Work Text:
It would have been better if they had taken him alone.
Dream thought that a solitary confinement, no eyes except those of his enemies, no ears of any importance to hear the ridiculous things they said about him, might be tolerable. Instead, he was taken when he was inspecting his properties in the waking world, and as he usually was, he was accompanied. He was grateful, when he thought of it, that it was not Lucienne who had been with him, or Fiddler’s Green. They were strong, but there was an innocence to them that would not have survived the Burgess house, and just because he could fix them would not mean that they had never been broken. Instead, it was someone else accompanying him on the streets of Berlin that night, and if it had to be anyone, Dream was secretly, terribly grateful that it was him and not someone more fragile.
A moment before it happened, the Corinthian cocked his head to one side like a hound, a quizzical look furrowing his brow.
“My lord, I think –”
Whatever he intended to say was lost in the terrible rush of air, the gut-churning feeling of displacement. Dream heard his own voice raised in surprise, the Corinthian’s shout of fury, and just before he was rendered insensible by the crude and ancient magery, Dream was aware of a hand closing around his wrist, someone refusing to let go.
He came awake to the sound of screams, the Corinthian roaring not with the mouth he customarily spoke with, but the other two, a pair of low and reverberant bellows that shook the walls.
Through the haze that would not dissipate, Dream thought that he should get up and fix whatever mess the Corinthian was making, apologize for his behavior, smooth over whatever feathers had gotten ruffled.
There was an ice-cold prick of steel at his throat, a boot planted on his side.
“Demon! I have your master. Yield!”
“Fuck you!”
The steel bit into his throat, and a hot rivulet of blood streaked towards the ground.
“Fuck you,” and he knew that voice, abashed, ashamed and defeated, and something hit the ground with a thud and a whine. “There, that what you wanted?”
“The shackles. Pick them up. Put them on.”
“My lord?”
Dream tried to tell him to calm himself. This was most unseemly, a nightmare of his age and his capabilities sounding so small and panicked , but somehow he couldn’t shape the words, couldn’t rise to comfort or to scold, and then he was gone, lost to the unaccustomed spinning void of unconsciousness.
*
W hen his captors brought the Corinthian before Dream, they were smart enough to muzzle him and to put him in a straitjacket as well. They questioned them about each other, ask if they are related, if the Corinthian serve d him, if they wer e lovers. Dream was silent, so the Corinthian was as well, but Dream knew that it wouldn’t last. The Corinthian was fuming, brimming over with vitriol, and his tongue had always been a sharp and ill-considered thing.
Dream gave himself away when one of the men, out of frustration, grabbed the Corinthian by the hair unexpectedly, jerking him back and making him growl. It wasn’t the sight of the Corinthian hurt that startled him – the Corinthian had been designed with a certain amount of damage in mind – but the Corinthian was not meant to be helpless. Dream flinched, and Burgess’s eyes narrowed in consideration.
A gesture from Burgess started a vicious beating, one that would have killed a human. The Corinthian swore and then fell silent, and Dream, furious at having being tricked into a reaction and heartsore at his nightmare’s pain, gave Roderick Burgess back stare for stare.
Finally they haul ed the Corinthian, already healing, swearing again, out of the room, and while Burgess went away furious and empty-handed, Dream had the sinking sensation that he had revealed too much.
It turned out that he was right, and Burgess was after all an old-fashioned kind of man and a too-typical kind of occultist. Those toys from the Spanish Inquisition he had acquired to frighten his neonates and to impress the pretty young girls worked well, and the Corinthian screamed and swore and howled on a wooden block that was quickly stained with his uncanny blood. He did not die, because it was not Dream’s design that he should do so, but he could feel pain, and Dream came to regret that long-ago decision as bones broke and teeth shattered. They turned his face to mass of swelling and bone splinters and when it heal ed perfect, they did it again.
When they thrust him bloody against the glass, Dream made himself look without flinching because he would not betray himself or his nightmare again.
