Chapter Text
Going to visit Hob felt like a formality, at first. It did not occur to Dream until his sister suggested it; perhaps he hadn’t thought Hob would be interested in seeing him, not after all this time and the wounds left between them. Perhaps Dream himself hadn’t wanted to face him.
He did not want censure, not right now, not even if it was warranted.
He was… tired.
All those years in that basement and he had never felt tired. Rather, he had been charged with fury and vengeance, sick with hunger and grief, itchy with stagnation and weakened by the summoning circle but tired, no, not like this.
This was deeper than the weight of chasing down his tools, of putting the Dreaming back together. Death's advice had given him a direction again, a way back to his function, but Dream still did not know what to do with this soul-deep ache.
If only he were still wounded, still bound by the summoning circle. That would be easier to understand.
So returning Hob felt almost like another task to add to the aching mountain of them he had been climbing since his escape– perhaps at best an attempt at returning to known ritual, to reconnecting with a side of humanity that wasn’t so horrible as that with which he had recently become so well acquainted.
It felt that way right up until Dream stopped outside the crumpled skeleton of the White Horse Inn.
He stared at it through the fence, not moving, not blinking, not believing . Even this. Even this one, small marker through the ages was gone in this new era. Nothing had been spared the ravaging of that basement: not the Dreaming, not Dream himself, and not this, this tiny ritual.
He had not realized how much those periodic meetings had meant, had grounded him, until he stood before their loss. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of how he had felt falling back into the Dreaming after his imprisonment, and finding half of what he’d created dissolved back into sand. A familiar door not only locked, but vanished altogether.
Would he have to put this back together, too? This, as he had everything else?
Then his eyes fell on the scribbled note.
The New Inn –>
Perhaps not. Perhaps that door was still cracked open.
Dream followed the sign, steps numb on the pavement. He did not know what kind of welcome he would receive, but regardless of the fate he was treading towards, there was something simple and relieving in merely following the sign. For once, Destiny’s book open in his hands, no more searching and floundering for the right path.
Dream would have thought he’d be desperate for choice after being deprived of it for so long. But he was tired. He only hoped the architect of this choice had designed it mercifully.
The New Inn bustled with light and energy as he stepped inside, and the echo of history hovered in its walls. Dream felt comfortable there immediately in a way he usually didn’t in the waking world, and walked in a daze past the bustling tables, through sounds of clinking glass and tinkling laughter, letting his steps carry him automatically.
Only then did it occur to him that Hob might not be there. This gave him pause. Dream had anticipated anger over his absence. But he had not considered that Hob might simply… not wait.
Why would he, though? Dream was given to understand that three decades was rather a long time for a human, if not so much for an Endless, and their prior parting would have given Hob no particular indication that Dream intended to show up, in any case.
The thought lodged something painful under his heart, something unexpected. Another bit of consistency pulled from under his feet, lost during his imprisonment.
And then he saw Hob.
Hob, sitting at a table in the corner of the inn, some work and a half-drunk pint of ale spread out before him, like he had been sitting there this whole time, just waiting for Dream.
Dream stopped walking and just looked at him.
Waiting. So few had waited.
Then he forced himself back into motion and stepped over to Hob’s table. The lights and sounds of the inn faded out, narrowing in on Hob’s face as he looked up at Dream and just— smiled. Surprise melting into a smile that lit up his whole face. He had— Hob had such a warm smile; Dream wasn’t sure he had ever let himself notice before. Some dampened hearth within him murmured back to life at the sight.
“You’re late,” Hob told him, but there was no accusation in it. Only grace, for Dream, grace, and a forgiveness he sensed had already been offered years before he had arrived.
And so Dream did what he so rarely did, and apologized. For leaving on bad terms, so long ago, and for his absence, though the latter had not been intentional.
Hob offered him grace for it, though. Kindness. Even operating under the understanding that Dream had meant to abandon him.
Dream sat down across from him. Were he not Endless, not newly restored by the power of his ruby, he thought his legs might have given out not only from the exhaustion that still lay sunken in every part of him, but from the kindness offered so freely, the hand outstretched through the glass that still surrounded him in a halo of reflecting fragments.
As it was, he merely sat, and allowed himself to smile at Hob. A real smile. There had been so little to smile at, of late. He called Hob friend, which earned him an even wider smile in return.
“Friends,” Hob repeated. “You don’t know what it means to hear you say that.”
Dream did know what it meant. He knew the pang it had struck in him a century prior, and the hollow ache of rejecting it. Dream did not have friends.
Well. He supposed he had one.
He did not know how he had let this become unimportant in his mind.
