Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Morpheus does not want to be in this bar. Teleute had dragged him here, promising that she’d only make him stay out for two hours. She hadn’t said anything about his breakup with Calliope, not explicitly. She had said it would be good for him, to get out of his room and be around people, maybe meet someone, and Morpheus can read between the lines. He’d gone along with it, if reluctantly, because he trusted her judgement.

It’s awful. The bar- the White Horse, a grubby building just off campus that caters to any student with a half-convincing fake ID- is so stuffy he feels like he can’t breathe and smells so strongly of sweat and stale beer he’s not sure he wants to. And it’s crowded, and the drinks are shit, and every time someone brushes against him he wants to scream.

Moving to one of the tables in the corner instead of sitting at the bar itself would probably mitigate that final problem, but he doesn’t move. He’s going to be miserable for the next- he checks his phone- fifty-seven minutes no matter what he does; it doesn’t seem worth the effort to get up. It might be worth the effort to ask Teleute if she’d move to another bar, but she’d wandered off to chat with friends. The invitation to come with her had been implied, but Morpheus has no desire to make small talk.

Before he can decide what to do with himself instead, what seems to be the entire men’s hockey team piles into the building, each competing to be louder than the next and take up more space. By time they’ve gotten drinks (including multiple pitchers of the electric blue nightmare mixed drink the White Horse is famous for, the one that smells like paint thinner, tastes like candy, and will leave you hungover for a week afterwards), greeted friends, and sat down, they’ve taken over Morpheus’ entire half of the bar and raised the volume in the building by several decibels.

It takes most of Morpheus’ self-control not to get up and leave. Instead he pulls his jacket closer and wills Teleute to return from the other end of the bar, where she’s chatting with a guy Morpheus vaguely recognizes from an upper-level writing seminar. Morpheus would wonder how they even know each other, when Morpheus is an English major and Teleute is pre-med, but he’s long since accepted that his sister knows literally everyone on campus.

In the meantime, and the group behind him only gets louder. If he were inclined to be charitable he’d say they were in a celebratory mood, but frankly he thinks “self-congratulatory” is the better adjective. The number of cheers going up from the table are excessive for- winning a hockey game, presumably. One of them is telling anyone who will listen that he’s going to live forever.

Morpheus risks a glance over his shoulder at that, curious to know if this guy looks as sincere about his plans to “tell Death no thank you” as he sounds, but he can’t pinpoint which of the disheveled, only-half-showered, somewhat injured men was speaking. There’s a noticeable dip in the noise level as he turns back to his drink, and that is almost satisfying, even if he still wants to crawl out of his skin.

Then a burst of mocking laugher goes up from the group, and any contentment he’d been feeling evaporates. He sets his drink down slowly, listening, and picks up a very clear “… he’ll hear you!”

When Morpheus looks back again, a group of four players at a table in the far back of the room is staring at him. Three of them look away as soon as he moves, but the fourth, a man with brown eyes and a beard that makes him look like he’s been marooned at sea for a month, holds his gaze. There’s a glint in his eyes that Morpheus can’t quite parse and isn’t sure he wants to.

Then one of his friends cuffs him in the back of the head, and he looks away as well.

Morpheus turns back to his drink. Toys with his phone, not unlocking it, just turning it over in his hand. Feels a prickling sensation on the back of his neck.

Sure enough, when he turns around, the guy is looking at him again.

He turns back to his drink.

The cycle repeats.

Sometimes it’s one of The Guy’s friends looking, but more often it’s The Guy himself, and several minutes tick by wherein Morpheus always has at least one set of eyes on him.

He should probably leave. Teleute is still at the other end of the bar, it would be easy enough to move. Or text her, even. The group is whispering among themselves, now, and that can’t herald anything good. But getting up now would feel like running. And Morpheus is not going to run and hide from some dumbass student athletes.

As Morpheus watches, The Guy downs his drink and breaks from the group, accompanied by cheers and a piercing wolf whistle. He looks young despite his beard, Morpheus realizes, and decidedly non-sober. Morpheus isn’t sure if that’s reassuring or not.

He’s also making a wobbly beeline toward Morpheus, which definitely isn’t.

“Hi,” he says, leaning against the bar next to Morpheus with a smile that’s probably meant to be charming.

Morpheus tenses. Shifts slightly off the stool, so he has a foot firmly planted on the floor, makes sure both his arms are free in case he needs to throw a punch.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Hockey Guy adds. Morpheus scowls at him, waiting for the punchline. “Sorry about my friends,” he continues, with a stubborn cheerfulness that reminds Morpheus of a golden retriever. “They’re-” he glances over. His three friends are staring without attempting to hide it. One of them flashes Hockey Guy an unsubtle thumbs up. The rest of the team is playing a game that seems to involve throwing the cheap bar coasters at glasses. They’re cheering no matter where the coasters land. “Loud,” Hockey Guy finishes, after a moment watching the game. “So can I buy you a drink? As an apology?”

Morpheus stares at him a moment longer. There’s an edge to his smile and his eyes are sparkling like he’s trying to suppress a laugh and he has to have some ulterior motive for being here, or else he’s the young dumb freshman sent to do the team’s dirty work, he can’t possibly be here of his own free will.

“From you?” Morpheus asks, with every ounce of his disgust at whatever trick this is, “Of course not.”

He’s kept his eyes locked on Hockey Guy’s, waiting for the moment his charade falls apart, so he catches it when the façade cracks. The briefest flash of- anger, maybe- and then the smile is back, much more obviously false now. “Oh. Uh, yeah. Sorry. Enjoy your night,” he mumbles, and slinks away. Morpheus doesn’t feel as satisfied as he expected.

“I asked you to come out with me to have some fun, not break some stranger’s heart,” Teleute says, appearing at his shoulder with two drinks in hand.

Morpheus scoffs. “He wasn’t serious.” He takes the offered glass, even though it means he now has two equally undrinkable beers sitting in front of him.

“I think he was,” Teleute replies. She sits down next to Morpheus, somewhat blocking his view of the hockey team, and nods in their direction.

The player who’d spoken to Morpheus has his head down on the table when Morpheus looks over. He sits up just enough to drink from a mostly-full glass of toxic hangover juice, then lets his head fall again, carelessly enough that Morpheus can’t suppress a sympathetic wince. Two of his friends exchange worried looks, while the third reaches over to pat his back gingerly.

“He may have been serious,” Morpheus admits, with chagrin. And a pang of guilt.

“Told you,” Teleute says, with love. She looks pointedly at him for a moment, then, when he doesn’t rise to the bait, adds, “You know, I said you should get out and meet some people…”

“You don’t seriously think I should have said yes?” Sure, Morpheus would have been politer about the rejection if he’d known, but nothing more. And frankly he’s a bit offended that Teleute has moved on from ‘attempting to set him up with some of her friends’ and ‘forcing him to mingle with people’ to ‘telling him he should take anyone who asks.’

“I think he seems nice and you might, horror of horrors, have enjoyed yourself.”

“He’s drunk. Even if he was sincere in the moment-” and even now that seems implausible but Morpheus can’t deny that the man is currently still facedown on a table “-there’s no way it would last. He’d turn out to be some shallow asshole, and realize he didn’t want-” Morpheus realizes where that sentence is headed and snaps his mouth shut, too late. Teleute is already staring at him, eyebrows drawn together in sympathy.

“He means it,” she says. Morpheus shoots her a skeptical look. “His name’s Robert something, he was in that history of plague class I took last year. I don’t know him well, but he was… sincere. If nothing else he gave a really emotional presentation about the Black Death at the end of the term so I think ‘shallow asshole’ is overselling it.” She takes a sip of her drink, then nudges Morpheus and says, “Plus, he’s cute.”

“If you like scruffy, I guess.” Which Morpheus does not. He’s always found men with beards, especially longer, unkempt beards like Robert Something’s, the opposite of appealing, and the fact that Robert is definitely on the ‘half’ end of ‘only half-showered’ is not aiding his cause.

It isn’t.

So it’s entirely inexplicable that Morpheus finds himself blushing as he speaks, that his brain gets caught in a loop wondering what it would feel like if he kissed him, if he-

No, Morpheus tells himself firmly. Maybe Teleute was right, he does need to get out more. Clearly his brain has been viciously self-immolating if it’s going to latch onto the first vaguely friendly person he meets to fantasize about.

He’s about to admit as much, when Teleute says, “Give him a shot.”

“What‑”

“Take him on a date. I bet you’ll have a lovely time. And if you don’t, or he rejects you, I’ll stop bothering you about your love life for- three months.”

“Six,” Morpheus counters immediately, before the terms of the bet have entirely registered in his mind. Once they do, he adds, “What do I have to do if I lose?”

“Admit I was right?” Teleute says, like she hadn’t actually considered the question before he asked it. “Or, no. Admit I was right and stop moping at me about your love life. For six months.”

Morpheus considers, but only briefly. As much as he loves his sister, her attempts to set him up since he and Calliope broke up have been infinitely frustrating, and this is a bet he’s more or less guaranteed to win. And even if he loses- he hasn’t been moping that much, has he? It won’t affect him too badly. “Fine,” he says.

Teleute grins at him. “Do you want to tell him, or should I?”

“How… would you…?”

“My brother sent me to convey his apologies for his behavior, and-”

“Yes, fine,” Morpheus grumbles, sliding off of his stool, “I’ll go tell him.”

The hockey players have not gotten any quieter in the few minutes he and Teleute had been talking. Robert Something has, if anything, gotten louder, and is currently declaiming to most of the building, “Soulmates are real. You just meet someone’s eyes, and you know you’re meant to be together. You’re destined for each other.”

“You just think he’s hot,” one of his teammates says, sliding his glass out of his reach.

“And you wouldn’t know romance if it bit you. My point is, he’s my soulmate and I just fucked it up before we even had a chance.”

“Your soulmate?” Morpheus doesn’t actually mean to say it, but he’s so startled the words fall from his mouth. It’s a small piece of luck that it comes out cool and indifferent, that he managed to repress the storm of feelings stirred up by this virtual stranger calling him his soulmate. It’s ridiculous, it’s presumptuous, it’s nauseatingly romantic. Morpheus isn’t sure if he’s more annoyed by the statement itself, or the way his heart momentarily leapt at hearing someone call him their soulmate.

Robert looks up at him and smiles like he’s just received a visitation from a god, a strange combination of delight and disbelief. His eyes are shining, mesmerizing, somewhat unfocused, and thankfully that final observation wrenches Morpheus’ mind away from whatever self-destructive ‘liking scruffy’ bent it’s found itself on.

The rest of Robert’s friends are staring at Morpheus rather more unpleasantly. The one sitting to his left, who seems to have taken on the role of Designated Least Drunk Friend, angles himself so he’s partially blocking Robert from Morpheus’ line of sight.

Fuck, Morpheus should’ve worked out what he was going to say before he came over here.

“It occurs to me,” he says, slowly, “That I misjudged your intentions, earlier. I thought you… insincere.”

“Oh he was sincere alright,” the man on Robert’s right says. “Sincerely-”

What Robert was, sincerely, Morpheus will never know, because Robert elbows his teammate hard in the ribs, then waves a hand at Morpheus to continue.

“You wanted to ask me out, right?” Morpheus says, his composure slipping.

“Oh.” Robert seems stunned by this question, although Morpheus can’t fathom why. “Yeah.”

“Then would you meet me here, a week from today? At this time?” Morpheus asks, in the same way he’d throw himself into a lake that he knows is going to be freezing: quickly, so he can’t talk himself out of it.

