Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hob visits Eleanor’s grave, sometimes.

It’s a peaceful, well-tended plot in an otherwise neglected part of the cemetery; people want to believe that the dead are never forgotten, but collectively people also have rather short memories. Hob has discovered that, for most, “gone but not forgotten” might hold true for a few generations at best. Eleanor, his beloved wife, was survived, according to the official records anyway, only by a sister in Yorkshire who died not long after her of some illness easily treated today. No living descendants— Just a widower who eventually vanished, which was far easier to do back then.

He leaves flowers by her headstone. Daffodils—her favorite. Seems like the least he can do. Eleanor had married a man with whom she believed she would one day be reunited in Heaven, and he can’t ever give her that.

He hopes that she’s with Robin and their other child; fuck what the Church used to think about unbaptized stillborn babies ending up in Limbo, which always sounded so dull, worse than Hell, in his opinion.

And, hey, maybe she met someone new and found love up there, wherever she is. Probably it says a lot about Hob that his personal idea of Heaven is to just—keep living, but elsewhere.

Hob genuinely hopes his Eleanor is happy.

He hopes she would want him to be happy, too.

Hob is not ashamed to admit to the loneliness that made itself a permanent home in his heart centuries ago. If it hurts, most of the time it’s a gentle ache, like a cat kneading its claws into his chest.

It isn’t that he never sees anyone; that’s not true. He has had countless acquaintances, comrades-in-arms, friends, lovers. Wonderful people, all. Truly, he is grateful for the chance to know them.

It’s just that no one really knows him.

No one lives long enough.

Well. Almost no one.

In a way, he has known his mysterious stranger for hundreds of years but, perhaps in a truer way, it’s only been a handful of days. Scattered hours of drinking, him talking incessantly and the stranger usually content to listen. Probably it says a lot about Hob that his best and oldest friend is a being of unknown origin and unknowable power who, after all this time, has never deigned to offer any personal details about himself, even his name.

Of course, Hob stopped asking after a while, hadn’t he? Maybe he’d just known a lost cause when he saw one. His friend always was so damn cryptic whenever he did answer a question. Or maybe it was Hob, always so caught up in his own life experiences—his excitement or boasting or grief. It must take a certain degree of selfishness to wish for immortality in the first place, he supposes. Still, he finds himself anticipating those centennial chats with a quiet, expectant joy. Hob doesn’t know when he started marking time by them, the way other people might birthdays or anniversaries.

Next time, he tells himself, he will ask. He will muster his courage and reach out a bit. Something like, “How have you been?” or perhaps, “You know, we could do this more often, if you’d like.”

Because it doesn’t matter who or what his friend is. Hob suspects that he has been much lonelier, and for much longer, than he could possibly imagine.

It all falls apart.

Sitting in the same pub he’s come to for centuries, an empty chair where his friend should be, Hob feels unmoored.

No. No, he feels—hollowed out. Torn down. Like The White Horse will be when the wrecking ball and the excavators roll in to clear this land and build shiny new flats no working-class Londoner in this area can even fucking afford, all so some wealthy property developer somewhere can make a profit. Rage flares inside him. He feels kindship with those ghosts in films who torment unsuspecting families when the house they haunt is disturbed. Don’t they realize what this means for him? What they’re taking away? Of course they don’t. The relentless steamroller of gentrification stops for no immortal man.

Things change; they never stop changing, and he loves that. Yet no matter how far he goes, or how long he stays away, he inevitably returns to England where his deepest roots are planted. Something in the human DNA craves consistency, the safety of a familiar place. For most people that's home, but this— This is a historic pub. His history. Sure, it had burnt down, been rebuilt from the ground up, renovated, damaged in the Blitz, repaired and sold and redecorated and renamed God knows how many times—but it was always here, every century, when they needed it. His friend was—

Fuck.

“I met him here. We... What am I supposed to do now? Where do I go?”

Hob is embarrassed to find himself on the verge of tears, though not overly so, because he’s been reading about unlearning toxic masculinity and accepts that it is okay to cry, that it isn’t a sign of weakness. There are a lot of things he’s had to unlearn throughout his long life.

The bartender gives him a sympathetic look. Bartenders are kinder than they used to be.

“Plenty more old pubs in London,” he offers as consolation. “More friends, too, you know.”

He feels like he’s falling through time. Like he’s a lost child. The two constants in his world—his friend and this place—are slipping away. Are already gone.

It’s pathetic. Desperate. He knows it is. His fr—the stranger didn’t turn up at all in 1989 or since. Hob ought to take the hint; he knows he should. A crystal-clear rejection of his friendship. Message received. But Hob Gadling didn’t survive plague and war, weather years of hardships and heartbreak and Thatcher-era Britain, without a profound sense of stubbornness about him.

Unyielding hope, however foolish it seemed sometimes, got him here. It’s why he’s still alive.

His friend used to look at him with such surprise and wonder during their earlier meetings, like he couldn’t fathom the drive simply to keep going for its own sake, no matter what. Part of Hob always wanted to ask him, “What about you? What’ve you got to live for?”

He knows now, judging by the disaster of their last conversation, that doing so probably wouldn’t have gone too well. Maybe he will ask next time anyway. Because there will be a next time.

So, Hob continues to live his life as he chooses, as per their ancient arrangement, which he assumes is still on considering he isn’t aging or a corpse. He campaigns vehemently to save The White Horse, and when that fails he buys a pub nearby—calls it The New Inn. He waits, confident that he can be at least as patient as his dear old friend is petty, if not more so.

He has all the time in the world.

It’s amazing the things they have words to describe nowadays. Terms for gender, sexuality, so many different kinds of attraction—and the flags! There are ways of being and loving that a certain hack playwright could never have dreamt of.

