#my manic and i [STORIEDPRINCE/HEL] | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sinnhelmingr · 3 years

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There’s something so strange about it, being watched by a reflection. Yet she doesn’t betray the unease that builds in her stomach at such a thorough examination, can’t blame her audience for the curiosity that brings this child to lean in closer to the dark vanity. She knows no better, knows nothing of what being the center of attention does to Hel. Dark brows knit together, and the girl sucks in a breath, setting her mother bracing for impact.

“Mama,” Runa begins, shifting against her lap, “How come you put on glamours?”

“Why not?” she answers in kind, dropping the pendant around her own slender neck. After so long, she hardly needs to monitor the runes for efficiency. Their magic surges tenderly along her skin, turning rot to false beauty. All told, she’s rather more concerned with what makes her daughter so fascinated by the work.

“Papa doesn’t like them,” her daughter admits. I know, Hel longs to drawl, but fears her dry amusement will be taken for something with a bite. “He won’t let Nuala wear them.”

Slender fingers card through wild curls, a now perfect chin kissing the crown of Runa’s head. The pallid girl settles easily into the affection, smiling contentedly at the reflection of the embrace. She can’t say how badly she needs these moments, these assurances that her baby is still such, that she is still happy to be here with her, wherever here might be.

“I don’t do this for your father.”

Runa looks just like him, when she’s puzzled. The same twist of the mouth, the wrinkled set of the brow, eyes narrowing in a way she’s seen too many times to count, Hel cannot deny her daughter is a product of her mate’s blood more than her own. She spares the girl the suspense, resting a hand against the infant’s shoulder.

“I do this because I like to, from time to time. It’s something I enjoy, and no one can tell me not to.” She looks away from the mirror, staring down at her girl with a soft smile. “Like when you wear your rain boots indoors, because it makes you happy.”

The gears are turning. She knows they are, that her daughter is cleverer by far than her father, that she actually thinks about things. Her confidence is confirmed when the girl lilts her head to look up at her, black eyes meeting green.

“It makes you happy?”

“Very much, my love. It’s like putting on my favorite dress, or my rings.” Saying so, she plucks a silver offering from her jewelry box, sliding it neatly into place against a glamoured knuckle. “It’s another way I get to… Express myself.”

She reaches for another ring, smaller than the one now sitting on her middle finger, and coaxes her daughter’s hand up. With care, she pushes the golden band down a bone-white thumb, letting the girl marvel at it for a few moments. She twists her hand to and fro, watching the torchlight catch the jewels and set them sparkling against the mirror.

“How come Papa doesn’t like them?”

Because try as he might, your father is still a man, and men are full of flaws. No, that’s not it. Because your father is a control freak. That’s not a conversation he’s ready to have, should his daughter go repeating the fact tonight. Sighing quietly, Hel racks her brain for a proper answer.

“I don’t think your Papa understands it himself, really. He thinks it’s a trick of some sort.” She raises a brow. “Do you think I’m tricking you, when I put on my jewelry or a nicer dress than usual?”

That tiny head sways from side to side, though her attention never drifts from the treasure on her finger. Hel stills her, gathering the raven coils into her grasp loosely. “How about if you did your hair differently? Would that change anything about you?”

“Unh-unh.”

Such a verbose answer. Her tutor must be so proud of his students conversational skills. Hel chuckles, placing ah and over her daughters in a vain attempt to draw her back into the discussion at hand.

“Then I guess it’s just that he doesn’t get it.”

“Papa’s old, though.”

Runa punctuates the second word with such force that Hel can’t help laughing, properly this time.

“But he doesn’t know everything, love. Only Uncle Destiny does. Your papa can’t make sense of glamours, so he doesn’t like them.”

“Uncle Destiny likes glamours?”

That’s certainly one way to interpret her statement. Hel shrugs her shoulders, contemplating how best to lead Runa back to the deeper subject at hand.

“I don’t know. Ask him next time you see him.”

A huff.

“He never comes and visits, though. I’ve never even seen him, Mama! What’s he like?”

A taloned finger taps against her chin, expression turning thoughtful.

“He’s smaller than you are and smells of wet dog.”

