Um…I’m glad I caught you, actually,” you say, trying to turn your sole attention to the matter at hand. “I was grading your Intro to Medieval Europe essays, and I’m ninety-nine percent sure I caught plagiarism again.”

His face falls. “Seriously? Who?”

“Tom Wyatt, from your 9 a.m. Tuesday/Thursday. Not only did he forget to remove ChatGPT saying ‘certainly, here’s an essay,’ but there’s also a sonnet about oranges.”

As a hopeful deterrent against plagiarism, but more realistically, as an easy way to catch it, Rob always put a prompt in white at the end of the essay prompts on the class websites. For this assignment, he tacked on a command to “write a sonnet about oranges.” Students who actually wrote their assignments would never see it, but an AI chatbot programmed to respond to all commands from a block of text being copied and pasted?

Hook, line, and sinker.

“Damn, that’s frustrating.” He sounds just as aggrieved as you feel. How hard is it to write a freshman-level essay on how the Catholic Church benefited from feudalism? “That makes how many for you?”

“This would be number four that I’ve caught.” At barely a month into the semester, too.

“Who needs GPTZero when I’ve got you? Bring it by during office hours tomorrow and we’ll have a look, alright?”

“Sure.” A voice calling your name has your head snapping up, and you see a couple of your fellow grad students beckoning you over to their table. “I'd better go. I’ll see you tomorrow!”

You chance one last glance at Rob’s friend and find those piercing eyes of his already on you, smiling at him even as your heart pounds. When you turn and make your way across the room, you push away the ludicrous thought that you can feel icy pinpricks on the back of your neck.

“Hey, guys,” you greet, landing in an open chair and opening your backpack to take your laptop out.

“What, you don’t get enough of your advisor during school hours? It’s only September, and I’m already wishing that Keller just randomly decides to take a sabbatical in the middle of the school year,” Connor, a second-year PhD student with a focus on geopolitics in World War Two who’s decided to help you out since he knows how Keller’s classes work, bemoans.

You laugh. “I would have just said hi and moved on, but another student plagiarized their essay, and I wanted to let Rob know.”

Groans go up around you. “Fucking AI, man. I worry about how dumb the world is going to be in ten years.”

“Ten years? That’s very optimistic of you.”

“I’m surprised you went over there at all, what with his scary friend sitting there too,” Georgia, in her second year and with a thesis focusing on economics influencing fashion, says.

You raise your eyebrows. “Scary?”

“Yeah, looks like the boogeyman or something.” The other grad students nod, a couple of them casting furtive glances at Rob’s table to see what is, apparently, a specter from their nightmares.

You keep quiet, because what are you supposed to say? ‘I think he’s really cute’? ‘Are you guys blind?’ You’re not a teenager who can’t control their hormones and crushes on every attractive person they see, and these are your peers in academia.

(Plus, cute feels like a massive understatement)

Still, you can’t help but glance one last time at the table as conversation shifts to the term assignments you’re meant to be working on in the first place, only mildly disappointed when you see that he’s already left. Oh well, you think, attempting to turn your focus towards powering on your computer and navigating to Keller’s class website. Time to put the handsome stranger out of your mind and get on with the rest of your night.

Much easier said than done, though, especially when your head hits the pillow and you finally fall asleep.

The scenario you’re in is immediately recognizable as one of your regular stress dreams; though, all of your dreams lately seem to be stress dreams now that the school year has started. You’re standing at the front of a classroom you’re a teacher’s assistant for, only to find that the class isn’t history. Sometimes the class is a foreign language you don’t speak, other times it’s math or science-related. Tonight, apparently, you’re meant to be teaching microbiology.

You try your hardest to bluff your way through the class, first by attempting to make sense of the writing on the whiteboard, which, by virtue of this being a dream, is unreadable. When that doesn’t work, you switch to pulling from the meager knowledge of biology that you have from high school and the gen-ed biology class that you took as a freshman in college.

While you’re stuttering about the mitochondria, you chance a glimpse around the room. The faces of the students watching you are never fleshed out and are usually just blurs interspersed with one or two students that you’ve taught before, but old habits die hard, and you still like to make eye contact with your students even when they don’t have eyes. Your own eyes are drawn to the back of the classroom when a flash of black catches your attention.

