Chapter Text
...and this provides one more piece of evidence that the Dark Ages were appropriately named.
He rolled his eyes, his fingers flexing around the red pen which had already spent roughly half its ink on this one paper alone, and searched for patience. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be much left to spare.
“Save me from the ramblings of undergraduates,” muttered Professor Robert Gadling as he wrote down yet another correction and reached up to rub his eyes. He’d have to set the stack of papers aside soon and get up, stretch, go for a walk, do practically anything in order to keep himself at the grindstone until this most recent batch was graded.
The end-of-term workload was relentless - more so on professors than on students - and he’d had plenty of time to learn that.
He’d had plenty of time to learn a lot of things.
And yet, when the bell above the street door rang and his head came up in the familiar movement he’d used for the past five years, he found he had no time at all to marshal his face into an expression of stony disapproval instead of near-gleeful wonder.
The stranger - his stranger - had just walked in the door.
Hob’s hand hung in space, the point of the pen just above the much-marked surface of the paper, his voice nowhere to be found and his thoughts a wild jumble as his stranger moved with unhurried steps towards the table.
And yet, when Hob’s voice did abruptly return to him, he found himself uttering what had to be the least creative greeting anyone had ever thought of.
“You’re late.”
Inwardly he kicked himself, and yet his stranger did not glare down his nose at him in chilly response. Instead, and incredibly, he smiled. A real smile, so unlike the tentative, almost smirks Hob had seen a few rare times previously.
An unexpected warmth seized his heart.
“It seems I owe you an apology,” his stranger murmured. “I have always heard it is impolite to keep one’s friends waiting.”
And before Hob could offer him a chair or even stand up and do… something, though he wasn’t sure what… his stranger sat down across from him, settling into the seat with the kind of slouch that suggested he might stay a while.
“I’ve been waiting,” Hob replied with a smile of his own.
The fact that his stranger had admitted that they were friends, after the way their last meeting had ended over the use of that word, made the fact that he’d missed their scheduled meeting by more than thirty years somehow seem - well, forgivable.
“I’m glad you got my message.”
The spray-painted directions on the construction barricades surrounding the White Horse were crude, and he’d had to repaint them several times as they’d become obscured by time, weather, and graffiti, but they’d clearly worked.
“Your message was rather impossible to miss.”
They’d worked, and his stranger was still smiling at him.
“Would you like a drink?” Hob blurted out, finding that smile impossible to think under. He sighed at himself, shook his head, and smiled again. “Most of the people who come here just want a pint or a taste of peat, but I’ve got a few bottles dusty enough to be of interest.”
“I am quite interested.” The stranger’s mouth quirked into one of those smirks Hob was so familiar with. “In a dusty bottle of wine, yes.”
Hob just barely managed to keep himself from asking the stranger to promise that he’d still be there when Hob came back up from the cellar.
Where had he been? Hob wondered as he headed down the narrow stairs into the cool darkness of the cellar. Why had he waited so long to seek him out? And what would he do now?
Hob knew exactly where the best stock was, of course, and it took him only a moment to pluck two bottles from the meager few of the oldest vintage and head back up the stairs. As he passed the bar, he nodded to Calvin for a pair of wine glasses, and returned to the table.
His stranger hadn’t moved.
He seemed to watch with interest as Hob uncorked and poured them each a glass of a fine Portuguese port from 1903 (that had cost a pretty quid at auction), but he made no comment until he had taken a lingering sip of the wine and set it carefully down on the table.
“You seem to have the run of this place, Hob Gadling.” His eyes never left Hob’s. “One might think you were the proprietor.”
“The estate agents certainly seem to think so,” he replied easily. “They made me put my name on the mortgage and all.”
His stranger gestured - just barely; a slight twitch of his fingers, really - at the stack of papers stuck unceremoniously under one of the wine bottles.
“And you have become a teacher as well.” A slight smile once again tugged at the corners of his mouth, and Hob felt his own lips match the movement. “You are doing quite well for yourself this century, it seems.”
Hob thought of the past century. Thought of his time spent in America during that country’s Prohibition, making a tidy (if illegal) pile hand-in-glove with the Italians in Chicago and New York. Thought of the dark days when he’d returned to Europe at the worst possible time and seen the worst possible things. Thought of the past fifty years, during which he’d invested wisely in a few companies that had done so well that he’d never have to worry about money again. And thought of the fact that he’d finally decided to invest in his own education and, in turn, the education of others.