“He changed his mind,” Soberish Friend says, firmly.

“No I didn’t,” Robert interjects, clearly annoyed, before Morpheus has a chance to feel relieved. “You’re all terrible friends.” To Morpheus, he adds, “Don’t mind them. I'll be here next Saturday.” And then he smiles, the same, slightly teasing smile from before, but he’s still staring at Morpheus like he’s something special, and-

Morpheus has thrown himself into the metaphorical lake, no backing down.

It’s a terrible time to realize he can’t swim, and the water is so cold it’s hard to breathe.

“Next Saturday,” Morpheus agrees. Again, miraculously, he manages to keep his voice level. He nods once at Robert and turns for the door.

The last thing he hears from the table before the noise of the bar swallows them up is, “Are you sure about this, Hobsie?”

Then he’s outside, away from the crowd. The anxiety he’s been fighting the whole night evaporates as soon as he draws in a breath of the chilly mid-February air, leaving him more cheerful than he’s felt in months. Whatever brief madness had overtaken him in the bar dissolves as well; his thoughts drift to next weekend with anticipation instead of a horrible knot of confused anxiety. Six months free of being dragged out to ‘socialize’ will be worth whatever combination of dull and awful the date brings. A small smile on his face, he pulls out his phone to text Teleute he’s leaving.

It’s probably, he reflects, the most excited anyone has ever been to be stood up.

Chapter Text

To Morpheus’s disappointment, Robert Whatever is sitting at the same table in the back of the White Horse when he arrives there, a week from the day they'd met, as close to the minute as he could make it. At least the bar is slightly less crowded tonight, and absent of other hockey players, although Morpheus doubts any of his other problems with the establishment have been solved on such short notice.

“You’re actually here,” Robert says, whispers, really, as Morpheus approaches his table. He looks a bit poleaxed, like he thinks the Morpheus of last week was a drunken hallucination.

“I am,” Morpheus says, sitting down.

Robert stares at him, one leg jittering under the table. He cleans up- well, ‘nicely’ may be overstating it, but he is cleaner this time. Although maybe Morpheus is putting too much trust in the fact that his hair is pulled back in a bun and he’s wearing something other than a grubby jersey.

He’s shaved, too.

Morpheus is not disappointed.

It occurs to Morpheus, as he battles his not-disappointment, that Robert hasn’t actually said anything since he sat down. He’s been cataloging Robert’s appearance for… long enough to be rude, really, which would be embarrassing if Robert weren’t staring at him with equal intensity.

Now that he’s aware of the silence he wants it to end. Immediately. He wonders how much of an effort he’s expected to make to constitute ‘winning the bet fairly.’ Does he wait for Robert to say something? Introduce himself? Get up and leave?

Before he can decide, Robert takes a deep breath and says, “Okay but why? You definitely meant it when you turned me down the other day.” A look of low-level panic crosses his face, and he adds, “You’re not- no one’s forcing you to be here, right?” It’s not phrased as a question so much as a rhetorical confirmation that Morpheus doesn’t feel obligated to go on a date with him.

He's terribly gentle about it, and Morpheus feels a brief, petty urge to inform him that he is obligated to be here, he has a bet to win.

“I know,” he says, instead. “Like I said, I initially turned you down because I didn’t think you were serious.” He hopes that additional information will satisfy Robert’s need for an explanation, or at least stall the conversation until Morpheus can think of one that doesn’t involve admitting to the bet. Petty impulses aside, that would definitely be winning the bet unfairly.

Robert has the nerve to look at him like he’s just said something unbearably tragic, but all he says is, “What made you change your mind?”

“My sister thought you seemed sincere.” Once he’s said it aloud, it seems like a weak explanation, so Morpheus adds, “And I was interested.”

“In… me?” Robert asks, with a nervous laugh. Morpheus is fairly certain he’s blushing, but he can’t tell in the dim light of the bar.

For a moment, Morpheus considers saying ‘yes.’ Considers taking this seriously, playing by the spirit of the bet instead of by the letter. Considers letting himself get lost in Robert’s eyes, reaching out to take his hand and soothe some of his wariness.

Considers the absolute mess of a situation he’d inevitably cause if he did.

So Morpheus nods, sharply. It seems the safer answer.

Robert says “Cool, Bro,” and holds out his hand for a fist bump, effectively shoring up Morpheus’ certainty that he isn’t taking this all that seriously for the next century or so.

When Morpheus doesn’t move, he lets his hand drop and says, “Robert. Gadling. Hob, actually. I realized I probably didn’t tell you my name last time.”

“That’s a medieval version of the nickname?” Morpheus asks. He’s genuinely curious where ‘Hob’ came from, but more importantly, he once spent about a week knee-deep in research on medieval naming conventions for a short story he wrote and gave up on halfway through, and ‘annoy him with obscure trivia you only know for exactly that reason’ is a perfectly valid way to win this bet.

And then Robert smiles at Morpheus like he had last Saturday, like Morpheus is some unexpected miracle dropped into his lap. “You’re the first person to ever get that right,” he says.

Morpheus does not know what to do with that. It has effectively torpedoed any expectations he’d had about how this night would go. Robert- Hob- goes by a name nobody’s used in 600 years. Intentionally. Gleefully, if anything. Morpheus can’t figure out how to make that revelation mesh with his initial impression of the man, nor does he understand why it has him biting back a smile.

It takes him a moment to realize that Hob is staring at him expectantly. “Morpheus. Endless,” he admits.

It’s always a fifty-fifty shot whether someone will say, “Isn’t ‘Endless’ the name of the science building?” when Morpheus introduces himself. Once that sentence has been spoken, it’s invariably followed by, “Oh. You’re from that Endless family, aren’t you?” Morpheus isn’t sure why the connection is so obvious. Every single one of his siblings tells him it’s because of the face he makes when someone asks the former question.

Mercifully, all Hob says is, “So, Morpheus. Can I buy you a drink?” There’s an intensity in his gaze that doesn’t quite mesh with the casual words.

Morpheus offers to get their drinks instead. It gives him a chance to stand at the bar, stare at the rows of bottles until their colors blur and warp, and reconsider every life decision that brought him to this point.

Thankfully, the situation resumes some form of normalcy when Morpheus returns with their drinks. They exchange majors (Hob’s is history, and suddenly the ‘Hob’ thing makes a lot more sense) and grades (Hob, shockingly, is also a senior, and sheepishly says ‘I know, I’m older than I look’ when Morpheus boggles at him). Another silence sits down at the table and makes itself comfortable.

“So,” Morpheus says, accepting that he needs to at least attempt conversation, “What do you do for fun?”

It’s the perfect question. Hob starts rambling about hockey, and Morpheus quickly loses all track of what he’s saying. He isn’t making a particular effort to figure it out, to be clear. But it’s nice. He can sit, and drink his slightly-less-awful-than-last-night beer, and let Hob’s words wash over him. And then he can go back to Teleute and say it didn’t work out, their interests were too different. And that will be… nice. For this to be pleasantly dull and burn out on its own, rather than blow up spectacularly.

“Oh! And bookbinding, that’s the other thing,” Hob says, wrenching Morpheus firmly back into the conversation.

“Bookbinding?” Morpheus asks.

“Yeah! I got into it a couple years ago- took a class on early modern history and got really distracted in the middle of my final project- but it’s fun,” he says. “I own a thing called a bone folder now and that’s badass.”

“Your hobbies are hockey, and bookbinding?”

“Yes,” Hob says, a little sheepishly, “There’s not money in it, or anything.” That really wasn’t what Morpheus had meant by the question, but it is the question that Hob continues to answer. “I mean, some of my friends do Ren Fairs, so I’ve sold a couple that way, but it’s not like. A business.”

“No, I mean- those two things?” Morpheus asks, very articulately.

“I have other hobbies!” Hob, legitimately offended, once again misses the point of Morpheus’ question by a mile. “I mean, the sailing thing was short-lived, because it turns out you need a boat for that, but I can knit, I built a computer once, and I’m very good at cards.”

Which does, in a roundabout fashion, answer Morpheus’ question. It’s not that Hob has two very disparate hobbies, it’s that Hob doesn’t make much sense as a person.

“You know the last time someone looked that confused by me on a date it was because I said I’m a single father,” Hob muses. A look of horror dawns on his face, and before Morpheus can feel anything but shock he pulls out his phone, muttering, “And I just said it again, Christ,” to himself before holding up the phone so Morpheus can see the home screen. “This is my son,” he says.

There’s so much paternal affection in his voice, anyone eavesdropping would be forgiven for thinking Morpheus was looking at a photo of a human child.

Morpheus is looking at a photo of an orange cat curled up on a windowsill. “His name’s Robin,” Hob says, still in the tones of a proud father. “He’s four.”

Morpheus can’t stop the delighted little noise that escapes him, which Hob takes as his cue to scoot his chair a bit closer to Morpheus, so that their shoulders brush, and start scrolling through photos.

After a moment, he stops scrolling. Morpheus doesn’t notice at first, because the photo he’d stopped on, of Robin sitting on top of a fridge, is entirely adorable. When he does turn to look at Hob, Hob is staring at him instead of the phone, a soft fondness in his eyes.

Morpheus’s breath catches in his throat, and a thousand warning alarms chime in his head at once, and he abruptly straightens in his seat.

Hob sits back more slowly, but he doesn’t return his gaze to his phone. Instead he says, “Do you want to meet him? My apartment’s like a five-minute walk from here. Just meet him,” he adds, when Morpheus doesn’t respond immediately. “No pressure or anything, I just-”

“No, I’d like that,” Morpheus finds himself saying.

“You would?” Hob’s eyes, it turns out, can be hypnotizingly, meltingly happy even when he’s sober.

For the second time that evening, Morpheus can only nod.

Hob bounces to his feet, half-finished drink forgotten, and offers Morpheus a hand up.

There are all sorts of excuses Morpheus could make to himself: that at least he’s getting out of the bar, that he’s more interested in the cat than his owner, that he’ll just drop in to the apartment and leave, that he’s still going to call it quits after tonight.

He’s thinking of exactly none of them as he takes Hob’s hand, and Hob pulls him to his feet, slotting their fingers together.

Chapter Text

Hob Gadling is the luckiest man alive. He was blessed at birth by the gods, or by fate, or some eldritch creature that controls the cosmos. Either that or he’s dreaming, but his dreams have never been so vivid.

He’d been half-expecting to get his heart broken when he’d left his apartment. Then his Mysterious Stranger had shown up, armored in the same black coat from the night they'd met, a coat that is far too nice for a bar like the White Horse. He’d stood there. Stared at Hob like he was disappointed in Hob’s entire existence as a person, his eyeliner (more of it than last week) intensifying the blue of his eyes and the disdain in his expression. Sat down with the reluctance of someone going to the electric chair. And just when that air of awaiting death had faded and been replaced with something Hob would tentatively call ‘nerves,’ Hob had put his foot in his mouth and been rewarded for it.

The only possible explanation Hob can think of is that he’s somehow preternaturally lucky. Or hallucinating. He and Morpheus are still hand-in-hand, Morpheus is asking him about a class he took last year, and he seems genuinely interested in Hob’s ensuing rant about the Black Death. Morpheus still has that strange air of maybe-standoffishness-maybe-nerves wrapped around him like a coat, but he also leans into Hob’s shoulder as they pass that one alley that’s practically a wind tunnel, and Hob is going to knit him so many scarves. He has black yarn, doesn’t he?

He's getting ahead of himself, he knows, but the cocktail of Morpheus’ undivided attention and his own anxiety has him floating in a sea of giddy terror.

