Chapter Text
Winter comes to London.
Normally that sounds much more dire than it actually is, but this year it's a proper winter, how Hob remembers it from his youth: snow drifting from the heavens in fat white flakes, first dusting the ground in a fine layer of powdered sugar, and then heaping up in the gutters, on the kerbs, in the front lawn of the Inn. He's got one or two vivid memories of campaigns that had lasted through the winter, camped out in the wind and huddled miserably together with whatever other poor blighters were unlucky enough to be fighting in your same company. Vague shadow-faces swim up from the depths of history: men with quick smiles and scars and rough hands who he'd lain with, both as brothers and as lovers, trying to soak up whatever scraps of warmth they could at the same time as they'd snatched pleasure from the jaws of death.
All of them gone now, of course. Long gone. He's the only one to keep vigil for them now, in the cold dark; he doesn't know if that's what they'd want, but he likes to think it is. Good old Pratchett said it best, that a man never dies as long as his name is spoken. Hob hasn't got names any longer, but flashes of eyes and noses and clever hands will have to do.
The winter hols come on, and King's turns as dark and quiet as the winter. Hob's got a whole heap of grading to do, papers to read for one class, tests to correct for another, so of course the second the break starts is when he feels the first telltale itch at the back of his throat.
"Bugger," he says, when he wakes up, on the first day of the holidays, and finds that one nostril is completely blocked. It clears over the next hour, but he just feels...off. Not sick, not yet, but the precursor to it. He remembers this from the campaigns, too, though back then it was more likely dysentery that you got, rather than colds or flus. God bless modern sanitation, because he knows he spent a few weeks shitting his brains out while he was fighting for the Lancastrians, back before the Tudors took over. Probably happened before that, too, but that memory is clearer because it was one of the things that had convinced him he ought to give something other than warfare a try.
He's got a bit of time, he reckons, before the worst of it hits, so Hob settles in and gets to grading. He does the tests first, because his students are expecting those back in a timely manner, and he loses himself in the rhythm of multiple choice and essay questions, of fact-checking his own memories (because he's still only human, and sometimes he forgets whether it was this House or the other that fled the field in shame), and at some point in the middle of the afternoon he looks up and there's Dream, standing next to him, still and stiff as stone with his head craned so he can watch over Hob's busily-moving arm.
"Hullo, dove," he says, and that's it, that's all it takes for his momentum to be lost. He's hit with a wave of exhaustion so powerful that it staggers him for a moment – thankfully he's already sitting down, but he has to stop for a few seconds and collect himself, blinking through eyes that are suddenly trying to swim straight out of his skull. Dream makes a faintly alarmed noise and puts a hand on Hob's shoulder, which drags him back a bit further into the clear and present now; when his vision focuses again he's delighted to see that Dream isn't wearing any shoes. He's been doing that more and more often lately, shedding bits of his clothing when he visits, and at first he just...ate them or absorbed them or whatever it was that he did, but now he's starting to take them off like a human would. Leaving shoes by the door, and a coat draped over the back of the sofa. Hob can see it now, like a half-melted raven, laid fastidiously over Dream's side of the couch, and it makes his heart ache for how happy he feels.
"Hob," Dream says. "Are you well? You entered my realm. But for a moment."
Had he? Hob blinks, and everything comes back into sharp immediacy again. Maybe he had. His ears feel like they're stuffed with cotton wool, and there's pressure in his sinuses that doesn't go away even when he digs his thumbs into the skin below his eyes, so it's entirely possible that he...drifted. For a second.
He's got a few tests left to do. If he pushes hard, he can finish them today and then send an email out to his other class that they'll be waiting a bit longer for their papers to be graded.
"I'm all right," Hob says, which isn't so much a lie as it is 'true, for now.' He's still fairly clear-headed, but he has no idea what he's going to feel like in an hour or two. All the more reason to buckle down and get the grading done. "Just coming down with something. Should've known, with the weather the way it is. Everyone cooped up inside."