Hob has seen people jailed or worse for preferring the company of their own gender. He is ashamed now that he never did more to fight against that, or any, prejudice. It was so much easier to make excuses, to love Eleanor with his whole heart and tell himself that the attraction he might feel toward other men as well was inconsequential, to be shed and discarded along with his old names and lives.

Some people don’t accept themselves and come out for decades. The queer community makes space for that sort of thing. For him, it just took a few centuries. Better late than never, right?

He is perpetually something of an outsider by necessity, but it’s truly heartening to watch the community grow and flourish over time despite all the hatred and ignorance. And cowards like him. Feels nice to know that there’s an identity Hob can always claim regardless of who he currently is on paper. There is a place for him, even if he doesn’t always feel worthy of it.

Throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s, Hob occasionally goes to darkened goth clubs, from Slimelight and The Batcave to lesser-known spots. They aren’t really his scene at all, if he ever had one. Trends move so fast; disco passed him by entirely in the ‘70s. At the clubs, he picks up skinny, black-clad men with makeup and messy hair and he brings them back to his flat for the night. He never asks for their names. Which—yeah, okay, even Freud could work that one out. Displacement or projection or whatever. Maybe Hob has a type. Maybe he has a little unrequited crush spanning the past six hundred years. What of it?

Sometimes they have sex. More often, though, they just drink and talk for a while until the stray cat called Loneliness curls up to sleep in the back of his mind, content for now.

“I’m immortal,” he tells them sometimes, just to feel the weight of it on his tongue, to tell another living soul.

This confession is typically met with an incredulous eyeroll, less frequently a wide-eyed gasp of, “Me too!” (Yeah, sure you are) or an offer to drink their blood, which is something he is decidedly not interested in, sexually or otherwise. He saw more than enough blood as a soldier. And he is not, unlike his wayward old friend, potentially some kind of vampire.

He genuinely hopes his friend is safe and happy, wherever he might be, even if he's still angry at Hob. That he's somewhere smiling those barely-there smiles of his; Hob always used to count each one a little victory. Hopes that he has someone to talk to. Reasons to go on.

When his oldest friend finally walks into The New Inn on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, Hob feels— It’s like he couldn't breathe, like he’s been holding his breath for 133 years, and now his lungs fill with air.

There are so many things he wants to say.

Where have you been?

Are you okay?

Does this mean we are friends?

I’m sorry.

I missed you.

He says, “You’re late.”

And his friend smiles.

“Don’t you miss me? Us?” asks Eleanor, one hand resting on the curve of her heavily pregnant belly. “Robin and the little one.”

“Of course I do,” he says.

“Yet you refuse to die,” she spits. “If only I had known the coward I married. All that time you knew you would outlive us, and never—not once—did you attempt to beseech Death on your own family’s behalf. You care only for yourself. We are dead because of you.”

“What? No— El, I love you! And the children.”

“But you love another, don’t you."

Her eyes blaze like fire. Their surroundings blur and run together like watercolor, although perhaps that is the tears. Some war-torn trench made from a patchwork of memories, most likely. With startling clarity, he realizes it; this is a nightmare.

“Enough!”

The ground shakes with the force of the voice, and Hob falls to his knees. He watches as his friend—Dream of the Endless, Morpheus, it’s still so strange to have a name to put the familiar face after all these centuries—is suddenly here and advancing toward Eleanor with steely determination, long black coat billowing.

“You dare,” he says, low and dangerous. "He is my guest."

“I was merely—”

"No harm will come to Robert Gadling while he is in the Dreaming. Go near him ever again and I shall unmake you.”

“My Lor—”

“Leave us.”

With a wave of Dream’s hand, the creature impersonating Eleanor disappears in a cloud of sand. Sure, okay, why not.

Hob closes his eyes.

Never hss he had a nightmare so vivid before.

When he opens his eyes again, Dream is crouched down in front of him.

“...Fancy meeting you here,” Hob says, gathering himself. A hysterical laugh bubbles up from his throat and his friend regards him with an expression of deep concern.

Dream's eyes are like stars.

“I apologize for the deplorable conduct of my subjects. Some have been discontented since my return. This was likely a form of...protest.”

Hob nods. Mhm. Those certainly are words.

“That. That wasn’t really Eleanor.”

“No,” Dream confirms, not unkindly.

“Why— You created that.” Statements often got him further with Dream than questions.

“Nightmares exist to confront dreamers with their deepest fears. Hope untested is no hope at all.”

“And life without death is nothing? Yeah, no. Respectfully, fuck that,” Hob snaps, suddenly filled with a directionless anger. “Why’d you stop her, then?”

Dream averts his gaze.

There is a long silence, then. It’s not quite the companionable quiet of two old mates at the pub. Usually Hob would start talking, but his thoughts are still scattered somewhere on the ground around him—ground which now, he notes, is a lush green field. So, he waits for Dream to say something more.

He’s good at waiting.

An expert, one could say.

Then, at last—

“I was married. We had a son.”

It takes him a moment to process that Dream has actually spoken, so unexpected are those seven words in that order from his old friend. Was that English? Is this real? Or a conjuration of Hob’s own guilt-ridden psyche after all?

“Oh,” Hob replies, because what do you say to that? He doesn't know. No one he's ever told about losing his wife and children seemed to know, either.

And then his brain catches up.

Was. Had. Past tense. He could ask, push his luck by prying for more details—God knows he’s curious. But the glacial pace of their relationship thus far urges him to bide his time. Dream has given Hob knowledge of himself today which possibly no other human may possess. So, he doesn’t ask any questions, and he doesn’t really need to; the pain in his friend’s voice is like a mirror.

“I didn’t wish to cause you any further undue suffering on my account,” Dream says, maybe to clarify his reasons for intervening. Or just change the subject.