It’s him. The man from the pub, looking just as handsome and serious as a few hours ago. He’s more in focus than the rest of the classroom—everything about him as though you’re awake and standing in a room with him. He seems just as surprised to see you as you are to see him, as though he wandered into this classroom by accident while on the hunt for another one.

“Hi,” is all you can think to say, stopping your half-assed attempt at teaching a subject you only know the basics about. “Are you lost?”

He remains silent. Maybe whatever he’s here for, he doesn’t want to talk about it in front of your students (obviously, that’s not the case, but your sleeping mind, which is currently in teaching mode, is treating this entire situation like a regular school day)? You should probably address this.

“Give me just one moment,” you say to the class before making your way to the steps to the back of the lecture hall.

The man’s surprise only increases as he watches you move towards him. When your foot reaches the first stair, he makes a movement with his hand—

Your eyes snap open to the sight of your ceiling fan spinning circles above you. The dream is already slipping through your fingers like wafting smoke, and you sigh as you turn it over in your mind, examining it from every angle while you still can.

It’s been a while since you’ve been…interested in anybody. Sure, you have crushes on celebrities, on fictional characters from television and movies and books. But actual dating? Taking a second look at somebody and thinking that they could be a person you might imagine yourself being romantically interested in?

You don’t have time for that—not when you’re working so hard to get to where you want to be in life. Life feels more than fulfilling for you right now; you’re studying in a field you’re passionate about, getting to research, write, learn, and teach (even if each individually causes you grief at times). You have a good group of friends and peers, most of whom are also trying to make their way through academia. It’s a time in your life that you’re trying to savor while you’re in the middle of it, knowing that one day you’ll be missing this period.

Romance, you feel, would only slow you down. But is it so bad to have a harmless crush? To find a stranger in a bar so attractive that you can’t help but have a one-off dream about him?

No, you don’t think so. After all, there’s comfort in knowing that you’ll never see this man again, that the endless depths of his eyes will never analyze you and somehow know that you’ve managed to conjure his form in your sleeping mind.

A large yawn interrupts your thoughts, and your eyes start to flutter shut against your will. Maybe you can fall back asleep for a bit before you have to be up? One glance at your phone screen reveals you’ve woken up a mere five minutes before your alarm is set to go off, and you shove your head under your pillow to groan miserably before throwing your blankets off of you and getting a start on your day.

•••

As expected, the handsome stranger begins to fade from the forefront of your mind as your usual daily life marches on. There are classes to take, classes to teach, papers to mark, and a social life that you continue to try and have despite it all. It’s a complicated juggling act, but it’s one that you’ve managed to balance well. It’s a relief, honestly, that the dream was a one-night-only affair, lest it throw everything off.

Logic tells you all of this, and you agree with it. Yet, there’s still a part of you that can’t help but eagerly look towards Rob’s usual table on the next Thursday, feeling a sliver of hope that the scowling man dressed like a member of the Addams family will be there too. When you see nothing but two empty chairs sitting at the table, it’s only a mild letdown.

•••

The university’s campus is beautiful during all four seasons, but is particularly lovely during the fall. The sun is still shining, but it’s no longer uncomfortably hot. Leaves have started to turn autumnal shades of red, orange, and yellow as the trees prepare to shed in anticipation of the winter months. There’s a steady stream of students, either heading to and from one building to the next, or taking advantage of the conditions by studying or relaxing outside. The campus green is practically alive with activity—with a newly curated “fall faves” playlist playing in your ears on your walk to Rob’s office before class, and plans to treat yourself to a favorite drink from the on-campus café after, you think that this might be your idea of a perfect fall day.

A skateboarder attempting to slide across a bench draws your attention, and you find yourself mildly impressed when he lands the trick. He grins when he notices you watching, throwing up the horns as he skates past the small alcove and away. You look back at the bench to marvel at just how he did that when a sight more surprising than any skateboard trick stops you in your tracks.

There, staring at one of the large campus map signs posted in the alcove, is the man who was sitting with Rob at the New Inn a couple of weeks ago. It’s startling to see him here, in a place you consider yours; almost like seeing a teacher outside of school for the first time (perhaps not a very good simile in your grad school years, now that you regularly see at least one teacher outside of school). He’s just as handsome as you remember from both your brief encounter and the dream, only this is no dream. Your eyes quickly snap away from him and ahead of you at the realization that he’s only a few feet away from you, and not some distant memory.

