#in waking dreams

[cuubism]

If you feel up to In Waking Dreams, it remains one of my all time favorites.

continuing right on from the prior bit:

“Don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry,” he said softly. “It is not preferable,” Dream said, and somehow, it made Hob smile. He leaned in to catch Dream’s lips in a soft kiss, and Dream tasted his own tears there, perhaps because Hob imagined them to have a taste. “It’s alright. You can cry,” Hob told him. “Lord knows I’ve done enough of it over you.” “Do I make you sad?” “Oh, constantly.” He didn’t seem sad as he said it, though. “How?” Dream asked. His reticence, surely. His inability to let what they had be real. “Other than recent circumstances? All those times when you were clearly hurting and I couldn’t do anything about it. When I just had to do my best, and then let you go at the end of the night.” He rubbed his hands up and down Dream’s arms, a self-soothing motion. “And then there’s, well. You know how it is when you wake up from a dream you really wish were real.” In the past, Dream would have said that he did not. He was dreams, he did not experience them. But he knew now, the longing. The pain of only half having something, a partial life that must have felt very much like a dream just out of reach. Hob always slipping from his fingers come morning. “Yes,” he said.

[hansoeii]

only you.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The math just adds up!

[feyburner]

I ??? woke up at 3am with this scene fully written in my mind palace and quickly jotted it down in the Notes app

*

Clark’s shaking his head before he realizes he’s doing it, and feels a twinge of embarrassment at his own bad manners when Bruce stops mid-word to look at him, brows raised.

“No?” he says.

“No,” Clark says, again without thinking, and again with the reflexive urge to apologize. Somewhere his mother is tutting without knowing why. But he doesn’t apologize, because he’s already saying, “No, it can’t—it can’t be that.”

“Okay,” Bruce says slowly. “Can you elaborate?”

He is, honestly, having trouble taking his eyes off the screen. The mockup design of his new suit is there, dark and sleek, ridged like tactical gear. The blue is like the last shade of evening before you can’t call it evening anymore, the color of nine PM in Kansas in July, so exact there’s a strong chance Bruce color-picked it from a photo. The yellow accents are the cool fluorescent yellow-green of lightning bugs. The red is dark as arterial blood. Every aspect of the suit has been updated—the colors deeper, the angles sharper, the S extending to the corners of its frame—but Bruce has done it without changing the fundamentals. It’s immediately recognizable as the Superman suit, just… well, a little cooler, maybe. A little more of the times. Even the tailoring is modernized. The neckline. The shape of the boots. Where the belt hits at the waist. Clark can tell just by looking that Bruce has not only spent a lot of time on this in general, he’s spent a lot of time designing it specifically with Clark in mind, Clark’s needs and preferences and the small discomforts of his current suit, things he might have mentioned offhand after a mission but never with the assumption that Bruce was listening or filing it away. No doubt the next slides of this presentation will detail all the hidden features of the new suit, and they’ll all be incredibly thoughtful if not slightly overkill, and Bruce will pretend his sole motive here was practicality and risk reduction and respond to any thanks with a curt nod.

And Clark wants to thank him. He will. It’s just.

“It can’t be… cool,” he says, inane. Bruce is watching him with that steady look that used to feel clinical, piercing, and now mostly reads as attentive. “It can’t be—like yours. Tactical, military-grade.”

“Lightyears beyond, actually.”

“It has to—Ma said once, a kid should be able to draw it with crayons. You know? I can’t look like a weapon. I have to—I want to look like a friend.”

He can feel himself flushing. It’s rare that he speaks like this, and rarer still that he does so while being stared at intently. Bruce may think of himself as the darkness, but his gaze is a spotlight: unwavering and revealing and more a little sweat-inducing, for one reason or another.

“Sometimes, when I show up, people laugh,” Clark says. “If it’s somewhere out of the way, where they haven’t seen me before. I show up and I look like a festival performer. It’ll be the worst day of their lives, and they’ve got no reason to trust my face, but when they see what I’m wearing—it goes from ‘Who are you?’ to ‘Who is this guy?’ And that’s a good thing.”

“Hard to be afraid of a man dressed in primary colors,” Bruce says, almost to himself.

“Exactly.”

“I see. Thank you,” he says, “for explaining.”

Clark tries not to show how surprised he is to hear that. Judging by the crook of Bruce’s mouth, his success is negligible. “Of course. Sorry I didn’t—I mean, thank you, obviously, for going to such trouble. I didn’t mean to come in here and—I really do appreciate it, I can tell you put a lot of work in—”

Bruce’s eyes cut away. “No. No need. I didn’t ask, before I…. It was only a first draft. If you’re amenable, I’ll incorporate your feedback into the second one.”

