#(foreshadowing.)

The text reads: "Does Joyce love Dorothy more than she hates presenting as a sexual being? Let's find out!"

⚠️ Disclaimer: This work is a transformative fanfiction inspired by The Sandman. All canon characters, settings, and related rights belong to their respective creators and rights holders. I do not claim ownership over them. ⚠️ Content Warnings: Terminal illness, hospital setting, death of a parent, grief, secrecy, magical bargains, coercive supernatural contracts, emotional isolation, inherited danger, psychological manipulation, surreal dream logic, loss of control, obsession, and emotionally intense themes. ⚠️ Audience Notice: This work is intended for readers 18 and older. Reader discretion is advised. ⚠️ Story Note: This is a Dream x Reader alternate universe story in which the Reader is Johanna Constantine’s daughter.

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Chapter 2: Impossible Architecture

You do not try to avoid it on the second night.

That is what you tell yourself, at least. That you do not try because trying would be useless, because the previous night proved that the dream comes when it decides to come and not when you authorize it, and the Constantines have enough pragmatism in their DNA not to waste energy resisting what has already proven itself irresistible. You tell yourself that while you review the file on the unresolved spirit. While you make the notes you did not make the night before. While you prepare the gear for the next case on the list — a poltergeist in Bermondsey, classified by Johanna as moderately tedious, which was her way of saying it required work but posed no real risk. While you do all of that with the meticulousness of someone being very careful not to think about one specific thing.

The dirt is still under your nails.

Or more exactly: you washed it off in the morning, with the slightly unsettled awareness of someone who does not know exactly what she is cleaning away, and it disappeared without a trace. But the tactile memory remains — the sensation of something that built up over hours in a place you cannot remember clearly, the ghost of evidence that is no longer there. The Constantines work with evidence. Without it, all you have is the physical certainty that something happened, and physical certainty without evidence is faith, and Johanna had a very definite opinion about faith as a working tool.

Faith is for people who don’t have a better method, she used to say. We always have a better method.

Tonight you do not have a better method.

Tonight you have the file on the poltergeist in Bermondsey, Johanna’s case list in her tight handwriting, and the vibration in your bones that did not disappear with the night but settled somewhere deep and persistent, like something that found a place to live and has no intention of leaving. It stays quiet during the day — during the day there is enough noise and light and movement for it to fade into the background, for you to operate around it the way you operate around a background sound the brain learns to ignore. But when the flat goes quiet, when the city lowers the volume and darkness comes in through the windows with the patience of something that knows it always wins, the vibration makes itself known again.

You do not fall asleep on the couch this time.

That is what you tell yourself too. You fall asleep in bed, with the lights off, with the deliberateness of someone making a decision rather than being pulled along by a current — which is the difference that matters, the difference between choosing and yielding, even if the result is the same.

The result is the same.

On the second night, the Realm arrives with more clarity.

That is the only way to describe it: more clarity. As if the first night had been a transmission with interference, with blurred edges and fragmented content, and tonight the signal had sharpened. The corridors have more definition — you can see the texture of the walls, which is not exactly stone and not exactly wood but something that has the properties of both and neither, something that exists in its own category of material as if matter here had decided not to abide by the agreements matter usually makes with itself.

The height is the first thing that hits you.

Everything is too tall. Not in an oppressive way — not the height of a space trying to overwhelm you with its scale, not the architectural trick of buildings designed to make you feel small. This height is different. It is the height of something that simply is this way because that is its nature, without aesthetic or psychological intent, the way the sky is high not to impress you but because it is the sky and that is what the sky does. The corridors rise to points the light — and here the light works differently, it comes from everywhere and nowhere in particular, ambient in a way that has no identifiable source — cannot fully resolve, leaving the upper reaches in a half-shadow that is not exactly darkness but an absence of definition, like the edge of something that continues beyond the limits of perception.

You walk.

This time with more intention. The night before, you walked with the passivity of someone still processing the fact of walking — tonight you walk the way the Constantines walk through new places, which is with your eyes open and your hands open and the specific disposition of someone who knows places carry information and that the information is in the details. You touch the walls. The surface gives slightly beneath your fingers in a way no material you know would give — not soft, not exactly, but responsive, as if it registers the contact and files it away somewhere. You trail your hand along the wall as you walk and feel the space shift beneath your fingertips with the subtle variation of something breathing.