Runa gasps, turning to look back at her mother.

“Does not!”

“Ah, my mistake, Princess. I haven’t seen him in so long. I must be confusing him with someone else.”

Somewhere, blind eyes have read the exchange, and she’s sure they are rolling. Still, it’s drawn her daughter’s attention back to her. Hel holds her gaze, voice becoming all the more serious.

“When I do this, I don’t do it for you father, Runa. I don’t do it for anyone in the entire world but myself. The way I look, what I present myself as, it’s only for me. Remember that, little bird. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, so long as I like who I am, what I am.” She takes the girl’s face in her hands, tender. “It’s just the same for you – for anyone. Don’t ever let another person tell you what to do with yourself. This body is yours. You can do with it what you like, and no one else can stop you. No one should.”

Her daughter is a good girl, and smarter than her father. There’s a thread of empathy in the child that amazes Hel sometimes, especially having seen so much of Dream in her. She’ll understand – if not today, then in the future. Other perspectives come so easily to her, after all.

“Does that...” Runa hesitates, twirling the ring around her finger anxiously. “Does that mean Papa’s bad, making Nuala not wear glamours?”

She’s getting it after all, even if it distresses her. Hel understands, really, pressing a kiss to the girl’s forehead. She was just the same at that age, putting her father on pedestals the Trickster could not possibly reach on his own. If there’s one creature in all of creation that believes in her mate, believes him incapable of mistake or harm, it’s the one curled into her lap.

“That’s for you to decide, Runa. I think, if it upsets you, you could try talking about it with him.”

It’s not the assurance the child so clearly seeks. Still, it’s not Hel’s place to absolve him for one of many flaws. “For whatever it’s worth, I think there’s a difference between a bad person and an ignorant one.” That familiar expression returns, leaving her mother abashed to realized the accusation might include a word Runa has yet to be acquainted with. Woe betide her, if the words get back around to her partner that he’s seen as ignorant.

Before it can settle into the forefront of the child’s mind, Hel reaches to the other side of the vanity, plucking up a soft brush and tracing her daughter’s profile with it. A giggle rings out at the sensation, and Hel relaxes into a successful distraction.

“Now let me up. I might not have any glamours for you, but I think some cosmetics might help you understand a little better, if you want them.”

#my manic and i [STORIEDPRINCE/HEL]#I WAS POSSESSED AND HAD TO WRITE A MOMBIE DRABBLE--

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sinnhelmingr · 3 years

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Unfortunately, I typed up my Helpheus shipping manifesto, as in the entire line by line breakdown of my shipping my Hel muse w my Morpheus muse. it’s over 5k words and covers all of the series, as well as pre and post canon. Here there be spoilers for the entire S*ndman narrative. You are warned.

No I don’t know why I am posting this.

Hel, a teenager, thrown out of her home by someone she thought loved her, isolated, lied to, gaslighted by Odin. Invited, as a queen, young though she might be, to some affair. Her family is not there – but of course not. Odin has already told her that her father left with his new wife, and he would not want to see her, the daughter of a lost love. So Hel comes to Asgard tired, and she is angry, and she only wants to go to her chambers and sulk.

But wait! Someone is in her room! Someone is in this place, with its high windows, that was hers in another life. This tall, dark eyed Jotunn, with his black hair wild. And she demands to know what he is doing here. He is in the wrong place at the wrong time – and she is shouting at the wrong man for it.

Things are said. Lines in the sand are drawn. No less than Frigg herself intervenes, clasping her hand across Hel’s mouth, offering the most fearful and profuse apologies for Hel’s behavior. And Hel wants none of it, but she is dragged from the room, denied entry to the one place that was her comfort.

Before she can say anything to defend herself, gentle, good Frigg is half to slapping her. Asks if she knows who that was. Asks if she knows what she has done.

Frigg breaks the truth to her like fine china against the face. She’s mouthed off to no less than the Third of the Seven.

Hel’s blood runs cold, thinking her days are numbered now, she knows Dream’s reputation and his love of cruelty. This is how she dies. Still, for the sake of politics, she bites her tongue, makes her apologies to Frigg. She swallows her own pride but its another blow to know that nothing in this place is hers anymore.

