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aquilathefighter · 1 year

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Aquila dear, I cannot wait to hear your opinion on the choice of raven/crow species for Matthew and Jessamy 💛 Would you have any headcanon on which species Lucien(ne) might have been back when they were Dream's raven ? 👀

Hi! So sorry it's taken so long to get around to this! I have so many thoughts!!!

I'll start with the caveat that the distinction between crow and raven is not scientific. They both refer to members of the genus Corvus and there is no clear distinction between what is a crow and what is a raven. As such, I don't get too worked up about the differences in common names.

Matthew is a common raven (Corvus corax). I think this fits him for a number of reasons.

He's American! We only have two "raven" species here (and four crows but that's besides the point), and the common raven is by far the more widely distributed species compared to the Chihuahuan Raven, which is as its name implies, restricted to the areas in and around the Chihuahuan desert. I'm not sure if we know exactly where he's from, but he has a general American accent to me, so I can get away with placing him virtually anywhere on the West Coast, Appalachians or Northwest.

Common ravens are very gregarious! They're often seen in mated pairs or flocks. Matthew prefers to stay by Dream's side over and over and builds a pretty deep bond with him over the course of their relationship.

Play! Common ravens are often observed engaging in play, like somersaulting in flight or making toys out of twigs to share with others. To me, Matthew is very irreverent and playful in his own way, his crude behavior and language being a prime example.

I think common raven is such a great choice! I'm thrilled to bits that they had real ravens play his part in the show, it was honestly one of the first things I looked up about the production because I was just blown away that the birds were actually behaving like birds!!! But that's another rant for another time about animal portrayal in media.

Onto Jessamy! I haven't read the comics (where she appears to be a common raven as well, from some cursory research), so this will all be based on what little we get of her in season 1 of the show.

Jessamy is a pied crow (Corvus albus). According to the wikipedia entry for this species, it is said to be considered

"a small crow-sized raven, especially as it can hybridise with the Somali crow (dwarf raven) where their ranges meet in the Horn of Africa. Its behaviour, though, is more typical of the Eurasian carrion crows, and it may be a modern link (along with the Somali crow) between the Eurasian crows and the common raven." (Source)

Like I said, there's no reliable division between crow and raven and it's just the common names, so there's no big deal in her being portrayed as a species that has "crow" in its name.

Sociality. Pied crows are, similarly to the common raven, typically found in mated pairs or small flocks. Jessamy is very loyal to Dream, staying by his side during his captivity until her untimely death. I would argue that most Corvus species would be a good fit as they tend to stay with the individuals they are bonded to, but I see no reason why pied crow wouldn't be chosen over another species!

Distribution. While we don't have any idea where Jessamy was from when she was alive, she is also given a widely distributed species that we could reasonably place her in many parts of Africa, along either coast up until the Sahara Desert, but not in the thick rainforests of countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Exposure to another species! The Sandman was written by an English author, originally scripted and performed in English, and in my opinion, culturally directed towards the Anglosphere. As such, folks who speak English as their first language may have never heard of the pied crow, and may only be familiar with the common raven! I think its a great way to get people to investigate more into a bird they've never seen before.

Now, let's talk about Lucienne! We know she was Dream's first raven, but not really any timing about when he first took a raven companion. As such, I'll simply consider any extant Corvus species for her. She has an English accent, so I will simplify my choices to species found in England. I'm just making this assumption without much reasoning other than it's fun to imagine that the ravens come into being reflecting species found where they lived as humans.

I'm going to choose common raven (C. corax) for Lucienne as well, but for different reasons than why it's a suitable species for Matthew. They are, after all, very different personalities.

Mainly, common ravens are highly intelligent! Lucienne is the Dreaming's librarian at present, and would thus have to have very high reasoning and problem solving skills. This is typical for common ravens and corvid intelligence has been highly studied in this species!

My other big reason for choosing this species is that, well, you can't beat a classic. If Lucienne is the first raven, then it's fitting that she be the type species for the genus Corvus and the first thing people think of when they hear "raven."

Thank you so much for asking and giving me the opportunity to smash my two main interests together like I'm mixing 2 colors of playdoh in preschool <3 <3

#aquila's bird facts #the sandman #the sandman meta #matthew the raven #jessamy the raven #lucienne

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hannahssimblr · 2 months

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Chapter Sixteen (Part 3)

We’re the last customers in the local Centra before it shuts, and even though we aren’t that hungry, we buy Pringles and a sharing packet of Minstrels, both agreeing that the idea of becoming suddenly ravenous back at the beach house with nothing but those those stale rice cakes to feed us is a harrowing concept. We get toothpaste and toothbrushes, and at the last second I grab a bottle of white wine. Jude teases me about it when we step out onto the footpath.

“What’s all that you said at the restaurant about not wanting to drink anymore?”