You should just keep walking—you are on a mission, after all—but he looks genuinely lost. With a sigh and only a bit of hesitation, you turn around and approach the sign.

“Hi! You’re Rob’s friend, right?” you ask, knowing very well that he is.

The man turns away from the sign to look at you for a long moment before he nods.

Okay. Not the best reaction, but you won’t let that dissuade you. “Are you…looking for him?”

“I am hoping to leave a book with him, but am unsure of his current whereabouts.”

His voice. Oh god, his voice. Sonorous like you’ve never heard before and as smooth as silk; if he doesn’t narrate audiobooks, he definitely should look into that as a potential career path. It leaves you feeling almost as flustered as when you first looked into his starry blue eyes—paired together, it’s a deadly combination.

You check your watch to remind yourself of Rob’s Wednesday schedule, grateful for the opportunity to avert your gaze for a moment and get yourself under control. It’s 10:35, which means that he’s discussing Chaucer in his Medieval Literature course.

“Rob’s still teaching a class, but should be done in about twenty minutes.” He nods again, seemingly unsure of his next course of action. Lucky for him, you’re far too helpful for your own good. “I’m actually on my way to his office to drop off a couple of things. I could take you there? If you don’t know the way?”

“That would be much appreciated.” Though he doesn’t speak very loudly, his voice carries easily through the breeze.

“Great! This way, then.” You turn back towards your original path and immediately cringe internally.

Great? My best response to him was great?

The man falls in step next to you, and you wage a battle with yourself as you try to decide if it would be worse to allow the silence to persist on the entire walk or to fill the silence with boring, meaningless small talk. You see him glance at you out of the corner of your eye at the same moment that you glance out of yours, and smile nervously upon being caught.

“I didn’t get the chance to actually introduce myself the other night when I stole Rob from you for a bit,” you say sheepishly before giving him your name.

He inclines his head in your direction. “I am Morpheus.”

It’s a name that you weren’t expecting at all, but somehow, you already know that it fits him perfectly. Of course, this man would be named after a Greek god; to name him something common would be a disservice to him.

“It’s nice to meet you, Morpheus,” you say warmly.

While you’re expecting the conversation to end there, Morpheus only glances in front of him to make sure his path is still clear before looking to you again. “You are H—Robert’s student?”

“Mhm, he’s my graduate advisor.”

You interviewed with a few different colleges and universities during your graduate school hunt, but none of your prospective advisors could hold a candle to Robert Gadling. He was immediately engaged in your areas of interest, hearing out your potential ideas for a thesis, and explaining how his skill set would be able to help you get your degree. When you managed to get full funding from this university as well, the decision was rather easy.

Compared to what you’ve heard from some of your friends at different schools across the globe, stuck with advisors who have received tenure and thus checked out from doing any actual advising, you’ll never regret the choice you made.

“He’s one of the best teachers I’ve ever had across all levels of schooling,” you say, unable to not compliment him, especially to his friend.

“That does not surprise me in the slightest.” His lips quirk up ever so slightly, and you get the feeling that this is his version of a smile; in that case, it’s easy to see that Morpheus is very fond of Rob. “Is your area of focus on the Medieval period as well?”

“I think the Medieval period is interesting, but no. My thesis is about oral traditions and examining what information is lost when they’re put on paper.” That’s the 30,000-foot view of it, at least.

His eyes turn bright, curious, and you squirm under his focus as you look nervously in front of you to make sure he’s not going to hit anybody with his inattention.��

“You enjoy learning about stories?” Morpheus asks.

You can’t help but grin at the unexpected question. “Oh, yes! Storytelling is one of our earliest forms of communication, and every society across all of human history has its own stories and folklore. Before there was any written language, before there was an idea to elaborate on what was being said by painting illustrations onto the walls of caves, there were simply people sitting together and coming up with stories. Stories to entertain, stories to warn, stories to educate. It’s fascinating.”