Hob continued, “I’m really glad to see you. Always feels like ages and no time at all between our meetings.”
One hundred years had never felt like a long time to Dream before. He had existed for millennia; a century, while not nothing at all, was not so much time that he felt deeply moved by its passing.
But this century. This century of damp and darkness and cold, seconds eking by with nothing to occupy them, without the turn of the earth to mark days or the sounds of the Dreaming to mark lives--
Dream felt as though he had been destroyed and remade since the last time he had seen Hob Gadling, so long did this century feel.
“And how did this time treat you?” he managed to ask.
Hob let out a low whistle. “Hell of a century. Somebody took the dial on progress and ratcheted it up to eleven.”
And he launched into a rundown of the twentieth century’s major developments. Dream found it startling to hear them laid out in order. He was aware of these things by now, having once more been immersed in the collective unconscious, but he had not yet found a moment to truly think about them, to reconcile them with the world he had known from before. Dream could draw a logical line from the first flights to a rocket landing on Mars, he could see the technological family tree of the mobile phone Hob held out to him, its birthplace in mathematics – but that did not make the information organic. Rather, it was a story, a story proposing an alternate world, one that Dream was not a part of for all that his essence, his function, nestled in every atom of it.
“Are you still with me?” Hob asked. “If I’m boring you, just say, I can handle it, I promise.”
“You are not,” said Dream, forcing himself to focus. If anything, he enjoyed hearing the way Hob recounted these things. It was simply hard to stay here, in this waking plane that had lost its place for him.
Harder, with no urgent mission driving him to it.
Hob squinted at him. “Are you alright?”
Dream stiffened, and Hob immediately raised his hands in surrender. “Never mind, never mind, made that mistake before. Won’t prod at you this time, promise.”
Dream made himself settle. “It was unfair of me to leave in that manner,” he admitted.
“It’s alright,” Hob said, his forgiveness easy as breathing once again. He leaned back in his chair, steadying himself. “Pushed you too hard, I’m sure. And I’m a patient man, got no shortage of time.”
He smiled at Dream in a way Dream thought was meant to be reassuring but seemed more like it was trying to reassure Hob himself. A smile that wavered at the edges, like Dream was a bird Hob was afraid was on the verge of flight.
The temptation was there, always, but Dream didn’t fly away. He was not so good at friendship, but he did understand that after all this kindness, it was the last thing Hob deserved.
“I had meant to attend our meeting,” Dream said.
Hob’s expression shifted. Confusion, curiosity. “Oh? What changed, then?”
Dream meant to hedge and slip around the truth in a way that told Hob his absence was unintentional, but offered no other detail– but Hob’s easy forgiveness was such a heady thing that it blew right through the distance Dream always tried to keep between them. In a flash every fond look Hob had ever directed at him flickered through his mind, and Dream’s battered heart gave a lurch and he said without thinking–
“I was imprisoned.”
And as the words forced their way from him he realized he had told no one of this. Lucienne knew the shape of it, but Dream had not spoken of it in detail. Matthew, too, had picked up hints, but Dream had not confided in him anything he did not surmise on his own. Death had already known without Dream having to speak it.
These words were living inside him, as his prison was.
Hob, always so active, so lively, went still. His gaze met Dream’s, cautious. “Imprisoned?” he echoed, and the word was sharp with imminent threat.
Dream looked into the soft brown of his eyes and felt himself at the apex of some great fall, as if he had tipped back too far on the legs of his chair and was hovering just on the precipice of overbalancing. He didn’t know if he should allow himself to tip over.
Did one allow oneself to tip over?
“Captured,” he said.
Hob stared at him. The first feeling that flashed across his face was disbelief, a disbelief not unlike Dream’s own when he’d first awoken to find himself in a cage. Who could capture one such as him? Apparently, it had been easier than he’d thought.
Then it shifted into what Dream could only interpret as grief. “Captured,” Hob repeated, a pained crack through the middle of it. “For… wait, since–?” He ran his hand anxiously through his hair. “My God.”
“You need not trouble yourself over it,” Dream murmured. That was done now, gone, or should be. Dream could not quite make it so, in his own mind. He felt at a remove from that century, like he was one of his dreamers haunted by a nightmare.
Or perhaps it was the after that was a dream.
He did not know how to feel about Hob acknowledging it and settling what had once merely hovered in the air into something solid between them.
“What?” Hob looked at him incredulously. “I don’t know where to start troubling myself over it. Since– since when, since– Christ, before 1989?”
Hob was so concerned, Dream thought, even though he did not know what Dream was, or how his absence had affected the waking world. He was simply concerned, as he was once upon a time when a knife had been pulled on them, for Dream’s person. Such that it existed. Always, Hob was giving him these things that he did not know how to hold.