“Well, I didn’t say that, I said I’d like to drink more like the Italians. I thought maybe we could try it out.”

“Civilised drinking?”

“Yeah.”

Back at the house we put the snacks in little bowls as though we’re expecting guests, and I grab a pair of wine glasses from a cupboard above the fridge. I turn on one of the little lamps in the living room and pour out a glass for us both.

“Are you feeling civilised yet?” Jude asks me after my first sip.

“I’m always feeling civilised.” I’m lying, I have no concept of what that feels like, but after half of the glass I at least feel relaxed. The wine sits in my belly and heats my cheeks, and the fact that I cannot have more than this, just this one glass that I’ve limited myself to, means that for once I actually think about what it tastes like. I always drank wine because it was cheap and strong, but never asked myself if I really enjoyed the flavour, and all of a sudden I’m not sure that I do. I must pull a sour face after one of my mindful sips, because Jude laughs at me.

“It’s not you, Evie. It’s the wine. It’s shit.” He says, and I give him my glass so he can take it into the kitchen and pour it down the sink.

When he comes back to the couch we sit and talk for ages. He’s very good at articulating himself, at telling stories and painting a picture with words, to the point that I always feel like I can imagine things perfectly. He tells me about America, the dry brush of the Chihuahuan Desert and the way the rocky mountains might look under sunset skies on the train to Denver, and in exchange I tell him about things that happened to me back when I lived my flat, midlands life, which I always thought was unbearably boring, but he settles the full weight of his attention on me when I’m speaking to him, and I feel, as I always do with him, like I am the most fascinating girl with the most fascinating stories he’s ever heard.

He touches me all the time, to emphasise a point he’s making, to tuck a stray piece of hair behind my ear, or fix the strap of my bra as it slips down my shoulder, and every time he does I feel the imprint of his warm fingers on me for ages. When we kiss again his touch is gentle and soft. Even as he does more daring things, like cup my breasts or suck on the skin beneath my ear, nothing about it feels wrong. I didn’t know it was really possible for such things to feel natural and right, when before I’ve always felt a little bit put off by them, objectified or slightly violated.

We must kiss for at least an hour, and even when we aren’t kissing we’re lying there and lazily stroking each other’s skin and talking about everything we can think of, and it slowly occurs to me that he’s not asking any more from me. He’s not just getting the girly stuff out of the way so that he can earn his way into my knickers, and it’s far easier to relax when I stop waiting for the moment he starts peeling away my clothes and asking me to put my hand into his trousers. What’s funny though, is that with the pressure to do those things stripped away I find myself wanting them all on my own.

I don’t know when the kissing gets desperate and more urgent, but it must have been sometime before I put my hands inside his T-shirt and he slung my thigh over his hip so that we’re lying with our bodies pressed together. The bare skin of his stomach lies flush against mine, as my vest rides up a few inches above my trousers, and I mustn’t be thinking straight at all, because I don’t do anything to halt our slow grinding against each other, which feels so good even through two layers of denim that stars fly across my vision. I whimper in his ear, which draws a low groan from him, a hot rush of air against my neck, and his fingers grip my hips for better friction. I tangle my fingers in his hair and throw my neck back against the cushions and everything is suddenly a hundred times hotter than it was a few seconds ago.

“No.” He’s saying now, pushing my hands away and sitting up. “It’s time to go to bed.” For some reason I think that I might die because of this. “Can’t we kiss for another while?”

He closes his eyes for a moment and when I accidentally brush his thigh with my foot his nostrils flare. “Sorry, I need a timeout.”

I look at him and wonder, “Have I tempted you? Are you that turned on just from kissing?” I don’t know why I’m teasing him, as though I’m not twice as turned on.

“Evie,” He sounds agonised. “I’m very clearly horny for you, are you surprised?” He gets up very slowly. “I’m not going to pressure you into things you don’t want when you said you aren’t ready, but I can’t keep on doing… this with you for any prolonged amount of time. We had to stop. I’m going to show you where you can sleep.” He goes into his bedroom, which suddenly feels like a very sexy, forbidden place to be, and gets me a t-shirt. It swamps my body and comes halfway down my thighs, and has something on the front about Kasabian. Like the last t-shirt he gave me, it is ancient and worn and soft, the kind of thing once loved, now relegated to the summer house wardrobe. I hope that he’ll never ask for it back.

After we brush our teeth, I take my makeup off with the hand soap by the sink. When we go towards our separate rooms, he blocks the door with his body. “Goodnight, Evie.” He strokes my cheek with his thumb. “I’m genuinely sorry that I wouldn’t kiss you all night.”

“How dare you.”

He drifts in towards me and stares at my lips, and even though he doesn’t kiss them again, the way that he is reacting to me makes me feel like some kind of seductress, a siren that he can hardly resist, and I shiver with pleasure. Me. In the last second, the corner of his mouth twitches up with humour. “I’m just too afraid that I’ll drive you wild and you’ll corrupt and befoul my innocent body.”