It’s only when he’s tugging Morpheus up the stairs to his apartment that a relevant thought manages to push through the ocean in his brain: this was a terrible plan. He hasn’t cleaned since- he hasn’t cleaned, and there’s still clothing scattered around his room from his attempts to figure out an outfit that could impress a potential date but wouldn’t look pathetic if no one showed, and Morpheus had flinched when he’d got close to him in the bar, earlier, why the hell had he thought ‘dragging him to his apartment’ was reasonable or sane?

He drops Morpheus’ hand, partially because his door requires both hands and a firm kick to open, but partially to give him the chance to back out.

“So, this is my apartment,” he says, holding the door open for Morpheus, who enters with the same air of dread he’d had when he initially sat down with Hob.

It’s dark, the entryway is barely big enough for two people, and most of that space is taken up by a closet. The door to the rest of the apartment is narrow, and at a right angle with the door to the hall, adding to the smothering feel of the space. “Uh… there’s light, usually,” Hob says, fumbling for a light switch.

It clicks on. Now they’re standing in a coffin-sized space, staring at each other, only there are lights on. Morpheus had walked in first, so the doorway to the rest of the apartment is behind him, but he hasn’t taken the step backwards into that space. Whether that’s because of some instinctual Guest Thing or he’s actually frozen in place, Hob can’t tell.

Nothing about the situation is quelling the little voice in Hob’s head chanting you fucked up, it was going ok back there and you ruined it, at him repeatedly.

“Hob? That you?” calls a voice from deeper inside the apartment, and Hob nearly jumps out of his skin. He’d been so swept up in Morpheus he’d forgotten his roommate was staying in tonight. Which isn’t a problem, exactly, but Andrew’s parting words a few hours ago were, “Just don’t beat yourself up if he doesn’t show. Go to the swim team party or something,” and that has the potential to make things very awkward.

“How’d it go?” Andrew asks, warily, before Hob can respond.

“Great!” Hob says, taking off his shoes without bothering to untie them and throwing his coat in the general direction of the closet.

“You sure? You’re back early, did-”

“Morpheus wanted to meet Robin!” Hob shouts, before Andrew can say anything ill-advised.

“What?”

“Hang on a second!” Hob turns to Morpheus and offers an arm for his coat, but Morpheus shakes his head silently, bolstering Hob’s decision to knit him a scarf as soon as possible. He has taken off his boots, though, and Hob moves them into the closet out of habit. “Robin likes to eat shoelaces,” he tells Morpheus, in an undertone, and is rewarded with another shy smile.

He must have been right about soulmates, he thinks, with the way that smile eases- fucking erases- the churning mental anxiety ocean.

Hob holds a hand out to Morpheus again, and pulls him in to the apartment proper.

When Hob left the apartment, Andrew had been sitting on the couch, hunched over a thermos of coffee and an assignment that’s due at midnight. He is in exactly the same position now, although he does look up to unabashedly stare at Hob and Morpheus. He actually makes the effort to turn on the lamp by the couch to better stare by, even though he’d apparently been suffering in the dark up to this point.

Hob can’t actually say I don’t know how I managed it either but whatever I’m doing has worked so far so I’m running with it! with Morpheus less than a foot away from him, so he just grins somewhat manically at Andrew and hopes he takes the hint.

“Andrew, this is Morpheus. Morpheus, this is my roommate, Andrew,” he adds, still smiling uncontrollably.

“We’ve met,” Andrew says, coolly. “I was at the bar last week.” It’s not so much a statement as a warning. It is not directed at Hob, although Hob is trying to frantically convey Come on man don’t fuck this up for me at him with his eyes.

“You were,” Morpheus replies. His tone somehow carries the implication that there were dirty glasses at the bar more interesting than Andrew, and that Morpheus is a saint for remembering him.

Hob probably shouldn’t find that as attractive as he does.

But given that Andrew has asked, before Hob left, why Hob was even taking the offered date seriously, while Hob had attempted, unsuccessfully, to explain that of course he was, he had so much to gain for it and basically nothing to lose, and given that Hob’s now been proven unequivocally right, and the proof is right here in the room still holding his hand, and Andrew apparently still doesn’t trust Hob’s judgement-

Hob appreciates Morpheus’ absolute indifference more than he might have otherwise.

“We won’t bother you,” he says, and tugs Morpheus toward his room.

The place is less of a mess than he’d feared. His pile of discarded shirts is still sitting on the bed, and he can’t attempt to make the bed to cover them up because Robin is curled up asleep in the center of the pile, but otherwise, it’s not a terrible room. It’s small as hell, barely space for a desk shoved directly up against the bed and a beanbag chair in the opposite corner, and most of the surfaces are littered with class notes and detritus from whatever hobby caught his attention this week but… it’s clean, otherwise? And there’s a little bit of roof right outside his window that’s great to sit on, although that’s more of a draw at times other than “9pm in February.”

And it’s not moldy, which is a huge step up from the dorms.

So Hob’s really not sure why Morpheus is looking around like he’s trying to find the clues to solve a murder. He suspects he's not going to figure that one out any time soon, so he flops down on his bed, heavily enough that Robin looks up, disgruntled.

“Robin, Morpheus. Morpheus, Robin,” Hob says, with the accompanying gestures. His cat, at least, has more manners than his roommate, and gives Morpheus a considering blink before nudging his head up against Hob’s hand for pats.

Hob pulls him into his lap, giving him a kiss on his little kitty head. Robin takes to being moved like a noodle made of lead, but immediately cuddles up to Hob once he realizes where he’s been moved to.

 “Uh, you can sit, if you want,” Hob tells Morpheus, who's staring intently at a poster behind Hob's head. “Although,” he adds, giving the desk chair a kick. It rattles unnervingly. “Probably not here.” Morpheus lowers himself into the beanbag instead, sitting with potentially the best posture anyone has every graced a beanbag chair.

Hob slides to the floor with Robin still in his lap. Their position accentuates the small size of the room- neither of them has enough space to full extend their legs, Hob practically has to sit underneath his desk to stretch out his legs parallel to Morpheus’, rather than on top of them, and even then there’s barely space between them.

“Give him a minute to warm up to you,” Hob says, digging a toy mouse out from underneath the bed and lobbing it over to Morpheus. “He’ll head over on his own.”

Robin normally loves new people, because new people often pay attention to him, as he deserves. The one occasion he’s been “shy” around new people was because there were about 46 of them crammed into a two-bedroom apartment. But just in case, Hob wants to temper expectations.

The ploy pays off. Robin notices the mouse being thrown and immediately wanders Morpheus-ward. Morpheus holds out a hand to him, tentatively, adorably gentle. Robin ignores the hand entirely, opting instead to climb directly into Morpheus’ lap and headbutt his sternum.

And Hob has the distinct pleasure of watching a genuine smile, unhindered by shyness or nerves, break out across Morpheus’ face.

“Hello,” Morpheus says, petting Robin gently. His voice is quiet, but his tone is serious; he’s speaking to Robin like a person. “You’re very friendly.”

Hob arranges himself more comfortably against his bed and watches Morpheus dote on his cat, some warm sense of assurance blooming in his chest. This isn’t his first date since he and Gwen broke up, not by a long shot. Some of them had been good dates, some of them hadn’t. None of them had been this sweet with Robin.

It’s not a fair comparison, Hob knows- most of them never even met Robin. And he should probably seriously consider whether Morpheus is more interested in his cat than him. It’s still hard to stop his heart from crowing soulmates soulmates soulmates when he’s just been handed the exact green flag he’d have asked for, if he’d asked the gods for one.

“You named your cat after yourself?” Morpheus asks. It takes Hob a moment to realize the question is directed at him. It takes him another moment to parse it. 

“Oh, no,” he says, “He’s Robin like Robin Hood. Because we stole him.”

That actually gets Morpheus' attention, somewhat. He glares at Hob judgmentally, one arm curling protectively around Robin.

“One of the frats owned him,” Hob says, speaking in the tone of voice one might use when trying not to scare a cat away, only in his case the cat in question is a human man in danger of stealing his stolen cat. “My friend Ellie and I were there at a party freshman year, and we noticed-” He pauses for a moment to modulate his voice, because even four years later he still sees red when he tells this story. “Let's just say these people shouldn’t have been trusted with a pet rock, let alone a kitten. So I stuck him under my coat and pretended to be wasted, and El started screaming at me- fully screaming- about how she can never take me anywhere while she dragged me out of the building, and everyone was so distracted by that mess they didn't notice the catnapping.”

Hob has noticed Morpheus staring at him like he’d spontaneously started speaking Polish a few times so far tonight. He’s making the face again, but-

Maybe Hob’s kidding himself.

But he looks impressed.

Or, at least intrigued.

And Hob wants (maybe a little desperately, he’s always fallen in love too fast and Christ he shouldn’t even think that) to impress him.

“Anyway,” he says, “We brought him to an emergency vet and lied about where we’d found him. By the time he was healthy enough they let us adopt him you couldn’t even tell he was the same cat. And he's been mine ever since, huh?” he adds to Robin, just in case Robin understands the conversation and needs reassurance.

"Your friend didn’t want him?" Morpheus asks, quietly.

Hob has to stifle a laugh. Morpheus bristles, so Hob knocks his leg against Morpheus’ in apology. “Not laughing at you,” he says, “It’s just- by that point in the year she’d nearly set her dorm on fire three times and actually broke her ankle falling off of a lamppost. She poisoned the only houseplant she ever owned a month after she got it. It wasn’t a question of ‘want’ so much as ‘could conceivably take care of a cat.’”

There’s more to that story, and then we moved in together but then she transferred schools and left me all alone- that’s when my entire team started telling me I’m no fun since I became a single dad, btw- and I was still the better person to take care of a cat so at least I didn’t lose my cat and my best friend in one go, but even in his head he’s aware he’s being overly weepy about the whole thing, so he ends the story there.

Morpheus’ leg knocks into his, mirroring Hob’s gesture, and rests there. “You seem to be doing well,” he says. For all that the words are mild, the tone is earnest. His face is turned to Robin, who’s curled up in his lap and purring like a chainsaw, but he glances up just enough to make eye contact with Hob.

Hob looks away, flustered by the compliment, but not before he notices the blush dusting across Morpheus’ cheeks. “Well,” he says, “That’s good to know.”

When it becomes obvious Morpheus isn’t going to reply, Hob starts rambling quietly- about the New Horizons mission, about how cool wireless headphones are, about the Shakespeare play he read for an English class requirement and how much he loathed it. Morpheus listens intently through the first two and argues intensely on the third.

(“You don’t get it, the tragedy is the point,” Morpheus says, in the most vehement whisper Hob has ever heard.

“No, I completely understand that the point is tragedy, I just think it’s stupid. There were a million ways they could’ve got out of that situation-”

“That is the point! That you are not getting!”)

Somewhere in there, the hushed argument about Shakespeare’s tragedies morphs into an argument about the relative merits of tragedy overall. Hob keeps needing to scoot closer to Morpheus, partially because if he’s going to argue tragedy entirely in whispers he’d like to at least understand what the other person is saying, and partially because Morpheus is hogging his cat.

Until Hob finds himself sharing the beanbag with Morpheus, complaining about a movie he’d watched over the break in a way that probably undermines his original argument. “And they gave it a happy ending! I just- how could anyone possibly misunderstand their source material so badly? The whole point is that the city gets destroyed and the characters you loved die. And where did they think they were going to go from there?”

