Chapter Text
There is a price that comes with immortality.
A sense of age that'll never truly come; a lingering knowledge that those you may possibly have affection for will soon melt away at their skin and will become no more–nothing more than a memory that you may eventually forget, clouded over with someone else–someone else who is entirely as temporary as them.
Nightmare isn’t one to be frivolous with affections. He didn’t dance and find amusement in mortals–and in a way, he thinks he never has; even when his bones were pearl white and his
expression was worn as sweetly as he could muster. He clamored in collapsing AUs–their negativity was delicious and allowed himself that pleasantry.
It had only been recently that he learned a new kind of pleasure–one he had always known of course, but never one he himself had thought to indulge in. It felt too intimate. Too standard; too positive.
Of course, he thinks Dream didn’t indulge in such a pleasure either. Mingling with mortals with sweetness and purity clinging to him; and then he would turn around and mouth off to Nightmare–but even Dream wouldn’t dare stoop to such.
In a way, perhaps that's why Nightmare began to coil his tentacles too tightly around one of his subordinates' thighs; allowed it to slip ever so slightly in places it shouldn’t–and allowed his subordinate to squirm with their primal and mortal desires, and offered them the luxury of only
knowingly staring and not speaking it allowed.
Anything Dream squirmed and flushed and refused at—
Nightmare became drunk on.
A power he held over Dream was superiority, and that would be enough for him to willingly lose some sense of distance he had with mortals.