“I’ve done better than I thought I might,” he mused, taking another careful sip. “But what about you?”
“Me?” A curious expression flitted across his stranger’s face, and (not for the first time) Hob was reminded of just how little he actually knew about him.
The stranger took another, lingering sip of wine, but before Hob could rush to fill the silence, he set the glass down and looked at Hob for a long moment.
Considering something, perhaps.
“I was sorry to miss our last meeting.” He said the words slowly, as if choosing each one with care. “It was not deliberate. I would have not missed it purposefully. I was…” He looked away, just for a moment. “Indisposed.”
Hob knew that his expression of incredulity couldn’t possibly convey what he was feeling. Still, he hoped it was helping.
“Indisposed?” The rhetorical question was somehow entirely necessary. “You?”
He’d always known that his stranger wasn’t what he seemed. That much had been obvious even to a fourteenth-century peasant, and it had become increasingly more obvious as the centuries had gone by. Whatever he was, he certainly wasn’t human. And if that was so, what could have happened to him?
“Indisposed,” his stranger echoed, and Hob caught a glimpse - just barely - of something haunted that flickered in his stranger’s expression before he chased it down with another pull from the wine.
Just a flicker, and it was gone.
“But it is taken care of.” He set his glass down, and Hob moved to refill it. “And I wanted you to understand that I…” He tilted his head, again seeming to select each word mindfully. “I would never simply… refuse to meet with you. Even if things ended… poorly… at our last meeting. I would not do that.”
And, somehow, that was enough.
Oh, not to satisfy Hob’s curiosity about what might have actually happened to the stranger, not at all. But to satisfy him that things between the pair of them were not - and, perhaps, could never be - irreparably damaged. And that filled him with a lightness that he could scarcely remember having felt for the past two hundred years.
“I believe you,” said Hob simply. A frown might have briefly warred with the smile on his face. “Still, I can’t think of what in the world would be enough to waylay you, of all people.”
He shook his head, remembering a supremely confident woman with the tip of her stiletto resting casually but precisely against the hollow of his throat. The way Hob had quickly and skillfully dispatched her two henchmen hadn’t ruffled her in the slightest. And then the stranger had uncurled one of his long-fingered hands almost in slow motion, blown a puff of breath at her, and Hob had watched, mesmerized, as a cloud of fine, powdery sand had drifted into her eyes. They had clouded over into milky whiteness, the stiletto had clattered to the floor, and the woman had collapsed to her knees, her face a mask of horror and her voice pleading in whispers to placate invisible foes.
What was he?
“All of us may be laid low in some manner or another,” his stranger said quietly, and Hob sensed that haunted feeling again.
He had so many questions.
The stranger studied the wine in his glass, swirling it to and fro before taking another small sip and setting the glass down. “But enough of that.” He gestured - again, just barely a flick of his fingers - about the pub. “Tell me how you came to own this place.”
Well, that was asking a great deal, wasn’t it?
“Where do I even begin?” Hob took a fortifying sip of wine and studied the glass for a moment. He sighed.
“I suppose it begins with the day we were supposed to meet in the White Horse.”
The horrible sinking feeling that had come over him when the old barman had said the place would be closing down to make way for high-end housing. The sickening realization that their meeting spot - the place where it had all begun - would be taken away from them by shortsighted greed, by people whose brief lives were governed by profit and who would never know the richness of the history in which that place was steeped.
“When I learned they were closing it down, I tried everything I could think of to keep it open.” He snorted humorlessly. “Wrote reams of letters to everyone I could think of, badgered the developers to no end. Hired a good team of solicitors, tried to buy the place outright, finally submitted the paperwork to get it declared an historical landmark out of desperation.”
He snorted again, this time with the sort of humor edged in black. “And do you know what the hardest part was? Still is, in fact?”
Loons.
Hob would never forget the day - 8 November 1995, in fact - that his solicitor called him out of the blue, abruptly jarring him out of what had no doubt been a scintillating bout of stockbroking at his cushy, if somewhat unfulfilling, City job.
“I have good news and bad news, Robbie,” the solicitor, a man named Reynold Chapman, said without preamble. “Which did you want first?”
