#dreamling venom au

[magnusbae]

tfw u have a Complicated™️ Relationship With An Otherworldly Creature

First of all, I would like to point out that I DID NOT REALIZE WE HAD THAT DISCUSSION ON APRIL FOOL'S DAY.

All I remember is being delirious from lack of sleep and you indulging me by listening to my ravings about a Venom AU for dreamling aND THEN MAKING AN ACTUAL MEME FOR IT!!!

While I don't remember much of what we said that morning, and this meme being perfect for Canon AU also, I will focus my efforts on elaborating on this Venom AU no one had asked for but everybody will be getting!

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"It's not human, but it's given me things no girlfriend ever could."

Hob Gadling is by no means a man who lacks options. He had fucked, and he had fucked a lot. He dated, he had even married once. He did all there is to be done, from casual to serious and yet... nothing comes close to this, to this bond he shares, to this otherworldly creature living within him, sustaining him, enveloping him, devouring him.

"Beloved," Hob says, feeling the instantaneous warming of his chest. Dream, (That is his name.) (Oh, what a lovely name it is.) often responds in such a manner to terms of endearment. He enjoys them more than he would ever care to admit. All the more incentive for Hob to use them as frequently as humanly possible. Which is to say, a lot.

The low frequency rumbling inside of his chest cavity lets him know that Dream is very much aware and chooses to remain silent on the matter. He is so sweet, actually the sweetest creature in the entirety of existence. It's hard to remember a time when he had thought otherwise, a time in which he was actually terrified of the creature that had decided to use his body as a free-ride.

Yes? Dream finally speaks, tired of waiting for Hob to verbalize his thoughts. His voice is a deep thunder inside of Hob's mind, closer to a loud thought than an actual audible sound. An intrusive thought he would never wish to get rid of. Hob. Strict, impatient, amused. He feels like Dream cannot decide if he's more irritated or amused by Hob's wandering thoughts. Speak.

Hob huffs out a laughter, shaking his head and opening his fist in an invitation. The empty spaces between his fingers are soon filled with claw-like ink black fingers. Dream's hand, firm and strong.

"I was just thinking," Hob closes his hand, squeezing Dream's hand in his, feeling the tightening of Dream's hand in turn. "how it's our anniversary tonight" he closes his eyes, thinking of a year ago, miserable and lost and terrified, with nothing in this world left, running into an alien that by all means was supposed to devour him long ago.

Expect for the miraculous part of them being so perfectly matched that Dream decided to preserve him instead. Tend his body, strengthen it, keep it safe. The only price being that he also gets to live in it. See humanity, learn of it, understand it. It's what he told him, however Hob suspects, knows really, that it was something far more personal.

Dream had filled spaces Hob didn't even know he had. Voids so small you don't know them but you ache them. And if Hob does even a fraction of what Dream does to him— well then, there's the reason.

Yes. Dream rambles, pleased. Anniversary, like marriage. the last word is purred so quietly it's almost like it's Hob's own thought.

"Hold your horses," Hob laughs again, cheeks warming up, he's smiling wide enough to ache "I expect to get properly proposed to, who do you think I am? I ain't cheap, you know" he feels a hand brushing his hip bone, an intimate, possessive gesture that sets a shiver down his groin.

Yes, of course. Dream's finger trace's down the 'V' lines, claw gentle but ever present. Not cheap. Proposal. Indeed. Dream is amused again, the cheeky creature is making fun of him, and that, is damn hot.

Whatever response Hob was about to give is swallowed down with a yelp when Dream takes him into his hand. Hob breathes out, mind blanking as the decidedly inhuman hand starts working on him.

Conversations about propriety can wait. After all, this is so much more interesting. Whatever else you can say about dating a formless alien who resides inside of your body, there's undeniable benefits to them literally sharing your own pleasure. Makes for a very good partner indeed.

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Written in one go without editing because if I allow myself even a single more hour of thinking how it needs to be PERFECT I will die LMAO.