“...Yeah. I know you wouldn’t. Thank you.”

The Lord of Dreams stands and offers a slender hand to help him to his feet, which he accepts. The hand is cold. Is it like that in the waking world, too? He wants to find out.

Dream withdraws as if to leave.

“Don’t go,” Hob blurts out. God! Get it together, he admonishes himself.

He could wait another hundred years. He knows he's capable of that. But he hopes he doesn’t have to.

“It’s not I who must depart,” Dream tells him. “You’re waking up now. I shall see you soon, Hob Gadling.”

And he does.

Chapter Text

True to his word, Dream starts to visit him more frequently in the waking world, never in his dreams. Not always at The New Inn, either. Sometimes he just appears at his work in the middle of a lecture. Sometimes they go back to Hob’s flat for a drink which is—surreal, to say the least. He doesn’t know exactly what caused this sudden shift. Or maybe he does; it’s what friends do, after all.

It is all he's ever wanted for centuries. Even so... Dream rules a whole realm. The Dreaming. It's important to him, part of him, intrinsic to who he is. Why, then, is he spending time here with someone who is, despite his immortality, comparatively rather boring on a day-to-day basis?

Hob blinks and massages his temples to stave off the headache that always seems to accompany staring at a screen for too long. Humans weren't meant for this.

Wait— Shit. Did his friend say something?

"Sorry?"

"What is that?" Dream repeats. He is scrutinizing Hob's laptop over the rim of his untouched Americano.

Oh, no.

It isn't an immortal thing. Hob prides himself on embracing change and doing his best to stay on the cutting-edge of technological advancement, a task which has become increasingly difficult in the 21st century. He half-remembers being practically giddy about handkerchiefs and chimneys, for Christ's sake. Airplanes and iPhones would have given his younger self a heart attack. Unlike him, though, the King of Dreams apparently doesn't even try to keep up with the modern world except to update his dark wardrobe. Absolute luddite, his best friend is.

Still, Dream never fails to ask about the inventions and innovations he'd missed during the previous hundred years. Maybe because he knows Hob loves this stuff, marvels at it all with a similar pride and wonder Dream must feel toward his creations. But after Hob provides a lengthy explanation of the television or the electric kettle or whatever, Dream will declare, again without fail, that he doesn't really see the point. And Hob will once again remind him that not everyone has access to infinite magic sand and their own personal universe.

"Dreams made this possible, you know," he'll say sometimes, just to shut him up.

Not that Hob Gadling is personally responsible for great feats of achievement like solar power or the polio vaccine, or much of anything, obviously. But he is human. He has grown and seen humanity grow for hundreds of years. Hob watched the moon landing on telly in 1969 along with the rest of the world, and thought, A giant leap for mankind. Yeah. We did that.

Then he’d thought, I can’t wait to tell him!

Of course, now any smug bastard with billions in disposable income can just pop to the moon and back for a quick day trip while countless workers struggle to make ends meet, many of whom die each year. So it goes. From the 1300s to the present, rich fuckers never change.

Anyway. The point is, Hob is dreading this. He really does have work to do.

"My laptop," he sighs.

His friend gives him one of those looks that is probably meant to be intimidating, but just reminds him of a haughty black cat.

"I do know what a personal computer is, Hob Gadling."

Yeah, you do, thinks Hob, Since like last week.

"I've seen such in dreams," he continues. "I was referring to this."

Here, with one slim finger, he indicates a sticker on the laptop.

Oh.

That.

Now he is dreading this conversation for an entirely different reason.

"It's a sticker."

It had been a gift from one of his students at the end of the semester—left on his desk along with a note thanking him for being a cool teacher and, in their words, a bicon, whatever that was.

It feels good to make a positive difference. Hob has made innumerable mistakes in his deathless life. Done unforgivable things he can't ever undo. Stolen, hurt, killed, gone to war in the name of faceless kings and soulless governments. Turned away when he should have fought injustices, because the people involved weren't people to him. He has stripped others of their humanity. He will forever be haunted by nightmares of his participation in the slave trade, and he wouldn't want Dream to take those away; he needs to carry that with him so he always remembers to do better.

If Death weighs each heart against a feather, he knows his would be found wanting. Still, he tries every day to tip the scale back a little bit more. Not out of fear; he's already centuries late for whatever hellish punishment may await him. He does it because it's the right thing.

Karma, it seems, has brought him to this moment here and now, his old friend peering at a sticker which reads "I Put The B In LGBTQ" and features a grinning cartoon bee rendered in pink, purple, and blue.

"Yes. What does it mean to you?"

There are worse times and places to come out to your old friend/long-time crush than Friday afternoon in a Starbucks—which happens to be closer to the school than The New Inn because everything is closer to a Starbucks than anything else. And he really should be marking essays, so why not?

"I'm bisexual," Hob says.

Dream blinks at him. Says nothing for a while.

"And that is...not typical," Dream states, or maybe asks. Hob can't tell if it's acknowledgement or query. He was married at some point, right? And potentially has access to everyone's dreams? Surely not all of this is a complete mystery to him.

They are two immortals in a coffee shop. What about his existence has ever been typical?

"Uh. No. I mean, more than it used to be, I guess, but. Not really."

Dream stares, his eyes fathomless and unreadable.

"It means I experience romantic and sexual attraction to men and women. And. Others," he goes on haltingly, somewhat detached. He's not sure if he should explain the broad and beautifully complex spectrum of human gender just yet.

"Others," his friend repeats. He again doesn't know if it's a question or not.

"Yeah. Like, um..."

Like you, he thinks unbidden. Doesn't dare say.

Dream generally presents as male, answers to he/him pronouns, but do the Endless even have a concept of sex or gender? Was that given to him like his role weaving and watching over the world's dreams, innate and unquestioned, or did he choose it?