The good news was that the National Trust had decided to provide legal support to Hob’s suit in amicus curiae. And if that weren’t enough to sway the courts, they had pledged to join the suit as an additional complainant.
And the bad news?
“Loons, Robbie.” Chapman sighed very deeply. “The grounds are overrun with loons.”
“Loons?” his stranger echoed, the corners of his mouth quirking in what was unmistakable amusement.
“Bastard birds are protected, apparently,” Hob grumbled, still glaring at his wineglass. “The London Wildlife Trust ended up lodging a countersuit to both the National Trust and the estate developers. Said no one can touch a thing until three years after the last sign of nesting activity.”
In 1998, the bastard birds were still nesting.
“Not a thing we can do about it, Robbie,” Chapman said over drinks in the small, unobtrusive pub that would one day become the New Inn. “Our hands are completely tied, I’m afraid.”
When it became apparent that the birds had decided to stay, and that therefore the situation was at a hopeless stalemate, Hob found himself looking ahead. The stalemate had the potential to last years, possibly decades, and people would begin to notice that the man at the helm of the whole thing wasn’t aging.
“So I held out for a few more years and then headed off to Australia.” Hob took a last sip and set down his empty glass. “Came back as my wayward son, naturally, though that’s getting harder to do.” He frowned. “It costs a lot of money to change your identity these days.
In fact, it had cost nearly him nearly £100k and the assistance of an extremely efficient ex-Mossad agent who made his real living helping people to disappear.
“A car crash is easy enough to arrange,” the man, who called himself Levi (though Hob was quite certain that was nowhere close to his real name) told him. “An unidentifiable body? Now that’s where the real cost - and artistry - come in.”
“I remember when it was as simple as just shaving your beard and walking to the next county,” Hob mused.
Levi’s artistry proved reliable, however, and a scant few weeks later, Hob was on a plane to Perth with his new, wholly unremarkable life (which was exactly the way he wanted it) tucked into a dossier in his briefcase.
If he lost a few years beach-bumming around Australia, well, he was trying to play the part of the thoroughly unimpressive, prodigal son.
“Even learned to surf.” He poured the stranger a glass of wine from the second bottle, a French vintage from 1925. “Though I’m still a bit shit at it, I must admit.”
He’d naturally included provisions in his will for ‘his son’ to take over leadership of the ongoing legal quagmire, and so he had regular correspondence with first Chapman and then his successor, Rajiv Pandit. All through telephone and email, naturally, so there would be nothing to make anyone suspicious.
He sighed. “Anyway, I’d done enough research by that point to figure out that I had a liking for history. And I’d already made enough money from investments to make sure I’d be comfortable for the rest of my life, so I could afford to find a job that I could do for pleasure instead of profit.”
His stranger raised an eyebrow at that, twitched one slender finger toward the pile of papers that still awaited Hob’s marking. The meaning, though unspoken, was unmistakable.
“It’s not all pleasurable,” Hob conceded. “But on balance, I’ve found I like it more than any other career I’ve had.” He smiled. “So I went to university. And stayed there, I suppose.”
The mediocre performance in secondary school that Levi had fabricated for his new persona wasn’t impressive enough to get him into King’s College, at least on its own. But the school did look favorably on his life experience, even the extremely abbreviated version he’d written for them, and he’d pursued a degree in history, followed by a doctorate in the same subject - this time at Oxford.
“Oxford?” Did his stranger look, even briefly, pleased by that fact?
“Merton College,” Hob supplied. “Founded in 1264, so it’s even older than I am.” He took a sip of the French vintage. “Focus on medieval Europe, naturally.” He smiled a bit more broadly. “It helps that I was there for a lot of it.”
“Indeed.”
The stranger set his empty glass down, and Hob immediately moved to refill it. This was more than they had ever drunk together in one sitting, and he was in no hurry to bring an end to it.
“And which university has the pleasure of your talents now, Hob Gadling?” the stranger murmured, looking at Hob with an expression of…
More than interest? Perhaps?
During their meeting at the end of the eighteenth century, there had been… something there. Something that could have been wildly significant and world-changing, Hob believed, if it hadn’t been derailed by Lady Johanna Constantine.
Was it wishful thinking?