Dream did not make his creations to change – selected against it, as a matter of fact – but his time on the block changed some elemental part of the Corinthian, even if he never did break. He swore and screamed and threatened, and then he was silent, and then one day, he started to laugh. Dream held back his surprise by the barest margin; Burgess and his torturers looked unnerved at his soft and startlingly sweet laughter.
“Boys,” he said, spitting blood, “you’re going to have to come up with something else or you’re going to have to buy me dinner, because, frankly, this is starting to do it for me.”
He wasn’t lying, the evidence of his arousal was stark and uncomfortable. Dream couldn’t tell whether he wanted to scold him for his uncouth display or applaud. Burgess wrapped things up for the day, sending Dream a fulminating look over his shoulder as they departed.
It took a month before they returned. Dream guessed it had taken Burgess that long before he found men willing to stick their pricks in something like the Corinthian for all that he was made to be beautiful. Even with a muzzle and his ocular mouths stitched shut, most humans knew there was something unwholesome about him, something that recalled the depths of fevered sleep and a fear of their own beds. Therefore the men that Burgess found to do his work were desperate enough to ignore the fear, or themselves so brutal they saw the Corinthian only as one more chained and helpless victim. I n the end, it only mattered that they were capable. And vicious. And eager.
Dream could tell that this was harder for the Corinthian to take than the other, for all that it kept the face he was so vain of in one piece. He flinched back from the hands on his cock and the things they put inside him like he hadn’t for the brands or the nails. He actually cried out in shock and offense when they entered him, one after the other. He had had worse pain on Dream’s business, but for this he flushed bright red and pressed his face against the floor to endure it, whining and arching his back to try to alleviate some of the pain even if it contort ed him into a humiliatingly desperate posture.
Dream was carefully blank when the Corinthian broke down into nearly hysterical sobs, drawing deep and gasping breaths that were never quite enough when it didn’t stop, because it didn’t stop. The amount of outrage that Burgess was capable of piling on him seemed never-ending. If he was a mortal , he would never feel that his body was his own again, would wake up nightly with unwelcome hands on him and the impression of more hands forcing him open. Instead he was a nightmare, Dream’s favorite nightmare, and Dream had no idea what this would do to him.
At the end of one session, they brought him to the glass, hauling him up on legs that didn’t want to support him. Now Dream could see the filth they had put on him, that was still trickling out of him. He moved stiffly, injuries still healing, and it was hard to look at the bite marks that jeweled his flesh. H e refused to look at Dream, kept his face down even though his eyes had been unstitched for the past few weeks.
He had always been able to look at Dream, no matter what he had done or how angry Dream had been with him. He had said once that if cats could look at a king, then surely a Corinthian could, and he had smiled, so winsome that Dream hadn’t had the heart to punish him.
He wasn’t looking at him now, and Dream watched it all with a detached indifference that made Roderick Burgess curse.
They took him away, and for a year or more, there was nothing.
Dream waited, and he did not think of the Corinthian, because what use would it be to hurt himself on something he could not change?
One night, winter by the chill in the air and late from the way the guards had to keep taking their pills, there were screams from above. That was not terribly unusual. People screamed at Burgess’s parties, in delight, in excitement, in ecstasy, but these screams were tinged with terror, and the guards exchanged nervous looks.
“Think we should go up, see what’s going on?” asked one.
The other started to reply, but what that reply would have been was lost forever as the Corinthian came down the stairs and ripped his head off his shoulders. The second one reached for his gun, but then he reached for his throat instead, which was spouting blood as the Corinthian turned, uninterested in watching him fall.
There was blood on his hands, blood on his stolen shoes and his too-large clothes. He looked as if he had been wading in the stuff when he came to look, not at Dream, but the glass sphere that held him.
There was a moment with the Corinthian’s face so still, the Corinthian refusing to meet his gaze , that Dream was certain that his nightmare would simply turn around and walk away, leave him to rot. He opened his mouth to speak as he never would have for Burgess, but then the Corinthian picked up one of the guards’ chairs and swung it in a perfect arc straight into the glass.