She spends the rest of the affair keeping her distance from Dream or studying him too intently. At one point asks her little kin Thrud if she sees the Jotunn at the front of Odin’s table. What Giant, Thrud lisps, that’s an Asa with Afi. and Hel knows she’s fucked and that really is Dream.

She catches Dream at the end of the delegation, as he himself is leaving. Asks his forgiveness. Says she is sorry for incurring his wrath, and rattles on like a girl, not the queen and diplomat she will become. Dream would have let it slide, because Frigg had pleaded so skillfully and so kindly for the girl and her youth and her struggles. But Hel’s apology also paints her afraid of a tyrant, and his pride won’t have such disrespect.

So he mocks her again, asks why she thinks Queen Frigg’s words were not enough, why her arrogance made her have to say anything at all. And Hel bites her tongue near to bleeding at the naked self-righteousness of his actions. But yes, little queen, he will forgive her, after tonight. She need never worry for his wrath again.

That night, in her own dark hall, she is reunited with her brothers. They are all free. They are back in the Ironwood, where once she was safe and happy. Her mother and father are there, too. She is happier than she has been in years. Everything is right, everything is just what she wants. There is no emptiness in her.

And then she wakes up, alone in her bed, beneath Yggdrasil, knowing that it was a dream, and she weeps. In this, the Dream Lord has his petty revenge on an insolent child.

But he does not break his word. After her punishment, all is forgiven, if not wholly forgotten. She grows more solemn, and well-spoken, and she is polite with him, if reserved. He repays the sentiment in kind, in the times when they run into each other at various affairs. She comes to befriend his most beloved sister, and at times they hear of each other, and their affairs, from Death. Neither pays the other much mind.

And then he disappears after centuries of.. acquaintanceship. Things are certainly more chaotic without him, but Hel can hardly notice. She wonders to herself, over the decades, if he has died and if the 7 can ever be 6. He is the great mystery. The only missing persons case in all mythology.

But her returns, at the end of a decade. And it is strange, when she first hears his name in present tense. But his sister is happier for his return, and Hel does not question it. Perhaps sends her regards via messenger with all the others who remind the Dream Lord of their loyalties and alliances.

She owes him nothing and he has no power over her. It’s little more than goodwill and acknowledgment of his station.

She has little and less to do with him for nigh a year. When he gains Hell. When he holds his court. It stings at first, knowing Odin so easily forgets her and her realm and its function, not realizing his true intentions with the Christian Hell. Worse still that her father is only freed like a dog upon a chain.

What cuts her the deepest is the midnight specter, Loki given form before her. He must be a dream thing. Grimnr and Lord Shaper conspire to hurt her, and she knows not why, as if Odin ever needs reason for his cruelty, as if Dream ever, ever did. And she tries to tell him to stop, stop talking with her father’s voice, and stop weeping with his eyes, to please get out of her hall and return to whatever master made him. This is a dream, and it settles leaden in the pit of her stomach. It is the crueler mate to Morpheus’ prior ‘gift'

Loki pleads his case. and with one question, he proves himself. He is real, and he is not of dreams. Her father is free. She could weep for joy, but they have much to discuss, webs to untangle of Odin’s making. She starts to realize the truth, and that Loki spent so long seeking her out, trying to find her brothers. That Odin lied all that time. Her father did so many things up to and including slaughtering Odin’s own dearest son to try and send a message, or some regard, something to his only daughter. That he would have fought and died to find his way back to her, to free her and her brothers. That someone out there loved her and ruined himself to try and show it.

They have all the time in the world for it, as he comes and goes. But that first night, he reveals his liberator.

The Dream Lord.

A creature she has known to be more monster than reason. Perhaps he is, as others say, changing. Perhaps, at the very least, he is not the monster she knew him to be for so long.

It scares her to death, approaching him in his own home, but she must. Debts must be repaid, or named. And half-trembling, she has her audience with him, and thanks him truly for his mercy with her father, and offers herself as ally and tool, if ever he has need of her.

He does.