Part of Hob’s mind urged him to accept that it was, to protect himself from shattering disappointment. But a larger part reminded him of the way the two of them had looked at one another, and especially the way his stranger had regarded him after he’d bested the woman’s two musclebound enforcers.
No, he decided. There was something more afoot. And this time, he would not allow anything to get in its way.
“I’m back at King’s,” he replied, refilling his own glass and sitting back with a comfortable smile. “They gave me my start, and they’ve got the best medieval history program in the country, so it was the perfect place for me to work.” He grinned. “You know, out of all the titles I’ve held in my life, I like ‘Professor Robert Gadling’ the most.”
“It suits you,” his stranger said softly, and for a long moment, he seemed content enough to study Hob until he broke eye contact with another lingering sip of the damnable French vintage.
It was impossible to look away from him even then.
“But,” the stranger continued, a hint of a smile playing at his mouth, “you still have not brought the story full circle.” Another scant flick of the fingers. “To this place.”
Hob sighed. “Well, it turns out that when things go wrong, they tend to keep going that way.”
He’d carried on with his teaching, happy to have found a way of putting his considerable firsthand experience to good use, and continued paying the retainers of the solicitors who were working on the situation with the White Horse. And then, in the middle of February two years previously, he’d gotten a call from Pandit.
“Well, Robert, I’ve a bit of good news for you at last.” He’d sounded extremely pleased with himself. “Nesting season’s come and gone for the third year in a row, and not a loon to be seen. We’ll be ready to reopen the matter as soon as the Wildlife Trust withdraws its block.”
Three weeks later, a freakish worldwide plague - one of the many he’d lived through - shut down all of society.
“I couldn’t have seen that coming,” sighed Hob, shaking his head in resignation.
“So, Robert, I’ve got a bit of good news and a bit of bad news,” Pandit had followed up with, only a handful of weeks ago.
Hob bit back of a preemptive sigh.
“Good news is, the Wildlife Trust has finally withdrawn its suit. No loons, no block.” Pandit had the good grace to let Hob marinate in those tidings for a moment before dropping the rest. “Bad news is, the pandemic’s backed up the courts for at least half a decade.”
“But if we can’t move on it,” Hob said over the last dregs of wine, “neither can the developers.”
He noticed then how empty and quiet the New Inn had become. How dark the skies were outside. A glance over at Calvin showed him quietly wiping down the bar, dirty glasses racked and ready for washing.
“It seems our meeting is at an end,” his stranger said quietly.
Not bloody likely.
“Calvin?” Hob called without taking his eyes off of the stranger. “You head on home now. I’ll close up.”
Calvin hesitated only very briefly before nodding his thanks, folding the bar rag, and heading towards the coat tree.
“I own the building,” Hob said as Calvin shrugged into his coat. “Including the flat upstairs. It’s fairly convenient to live above your main source of income. And the tube ride to King’s doesn’t take too terribly long either.”
He paused. “So… would you like to come up for a bit?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Hob saw Calvin either wave goodnight or attempt a covert ‘good luck’ gesture before slipping out the door.
“Come up?” the stranger echoed, and another small smile played at the edges of his mouth. He otherwise didn’t move from his spot though.
Hob briefly wondered what it would take to again see that same beaming smile the stranger had first given him when he walked into the pub. (He also wondered if he needed to clarify what, exactly, he was offering his stranger.)
“Yes,” the stranger breathed, in such a way that stirred something in Hob best not examined too closely right then. “Yes, I would like to come up for a bit.”
It took him longer to dash down to the cellar for more wine than it took for him to close up the pub. He felt a thrill at returning to the main room to see his stranger still there waiting for him.
“All right, then.” Hob felt suddenly lightheaded. “Follow me.”
The back stair, accessible through a locked door opposite the stairs to the cellar, led up to the flat in which Hob had lived ever since he’d bought this place five years ago. And when he opened the door to show his stranger inside, a giddiness seized him and would not let go.
“It’s a lot more spacious than I thought it was going to be,” he said as he hung his keys on their hook beside the door and set down the wine on the coffee table. “I had space for a second bedroom, a laundry, and an extra full bath. Even if there was nothing but cobwebbing there when I moved in.”
He hesitated. “Do you like it?”