Dream stares at him, in the way that Hob's come to realise is his friend's version of thinking. Like watching a loading screen, Hob waits patiently for Dream to finish computing, smiling a bit to himself as he does. Dream's not only barefoot and without his coat, he's noticed, but he's also got a few biscuit crumbs on the hem of his shirt. He’s found the Custard Creams in the pantry, then. Since the success of the pottage, they've been experimenting with what Dream does and does not like to eat, and so far the results have been that anything Hob cooks himself is greeted with enthusiasm, but anything gotten pre-made at the shops requires a bit more consideration. Dream's turned his nose up at crisps and pot noodles, but he has an incorrigible sweet tooth. Apparently, bikkies – at least the ones geared towards a younger audience – are a hit.
"You are ill," Dream says, the shoe finally dropping. "I should have realised sooner. There is. The feel of my sister. About you."
"Not the one I'm thinking of, hopefully," Hob says. He wracks his brain to try and remember Dream's other siblings, but he doesn't talk often about any of them save for Death, who apparently is his favourite.
Dream's lips quirk a bit. "No," he says. "My youngest sibling. Delirium."
Oh, Delirium, of course. They've all got 'D' names, so that makes sense. All the more reason for him to get his grading done, he thinks, and then full comprehension nips on the heels of that, and he frowns. "Wait," he says. "Wait, does that mean..." He puts a hand against his own forehead, but that never works, so he gets ponderously to his feet, and then has to pause and wait for the lightheadedness to pass. "Oof," he says, but relaxes when he feels an arm slip around his waist.
"You should be in bed," Dream says firmly. Hob flaps a hand at the desk, at the little stack of tests he still has to finish grading. Nothing feels quite right, but he doesn't truly feel sick yet. Just...off-kilter.
"I've got grading to finish," he says. "Let me just get the thermometer, I'll check my temp and if it's above thirty-seven I'll let you drag me off."
Dream puts his hand on Hob's forehead, a near-perfect imitation of what he'd tried to do earlier. It feels ice-cold.
"It is above thirty-seven," Dream intones, and unceremoniously steers Hob towards the bedroom.
"Oi!" Hob says, but his legs seem more inclined to cooperate with Dream than with him, and so he's hauled bed-ways, and tumbled in amongst the sheets, still unmade from that morning. The bedroom has that shut-in smell that rooms get in the winter, the stale odour of sweat and skin and a body closed up away from the wind, but he realises he can only really smell it through one nostril. He's gone clogged again, so Hob gropes for the tissues on his bedside table while Dream's chilly hands start unbuttoning his fly. "Just saying, if you want a shag you might be doing all the work," he says, and is treated to the singular joy of having Dream roll his eyes at him.
"You are in no condition for coitus," Dream says. He doesn't wait for Hob to lift his hips, but cups Hob's arse one-handed and hauls him up as easily as if he were scruffing a kitten, and with the other hand he tugs Hob's denims down to his ankles. Hob's not ashamed to admit that the casual show of strength does something for him, but he's even more delighted by this belligerent vision of Dream in the role of caretaker.
You have to be comfortable, he reasons, to boss someone about in their own flat. You have to be comfortable with them, and with your place in their home, you have to be secure in the knowledge that you won't be kicked out if you take things into your own hands.
God, he's fucking ecstatic. He's bloody glowing with it.
He must look like a fool, lying there beaming at Dream and not helping a whit while his friend wrestles his shirt off. He can't stop smiling, though. This is what he's wanted ever since he first learned that Dream didn't really have a home, not in the way that Hob understands it.
"You are suspiciously glad for one who is suffering an ailment," Dream grumbles. Hob watches from the bed while Dream goes to the closet and shuffles through it, pausing every so often, still a little uncertain. He eventually emerges with one of Hob's bathrobes and brings it over, holding it up so that Hob can slip his arms through the sleeves.
"I'm just happy you're here," Hob says. It's more than that. He's happy that Dream is not only here, but is moving around like he knows the place. Like it's safe for him. Sure that there'll be no objection if he rifles through Hob's underthings. It's brilliant.
