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.