The stranger didn’t answer immediately, choosing instead to drift through the sitting room, pausing here and there to study a photograph or painting on the walls or the assorted collections of odd knickknacks on the bookshelves. Mercifully he didn’t linger over any of the half-starved plants on the windowsill, but he hovered over a wall of books, slender fingers trailing across the titles written on the spines.
His observations gave Hob a moment to observe him.
The stranger had always been tall and rail-thin, but now he seemed to have taken on a gaunt, almost starved look rather than his earlier austere leanness. Whatever had kept him ‘indisposed’ during their last meeting - and probably far longer than that - had clearly taken something out of him, and Hob discovered that he was worried about him.
His hair seemed different as well, though not in a way that invited concern. In previous centuries, it had been immaculately styled, whether tied with a ribbon or combed cleanly back from his forehead. But now, it was simply a thick black shock, neither long nor short, like something a musician or an artist might affect.
Hob had the sudden impulse to touch it, but hastily willed that down.
The clothing he wore was of his usual black, though perhaps not as obviously expensive and well-tailored as his previous outfits had been. A pair of tight denim trousers, a form-fitting t-shirt, a thigh-length woolen coat, and a pair of boots. Missing, Hob noted, was the conspicuously large red gemstone he’d worn either around his neck or as a brooch in centuries past. He looked more at ease, somehow, than he’d seemed before.
But it was the eyes that Hob found himself most struck by. Perhaps it was an effect of the lighting, but they seemed to have grown deep-socketed. Dark, with perhaps a single pinpoint of light in the depths of each to show the presence of anything. They might have been far-off stars, glinting singly in separate black skies.
“Are you…” Hob faltered for a moment, taking a step towards the stranger. “Are you all right?”
The stranger blinked, and Hob wondered how he could have thought his eyes were anything out of the ordinary. It must have been a trick of the light after all.
“Why should I not be?” The stranger held a book in his hand, and Hob realized with a start which book it was.
Two Blokes Walk Into a Pub: a Social History of the White Horse Inn. Published by Oxford University Press in 2017, and written by Dr. Robert Gadling.
“I was pretty proud of that one,” Hob offered somewhat sheepishly. “Never thought I’d get round to actually writing a book, but it turns out that publication is a requirement for tenured professorship.” He grinned. “Turns out as well that once you get started writing, it’s hard to stop. There’s another book of mine there, published only a couple of years ago. The Peasant’s Guide to Medieval Europe.”
He couldn’t help but add, “That one became a bestseller too.”
The stranger glanced up at him for a moment, then returned his attention to the book. He flipped open the cover with one slender finger, immaculately black-varnished fingernail catching the light.
Hob felt his heart hammer in his chest. “The dedication…”
To my Stranger,
I do hope I get to share this with you one day.
He had written the dedication with all the truth in his heart, half-hoping his stranger would see it some day, half-fearing he never would.
His stranger said nothing, and Hob resisted the urge to snatch the book from his hands, offer him another bottle of wine, and hastily change the subject. About what, he wasn’t sure, but he was seconds from grabbing the 1928 vintage Bordeaux from the coffee table.
“You wrote this,” the stranger said softly, eyes flitting up from the page to catch Hob’s, “for me?”
Hob suddenly wanted something to do with his hands, afraid that he could not keep them from fidgeting but not wanting to jam them into his pockets. He settled for resting a single forefinger on the cork of the nearest bottle.
“Was it too much?” he murmured.
“Why would it be too much?” His stranger closed the book delicately. Almost reverently. “I am… touched… by this gesture. Truly.”
A smile of mingled relief and excitement spread across Hob’s face, and he made no effort to conceal it.
“I’m glad,” he replied, promptly felt a warmth spread across his cheeks, and busied himself uncorking the wine before he could say or do anything else that would seem unaccountably stupid. He set out a glass for each of them, finally gesturing toward his favorite armchair and settling himself onto the sofa.
His stranger sank down into the armchair as if he had no intentions of leaving any time soon, though he didn’t speak until they had each tasted the 1928 vintage. (It was good, of course, but perhaps not as good as the previous two bottles had been.)
“You still have not finished your story,” he remarked. “You have not told me how you came to take ownership of the New Inn.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” Hob replied over the rim of his glass, a sudden mischievous glint in his eyes. “You still haven’t told me your name.” He paused. “Or anything else about you, really. I’ve just been going off of what I can guess, and that isn’t much.”
