Chapter Text
The invitation arrived on a Tuesday, because of course it did.
Tuesdays had a long and storied history of ruining Hob Gadling's life, stretching back to a particularly memorable one in 1532 when he'd lost three teeth and a horse in the same afternoon.
This particular Tuesday was less dramatic but no less threatening: a thick cream envelope, hand-addressed in calligraphy so ornate it bordered on aggressive, wedged into his departmental pigeonhole between a reminder about updated fire safety protocols and a passive-aggressive memo from the Dean about "appropriate use of the shared kitchen microwave."
Hob turned the envelope over in his hands. He already knew what it was.
He'd watched Lakshmi from Comparative Literature flash that sapphire ring around the staff common room for three solid weeks, practically dislocating her wrist with the enthusiasm of her gestures.
She and her partner Saoirse had been together for six years. Everyone agreed it was about time. Hob had bought them a round at the pub and meant every warm word he'd said, because he genuinely liked Lakshmi.
She was whip-smart, disarmingly funny, and one of the few people on campus who could keep up with him in a pub argument about the actual political dynamics of the Tudor court without resorting to Wikipedia on her phone under the table.
He slit the envelope open with his thumb and pulled out the invitation. It was printed on heavy card stock with little botanical illustrations climbing the margins. A summer wedding in Suffolk, the kind with a converted barn and wildflower centrepieces and, if Hob knew Lakshmi and Saoirse at all, an inappropriately competitive lawn games tournament.
There was more. A second card, tucked behind the invite, with details for the attached bed and breakfast. The venue had rooms for guests, the card explained in the same elegant script, and Lakshmi and Saoirse had reserved a block of them at a discounted rate.
The reception will run late. Please consider staying. Breakfast included.
A whole affair, then.
Hob could already picture it: the ceremony bleeding into the reception bleeding into the small hours, everyone pleasantly drunk and dancing barefoot while the summer dark pressed warm against the venue windows.
He'd have to stay. Driving back to London at three in the morning after a night of drinking was out of the question for anyone.
His eyes darted back down to the invite.
Plus one.
Those two words sat on the RSVP card as innocently as a landmine.
Hob tucked the whole lot into his satchel and headed for his eleven o'clock lecture, trying very hard not to think about it.
He made it approximately four minutes.
The problem wasn't the wedding. He loved weddings. He'd been to hundreds of them across the centuries, from the brief and transactional to the lavish and genuinely romantic, and he never tired of watching two people stand up in front of everyone they knew and say yes, you, I choose you.
There was something stubbornly hopeful about the whole enterprise that appealed to the part of him that had once told Death herself he'd never die.
No, the problem was his colleagues.
Specifically, the unholy matchmaking coalition that had formed around his perpetual singledom like antibodies around a splinter.
They meant well. That was the worst part.
If they'd been malicious he could have told them all to piss off and felt fine about it. But they meant well, every last meddling one of them, and so Hob was forced to endure their efforts with a strained smile and the quiet patience of a man who had survived the Black Plague, the English Civil War, and the complete works of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
It had all started innocuously enough.
Marcus Webb, the head technician for the Biological Sciences labs, had invited Hob to a dinner party that turned out to be Hob, Marcus, Marcus's wife Diane, and Diane's recently divorced sister Kath.
The seating arrangement had been less than subtle.
Kath was a lovely woman, a paediatric nurse with a filthy sense of humour and strong opinions about rugby, and under different circumstances Hob might have been genuinely interested.
But he'd sat across from her and done the maths he always did now, the quiet arithmetic of immortality: she was perhaps forty-five at the most, which meant she'd been born around 1980, which meant that when she'd been drawing her first breath in some hospital in Croydon, Hob had already been alive for over six hundred years and was on his tenth identity.
The numbers never stopped being strange.
A brief fling, he could manage. He still indulged now and then, a few months of warmth and company with someone whose smile caught his attention. He wasn't made of stone. But anything lasting, anything that looked like building a life together, that was a door he'd bricked shut a long time ago.
The older he grew, the more grotesque the maths became.
His partners kept getting younger relative to him even as they aged and greyed, and the pretence required to stand beside someone and act as though you were peers, contemporaries, two people on roughly equal footing in the grand sweep of time, had become an exhausting performance. And always, waiting at the end of it, the staged death. The forged documents. The quiet disappearance into a new name while someone who'd loved him wept at a funeral for a man who wasn't in the coffin.