“I feel much the same,” he responds. “Stories…connect. The elder generation warns the younger about dangers in the forest by speaking of bloodthirsty monsters. Warring factions may find that they have common ground upon realizing they believe in the same mythos. Friends keep one another company in the long hours of the night around a fire by making up tales of bravery and heroism.”

Finally, it feels like somebody is speaking your language, and you nod in excitement. “Exactly! And there’s something magical about how stories can be so powerful that they can transcend the time and place they were first thought up. Romeo and Juliet just finished a run on Broadway after being written in England in the late sixteenth century. The Odyssey was first spoken in around the eighth century BCE, and one of the biggest directors of the twenty-first century is filming a star-studded adaptation today. Stories are kind of time capsules, when you think about it.

“It was hard even to narrow down a research question for my thesis, to be honest. If I could have, I’d just analyze the history of stories, but you need an actual research question for—”

Rounding the corner to see Rob’s office door cuts you off, embarrassment flooding through you as you abruptly realize that you’ve been talking this poor man’s ear off for almost the entirety of the walk to the history department’s offices.

“I’m sorry, I’m rambling.” Heat rises in your face, and you focus on finding your keys and unlocking the door rather than wishing the ground would open up and swallow you whole. “I just get excited to talk about this subject.”

“You need not apologize,” Morpheus assures. “I asked you a question, and I was happy to learn from you. You are, after all, attempting to become an expert in this subject, correct?”

His words make you feel a bit better, but you’re only able to let out a halfhearted laugh and a “Yeah, I guess,” as you swing the door open and step inside.

To the average outsider, Rob’s office would be considered messy. The bookshelves are stuffed full with both textbooks and historical texts he finds handy for teaching and researching, and a variety of papers litter every flat surface one might use for writing on. Rob, though, knows exactly where everything is; in your third semester as his graduate student, you start to believe you’re getting there.

Your favorite part of Rob’s office, though, has to be his decor. Everything that’s not school-issued is vintage and sourced by him, from the velvet Art Deco club chair by the window to the Victorian-era globe that sits on a shelf in the corner. He even has a literal broadsword hanging behind his desk that is, supposedly, an heirloom that has managed to stay in the Gadling family for hundreds of years. You’re still finding little treasures tucked around the room that you’ve never seen before, like the small, ornate snuffbox from the 1770s sitting on an upper shelf that you came across last week when looking for a spare copy of the Medieval Lit textbook.

Morpheus starts a slow lap around the room as you lay your backpack on Rob’s desk so that you can grab both the proposed answer key for his Intro to Medieval Europe pop quiz (he hates to give pop quizzes, but his 2 p.m. Monday/Wednesday/Friday course has been particularly dismal when it comes to even bothering to pretend to take notes) and the rough draft of the first 15 pages of your thesis, which you’re particularly nervous about leaving in the hands of somebody who’s not you.

While you could have just emailed both of these documents, Rob enjoys having physical copies of almost everything and makes it a requirement that essays are to be printed out and handed to him in class so that he can have adequate space to leave feedback. In the matter of the work-in-progress that is your thesis, you’ll take as much constructive criticism as you can get.

“Have you ever been in here before?” you ask, noticing Morpheus’s eyes lingering on a small daguerrotype of a group of American Civil War soldiers on the wall by the bookshelves.

“No. Robert was, perhaps, overconfident in my abilities to navigate the university to find his office when he told me I could simply leave the book here.”

A huff of amusement escapes you. “Glad I was around to rescue you, then, so you could explore a bit. I love his office, it’s like a museum.”

“His home is much the same; a testament to life, created by a man grateful for every minute of his own,” Morpheus says eloquently.

“That’s such an accurate description of him.” Truly, your advisor always has something good to say, even when a situation may call for a bit of doom and gloom; faced with the way that AI is wreaking havoc on academia, for instance, he simply expressed gratitude that you were good at catching such uses.

Your phone buzzes with a notification, and when you look at the screen, you see that it’s almost 10:45.

“I have to get going. My class is on the other side of campus, and if I don’t leave now, I’ll be late,” you say apologetically.

“Far be it from me to stand in the way of anybody’s pursuit of knowledge.” Morpheus doesn’t speak like anybody you’ve ever met—in fact, he speaks more like a character from a book than anything—but it doesn’t carry any of the affectation that it would were it coming from anybody you’ve met.