His stranger smirked. Not subtly. “And what have you guessed about me, Hob Gadling?”
“Well, you did tell me you weren’t a demon.” Hob smiled at the memory. “And you told Lady Johanna that you weren’t the devil. I did think for a while that you might have been a vampire, but that didn’t seem right.”
The stranger raised an eyebrow at that, but when he spoke, he seemed to be genuinely amused by the suggestion. “If I were a vampire, would I not have eaten you by now?”
“Well, I did say it didn’t seem right, didn’t I?” Hob took a sip of the wine and went on. “I remember thinking at some point that you were a wizard of sorts, but that wouldn’t have explained everything. As near as I can figure it, you’re not a man at all, and you weren’t ever. What that leaves to choose from, I really don’t know.”
The stranger merely sipped his wine in response.
“I’ve been waiting and wondering all these years,” Hob said softly, the glass still in his hand, hovering between his mouth and the table. “I don’t just want to keep thinking of you as a stranger.”
Even if it was more often ‘his stranger’.
“Morpheus.” The stranger said the name very quietly, as if perhaps even sharing that small part of himself were an enormous undertaking. “You may call me Morpheus.”
“Morpheus,” Hob repeated, feeling the room shift around him as this hugely significant detail finally settled into place. The feeling of his stranger’s name in his mouth was like a milestone reached, and Hob knew it marked real progress.
“Like the fellow in The Matrix?” he asked, his mouth quirking in a small smile.
The stranger - Morpheus's - brow furrowed at that. “No.”
Something suddenly clicked into place. The powdered sand in Lady Johanna’s eyes, showing her nightmare visions. The way he seemed to know everyone’s deepest thoughts, no matter who they were.
“More like the Greek god of dreams, then?” Hob asked slowly.
His stranger - Morpheus - nodded once.
“Well,” Hob breathed slowly. “That explains a bit.”
He’d imagined demons, devils, vampires, wizards, and all manner of creatures out of the stories of his peasant childhood, but never once had he imagined a god. The thought seemed to suddenly press down on him, the weight of its significance settling firmly onto his shoulders.
A god.
He suddenly squinted at Morpheus. “You don’t look Greek.”
Morpheus snorted softly into his wineglass.
“Don’t sound it either.” Hob refilled both of their glasses, though neither was empty.
“I suppose I do not, at present.” Morpheus accepted the refill with a nod, took a small sip, then added, “But the New Inn, Hob. Finish the story before you are too deep into your cups to remember it.”
“What do you mean, ‘at present’?” Hob gave a short breath of incredulous laughter. The idea that Morpheus would alter his appearance for his benefit had never occurred to him.
Still, he had made a point.
Hob did have a story to finish telling, and it wouldn’t be long before he was indeed too deep in his cups to do so. Not for lack of remembrance, of course, but because he might very conceivably decide to do something uncautious and daring.
“Right.” He took another sip. “The New Inn. Well, it really comes down to the fact that if we couldn’t use the White Horse, I had to furnish us with a different place to meet.”
Morpheus's eyes widened ever so slightly at that. He opened his mouth, presumably to say something, but no words came out and he took a long pull - not a sip, but what could almost be described as a lengthy gulp - of the wine.
“You…” His words sounded almost breathless when he did finally speak. “You bought this whole place…” He lifted his gaze, eyes locking with Hob’s. “For us?”
“Well, yes.”
Hob felt quite suddenly shy. Hearing it spoken so plainly, the underlying reason behind all the expenditure and effort, not only on the New Inn but on the White Horse, had a dizzying effect that made him reach for more wine.
“I wouldn’t leave us with nowhere to meet every hundred years,” he murmured into his glass.
“That…” Morpheus seemed torn between taking a fortifying sip of wine or studying Hob intently, and ended up looking at Hob with the wineglass halfway to his mouth. “That is…”
It was difficult to meet Morpheus's eyes just then, and Hob immediately busied himself pouring out the last dregs of the wine into both their cups and uncorking the next one, talking all the while.
“A bit of a lavish expenditure, I know, but I couldn’t bear the thought of the White Horse gone forever, and I couldn’t bear the thought of you turning up after all and not being able to find me, and I had the money anyway, and I wasn’t going to make any better use of it elsewhere, and so-”
“I am touched,” Morpheus said quietly. “Again.”