“Longer,” Dream admitted.
Hob paled, but did not ask how long, exactly. “That’s… awful,” he said, at a loss. “I assume– I hope? whoever was involved was–”
“It is taken care of,” said Dream, and Hob’s lips pressed thin, twisted, not as satisfied with that as Dream would have hoped.
“Good,” Hob said. “And… what about you?”
“...All bonds were broken when I escaped,” Dream said, unsure exactly what he was getting at. “Nothing holds me now.”
“No, I meant…” Hob trailed off, thinking. Dream watched the tap of his fingers on his glass of ale, the uneven rhythm of his movement.
“I assure you,” he said. “I have had much to do since my return. But everything has now been set to rights.”
If only that were the whole truth. Dream’s tools were recovered, all immediate threats to the Dreaming eliminated, its decay stopped and the reversal begun. But. Several of Dream’s creations were still in the wind, and the Dreaming was not as it was. Dream had begun to think that, even though he could repair it fully, it would never be quite as it was before.
“I’m sure,” Hob said. “And I– I’m glad. I guess what I meant was.” He tugged on his hair. It was longer now, or at least styled more loosely than Dream recalled from their last meeting. These details stuck in his mind, now, small grounding points in the miasma of change that surrounded him.
“What I meant was,” Hob continued, summoning his courage, “and forgive me for overstepping – though I am wont to do so, as you know – but. Things being… set to rights? though they may be… you look like you could use… some rest. A reprieve, of some kind. It sounds like you have been working very hard. So. If there is anything I can help you with, I would be more than happy to do so. Lord knows I’ve known what it is to be in need of rest. So know that I speak out of empathy and not–” he winced– “accusation. Made that mistake before.”
Hob did have a tendency to ramble, especially when he was getting nervous. But Dream couldn’t help but to find his voice soothing. After a century of isolation interspersed only by cruelty, kind words had more often than not felt foreign, a discomfort, or worse, like pity. But Dream recognized better now that Hob never meant to pity him, not even at their last meeting, when Dream had instinctively read it so. He spoke, as he said, out of empathy, and the belief that whatever he himself might suffer without, Dream would feel the same. Dream, his… friend, not the Lord of Dreams.
For Hob still did not even know his name.
Dream should rectify that. Soon. For now, he was realizing what he should have realized, so long ago. That Hob Gadling was the only being in all the world who knew nothing of what Dream was, his power, his status, his responsibilities – and called him friend. Still wished to associate with Dream, gaining nothing from it.
“Perhaps,” Dream admitted belatedly in response to Hob’s suggestion. He was unsure, however, how exactly rest was meant to work for one such as him. In a way, he had been resting for a century, frozen in inaction.
“I have been told so already,” Dream added, remembering Lucienne’s words when he had returned to the Dreaming.
“Good,” Hob said, with a half-smile.
“Good?”
“Means you have someone else who cares about you.”
“And do you, Hob Gadling?” Dream asked, throat tight. He did not know when these had started, either, these human feelings, arising unbidden. “Care. For me?”
“‘Course,” Hob said, and now his smile looked pained. “You are my oldest friend.”
Since his escape, Dream had been hovering in a strange in-between space merging dream and nightmare, a space where the Dreaming felt comforting but unfamiliar and the waking familiar but cruel, where unease crawled along his veins even in the Dreaming though he barely had a form there at all, where nothing felt quite right and he did not know how to make it so. Dream was a creature of the unconscious mind, so this space between sleep and waking was only a part of the hazy border of his realm, under his sway but not his control. And he recalled how dreamers slipping through that liminal space jolted awake sometimes, just before touching the Dreaming, their minds startled by the illusion of the sudden drop.
This in-between space was a place of falling. But Hob’s smiles drew him forward and made him want to risk a step off the edge of the cliff.
“As you are mine,” he conceded, and Hob lit up like the sun. The bright joy of him found Dream in the air and caught him, melting away any discomfort over the admission.
“Regarding your advice,” Dream added, “I’m afraid there is still much for me to do. And my realm has suffered from my… inaction… long enough.”
“Realm,” Hob repeated, tasting the word. “Tell me this, though. How does your realm fare when its… ruler?... isn’t at the top of his game?”
Dream stifled the instinctive bristling response to this question. He refused to make the same mistake with Hob twice.
“It is… complicated,” he said, rather than attempt to explain that he was the realm, in essence. “I understand the point you are making, however.”