“Are you going to wait for Rob in here, or do you need me to walk you out?” you ask.

“I shall wait,” he decides.

“Okay! I’ll leave you to it, then.”

You rock awkwardly on your heels, unsure of how to end this interaction. When his lips quirk up at you this time, and not a mention of his friend, you panic.

“Bye,” you squeak, ducking out of Rob’s office and practically running out of the building, if only to get some distance between you and the mortification chasing after you as it attempts to engulf you.

(And, if you’re truly being honest, to put some physical distance between yourself and the enigmatic man you’ve just walked through campus with)

When you make it outside, you lean against the stone exterior and bury your head in your hands. You can feel your cheeks burning beneath your fingers, and you can’t help the forlorn groan you make as your brain forces you to recall every painful moment of your interaction with Morpheus.

“What’s wrong?” somebody asks.

Peeking between your fingers, you see Georgia standing in front of you, sipping on the straw of the large iced coffee in her hand. In her other hand, she holds your favorite drink, having taken the silence when she texted you to ask if you wanted a drink (since you were otherwise occupied) as a yes—bless her.

“I’m an idiot. The most handsome guy I’ve ever met in my life talks to me, and I infodump about my thesis to him!” you wail.

“The grad student curse,” Georgia commiserates, handing you your drink so that she can lean against the wall next to you and pat a comforting hand on your shoulder. “I was DD once for my friends this summer and was not feeling like being out at all, so I decided to post up at the bar with a book about fashion during the Great Depression, as one does.”

“Oh no.” You can already tell where this is going, both dreading and anticipating the next part.

“A guy came up to me to ask what I was reading—he was obviously flirting with me, only I didn’t realize it, so I proceeded to spend the next ten minutes talking about feed sack and flour bag dresses.”

When you begin to laugh, her smirk widens into a grin.

“I wish that I were joking. It’s like a disease! We get to study what we’re passionate about, but the cost is that we’re unable to talk about it like a normal person.”

“I’m so sorry,” you say when you get your laughter under control.

“Pssh, he wasn’t even that cute, anyway, my smarts simply did the job for me and scared him off.” Georgia links an arm with you, pulling you away from the wall and out of your despair. “What I’m trying to say is that if someone can’t match your freak from right out of the gate, then that’s not a person that you want in your life, friend or otherwise.”

Wise words, presented in a way that’s so uniquely Georgia.

“Sorry to have laughed at your misfortune, but it did make me feel better,” you assure her.

She pumps a Breakfast Club-esque fist in the air victoriously. “Then my mission’s accomplished.”

“I still think I might walk into traffic, though.” You make like you’re going to walk to the parking lot (you won’t, obviously), and she yanks you back.

“At least wait until you graduate. It’d be a shame to have done all this work and not be able to put that you have your master's degree in your obituary.”

You give the suggestion a blink of consideration. “Good point.”

“Man, I am just full of great advice today,” Georgia marvels, walking with you in the direction of your next class. “Perhaps I should switch to psychology instead of history?”

“Please don’t, I don’t want to have to pay for advice you’ve been giving me for free.”

Georgia throws her head back in a laugh, platinum blonde hair shining in the sun. “Oh! Speaking of therapists, I don’t think I told you how mine rightfully read me for filth and called me out the other day.”

You’re happy to simply listen to your friend talk as you head to class, the warm day making it impossible for you to feel any icy pinpricks from a watchful gaze on your back.

•••

Tags: @universallyrascaldreamercookie @lucidlonging @omg-hellgirl @darkened-writer @totallysocially @hopingtocleaemedschool @lucycarlisleswife @adrestlyd @imagineslendk @thegirloftheirdreams @ultimatreality @the-garbage-central @dilfsandtherapy @saltyluminaryvoid @naty-1001 @megscabinetofcurios @saturnssrings @deniixlovezelda @marsmallow433 @dreamingdream @thecraziestcrayon @tendersolstice @hiraethmae @kpopgirlbtssvt @last-but-not-the-least

#reblog #the sandman #dream of the endless #morpheus #morpheus x reader #dream of the endless x reader #dream of the endless imagine #morpheus imagine

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7-wonders · 5 days ago