Brief explanation of Venom for those who didn't watch it! >> under the cut.

Generally speaking, I would imagine that Dream's initial reason was to study, understand, experience a different existence than his own. He had no regard for human life (still doesn't, not in the way a human would) he was perfectly fine with riding human bodies and living their lives until they expired.

Expect Dream had found Hob, a perfect match, a human body that accepted every single cell of him with open arms, way before Hob even realized he loved Dream, his body had already accepted him.

This can have over-complicated plot, and it could be a simply fun-little au. It can have a "fish-bowl" rescue of reported Hob breaking into the Lab where Dream was being experimented on, and it could be Hob's homeless era when on top of everything else going wrong with his life, he also gotten jumped by an alien symbiote in an alley.

It can be anything you wish to imagine, but bottom line is— imagine the intimacy, the bond, the tenderness of sharing a body with a creature that envelopes you whole, who loves you whole, who cares and wants you whole. Body and Soul and Mind, literally, figuratively, everything.

A bond so close you feel like a single being, bond so close you feel you would die if separated. Hob didn't even know he needed it. Hob thought his life was complete, even if shitty at times, he didn't feel any lackings, and yet..... when Dream came into his life, he realized it was an empty shell compared to what it is.

And Dream, who had never felt a connection, only felt rejection after rejection, and then in the case of the lab-trab, the experiments and cruelty. Being loved and accepted and wanted so fully he betrays his entire species to be with Hob.

-----

Essentially, Venom is one specimen of a symbiotic life form that finds a host and bonds with it. It's not easy to find a proper host, if the host is not right, the symbiote would slowly devour the body and eventually kill the human. In the comics canon, a human named Eddie and Venom form a bond, eventually fall in love, and share a very intimate relationship. It's a VERY half-assed explanation, but basically, the symbiote literally lives inside of the human host, and it makes for some......fun dynamics. considering it's a literal alien.

[timesorceror]

So I started this rec list sometime in mid to late 2024 after listening to @thisweekinfandomhistory's episode on the Crack Van, where one of the hosts commented (and I'm most definitely probably paraphrasing here) about how rec lists are something of a lost art.

This, combined with my burning desire to write a primer on Dreamling (in the hopes it could perhaps one day get covered on the pod) was what pushed me to start going through my 30-something pages of bookmarks (of which those occupy slightly more than a third of my total pages of bookmarks) and start categorizing them in preparation for this list.

Sorry about all the parentheses; I've very likely got some rather loud undiagnosed ADHD and cannot for the life of me keep my brain from interjecting with every single bit of information, relevant or otherwise. But, I digress.

There are ten posts included in this monster of a fic rec masterpost, and they are divided between Oneshots, Multi-Chaptered Fics, and Series. The reason for the divide is simple: Tumblr only allows 100 inline links per post, as I also learned from listening to the lovely ladies of the This Week in Fandom History Podcast.

The rec list posts are below the cut, along with a link to my masterpost Google Doc, an explanation as to the method behind my madness, among other things.

Oneshots - Part One Contains: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crossover

Oneshots - Part Two Contains: Fluff / Happy Ending, Fishbowl Rescue, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, New Inn Is A Temple

Oneshots - Part Three (NSFW) Contains: Accidental Vouyerism, Age Difference, BDSM, College / University AU, Centaur AU, Dragon AU, Dream Sex, Fantasy AU, First Time / First Kiss / Getting Together / Friends to Lovers, Fluff / Smut

Oneshots - Part Four (NSFW) Contains: Fishbowl Rescue, Hurt/Comfort, Medieval AU, MPreg / Breeding Kink, Nursing Kink, Omegaverse, Oviposition, Pacific Rim AU, Period Sex, Retired Dream of the Endless, Selkie AU, Sex Pollen, Shapeshifting, Star Wars AU, Stuck in An Airport AU, Soulmates / Soul Bond, Temporary Amnesia, Tentacle Sex, Touch-Starved Dream of the Endless, Venom AU, Werewolf AU