He'd done it once. Built something real.
Eleanor, in the 1500s, with her sharp tongue and the way she'd look at him across their table like she found him perpetually, inexplicably amusing. Then they'd had a son, Robyn, a bright-eyed boy who'd inherited his mother's quick wit and Hob's stubbornness, and for a few years Hob had allowed himself the dangerous fantasy that this was enough. That he could hold on to it.
Eleanor had died bringing their second child into the world, and the baby with her. Two lives extinguished in a single terrible night while Hob paced the corridor outside like a man walking the edge of a cliff. He'd held her hand after, when it was already cooling, and the silence in that room had been so complete he'd thought for one wild, lurching moment that the world itself had stopped.
Robyn had followed not long after. A stupid fight in a bar that was over as swiftly as it started. Quick and merciless and utterly indifferent to a father's desperate bargaining.
Three graves. His whole fragile, precious, borrowed life shovelled under the earth in the space of a few years, and Hob had walked away from the churchyard on legs that barely held him and understood, finally, the price of wanting things that time would take.
He never married again. Never let another person that close to his heart.
Six hundred years, and one family had been enough to teach him a lesson that most immortals in stories needed centuries of repetition to learn.
He'd had his love. He'd had his ruin.
He carried both with him the way a sailor carries the memory of a shipwreck. It was not always at the surface, but woven so deeply into the fabric of himself that some nights he still reached across the bed in the dark, half-asleep, searching for a warmth that had been gone for over four hundred years.
He'd been polite to Kath. He'd been charming. He'd gone home alone and poured himself a whisky and sat in the dark of his flat, and the loneliness had been a familiar thing, worn smooth by handling, like a river stone he carried always in his pocket.
After Marcus's gambit, others had taken up the cause.
Fumiko Tanaka from the Japanese Studies department had "accidentally" given his number to a friend of hers who did something with sustainable architecture.
George Whittaker, the barrel-chested Yorkshireman who managed Campus Security and treated Hob like an adopted younger brother, had cornered him in the car park to pitch his nephew.
"He's a good lad, Robbie. He runs his own joinery business, he has lovely hands."
That particular detail had haunted Hob for weeks.
Even Elena Vasquez, the quietly terrifying Head of Faculty Administration who controlled room bookings and travel reimbursements with the iron efficiency of a wartime quartermaster, had weighed in.
She'd stopped him in the corridor one afternoon, peered at him over her reading glasses, and said, "Dr Golding, I have a cousin visiting from Madrid next month. She's a cellist. You would like her."
It had not been a question.
The only colleague who'd never tried to set him up was Tom Bakare, his closest friend in the department, a fellow historian whose research focused on West African trade networks.
Tom had simply looked at him one evening over a pint, said "You've got the look of a man already spoken for, whether you know it or not," and then changed the subject to the department's crumbling photocopier.
Hob had nearly choked on his beer. Tom was too perceptive by half, which was what made him both an excellent historian and a slightly unnerving drinking companion.
Because Tom was right, wasn't he?
Hob shouldered through the doors into the lecture hall and dropped his satchel on the desk at the front, pulling up his slides on autopilot while his mind continued to gnaw at the problem.
Thirty-odd undergraduates filtered in, clutching coffee cups and looking only partially alive, and Hob launched into his lecture on the social upheaval of fourteenth-century England with the practised energy of a man who'd been there and had the (carefully hidden) emotional scars to prove it.
He talked about famine and labour shortages and the Statute of Labourers, and part of his brain kept circling back to the RSVP card in his bag.
Plus one. Tick yes or tick no.
And now, layered on top of the usual matchmaking dread, the added complication of overnight accommodation.
A shared room, presumably. The whole domestic morning-after tableau, where whoever he brought along would be seen by everyone bleary-eyed and rumpled, reaching across him for the toast rack, and conclusions would be drawn.
If he went alone, it would be open season. An entire evening and the following morning with nowhere to escape. At least at a normal wedding he could plead an early drive home. At this one, trapped in Suffolk with the matchmakers until checkout time, he'd be a sitting duck.
Lakshmi's social circle was vast and enthusiastic, and she'd already made pointed comments in the staff room about a colleague of Saoirse's who was "really fit, Rob, honestly, and she just got out of this terrible thing with a banker, she's ready for someone who's kind."