Hob is, perhaps, a little bit more out of it than he thought he was, but that's fine. It's all fine. Wonderful, even.
"Hm," Dream says. He touches Hob's forehead again, and then carefully arranges the blankets so that they're cradling Hob, but not actually covering him. "Have you eaten this day?"
Has he? He had tea this morning, and some jam and toast, but when he'd next looked up it had been the afternoon and Dream was there. His sheepish expression must say it all, because Dream makes a noise of disgust and then disappears out into the hall. Hob watches where he was standing for a few minutes, still basking in the warm happiness of Dream being here and settled in and treating Hob's home like his home, and at some point he must close his eyes and doze off again, because the next thing he knows he's startling awake because he can't breathe and he's so cold that it feels like someone's pumped ice water directly into his veins.
"You're awake!!!!"
Hob tries to focus his eyes, because he's never heard someone enunciate multiple exclamation points before and he's actually quite keen to figure out how they've done it. What he narrows in on is Dream, sitting in a wingback chair by Hob's bedside (Hob doesn't recall owning a wingback chair this century), looking disgruntled with a pile of papers in his lap. The voice hadn't come from Dream, but Dream definitely heard the voice too, because he looks up, and up, and so Hob follows his line of sight and discovers that the voice came, presumably, from the woman who's floating above the bed.
She's thin, long-legged and lanky in the way of unfinished things, a permanent teenage gangliness that doesn't translate fully to her face, which is foxlike and clever and could be anywhere from sixteen to twenty-six. She's wearing outrageous makeup, the kind that Hob's more likely to see on drag queens these days, pops of neon purple, green, pink, yellow, and her hair is a cascade of messy, red-blue-orange curls on one side, shaved nearly bald on the other. Her eyes are two different colours, green and blue, and there's a goldfish swimming sedately in one ear and out the other, back and forth.
"Delirium," Dream says. He doesn't sound happy about it, but he doesn't sound angry, either. Just sort of resigned, but fondly so. Youngest sibling, he'd said, and Hob understands. It's an older brother's God-given right to find their younger siblings frustrating and annoying, but you can't hate them. Not without a very good reason.
"Big brother~" Delirium says, once again pronouncing a piece of punctuation in a way that makes Hob's ears pop. "I was wondering when I’d get to meet your friend!"
"Can I have some tissues, please," Hob asks. His voice comes out in a pathetic croak. Dream indulgently hands him the entire box, which Hob proceeds to waste because when he tries to blow his nose nothing comes out. "Ugh." He squints over the edge of the crumpled tissue. "Are those...my students' papers?" Everything feels fuzzy and strange. He wonders how bad his fever must be, if Dream's sister called Delirium is here.
"You need not be here personally," Dream says. It takes Hob a moment to realise he's talking to his sister, and not to Hob. "The fever will continue in your absence."
"I wanted to meet him," Delirium says. Her voice whines like a buzzsaw. The goldfish does a fancy little flip over the crown of her head and then bursts into a shower of brightly-coloured cereal flakes, which fall all over Hob's bed and immediately turn into crumbs. "He should meet all of us! Because you're frie~ends!"
"Suit yourself," Dream says. Hob makes a clumsy grab for the papers in Dream's lap, but only gets an inch or so out of bed before his throat starts to tickle, and then to tighten, and he has to subside back into the sheets while a coughing fit deep enough to hurt rattles his bones. He's still shivering, still can't breathe, and he knows that this is all going to pass but it's fucking miserable and he can't think.
A hand touches his back, right in the middle, spreading its fingers over his lungs, and it's probably just the placebo effect but it feels like the coughing eases. He takes a whooping breath, blinking tears from his eyes, and finds that the hand belongs to Dream. Dream, no longer in the wingback chair but sitting on the edge of the mattress next to him, a frown pinching his brows together, concern writ large all over his face.
"M'fine," he manages to gasp, though it comes out through chattering teeth. "Gonna be. Fine."