The corridors change.

You notice that more clearly tonight as well: the geometry is not fixed. Not chaotically — there is no disorientation, none of the vertigo of labyrinths that reconfigure themselves to confuse. It changes according to a logic of its own that you cannot quite decipher but that you perceive as logic rather than arbitrariness. A corridor you took ten minutes ago now has a fork it did not have then. A door that was closed is now half open. The space is accommodating itself somehow, adjusting to your presence with the strange hospitality of something that was not expecting visitors but makes room anyway.

You open the half-open door.

Johanna would have said that was poor judgment. Johanna would have pointed out that in the line of work you do, half-open doors in unfamiliar places are more often an invitation from something with questionable intentions than an architectural coincidence. Johanna would probably have been right. But Johanna would also have opened the door — that is what the Constantines do with doors that should not be opened, they touch them, push them, assess the consequences afterward.

Behind it is a room that contains dreams.

There is no more precise way to put it than that. There are objects — physical objects, with mass, presence, and shadow — that are dreams. Not representations of dreams, not symbols: the dreams themselves, contained in a form with three dimensions that you can circle around and view from different angles. They are all different. One has the approximate shape of a door and contains within it the light of a summer afternoon you have never lived through but recognize with the immediate emotion of something longed for. Another has no fixed shape, changing outline every time you look at it directly, and emanates a sense of urgency without an object, the causeless panic of dreams the brain manufactures out of its own anxieties. There are a dozen more, each with its own texture, each with the specific weight of something that happened in someone’s mind during the time the body lay still and consciousness went elsewhere.

You remain in the doorway.

The threshold suddenly seems relevant — crossing it implies something, though you cannot define what. There is a difference between the corridors, where you walked without asking permission because no one told you that you could not, and this room, which has the specific quality of a place that belongs to someone. A place where the things inside it were arranged with intention. An archive, perhaps. An inventory. Something that has an owner.

You step inside anyway.

The nearest dream — the one with the summer afternoon and its golden light and historyless nostalgia — pulses softly when you come near it, like recognition. You reach out toward it with the same instinctive curiosity with which you touched the walls, with the Constantine inclination to touch what should not be touched in order to find out what happens when you do —

“Leave.”

There were no footsteps. No sound of any kind to announce anyone’s arrival. The space simply made a decision about its contents and suddenly there is someone else in the room, standing at the opposite end, looking at you with an expression that takes a second to classify and that, once you do classify it, is not reassuring.

It is not surprise.

That is the first thing you establish: there is no surprise on his face. No confusion of someone finding something unexpected in a place where he did not expect to find it. There is something colder and older than surprise — the controlled recognition of someone who already knew this was here and has come now because the moment required it, not because he was caught off guard. As if he had been waiting, somewhere in this huge impossible space, for the correct moment to appear.

He is tall. You notice that automatically and then immediately realize it is irrelevant — height in this place is not a useful measurement because the proportions of everything are different, because this space has its own scale and the bodies inside it obey that scale. What is useful, what you do register with the specific attention of someone who has learned to read danger in the posture of people and things, is the way he occupies the space. He does not fill it — he inhabits it, which is different. There are people who enter a place and fill it with their presence, imposing their energy onto the space until the space gives way. This is not that. This is a being that exists in this space with the same naturalness with which the space exists in itself, as if there were a relationship between the two that precedes any other consideration.

He is dressed in black. You notice that too, though it is the most superficial observation of all and the least relevant, and yet the one the brain offers first because the human brain, in rapid assessment situations, starts with the concrete before it reaches the abstract. Black that is not exactly cloth — it has the visual texture of something that absorbs light differently from the way normal clothing does, as if the materials here also have rules of their own.

His eyes.

His eyes are the problem.

Not in the sense that they are threatening — though there is something in them that could become threat if it chose to, that holds the capacity for threat without exercising it at this moment. The problem with his eyes is that they look with a depth that destabilizes evaluation. When someone looks at you normally, even someone looking at you intensely, there is an implicit symmetry in the act — you see them, they see you, there is an exchange. This is not that. This is something looking at you from a distance that has nothing to do with the physical meters between you, from a scale on which you are, at best, a detail in something larger that is evaluating.