Lakshmi had said the word kind while staring directly into Hob's eyes with an intensity that suggested she was trying to beam the information into his skull telepathically.
Bringing a friend wouldn't cut it, either. He'd tried that calculation already, somewhere between the Peasants' Revolt and the Statute of Labourers, while a student in the third row dozed peacefully behind a propped-up textbook.
If he showed up with a mate, a clearly-we're-just-friends companion, the matchmakers would simply work around them.
He'd watched it happen at the departmental Christmas party two years ago when Fumiko had brought her brother along and Marcus had cheerfully seated his latest candidate on Fumiko's other side with the strategic exactness of a Napoleonic field marshal.
No, a friend wouldn't provide sufficient cover. What he needed was a date. Someone the assembled busybodies would look at and think ah, right, sorted, we'll leave him be.
Someone convincing enough to keep George's lovely-handed nephew and Elena's cellist cousin and Lakshmi's really fit, recently heartbroken colleague of Saoirse's at a comfortable, permanent distance.
He could survive it without one. Obviously he could survive it; he'd survived everything.
But the prospect of an entire evening and morning spent deflecting well-meaning setups while pretending to be a normal forty-something bachelor and not a nearly seven-hundred-year-old immortal hopelessly in love with the anthropomorphic personification of dreams felt, frankly, exhausting.
And there it was.
The thought he kept trying to walk past, like a door in a corridor he'd trained himself not to open.
He was in love with Dream of the Endless.
He'd been in love with Dream of the Endless for longer than most buildings lasted, and the feeling showed no signs of diminishing.
If anything, it had only grown since they'd begun meeting weekly instead of once a century.
That had been Hob's suggestion, floated carefully over their first pint after Dream's return, after the years of absence that Hob now knew had been imprisonment.
He'd pitched it casually, the way you might suggest grabbing lunch with a work friend, as though his heart hadn't been hammering so hard he could feel it in his fingertips.
"It seems a bit daft, doesn't it," he'd said, watching Dream's pale fingers wrap around a glass of red wine. "Calling each other friends and then not acting like it. I've got friends I see every week. You could be one of them. If you wanted."
Dream had regarded him with that fathomless look, the one that could mean anything from deep contemplation to mild digestive discomfort, and Hob had held very still and tried to look like a man who wouldn't be gutted by a refusal.
"I would like that," Dream had said quietly and simply.
Hob had felt something bright and reckless bloom in his chest, the same feeling he'd had in 1389 when he'd first declared he would never die, that sense of staking a claim against all reason and having the universe, just this once, not laugh in his face.
Beyond wanting Dream's company, Hob worried about him.
Over a hundred years in a glass ball. He couldn't fathom it, and he'd tried. He'd lie awake some nights running the number through his head, one hundred years of captivity, and his blood would go hot with a fury he had no productive outlet for.
Dream never spoke of it directly, and Hob never pushed, but he could see the marks it had left. The way Dream sometimes went very still in loud places. The way he held himself with a careful, guarded precision, as though the world might contract around him again without warning.
Hob couldn't fix that. He knew he couldn't fix it. But he could make sure Dream got out of whatever dark palace he inhabited and spent a few hours each week in the warmth and noise of the living world, drinking wine and listening to Hob ramble about departmental politics and the surprisingly cutthroat dynamics of the university pub quiz league.
It wasn't much. It was what he had to offer.
So now they met on Wednesday evenings in The New Inn, their pub, or sometimes a different one if Hob felt like showing Dream a bit of the city. Sometimes they walked along the Thames afterwards, Dream's dark coat catching the wind off the water, and Hob talked about his week and Dream listened with an attentiveness that made Hob feel, absurdly, like the most interesting man alive. Which, given his lifespan, was at least statistically arguable.
He loved those evenings.
He loved the way Dream tilted his head when something surprised him, the way his brow furrowed when he encountered a human idiom that eluded him, the way he sometimes smiled with just the corners of his mouth, as though full smiles were an extravagance he was still learning to permit himself.
Hob loved all of it, every scrap, and he kept that love packed down tight and quiet inside himself where it couldn't cause any trouble.
Because Dream was his friend.
Dream, who had spent a hundred years in a glass cage, who carried loneliness over him like a second skin, who was only just learning to let someone close again.
Hob would sooner cut off his own hand than risk that fragile, precious thing by blurting out something as selfish and destabilising as I'm in love with you and I have been since roughly the reign of Henry VII.