"You always are," Delirium says. "You get to be mine again and again and again but we've never met! Hi! I'm Delirium!"
"Hob Gadling," he says, and tries to stick out his hand, only for his arm to fall like a lead weight once he tries to lift it above his sternum. The room is starting to rotate, slowly, and so he closes his eyes and shivers miserably.
"Why are you here?" Dream asks. His voice is a little sharper this time around. Impatient. "I am. Busy. And Hob requires rest."
"You're always busy," he hears Delirium say. "Always. And the frog is always crying because it's in the rain but it doesn't like the rain but it needs the rain, but it wants to be something that isn't a frog but it doesn't know what, so it's in the dark water instead where the rain sort of reaches and then there's a golden minnow that comes and it has the sun in its scales and a pearl in its mouth and I wanted to see the goldfish that's brought the sun out!"
What the fuck, Hob mouths, but he doesn't open his eyes. He's a bit worried he might throw up if he does.
"I...regret. That my duties have prevented me from visiting you," Dream says. And then, stiffly, he says, "But neither have any of you come. To visit me."
This is another way that Dream is feeling comfortable, Hob decides. If you're going to have a row with your sister it's either got to be an awfully infuriating subject, or else you've got to be in a place where you don't feel like people are going to judge you. This is still good. It has to be, because he can't do a damn thing about it right now.
"Would you want me to?"
"You need only call upon my sigil, sister."
"Yes but no, but would you want me to? Because! Because, I know..." Delirium's voice audibly twists itself in knots. It's incredibly disconcerting to hear. "I'm not. I'm all mixed up, now. I was pink and then I touched the sky and it got all muddy in me and now I'm violet except when I'm spaghetti instead. And a lot of times I think...I think you liked me better. Before I got confused and became spaghetti."
Hob still doesn't open his eyes, but he doesn't need to look at Delirium's face to understand that the 'you' she's using is a plural one. He can hear it, and, in a weird way, he can hear who she's talking about, too. They come through like colours, or radio waves, bleeding across the backs of his eyelids: a book, an ankh, a helm, a sword, a heart, a hook. He can make a guess as to who the ankh belongs to, and he's never seen Dream's fuck-off great helmet before but he knows it exists. The others, though, are mysteries.
"My sister," Dream says. Voice gone a bit softer. Dream's cool hand touches Hob's forehead, pushes sweaty hair back from his closed eyes. He feels like he ought to try and fall asleep, like he's intruding on something big that's been a long time coming, but sleep now seems the furthest thing from him. He's got no choice but to just lie here and try to be unobtrusive. Admittedly, that's not a hard thing to do. If he moves too quickly his chest feels like it's full of knives, and lying still seems to help with the shivering. "You were my sister when you were Delight. You are still my sister now."
That sounds an awful lot like she changed, Hob thinks. Dream's always going on about how he can't change, how his fate is set in stone, how he's this implacable and impenetrable thing that exists just to do its job, but...but if his youngest sibling changed, why can't he?
It's all got to do with duty, Hob thinks. Duty, function, and somewhere in the middle of it all is Dream's son, the boy who'd sang so sweetly he'd made gods weep, and this new child that Dream doesn't want to talk about. He's barely said a word about either of them ever since he had that breakdown a month ago, but Hob's not been able to get them out of his head. Now they sort of...drift, untethered thoughts, Orpheus who's still alive but somehow worse than dead, and this other child whose fate is already set. Or so Dream thinks.
The words drift like soap bubbles, baby and son and responsibility and family, smearing across his mind's eye until what's left behind is an iridescent film through which he can vaguely see a young man's face, chestnut curls and eyes so ancient they look like they belong to a statue, distant and sad. He's aware of Delirium and Dream still talking, but all he hears is the gentle rocking rush of waves, and he's in a dark place where the sun is always promising to reach him, but never fully commits. "They used to do things like this to seers, I think," he tells the chestnut-haired man. The lad doesn't turn his head, but his eyes flick to the side, and then narrow in consideration. "Locked them up somewhere and fed them hallucinogenic mushrooms until they vomited the word of God."
