#tom melissanthi you are my heroes

[onehundredandeleventropicalfish]

A Calliope/Dream reverse rescue fic

(where she's the one to escape first, because these two fascinate me and i will never get enough of them)

[on Ao3]

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It takes her a while, to locate him. He could probably have done so quicker, if he chose, chasing answers through the dreams of mortals, but she must make use of more mundane means.

Still. She knows he has been captured. She knows he is being held underground. And a mortal able to trap one of the endless must have significant magic of their own - magic like that draws attention to itself, no matter how well hidden you try to keep it.

And eventually, the rumors reach her ears, of Burgess and his caged devil.

She almost laughs at the thought of Oneiros being mistaken for a devil. He could certainly act like one at times, and yet... his heart was too soft, too warm, too full for any true malice. It's one of the things that drew her to him, long ago. And though she has yet to forgive him for what happened with their son, she knows that if he has ever truly loved anyone, it was Orpheus.

Far more than he loved her.

She doesn't even fully know why she is doing this. If their positions had been reversed, had he escaped before she did, he surely would have left her there. Will he even be grateful to see her? The realm of dreams has been closed to her for millenia, something she has long accepted as a consequence of her actions. Neither of them behaved well, after it happened. And even brought low in this manner, she cannot imagine Oneiros' pride has dimmed enough to forgive her.

He could hate her for this.

Or she could hurt him by showing up here, a reminder of everything he wished to forget.

But she has been too long on the receiving end of such excuses. Madoc's reasons for not freeing her may have made sense in his mind, but they were the justifications of a coward, and his cowardice made him monstrous. In the end, it doesn't matter how difficult this will be, for either of them. She would be committing a greater act of violence by leaving him here to suffer.

She walks unnoticed through the manor house, her magic keeping mortal minds conveniently elsewhere. Nothing so simple as guards and doors may keep a goddess out.

The cellar is another matter. She thinks she's prepared to see what awaits her there. But she finds herself hesitating, her principles weak against her failing resolve.

Breathe, Calliope.

No matter what lies beyond these doors, she cannot turn back now. Even if Oneiros would never know any different, she would never be able to forgive herself, knowing she got so close to helping, then fell to the same weakness that kept her captive for so long.

She steels herself, then slips through the gates, taking each step with purpose.

The hesitation gives way to fury when she sees precisely how he is being kept down here.

Her imprisonment had its own troubles, and she has no desire to name one worse than the other. But in all her pain, at least she'd been able to move, to sleep, to walk around. Had access to food, and to a bed. Oneiros is being kept in a cage, far too small to move in. He sits, unmoving, stripped of clothing, of food, of air, perhaps. Torturous for any being, but especially one so expansive, so accustomed to creating entire worlds on a whim.

He once had whole universes at his behest. Now, a sphere of glass, where he cannot even fully stand.

It's a simple matter, now that she has been returned to her full self, to make the mortals guarding him believe that they are seeing nothing but what they expect to see.

The harder part will be his reaction when he sees her.

She takes a breath, and steps into the light.

It takes a moment for Oneiros' eyes to land on her, and a moment more as his face twists in confusion. She sees him mouth her name, like a question, raising one hand to press against the glass.

"Oneiros," she greets in response, her voice shakier than she expected.

His gaze flicks to the guards behind her, then back to her, the question and warning clear in his eyes.

"I have bewitched the minds of the mortals, they can neither see me nor hear us here," she reassures. "You are free to speak."

He nods, slowly, a look on his face she cannot quite parse, and it's a moment more before he talks.

"I don't understand... why are you here?"

Why indeed, after everything?

"I... came to see if it was true," she starts, haltingly. "That you had been captured, by mortals-"

His eyes that had seemed so captivated by her up to this moment immediately turn away, his posture becoming more hunched and closed off, and she knows him well enough to read the shame in the gesture.

"You need not have-" he begins, but she has yet more to say.

"-That you had been captured by mortals," she repeats, letting her voice carry above his objections, "like I was."

He freezes, and slowly, his gaze moves to land on her once more.

"...When?"

"Some sixty years past," she tells him. "Freed only recently. Humans who don't accept that my gifts are to be given, and not taken."

"No," he says softly. "Nor did my captors."

"What do they ask of you?"

"For my sister to stay her hand with them. For wealth. For power. For protection. None of these things they deserve."

"Are they hurting you?"

He shakes his head.

"They have not opened this cage since they first trapped me a century ago. Too fearful of what I might do to them." A vindictive look crosses his face. "As they should be."

She smiles sadly, almost reaching her hand up to touch the glass, before remembering the circle on the floor, which would trap her just as equally.

"This prison is a kind of hurt, I think."

If he notices the retracted gesture, he says nothing about it, his head bowed, lost in thought. It's another long while before he speaks again.

"Calliope, I... I am grateful for your presence. But I thought you had wished to be free of me, and of my family. If you are not here to mock me, then why? Why go to all this trouble, just to remind yourself of a time long since past?"

"Whether you hate me or not, that is your decision, Oneiros. But the person I choose to be is mine. And despite our history, I have no desire to see you suffer down here for centuries more. Not when I have so recently experienced the same pain." She pauses, searching for the courage to speak her next words. "You do not deserve that."

His response is so quiet she almost doesn't hear it. But it is spoken with the certainty of the dream king she once knew.

"You're wrong."

"About what?" she asks, expecting his anger, the pride she uses to know so intimately.

Instead, his gaze remains on some distant point deep in the ground. It's not a gesture of shame, this time, more as if he were searching for words that have never before been spoken aloud.

"About... what happened. I would have done anything, to save him, and yet I failed. In the end, I allowed him to leave, and I... understand your fury at me. If this prison is my penance, then so be it. It is nothing, compared to how he suffered."

"Stop. We cannot weigh suffering like a handful of grain, Oneiros. Nor will yours erase his own. Or mine, for that matter. And in the meantime, the dream realm is sick. Your absence has poisoned it, and now all of humanity suffers for it. You could not save our son. Save someone else's."

She waits for him to look at her again, drawing herself up to full height, every bit the goddess she has not felt like in so long.

"Will you allow me to help you?"