His lecture wound down and the students shuffled out, and Hob gathered his things and walked back toward his office, the invitation a faint weight in his bag. The corridor of the History department smelled, as it always did, of old carpet and instant coffee and the faint ghost of whatever George had microwaved for lunch in the shared kitchen, which today appeared to have been something unfortunately fish-based.
Hob dropped into his desk chair and pulled the RSVP card out again, turning it over between his fingers. The bed and breakfast details sat beside it.
He needed a date. A fake one.
Someone willing to stand beside him for an evening and a morning and look sufficiently besotted that the matchmaking collective would finally, mercifully stand down. Someone who wouldn't get the wrong idea, who wouldn't expect anything real from the arrangement, who understood the parameters and would stick to them.
Hob ran through his options. They were, to put it charitably, thin.
Most of his social life revolved around the university, which meant most of the people he knew would already be at the wedding.
The friends he'd maintained from previous lives were few and far between, necessarily so, and none of them lived in London.
There was a woman in Edinburgh he'd known since the 1970s who knew what he was, but she was eighty-six now and probably wouldn't fancy the train.
He briefly considered hiring someone off the internet before the sheer bleak absurdity of a seven-hundred-year-old man browsing for a rent-a-date on his phone brought him back to his senses.
One name kept surfacing, bobbing up through his thoughts like a cork he couldn't hold under.
Dream.
Hob set the RSVP card down and pressed both hands flat against the desk, as though bracing himself physically against his own terrible idea.
He could ask Dream to pretend to be his date.
His fake boyfriend, partner, whatever word wouldn't make the Lord of Dreams stare at him as though he'd grown a second head.
He could frame it as a favour. A practical arrangement between friends.
Look, my colleagues won't leave me alone about my love life, and if I show up to this thing without someone on my arm I'll spend the whole night being shoved at strangers, so would you mind terribly just... pretending? You wouldn't have to do much. Just stand next to me and look like you don’t hate being near me.
Dream wouldn't get the wrong idea.
That was the thing about asking an immortal cosmic entity to fake a relationship. There was absolutely no danger of Dream mistaking the gesture for a genuine romantic overture, because the notion that Hob Gadling, a mortal man who'd once been a common soldier in a muddy English field, could be a viable romantic prospect for the literal personification of dreams was so preposterous it didn't bear examining.
The pretence would be safe precisely because it was impossible.
Dream would understand it as the practical ruse it was, and Hob would get his evening of peace, and nobody would be any the wiser.
The logic was flawless. Airtight. Completely reasonable.
The fact that Hob's pulse had kicked up at the mere thought of Dream playing the part, of Dream standing close enough for Hob's colleagues to read them as a couple, of Dream perhaps resting a hand on Hob's arm or leaning into his space with that unconscious gravity he sometimes had, the way stars leaned toward each other across the night sky, well… That was Hob's problem, and he'd been managing his own pathetic heart for centuries. He could manage it for one more night.
They could drop the act the moment the Bed & Breakfast bedroom door closed behind them. Perfectly innocent. Just two friends sharing a room for practical purposes after a long night of pretending to be in love.
He tried not to think too hard about that.
Dream on the other side of the bed, a foot of darkness between them, the soft sound of his breathing. Did Dream breathe when he slept? Did Dream sleep at all? Hob realised he didn't know, and that the question opened onto a vast, aching landscape of things about Dream he wanted to learn and catalogue and hold close, things that had nothing to do with friendship and everything to do with a longing so old it had become part of his architecture.
This was a terrible idea. The kind of terrible idea that felt, from certain angles, like the only idea. The kind that glowed with a seductive, dangerous reasonableness while quietly laying the groundwork for emotional devastation.
Hob was going to do it anyway.
"Oh, you absolute idiot," he said aloud to his empty office.
He picked up his phone, put it down and picked it up again.
Their next meeting was two days away. He could ask then, in person, over a pint, like a normal person. Explain the situation, pitch the scheme, let Dream decide. That would be the sensible thing to do. The patient, measured, adult thing.
Hob stared at the RSVP card.
He thought about Lakshmi's friend who was "really fit" and "ready for someone kind."
He thought about George's nephew with the lovely hands.
He thought about Elena's cellist cousin from Madrid.
He thought about an entire night in Suffolk with no escape route, and about trying to explain to a well-meaning stranger over breakfast that no, he wasn't looking for anything serious, while George clapped him on the shoulder and said something like don't let this one get away, Robbie.