Regardless, Hob tries not to think of the men he's taken to his bed over the years entirely because they bore a passing resemblance to this man—entity, deity, whatever—sitting across from him.

Oh, God—Dream can't read minds, can he? If he can, he's thus far been considerably more polite about it than Hob thought him capable.

He prays for death, even so.

"And these other letters. What do they mean?"

Hob is so grateful for this new line of questioning; he could kiss him. Don't think about that!

Which is how he ends up not getting anything productive done at all, because he has to give an anthropomorphic personification a crash course in human gender and sexuality (plus Internet Memes 101) and that's— It's fine, really. Hob is a history teacher. He can give an impromptu lecture. Some of his rants about historical inaccuracies in the articles and textbooks he's forced to assign are legendary among the students, in fact.

By the end of it, though, Hob seriously needs another latte.

“Thank you. You have given me much to consider,” Dream says at length.

Nothing more on the subject is said that day.

Hob still dreams, of course. He has the occasional nightmare as well. None feature Eleanor, or any other lost love. Instead, it’s fragments of memories from the wars; he wakes up smelling blood and gunpowder. Or it’s the years he spent on the streets, numb with cold, hunger like knives in his stomach. He has no idea what lessons he’s meant to be gleaning from these particular nightmares. He could ask the Dream King himself, he supposes, but that feels like cheating, and he is already cheating death; unwise to push his luck beyond that.

The thing is, Hob considers himself to be an observant person. So it hasn’t escaped his notice that Dream seems a little worse for wear—the tired eyes, the way he goes quiet and withdrawn whenever Hob attempts to ask about how he’d spent his time before or after their missed appointment. Hob doesn't think he's ever seen the man eat before, but his always-thin frame now appears closer to emaciated under his black clothes. And, hey, Hob isn’t one to judge. God knows he’s had his share of rough years. Rough centuries, even. Taken together, though, it all paints a disturbingly familiar picture.

He recalls lying in field hospitals or convalescent homes, his lungs burning from mustard gas. Dead-eyed doctors asking him, cold and clinical, about nightmares. About hopelessness. If he felt disconnected from people. If he'd thought about ending his life. Hob would think of his old stranger in those moments before he'd smile, willing the tremor in his hands to cease, and reply, rote, that he had not.

Eventually he'd given up soldiering for good. Criminal activity, as well, when the risk became too great; a long stint in prison or, even worse, an execution, would raise too many questions. Besides, scamming old ladies out of their pensions or selling drugs online holds no appeal for him. He no longer remembers why banditry ever did. Perhaps he just cares more about otber people than easy money, now. Wealth, he'd learnt the hard way, is fickle.

Hob had adapted. Tried his hand at higher education instead. Why not? Scholarly pursuits were once an avenue open mostly to the third sons of minor lords, but times change. Choices became abundant. He'd studied history, of course, but also dabbled in astronomy, economics, biology, philosophy, business administration, literature (where his essay about Will bloody Shakespeare was found to be "passionately written but poorly supported") and more.

Psychology class is where he'd discovered that an old monster he once wrestled which used to have many names—shell shock, combat neurosis, battle fatigue—now has just one: PTSD.

It looks like perhaps Dream has encountered the monster, too.

One evening at his flat, a little brave and more than a little drunk, he decides he'll have to be the one to bring it up.

“Can I say something, my friend? And you promise you won’t run away in a huff?”

Dream opens his mouth and then, seeming to think better of it, he simply nods.

“Good!” He clears his throat. “I’m worried about you. I think...maybe something happened, since 1889, you know? You’ve basically never talked about yourself as long as I’ve known you, which—is totally fine. Your choice. But we’re friends, right, and I just want to know if you’re okay. And if not, tell me how I can help?”

"There is nothing you could do," Dream replies. Not okay, then. “But to offer your aid despite how poorly I've treated you... You are kind, Hob. A good friend."

Well, that’s something he’s never been accused of before. Witchcraft? Yes. Kindness? No. He is self-centered to the bones of him. Not a good man, not by half. But he's trying to be.

“So. Do you want to talk about it?”

Dream is quiet for a long time. Pale fingers absently trace patterns along the side of his wine glass.

"I had every intention of meeting you at the tavern in 1989, as per our agreement. However, I was...summoned to a basement against my will, magically bound, and confined in a cage of glass and iron."

And that's—

Not what he had been expecting to hear at all.

He'd assumed Dream stayed away to prove his lack of loneliness, that he had no need of companionship. Now he wishes that were true.

"For how long?"

"A hundred years, give or take." This he says, as if Hob had asked him for his opinion on the weather.

One hundred years. More than an entire average human lifetime. And a significant portion of his own. He feels sick.

He doesn't have to ask why. Dream is immensely powerful. There must be no shortage of people desperate or foolish enough to exploit that power for personal gain; Lady Constantine comes to mind. Humanity has never needed a good reason to cage someone, anyway, even other humans. Which Dream isn't. So easy to justify, if you've a mind to.

“Fuck... Sounds like hell."

"No. I've been to Lucifer's domain recently." Dream smiles wryly, but his voice is bitter. "Unlike Hell, there was no air within my prison."

Hob absorbs the fact that Hell is apparently an actual physical place ruled by a real devil, and files it away for his inner peasant to panic about later. Dream is saying Hell would have been an improvement. Jesus Christ.

He can't help but imagine it. His old friend, trapped like a butterfly in a jar. Suffocating. Parched and starving. Was he alone there? Or subjected to the constant scrutiny of unfriendly eyes? If only he'd known, he could've... something. He should have looked for him. He should have tried, somehow. One more regret. But this isn't about Hob.