Oneshots - Part Five Contains: Soulmate AU (No Smut), Touch-Starved Dream of the Endless

Multi-Chapter - Part One Contains: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Crossover, Fishbowl Rescue, Fluff, Friends / Enemies to Lovers, Getting Together

Multi-Chapter - Part Two (NSFW) Contains: Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Swap, Canon Divergence AU, College / University / Academia AU, Creatures & Monsters AU, Dragons AU, Dream Sex, Established Relationship, Fairy Tale AU, Fantasy AU, Fishbowl Rescue / Hob Gadling Saves Dream of the Endless, Friends to Lovers, Fuck Or Die, Getting Together, Historical AU, Hob Gadling is Hope of the Endless, Hob Gadling Owns the New Inn

Multi-Chapter - Part Three (NSFW) Contains: Hurt/Comfort, Medieval AU, Modern Setting / Human AU, Monsterfucking, Omegaverse, Past Relationship(s), Period Sex, Retired Dream of the Endless, Roommates, Sex Pollen, Soulmates AU, Temporary Amnesia, The New Inn is a Temple, Touch-Starved Dream of the Endless, Vampire AU, Victorian AU, Werewolf AU

Series - Part One (A–L) Features series written by: acadethicc | AceDragonType | Aetheltrythh | Anonymous | apocryphal | Ardin | Aria_Lerendeair | aWordyBody | Bacota | BeatnikFreak | behold_me (feat. The_KickIt_Domain) | BuckytheDucky | chaosheadspace | charinabook | CourfeyracFredMariusCratchit | cuubism | dancinbutterfly (feat. Moorishflower) | Darci | Delta_Pavonis | Dira Sudis (dsudis) | everythingisconnected | foxish_nonsense | frihetkanske | GalaxyDreamStories | hardly_an_escape | honeyteacakes | IcePhoenix96 | im_not_corrupted | Ismene_Jane | issylra | Konstadt | LeotheLionathefootofOrion

Series - Part Two (L–Z) Features series written by: Lightning_glass42 | LikeMmmCookies | lithenemesis | LLflorence dreamling (LLflorence) | Maelstrom22 | MDJensen | Mondaysundayssadurdays | monobuu | MonstrousRegiment | MoonlightMav | Moorishflower | Mywayornorway | NyriaMizell | often_adamanta | Purplesauris | Sam_Salami | SerenAur | starsniper | softestpunk | Stormysaslytherin | slythernim | Sylcian_SPH_Legacy | tharkuun | The_Shy_One | TheFanficMustFlow | Thesuspiciousflyingjellyfish | ThirtySixSaveFiles | Thranduilland | TimelessRiver | tinglingsensation | Torte | ObsessiveAgony | viiidispade | winterbucky (WinterLadyy) | Whoareyou0000 | zoomacroom

There will likely not be any more posts added to this, given the nature of how Tumblr posts work, but as I am still in the middle of my second run-though of the Dreamling ship tag's entire body of completed works, I will continue to update this Google Doc as I go (and whenever I comb through my Marked for Later tab and go through fics that are still there as well) that you may view at your leisure.

Note: this Google Doc is my personal fic rec list, and is not the be-all, end-all of Dreamling fics, despite how expansive it is. If there is a fic I have not added, it's very likely I did not read it because of a tag I'm not into (like Hurt No Comfort), or I read it and didn't bookmark it because I felt like I wasn't going to read it more than once. Or any other number of reasons, such as incomplete fics, which I rarely read these days unless it's a tag that I absolutely go feral for.

So don't DM me asking to add specific fics, please. Thanks. :)

I would like to explain that the Google Doc uses the tab function to separate the Oneshots, Multi-Chaptered Fics, and Series, and within each tab, they are further divided using the outline function.

