Chapter Text
Hob was late.
Hob was really, horribly, utterly and undeniably late, and he hadn’t even left his lecture hall yet, so it was only going to get worse.
He wouldn’t blame Morpheus if the man had already left the New Inn by now, almost two hours past the time they had agreed to meet, and just hoped it wasn’t enough to stop their more frequent meetings entirely. If there was anything Hob had learned in his years at court, it was that one never, ever, made royalty wait for them, and his friend was king of something far greater than just a measly island kingdom.
He dearly wished he had some means to contact Morpheus other than hoping to see him in person again. Mobile phones and the internet were some of the greatest inventions mankind had ever managed, in Hob’s humble but very informed opinion, and he felt almost thrown back to another lifetime by his inability to just send off a quick message with an explanation or apology.
Nothing for it, he supposed as he shoved his laptop into his bag. He couldn’t very well leave a student having a panic attack in the back row of his classroom to fend for themselves just because he had finally managed to truly befriend the stranger he’d been trying to get to know for over six centuries. He’d just have to hope Morpheus was either still at the Inn or would show up next month without their explicit agreement to do so.
He slipped into the steady stream of students and staff flowing through the hallways and nearly missed the splotch of blackness in the row of seats against the wall in his haste to get outside. Nearly being the operative word.
He froze, did a double take and blinked, his brain trying to process what his eyes were seeing.
“Hello Hob.”
The other people in the hall stepped past him as he turned and walked back, seemingly blind to the personification of dreams that unfolded himself from the chair with more elegance than Hob would have expected anyone to show after sitting in the torture devise the school board had deemed proper seating.
Hob felt an almost embarrassing rush of relief at seeing him, and nearly stumbled over his words in his rush to get them out.
“Morpheus! I am so sorry my friend, please forgive my tardiness. I couldn’t in good conscience walk away from this.”
A faint look of confusion crossed Morpheus’ face while he stepped up to his side, the stream of student parting before him like a school of fish before a shark. He looked Hob up and down, like he was trying to figure out what it was he was begging forgiveness for, and gave something that would have been a shrug in anyone else.
“Duty should always come first Hob, do not apologize for doing yours.”
That was something that Hob might not agree with entirely, not after having served under dozens of worthless superiors, but it was an argument he wasn’t willing to start. Certainly not when he could guide his friend out of the university instead, stepping out into the lovely autumn weather.
“Do you still have time for a chat at the Inn?”
“I do. Matthew will alert me if I cannot tarry any longer.”
“Great. Let’s go then, I’m starving.”
Hob loved this time of year. Always had, even when autumn had meant either backbreaking work in the fields, trying to get the harvests to storage before the rain came around to destroy them, or the start of the muddy season where rust formed on your sword in a single night and the commanding officers wanted to gain every last inch of ground they could force out of their troops before winter set in to end the fighting season.
He loved the colours, the scent of decaying leaves in the air, the crisps first hints of frost in early mornings. Fall was a spectacle nature brought on each and every year, a rapid change that managed to surprise and amaze him with its onset every time. Morpheus hummed in something that sounded like agreement when he tried to explain his love of the season, picking up a leaf painted in the brightest reds and yellows he could imagine and holding it out in front of them to force them both to look at it properly.
“It’s so brief and fleeting, this beauty. A few days of rain and they’ll all be a soggy brown mush only the worms can enjoy. But it’s fantastic right now. It’s those little things to look forward to that makes life worth living you know? Even when I was down to rags and eating nothing but my own fingernails most days, this could bring some hope to my heart. Nature changes all the time, cycles round again and again no matter what we do. It’s only natural for us to change alongside it.”
“You make changing along with your world sound so very easy Hob. Though perhaps change is easier for mortals, even if they happen to be of the immortal variety.”
Hob snorted, throwing the leaf up in the air so it could flutter down between them as they walked on.
“I suppose it is. I can’t imagine doing the same thing all the time, I’d go mad. I think humans thrive on change and chaos. We need it to keep growing, to keep improving and reinventing ourselves.”