Even then, he sees her value as a potential pawn in his long game. At the very least having her loyalty might make Loki more malleable – what father wouldn’t move the heavens to free his daughter? He accepts her as ally and, should the need arise, an agent of his interests. With that, half of Hel’s business outside of her own realm is concluded, leaving only Odin to be dealt with.

That is what leads her to Asgard in the aftermath. By her mirror, in the way that she swore never to do. She finds Odin’s chambers, and she does not make a threat, she is a threat.

Hel coolly, with darkness surging around her because something dead and long atrophied in her still fights to be free, lets him know that she knows. She knows everything now. She knows Bestla’s son a liar, a monster, the kind of man who hurts a little girl for no reason but his own need for control and to try and burn fate to the ground. And her eyes are so sickly green against the chiaroscuro of her form. She is jotunn, and that’s a primal, brutal thing.

How can she know?

And that is when she drops the bombshell of her latest company. The Dream Lord. and Odin realizes an alliance might slip from his hands. And she says that, in Morpheus’ honor, she ought to show Odin how cruel she can be – she wants his pulse against her palm as she tears his neck from his torso – and she ought to pay him as he deserves – long, lonely teeth tearing deep into him – and so she will. So she will. She says this in parting. She will make the Allfather pray for Ragnarok.

Odin going to Dream for explanations, for why he’s allowed himself some affinity with Odin’s enemy. Dream calmly explaining that he did Hel a good turn after the affair with… Well, Hell, and she saw fit to owe him a boon in return. It will pass. He’s sure she’s too proud to keep the arrangement long. They discuss it and Dream just ’why do you care about the company she keeps, all these centuries you’ve told me she’s nobody, just a…'

It slowly suddenly dawns on him. Oh, she’s your prisoner. She’s nobody to you. And I encouraged that once.

So now, in fine Dream fashion, he’s facing the reality that he encouraged what was done to Hel and it’s just a modified version of what he himself endured for 70+ years, that Hel was given titles and false power with her imprisonment but it’s still that. Helheim is still her cage.

Dream did nothing when it was first brought up as a possibility, and supported it over the centuries, by not speaking up, by encouraging Odin to keep it up, by never questioning what a child did to deserve being sealed way beneath Yggdrasil. He said that it was acceptable because she was a threat. Because of what she might do when grown, her fate was brutal. To him it was no different than destroying a dream vortex, because Odin did what he had to in order to protect his own. And now sitting on the other side of his imprisonment, Morpheus disgusted.

Dream trying to make up for it. Trying to give Hel some time, some boon, anything that might give her freedom, for however long it might agree with her. He knows her destiny, writ clear in his brother’s book. He knows she must have the cage, and the war with Asgard, that he cannot stop this – but Ragnarok is so far away.

He wants to badly to do whatever he can to keep her from what he encouraged be done to her. He can’t apologize for it and she shouldn’t accept it but he’s not doing this for his ego or his newfound sense of conscience, he’s doing it for her, because she never deserved any of it.

It is through this consideration of ways to pull Hel from her own prison that Dream gets the idea to send her on a sort of quest. There is, in fact, something she can do for him – seek out knowledge of a particular rite from Svartalfheim, that has fallen out of practice. And in this, Hel begins her path towards Dream’s ends.

Hel does eventually return to her new master with the knowledge that Morpheus told her to find, having traveled several realms seeking out some teacher. She tells Morpheus about the lost art of burning the humanity from a mortal, of cleansing fires. She does not understand his need for it, but then she is in no place to question it. That should be the end of things between them, her debt repaid, but they keep in touch. Sometimes, she dares to invite him to join her in her ramblings on Midgard.

By the Three, she sees so much of herself within him, ancient and noble and chained to what keeps them so unhappy. He hates the comparison – his throne, his being, is not a chain.

He does not punish her for misrepresenting him this time, at the very least. He is better than that now. Though he does not encourage her loose tongue, his warning is a softer thing than she ever knew him to issue before. Hel finds some confirmation in her belief that he is no longer a tyrant on a power trip.

She sees him try to be better. She sees him succeed, in some ways. she believes in him. She cannot change him, and she is not foolish enough to think she can, or try to. But he can change, himself, on his own. Oh, she has such faith, in this creature, in what he could be becoming.