“They probably didn’t,” Morpheus says, “The unnecessary changes will destroy it, and people will forget about it after a year. Stories survive as they were meant to be told. Like with Shakespeare.”

“Yeah?” Hob says, drawn in to Morpheus’ conviction like a moth to a flame even though he’s definitely lost the argument now.

“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they adapted some of his plays to have happy endings,” Morpheus says.

He’s interrupted by a shout of “Thank fucking FUCK that’s done!” from the other room.

“He finished his assignment,” Hob says, in response to Morpheus’ questioning look. “I think it was due today. Or yesterday. What time is it?”

Morpheus checks his phone, and then startles. “I have to go,” he says, a thin line of distress under the words. “I have- work- I didn’t realize how late it was-” For all his obvious panic, he removes Robin from his lap very gently, passing him over to Hob. The tension from earlier bleeds back into his body as he stands, until he’s looming over Hob, just as distant and untouchable as when Hob first approached him.

“I have to go,” he says, even his voice returning to a clipped, formal tone.

It- stings. Hob can’t figure out what he did wrong. Unless it is just- later than Morpheus expected, like he said, but that doesn’t explain why he had closed off again, so suddenly.

Still, Hob gets up, letting Robin stake his claim on the beanbag, and walks Morpheus to the door, leaning in the doorframe between the entryway and the apartment while Morpheus pulls on his boots. Andrew has, blessedly, vacated the room.

“Come back and see Robin anytime,” Hob says. He comes close to sounding like his heart hasn’t wedged itself in his throat.

Morpheus stills, and then turns to Hob with an unreadable expression on his face. “You would want to?” he says. If Hob didn’t know better he’d say he sounds shocked. “Do this again?”

“Fuck yes,” Hob says, before he can think of a better answer. His heart’s back in the right place and pounding now, the same adrenaline rush as that time he went skydiving. “Here, let me give you my number-” He pushes off the doorjam, one hand held out for Morpheus’ phone.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, Morpheus hands over the phone. Hob adds his contact in equally slowly, not out of reluctance but because he needs to pick the proper emoji to add after his name (a cat and a hockey stick) and check the number six times to be sure he has it right. “Do you want to…” Hob looks up midway through the sentence to find that Morpheus has taken a step closer to him, and the words trail off into silence.

He's.

Very close.

Not touching Hob at any point, but close enough that the fact that he isn’t is more noticeable than if he were. Hob would barely have to lean forward to be kissing him, and on another night he might have done that already, but he still remembers the flinch. He sends himself a text and passes the phone back instead. “I had a good time, tonight,” Hob says, letting his fingers brush deliberately over Morpheus’.

“I did, as well,” Morpheus replies. The clipped tone has vanished from his voice as quickly as it appeared, replaced by something raw, something Hob hasn’t heard from him before now.

“You’re still wrong about tragedies,” Hob adds, with a teasing grin that he’s deliberately honed to be as charming as possible.

Morpheus sighs, softly, and sways forward, and the next thing Hob knows he’s being kissed. Morpheus kisses like it’s a challenge, like he’s daring Hob to be the first one to pull away.

Hob’s never been one to back down from a challenge. He crowds Morpheus up against the door, slipping one arm underneath his coat, and deepens the kiss, every other thought beyond make this the best first kiss he’s ever had falling away. By the time Morpheus breaks the kiss, panting for breath, Hob’s lungs are starting to burn as well, but before he’s full recovered Morpheus is kissing him again. It’s not a challenge this time but a declaration, just as intense as before.

“You need to go,” Hob says hazily, minutes or hours later, clutching the lapels of Morpheus’ coat.

A look of hurt crosses Morpheus’ face, obvious enough that even Hob’s addled mind picks up on it. “You said you needed to go,” he clarifies, pressing a kiss to the corner of Morpheus’ mouth, “and you should do that,” he continues, between kisses, “even though I don’t want you to. Really don’t want you to.”

He pulls away then, just slightly, enough to look Morpheus in the eyes. For one bright, searing moment, tonight could go one of two ways-

And Morpheus steps away.

“I do. Need to go,” he says, reluctantly.

“Alright then.” Hob cups Morpheus’ chin in one hand and presses one last, gentle kiss to his lips. “I’ll see you soon?”

“Next weekend,” Morpheus promises, dragging his thumb along Hob’s cheek.

Then he’s gone, the door closing softly behind him.

Chapter Text

There’s a tiny, foolish flame of hope burning in Morpheus’ ribcage as he leaves Hob’s apartment.

It takes five steps- five admittedly blissful steps, five whole steps of planning how he’s going to impress Hob next weekend, what other stories he could coax out of him, what it would feel like to kiss him again- for reality to come crashing down on him.

He’d kissed Hob. Or Hob had kissed him, intensely, attentively, like he’d been put on this earth to make out with Morpheus in a coat closet. If nothing else disproves Morpheus’ theory that Hob had been toying with him, that would have.

And on top of that, there’s their earlier conversation to go on, Hob’s eyes sparkling as he rattled off the worst literary opinions Morpheus has ever heard, disagreeing with Morpheus on every point but continuing the conversation anyway with unbridled enthusiasm, Hob telling him that fuck yes he’d do this again, even though ‘this’ was only an uncomfortable round of drinks and a conversation with Morpheus, which Morpheus himself knows is no real prize-

It doesn’t matter.

 What matters is that Hob- for reasons unknown to Morpheus- genuinely likes him.

Hob wants to take him on a second date.

Hob does not know that Morpheus only agreed to their first date because he assumed there was no way it would go well.

Morpheus walks faster, in the vain hope that the movement and the still, cold air biting his skin will make his thoughts come easier.

He should end this now, before it can end in a violent explosion instead. Which is how it will end, he knows, knows from years of precedent, that eventually anyone he loves will realize he’s not worth the trouble-

His phone buzzes with a text.

From Hob.

It’s a photo of Hob, Robin sprawled across his chest and fast asleep.

It is actually, mostly, a photo of Robin; Hob is only visible in pieces: the lower half of his face, a soft smile on his lips, one of his hands, caught mid-pet, his chest and shoulders, in a well-worn navy blue sweatshirt that clings to those shoulders better than any sweater rightfully should.

For a moment, Morpheus stares down at his phone unblinking while his brain does a remarkably good impression of a microwave catching fire. When he prods the mess of melted plastic for coherent thoughts, it can only offer a sheepish Shoulders?

There’s a message along with the photo:
I think he misses you.

Before Morpheus can think, he’s typed and sent a response: Tell him I’ll see him soon.

That foolish little flame of hope burns a little brighter.

Somehow, the following week fails to kill said hope, even though Morpheus spends it replaying the mental debate from his walk home on an endless loop. He hasn’t even seen Hob since Saturday, so one would think that he’d have time to get his thoughts in order, but Hob, as it turns out, is a constant texter.

Morpheus has received more shirtless gym selfies and invitations to frat parties in the past five days than he ever wanted, or needed, to receive. The latter would have been annoying on its own, more suited to some teenager showing off how popular they think they are than anything else, but the former is. Worse.

They’re obnoxious photos, self-impressed overconfidence radiating off them so thick Morpheus can practically taste it. No aspect of a photo clearly taken by a man more pleased by his own abs than anything else should be attractive. Even if the pile of broken glass and liquefied, on-fire plastic that has replaced Morpheus’ brain did not get that memo.

But whenever he begins to think he was right in the first place, that they have too little in common for the relationship to work, Hob will text him So apparently Robin knows how to open cabinets or I learned how medieval people made paper today and I’m going to torment everyone I know with this knowledge or they’re giving out free bagels at the café in the library, this is the best day of my life and Morpheus’ stupid heart will start doing somersaults again.

He hasn’t heard a single word spoken in any of his lectures this week, he nearly missed turning in a draft for his final portfolio, and he recently overheard Matthew asking Lucienne if she was positive he wasn’t concussed or possessed.

That last one, he supposes, is what he gets for having roommates who care about his wellbeing.

On Thursday, he decides enough is enough, locks his phone in his room, and sequesters himself in an out-of-the way nook in the English building to get some work done. It’s one of the oldest buildings on campus, and full of little nooks that definitely served a purpose at one point but are now completely forgotten, which means that Morpheus can sit on the floor in a space that may as well not exist and nothing and no one can bother him. Even the noise from the hall is more of a pleasant buzz than a distraction.

That noise has dwindled into near-silence, the people who were moving between classes having reached their destinations, when Morpheus hears two steps of footsteps coming down the hall. They’re both moving late-to-class fast, but he doesn’t pay them any more mind until a woman’s voice asks, “Was that really necessary?” in the tone of someone who’s been stewing on that question for a long time.

“Yes,” a second, familiar voice snaps. Hob’s voice. Morpheus does not get butterflies in his stomach at the sound; that would be stupid, especially given how annoyed Hob seems. “If I’d known you wanted to leave this early-”

“Of course I wanted to leave this early, it’s an hour drive!” the woman cuts over him. Morpheus winces in sympathy.

“We've got four hours to get there!” The voices are getting louder, passing Morpheus’ nook. He wonders if he should make himself more noticeable. Maybe call out to Hob. It would be easy enough, and the idea of offering Hob a rescue from-whatever situation he’s currently in- is appealing. Maybe Hob would smile at him, relieved, and make his excuses, and the two of them could get lunch somewhere-

 “No! We don't!” the woman says, “Because my parents are going to want to get photos of me and my boyfriend.”

The butterflies in Morpheus’ stomach abruptly turn into knives.

“And I'm going to have to say 'oh, sorry we're late, Hob was being an asshole.’”

Hob says something in reply to her, some variation of ‘do you even want me there’ that Morpheus can barely hear over the roaring in his ears.

He wouldn’t-

Hob wouldn’t.

You’ve known him for all of four hours, a vicious little voice at the back of Morpheus’ head points out. And spent half that time talking to a cocky jock-type and the other half a history nerd who’s trying to knit his cat a sweater. You’ve got no idea what he would or wouldn’t do.

“Should I… not go? I don’t want to, if it’ll make life worse for you,” Hob says. His tone, genuinely concerned, drives another dagger into the piece of Morpheus’ heart still frantically whispering he wouldn’t.

There’s a pause, just long enough for Morpheus to wonder if he’s going to find out he’s been cheated on and then watch said cheater be broken up with back-to-back. Then the woman replies, “You’ve never made my life worse,” although her tone suggests the exact opposite.

Hob laughs, not sounding hurt or angry in the slightest. “I punched your cousin in the face,” he says, “Twice.”

“And it was the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me,” the woman replies, “Both times.” The mention of violence seems to have cheered her up enormously. She continues in this vein, telling Hob that punching her cousin was chivalrous and daring and she was in awe of him and his muscles and willingness to step into danger for her and so on.

As she speaks, Morpheus is struck with the undeniable urge to see what’s going on. Maybe that will be enough to put he wouldn’t to its well-deserved death. Feeling like a ghost possessing his own corpse, stiff and cold and half-out of his body, he stumbles to his feet and peers around the corner of his study nook just in time to watch Hob and the woman embrace.

Hob is wearing a suit. Hob, who’d shown up to his date with Morpheus in a plain t-shirt, looks comfortable in a suit. His back is also to Morpheus, the only blessing in this situation. Morpheus doesn’t know what he’d do if they made eye contact, but he’s aware, distantly, that it would be bad.

And it’s not that the woman calls Hob ‘the best part of her life’ before her voice dwindles too quiet for Morpheus to hear.

It’s not the embrace, exactly, even though they slot together perfectly, his chin tucked neatly over her head, her more or less burying herself into his chest.