No oxygen. He knows how it feels to drown and keep drowning. Hob wonders, with growing horror, what else his captors deprived him of.

Gripped by an overwhelming urge to be of some use, he asks, "Are you hungry?"

Dream's brows raise slightly in surprise. "I don't require food to sustain myself."

Dodging the question, as ever.

"Neither do I, anymore. I won't die if I don't eat, but it's a lot better if I do. My body still wants it. Is it like that for you?"

A pause.

"It has been a long time," his friend says carefully.

Hob stands and walks to his small kitchen with purpose. He can't fix any of this. Can't go back in time and rescue him or warn him. What he can do, right now, is microwave a Sainsbury's ready-meal curry. Or would something simple be better? A smoothie? Toast? During their meeting in 1689, he remembers being so consumed by ravenous hunger after too long with too little, devouring as much food as he could before his friend left and Hob got kicked out of the inn again. He'd been miserably sick after. That sort of thing can be fatal as starving, if you're not immortal.

Something occurs to him.

"Would it be better if I went to sleep and dreamt up a feast for you?"

No answer. Curry it is, then. He puts the kettle on, too, for good measure.

Tentatively at first, and possibly just to humor him, Dream eats all of it down to the last grain of rice. Hob offers to get him something else, anything he wants—delivery apps really are a wonder of the modern age albeit overpriced—but he politely yet firmly declines more food.

Now, he regards the godlike being curled up on his settee beside him, wine traded out for a cup of cooling tea he probably won't drink. Hob wonders if he gets cold. Over his coat, which he'd refused to remove, a spectacularly ugly afghan Hob had bought as a laugh in the 1960s is draped around his thin shoulders like a cape. And he is a king, of sorts. Dream holds himself in a regal manner, even like this.

"The Queen stayed at my house," Hob remembers telling him once long ago, eager to impress the inscrutable man, to keep his attention for every second he could.

"Why didn’t you tell me sooner? About where you were?”

He'd apologized for his long absence that day at The New Inn, although not given any explanation. Hob has more questions, naturally, but recognizes that this isn't the time.

“I didn't want to burden you,” Dream murmurs. He sounds exhausted. Hob has no clue if the anthropomorphic personification of dreams even can sleep, but he looks like he might need it.

"Pain shared is pain halved, right? At least I think that's how the saying goes."

He doesn't respond for a moment. Hob is all right with silence. He waits. Sips his wine—a lovely 1989 vintage. Life's got a funny way of coming full circle, doesn't it?

"You sound just like her when you speak that way," Dream says softly.

"Who?"

"Calliope."

He offers no more than that. Should the name mean something to Hob? It's been a while since he brushed up on the Greek classics, to be fair. Seemed a bit rude to just start Googling Morpheus' name, considering the man in question had waited so long to give even that, and doesn't know what Google is.

He settles on, "Bet she's a smart woman, then."

"Very," his friend agrees, "She left me."

He isn't sure if that's a complete non-sequitur or a self-deprecating joke. The rhythm is all wrong if it's meant to be the latter.

"Ah. Sorry to hear that, mate. Her loss."

What? Why would he say that? Fortunately, Dream keeps talking as if he hadn’t heard. His eyes are dark and unfocused, faraway.

"She blamed me, and not without cause. We were both so different after..."

Dream doesn't fill in the blank. Doesn't have to. "I was married," he'd confided in the Dreaming. "We had a son."

Hob once read somewhere that a vast majority of marriages end following the death of a child. He'd wondered if he and Eleanor would have beat those grim odds if they had the chance. Probably. Divorce wasn't really an option back then.

"You were grieving," Hob says, aware enough to toe the line between gentle and pitying.

"You need not concern yourself, Hob Gadling. It was a very long time ago. And I believe she has found a measure of peace within herself, even amidst great suffering."

He sounds genuinely happy for her. Hob understands; knows how it feels to want the best for someone you once loved dearly.

"What about you?" he wants to ask.

Fuck it.

"What about you?"

Dream gives him a faint smile. "A work in progress, one could say."

Well, he'll drink to that.

He takes a breath and reaches out. Places a comforting hand on his friend’s arm. Dream's muscles immediately grow tense beneath his fingertips. He swears he can see the mental walls rising up behind his eyes again, and worries he miscalculated. He knows, logically, that Dream is unlikely to get upset and run off. He’s changed; they both have. But part of Hob, the same part that is still standing in the rain outside their old pub in 1889, feels a little afraid he might.

Hob waits, like he always does.

Slowly, very slowly, Dream relaxes. Then leans into the touch—practically lists like a ship until he's pressed against Hob's side. Neither of them speak, or move, for a long time. Hob isn't even certain he's breathing.

And—

They are officially in uncharted waters, now.

Chapter Text

Hob wakes from a dreamless sleep. His morning is also Dreamless, in fact, no trace of him left but a cold cup of tea on the table and a thin layer of sand on the couch cushion beside him.

Hob makes coffee. He showers. Eats eggs and toast for breakfast. Goes to work and stares blankly through meetings and office hours. He goes home. Tries not to think about the feeling of soft black hair against his neck.

The day passes.

Then another.

A week.

Two weeks.

A month.

And on and on, with no word from Dream for eight months. Hob tries not to worry about him or feel bereft—fails on both counts.

He knows the steps of this dance by heart.

Through all of this, Hob waits, in a holding pattern of sorts. He goes to work. He goes home. He goes to the pub. He goes to therapy.

Hob first tried therapy back when that meant lying on a couch while a psychoanalyst would pick apart one's subconscious, deriving meaning in what, to Hob, felt like scattered nonsense. It hadn't been a good fit for him. Whatever secrets he might have hidden away from himself in his dreams were best left buried, he’d decided.

