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cuckoo-on-a-string · 1 year

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Hello, Mr. Monster: The Nightmare's Interlude

Hello, Mr. Monster master list

Summary: Eros and Psyche inspired Soulmate!AU, Morpheus x female OC/reader (18+)

So, as some of you know, I've been very sick for a while. Everything's behind schedule, but then this struck me, so I thought I'd share. The Jeff fan club rides again! The next proper chapter will be out... soon? Not doing the tag list thingy for this, but that will return with the next, proper chapter, and I'll give ya'll a heads up about this blurb in case you missed it then. <3

The nightmare was older than the beds beneath which it lurked. It had slipped a cold, hard grasp around dreamer’s ankles before there were words for either. From the dawn of sleeping things, it startled creatures from fantasies and reminded all of the unseen dangers lurking in dark places. Snakes, spiders, and wicked things with tooth and talon. Worse threats, even: strangers and ghosts, murderers and curious thieves.

When the Nightmare King vanished, the thing from under the bed went looking. It was one of many, in the beginning, but others grew distracted, lost hope, or found fresh inspiration in the delights of the waking world. It did not give up its quest. Traveling from shadows under a bed to those under a low table on the other side of the planet, it searched. It saw without eyes and heard without eats. It listened from under chairs and lurked under parked cars. But the waking world was vast, and after nearly a century of hunting, it began to despair.

The Endless were not gods. And the Nightmare King did not take up his mantle with a light heart. Perhaps he’d left, abandoned his creations to wither and fade.

Was that a kinder end than simply unmaking the Dreaming in one, fell stroke?

Perhaps Dream of the Endless was captured. Or ill. Or enchanted by some fell demon. Perhaps he wasn’t in the waking world at all, and he’d been bound in the deepest circles of Hell, or drugged into bliss beyond the gates of Tir na NÒg. Without word, every possibility was as realistic as the last. The nightmare only knew its lord wasn’t dead. If he’d fallen, another aspect would’ve been given his function, and the Dreaming would not stand in ruins.

So, the nightmare kept searching, obsessed with a new purpose, a new reason for existing, and it decided not to return before its lord.

It found all kinds of things. Lost treasures. Creatures hiding from worse monsters than the dark. Other dreams and nightmares seeking refuge from their increasingly-unstable home. Bottles, buttons, and dust bunnies. Never a hint of its lord.

And then – something.

A thread of power reaching out through a sleeping mind, the glitter of sand and ancient power.

The nightmare rushed through the shadows, following the trace like a bloodhound. It would get there first. It would rescue their lord. They would return to the Dreaming and set all right. A quest fulfilled.

But when it finally chased down the source, it didn’t find Lord Morpheus. It reached up to clutch a very small, very human ankle.

The girl-child jerked awake at its touch, hiccupping on tears, and the nightmare wondered which of its brothers it had interrupted. It did not wonder long, though. It was too busy feeling a new sensation, one it was meant to inspire rather than suffer.

Horror.

This child had been… mangled. Deep within. Her mortality hung in tatters, like curtains in the windows of a haunted house, framing what should have been a miracle. His master’s name. The dream of dreams. But whatever had irreparably damaged the child’s natural place in the flow of life and death had carved over the name.

And there was the sand. In her soul. In her blood.

It must pull her deep into dreams, the poor thing.

She was fortunate to wake at all.

A strong child.

Little fingers brushed over nightmarish crusts and ooze, gentle with papery skin, and the little girl said, “Hello.”

The nightmare had never had a conversation with a human child before, and after a moment’s thought, it gave her ankle a slight, answering squeeze. Nothing to hurt her, but enough to acknowledge and return her greeting.

“Are…” Her voice quavered and died, but she tried again, determined. The nightmare hung on her every breath, waiting.

“Are you here to hurt me, too?”

It released her. Instantly. The shadows swallowed it back under the little princess bed, and it recoiled into the inky black as that new feeling – horror – brought goosebumps to its hairless flesh.

This was its lord’s soulmate. It had seen many come and go from Lord Morpheus’ embrace, but this – well. This was different. This was unique. Something that would not come again, even in another dozen millennia. The little human was precious, even if its master was not there to appreciate and protect the one creature whose wyrd twined so intimately with his.

“Don’t go!” A little face appeared, upside-down over the side of the bed, trying to see in spaces too deep for mortal eyes. Even eyes, the nightmare realized, as clever as hers. Oh, the trouble this child must find.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. Are you… a nice… monster?”

The nightmare returned to the light slowly, ensuring it wouldn’t scare her, and she smiled, reaching down to shake its hand.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Monster.”

The nightmare did not realize it at the time, but it was already lost. Lost to the hope in terrified eyes and the smile that invited it into the daylight for tea parties. Lost to slow conversations through knocks and a hand-drawn copy of a Ouija board the girl “saw on tv.”

It explained it was a nightmare, and she explained her name meant “dream,” too. When it said it didn’t have a name in the way she did, she gasped, told it that was terrible, and offered him one.

Jeff.