It’s the ease, the intimacy of it. He’s clearly held her like this a thousand times before.

That’s what finally snuffs the tiny, guttering little flame, leaving a yawning void where it used to be. Morpheus hadn’t realized how much it had warmed him until it was gone.

He wants to run, but before he can move the woman is grabbing Hob’s hand, dragging him down the hall away from Morpheus. She’s so dead-set on her goal that Morpheus doesn’t get a much better view of her than he’d had when she was trying to wear Hob like a jacket; just a flash of honey-blonde hair and the impression that she’s even shorter than he’d initially thought.

“Eleanor, darling,” Hob says, clearly allowing himself to be pulled, with a level of soppy affection that makes Morpheus feel unclean just hearing it. “You know your parents have hated me since we met, right?”

His question sets off a new round of bickering, which once again floats past Morpheus unheard, because- he knows that name.

Why does he know that name, he wonders for a split second, and then the answer hits him like a sucker punch- God fucking damnit he told you about her.

Hob had told Morpheus about stealing a cat with a friend named Ellie, and gotten strangely quiet at the end of it. Morpheus had felt bad for him, assumed the friendship ended tragically, had hoped to offer him some comfort for it- only to find that the words Hob hadn’t been saying were “anyway she’s my girlfriend so she’s over here all the time, I’m just responsible for the cat’s welfare.”

The realization yes, he would. Yes he would and he did and he knew exactly what he was doing the whole fucking time crystalizes then.

It should make him furious, but all he can muster is a bone-deep resignation.

Of course this was going to happen, he knew it from the start- and won’t it be fun to admit to Teleute that technically he’d won the bet because yet another person decided to throw Morpheus aside for a better option.

Not even that, decided to use Morpheus as a momentary distraction from the better option.

At the other end of the hall, as if to prove Morpheus’ point, Hob tells the better option he loves her.

“Not as much as I love you,” Eleanor replies, pressing a kiss to the back of his hand in hers.

And Morpheus finally wrenches himself away.

He hopes, as he sinks back to the dirty floor and emphatically does not cry, that maybe this time Teleute will listen to him. Maybe now she’ll accept the truth that he’s known for years now. Every single person he’s dated has come to the conclusion that he’s not worth it. He’s too much, in too many directions- if not too intense then too cold, if not either of those then too prickly, too talented at accidental cruelty. He should accept that he’s not meant for a relationship, that he’s only enough to be the momentary distraction, and move on.

He doesn’t get much done, the rest of the day. He doesn’t really try.

He does terrify one of the younger members of the campus literary magazine to the point of tears at their meeting that evening, but that isn’t really an accomplishment.

When he gets back to his apartment that night, there’s a series of texts waiting on his phone, spaced out over several hours:

We’ve got a home game Friday, do you want to come? We could get drinks after
:)

Followed by:
You’ve got to get there pretty early for the best seats but I promise they’re worth it.
It should be a good game, the team’s doing really well this year
It's a shame you missed the last one, we won by 6!
That never happens, it was awesome

And then finally, just before Morpheus got home:
Game starts at 7. Do you want one of my friends to save you a seat?

And by that point, wound up past the point of snapping, raw and jittery from the effort of not crying, and hurt enough that he feels physically sick over it, the way forward is much clearer than he expected.

He replies: No. Why would you think I want anything to do with you. Don’t text me again.

Then he falls into bed, fully clothed, and definitely does not cry himself to sleep.

He’d intended, in a vague way, to never see Robert Gadling again after that day.

His plan does not come to pass.

Normally, Morpheus isn’t the one sent to pick up food for the staff of the literary magazine when they work late. He’s the editor in chief, and has been for three years now, and that’s a job that gets delegated to first years and anyone who’s annoyed him recently.

But after he’d spent the first part of the week staring off into space daydreaming about a bastard who didn’t deserve his time, and the second half locked in his office listening to breakup songs, except for pauses to verbally eviscerate several more of the magazine staff, Lucienne had informed him that his options were to stop terrorizing the freshmen or make the food run, no he wasn’t allowed to argue.

He’d picked the food run. Not because he enjoys terrorizing his semi-employees, but because he’s aware that, in his current emotional state, it’s essentially inevitable.

When he gets to the inexplicably-named New Inn, which was established his second year on campus to serve greasy food to drunk undergrads, the Saturday night rush is in full swing. He’s so busy trying to grab his order and get out that he only notices why it’s so loud and crowded when he turns to leave.

A group near the counter has pushed two or three tables together and seem to be having twelve different conversations at once. It’s the strangest mix of jocks and people he vaguely recognizes from the theater department, and there’s more food on the table than the table has space.

Hob’s sitting at the end of the frankentable nearest Morpheus, with Eleanor cuddled in his lap, one arm thrown over his shoulders. One of Hob’s arms is wrapped snugly around her waist, a bit like a little kid holding their favorite stuffed animal.

She has a jacket thrown over her shoulders that’s several sizes too big for her. They’re sharing a drink.

And Hob-

Hob is looking at her like she’s the only thing in the room worth looking at.

It’s worse somehow, in the mildly sickening light of the New Inn. Before Morpheus could tell himself a story, that yes Hob and Eleanor were a couple, had been for years, but they clearly weren’t happy with each other if they fought like that constantly, were maybe only sticking together to antagonize Eleanor's family.

But now they’re lost in some private conversation, oblivious to the chaos around them, and Morpheus has to admit he’d been lying to himself.

He’s rooted to the floor. He isn’t going to walk over and say something. He looks like he’s just spent the past two days crying and he feels like someone put his internal organs through a meat grinder and then covered them in salt. No possible outcome could be worth that humiliation.

But he doesn’t want to leave.

And then Hob looks up at him. A strange combination of emotions flashes across his face- hurt, guilt, frustration. His eyes flick to Eleanor, who offers him a soft, if confused, smile, and then back over to Morpheus, expression settling firmly into guilt.

Morpheus smirks to himself.

It’s not vengeance, exactly, but it’s definitely satisfying to know that Hob is reaping exactly what he sowed. He lets the moment linger for another few seconds, letting the kicked puppy look on Hob’s face steel him, and then leaves the Inn.

It’s closure, of a sort, and he can ignore the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach if it lets him pretend he's won.

Chapter Text

Hob has known Eleanor since they were the only two eight-year-olds in a beginner’s skating class, both offended beyond belief that anyone would dare group them with the little baby six-year-olds. The indignation, along with the fact that they were inevitably the last two kids to be picked up at the end of class, gave them a lot to bond over. Their shared interest in fantasy knights and morbid historical disasters had meant that they actually talked to each other during that waiting period instead of staring at the floor, and the friendship bloomed from there.

That’s one way to tell the story.

The truer way to tell the story is that on the first day of class, Hob had been telling anyone who would listen that he was going to steal the Zamboni, and El had looked him dead in the eyes and said, “Do it. I’ll help,” and in that moment they had decided they were best friends now, no backsies.

Since then they’ve gotten each other into a ridiculous amount of trouble, gotten out of most of it, spent roughly half of their free time attending hockey games (in El’s case) or school plays (in Hob’s) that they absolutely would not have attended otherwise, and held each other’s hands through at least six separate, sometimes simultaneous, crises.

So when El had asked Hob to come to her sister’s wedding with her, and distract her parents from their increasingly-too-pointed questions about her love life, he hadn’t thought much of it. As long as they showed up together and acted mildly affectionate, people would make their own assumptions. He knew that one from experience; all of their family members and most of their friends had assumed they were dating between the ages of twelve and fifteen. They’d exploited it back then, too, with decidedly mixed results.

So, hopefully the results will be less mixed this time. But they've done this before, they've had practice, it's really no big deal. And sure, the wedding promises to be utter hell, but this still isn’t the most dangerous, unpleasant, or life-threateningly important he’s done in the name of their friendship.

Or at least. Hob hadn’t thought so.

He’s beginning to realize that El thought differently.

“Was that really necessary?” she asks, as though Hob had committed a murder or stolen candy from orphans, not ‘delayed their departure by fifteen minutes to drop an essay off at his professor’s office.’ She’s stalking down the hall a few feet in front of him at speeds that seem inadvisable, given the height of the heels she’s wearing.

Hob’s… not going to mention that it probably would have been quicker to go around the English building than to cut through it. He’s also heroically refraining from pointing out that it was only a fifteen-minute delay because he’d illegally parked his car in a faculty space, and he’d also like to get back before he gets ticketed or towed.

“Yes,” he says instead, not bothering to rein in his frustration.  “If I’d known you wanted to leave this early-”

“Of course I wanted to leave this early, it’s an hour drive!”

“We've got four hours to get there!”

“No! We don't! Because my parents are going to want to get photos of me and my boyfriend, and I'm going to have to say 'oh, sorry we're late, Hob was being an asshole,’” El says. Or, the word she says is ‘boyfriend’, the tone in which she says it implies ‘person who ran over my pet with their car’ or possibly ‘weeklong stomach virus.’

“Wasn’t me being ‘your boyfriend’ the point of me going?” Hob asks, too bewildered to be offended. Sure, actually saying the word ‘boyfriend’ to anyone was probably a level of fake commitment they weren’t ready for in their fake romance, but that was still the general idea, he’d thought.

“Maybe I changed my mind!”

“Should I… not go?” Hob says, stilted, scrambling for an appropriate response. “I don’t want to. If it’ll make life worse for you.” He knows, even before he’s finished speaking, that it was the wrong thing to say, but he can’t for the life of him think of the right one. Sticking with the plan is clearly an awful idea. Backing off seems equally awful given everything that prompted this situation, the tension in El’s voice as she’d explained, They’re trying to set me up with one of the groomsmen and they’re being really insistent about it and it’s freaking me the fuck out-

El stops dead in the middle of the hall, takes a deep breath, then spins around and glares at him.

“You've never made my life worse,” she says, in the same tone she’d been using to berate him for not tying his tie properly half an hour ago.

It’s a blatantly false enough statement to startle a laugh out of Hob. “I punched your cousin in the face,” he reminds her. That had almost gotten them both expelled and caused an explosive argument in her extended family that still isn’t entirely resolved; it definitely counts. After a moment’s thought he adds, “Twice,” because he thinks he deserves credit for that first time as well, even though he’d been eight, the cousin had been ten, and it had mostly been an accident.

El starts laughing too. Well, it’s more of a halfhearted snort than anything else, but it’s easily happiest she’s looked all morning, and enough to break the feedback loop of frustration they’ve been dragging each other into since last night. “And it was the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me,” she says. “Both times.” She swipes a hand across her eyes, even though she definitely hadn’t been laughing hard enough to tear up. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I should’ve-” Hob says. In hindsight, now that he’s not being yelled at, he can admit he really should have turned that essay in at… any point before this one. El’s expression goes stormy again before he can finish the sentence.

“No,” she says, stepping forward and grabbing him by the shoulders. “First of all, I’m sorry. Second, I'll repeat, you've never made my life worse.” Hob opens his mouth to object that that wasn’t really the point of this conversation, and also is she sure, and she gives him a little shake that doesn’t actually succeed at moving him. “More complicated. Needlessly complicated, sometimes. But never worse. Got it?”

“Yeah, fine, got it,” Hob mumbles, trying to avoid her eyes. The praise would be awkward enough on its own, the intensity with which it’s being delivered makes it unbearable.

Thankfully, El pulls him into a bruising hug, and while he may not know how to have, or even follow, this conversation, he prides himself on being able to give a damn good hug. “And third of all, you’re easily the best part of my life right now, coming to this cursed fucking wedding with me. It helps,” she mumbles into his chest, “That they’ll assume you’re my boyfriend. So much. But at the same time it sucks, you know?”