They become friends, weary and ageless. He laughs to hear her announce him as such – her friend. She’s like a child, so sure of things, so unthinking. She reminds him no, she is no child.

His eyes catch her just so. She cannot say what it means.

He keeps her close, too, whether they are friends or not. He makes sure she is seen with him. Her own uncle balks at this affinity, but what can Odin say against his most powerful ally? More than that, what must her father think? It is Loki’s regard for this relationship that Dream finds most interesting. There’s still a part for the Trickster to play, after all, and Hel would be a great motivation for it.

It would be easier for all of those involved if it was left at a game that he made of her and her family, but Dream keeps Hel above others, accepts her as his friend, as his ally, and sometimes a confidant. The latter is the least surprising part to him. There is enough of her patron in her that he finds it easier to strip himself to the bones and bile with her. She’s all dark hair and pallid skin, a gentle smile, headstrong, the reflection of what he has chased for so long. She makes his tongue too loose in his mouth.

It would kill him to be honest, though. It’s a slow knife just seeing her, sticky with innocence, having hope in him.

She tries to catch him up with all that he missed in his imprisonment. She is especially excited to show him her favorite films, to introduce him to the wonder of motion pictures. And he even makes attempts to be impressed, as he derides many films to have missed the point of the source material. She declares him insufferable. He corrects her that he is clear-sighted.

At some point, he teaches her to walk without glamours, that modern mortals might stare, but she is no devil to them, and she need never hide again. She laughs about it. Says that she feels almost lovely in this skin, now. He says she’s always been that before he even realizes what he is saying. Excuses himself, leaving her standing there in the park awed that anyone could say it.

Hel looks to the birds bunched around the bench and tells them – He thinks me lovely. and the pigeons are almost impressed!

Her mother raised her better than to grovel before the first man who calls her beautiful. She knows that is the path of least resistance for men, to applaud beauty when it requires so little of them. It’s a good thing that Hel finds more about him agreeable than his summation of her loveliness. She begins to feel something for him, the undertow threatening to pull her feet out from under her. There would be no coming back from it. She is so careful.

They dance around it, though he swears he doesn’t dance. Others can see it, too. Odin tells his friend to be wary of ‘her kind,’ that she’s a viper, she’ll strike and kill as surely as her father. Dream tells him to Be silent.

All of Hel’s loved ones fear for her, just as she once feared Dream. That his love is poison, and at the end he’ll leave her ruined. And she thinks, at least I could choose that pain.

She’s even involved with the lunacy of the fifth story arc, given her nephew’s need to chase the moon, she finds herself staving off Ragnarok by keeping Hati from his prey during Thessaly’s mischief. She helps Mani on his way with his burden, when the city passes into debris, when the storm clears. Hati asks her, why, my aunt. She has dreamed of Ragnarok, and her revenge on Odin.

And she can confess to herself it’s because now she wants something more than revenge, a someone. She endeavors to pursue him as ardently as Hati sought the moon, gaudy as the comparison might be.

This is first love. Some things can be forgiven, however dramatic they might be.

Dream also surrenders to it, finally faces the sad fact that he does feel something deeper for this girl who has thread her way into his life. But he keeps himself apart as the current carries her away from the shore. He has no use for this, even if he is lonely, even if he wants her in some kind of way, just as he wanted others before her.

He takes another in her stead. And Hel breaks.

She keeps herself apart from his realm for the duration of his dalliance with Thessaly.

Dream turns down Delirium. She goes to Hel, her sister's friend, tries to find said sister. and Hel, separated from her own family, bleed for Delirium's need to find Destruction. So, to distract her from Morpheus, she is going to help Lady Delirium find him. Vali and Narvi are regents in her absence. She won't be gone long.

Rather than Pharamond and poor Ruby, Hel relies on the immortal Raven-Floki, and his eponymous allies. The raven will lead them. he shall not go astray. But the raven dies, casualty of the hunt. Hel turns to a human ally to play chauffer. She is left with a human going manic by proximity to Delirium, a riled up Endless, and her own inability to sleep. Dream, meanwhile, in a fine display of Cannot Fight Fate, ends up pulled into the affair as well. One day, Hel opens a door, and the man who broke her heart is behind it. He already tried that trick with her descendant. Hel is not impressed.