It came down in a brilliant shatter, cutting Dream in a dozen different places, but it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, he’s free, and the Corinthian smiled at last, sketching a brief bow.
“Welcome to 1925, my lord.”
“Stop being so dramatic, damn your eyes!” shrieked Jessamy, winging her way down the stairs. “Give him the ruby, give him the sand!”
The Corinthian did, and they went to find the helmet as well, mysteriously wrapped in a s heet and stuffed under the bed where pieces of Roderick Burgess were cooling in a gelid pool of his own blood. The Corinthian looked neither to the right or the left at the carnage, and Dream, head spinning at his freedom, grateful in a way he would never speak of, chose not to see it either.
They found Alex Burgess sitting on the stairwell , shaking and staring at nothing, splattered with blood and missing an eye. Dream glanced at the Corinthian, who shrugged.
“His father made him watch once,” he said darkly. “He didn’t want to. But he did.”
“Let that be the end of it, then,” Dream said, and he wasn’t sure if it was an order or only a hope.
“It won’t end until we’re back in the Dreaming,” insisted Jessamy. “My lord, please.”
Dream started to speak, but the Corinthian laughed.
“Aw, Jessy, did you piss off all the local birds? Don’t you have anyone to hang out with anymore?”
“Augh, you utter brat!”
Dream was suddenly and deeply grateful for Jessamy. He would learn later that she had smuggled the Corinthian a set of lockpicks, and then patiently taught him how to use them to remove his shackles. She would be rewarded for that, but just then, for making the Corinthian laugh, he would have given her the world.
“We are going home,” he said, and he opened the door.
*
A few days later, after setting the realm to rights and getting that meal that Lucienne insisted upon, he went to find the Corinthian on the nightmare shore. He looked exactly as he had before 1916, but then Dream hadn’t made him to change.
Dream approached where he sat on a spar of rock overlooking the violet, violent waters. The Corinthian’s shoulders tensed when he heard Dream’s approach, but he didn’t turn, only let Dream come to stand at his back. For a long moment, they were silent, Dream looking for words, the Corinthian waiting to hear them.
Dream touched his fair hair, and he was unaccountably relieved when the Corinthian only leaned back against his touch, his right-eye mouth uttering the softest sigh.
“I could take it from you –” Dream began, but the Corinthian turned and rose lightning-quick, striking Dream’s hand away with sudden viciousness.
“No,” he almost shouted, and when Dream stared, he shook his head.
“No. Thank you. No.”
“It should not have happened.”
“No. But if I have a choice, I want to keep what’s mine. That’s mine.”
And then, spitefully, “It’s yours, too.”
Dream recoiled briefly at that, both at the Corinthian’s fury and the truth of it. If the Corinthian forgot, he would be allowed to do so as well, and suddenly he was angry that the Corinthian refused.
“I do not need to ask you,” he said without thinking, and the Corinthian glared at him.
“I have some experience with not being asked, my lord.”
Dream studied him for a long moment, and he realized he knew this serrated edge, this nearly shattering strain, and he knew how to ease it as well. The Corinthian did have some experience with not being asked, and it had not begun in the Burgess mansion.
“Kneel,” he said, and with a grateful sound, the Corinthian went to his knees on the rock.
“Don’t say you’re sorry,” the Corinthian all but begged. “It’ll be. It’ll be real if you say you’re sorry. I’m not real, why should it be?”
Dream could have argued that he was real, and beloved, but instead he nodded, pressing the Corinthian’s wet face against his thigh, taking a firm and comforting hold of his hair to keep him in place. The wind whipping off the nightmare sea was cold and clean.
“When you want to be done with it, you can come to me,” he murmured, and the Corinthian nodded silently.
Dream came to sit down on the spar of rock. Without asking, he guided the Corinthian to rest with his head on his lap, and when he stroked his fingertips over the lips of his ocular eyes, he was rewarded with the smallest beginning of a smile.