“I get it. You’re just a man.” I shrug.

“I am. A human man.” He pecks my forehead and knocks my hands away from him so he can shut the door on me. I slink off to bed on my own.

I lie awake forever in the bottom bunk in Ivy’s bedroom. I am cold, as the heating went off hours ago, and my mind is alive and buzzing. Each time I close my eyes, or even drift away for a few minutes my dreams, memories from the day, are so vivid and real that they wake me in an instant. The house is too quiet. The blinds are too thin to block out the moonlight. I’ve been up to pee already, and to have water. I get up a third time and go to his room.

“Hello.” I whisper as I open the door. I hear the covers shift.

“Evie.” His voice is alert, and I know that he wasn’t asleep either.

“Can I come in for a minute?”

“Yeah.”

I feel around in the dark until I touch the side of his mattress, and then I crawl boldly under the duvet with him. He isn’t wearing a t-shirt anymore, and his skin feels hot.

“I can’t sleep.” I whisper.

“I haven’t been sleeping well either.” He tells me. “Usually I stay awake for most of the night.”

“You’ve seemed tired these last few months.”

“Well, that’s why.”

It’s a bit odd not being able to see him. The blinds in his room are so much better than Ivy’s, but it’s interesting to feel for him in the dark. I trace my hands over his shoulders and his neck until I find his face, and I don’t know why I want to touch him, like I think I’m going to be able to feel the expressions that I can’t see, but he doesn’t mind it. He must have recovered from his earlier affliction because he’s permitting skin on skin contact again. He finds my arm and my wrist and gently links his fingers with mine.

“I’m cold.” I say.

“I can feel that.”

“It’s okay, you’re so warm, you’ll heat me up nicely.”

“Yeah I get that way.” I like the way that his foot snakes its way up between my calves and hooks our legs together. My hand leaves his face and settles above his heart.

“It’s beating quite fast.”

“Only because you’re here.”

“Oh.”

“I hoped you might come back.”

“I didn’t like being on my own without you, not when I knew you were here, in another room, it felt wrong to be apart for some reason.”

“Me too, but only because I’m scared to lose you again.”

“Again?”

“All I’ve done is lose you and push you away. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

“I’m afraid you’ll run away from me.”

“I won’t.”

I tuck my head beneath his chin and wrap my arms around him. “Okay.”

“Maybe we should try and sleep.”

I shut my eyes and let his body envelop me in cosy warmth, but I am still not tired. His hand smoothes a slow path from my hip to my ribs and back, and his heartbeat never slows. I’m a bit edgy. I keep anticipating that he’ll do something bold and daring, but he doesn’t, he keeps things very chaste and innocent, and eventually I begin to feel mildly infuriated, even though I’m the one who said I wanted it this way. Now I want him to touch me, so I take matters into my own hands, grab his wrist and press his hand firmly against my breast, hoping it’ll make it obvious enough.

His voice is tight, surprised. “This is what you want?” His thumb brushes over my nipple through the thin t-shirt material. I can hardly see him in the dark, only his outline and the glow of the moon on the curve of his shoulder, but I feel his breath quicken on my skin as he shifts closer to kiss the side of my neck. Then he moves to my mouth, and before I know it he’s leaning over me and kissing me so slowly, so deeply that I feel a bit dizzy.

“Yes please.” I gasp into his mouth.

Apparently this is what he really wanted too. He pushes his T-shirt up my legs and puts his hands underneath it to stroke my bare skin while I arch into him. I don’t really care how I seem, or what I might feel about this tomorrow, all of these ideas I have of what I would or wouldn’t do according to my own personal rule book of what sort of behaviour is acceptable for me, none of it really seems to matter as much as these urgent feelings in my body that plead with me to do something.

“I really think that you’re lovely.” He says, a surprisingly sweet thing to say considering he’s groping my bare chest and hard inside his boxer shorts, and it makes me feel a little bit shy.

“Well I think the same about you.” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I curl my hand around the back of his neck and kiss him with everything that I have, and when he yanks me closer to him and slides his thigh between my legs. I grind against it instantly as my body goes on ahead without my brain. I would never ordinarily do things like this, and yet, the way that he’s kissing me, the way his hands urge me on and the sound that escapes him, like some small yelp or moan serves to melt all apprehension out of my head. “Like this.” He says, and puts me on top of him so that I can feel him desiring me, right against the place that I want him. I feel my heartbeat in every inch of my body. “Is it okay? Or do you want to stop now?”

I no longer care about the things I said this afternoon. Since then he’s dated me, danced with me, kissed me and shared with me the bad wine that’s still warming my belly, and his body is hot and real underneath me and now all of those things I thought I knew before seem so wrong. “Do you want to stop?” I whisper.