He picked up his phone and opened his messages.
Dream had a phone now, a concession to modernity that Hob had lobbied for with the persistence of a man who'd once spent eleven years petitioning a medieval court for the return of a confiscated sword.
Dream used it sparingly and with the vaguely suspicious air of someone handling an unfamiliar animal, but he did respond to texts, usually within the hour, in complete sentences with perfect punctuation and absolutely no emojis.
He shouldn’t ask over text. The fake dating proposition was the kind of thing that required eye contact and a carefully nonchalant tone and probably at least two pints of Dutch courage. But he could lay the groundwork. Plant the seed and see if Dream was even free.
Hob typed, deleted, typed again, deleted again. His thumbs hovered over his smartphone.
Hey, weird question for you. What are you doing on the 14th of July?
He stared at the message. Reread it. Changed weird to quick. Changed it back to weird. Added a full stop, removed it, added it again. Wondered if weird question was tipping his hand too much. Wondered if Dream would read anything into it. Wondered if Dream, who oversaw the dreams of every living creature in the universe, had better things to do than decode the anxious texting patterns of a lovesick immortal who was apparently hell-bent on engineering the most exquisite possible form of self-torture.
Then he finally pressed send and put the phone face-down on his desk and went to make himself a cup of tea, because some decisions required caffeine and the comforting ritual of boiling water.
The kettle in the shared kitchen was, predictably, limescaled to within an inch of its life. Hob filled it and switched it on and leant against the counter, arms folded, staring at the noticeboard with its overlapping flyers for yoga classes and union meetings and someone selling a second-hand bicycle that was "barely used, with only a slight wobble in the front wheel."
His phone buzzed in his office down the hall.
Hob didn't move. He watched the kettle. He listened to it begin its low, building roar. He counted to thirty. He made his tea. He walked back to his office at a pace that could only be described as studied nonchalance, sat down, took a sip, and then turned his phone over.
One message from Dream. Sent forty-three seconds after Hob's.
I have no fixed obligations on that date. Why do you ask, Hob?
Hob read it twice. Took another sip of tea. Felt his heart do something complicated and inconvenient in his chest.
I'll tell you Wednesday. I've got a favour to ask. A big one, actually. The kind best discussed in person.
He hit send before he could lose his nerve, then sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere down the corridor, Tom was whistling something tuneless. The afternoon light slanted through the window and caught the dust motes drifting above his desk, each one turning slow and gold in the stillness.
His phone buzzed.
Then I will wait until Wednesday. I trust you will explain in full.
Hob read the message and let out a long breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. Dream didn't follow up with further questions. Just that calm, measured patience that he wore like he wore his coat, the kind of patience that came from being older than the Earth itself.
Hob envied it sometimes. Other times it drove him slightly mad, because he wanted, just once, for Dream to be curious enough to push. To say tell me now or I cannot wait or anything that suggested the same restless, gravitational pull that Hob felt constantly in Dream's direction.
But that wasn't who Dream was. And Hob loved who Dream was. So.
He set his phone down and drank the rest of his tea.
Once he was done, Hob took a deep breath and headed off to his two o'clock lecture and spent the rest of the afternoon explaining the War of the Roses to a roomful of second-years while a small, persistent voice in the back of his skull whispered you're going to ask the King of Dreams to be your fake boyfriend, you spectacular lunatic.
Wednesday took its time arriving.
Hob had taught four lectures, attended a faculty meeting so tedious it might have qualified as a form of psychological warfare, marked fourteen essays of wildly varying quality, and consumed enough coffee to fell a lesser man.
By the time six o'clock rolled around he'd changed his shirt twice, which was pathetic behaviour for a man his age, and he knew it.
The first shirt had been too casual, the second too try-hard. He'd gone back to the first, then swapped it for a third option entirely, a dark maroon button-down that Tom had once told him brought out his eyes, before catching himself in the mirror and saying, firmly, out loud, "He's not actually your date. Stop it."
He'd arrived at the New Inn ten minutes early, which was standard practice. Dream was never late, but Hob liked being there first. He liked choosing their table, the one in the back corner where the light was soft and the noise from the bar faded to a pleasant hum.
He liked having a moment to settle, to arrange himself into the version of Hob Gadling who was relaxed and easy and absolutely not vibrating with nervous energy like a manic tuning fork.