"And what do you know of seers, Hob Gadling?" the young man asks. There's something strange about his voice, something hollow and reed-like, and never mind the fact that Hob thinks he might be the one hallucinating, because he's just realised that the lad doesn't have a body. He's just a head, and a bit of neck, balanced carefully on a plinth in darkness, overlooking the sunlight on the sea.
"I think I'm going to throw up," Hob says, and comes back to himself doing precisely that, leaning over the side of the bed with his head in a bin, Dream carefully holding his hair back. Ah, Hob thinks, he feels comfortable letting me throw up on him, excellent. Then he loses himself again in the rhythmic, awful contractions of his near-empty stomach while a swarm of razor-sharp butterflies flit around his head and someone nearby plays the trombone at maximum volume directly into his ear.
"This is fucking awful," he slurs, once the spitting up has subsided a bit. He's not bringing up anything more than bile at this point, and even that's starting to run dry.
"Say that you'll come to dinner!" Delirium burbles. Her face ripples into focus at the bottom of the bin, and Hob grimaces.
"Could you please...not," he says, and bless her, she actually listens, the vague features of nose and eyes and mouth melting back into the mess until it looks, at least to his eyes, fairly ordinary again. Admittedly, though, he doesn't want to be looking at a puddle of his own sick, so he closes his eyes and waits until the room feels like it's stopped spinning. Somewhere in there he feels Dream gently manoeuvring him, taking the bin out of his lap, helping him lie back down in bed, pulling the blankets around him but not over him. Something cool and damp is laid over his forehead, and Hob immediately feels like his core temperature has dropped by three degrees. It's bloody awful. He can't stop shivering.
"I do not know what else to do," he hears Dream say. He sounds miserable. Hob wants to open his eyes again and reassure him, tell him that this is just part of being human, and it's a far sight better than it used to be when they were opening veins and shoving mustard seed in festering wounds. He wants to tell Dream that if this were the 1300s he'd be calling for a priest for his viaticum right about now, because once a fever reached the head it was generally considered the end. He wants to tell Dream that he's doing everything right, and he hadn't even known that Dream knew what a flannel was (he's assuming that's what's been laid on his forehead), let alone that a cool, damp one would help with his fever.
He wants to make sure that Dream knows it's all right. That it's all going to be fine, and this place, this flat, Hob's bed, Hob, it's all going to still be here for him no matter what. His home isn't going to vanish just because he didn't perfectly take care of Hob while he was infirm.
Hob opens his mouth, but nothing really comes out except a quite pathetic croak, and shortly after he feels something touch his bottom lip, another thing that's cool and damp. He's struck with such an immediate and powerful thirst that he latches on like a suckling babe, and feels his teeth clink against glass.
"Slowly," he hears, though it isn't Dream's voice. Delirium's? It sounds...steadier. Not as frenetic as it had before. "If he drinks too fast he'll sick it all up again."
"Slowly." That's Dream's voice. Not quite as despairing. Water fills his mouth, and Hob drinks and drinks until his throat is numb with cold, and when Dream takes the glass away he whines and whimpers – he can't stop himself – until it returns. It's the strangest, most uncanny feeling, unlike any fever he's ever had. A part of him is perfectly aware of what's happening, but it's floating high above everything else, unable to do much to interfere. Most of him is down here, in his body, desperate for water and still shivering. He wonders if it's because Delirium is here, if her presence grants a greater clarity at the same time as it makes the fever worse.
He slips under again, and the next time that he wakes the fever is broken.
Dream is still in the wingback chair next to the bed, but his sister is no longer hovering above him. Instead, there's a small, dense weight tucked under Hob's arm, curled into the curve of his hip, and when he looks down he sees a mop of uneven, multicoloured hair, and the tip of a sharp, pale nose, like a hedgehog poking out from some leaves. Delirium has twisted herself into a pretzel, an arm underneath Hob's back, the other thrown over Hob's neck, her legs akimbo, her spine arched, giving the impression of a cat quite determined to be comfortable no matter how ridiculous it looks, and he almost feels bad for how he has to untangle himself from her, listening to how she snuffles as he moves her arm from his throat.
