#literally VIBRATING to work on shaper of forms again soon after reading these bits omg

[landwriter]

WIP Wordsearch Game: Director's Cut Extended Edition

Why not! Courtesy of @softest-punk and @moorishflower - thank you both for tagging me, please enjoy these excessively long excerpts for every word that was a match in the WIPs:

lonely—lighthouses “You’re off your nut. The only thing Keats and I have in common is that we’re broke.”

But later, halfway out the door, leaving for his own lonely apartment, he finds himself asking, “Keats and Shelley were friends, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” says Dream.

He leaves Dream’s apartment with the words What he has offered me is generous, circling around and around in his head like a dog chasing its tail. I would offer the same, he thinks. I would offer more. Anything. He imagines Dream and his mystery love meeting in the cover of darkness, meeting in cars, in parks, imagines Dream’s lips slick with spit instead of grease, and at the end, each time, the other man, who he pictures as older, chiseled, clean-cut — who must surely have a wife — reminding him he loves another, and Dream nodding, serious, straight-backed as his settee. He wonders if they kiss each other. He hopes they don’t.

small—lighthouses “Trying to kill me,” says Dream, sounding scraped raw.

“Nah,” Hob says, handing the soup back, “I don’t think I could do a good Adonais.” Dream looks at him. “Your throat must feel like shit after that. I’m gonna make you some tea. You got honey?”

Dream nods minutely. He’s wearing an unnervingly soft expression that Hob puts down to him being terrifically, deliriously sick. He puts the back of his hand against Dream’s forehead. “Well,” he says. “No fever, at least.”

“Are you sure?” asks Dream, still staring at him. Hob feels a heat of his own spring to his face. He can’t even kid himself that Dream is just asking. But he’s sure Dream would regret it later, and there’s no way Hob is going to take advantage of him when he’s sick, and he - he tells himself he respects himself too much to be used as a surrogate for Dream’s man, for the one he loves and the one who isn’t here to check if he’s okay, to feed him soup and rub his back and want desperately, desperately, to suck his dick; and it’s not strange to want to do all those things, is it, to want to give him every small pleasure there is of life until he recovers.

He wishes they were both feverish. Wishes he was a slightly worse or significantly better person than this. He drops his hand.

“Yeah,” he says, after a weird, too-long silence. “You’re good. Where’s the honey?”

taste—lighthouses “God,” he says, sounding helplessly reverent. “I’m so fucking crazy for you, man. I’m- I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you.”

And Dream smiles, soft, and moves for him, hooking an arm behind Hob’s neck and bringing him close, pressing their bodies together, and Hob feels Dream’s naked chest rising and falling against his own as they kiss, and thinks, I love you, I love you, I love you, and he’s sure Dream can taste it in his mouth.

“I know what I want to do with you,” says Dream.

nose—lighthouses “You,” he says, nuzzling into Dream’s stroking, newly spit-slick hand, trying to gentle him, but he won’t be gentled now, not for anything, “Needy for you, for you, nobody else was the same, nobody else was close.”

Dream’s mouth has fallen slack, eyes glazed with lust. He focuses them, barely, on Hob, “For me,” he says.

“For you,” he promises. “Haven’t even made it with anyone else. Wanted you.”

Dream goes still and breathes in sharply through his nose.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“If you keep talking like that, I’m going to come, Hob.”

right—lighthouses “I’ll wait,” he says, standing so hard on the knife edge of truth and discretion he thinks he won’t be able to walk away from this, or walk ever again after it. “I’ll wait a hundred years for, for him.”

“You’re too loyal, Hob.” Dream looks disappointed with him. He wonders if it’s obvious, how fucked he is right now. He wonders if his want is rolling off of him, like fog, if Dream sees it. Or feels it clinging to his skin, damp. If he’s repulsed. He doesn’t want to be pitied. Not by Dream. Not for this. There’s nothin’ wrong, being loyal. Nothing wrong waiting.

book—shaper of forms He does not so mind the crowds, with Hob by his side. It is less of an awful clamour, without the dull roar of daydreams. But his own thoughts are louder, even with Hob holding his hand.

He looks at a book display and accidentally catches his own gaze instead. His window-self looks at him in scorn. Gaunt, it assesses. Frail. Weak. As they pass the next shopfront, he glances over again. And again, and again.

Each reflection is a jolt, a shiver, like a wing’d shadow over water. A fish-fear. Nightmare blotting out the sun. Announcing his new station to the world: you are helpless, you are helpless, you are- Helpless. You are only this. Nothing more.

After, he cannot stop looking, resolved to confront himself until he no longer feels surprise and pain at the sight, but a part of him, too, foolishly hoping to see himself restored in the next window. It is the way humans sometimes unconsciously beckon the same dream of missing something over and over, compulsively looking in the Dreaming for what awaits them in the Waking world: their brake pedal, their destination, their child.

This is not a dream. His loss is his own.

tea—shaper of forms Nightmares, he knows, are important to humanity. He is certain this is what is missing. Fear.

Three nights later — long, he thinks, but perhaps none of the Nightmares he created himself would dare visit their former lord, something he cannot resist finding flattering — he feels an innocuous dream start to turn from under him. He’s in Hob’s kitchen, making tea. His hands tremble and the cup slips and shatters on the floor. He knows he will not catch it in a dream, so he does not try. The puddle of black tea spreads across the floor, suddenly thick and ichorous, and then turns milk-white. At first, he is fascinated.

Then the Nightmare who has been called to his sleeping mind rises out of it with hair and suit the same colour, and teeth for eyes. It is not, he thinks, an especially creative choice. He is certain it is not the Corinthian himself.

Certain, until the Nightmare places a gentle hand on his cheek and says, all friendly impertinence, “Wanna hear a joke? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.”