He tries again throughout the years, and has been told on more than one occasion by a so-called mental health professional that he doesn't look old enough to have been through so much trauma. That he is remarkably resilient. "You don't know the half of it," he'd say with a smile.

His current counselor has never said something like that. While the timelines and the details of which wars he'd fought in may need to be altered, the core of everything he's shared in their sessions remains as true as he can make it. He had been a soldier, and now he isn't. He had been a husband and a father once, and now he isn't. He has some trouble getting close to people because there are parts of himself they simply can't understand. His longest and most enduring connection on this Earth is with a man Hob still barely understands.

His therapist encourages him to get out more and talk to people—to get out of his head, she means; he can read between the lines—so Hob picks up hobbies, old and new. Starts relearning Japanese and bookbinding and axe-throwing. He’s never been particularly artistic, but he gives poetry and photography a go anyway, having resolved long ago to live by the creed that he’ll try anything once, a practice which has led him astray less often than one might expect. Photography has come so far as a medium since the days of mercury and silver chloride.

He also spends much more time at The New Inn, either alone or with his colleagues, which is how he learns that one of the bartenders is having trouble finding homes for a litter of kittens. Hob hasn't generally ever been one for pets, but on a whim he agrees to take one in. She is a menace—all black with the disposition of a rebellious princess. Hob almost immediately decides that he would die for her, if such a thing were possible.

He gets on with his life.

There is a post-it note stuck to his door one morning. Written on it is a date, a time, and the address of a café he's walked past many times but never entered.

With one notable exception, Hob isn't actually in the habit of meeting with mysterious unnamed strangers, even in public places. Sound advice he heeded years ago tells him that is a good way to end up hurt or captured. He wonders briefly if this could be some sort of test from Dream; it’s vague and slightly ominous enough to be the case, but it doesn’t seem like him to bother with that. Whoever left the note clearly knows where he lives already. If they intended to do him harm, there are easier ways.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but people always forget satisfaction brought it back.

Which is how Hob finds himself, on the specified Sunday morning, waiting at a table in a quiet corner of the café.

He ignores the gut-sinking feeling of disappointment when, instead of Dream's familiar elegant visage, a woman he doesn’t recognize approaches his table and sits down across from him.

“You got my note,” she says. “How have you been, Robert? Or is it Hob?”

“Hob. I—I’m good, I suppose. Have we met?”

"Not formally, no. I'm Dream's elder sister."

It's a surprise, but perhaps it shouldn't be. Dream had a wife and son. Why not siblings? It doesn't quite fit the image of him Hob had constructed in his mind all those centuries ago, a man who likely had no significant attachments or close blood ties, and who, beneath his aloof façade, so clearly ached with the same shared loneliness. Maybe Hob had been wrong after all, as he has been about so many things.

Sister or not, though, Dream is also the sort of person to flee from the very idea of friendship.

"I'm Death," the woman says, with a reassuring smile.

And, just like that, any sense of normalcy somehow still remaining promptly leaves the room.

"You..."

Language seems to have fled, too.

"Of the Endless. Hasn't he mentioned me?"

Hob almost says that he never mentions anyone at all, but then again— Dream's sonorous voice, echoing across the centuries, "Do you still wish to live?"

"Um. Yeah. Sort of."

"I'm the one who gave you your gift, of course. Dream bet you wouldn't last nearly this long. Well done!"

“...It was a wager?"

Death nods.

The waiter comes by to take their orders. Hob, distracted and no longer having much of an appetite, just gets coffee. Death goes for the waffles.

“I love your hair!” she adds.

“Oh, thank you! Your necklace is beautiful.” The waiter smiles, self-consciously tucking a strand of pink hair behind their ear. He wonders, almost as an afterthought, if they're going to die today. "I’ll be right back with your drinks."

“I’m just an experiment, then,” Hob says, resuming his existential crisis once they’re alone. “A fucking case study.”

"Only at first," she explains. "Dream...couldn't see the point."

"In what? Me?"

"In anything." Her expression turns sad for a moment—regretful, maybe. Whatever else she is, she looks like a big sister. "I thought he could use a new perspective, perhaps even a friend. Then there you were, Hob, the perfect recipient for an all you can eat coupon to the buffet of life. And you've been good for him. Like Destiny or the Fates had a hand in it."

Hob quickly updates his mental list of things he didn't think were real but apparently are, then realizes—

"Oh my God, I called death stupid and you were right there! I am so sorry."

She laughs. "Do you honestly think you're the first human ever to be unkind about my gift? I promise I don't take it personally. The 1300s were...a busy time for me."

He can imagine. Doesn't have to, really. The Black Death wiped out nearly half of London. It had felt like that, anyway.

"My mum died, not long before that night at The White Horse," Hob finds himself telling her. Doesn’t know why he says it. Plague swept through their small village for years, but it had been the winter fever—pneumonia, they would call it some centuries later—which took his mother gently in the end.

"I know," Death replies, sympathetic, genuine. "I remember everyone."

The irony, he supposes, is that Hob does not remember his own mother. When he casts his mind back to the beginning of his long life, he unearths only vague impressions of her—warmth, the smell of lavender, rosary beads made of bone. He isn't even sure if these sparse recollections are accurate. Sometimes he thinks he might need an archaeologist more than a therapist. Forgetting pain allows people to keep moving forward, but it's so easy to forget everything else, too. Human memory is fallible, prone to mangling details and washing away entire stretches of time like water erodes stone. And Hob, while blessed with the many benefits of immortality, is still very much human.

"You okay?"

He doesn't have a chance to reply, because at that moment a bird swoops down out of nowhere and lands on the table. Strange, even by London standards, but none of the other patrons seem to notice the bird. A raven? Hob had briefly taken up birdwatching in the early 20th century during a spell of boredom. Then he'd taken up arms in the Great War. Should have stuck with identifying birds, really.