She sends Delirium and the human out to play in traffic, or whatever amuses them, as she and Dream talk. He asks to make right past cruelties. ...She says he can make this one right, how awfully he turned away his sister. All else is a pipe dream. And he nods. He says that he should like to follow what lead he has. To take control, for a time. Hel agrees. It is the last thing she does before waking, groggy, in the backseat of the car, outside of a titty bar.

She thinks she has died and descended into Remiel's hell. What other answer is there, for the blinking lights and cheap sex in the air? But she stumbles from the car, frightens off the bouncer with her natural face under the bright lights. Delirium is convincing men to give a worker all their money. The human is shoving as much money as she can into garter belts. Hel asks after Morpheus -- down the hall, talking with Ishtar. She catches only a snippet outside the door -- that he does not change.

To herself, she disagrees. But she does not intrude. Leaves them to it, to go and stop the mortal from trying to get onstage herself, or Delirium manifesting fish about the pole. When Morpheus reappears, they leave, the club sure to be a ruin before the hour is out. Hel drives, the mortal sleeps, and Delirium hums to herself in the backseat, counting lights. Dream sits at Hel's side. They speak, low, to one another.

He asks why she has joined this cause. She says she empathized with Delirium. That she knows what it is to lose your brother. She asks him the same. He admits he has done this to find the woman he lost -- and then, he confesses, it's become a distraction to keep her out of mind. He's knuckles turn white in the darkness. The slow agony of being stuck in a car with your almost. It's a strangely mortal sentiment, and it curdles inside of them.

But they find Destiny, the four of them. And one small variation is Destiny pointing out Hel's love for Morpheus, to which she replies, he does not want to hear that, either. The cat is out of the bag. There is little time to dwell on it. They go to Greece, to Morpheus' fate, to poor Orpheus. They go across the water, Hel calming Del lest she tip the boat, almost maternal. Asks, gently, what the smallest fish she can make is, as the girl-who-is-ancient settles against her. Sometimes, she recognizes Dream's eyes are set in her direction, and she cannot tell if it is for her or the temple behind them.

Ask her, and she hardly remembers the night in question. Just that his brother was so damn beautiful, and she was half mad for him. She cannot remember eating a single bite, cannot remember the rhythm of conversation. But the night was beautiful, the stars innumerable, and true things were said. Something changed. Destruction left.

And then, in the cold dawn, she looks to Dream, as if for the first time. Their kind cannot leave like Destruction. And her heart steadies, and she thinks yes, I suppose he must be the end of it all. But it can never be pretty. It cannot blossom. Orpheus dies that same day, by his father's hand. It was a mercy, she knows that. It was right from a wrong.

Even so, they, each of them, leave alone.

Hel lingers too long in her dark hall... and then, having washed the journey from her body, with her finery, with her face exposed, she returns to her end of it all. Nothing can be said. There is no comfort in this. Her hand finds his. Silently, she says they need not be alone, not in their staying, not in their pain.

They do not become lovers immediately, fates, no. She does not turn tragedy into romance. It would be foul. But something is coming. They both know it. She feels him changing, under his sorrow. It is like a living thing between them. When his grief clears, he will be a new man, and she knows this without prophecy.

Prophecy would have torn the hope from such an idea.

They meet only a few times, but the conversations are long, and deep. He's seeking answers, answers she does not have. He must find them himself.

He comes to see her one last time. He has kept his distance too long. In her chambers, every word sounds like the end of their story. It awakens old fears, that he can make a word sound like goodbye, and i'm sorry, all at once. Morpheus came to her to tell her not to get involved. Because he knows her, and he's learned -- too well, in fact -- what she feels for him. She's forever the one thing he never accounted for. He must try and take stock of any interference she might present, with her love, lest she try to go and save him.

Instead it twists, and they're too close, and she's trying too hard to make him stay, and all his barked, sharp attempts to keep her away just prove that he's not as in control as he wants to be. and at some point he just stops pretending with her, maybe for the first time, maybe she almost gets the truth out of him, the confession of exhaustion that even his own flesh and blood will not hear until the end of the whole affair.