And there’s nothing Hob can say to that, really, so he holds her a little tighter and pretends he doesn’t notice her breath hitching, just the tiniest bit.

“But can we please get going?” El adds, sounding disgusted. In that moment, as she shrugs out of the embrace, grabs Hob’s hand, and starts dragging him down the hall again, Hob connects several dots he probably should have connected earlier.

“Eleanor. Darling,” he says, pronouncing the word ‘darling’ with all the verve of the romcom love interest he’ll be playing for the next eight hours. It gets the smirk he’d hoped for out of El, and he continues, casually, “You know your parents have hated me since we met, right?”

“Excuse you, they’ve only hated you since that mess at my twelfth birthday party.” A fair statement, about an event that Hob regrets even less than he regrets both times he punched El’s cousin.

“Fine, since your birthday. My point is the time we show up for photos is not going to measurably change how much your parents hate me.” He pauses, giving her a chance to object. When she nods for him to go on, he adds, “So if we show up when your dad said to, instead of bowing to his weird passive aggressive bullshit, you can blame it on me, and there will be no consequences.”

El glares at him, but she slows her pace to something that’s reasonable in dress shoes, which is really all Hob had been hoping for. “I hate that you’re right. For so many reasons,” she says, eyes fixed on the doors in front of her. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“I could not give less of a shit what your parents think of me.”

“Then fuck it,” El declares, quietly, but with a joyful sort of vehemence, “Let's stop for donuts.”

Hob, who had skipped breakfast to finish the stupid essay that started this whole debacle, responds to that in the only way he can, which is a spontaneous and deeply sincere, “I love you.”

“Not as much as I love you,” El says. Where Hob had been going for ‘rom-com,’ she’s going for ‘tearjerker Oscar-bait historical romance’. She presses a kiss- or something approximating a kiss but a thousand times more spitty than a kiss should be- to the back of Hob’s hand, and then keeps holding that hand, so that Hob can’t actually wipe her spit off.

Despite the spit, it is somehow one of the last wholly nice moments Hob has for the next twenty-four hours.

Breakfast the next morning is one of the most emotionally wrung-out affairs Hob has ever participated in.

El is still decompressing from the wedding, which was, on the one hand, a nexus of family bullshit, and on the other hand, a great opportunity for improv. She’s half-buried in her coat, which could probably fit two of her, and giving the wall behind Hob’s head a thousand-yard stare.

Hob spent most of the past night lying awake and wondering what’s wrong with him, that everyone he’s ever loved finds him so easy to leave behind. He’s drowning his sorrows in coffee, which is doing nothing to help the awful gritty feeling in his eyes but at least has his brain running again, even if the only thing it’s running is the stuck record of Why would you think I want anything to do with you.

They probably look like they just came from an early-morning funeral. The rest of the dining hall is giving them a wide berth.

They’ve also barely spoken to each other all morning, aside from still-half-asleep negotiations of where they were getting breakfast, and haven’t spoken a word since they sat down, so Hob nearly jumps out of his skin when El says, “You know, I’m missing class today no matter what.”

“Yeah?” he replies, once his heart stops pounding. He should. Maybe. Stop with the coffee.

“I was thinking I might as well stick around this weekend?” El continues. It is deliberately, gently phrased as a question. “At least catch your game, maybe see if some of my friends want to hang out. If you don’t mind me crashing here another couple of days.”

And Hob knows full well that she’s actually offering him company while he nurses a broken heart. Partially because she’s asking at all, instead of making sixteen plans and then remembering midway through plan five that she should probably ask for Hob’s input. Partially because she’s being so damn kind about it, acting like he’s doing her a favor instead of the other way around.

It’s that kindness, almost moreso than the offer itself, that makes the makes the vise-grip of loneliness let up a little.

He doesn’t forget about Morpheus, exactly. But it’s difficult to feel sad and abandoned and bereft with El at his game, screaming loudly enough that he’s pretty sure he can hear her, specifically, from the ice.

It’s even harder to feel lonely the night after that, considering how many people they get together for bar-hopping. Between El’s friends from this campus, Hob’s friends, and the friends-of-friends who end up caught in the gravitational pull of a group that large, he’s actually surprised they only need four tables to fit the group in the New Inn, when one of them suggests getting food between bars. They’re crammed shoulder to shoulder, El sitting in Hob’s lap because all her alternatives were worse, but still. Only four tables.

“-and then the Baker’s wife and the Prince decide- fucking- reenacting act ii is a spectacular idea,” El says, with a flourish of her arms, and one leg, that has Hob grabbing her tight around the waist to keep her from cracking her skull open on the grubby fake tile, “10/10, spectacular, nothing could go wrong there.”

“No,” one of her friends says, scandalized.

“Yes,” El replies, leaning toward the table, still terribly off-balance. Hob wraps his arm more comfortably around her waist and resigns himself to being her human seatbelt for the rest of the night, or at least until he can get her another chair. “They were both in relationships. He’d been seeing his girlfriend for three years.”

It’s the ‘three years,’ of all things, that gets him. He’s never had ‘three years.’ A year, if he’s lucky. And then he’s alone again.

And he can’t resent anyone he’s dated for it, for time or distance getting in the way, but he’d hoped-

In his heart of hearts, he’d been hoping for ‘forever.’ Every time. But if he couldn’t have that why are three years so much to-

“You alright there Hob?” somebody at the table asks.

Before he can pull himself together enough to figure out who’s speaking, let alone force a smile, El says, “Oh, shit, was that you I kicked?”

“Sure was,” Hob says, mostly out of the rote instinct to, in times of crisis, agree wholeheartedly with whatever bullshit El comes up with.

“Fuck, sorry, I didn’t notice-”

“The difference between a chair and my shin?” Hob returns, catching on. He's deeply impressed by the lie, both because it gives him an excuse for the way he has to blink for a solid minute to dry his eyes, and because, while he's doing that, El uses it as the basis to drag the table into an argument about hockey- vs. dance-related injuries.

“Thanks,” Hob says, under his breath, as the argument grows louder.

“That’s what I’m here for,” El replies. She sways toward him a little, and then, finally, seems to realize she’s an accident waiting to happen and braces herself against Hob’s shoulders. Hob does not let go of her waist. He does not trust her.

After a moment of contemplative silence, El adds, “I can also hide the body, if you’d like me to.”

“Please don’t,” Hob says. He’s a little startled by how anguished his own voice sounds.

El raises an eyebrow at him. Hob sighs. “Half of the team is going to offer to hide and/or create a body once I admit to them that I got dumped over text by the guy I said was The One, so… that’ll be enough. To deal with.”

“Yeah that’s- a lot,” El says, frowning like she’s the one who’ll have to restrain half a hockey team from belated shovel talks. She takes another sip of her drink, then pokes him with the cup until he takes it from her. “Try this, it's awful.”

With that stellar recommendation, Hob shouldn't be too surprised that the drink tastes about how he'd expect TV static to taste, both the absence of a flavor and too much flavor. Hob would be hard pressed to say what that flavor is, but it certainly is one.

“You weren’t kidding,” he says, delighted. He tries it again, which does absolutely nothing to help him figure out the mystery does make his taste buds feel momentarily fuzzy, and passes the cup back to her. “What is that?”

“It is what happens when you pour everything in a soda fountain into one cup,” El replies, with dignity. They’ve been passing The Drink back and forth for a few minutes, halfheartedly debating whether or not they could get the same non-flavor by combining the drinks in any soda fountain, when El whispers, “You’re being stared at, by the way.”

Hob looks up.

And locks eyes with Morpheus.

The emotions he’d been- not ignoring, exactly, but certainly avoiding- come crashing down on him all at once. Anger, first, and then hurt, in a nauseating cocktail that resembles The Drink: two completely opposing things refusing to blend and creating a foul non-emotion in their wake instead. And then, as the equally strong desires I’m going to go over there and ask what the fuck his problem is and I’m going to go over there and beg him to take me back churn and spit in his mind, a third thought manages to worm its way to the forefront of his mind: God he looks like shit.

It's- unsettling. Somehow, despite being as perfectly put together as every other time Hob has seen him, Morpheus is giving off the aura that he’s been dragged behind a truck through gravel for several miles and then dumped in a lake.

Maybe Hob will just- go over and say hi.

"Don't even think about it," El says, so quietly and perfectly timed he thinks it might be his conscience talking. "If he doesn't come over here and offer a brilliant explanation for that text, he's not worth your time." He glances over at her, and she offers him a tiny smile. "You deserve better."

The answer Don't care. I want him. is on the tip of his tongue, and he nearly says it, but it would be, he realizes, an incredibly shitty move to ditch her in order to chase after the cause of his broken heart. Under any circumstances, but especially given that she subjected herself to two additional nights of sleeping on his ancient futon just to keep him company. And that she is currently, actively trying to stop him from throwing his heart off the cliff that is Morpheus, while still protecting him from the rest of their friends' notice.

He can’t stop his gaze from tracking back to Morpheus, though, can’t stop himself from wanting, wanting to kiss the smirk off of his face, to yell at him for that text and then drag him off to a quiet corner and cuddle him until he stops looking quite so much like a sad wet cat, to do whatever it will take to get Morpheus to look at him like he’s worth paying attention to.

He doesn’t figure out what that would be before Morpheus walks away.

Chapter Text

Morpheus knows there are still hours’ worth of work to be done for the spring semester issue of The Dreaming, that it’s his job as editor-in-chief to stick around until it’s finished.

He also knows that he’s not fit for human company at the present moment, with his head buzzing with formless anger and an aching black hole in his chest where his heart used to be, so he drops the food with Lucienne, promises her he’ll be back tomorrow, and goes home.

Home, to an apartment that’s freezing, because no one bothers to properly insulate college housing, and pitch-dark, and has a tomblike quiet to it with both Matthew and Lucienne gone.

Home, where he’s entirely alone with his thoughts.

Thoughts which are, in the present moment, turning increasingly in the direction you should have confronted him. If not for your own sake, then to let his poor girlfriend know he’s a cheating bastard. Save her the humiliation you felt when you were the one in her shoes. You could’ve made sure that he loses everything, even if there’s no way you come out of this the winner.

So he’s in exactly the wrong frame of mind, curled up on his bed with the window open to give himself an excuse to really feel miserable, when Hob texts him. I know you said not to text and I promise this is the only one I’ll send but can we talk about this? Please?

It’s not an apology. It’s not even an acknowledgement of what happened.

It is, most likely, the precursor to a plea for Morpheus to keep quiet about their relationship.

Morpheus should block his goddamn number. Or ignore the text, or throw his phone out the window, or at the very least say ‘no.’

But the only thing keeping him warm right now is that thought, make sure he loses everything, the seductive prospect of nuking this non-relationship from orbit, so instead he replies, Fine. Meet me at the dining hall on Saturday. Noon.

That gives him time to figure out how to contact Hob’s girlfriend, hopefully. And if not-

Well, if not, he’s not going to lose another week’s worth of work to this nonsense. He has essays due and a magazine to run and it’s important Hob knows he’s not Dream’s priority, even a little bit.

The week passes excruciatingly slowly. He is, perhaps, too cautious in his quest to get in touch with Eleanor- as far as he can tell, she doesn’t even attend this school, and he’s not sure how to proceed from there without making himself too obvious. The easiest thing to do would be to ask Teleute if she knows her, because she probably does. But then he’d have to admit to her both that he’d lost the bet and that he’d been cheated on once again, and he’s not going to subject himself to that particular twofold humiliation until he’s ready.