They do not judge. You register that as well — there is a difference between being evaluated and being judged, and his eyes evaluate without the moral component of judgment, with the neutrality of something observing a phenomenon and recording its properties without assigning value to them. That should be less unsettling than judgment. It is not.

He repeats the word.

“Leave.”

Only one. No particular inflection, no urgency or irritation — with the economy of expression of someone who sees no reason to use more words than are strictly necessary to communicate an instruction he considers sufficiently clear. Not a plea. Not a suggestion. A statement of what should happen next, delivered with the confidence of someone who has not had to repeat his instructions in a very long time.

Inside you, something assesses the situation quickly.

That is training — the same training that makes you notice height and posture and eyes before fear has time to organize itself into a coherent response. Analysis arrives before emotion: this is his space, that is obvious, the way the Realm responded to his presence in the second he appeared — a subtle shift in the light, an almost imperceptible variation in temperature, something you can only describe as the space recognizing the one to whom it belongs — establishes it without ambiguity. He is here with an authority that is not claimed but inherent, the difference between someone saying this is mine and something simply being so.

Even so.

“Who the hell are you to give orders?”

You hear it come out of your own mouth with the fluency of things said before the filter intervenes — the Constantine response to unnegotiated authority, which is to question it the moment it is exercised, regardless of the size of the one exercising it or how objectively considerable that size happens to be in this case. Johanna would have praised the instinct and criticized the timing. Johanna would have said it too.

He does not answer immediately.

He looks at you.

There is something in that silence that has texture — not the empty silence of someone without an answer, but the full silence of someone with too many and choosing which one to use, or perhaps the silence of someone who did not expect the question not because it is a difficult one, but because it is not the sort of question anyone usually asks him. As if most people or things that arrive in this space and find him do not ask anything — they obey or flee, which are the two reasonable responses, the responses any objective assessment of the situation would identify as the most sensible.

You do neither.

That, you perceive in the second that follows, unsettles him to some degree that does not reach the surface of his expression but exists beneath it. Not much. Not in a way that changes what he is going to do next. But it exists.

This man, you think.

Then you correct yourself because man is not exactly the right category even if the appearance is human, even if the voice is human, even if he occupies the space the way human bodies occupy space and not in any of the other ways things from this line of work do. There is something about him that exceeds the category. Something with the scale of the very old, of what has existed since before there was language to name it, of what has been what it is for so long that it no longer remembers becoming it, because being this is its natural state and everything else would be the anomaly.

This being, you correct yourself. This thing. Whatever it is.

He speaks as if the air in this place belongs to him. The air in this place does belong to him — that is what is most destabilizing about the situation, that the arrogance in his posture is not arrogance exactly but precision, the attitude not of someone who thinks everything belongs to him but of someone to whom something specific genuinely does and who sees no reason to disguise it and no need to apologize for it. As if I were a stain on something of his.

Anger. Immediate, clean, the kind that climbs your spine with a directness you almost appreciate because anger has the advantage of being manageable, of being a state you know how to inhabit, of being the language in which the Constantines process situations they do not know how to process any other way.

But underneath.

Underneath the anger, buried with the efficiency of someone who has practiced burying things for a long time, is something more uncomfortable. Something that the training, the instinct, the rapid assessment you make of everything that could hurt you delivers to the rest of you with a clarity you would rather it did not have:

This could crush you without effort.

Not as a spoken threat — he has not threatened, has not made any gesture in that direction, the word leave was an instruction, not a warning. But as a structural fact of the situation, as data analysis provides regardless of the will of whoever receives it: this has power over this space and over what happens within it in a way that makes your presence here entirely contingent on its tolerance of your presence here. If it decided you were not here, you would not be. That simple, that enormous, that irreversible.

And it is choosing not to decide it. For now.

That is there too, in the full data your instincts deliver: for now. Not because you are impressive or because you said something that stopped him — your question unsettled him by a millimeter, that is all, a millimeter of disconcertion that changes the power map of the situation in no relevant way. But because he is choosing, for reasons you do not know and has given you no grounds to deduce, not to do what he clearly could do.

That is more frightening than a direct threat.