He ordered at the bar. A pint of bitter for himself and a glass of red wine for Dream, something with enough body to it that even someone who took only a few sips might find it worth the effort. The bartender, a cheerful woman named Sal who'd started recognising them as regulars weeks ago, poured both without being asked and slid them across with a wink that Hob chose not to examine too closely.
He carried both glasses back to the corner table and sat down facing the door. Took a long pull of his beer. Set it down. Picked it up again. Tapped his thumb against the glass. Checked his phone. Put it away. Straightened the beer mat. Took another drink.
He was nervous, which was stupid.
This was Wednesday. This was his favourite part of the week, the fixed point around which everything else arranged itself.
Whatever happened with the wedding question, he was about to spend the evening with Dream, and that alone was enough to make something warm and settled slide into place behind his ribs.
He'd missed this, during those absent years. Missed it so fiercely that some decades the ache of it had been almost physical, a phantom limb sensation where a friendship used to be.
He'd sat alone at tables in pubs across London and saved the opposite chair and nursed his drink and waited, because that was what Hob Gadling did. He waited. And then Dream had come back, and the waiting had ended, and every Wednesday since felt like a gift Hob was determined not to squander.
He was mid-sip when Dream arrived.
One moment the chair across from Hob was empty, and the next Dream was in it, settling into the seat with the fluid, unhurried grace of someone who had never in his existence needed to worry about things like doors or queues or the physical laws governing the movement of bodies through space.
His dark coat was immaculate, his hair its usual artful chaos, and his eyes, those impossible, star-flecked eyes, found Hob's immediately across the table with an attentiveness that never failed to make Hob's breath catch.
"You could use the door," Hob said, the same thing he said every week. "It's right there. It’s a lovely door. Oak, I think."
"Good evening, Hob."
Dream's gaze dropped to the wine glass already waiting for him, and something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression. Acknowledgment, maybe. Pleasure, possibly. With Dream it was always a matter of reading tectonic shifts in what appeared to the untrained eye to be a perfectly still landscape.
He lifted the glass and took a small, measured sip. Set it down again with the precise, deliberate care he gave to everything.
"Thank you."
"Yeah, well. Seemed rude to make you queue at the bar when you've come all the way from..." Hob gestured vaguely. "Wherever it is you come from."
"The Dreaming."
"Right. Long commute."
The corner of Dream's mouth twitched. Hob counted it as a victory.
They talked for a while about ordinary things. Hob's week, the essay he'd been marking that had misspelled "medieval" four different ways in three pages, a fox he'd seen on his walk home that had stared at him with an unnerving degree of personal judgment.
Dream listened. Dream always listened, with his whole body angled slightly toward Hob, his pale fingers resting on the stem of his wine glass, his head tilted at that angle that meant go on, I am attending to you.
Hob talked, and drank, and felt the nervous energy gradually reshape itself into something warmer and steadier. This was good. This was them. Whatever else was churning beneath the surface, this part was solid ground.
Dream took his second sip of wine and then fixed Hob with a look. It was a particular look. Still and level, with the faintest elevation of one dark brow, and Hob had learnt over the centuries to read it as clearly as a question mark.
You said you had something to ask me. I have been patient. Ask.
Hob put his pint down. Wiped a bead of condensation off his thumb and took a breath.
"Right. So. You know I work at the university."
Dream inclined his head.
"And you know I've got colleagues. Lovely people, most of them. They have good hearts. Meddling, interfering, catastrophically well-intentioned hearts, but good ones." He paused, gathering momentum. "One of them's getting married. Lakshmi, I've mentioned her before. She works in comparative Literature. She’s very funny and has terrifying taste in cocktails."
Dream's expression did not change, which Hob had learnt to interpret as continue.
"She's invited me to her wedding. It’s in Suffolk. A big do, the works. It’s a… an overnight thing, there's a bed and breakfast attached, because the reception goes until God knows when and nobody's driving home at arse o’clock in the morning." Hob picked up his beer and then put it down without drinking. "The problem is my plus one situation."
He explained it. All of it. The matchmaking coalition, the years of increasingly creative ambushes, Marcus's sister-in-law, Fumiko's architect, George's nephew with the joinery business and the apparently spectacular hands.