"H'lo," he croaks, and Dream looks up from...yes, those are still his students' papers, Hob thinks, though these look like the essays instead of the quizzes. "Time 'sit?"
"Six in the evening," Dream says. Hob has a brief moment where he thinks that's not so bad, was only out for a few hours, and then Dream adds, "Tuesday."
Ah. He's been out for two whole days. Hob manages to peel himself away from Delirium's grip and is hit by a wave of dizziness that forces him to stop and rethink his choices of the past forty-eight hours. Not that he remembers most of them. But he does feel...clear, again. He still can't breathe out of one nostril and his throat feels like it's lined with razors, but that awful, bone-rattling shivering has stopped.
Dream is staring at him. Watchful. Waiting, it feels like. Hob weighs his options, decides that it's unlikely that eldritch personifications of concepts can get the flu, and then leans out of bed and drags Dream into an awkward, one-armed hug.
"Thank you," he whispers. "For staying. For taking care of me."
Dream is stiff in his arms, all bones and angles, but his hair is feather-soft when Hob turns his head and brushes his lips through it.
"I was unsure if I would be welcome. For such an extended period of time," Dream says. Even his voice is stiff. Hob has to bite his cheek to keep from laughing, more out of surprise than actual humour. "But I did not wish to leave you when you were...ill. Even if it meant that my sister would remain for longer." There's a long pause while Hob reacquaints himself with Dream's skin, dragging his lips over the softest places, his cheek, the hollow behind his ear, wallowing in tactility after, apparently, two days of being bedridden. Then Dream says, "I take it that you are. Pleased."
"Beyond pleased," Hob says. "Ecstatic. My home is your home, remember? You're allowed to be here even when I'm not. Or when I'm sick, or if I have to flee the country and make a new identity. It's not going to stop being yours just because I'm not around."
"I am not accustomed to the...ownership. Of things.
"I know," Hob says. Dream hasn't said as much before, but Hob's able to put puzzles together if he has to: the clothes that are just an extension of himself, the kingdom that's the same, the empty bedroom, the lack of photos, of letters, of anything to suggest a life outside of endless, unceasing duty. The only thing that Dream has that's his is the helmet that he made from the spine of a dead fucking god, and it's not like that's exactly heartening, is it? Just another reminder of the things he has to do, the sacrifices he has to make, the atrocities he has to endure.
Christ, Hob hates it. A job you can never set down. Work that never ends. No weekends off, no summers, no holidays, no chance of there ever being a break in the drudgery. Just perfect, eternal duty.
They stay there for a time, smushed awkwardly together, until beside him Delirium starts to snuffle louder, emerging from whatever counts as sleep for things like her and Dream. When she sits up she does it all at once, popping back into the present, her hair fluffing out wildly, looking like one of those hideously cute baby birds, more muppet than person.
"Oh!" she says, and then frowns, her eyes slightly unfocused. Then again, "Oh," sounding achingly sad. "You aren't mine anymore."
"Sorry, pet," Hob says, and finally lets go of Dream, though he really doesn't want to. Unfortunately, bodily needs are making themselves urgently known: he's got to piss something awful, and his stomach feels practically hollow for how empty it is. It's been two days, he thinks – has Dream been helping him to the toilet? Cleaning him? He ought to feel embarrassed by that, but...but he can't.
This is Dream's house, too, and everything in it. Warts and all, unfortunately.
"You never said," Delirium says. Hob swings his legs over the side of the bed and makes his first tentative attempt to stand. It goes...about as well as it could, considering he hasn't really moved on his own for forty-eight hours. "You never said."
"Said what?"
Dream makes a noise that Hob interprets as irritation.