Thankfully, Teleute is in year five of a five-year premed program, and she’s been too busy to notice that Morpheus’ current infrequent texting is different from his normal infrequent texting.

So he quietly seethes, and gets more done for his final essays and for The Dreaming than he has in a month, and listens to his breakup playlist on repeat whenever he’s awake.

(After the sixth round of the breakup playlist drifting through the thin walls of their apartment at all hours, Matthew threatens to steal his speaker. After Morpheus explains, Matthew threatens to beat Hob up. Morpheus declines both offers.)

Saturday morning dawns cold and grim, freezing rain pelting down in a perfect reflection of Morpheus’ mood. He reaches the dining hall far too early, stakes out a table by the door and watches as people stumble in hungover and half awake. There’s a cashier by the doors, at a rickety little table that was installed when the Powers That Be decided this dining hall should work buffet-style, ostensibly making sure people swipe their student IDs to pay but mostly looking at his phone. More importantly, he’s made it impossible for Morpheus to have a clear view of the doors, or even sit any closer to them; he’d be breathing down the cashier’s neck if he tried.

That frustration, combined with the uncertainty over whether he should have picked a different location for this confrontation, is at least a distraction. Morpheus would be hard-pressed to say if it is a welcome one.

He hears the commotion before he sees the source, one of the doors banging open so hard Morpheus wonders if it’s still on the hinges, the cashier saying, “You can’t come in here without an ID-”

And a familiar voice saying, “Shit, sorry, I’m just looking for a friend.”

Familiar, but strange; the cadence is Hob’s, but there’s a rasp to it Morpheus doesn’t recognize. Still, when he stands for a better look, it’s Hob he sees, leaning on the table and asking the cashier, “Can I sneak in and look for him? I lost mine.”

“Not without paying,” the cashier says. There’s a level of smug satisfaction in his voice Morpheus normally associates with the worst of asshole professors, the kind that take genuine pleasure in telling you they can’t accept your essay because you turned it in three minutes past the deadline.

“Please, man,” Hob says, his tone wavering between friendly charm and outright begging. It’s deeply unsettling, like watching the sun wink in and out of existence. “I don’t have any other way to get in touch with him. I just need to-”

“Can't you text him?” asks the cashier, clearly bored with Hob's plight. Morpheus shouldn’t care either, but Hob looks awful, soaked through and shaking from the cold, even though he’s wearing a coat, and instead Morpheus finds himself shoving his chair aside and walking toward the doors.

“I would,” Hob says, as Morpheus approaches, grimacing at the cashier in a way that was probably meant to be a smile. “Really, I would. But my phone’s dead.”

“Then you can-”

“He’s with me,” Morpheus says, feeling privately vindicated when the cashier nearly falls out of his chair in shock at his sudden appearance.

For the first time since he entered the building, Hob makes eye contact with Morpheus.

There’s a nanosecond-flicker of softness in Hob’s eyes, only notable because for that brief moment, Morpheus feels like there’s a heart somewhere in him instead of a black hole. “I have a table,” he says to Hob, mouth suddenly dry. “Go ahead, I’ll pay.”

“Thanks,” Hob replies, the hoarseness Morpheus had noticed in his voice even more apparent. Then he squares his shoulders and stalks past the cashier, leaving Morpheus to halfheartedly offer his own ID.

It occurs to him that he’s probably being kinder to Hob than he deserves, but he can’t bring himself to care, especially given the skeptical look the cashier trails from Morpheus to the back of Hob’s head.

By the time he has that sorted out, Hob is waiting for him in an out-of-the way corner of the dining hall, far enough from the doors that anything they say will be lost in the general chatter, but not seated or settled like he plans to stay. He looks exhausted, dark circles under his eyes in a bruiselike shade of purple-black, made all the more obvious by the greyish, wan cast to his skin. Exhausted, but not fragile; there’s a downed power line’s worth of anger sparking in his eyes, just below his skin, entwined with his bones until unbridled fury is the only thing keeping him upright.

“Look,” Hob says, an electric-spark snap, as Morpheus approaches, “I’ve had a godawful week. I’m here because my phone’s dead and I didn’t want you to think I’d ditched and I do still want to talk to you, really, but at some other point because I’m pretty sure my blood is mostly nyquill right now.”

The dread of dragging this conversation out any further overpowers both Morpheus’ concern that he’s about to be punched, and his confusion over how nyquill fits into any of this, and before he can stop himself he blurts out, “There’s no need. To postpone this conversation. I just needed to say, tell your girlfriend about us. Or I will.”

Years of keeping himself from showing any emotion in arguments with his siblings, or worse, his parents, mean that the sentence comes out a thousand times more calm and detached than Morpheus feels, and for an absurd moment he feels almost grateful.

Then he realizes he should be bracing himself for that punch. Or an argument, or pleading, or- any reaction, really.

Instead, Hob is staring at him, glassily. At first Morpheus assumes he’s shocked, but as seconds tick over into minutes and Hob keeps staring blankly, he begins to wonder if this is some sort of genuine medical crisis.

Finally, slowly, Hob says, “That’s. Going to be a little hard. Since I don’t have a girlfriend. Why would you even think- I haven’t had an anyone since August, unless you count a weird thing with the swim team and oh god forget I said that. Seriously, can we please postpone this conversation?” he adds, slumping slowly backwards until he’s leaning against the wall.

“It’s not a conversation!” Morpheus snaps. “I know about Eleanor. You saw me the other night, there’s no reason to lie. I. Already. Know.”

“I- That’s not-” Hob tips his head back, squeezing his eyes shut. When he speaks again, it’s a rushed stream of words, but pained somehow, like he’s an oracle communing with the cosmos at the cost of his own life force. “Eleanor- the girl you saw me with- is a friend, not my girlfriend. Never was, unless you ask some people who knew us as teenagers and made weird assumptions, which if that’s what happened I promise I can explain. But if- if you’re saying this based on us sitting together-” his voice wobbles, whatever theoretical cosmic connection he’d had snapping, and finishes in a shaky rush of hurt, “that was after you dumped me, so why do you care?”

“I overheard her call you her boyfriend,” Morpheus admits, hunching into his coat as he speaks. The seemingly genuine emotion in Hob’s voice has off-balanced him more than he’d like to admit. “The day I texted you. You were arguing about being late to something, and-”

“Oh, God, that?!” Hob asks, an expression of dread accentuating the greyish, exhausted cast to his face.  He stares at Morpheus for a split second, looking for all the word like he’s halfway into rigor mortis, and then doubles over in somewhat hysterical giggles. “I’m sorry,” he manages to spit out, through laughter.

Morpheus’ immediate instinct, to storm away, sure he’s being made fun of, dies before he can do more than glare. Even if Hob is laughing at him, it’s more than a little worrying that he finds the misunderstanding this funny.

“I am so sorry,” Hob repeats, the fact that he’s still laughing very much undercutting the apology. “I should’ve told you-” He swipes his hand over his eyes. Takes a long, shallow breath. Straightens his posture slightly, although Morpheus notes that the wall is still supporting most of his weight. “I went to a wedding with El last week, as her plus one, so that her parents would stop trying to set her up with this creepy groomsman,” Hob continues, finally speaking somewhat normally.

“But you’re… not dating?” Morpheus asks, clinging to the one stable question he can find in this conversation.

“No,” Hob says, firmly, “But we- We knew everyone would assume that we were. The whole plan was to lean into it- not like! We didn’t kiss or anything!” he adds, a thread of panic taking root in his exhausted tone. “We just called each other stupid pet names and danced together like, twice, and there you go. A romance for the ages. But. You know. I really should’ve fucking foreseen that pretending to have a girlfriend might make someone think I have a girlfriend, and- God, I’m sorry.”

And the thing is- Morpheus doesn’t think Hob is this good an actor.

No, he knows that no one as ill and exhausted as Hob looks is this good an actor.

The roaring flame of anger Morpheus had been nursing for the past week flickers and fades, something uncomfortably close to guilt slithering into its place. “You just- seem so close,” he whispers, one last objection that he can’t let go, “Even without- what she said.”

“Well, yeah.” Hob tilts his head, so that his forehead is resting against the wall, lets out a little sigh as he makes contact with the cool concrete. “We’ve been friends for over a decade; we’ve basically got a telepathic mind meld at this point. You know how it is.”

Strangely, Morpheus thinks he might. Not that any of the individual phrases come close to resembling how he’d describe his relationship with Lucienne, but he’s heard that most of the paper staff think it’s spooky how seamlessly they work together.

For a split second, it finally feels possible that he may have been wrong, that Hob might, genuinely, have liked him, and he’s swept up in a wave of giddy relief.

It last just long enough for Morpheus to realize that whatever feelings Hob may have had, he’s as good as killed them himself.

“Look, I know you don’t. Owe me anything. After one date,” Hob says.

And it’s probably good that Morpheus killed those feelings, he realizes, because he hasn’t managed to learn from his mistakes, has been treating their singular date as though he’d been cheated on after a seven-year marriage-

“But why didn’t you say anything?” Hob asks. The words themselves are an accusation. They should sound like an accusation. Instead he just sounds hurt.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Morpheus replies. He shouldn’t, but it’s the first thing to come to his mind beyond self-recrimination and he genuinely wants the answer.

Hob’s only answer is a rueful laugh. “Didn’t think a five-hour long lecture about my best friend’s family drama was real seductive. Or impressive.” He sighs, eyes fluttering closed again. “And that’s the story.”

His face is still pressed into the cement block supporting him. With his eyes closed, he looks asleep on his feet.

Morpheus will deny, until his dying day, that the thought that runs through his head at that moment is oh right that’s a bad thing.

It won’t be a lie, exactly. The thought that does occur to him is nowhere near as articulate, but the spirit is the same; it hits Morpheus with the force of a piano falling out of the sky that ‘Hob looks like a strong breeze would tip him over, or possibly kill him,’ isn’t a neutral observation of his appearance but a serious problem.

Yes, it’s definitely a good thing that Morpheus killed this relationship when he did. Hob, whatever his faults, deserves someone who will notice when he’s hurting and care about it, not force him into an emotionally fraught conversation.

“Do you want to sit down?” Morpheus asks. It is less of an invitation and more of a worried command, because the longer he stares, the more certain he is that Hob’s legs are about to go out from under him.

“I really can’t,” Hob says. The simmer of anger from when he first started talking to Morpheus is back in full force. “I’ve got a paper due Monday and I’ll be lucky to finish it even if I stay awake for another thirty-six hours, and-”

“Another?” Somewhere on campus, Teleute is sensing how hypocritical Morpheus’ horror is, and probably laughing to herself about it, but he can’t bring himself to care. “When did you last sleep?”

Hob shrugs.

“When did you last eat?”

“Do cough drops count?”

“No,” Morpheus says, decisively. He grabs Hob by the elbow, realizing too late he’s committed to the gesture, and drags him toward the nearest table. Hob, thankfully, is steadier on his feet than he’d looked; Morpheus doesn’t think he’d be able to catch him if he fell. “Here,” he says, shoving Hob in the general direction of a chair. “Sit. For a second. I’ll get you something.”

“I’m really not hungry,” Hob says, with a grimace.

“I will get you a drink,” Morpheus amends. “Sit,” he adds, and stalks off.