“Just think about it,” Hob said. “I’ve learned it well enough, if you don’t make time for rest when you need it, it’ll force your hand.” He gave Dream a crooked grin. “ Even if you’re immortal. Hell, more so. Kinda deactivates all the normal trip switches, that. You aren’t careful and you’ll find yourself facedown in a ditch after your body decided you’re going to sleep now, please and thanks. Not–” he pointed at Dream in mock-warning– “that that’s happened to me, mind.”
“Oh?” Dream raised an eyebrow. “Has it not?”
Hob took a sip of his beer, grinning. “Don’t attempt to ride for three days straight without rest, that’s all I’ll say. Horse won’t wait for you while you’re having your unwitting catnap in the mud.”
“I will keep this in mind for the frequent horse travel of the present day,” Dream informed him, and Hob laughed delightedly.
“Did you really just make a joke with me?”
“Perhaps,” Dream said, giving half a smile, and Hob laughed again. Dream liked to hear him laugh. Hob found joy in things so easily. Found joy in Dream so easily. Dream wished, fleetingly, that such a quality could be shared – it had been quite a while since he had found joy in anything at all.
But perhaps… it could. Was not Hob always offering as much, as far as it was possible? Sharing what he enjoyed, what made him laugh, in the hope that Dream would enjoy it, too? Sharing his experience, his stories, the food at his table, his expertise, across these many years. His pain, too. His friendship.
Dream found that he did not wish to move from the sunlight of Hob’s generosity, not this time; he wanted to take what was shared. He wondered if he might be allowed… more.
Carefully, unsure if it was himself or Hob he was trying not to startle, Dream laid his hand over Hob’s on the table.
Hob’s mouth popped open in surprise, and he looked from Dream’s expression, to their hands, and back. “My… friend?” he said. The word was still tentative on his tongue.
“I…” As soon as they were touching, Dream’s words failed him. Simple touch should not be so affecting. And yet.
Hob’s expression softened. “It’s alright.” He turned his hand underneath Dream’s so their fingers could intertwine.
How he could be so open about it, Dream didn’t know. They had never touched before. Still, he marveled at the feeling of Hob’s hand under his.
Hob didn’t ask him anything else about it, just let Dream hold his hand. And Dream did not offer anything, he did not know what to offer, how to explain his existence, his physical form or the lack thereof, the ephemeral moment he was experiencing here, somewhere between the world of his past and the world of now, which he could not seem to figure out how to reconcile.
But simply holding Hob’s hand, he felt… reconnected. Not so loosely unbounded in the sea of the collective unconscious, and of his own many years.
He felt greedy about it, hungry about it, desperate about it.
Hob was studying him, though he still did not speak, or demand that Dream do so. Hob had made quite a study of him over the years, Dream was realizing, and had extrapolated quite a picture from the vanishingly small quantity of information Dream had shown him. It made him feel both exposed, and, in a strange way, held – like if he really tried, he could transmit whatever he needed to say directly from his skin to Hob’s, and be understood.
But– Hob would not be the one to reach out further. Not after how Dream had responded to his overtures last time. Dream knew that in that moment he had taught Hob a lesson, a lesson that, now, looking back, he wished he hadn't taught.
Had Dream not let his most vicious instinctive emotions overcome him, would Hob now have not only welcomed him as friend, as he so generously did, but also embraced him?
“You know, if you–” Hob started, each word careful. Still holding Dream’s hand. “We don’t have to meet only every hundred years. If you want.”
“If I want,” Dream repeated quietly. A gift, he was offering, a gift of time, the value of which Dream had not understood until its free use had been stripped from him. He had always disliked the human phrase ‘spending time,’ like it was some base currency instead of one of the fundamental elements of the universe. But now he wished he could employ that phrase, to gather up all the days that had collected like coins clinking into the jar of his cage and put them to some better use than his own disintegration.
“Let me rephrase,” Hob corrected, with a smile that was small but crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Because it takes me long enough to learn lessons but I think I’ve learned better how to phrase things with you. I would like to see you more often. Would you like that, too?”
“Yes,” Dream breathed, the word darting from him like a bird flying from a cage, and oh, he was grateful to Hob for saying so first because the admission unveiled some empty space within him that he did not know how to fill. But that wound inside him followed the sunlight in Hob’s eyes, chased it upwards from his seat until he was leaning around the table, falling forward into Hob’s orbit, and Hob was jumping up with a startled breath to catch him halfway.
“Oh, my friend, I–” he lost his words halfway through, but wrapped Dream up in a hug, let Dream lean against the permanence of his chest, hold onto his back, and oh, touch was still strange since being freed, but Hob Gadling’s was not. Dream knew his touch going back across the ages, only he hadn’t reached for it. He could have known the way Hob would touch him by merely looking into his eyes when they last met, if he had let himself look.