A direct threat has protocol. A direct threat has responses — not always good ones, not always ones that end with you emerging unscathed, but at least responses that exist in the catalogue of what you know how to do. Deliberate restraint has no protocol. Deliberate restraint requires understanding the logic of the one exercising it, and you do not yet have enough information to understand any of the logic of this being watching you from the other end of the room as if it were the first time in a very long time that something in this realm had forced it to recalibrate, even if only by a millimeter.

For now, you repeat inwardly.

You file that for now in the place where you file things that need to be examined with more calm and more information.

Time in dreams works differently.

You are learning that in real time: there is no way to know how much time has passed because there are no external references, no changing light or advancing clock or any of the systems the waking world uses to mark the passage of time. Only the space and what happens within it, with the specific density of moments that matter — which is that they weigh more, that they have more substance than moments that do not matter, that they feel longer not necessarily because they are but because the attention you give them expands them.

This moment weighs.

He looks at you. You look back. The room of dreams — which are still there, which remained there through all of this with the indifference objects have toward the dramas of the beings around them — holds the particular silence of a space containing something.

You open your mouth to say something else — you do not know what exactly, something Constantine, something that maintains your refusal to obey without escalating the situation into territory where the lack of protocol becomes an urgent problem —

And you wake up.

The transition is so abrupt your body does not handle it well.

You are in bed — properly in bed, lying down, in the darkness of Johanna’s flat with the city making its nighttime noises outside — and the shift from the weight of the Realm to the comparative weightlessness of the waking world produces a second of physical disorientation, the kind of dizziness that has more to do with density than movement, like stepping out of very cold water into the air and feeling that the air does not offer enough resistance.

Your heart is racing.

Not from fear — from something with the same physiology as fear but that is not exactly fear, the body’s response to something enormous it is still processing, the adrenaline of having stood in front of something beyond ordinary parameters without there having been harm or flight or any of the resolutions adrenaline usually precedes.

The room is dark. The ceiling is the ceiling of Johanna’s flat, with the crack in the right corner she never had repaired because it was structurally irrelevant and Johanna did not spend energy on the irrelevant. Everything is in place. Everything is what it has always been — the room, the ceiling, the darkness, the muffled sound of the city outside.

You reach toward the bedside table without turning on the light, out of instinct, out of the same instinct that made you look at your hands this morning.

Your fingers find something.

Not paper. Not your phone or the glass of water or any of the objects that should be there. Something with the texture of something natural but that has no business being on a bedside table in a London flat — soft in a way that is not fabric, with a faint resistance when your fingers press against it that recalls something structured but fragile, like something designed for flight rather than for static touch.

You turn on the light.

A feather.

Black, long, with the specific sheen of certain birds’ feathers that light treats differently from other surfaces — with a shine that is not quite iridescence but something deeper, more shifting, as if the black you see depends on the angle from which you look at it and from other angles there are other blacks, darker or deeper blacks, blacks that have no name in the spectrum your experience has given you for naming colors.

There was no feather here when you fell asleep.

You hold it. It has weight — more weight than a feather of this size should have, the weight of something that comes from a place where matter obeys other rules and keeps those other rules even here, even in the world that obeys gravity and geometry and all the agreements matter makes with itself on this side.

You think about his eyes. You think about leave said with the conviction of someone who does not repeat instructions. You think about the for now you set aside to examine later and that now, with the feather in your hand and your heart still beating faster than normal, you examine with the lucidity of someone awake at three in the morning with nowhere to put what has just happened.

On the third night, you know with a certainty that does not require verification, you are going back.

Not because you want to. Not exactly because you do not want to, either. But because there is something in that space vibrating on the same frequency as the vibration in your bones, and that is information the Constantines do not discard, even if they do not yet know what to do with it. There is something in that realm that recognizes something in you, and that too is information, and information is gathered before it is evaluated because Johanna was right about that, as about almost everything methodological: first you gather, then you classify, then you act.

You are still in the gathering phase. You look at the feather for a moment longer. Then you place it on the bedside table, reach out in the dark, and turn off the light.

Outside, London goes on. The river goes on. The city that never quite sleeps makes its three a.m. noises — the garbage truck on some nearby street, the distant siren drawing closer and then farther away, the steady low sound of a city breathing.

The vibration in your bones breathes with it.

On the third night, he is already waiting.

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yooooo lets goooo 🤑🤑 also thats a good idea... I should... im going to do 360s while killing mobs and be super cool