He described the specific and imminent threat posed by a wedding reception from which there was no escape, an entire night and morning trapped in the Suffolk countryside with people who wanted nothing more in this world than to see Rob Golding paired off and happy, and how bringing a friend wouldn't be enough, they'd just redirect their efforts around whoever he brought, he needed someone they'd read as an actual partner, a romantic interest, someone whose presence beside him would broadcast taken, sorted, stand down loudly enough to penetrate even George's well-meaning skull.
He was rambling. He could hear himself rambling. He drank some beer to shut himself up.
Dream regarded him across the table. His face, as always, gave almost nothing away. That porcelain stillness, those depthless eyes, the architecture of his features arranged with the careful neutrality of a cathedral facade.
Most people would have seen nothing. Most people would have read Dream as blank, unreadable and remote.
Hob was not most people.
Hob had been studying this face for nearly seven hundred years, and he caught it: the smallest possible contraction of muscle at the corner of Dream's mouth, a flicker so brief and so faint that it existed at the absolute threshold of human perception. Almost, if you were being generous, if you were a hopelessly besotted fool looking for evidence of warmth in the face of an ancient cosmic being, a smile.
"Your predicament," Dream said, and his voice was low and measured and gave away as little as his face, "is perhaps less dire than you believe."
Hob blinked. "How's that?"
"You are, from the perspective of a human, a very eligible partner."
Dream said this the way he said most things, as though he were stating an observable fact about the nature of reality. The sky is blue. The tides obey the moon. Hob Gadling is eligible.
"You are intelligent. You are kind. You are handsome. You hold a respectable position. It is not surprising that those who care for you wish to see you happy. Nor is it surprising that others would find you appealing."
Dream’s words landed in Hob's heart like a series of small, precise detonations.
Intelligent. Fine, that was fair enough. He had a doctorate. Multiple doctorates if you counted the ones from previous lives buried in boxes in his storage unit.
Kind. Alright. Generous of Dream, but alright. He tried to be kind. That one he could absorb without incident.
Handsome.
Dream of the Endless thought he was handsome.
Hob's brain, which had served him reliably for the better part of seven centuries, through wars and plagues and the invention of the incandescent light bulb, seized like an engine thrown into the wrong gear.
He felt heat climb the back of his neck. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. He looked like a fish, probably. A stunned, lovestruck fish sitting in a pub in London, having just been called handsome by the most beautiful being in all of creation, and trying very hard to remember how words worked.
Dream watched him with the patient, faintly quizzical expression of someone observing an unfamiliar species of bird.
"That's," Hob managed. His voice came out roughly half an octave higher than usual. He cleared his throat. "That's. Cheers. Thank you. For saying. That."
Eloquence. Centuries of education and lived experience, and he'd been reduced to sentence fragments by an adjective.
He took a very long drink of his beer. Set the glass down. Gathered every remaining scrap of composure he possessed and bundled it together into something passably functional.
"The thing is," he said, "even if all that's true, which is, again, very kind of you to say, the matchmaking isn't going to stop on its own. And this wedding is an overnight siege. I need a strategy."
He looked at Dream. Dream looked back. Those impossibly blue eyes, steady and waiting.
"Would you come with me?" Hob said. "To the wedding. As my date."
A beat of silence. Hob pressed on before his courage could desert him entirely.
"My fake date. Obviously. Pretend. We'd just need to look like we're together, so people leave me alone. You wouldn't have to do much, just... be there, next to me, and let them draw their own conclusions. And I know it's a lot to ask, a whole day and night of pretending, and staying overnight at the bed and breakfast, but we could drop the whole act the second we're behind closed doors, and I'd owe you a massive favour, genuinely, anything you wanted, I'd..."
He was rambling again. He bit it off. His heart was hammering so hard he could feel his pulse in his temples, in his wrists, in the tips of his fingers where they gripped his nearly empty pint glass.
Dream had gone very still. Not the usual Dream stillness, the composed, regal sort. A different quality of still. Hob watched him and tried to read the silence, tried to parse the angle of his brow and the set of his jaw and the precise degree to which his fingers had tightened, fractionally, almost invisibly, on the stem of his wine glass.
Seconds passed. They felt longer.
"You wish me to accompany you to this celebration," Dream said, "and to present myself as your romantic partner."
"Yeah." Hob's throat was dry. "If you're willing. Only if you're willing. I completely understand if it's too strange, or beneath you, or just not something you'd want to spend your time doing, and I won't be offended in the slightest, honestly, I'll just go alone and fend for myself, I've survived worse..."