“Hey, it’s alright now, isn’t it? It’s alright,” Hob tried again. His voice wavered between soothing and nervous but he didn’t let go of Dream. Dream pressed his forehead to Hob’s shoulder, drunk on the warmth of his body, with a little whimpering sound that he realized only belatedly, and with utter mortification, had come out of his mouth.
Hob startled at it, but still, he held him, fingertips digging into the heavy fabric of Dream’s coat. “When–” his voice, whisper-soft now, brushed over Dream’s ear. “When did you get out? Exactly?”
“Time in my realm does not work exactly the same as it does here,” Dream told him, voice muffled in his jacket. “And I have had much to do. But. I believe it was a week or so ago, here, in this world. Perhaps two.”
Hob’s grip tightened around him until he was crushing Dream to his chest. It was restricting but Dream couldn’t find any objections, he felt as though he was being squeezed back into himself after spilling outwards. “What? Seriously? I mean, you’re always serious, I just– God. ”
“My realm was in disarray, I could not come sooner,” Dream said, and felt Hob’s hair brush his temple as he shook his head.
“No, you misunderstand, I’m not upset. I would have waited ages, don’t you know? Even if you really were just having a sulk.”
Dream absorbed this like rain into parched soil. He did not know what to do with such undeserved devotion.
“It only– it’s terribly recent, is all. It must still be very raw.” He rubbed a hand up and down Dream’s back as if to soothe said injury.
Raw, Dream thought. Yes, like a flayed thing. One that was yet to recover its skin.
“Perhaps,” Dream said.
Even so – he could feel the ever present press of the glass under his fingertips dissolving into the suede of Hob’s jacket.
And Dream was given to understand that while human friends did hug each other, that what they were doing now was not quite normal. For they were still standing in the middle of the inn, and Hob was still wrapped around him, swaying him in a soothing motion, and Dream thought that this was not a hug of casual friendship but perhaps more appropriate to those who had been long separated by tragedy.
Dream felt he should let go, but still he indulged himself a moment longer, supported by Hob’s strength. And Hob was strong, incredibly so; Dream still did not know how he managed it, all these years, all these lives. This bet, this experiment, had yielded him no answers. But it had yielded him a friend.
Finally, he managed to disentangle himself from Hob’s embrace, preparing himself to retreat to the cold and solitary air – but Hob took him by the arm. “Come, stay for a bit.” Dream let himself be led to sit beside Hob on the bench, instead of across the table, close enough to feel Hob’s body heat. “I’ll have them bring you some tea, solves everything, hm?”
His voice was just on the edge of choked, and Dream said, uncertainly, “Hob…”
Hob turned to him, eyes glimmering, and Dream was able to watch in glittering detail, this close up, as a tear spilled over his lashes. He brushed a thumb over Dream’s cheek, a quick, soothing motion, though Dream had no tears of his own. If they were somewhere within him, he had yet to fully find them.
“If something like that happens again” – Hob was deadly serious now – “I would come help you. Yeah? I swear it.”
“You know not what you promise,” Dream said, quietly. But. Hob must have known, by that point, that Dream was not human. And that any such circumstance would hold far more danger for Hob than it would for Dream. And he would aid Dream anyway.
“I do,” Hob said.
Perhaps this was what friendship was supposed to mean. Or perhaps Hob was simply exceptional in that regard.
Dream did not want Hob to be hurt on his behalf. But he couldn’t deny that he– that he did want Hob to come for him. He imagined what he would have felt, if Hob had walked into the basement, that day they were supposed to meet. The hope breaking through the long darkness of his imprisonment.
“You would come to my defense?” he said, allowing a small smile, though inside his chest was squeezing tighter and tighter.
Hob chuckled, expression softening. “Damn right.”
Truly, Hob was too kind to him, but Dream could not find it in him to rebuff it again. Did not want to, for now that he had had a taste, the barest sip of Hob’s kindness, he felt he might die of thirst without it, would retreat again to that distant place he had been since escaping his prison, that Hob’s touch had only just drawn him a single step out of.
“Thank you, Hob,” he murmured, and felt Hob knew he was not speaking only of the promise of rescue.
Hob laid a hand on his shoulder, letting it linger a moment before slipping away again. His smile for Dream was unbearably soft. “Shall we get you that tea?”
“Tea,” Dream repeated. While he rarely ate in the waking world, had not been able to stomach the thought at all since his escape, too used the hollow space within him, he thought he might be able to try, for Hob. To imbibe just some of the very human succor he offered, and perhaps let it warm him, too. “Yes.”