"My sister has invited you. To a family dinner," he says, sounding aggrieved by the very thought. "I urge you in the strongest possible terms. To decline."
"Why? I'd love to meet your family. I'd introduce you to mine if they weren't dead." He looks steadily at Dream as he says it, trying to gauge his reaction. Does Dream know that meeting the family is a thing couples do? Is he aware of the implications? Hob's been hoping...he thinks there might be something here, something...ever since they had dinner together, when Dream turned up dressed like a supermodel, the sex afterwards...he doesn't think he was imagining it. The way Dream had looked at him.
He hasn't done a slow courtship in so long. It's not really the modern way, is it? Who would he even ask, if he was going to ask permission to court Dream? His eldest sibling, usually. Hob can't remember which that is at the moment.
"You...would," Dream says, not really making it a question, but rather an incredulous statement of fact. Hob tries to stand again, testing his weight, and this time he manages to get all the way upright. For a second he stays there, breathing, remembering how to balance; behind him there's a sound like someone stirring a large pot of noodles, and a shower of soap bubbles cascades over his shoulder and down his front.
"They'd love to meet you!" Delirium says...or, shouts, right next to Hob's ear, but that's fine. He doesn't feel like throwing up any longer, at least. "Say you'll come! Say you'll visit!"
Hob looks at Dream. He raises his eyebrows. In couples, he's noticed, they tend to have their own secret language, built off of years of being together, of learning tics and tells and habits. He's not sure if he has that with Dream, but six centuries must be good for something, right? Even if they'd only met a handful of times throughout.
I won't if you don't want me to, he tries to say, with his brows and his eyes and a tilt of his head. I want to, I want to know everything about you, I want to be in your life the same way you're in mine. I want your family to be my family, the way my home is your home.
He's not sure if Dream understands. He's always been a bit unclear on what Dream can and can't do – being able to see daydreams seems an awful lot like mindreading to him, but apparently they're very different – but now he tries to push that thought with all his might towards Dream. Imagines a scenario where Dream shakes his head, and Hob shrugs and smiles and kisses him and then makes breakfast for him; imagines, too, a scene where Dream is the one who shrugs, and Hob is still smiling, but excited, now, by the upcoming dinner.
Dream blinks at him. There's no sign that he saw either scenario playing out behind Hob's eyes, but...
He sighs.
He nods.
"Yes!" Delirium says, throwing both hands into the air and then hurling herself at Hob's back. She explodes into clouds of rainbow-coloured mist before impact, showering him in glitter, and Hob doesn't physically stagger forward but mentally he feels like he's been slapped on the back of the head. "Oh, yes yes yes! Thank you big brother thank you! And Hob! You can meet Desire and Death and Destiny and Despair! They'll love you! They'll love you love you love you to pieces! We've all had you at least once but now we can actually talk to you!"
Hob keeps a careful eye on Dream, watching his expression. It looks...resigned, but not unhappy. Just...braced, maybe? Readying himself for something, though whether good or bad, Hob can't tell.
"Great," Hob says. "Sounds fantastic. Now, I really need to..."
"And we can have cake! Cakes and pies and tarts and candies, green mouse-flavoured and bilberry-flavoured and maple and tornado orange juice and, and, and!"
"That sounds amazing," Hob says firmly, "but I really need to use the toilet, if you'll...I guess, take your glitter off me?"
The riot of colours that's dusted his shoulders melts, Dali-style, and drips down his sweat-soaked shirt to puddle on the floor, where the whole rainbow mess of it turns into a pack of tiny clay armadillos which scurry under the bed.
"Thanks," he says, and feels, despite everything, a bit of warm affection when Delirium hooks her chin over his shoulder and plants a huge, smacking kiss on his cheek. He tries not to think too hard about how her neck must move in order to accomplish that.
"Thank you, my sister," Dream says. He stands from his chair, regal, solemn, and Hob, sap that he is, falls a little bit more in love with him, with his elegance and the pale turn of his wrists as he neatly sets aside the papers he had been reading. "Now. If your business here is concluded?"