Before he can shoo it away, Death greets the raven by name.

“There you are! Hi, Matthew."

"Makes sense for Death to have a raven, I suppose,” Hob says, determined to roll with all of the weird bullshit life sends his way. The true price of immortality. The only way to stay sane.

"Nevermore," says the raven, deadpan. Which—honestly isn't the weirdest part of this situation, okay, not at all. Hob once saw a video on Tiktok of a raven trained to mimic human speech, so a talking raven at his breakfast with Death hardly even seems worth noting.

"Oh, he isn't one of mine," Death explains cheerfully. "I've got a couple goldfish, though."

"I work for Lord Morpheus," the bird tells him. "His eyes and ears in the Waking, I guess."

That is not mimicry. Okay. Yep.

"You guess?"

"I was as human as you. Died in my sleep and woke up with wings. Shit happens."

Hob grins, gesturing to himself. "Got drunk and woke up immortal." 

"Wow! Lucky bastard."

"Thanks. So you just...became a bird? No choice in the matter?"

It doesn't sit right with him, if so. It's a poor thing indeed for one man to enslave another, as Dream himself said.

"Oh, yeah, I agreed," says Matthew. "Didn't fully know what I was signing up for. But I mean, if it's between this and...Hell, probably, or whatever's next, then no fucking contest. I don't know if that's how it is for everybody?" The raven turns his beady eyes to Death for confirmation.

"No human is claimed against their will," she says. An odd thing for her to say, given that taking people against their will or not is basically Death's entire job description.

Hob thinks of that fateful meeting in 1389 when he, a nobody who could neither read nor write, drunkenly struck a deal—the terms of which he barely knew and would guess at for the next hundred years—not really believing the posh stranger actually had the ability to grant such a boon. Turns out he didn’t. But Hob had been given a choice, many choices since then, every time Dream asked if he still wanted to live. Were he less lucky, it could have been the devil in the tavern that night.

The pink-haired waiter returns with coffee and food. They don’t appear to notice Matthew perched on the table either. Might just be too polite or underpaid to say anything, though.

"Can we please bring this meeting to order, gentlemen?" Death requests.

"Yes, ma'am!" The raven raises a feathery wing in salute. "The boss lady sends her regards, by the way. She's too busy helping everyone escape the, uh, flood zones."

"Lucienne should take a holiday."

"You serious? The Dreaming would literally fall apart without her."

"Sorry, hello, Hob here, still here—What meeting?"

He thinks, distantly, that he should probably be more afraid of Death. But he’s lasted this long, and her smile is warm and friendly.

“An emergency meeting of the People Who Love And Put Up With Dream Club."

"I thought we agreed it's more like a taskforce?" Matthew adds.

"Oh, yes! The People Who Love And Put Up With Dream Taskforce."

"...Okay. Brilliant. Why am I here?" Hob asks.

Death and the raven both stare at him. They don’t say it outright, but they may as well have. “You love him.”

“Is... Is it that obvious?”

“Uh, yeah, I’m pretty sure the whole Dreaming knows by now,” Matthew says. “Except for the boss, obviously.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain. Desire's been meddling again,” Death tells him.

The raven flaps his wings in distress. “Oh. Oh, fuck! That explains a lot.”

“Not to me,” Hob mutters into his coffee.

Explanations are not forthcoming. Hob listens to their discussion and learns that conditions are bad in the Dreaming, which apparently is or isn’t or is partially in Dream’s control. Death promises to speak to him; she loves her little brother dearly, but never has she met anyone else so determined to get in the way of his own happiness. No mention is made about who or what “Desire’s meddling” refers to. He still doesn't know why Dream seems to be avoiding him. And then the meeting is cut short before he can ask any clarifying questions.

"Sorry about this. I've got to go," Death says, rising from her seat. She makes her way over to another table where a man is clutching his chest while his family look on in horror. The whole restaurant soon becomes a flurry of panicked motion, but Death is calm as she approaches.

“Wait! Matthew, can you take a message to Dream?”

“Caw! I'd love to but... This one’s above my pay grade."

“All right. Am I—I don't know—supposed to do something?”

“Just keep being you, lover boy,” Matthew replies, with a wink.

“Never do any of that again.”

The raven gives no further comment, plucks a grape from Death’s abandoned fruit salad in his beak, and flies away.

One day Dream appears at his flat with no warning at all.

"Hello, Hob," he says. Nothing more.

He knows the bastard doesn't have a cellphone, but honestly—a letter, a carrier pigeon, smoke signals. Something. Anything.

Suddenly Dream is on his couch, as if no time had passed between their last interaction and now. Except Margaret—named for the late princess, not old Thatch—has made herself quite comfortable in his friend's lap, demanding affection.

Hob stands there, watching him, admittedly a little jealous.

Dream does something he almost never does—initiates conversation.

"How have you been keeping, my friend? I see a cat has chosen you."

Which is probably the weirdest way to remark that someone got a new cat. He's trying, though, he really is. It's sweet, and slightly infuriating.

"Yeah, well. When you vanish for almost a year, things change."

"Mm." Dream absently scratches Margaret's ears. "I'm partial to birds. But cats are noble creatures. She is content here."

Silence, then, save for the cat's purring.

He can't take it anymore.

Even the immeasurable patience of Hob Gadling has its limit.

"Is that it?"

Dream looks at him, confused.

"Nothing from you for ages and then you just— You come 'round for a chat?"

"...Is that not what friends do?”

“No, it’s not.”

“I could have delayed my next visit another hundred years, if you prefer."

So that's how he wants to play it. Fine.

"I know you're busy, creating dreams or whatever. I'm not expecting to see you all the time, but—" Not once has he asked for more than Dream is willing or able to give. But this? “You just disappeared. Didn’t even say goodbye.”