He became Jeff, and without meaning to, he found a new kind of quest. Even if his lord should never return, Jeff would guard his lady. The little dreamer marked for death with terrible power because she’d first been marked for love.

Protector. Guard. Confidante. Friend, even. He’d never been such things, but he took up the role gladly as the child told him about her parents, who knew something had happened to their child, but couldn’t believe her story about the fairy under the bridge. Jeff believed her, and Jeff remembered.

She explained why her favorite foods were the best, why it was important to have a favorite color, and why swings were her favorite part of the playground.

One day she came in with a little bottle, giggling, and called him out. He stretched into the yellow sun, the tips of his fingers brushing the hem of her lavender dress.

“Mommy made my nails pretty, so now I’m gonna paint yours and make you pretty, too, kay?”

She painted his broken, half-peeled fingernails with glittery purple polish, and they made her so happy he kept them that way a whole week. Jeff would do many things to keep her smiling, because sometimes the terror carved into her young mind swelled until she became sick with it. The fear stole the breath from her lungs and the thoughts from her mind. It came most often in the dark, when she felt most alone, and Jeff held her little foot to assure himself she hadn’t shaken apart into broken pieces, and to let her know he was there.

And then came the night he failed her, the night the child lost her family and stared into the eyeless maw of her soulmate’s favorite creation. Jeff tried. He warned her not to go out, and when she didn’t listen, he pulled her under the bed.

But too late. Not enough.

The Corinthian pulled her out of the shadows and sent her running into the woods. Truly alone, where Jeff couldn’t so easily follow.

The child fled, pursued by hungry things in the night, the Not Deer among them.

The Corinthian returned to the room and smiled down at Jeff, wiping the parents’ blood off his knife.

“Nice girl you had there. Real peach.” The greater nightmare crouched low, taking off his sunglasses. “Not ripe yet, of course. It’s better this way, don’t you think? If she can’t survive a few of us, how could she survive our maker?”

He called, and summoned, and reached for every dream and nightmare he knew walked the waking world without malice. Some of them came. Jeff rallied Polyphemus, the shepherd who once carried the smallest dreamers away from the deeper shoals of Nightmare, into gentler dreams.

Enough came. Enough heard. They did what Jeff could not and snatched the plucked the girl out of reach of her pursuers. Polyphemus, and the nightmare Gault, and Fiddler’s Green – who wore a strange shape and a new name.

When that awful, terrible night had ended, when the child – Aisling – was safe enough in the hands of human authorities, Jeff began leaving for longer and longer periods, hunting ardently for his lord. The girl was not safe. She would never be safe until Dream of the Endless returned.

The fear became worse, paralyzing attacks that interrupted her waking hours.

She struggled in even the most welcoming foster homes, trying to navigate a pitying world that saw her as half-mad at best. And when Jeff reached out to comfort her, the other children screamed and ran to tell adults about the monster under the bed.

Other nightmares came to visit, and Aisling made her roommate cry after she asked to leave the closet door open “so the boogeyman can breathe.”

She did not smile so much.

She did not paint his nails, and she stopped drawing Ouija boards after one foster family subjected her to an exorcism.

Jeff listened to many would-be families plead with her to be good or demand to know why tormented the other children. They wanted her, if only she could behave. If only she’d stop lying. If only she’d stop playing sick pranks on the little ones. If, if, if. They only wanted her if. Jeff had seen her face horrors that could break the human mind and still smile after. He did not know how to help, so he held her ankle as she slept, and her hand when she was grounded.

He went with her to therapy sessions, learning beside her as she developed coping mechanisms to manage the fear. Panic attacks, the therapist called them. But the therapist also pushed her to tell a more palatable truth, to accept a human killed her parents, not a nightmare with mouths for eyes. The therapist wanted Aisling to stop talking to shadows and to make a best friend who wasn’t a monster under the bed.

The child, who was a little less a child every day, refused.

In the silvery glow of a full moon, she looked across the bedroom she – for once – had to herself, and told Jeff, “I won’t let any of them tell me what to be.”

The new families did not accept her, and she did not accept them. She wasn’t cruel, but she wasn’t right or normal, so it never mattered if she was kind (though Jeff knew she was). Rather than waiting for age to liberate her, she demanded the mortal courts recognize her as an adult two years too early. She finished her schooling, found a job near the house her parents left for her, and won her independence.

Then she began collecting folk of the Dreaming. The house where the Corinthian killed her parents was remote, far from the city where she’d been hurt. It was a good place for things too delicate, too big, or too strange for the waking world. Polyphemus came and herded them all, keeping the refugees of the Dreaming safe from the greed of the waking, and keeping the folk of the waking safe from the power of the dreamfolk.

The child who was now a woman had adventures. She traveled and developed her intuition into proper magical skill. The dreams and nightmares were her life, and Jeff continued shifting between the child and his eternal search for his master, determined to fail neither one a second time.

He could not have guessed that the child would complete his first quest without his help.

#fic: hello mr. monster #morpheus x reader #morpheus x oc #sandman x reader #dream of the endless x reader #jeff the nightmare

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