The way I chose to organize the Oneshots and Multi-Chaptered fics was to start by thinking of this rec list as sort of like a menu at a restaurant by picking a main tag that I feel is the focus of the fic, and then further organize them by a sub-catagory tag (for example, I have Moorishflower's fic, Radio Silence, under the broad umbrella of 'Alternate Universe Oneshots' which is further organized under the sub-catagory, 'Post-Apocalyse AU'). Mostly I tried to follow this method by selecting two tags from the tag list of the fic, however not all fics I wanted to include HAD enough tags to use, or they had a bunch of hyper-specific, talk-commentary tags that I felt were not very compatible with the system I had worked out. So there are a few fics that I had to categorize or sub-catagorize simply based on vibes.

Hopefully, that explanation was sufficient, and I know that – given the current state of the fandom in regards to NG – some of these fics may one day become orphaned or be taken down. Unfortunately there is little I can do about that other than to encourage you to download any of the fics you enjoy so that you may continue to enjoy them if they disappear.

The purpose of this undertaking was more to challenge myself (and my patience) to see if I still had what it took to make a proper rec list and also to truly get a sense of Dreamling's major themes, tropes, and common tags so that I could list them out in the primer I still want to write for TWIFH.

That's... pretty much why this exists, though along the way, I was moved to finish this project for the sake of creating a snapshot of this particular ship's fandom at this particular moment in time. Whether or not it lasts remains to be seen, but I'm glad to have done it, and I hope that any fandom historians, as well as current and future fans of Dreamling appreciate my efforts.

I would also like to give a special shout-out to the @mr-sadman Discord, which also has a fic library of at least some of the listed fics for the occasions when AO3 goes down for whatever reason, as a good chunk of Dreamling authors and artists tend to congregate there and are all a bunch of lovely and wonderfully derranged people who have supported me in this endeavor.

So please, enjoy. Go forth and read fic.

All my love, TimeSorceror

[gabessquishytum]

Surely there’s been a dreamling Venom AU done before? I just came back from watching the Last Dance and I can’t get it out of my head.

So Hob is this journalist who loses his job after asking too many questions about the Burgess Corporation and the rumors that they’re doing illegal experimentation in their labs. This is true, of course. In the search for extraterrestrial life, they locked up various specimens for research and have been trying to achieve “symbiosis” with human test subjects. Unable to shake off the feeling there’s something shady going on, Hob sneaks into the labs and lo and behold, discovers all of these chambers with innocent people all locked up and looking not so good. After trying to break one of the patients free by shattering the glass, the alarm goes off and the patient jumps him and he only barely manages to push them off and get away, but not alone.

Back at home he’s experiencing these strange changes to his body he can’t explain. The doctors say it’s a parasite but even they can’t put their fingers as to what it is exactly. Either way, Hob goes about his life trying to get used to the sensation of something squirming around inside him.

On the other hand, Dream, the symbiote, has been making home inside his new host and is just relieved that he’s free from that godforesaken lab. It doesn’t hurt that his host is easy on the eyes either. It’s been so long since he’s met a body that he’s so compatible with so he’s pretty damn determined to keep it alive. It’s so warm inside this body that Dream’s been making sure to explore every corner and crevice to get himself really familiar.

Shenanigans occur and eventually Dream reveals himself to Hob and explains everything about how they’re attached at the hip etc etc and Hob has no idea why this is happening to him but he also can’t help but feel really turned on (like the monsterfucker he is) about having something inside him at all times and hell, he never really liked being alone anyways so what’s the harm? And Dream has also gotten really fond of his new host so he decides to stay around instead of returning to his planet because listening to Hob try to explain what it’s like on Earth and having him take him around to new places has just been so fun and he really couldn’t imagine separating from him at this point. The only issue now is how they’re going to handle Dream’s diet of human brain but they’re sure one Roderick Burgess could help them out with that.

And yes, tentacle porn in an inevitable.

So. I can confirm that the excellent @seiya-starsniper has blessed us with a Venom AU: you're the only real thing i've ever touched. Its really fucking good.