His friend considers.

"It seems I owe you yet another apology. There were urgent matters. Loose ends to tie up as a result of my...extended absence.”

“Is everything okay now?”

“Yes. I still have duties to which I must attend, however; the world cannot afford for me to put you—or anyone—above them."

Even yourself, thinks Hob, sadness cutting through the irritation. Loving an Endless feels a little like loving the sun.

"I know that."

"A mortal mind is incapable of comprehending the responsibilities that rest on my shoulders."

"Good thing I'm not mortal, then," he counters. A challenge.

Dream...backs down, surprisingly.

"A very good thing," he says, quietly.

"I’m not asking to be first, just—somewhere on the priority list. All I want is to be kept in the loop, yeah?”

"You deserve more than that,” Dream tells him. It sounds like the words hurt to say. There’s something vulnerable in his eyes, for a fleeting moment, before it’s gone. “But you need not concern yourself—"

"I'm always gonna worry about you, you prat. I thought— You could've been hurt again. And I wouldn't know."

"You...care. About me," Dream says, slowly, like it's a math equation he's struggling with. A revelation. Hob can't help but laugh.

"Yeah. Been trying to show you that for about four hundred years, but thanks for noticing. Even your raven and your siblings worked that one out before you did."

"My sibling was here?” The Lord of Nightmares is on his feet in an instant, ready to start delivering vengeance if necessary. “Did they hurt you?"

"...No. We just talked a bit. Me, her, and Matthew. She gave me a great recipe for apple crumble."

"Death," he sighs, relief palpable. He sits back down again, apologizing to Margaret for disturbing her.

"You thought I meant Desire, didn’t you?"

There is a moment's pause before he answers, sidestepping the question, "You have... desires."

"You don't?"

There is no response for so long that Hob begins to suspect he may have reached a conversational dead end.

"It doesn’t matter," Dream says. "I'm not a person to whom you should tether your hopes, Hob Gadling."

Thinks highly of himself, doesn't he.

"Who says I am? You know me; always full of hope."

But Dream isn't even listening now. "I'm not a person at all. I do not belong to myself; I am a conduit for the collective unconscious. A story. Inhuman."

"Your captors tell you that?"

It feels cruel, and he regrets it as soon as the words leave his mouth.

His friend—God, he hopes he can still call him that after this—goes completely still. His eyes are dark and distant. Margaret protests the sudden lack of petting, insistently digging her claws into his coat.

"Fuck. I-I didn't mean—" Hob starts.

"Some of it. Yes," Dream replies, emotionless. "They did."

"Dream, I’m sorry—"

"He sought that which I couldn't give. Jessamy, my raven, dared to show loyalty to me, and she died for it. Do you see?"

Hob doesn't see. He feels like there's context missing here, as though this conversation they're having began months, maybe years ago, in Dream's head. He can tell it's tearing him apart.

"Hey. Please look at me? I shouldn’t have said that. You're more than what you think you are. All right?"

He reaches out tentatively, careful not to cut himself on broken trust. But it is Dream who takes his hand, grasping it like a lifeline. There are times, it seems, when he aches to be touched and other times he can't bear the sensation.

"How long would you wait for me?" he asks Hob.

He shrugs. “Rest of my life, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Because I've been in love with you for the better part of the last thousand years. So if anyone's an expert, it's me, and I can tell you that it's no picnic sometimes, sure enough, but it hasn't killed me yet either, and frankly I wouldn't trade it for anything."

“They were telling the truth,” Dream whispers, ostensibly to himself.

Hob is extremely cognizant of the fact that his old friend spent over a hundred years inside a glorified fishbowl with no agency over his body, gawked at and feared and degraded, stripped of even the basic dignities an imprisoned human would be afforded without question. Dream might not feel that his own wants and needs are very important, but they are to Hob. He wants to help him heal.

It is for this reason that he says, "Our friendship means too much to me to ruin it. So nothing has to change if you don’t want it to, right? If you're not interested in me like that, just say so and I'll respect your choice.”

"I am interested. In you," Dream admits. Hob’s heart does something that would probably kill a mortal man. "In all aspects. But there are rules. Such an entanglement would be...inadvisable. Dangerous for us both."

"I'm not opposed to danger. Keeps things exciting. Know what I think?"

"No. I can't read your mind," his friend replies. Mystery solved, thinks Hob.

"I think you're scared."

A few centuries ago, that would have been it; Dream would be gone. It isn't anger in his eyes, however, when he looks at Hob now—it's fear. He has changed.

"I will not risk you, Hob," he says. “I fear that... I have hurt many, in the past.”

"Yeah? I've hurt a lot of people. Been hurt, too,” Hob says. "We're both adults. We make mistakes, we learn, and we forgive. That's life."

 “How is it, after all this time, you still have more lessons to teach me?”

“Well, I am a professor now.”

"This will not end well," Dream warns one last time, leaning in close. His thumb brushes over Hob’s cheekbone, light as a butterfly wing.

It will be a while yet before they figure out, together, what exactly “this” is, emotionally and physically. With centuries’ worth of baggage to unpack between the two of them, it’s going to take some time, perhaps all of the time they have. So they'll start with simple things.

Dream wants to show Hob his favorite places in his realm, the loveliest parts of himself worth seeing—and eventually the jagged edges, too. Dream wants to hold his hand. Hob wants to show Dream films he’s missed—some he’ll enjoy, even more he will probably hate. He wants to drink good wine, as they always have, to cook him a meal and talk for hours whenever they’ve been apart. Wants to cuddle up on the settee with him and Margaret, and stroke Dream’s hair until sleep washes over him like the tide—and they dream together.

"Never liked endings much, anyway," Hob says with a smile.