He drained the last of the wine and put the empty glass down on the coffee table, leaning forward slightly so he could slide it toward Hob, who quickly refilled it.
“You have done all this so that we could meet again. You are…” The word presented itself as a soft puff of air between them. “Remarkable.”
“If I am, it’s because of you.”
Hob’s voice, barely above a whisper now, was saying things he never would have said aloud if not for the several bottles of wine they’d shared. He met Morpheus's shining eyes for a moment, found the intensity there frighteningly magnetic, and could not take his gaze away. Nor could he stop speaking.
“I never would have had the chance to be anything if I hadn’t met you.”
“I merely presented you with an opportunity, Hob Gadling.” Morpheus reached for his wineglass, the tips of his fingers just barely brushing against Hob’s before he settled back into the armchair, and Hob felt as though he had just laid his hand on a bare electrical wire. “You were the one who made every choice that led you to this moment.”
“Every choice,” Hob murmured, recalling some of the worst ones he’d made.
Even leaving aside the banditry and the mercenary soldiering, the buying of courtly favor in the sixteenth century and the selling of human beings in the eighteenth, he’d made enough bad choices to last several lifetimes.
“I can think of a few choices I might have made differently.” He looked up into Morpheus's eyes again. “But not this one.”
A small smile tugged at the corners of Morpheus's lips, and Hob found he couldn’t look away.
For an incalculable moment, they simply gazed at each other over the rims of their respective wineglasses until the tension finally became too great and they were forced to take refuge in the singular taste of a rare 1931 Russian Massandran port.
A thought occurred to him, bringing an amused smile to his face: was it possible for Morpheus to feel the effects of alcohol? Hob himself certainly did - they were now on their fourth bottle, and he didn’t trust himself to stand up without immediately falling over - but could the same be said for a god?
He still couldn’t wrap his head entirely around that one.
“I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do with this place once I can reopen the White Horse.” He picked up his wineglass with slightly numb fingers and peered at the dark liquid as it swirled inside. “I mean, I can trust Calvin to tend to the day-to-day running of the place, and I’m sure I’ll pop by at least every other day, but I’m not sure I’ll keep living here.”
If Hob fully expected Morpheus to follow up with some sort of question - perhaps to the tune of “And where will you live?” - well, Hob had spent centuries detailing the plans of his life while Morpheus listened and asked the occasional question.
It was their done thing, after all.
Instead, very quietly, Morpheus said, “I would have found you, regardless.”
Something about those words and the way in which they were said brought a flush of warmth to Hob’s heart that he was sure had nothing to do with the wine.
“I wanted to make sure,” he murmured.
Morpheus studied him for a moment, and though it was very likely nothing more than the effects of four very good bottles of wine, Hob swore his eyes seemed to glitter in the dim light. Just for a moment, and then it was gone.
“I am glad that you did.” His stranger - his Morpheus - gazed at Hob with… fondness, perhaps.
Perhaps something more. Something Hob couldn’t quite put a name to, not yet, but brought the delightful, lifting, floating feeling of irrational hope to his heart.
“But had you been unable to, for whatever reason,” Morpheus continued, “I would have found you. I would not have simply…” The words were whispered so softly, Hob had to lean forward to hear him. “... let you disappear. I would never have allowed such a thing.”
“I wish I’d been able to find you,” Hob said, entirely without meaning to. The wine had loosened his tongue and made his brain sluggish enough not to be able to keep pace with it. And so, naturally, he took another sip.
The worst part about those years had been the thought that he’d overstepped his bounds, and that Morpheus had simply decided he wasn’t worth the trouble any longer. When Morpheus had stormed out of their meeting in 1889, Hob had spent the entire following century in increasing nervous anticipation. When he hadn’t appeared in 1989, Hob had felt absolutely gutted. And as the years had ground on with no sign of him, Hob had resorted to more and more farfetched hopes.
But hearing Morpheus say that he would never have allowed Hob to continue that way brought all those years of hope back at once. And (probably because of the wine) he felt his eyes begin to prickle.
“I wish I’d been able to do anything other than wait and try to make sure that we still had a place to meet whenever you did come back.” He snorted. “I wish I’d been able to apply anything to the problem except stubbornness and money.”