“No, not at all.” I bury my face in his neck while he hauls me against him and rolls my hips against the solid ridge inside his boxers. Without the restriction of the denim it’s a hundred times better, and my whole body erupts with sensation, like there are sparks shooting through every nerve ending and bursting out of my fingertips. Jude’s hands are everywhere, under my t-shirt, inside the back of my underwear holding me, encouraging me in a way that draws pleasured sighs from us both, and I wish that we had the light on, just to see what he looks like when he sounds like that. I bet that he’s twice as pretty.

His heart is thumping beneath me. “Do you want me to get you off now?”

I lift my head from his pillow, drag my hair out of my face and look down at his outline. He smoothes the sides of my thighs from my hips to knees and back again while I consider it. I really shouldn’t want that. It might not be a good idea, I’m too self conscious, but when he strokes me through my underwear to give me a teaser of what he could do to me, all reasonable thought dribbles straight out of my ears.

“Yes.”

“Get on your back.”

I roll onto the sheets, and he shoves my t-shirt up to my chin. I gasp with surprise and delight while he trails kisses from my belly to the hollow of my neck. “Tell me what you like.” He says.

“Whatever you want.”

He chuckles. “I’m just trying to make you come. Can you tell me how?”

How direct. “Oh. I don’t… I don’t really know. Is it weird that I don’t know how to say it?”

“Do you want to show me yourself?”

If the lights were on he’d see my face burning bright red. “You want me to… do that in front of you?”

He holds my wrist and slips our hands beneath the waistband of my underwear, his atop mine. “Together.” He says. “Just show me what you do to yourself.”

For a wild moment I wonder if this is some kind of joke, if he’s going to take his hand away and say ‘just kidding, I can’t believe you thought I’d want you to do that!’ But laughing at me appears to be about the last thing he wants to do, so I chase away my hesitancy and show him what to do.

It must be about the most intimate thing I’ve ever done. He touches me, touching myself while he kisses my mouth between my deepening sighs, and then I move my hand away and let him take over on his own, and say things like “Do you like that?” in this rough, sexy voice that makes me feel like I truly might combust.

He says other things too, whispers the kinds of words into my skin that will make me blush when I think about them tomorrow, but for now I let them wind around me and push me until I let out staggered, breathless gasps and all I can do is feel the loveliness of these sensations. I begin to reach the brink, but immediately worry about it as soon as I start thinking about what he’s witnessing.

He seems to understand. “You can just let go,” He tells me. “It’s just me.” and I do. He takes me straight over the edge with a curl of his fingers as he hurls me into a kaleidoscope of euphoria, and I’m tumbling, freefalling into sweet oblivion until I land back in his arms.

I lay there just breathing for a while, and he brushes strands of hair from my forehead, kisses my neck and rests his hand on my belly, which reminds me that my t-shirt is still bunched up around my collarbone. I quickly readjust it to cover myself, because even though Jude can’t see me in the dark and he had his fingers inside me two minutes ago, some things don’t just change in an instant, and I’m still embarrassed to have my boobs out.

He’s touching my face like he’s trying to memorise my features, smoothing his thumbs over my cheeks and tracing the shapes on my nose and my lips and then pressing his own lips against all of the same places and the attention is so soft and warm that I could turn to liquid and melt right onto the sheets. “That was hot.” He says. “Did anyone ever tell you that you make the sexiest little sounds?”

I would burst out laughing if I hadn’t already melted. “No. Nobody has ever told me things like that.”

“Well those other guys are losers, then.” He lies back onto his pillows and I automatically follow, nose to nose in the dark. “Do you want me to, um, touch you back?” It’s not like I have a lot of real, valuable experience with sexual things, but I have learned enough to know that nothing is given freely without reciprocation.

He just hooks his elbow around my neck and rests my head on his chest. “Yeah, I’d like that. Next time. Not now though.”

“Then what would you like?”

“To try and sleep.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I just want to be here with you.” His heart beat finally slows beneath my ear and I shut my eyes while he traces slow, dreamy shapes with the tips of his fingers against my hip.

“You liked that?” I whisper. “Just touching me?” It was enough?

“I liked it so much.” His voice is thick with sleep. “I like you so much. So much that I don’t know what to do. You’re perfect.”

“I’m not perfect.” I start to protest. “I’m about the furthest thing from it, actually, I’m a bit of a mess, and-” He’s shushing me now and turning me over to wrap himself around me and deliver more of those sweet soft kisses to the back of my head. “I know you’re not, you just seem that way to me right now. Go to sleep.”

“You want me to stop talking?”

“Mm. If you want.”

“Alright, that’s fair enough.”

“Night, pretty girl.” he murmurs, and drifts away in an instant.

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#lucky girl part 3 #tw: sex #sim spice

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