"I will come."
Hob stopped talking. The abrupt silence felt like stepping off a ledge and finding solid ground where he'd expected a drop.
"You will?"
"I have said so."
Dream lifted his wine glass and took a third sip, which was unprecedented for a single evening and which Hob filed away in the private archive of Dream-related data he maintained in a dark corner of his mind.
"I will arrive at your flat in the early morning and travel with you. It would not serve the deception if I were to arrive separately. Your colleagues would find it unusual."
"Right," Hob said. "Yeah. Good thinking. Arriving together. Makes sense."
Dream set his glass down. "You will need to brief me on the relevant details. Your colleagues, their names, the nature of your supposed relationship with me. A credible fiction requires consistent details."
"Absolutely. I'll put together a... a dossier, or something."
"That would be acceptable."
Hob nodded. He kept nodding. He was aware that he'd been nodding for slightly too long and that it was beginning to look less like agreement and more like a mechanical fault, but the signal from his brain to his neck muscles seemed to be stuck in a loop.
Dream had said yes.
Dream was going to come to a wedding with him and pretend to be his boyfriend.
Dream was going to arrive at his flat in the morning and get in his car and ride with him to Suffolk and stand beside him all day and all evening and then spend the night in the same room as him, and in the morning they'd go down to breakfast together among Hob's colleagues and the whole world would look at them and think couple.
His chest felt too full. He let out a breath to make room.
"I should probably figure out what I'm wearing," he heard himself say, because apparently, when all higher brain functions had shut down, his mouth defaulted to wardrobe logistics.
"Indeed," Dream said, and the ghost of that micro-expression was back, that almost-smile, that miniscule shift at the corner of his mouth. "I imagine you will wish to make a favourable impression."
"I always make a favourable impression. I'm very eligible, apparently. Someone told me so recently. Intelligent, kind and handsome. I’m practically irresistible."
Dream regarded him with an expression that was, by Dream's austere standards, very nearly amused.
Hob grinned at him, wide and stupid and helplessly happy, and signalled to Sal for another round.
The rest of their Wednesday evening unfolded from there the way it always did, settling into the easy, warm rhythm that Hob lived for.
They talked about a play Dream had observed humans dreaming about. They talked about Hob's ongoing feud with the departmental photocopier.
Dream took a fourth sip of wine, which was entirely without precedent and which Hob resolved to commemorate somehow, perhaps with a small plaque.
By the time they stepped outside into the cool night air, the Thames glittering darkly beyond the embankment wall, Hob's nerves had quieted to a low, steady hum of anticipation.
Dream paused on the pavement beside him, collar turned up against the breeze, his profile sharp and pale against the city lights.
"Goodnight, Hob."
"Goodnight. And...thank you. Really. You're saving my life. Metaphorically."
That micro-expression again. Hob was going to start cataloguing them, pinning them down like butterflies in a display case, except that felt wrong, because the beauty of them was precisely that they were fleeting and wild and freely given.
Dream inclined his head, a gesture that managed to be both regal and oddly gentle, and then he was gone.
Just the empty pavement and the sound of the river and the distant hum of traffic, and Hob standing alone in the middle of it all with his hands in his pockets and a smile he couldn't have wiped off his face with industrial solvent.
He walked home along the river, as he often did on Wednesday nights. The route added twenty minutes to the journey but he never minded. He liked the way the water looked at night, all that restless dark motion, and he liked the space it gave his thoughts.
He was going to need a suit. Something good. Something that said I am a put-together adult man in a stable and fulfilling relationship with my definitely real boyfriend who is definitely not an eldritch god-king of the dream realm.
He had a navy one that might work, or the charcoal grey that Tom had approved of at the last faculty dinner. He'd need to get it pressed. And shoes. When had he last worn his good shoes?
Hob unlocked his front door, stepped into the quiet of his flat, and leant back against the closed door with his eyes shut. His smile was still there, stubborn and bright, aching at the edges.
He pulled out his phone and opened his calendar app.
July 14th. Six weeks away.
Six weeks to prepare himself for an entire day and night of pretending to be Dream's partner while simultaneously pretending, to himself, that pretending didn't feel like the closest he'd ever get to the truth.
He could do this. He'd survived the English Civil War. He'd survived George's awkward nephew pitch. He’d survived everything.
He could survive one fake date with the love of his life.
Probably.