I do love the idea of Dream being Hob’s symbiotic alien boyfriend. Mainly because I think Hob would be super into it. He likes the constant companionship. He likes the fact that he kinda has super powers. He really, really likes the sex. He and Dream are very very compatible indeed.

A lot of the time Dream will happily curl up and sleep deep down inside Hob, occasionally squirming to get comfy. Hob secretly loves that sensation of movement, reminding him that his lover is there, safe inside him. Sometimes Dream will add an extra little tease during Hob’s workday - wrapping a tendril around his cock, or slithering into his hole. Hob gets so blushy and squirmy, sometimes Dream has to talk to him sternly in his deep, sonorous voice.

Dream isn't going home to his native planet any time soon. He thinks earth is very beautiful - through Hob’s eyes it is, anyway.

[seiya-starsniper]

you're the only real thing i've ever touched (Dreamling - AO3)

Rating: Explicit

Status: Complete

Chapters: 1/1

Words: 2,608

Archive Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Symbiotic Relationship, Venom AU, Symbiote Dream, Immortal Hob Gadling, by way of the symbiotic relationship, Monsterfucker Hob Gadling, Dubious Consent, Possession, Body Hijacking, Possessive Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Drunk Sex, Hook-Up, One Night Stands, Cunnilingus, Blow Jobs, Symbiote Sex, but not marvel this is dc

Summary: Hob is just trying to have fun with the pretty woman who seems desperate to get into his bed. Dream has other plans in mind for the night.

@dreamlingbingo - Square C3: Blowjob

@monsterfucktoberbingo - Square: Symbiote

[gabessquishytum]

Don't know if you've ever seen the Venom movies but... Dreamling Venom AU

Hob gets possessed by a symbiote that calls itself Nightmare, though after knowing him for a while, Hob is more inclined to call him Dream, even if he is a bit of an asshole.

Hob, being the major monsterfucker that he is, tries desperately to hide how badly he wants Nightmare to rail him into oblivion, but given they literally share a body, it's kind of hard to hide. Nightmare knows that Hob wants something from him but not exactly what it is.

At least not until Hob has probably the most erotic dream he's ever had in his life, of Nightmare completely taking him apart. He wakes up hard and aching and fucking desperate. Luckily, Nightmare is more than eager to make Hob's dreams come true 😉

- 🐺

Mmm yes I can get behind this!!!

Hob is literally Just Some Guy and he gets possessed by this weird alien who starts wanting to do weird alien shit with Hob’s body. Some of it is like... hunting down other (evil) alien creatures and killing them. Some of it is more like, Nightmare curling himself over Hob’s shoulder and hissing "You need to get us an iced latte NOW" until Hob finally gives in.

Hob is actually pretty ok with the whole thing because now he has this very clingy best friend with him all the time, and that's lovely. The trouble is that Hob now has no privacy. He can't shower in peace any more. And he used to have a healthy masturbation habit that he no longer feels like he can indulge in. What if Nightmare doesn't like it? What if he doesn't like Hob? The thought worries him and gets all scrambled up in his horny repressed brain. His thoughts are full of flashes of fetish art he saw months ago, monster cocks and tentacles and all that stuff. Basically it's impossible for him to keep any of this to himself. Of course Nightmare knows exactly what kind of turmoil Hob is going through when he sees Hob’s needy, leaking cock as he dreams about being absolutely destroyed by Nightmare.

And Nightmare is a teeny tiny bit evil in his own special way, and he takes great pleasure in teasing Hob. In the shower, when he's getting dressed, when he's trying to focus on work. Nightmare will tease him with soft, slimey limbs, idly stroking him and looking oh so innocent when Hob startles and blushes. There isn't an inch of Hob’s body that he doesn't already love, inside and out, and it feels good to show that love in a physical sense. Seeing Hob squirm and pretend that everything is normal while Nightmare plays with his pretty pink nipples is truly the most delicious way to spend time. Hob gets so used to being played with as he goes about his day, he even lets Nightmare slide right inside him without even flinching! He's such a lovely, welcoming warmth. Nightmare can't wait to reward him.