“Most intelligent species do.” Morpheus answered, like throwing out that there were more intelligent species roaming about the universe was a perfectly normal thing to do on a walk through your local park. He shot Hob a look, lips twisted in a faint, teasing smile. “Though humans do seem to be exceptionally prone to chaos.”
“Oi!”
Hob kicked a pile of leaves over Morpheus’ feet in retaliation, fighting the urge to stick out his tongue at the look of fond exasperation the other man shot him and settling for just an innocent smile.
He wouldn’t have dared to do something like that even a few months ago, something so juvenile and familiar. Not with his Stranger. But for all his talk about change being difficult, if not impossible for a creature such as him, his friend had changed, perhaps more than he himself was aware of.
Not just due to his captivity, although that first meeting after their missed appointment had already been so very different from the ones before. Morpheus still looked more or less the same as he had that afternoon; ethereal, tired and skinnier than he should be, but he was obviously trying to be different. To actually interact rather than just observe, to be a proper friend.
He even greeted Paul, the barman on duty in the New Inn, quite politely when the man welcomed them with a smile and slightly worried inquiry about their tardiness.
Hob wondered if it was a bad thing to have your schedule known well enough by the staff of a pub to have them get worried when you didn’t show up on time when it was your own pub. He decided that it was fine as long as that same barman also pulled you your preferred beer without asking, along with the now customary glass of water for Morpheus.
“We do have other things to drink here you know?” Hob said as they made their way to their preferred corner table. “You were drinking beer that very first day we met, weren’t you? I can promise you I serve better stuff here than the White Horse did back then.”
He took great pleasure in finding all sorts of hobbyists and microbreweries to supply his Inn, even if some of the results of their experiments were somewhat questionable. Beer was what he’d been drinking for centuries, and he rather liked that the beverage has been as ever-changing and yet everlasting as he himself was. He would gladly support the people who were taking the mixing of water, barley and yeast to new and exciting places.
“I am aware of that, yes. The water will suffice.”
Hob honestly doubted that. His friend still had that tight, drawn look of hunger about him, skin and sinew tightly stretched over the bones of his hands and face. He looked like a man who could do with more regular meals and a good night’s sleep every now and then.
“Sure I can’t tempt you? Perhaps with a bite to eat then? It’s absurd what sorts of food one can get in London nowadays. Exotic fruits, spices and meat available to everyone, even fake meat for the ones who don’t want to eat the real thing for whatever reason. Eggs and milk are available year-round now… And that’s just what’s in the supermarkets. It’s bloody amazing.”
He remembered earning a fortune on getting just a single shipload of pepper and nutmeg across the ocean, and eating pork trotters or no meat at all in the decades before he got himself out of the nameless masses and into the shipping business. It still felt like a great luxury to just step up to a fridge and get to choose from any number of cuts and species whenever he liked.
“And yet you still serve the same things that have been on the menu since the days when you were an illiterate brute who would kill a man for a loaf of white bread.”
“Well, you can’t go wrong with the classics, can you? A good stew, bread with eggs and bacon, a crusty pie… Even the king of dreams wouldn’t be able to find fault in the pies here. They’re damn good if I say so myself.”
Morpheus huffed at that, a laugh without sound that still managed to sound self-deprecating.
“I fear I would be a very poor judge in these matters. I do not seem to recall the taste food used to have, nor the pleasure it once gave. I craved food like I never had before when I sat in my cage and sated the hunger that gnawed inside me immediately after my escape, but I have found myself with little appetite since.”
“That isn’t abnormal after a long stint without food. And more than a century is a long time, even for someone immortal.” Hob should know. He still remembered the years of hunger and deprivation he’d suffered so long ago. Drowning had been bad enough, but the starvation that had come afterwards? That had been so much worse.
“You do need to eat then? I always wondered, you never did seem to be interested in anything but a drink when we met up before, and even that you usually just sort of… fiddled with.”