“You have done more than I would have asked from anybody,” Morpheus breathed. “And you did these things because…” He seemed to hesitate over the words. “You wanted to.”
Hob was silent for a long moment, looking into the hypnotic eyes of his stranger, whose name he had not known for nearly seven centuries and yet for whom he’d done more than he’d done for anyone since Eleanor.
“Of course I did,” he murmured, his fingers caressing the rim of his wineglass. “It was you.”
Morpheus huffed softly at that, shook his head, then simply gazed at Hob for a moment.
The air, pungent with wine and careful words and centuries of unspoken longing, hung heavily between them.
Finally, quietly, Morpheus said, “You have shared four bottles of wine with me, and I have yet to see you eat anything. I should leave you to your rest.”
The bed did indeed call to Hob, as it could damn well have been expected to after drinking as much wine as he had. But the idea of saying good-night and then not seeing Morpheus again for another hundred years gave him a sobering shock.
“You could…” Hob trailed off, hesitating at the very edge even despite the hogshead of liquid courage humming in his veins and despising himself just the slightest bit for it. He swallowed.
Steeled himself.
“You could stay.”
“Stay…?” Morpheus breathed.
“Stay,” Hob echoed, his face beginning to pull into a smile.
He tried to gain his feet, intending to reach out and offer his hand to help Morpheus up and show him to the nearest bed, but the room seemed to pitch like the deck of a ship all of a sudden, and his reflexes were slow, and his gallant gesture turned into an awkward headlong fall that would have seen him smack his face right into the surface of the table if a pair of firm hands hadn’t reached out to catch him.
Morpheus was directly in front of him then, face only a whisker’s breadth away from Hob’s, hands that felt surprisingly strong (for such slender fingers) at his elbows.
“I think you will be asleep the moment your head meets the pillow.” His voice was soft, yet amused. “I think to imagine anything else is quite ambitious, indeed.”
“I can be ambitious for this,” Hob murmured, his eyes already lidded.
Without protest, he allowed Morpheus to lead him toward the bedroom. He supposed that he had his answer as to whether or not Morpheus would spend the night, and he was thickly disappointed. But a sharp thought struck him just then, and his eyes flew open and focused intensely on Morpheus's.
“When am I going to see you again?”
They paused in the threshold to the bedroom, Hob gripping Morpheus's elbows just as firmly as Morpheus was gripping his.
“I suppose that depends on whether or not we restart the clock.” A brief frown creased Morpheus’s lips. “Do we meet again in 2122 or 2089?”
Hob found a smile somewhere and pasted it haphazardly on his face. “I was thinking next Thursday.”
Something like a startled laugh - really, just a puff of air, but the closest Hob had seen to a laugh so far - slipped from Morpheus’s mouth.
“Truly?” He sounded surprised, but perhaps… not unwilling. “Would that not be outside the boundaries of our agreement?”
Hob waved a hand in an uncoordinated dismissive manner. “We never said anything about meeting more than once every century.” He fixed his unfocused eyes on Morpheus’s again, seemed to see an infinite depth in them once more. “And the schedule’s already been broken, so I’d say our agreement needs a bit of reworking anyway.”
After a brief, yet seemingly contemplative moment, Morpheus merely said, “Very well. Next Thursday then.”
They finished the shuffle over to the bed, and Morpheus waited until Hob was seated on the edge of it before speaking again.
“But I do want you to understand something, Hob Gadling.” The amusement was gone from Morpheus’s voice now, his expression one of utmost gravity. “Should I fail to appear next Thursday, or indeed at any other time, it would not be because of you.”
A flicker of hesitation skittered across his face, then quietly he added, “It would never be because of you.”
Through a rapidly descending fog in his brain, Hob searched for the right words. Unsurprisingly, they eluded him, but a sudden impulse seized him. He’d tried this the last time they’d met, and it had gone very badly, but surely this time…
He got to his feet somehow, balance impossible to achieve, but his arms were already reaching out, and he wrapped them around Morpheus’s shoulders as he’d wanted to since 1889, and what did it matter if his legs turned to jelly then?
“It’s bloody good to see you again,” he murmured into his stranger’s shoulder.
His stranger was certainly right about the one thing though - Hob was asleep the moment his head met the pillow.