“Oh! Yeah. Yes, of course, but you really don’t have to—”

“If you have any further notes, I would like to hear them.”

There’s something determined in the lines of his face. Clark has the sense that this moment is important, that it’s a turning point, even if he’s not sure why. It feels like striking out into a sea of ice, a blank white expanse under which something precious and vital is hidden, has been hidden all along, just waiting for him to find it. To want to.

“Sure,” he says. He looks back at the suit and swallows, and knows Bruce will see the flicker of his throat and take some meaning from it, and wishes he knew what the meaning was. Or maybe Bruce won’t notice or read into it at all. Maybe Clark needs to calm down, in fact. “Um. I don’t want to assume, but does it… do things?”

“It does things,” Bruce confirms, after the barest pause. “Let me show you the next slide.”

[clemenlush]

i hope this isnt a dream

[anna-scribbles]

emma dupain cheng on the brain😽🎀

more:

[flora-of-the-moon]

(Part 2 of my other post)

More chaotic Soulsborne/Arcane snippets from my disaster of a dream

[toyogamii]

”don’t do this.”

you’re desperate, satoru can tell. he has his blind fold pulled down over his eyes so he doesn’t have to face you fully.

“toru, please, we can talk about this,” your breath is picking up, there’s tears threatening to fall. god, he wants to hold you so bad. he feels himself leaning towards and forces his body to stop. he shudders slightly.

“i cheated on you.”

he could never, there’s no one in this world he’d rather be with than you.

you freeze, you don’t know how to handle it.

“oh.”

he can’t help but flinch at your tone. he wants to beg you to stop looking at him like that, scream that it was just a lie, he didn’t mean it; he could never dream of hurting you.

but he doesn’t, he drives the nail deeper, rubs salt on the bleeding wound.

“they were prettier than you.”

no one could ever be prettier than you, he thinks.

you gulp and nod, still looking numbly at the ground,

“okay… get out.”

you’re pointing towards the door and it hits him, you’re making him leave. he doesn’t want to, something inside of him is begging, screaming for him to turn back around but by the time satoru gets the courage look back he’s on your porch, staring at a closed door.

he shudders again, there’s no sense of relief like he’d thought there would be. hurting you so badly that you’d leave him had been his intention, he accomplished his goal.

it’s too keep you safe he tells himself, he’s leaving because he loves you so much.

he’s the strongest, he’s not allowed to have weaknesses like you.

pt. 2

a/n: @kissagii I had to

[bittsandpieces]

[antlergrave]

uh oh

oh damn he was just dreaming

[archiepelago]

You’re on a path—

Hey wait that’s not a princess.

[cuubism]

In waking dreams final chapter please? 👉👈

my slowest of all progress, i can't believe it's been a year since i updated it 😂 curses

[ make me work on one of my fics if you want ]

-

It was restorative to be close to him. Dream’s realm ought to have been what most restored him, but instead it was Hob—his touch, his assurance, his faith. Hob saw wonder in the Dreaming where Dream could see only destruction and ruin. He wanted Dream, when Dream had so often shied away from his touch. Every time he glimpsed something new of Dream, he only seemed to want him more. Dream loved him. He’d loved him, he thought, since that first night after their wedding, when Hob had welcomed him into the house he’d built in the Dreaming. He hadn’t let himself see it until so much later, but he’d loved this man who’d kissed him in a shadowed church, and brought him food to eat that he didn’t need, and held him when darkness threatened to swallow him. He could not fathom how he’d ever thought he could simply walk away. It would be like tearing out his own heart. He’d experienced something like it in his prison, and he did not want to feel that pain ever again. “I am sorry,” he murmured. He barely knew, at this point, what he was apologizing for. He felt Hob had forgiven him for his mistakes already. So perhaps it was only for himself. Perhaps he had hurt himself more than anything else. “No need,” Hob said. He twined his fingers in Dream’s hair, brought him back far enough that they could look each other in the eyes again. Dream raised shaking hands to wipe at his eyes, which were beading with tears. He felt it all so keenly now, not only the isolation of his prison, but the pain of the Dreaming, gouged and aching, and the pain of Hob, too, long left behind. His fingertips came away black with ink, and he knew it was streaking down his cheeks like trails of blood. Hob swiped his thumbs over Dream’s cheeks and the tears started to run clear.

[lovestruck-lamb]

[paintedcrows]

they make me feel unwell

(continued: Stan & Young Ford)

[marisashinx]

How long have they've been sleeping?

[amielot]

Sensitive

Bonus:

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