The raised eyebrow aimed his way would have been slightly more intimidating if Morpheus wasn’t currently doing exactly that with his glass of water. “Fiddled?! I do not such thing as ‘fiddling’ Hob Gadling.”
The look on his face upon realizing that he was, indeed, fiddling, was priceless. He crossed his arms across his chest and glared at the glass instead as he spoke on. “But yes, I need to eat, much in the same way you do. I will not die due to a lack of food, but it is… uncomfortable to go without. Weakening, both to this body and to the Dreaming as a whole.”
“That settles it then. I’ll have Paul bring up a little bit of everything he has available in the kitchen and we’ll see if there is anything you like. Who knows, maybe stuff from the real world is different enough from what you’re used to to make it palatable.”
Hob’s stomach was making it very clear that it had been quite a few rather stressful hours since lunchtime had come and gone, so he made quick work of getting a spread of edible stuff brought to their table. There were plenty of upsides to owning a pub, and no questions being asked when you requested a sampling of anything and everything edible that was lying around was apparently one of them.
“How does this work in your realm then?” He asked as he sat down again and grabbed a handful of chips, pushing the bowl towards Morpheus in invitation. “I honestly can’t imagine you cooking something yourself. Do you have kitchen staff to cook for you? Or do you just dream up what you need?”
A look of distaste crossed his friend’s face as he tried a chip, the greasy wedge of fried potato clearly not to his liking. He followed it up with a swallow of water before answering.
“The Dreaming provides what I wish it to, one way or another. Some of my subjects and a great many dreamers enjoy cultivating crops, so there are many lush and fertile regions for them to work, even beyond the frontier of nightmare. It is interesting how many varied and ever-changing horrors the dreamers and my nightmares can come up with, given just some good soil and farming tools.”
“Sorry. Frontier of nightmare?”
“The area where dreams and nightmares cross over. A place of constant flux, of change and disorientation, even more so than the rest of the Dreaming. The dreams and nightmares who serve there are fickle and mercurial, flighty little things, as likely to show you wonders as they are to torment.”
Hob let that sink in for a moment, chewing on a bite of pie.
“You know, I never thought of dreams and nightmares as people? I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that they are, considering who I’m sharing a pie with -and you’re supposed to eat it mate, not just rip it into tiny pieces- but still. A real place and real people… It’s like suddenly finding out there’s a whole new continent on the world. Like discovering the America’s all over again.”
A pleased smile flashed across Morpheus’ face, followed by a more calculating look, not dissimilar to the ones Hob had seen back when their conversations were still very much one-sided and he’d tried so hard to impress his Stranger with stories about his exploits.
What would that Hob of the past have given to be able to talk with his friend like this, like something approaching equals, even if they would never truly be that? To hear about the strange and fascinating life his Stranger led, the world he came from?
Morpheus’ next words dragged him out of those musings quite abruptly.
“Would you like to visit?”
“Your realm? Hell yes, of course I would. Is that even possible?” Of bloody fucking course he would like to visit the place his friend ruled. He had a vivid imagination, but there was only so much one could do with the crumbs and snippets of information he had.
“It is, though I allow very few mortals to do so. But you are not quite an ordinary mortal, despite…”
Whatever he was going to say next, and Hob believed it to be a fifty/fifty chance of unintentionally being either very sweet or deeply insulting, was interrupted by a loud tapping on the nearest window.
They both looked at it, the memory of Lady Constantine flashing back up in Hob’s mind.
This wasn’t a woman though, or even a human. It was a bloody big bird, sitting right in the middle of the window box he’d installed a year or two back. The beast managed to look both rather silly and ominous, its deep black feathers at odds with the bright colours of the last few flowers that managed to bloom despite the changing season. It pecked at the window again, only stopping when Morpheus rose and said his goodbyes with a regal nod.
“That is my call I’m afraid. I will send you the means to visit me. Until then, my friend.”
He left with quick steps, moving through the evening crowd as easily as he had through the students back at uni, leaving Hob behind with a curl of excitement in his belly.