Even at the end, he tells her no truths, only shows her something raw and weak. He lets her kiss at his wounded pride and the pain that words escape. Maybe she can keep him pretty in her bed, and pin him in, and he will be so in love with her and so starving for it after all he has seen that he will stay. Perhaps she can be something worthwhile and some balm for all his aches and his agony.

They know better. They're too old and too broken for that kind of fairy tale, that sort of romantic salvation. But she will need something to go on, and he is her first in so many ways. It's a desperate, sad thing, names whispered like apologies, and she wants his eyes on her, don't look away. He knows he should not be doing this. He should leave her for the next love, the one that will know what to do with her, who she cannot surprise. Someone will get it right. They will have to, for what he is going to do to her.

it becomes two desperate, hurt people using sex as solace and realizing even as it's happening that this is a bad idea but not wanting to stop because it's something.

Hel falls asleep and Morpheus studying her, the curves of her face, the pretty and the profane. And again, his last chance, he considers staying. He considers calling the whole thing off -- he could stop Lyta, the same as he could stop everything, if he only had the will for it. He could stay here with her, and maybe, with enough time, they could stop hiding themselves. Just like he has every other time, he talks himself down from it. He wants everything to be done more than he has ever wanted to love her.

(And he can admit, selfish as he is, and as aware of it as he has become, that even his want to be loved by her pales under his need to have an ending.)

She wakes up alone.

She thinks, maybe he will come back, after the storm has passed.

He leaves her the morning after their first time without a word, and within days he dies. and she has to feel it.

It's a similar enough ache, a deep, shattering feeling, and she remembers her childhood, and the fall from Asgard, and wonders why. Why has this come back now? But it strikes her different, and finds new places to cut, not content with old scars. Something has been lost to her. Someone has gone far beyond her reach. And it slowly dawns on her, and she can't breathe, her chest is too tight, a cage around her stilling heart. She can hardly steady herself -- years from now, she will be thankful he was not the one to bring her to her knees -- and can hardly keep afloat as she knows what became of the man she loved so fervently.

But you know, she dances at his wake, and she drinks, and for one passing fancy, she is a bride on her way to the altar. Her groom is cold under his shroud, blind to her reveling reverie, but she gives herself this last moment of joy in his name. She knows it will be rare in the days to come. Already, it's chased down her throat with ash.

You say your goodbyes, you wake up, you live, because you are alive.

She paints herself the widow. They barely loved, but she understands that Dream understood.

The happy ending is Hel stays quietly pining for lost love. She slowly comes alive again, and though she does not love again for a long, long time after, she is bold enough now to let others in. The love and the warmth is always worth the risk of loss. He's taught her that. She makes friends, and allies, and lives as she always should have. A part of her will always miss him, and be his, the way a part of her is always Johanna's, but it hurts less and less with the years.

The bad ending is she goes searching for answers, wants to know who is culpable for the loss of the man she loved. The search brings her to finding out the responsible party is Morpheus himself. That he arranged this as suicide. That everyone was a pawn. And when she reaches her father for answers, to know why he turned on the man that freed him...

Because he loved his daughter. Because he saw her in Dream's clutches, and he was terrified for her. That it was fine enough for him to be held as Dream's servant, but not her. And Hel realizes, at last, what her part to play was in it.

She was a pawn, too. She was the final push her father needed to take the child, to play into the grand, gruesome game. She frees her father, for having killed the man she loved. She cannot love that dead man, rotting at the center of his own web, anymore. Not when she cannot tell if he loved in return.

Was it his game? Was he pretending to love her to keep her close, to twist a parent's love for their child just as he did with Lyta?

She walks away hating him and never being able to get an answer to what was real.

(I do have one more hopeful ending for the latter, where Hel and Morpheus' spirit have a moment together due to plot. He confesses his part in it, and he apologizes, and she admits she loved him, and he makes her want to still but she hates him and--

He offers that, in the sunless lands, he could be better, if she would try. But he tells her to take her time.

There is no rush.)

#my manic and i [STORIEDPRINCE/HEL]

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