It occurs to him, as he pours a glass of water from a dispenser, that he has no idea what he’s doing, and no reason to believe Hob will stick around long enough for him to do it. He’s figured out by now that Morpheus is too proud and self-centered and spiteful to be worth his time as a friend or a lover, and the smart thing for him to do would be to leave. Still, Morpheus slips into one of the buffet lines for a slice of bread and some plain pasta. If Hob isn’t there, Morpheus has had worse meals, and if he is- plain foods are easy to eat when you’re sick, right?

Shockingly, when he elbows he way out of the crowd surrounding the food, Hob is still slumped over the table Morpheus had left him at. Morpheus hurries back to him, mentally penciling in get him to a doctor?? on his list of things to do.

But Hob lifts his head easily enough when Morpheus returns, accepts the offered meal with a mixture of wariness and gratitude. Morpheus slides into the chair opposite him, watching him carefully for signs that he should call an ambulance, and is greatly reassured when Hob rolls his eyes at him and takes a cautious bite of bread.

His eyes go wide, and the next thing Morpheus knows, he’s scarfing down pasta with the ferocity of- well, with the ferocity of someone who hasn’t eaten in thirty-six hours.

“Thanks,” he mutters, around a mouthful of food, “This is honestly the best thing that’s happened to me all week.”

“What else happened to you?” Morpheus asks, vaguely horrified that anyone could end up in a state where ‘eating shitty dining hall food with the man who broke their heart’ could be a notably good moment in their week.

“You know that fountain on the North Quad they didn’t both to fully drain?” Hob asks. On the surface it’s a casual question. Just below the surface, not even deep enough to be fully soaked, that power line of anger is snapping and sparking again.

Morpheus nods.

“One of my teammates pushed me in on Monday.”

“On purpose?”

“Not sure.” It’s a growl more than it is words. “I had my backpack on and my phone in my pocket, and now my laptop is cracked in half because of how I hit the fountain and my phone is sitting in a bowl of rice, and I’ve been too afraid to take it out because I don’t have the money to replace both of them. I’ve got an essay due Monday that’s worth forty percent of my grade that was saved to that laptop that I’ve spent the past week trying to scrape back together enough that I don’t fail. The professor won’t give me an extension, because apparently it was my fault for not backing up my work. I probably won’t be able to play the last game of my senior year because I caught the Dorm Plague somewhere in there, and I feel so sick right now I don’t even care. And my heart’s still kind of broken-” Hob stops speaking abruptly, darting a worried glance at Morpheus.

Morpheus, who has not managed to keep the worry from his face. Morpheus, who is in part responsible for Hob’s current misery. He braces himself for Hob’s ire, or for Hob to leave, and can’t figure out which idea he hates more.

Hob, incongruously, smiles at him, a wan, shy thing but adamantine-strong under all of it. “While I can actually string three words together,” he says, “I’m sorry I didn’t think to tell you about the wedding. I-” His voice dies abruptly, as Morpheus’ hand comes to rest over his on the table.

Morpheus, almost as surprised by the gesture as Hob is, starts talking with absolutely no plan, “I understand. You don’t need to apologize. Did it work?”

“Uh…” Hob’s eyes are locked on Morpheus’ hand, which he’s somehow neglected to pull away, but after a moment of quiet staring he says, “Yeah, worked perfectly. Better than we expected, actually- her parents like. Hate me. They’re so busy trying to convince her to ditch her good-for-nothing boyfriend they haven’t had time to be assholes about… other things.” There’s an edge to the way he says ‘good-for-nothing’, like he’s trying too hard to sound flippant.

“They’re idiots,” Morpheus says. He might, possibly, say it a bit too aggressively, because Hob looks up from their hands, alarmed. “You’re- anyone would be lucky to have you as a boyfriend,” he adds.

He’s already wrecked things, the least he can do is make sure Hob knows there’s nothing wrong with him.

“Just anyone?” Hob asks, softly. He wriggles his hand until his fingers are loosely entwined with Morpheus’, offers him a smile that’s a faded version of the way he’d beamed at Morpheus the night they met.

Which answers Morpheus’ earlier question as to how sick Hob is right now: entirely delirious. Morpheus can’t see many other reasons he’d offer to get back together with Morpheus after what Morpheus put him through. “We should have this conversation when you can string four words together,” he says, standing and straightening his coat. “And you should go to bed.”

Hob doesn’t move. “I’d love to,” he says, entirely defeated, “But I can’t afford to fail this class.”

The thought, stubborn idiot, winds its way across Morpheus’ brain, in loopy cursive font with hearts for the ‘O’s and dotting the ‘I’s. “You’ll write better if you’ve slept,” he says, fully aware that he’s repeating the exact advice he tends to ignore from others. He walks around the table and offers Hob his hand. “Let me walk you home?”

Hob’s expression goes glassy and dazed for a moment, and that lapse in lucidity, Morpheus assumes, is what gets him to agree.

Close to forty-eight hours after he’d dragged Hob back to his apartment, Morpheus is standing on his doorstep again, more nervous than he has any right to be. He’s just- checking on Hob. Because he was in the area. And he wasn’t sure Hob’s phone would be working.

They’ll need to have The Conversation eventually. The one where Hob gets to scold Morpheus for treating him awfully, refuse to speak to him again. They might have to have it today.

For now he’s checking on Hob, and he shouldn’t be nervous. He always knew that this would end, he shouldn’t be worried now that that’s about to happen. It has been in the process of ending for a week now.

He knocks.

The door opens.

Hob’s roommate is not behind it.

Determined to learn from his mistakes, Morpheus takes a moment to fully catalogue Hob’s appearance, on alert for any warning signs that he’s terribly ill and needs immediate medical attention. He does look better, if nothing else; the feverish haze is gone from his eyes and he’s not leaning on the door for support, but he’s still pale and wearing a number of layers that even Morpheus deems excessive.

So the first words out of Morpheus’ mouth, instead of any reasonable sort of greeting, are, “Why the fuck aren’t you in bed?”

Somehow, the emotional journey that plays out across Hob’s face as he decides not to make the obvious joke is stupidly endearing. Maybe it’s the way it ends with a confused, hopeful smile. Maybe Morpheus has been ruined for other partners for all time by the face Hob makes when he thinks he’s being funny.

For whatever reason, he’s charmed, and when Hob finally answers, “Well, for one thing, I had to answer the door,” he with a blatantly flirtatious grin, Morpheus can’t stop the ugly little bark of laughter that escapes his lips.

“Do you want to come in?” Hob asks, instead of responding to that laugh- and Morpheus in general- with the appropriate level of disgust. His voice is soft.

“I just- wanted to see how you were feeling,” Morpheus says. He can't stay long, he shouldn't stay long, shouldn’t impose himself on Hob any more than he already is-

“Better, thank you.” Hob takes a step backwards, pulling the door with him, leaving a space for Morpheus to step inside. He’s clearly fresh from the shower, the brash edges of him softened a little by sleep and comfort. The outermost of the layers he’s wearing is a sweater advertising a sailing camp, faded, threadbare, clearly beloved by the off-color patches on the sleeves. Taken together, it adds an intimacy to the offer to come inside, an intimacy Morpheus knows he doesn’t deserve.

Gingerly, Morpheus crosses the threshold. Takes off his boots. Follows Hob into the apartment, every move a taunting glimpse at what a better, kinder, version of him could have had.

Hob half-collapses onto the couch in a pile of blankets the second he gets close enough. “You can sit, if you want. To stay,” he says.

The only places to sit in the room are the couch, which looks like it’s been dragged through hell and back and lost most of its stuffing while it was there, and a rickety wooden chair at the other end of the room, in the half that is theoretically a kitchen. There is, also, a second wooden chair pulled up to the couch, but it’s currently housing a gutted mess of electronic parts and wires. Morpheus gingerly takes his backpack off, weighing his options.

“Thank you for yesterday, too,” Hob adds, as Morpheus perches on the edge the couch, certain if he puts any more weight on it he’ll be speared by a loose spring. “You were right. That I needed to sleep.”

It’s possibly the first time in Morpheus’ life that someone has told him he was right about sleeping, and he wastes a moment being startled and pleased, missing part of Hob’s next sentence. “-first time I’d looked at it that I wasn’t exhausted or blinded by rage, and I realized I could just take the hard drive out. I’ll still have to go back to the library, but-”

“No,” Morpheus says, more forcefully than he’d intended. “What is wrong with you?”

“This paper’s worth like 50% of my grade and I need a working computer to finish it?” Hob says, a bit more sarcastically than Morpheus thinks is warranted, especially since the reasonable solution is so obvious.

“Just use mine,” he points out. “I’ve got reading to catch up on. If you need it longer than today I can come back.” He takes the laptop from his bag and unlocks it, only realizing as he hands it over to Hob that Hob is staring at him like Morpheus is signing over his inheritance.

He is only a little less worried that this is a sign of some horrible deadly brain fever than he was two days ago.

“Um,” Hob says, after a moment, fidgeting with the edge of one of the blankets he’s cocooned himself in. “You said we should save talking about. Us. For when I was able to string four words together.”

Morpheus doesn’t answer. He can’t bring himself to, can’t take another step on the path that ends with him losing Hob forever.

“After I asked you to be my boyfriend?” Hob asks, taking Morpheus’ silence for confusion rather than dread. He sounds painfully nervous, like he’s expecting Morpheus to react just as abominably to his rejection as he has to everything else this past week, and Morpheus doesn’t know how to reassure him otherwise.

“Do you still want that?” he asks woodenly, forcing himself to meet Hob’s eyes.

 “Of course I do,” Hob says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “You’re my soulmate, after all,” he adds, with a teasing grin.

There are tears prickling in Morpheus’ eyes.

For the first time since Hob walked up to him in the White Horse, Morpheus thinks that maybe he could keep this. He’s never had a relationship that didn’t end in disaster, but a disaster already happened. A disaster already happened, and Hob still wants him.

“Unless you don’t want that!” Hob says, sounding alarmed. Morpheus realizes, to his abject horror, that one of those tears has escaped and is running down his cheek. “I just mean-”

Morpheus reaches his hand out, snakelike-quick, and grabs Hob’s hand. It’s less of a romantic gesture and more of a very halfhearted attempt to take him prisoner.

They sit like that for- a time, as Morpheus attempts to gather himself. This should be easy. He should be able to just tell Hob what he wants, that he wants-

Things that were impossible twenty minutes ago, and still seem so faint and terrifyingly fragile that he can’t work out how to reach for them.

Gently, he draws Hob’s hand toward him and presses a kiss to the knuckles. Hob, to his delight, blushes. “I do. Want that,” he whispers.

“Nice,” Hob says, rescuing Morpheus from the horror of having to say anything more, “So I was thinking this weekend we could go to that movie theater off-campus? Or there’s this great old bookstore-”

“Finish your essay first,” Morpheus grumbles at him, “We won’t be able to do any of that if you die from pneumonia.”

“You say that like you think I’m mortal,” Hob says, but he picks up a piece of black plastic and a cable from the mess on the chair, and turns his attention to Morpheus’ laptop.

Morpheus digs around in his bag for a book and a pen. He absolutely does need to catch up on his reading, and it would be silly to leave Hob’s apartment- his boyfriend’s apartment, a tiny voice in his head trills- only to come back a few hours later to pick up the laptop. When he sits up, and cautiously lets himself sit back against the couch, Hob immediately leans into his shoulder without looking up from what he’s typing.

I could keep this, some part of Morpheus sings, cataloguing every detail of the warmth that is Hob curling into his side and squirreling them away to write poems about.

Almost two hours later, the essay finished and submitted, Hob dozed off with his head in Morpheus’ lap, he finds he can almost believe it.