"Right as daisies!" Delirium says, and then she kisses Hob's cheek again, and with a loud pop and the smell of fried electrical wiring, she disappears. Hob waits for a few seconds, just to make sure, and then starts shuffling at high speed towards the toilet. When he feels Dream's arm curl around his waist, supporting him, he sags in relief, and together they stagger into the loo, where Dream leans against the counter while Hob relieves himself.
"Your sister's nice," he says while he washes his hands. The hot water feels heavenly, and it occurs to him that he likely hasn't had a shower in the past two days.
"She made your fever immeasurably worse," Dream points out, and Hob shrugs.
"Not like it'll kill me, is it? And I had some interesting dreams. Or, hallucinations, I guess. And if it means that I get to learn more about you in the end, it's all been worth it."
"You are...truly that interested. In me?" Dream asks, and Hob shuts off the tap, leaning against the counter and staring at Dream's reflection in the mirror. This would be, he thinks, an absolutely fantastic moment to confess that he's in love. That he's been in love with Dream for ages, and even if Dream never loves him back it won't change anything. Hob's just not wired that way. He licks his lips.
Gentle. Soft. Slow. It would be an excellent time to confess, but...it would be better still if Dream made the first move. Let him be in control, setting the pace. Hob can wait. He can wait as long as Dream needs to, dropping hints along the way.
"Yeah," he says softly. "Yeah, I really am."
In the mirror, Dream gazes back at him, his lips slightly parted, his eyes wide.
"I. Must return to my duties," he finally says, and Hob nods.
"I know, dove," he says. "Just. Don't be a stranger? Or, you know what I mean. Just be my stranger. You're welcome here. Always."
What he means is, this will always be here, waiting for you, and he means, this flat is yours, and he means this body is yours, and he means it's not going anywhere, it's real, it's real, it's real. He's still not sure if it gets through.
He waits until he sees Dream nod in the mirror, then he turns around, and in the split second between sight and movement Dream is gone.
Hob stares at where he was standing for a long time, until his feet get cold and his legs start to feel a bit trembly. He's still hungry enough to eat a horse, but he just...wants to make sure that Dream isn't coming back. That he didn't...Hob doesn't know. Forget something?
But Dream doesn't come back. There's no last-minute confession, no realisation on Dream's part, and eventually Hob sighs, and totters his way back to the bedroom so that he can change out of his less-than-fresh clothes. His eye is caught by the stack of papers on the wingback chair – which is still there, so Hob supposes he owns a wingback chair, now – and he pauses in the middle of stepping out of his trousers in order to look at them.
His students' essays, like he'd thought. He'd assumed that Dream was just reading them, but...
The quality of your writing is consistent and informative, he reads on the first page. It's penned in old, black ink, in clearly-written, slightly jagged letters. However, the same cannot be said of your citations. I have labelled each improperly-formatted citation in red ink, and have included information on how the citation may be corrected. Otherwise, you present compelling arguments given the information available to you, and I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future. Please find additional comments on pages 1, 3, 4, 7, and 8. At the top of the page, near where the student – Amelia Franklin – has written their name, there's a neatly-circled score: 92.5/100.
Hob sits down heavily on the bed and looks through all of them, until his eyes go blurry and he can't stop himself from grinning like a lunatic; page after page of commentary, some of it proud, some of it scathing, all of it held to the same standards that Hob employs himself.
After ten minutes of reading he sets the essays on his bedside table and realises, with a flutter of delight, that the blanket Dream had tucked around him is that stupid llama blanket. It's their thing now, he decides. He can't ever get rid of it, not even when it's ancient and in tatters...which, knowing modern manufacturing standards, is going to be within the next year or two. But he can buy a new one, the exact same one if he can find it, and when that goes out of style it will be some other llama-themed thing.
Slow down, he tells himself, but the smile feels bolted on, paralyzed with joy, and he's still grinning from ear to ear when he leaves the bedroom a few minutes later, dressed, still feeling like crap, but ready to face the evening.