Chapter Text
For the first time in many years, the Dreaming experiences a bright, uncomplicated sunny day.
Through Fiddler’s Green, a gentle breeze carries the scent of honeysuckle growing riotous throughout the fair green fields, and sweet alyssum and ox-eye daisies run rampant, blanketing every spare inch of soil in delicate whites and pastel purples, while wild gorse fills the cracks between every stone with a yellow so vibrant it rivals the sun itself. The soughing wind carries loose petals with it along its journey, sending them reeling and spinning over two homes nestled in gentle rolling hills, showering the eaves of the Houses of Secrets and Mystery with an explosion of color. Cain, in the midst of unearthing his brother from the dirt, pauses in his digging to admire the way the petals fall, a carpet of sweet-smelling softness.
“Oh,” he says, “today must be the day.” Then he shrugs, and reaches down to grasp the hand that claws upwards from the ground, heaving his brother from the newest grave that dots the fields behind their houses. Abel blinks up into the light, his face covered in mud and grit, and Cain, solicitously, hands him a handkerchief.
“The day?” Abel says, dabbing at his cheeks, and Cain rolls his eyes. “Oh, that day. How long has it been?”
“A few months, if we go by the Waking. Which is what matters, considering he’s human.”
“Is he, though?”
“Well, are you going to tell him he’s not?”
Abel studies the fall of petals in silence. Gregory is having a grand time trying to bat them out of the air as they drift down, and has already collected a fair few of them in his mouth, yellow and purple shreds specking his muzzle like confetti.
“No,” he says eventually, “I suppose it doesn’t really matter.”
And very far away, and yet not far away at all, for the Dreaming measures all things by intent, Dream of the Endless kneels in a sun-blasted savannah, his hands stained in ochre dust up to his forearms, regarding, with solemn uncertainty, a massive and alien tree. A door still hangs from its bulbous trunk, at angles with the ground, half-open and blackened in streaks across its front by lightning strikes. Merely looking at it makes him frown, and clench his hands into the dirt, sending plumes of goldenrod yellow into the still air.
“You are not going to keep him waiting forever,” Death says, and comes to stand beside him, her thumbs tucked into the loops of her trousers. She looks up at the tree, and hums in thought. “Especially not when you’ve already got permission. That’s good, by the way. That you asked permission.”
“It would only be right,” he says. The leaves of the baobab sway in a breeze that smells faintly of honeysuckle, of grass, of rolling English fields. “He felt some kinship with this dream.”
“And it with him, I suspect. Two strange creatures, very far from home.”
“How is he?”
Death shrugs, and clambers down into the dirt with him, neatly crossing her legs. Her ankh glints in the white-hot glare of the sun, and she opens her mouth for Dream to inspect, sticking out her tongue and mumbling, “Ah.”
Within her throat, a gleam of light: golden, flickering, there. She snaps shut her teeth before it can escape, and Dream has no heart, but he feels it still, a skipped beat at the core of him, the nagging worry that has dogged him since he returned to the Dreaming, now four months past.
“The same as he’s been,” Death says. “Not dead. Not alive. Somewhere between.”
Her response has been the same every time he has asked, and he supposes he should take comfort in the fact that it has not changed, that Hob Gadling’s immortal soul remains, to some degree, intact, despite its trials, despite the amount of his ineffable self that he had left in ichorous smears across the basement of Fawney Rig.
Yet every day that has passed has seen the fear creep further into his heart.
I bid you be satisfied, he had said, and Hob had pursued him all the same. I will not lose you to the Fates, he had begged, and Hob had defied him at every turn, ridden gallant and true across a sea of Madness to bring back news of good tidings. He has done nothing but cause this man pain, and yet Hob had still crawled to him, bleeding and broken, garbed in the raiments of the dead, had poured the stuff of his soul into the barren stone and broken his bindings, had begged of him a kiss.
And when Dream had still been too afraid to give it, he had taken it himself, without malice, without expectation of reciprocity. His memory is long, and perfect – he can recall the sighing ethereal nature of it, of Hob’s lips, neither physical nor spiritual, but some fading in-between thing. How he had tasted the way sunlight feels, when it lances in broad beams through a window on a warm summer day; how the outline of his body had grown thinner and wavering while his eyes had blazed like a dying star.
Hob Gadling, eternal, confusing, beloved. His most treasured subject, and yet not his at all. Ever has Hob belonged only to himself, and thus makes his devotion all the more confounding. He does not deserve this love. Dream is Endless, and still it seems too much, so all-encompassing that he does not dare to try and possess it, lest it overflow him.
“He will grow weary of me,” he says, and Death tucks her hands between her legs. “As all others have. I am not designed for love.”
“You and I both know that’s bullshit,” she says, though not unkindly. “Isn’t this how the story is supposed to end? A kiss, and a happily ever after?”
“He is not a story, sister.”
“Yes. So stop moping and change things. Let yourself have something sweet for once. Your knight in shining armor.”
“Hm. Lucienne tells me. He took umbrage with that title, in later years.”
“I’ll bet he did. He got a bit tired, at the end.”
They both fall silent, and there is only the sound of the breeze through the baobab’s strange and spindling branches, and the sun glinting off of the light patina of yellow dust that swirls around their legs.
“The Moirae gave their blessing,” Death murmurs at last. “There’s nothing holding you back but yourself, little brother. I know it’s hard. But maybe it’s all right to just…let go, for once.”
Let go of the narrative, Hob Gadling had begged him. Yet how, when stories are all he is? He can see the path this tragedy must take: that Hob will leave him, as all others have left him, because he is fickle, and mercurial, and untameable as the sea. The multitudes he contains are at the exclusion of all else.
Yet in the quiet cut-off silence of the glass sphere, his consciousness in tomblike singularity, had he not thought of his knight?
Hob’s face, dear and bright as the sun, his hair a gleaming umber wave, each sunspot and scar frozen in immortal perfection. He had ruminated often on what it might feel like, to let Hob’s fingers brush against his throat, as they had when Dream had carried him through Fiddler’s Green. How it might feel to tilt his head and allow such pleasures, and how Hob would look on him with quiet reverence, yet his touch would be firm as a lover’s. How in his words and deeds Hob would venerate him as sweetly as any pagan worshiper, and in the shape of his body and the kisses of his mouth Dream might find some brief taste of being known, grounded in sheer humanity, in the full regard of Hob’s unwavering love.
“He will be angry,” Dream says.
A love story, Hob had said.
Dream closes his eyes, and in the gleaming straightway of the story he sees, for one shining moment, some other path. Winding, narrow, treacherous, but there. He rises to his feet, mapping its progress in measured steps until he comes to the base of the tree, feeling out the shape of it behind the darkness of his lids.
“There you go,” Death says, her voice warm, and terribly, achingly kind.
Dream, when he opens his eyes again, sets his palms flat to the trunk of the tree, and begins to shape. “Thank you,” he whispers into the warm wood, to the burnt scars of lightning strikes, to the shivering leaves, to the bark in which he already sees the mink softness of Hob’s hair.
The tree cannot respond; it’s a simple dream, never meant to be much more than ornamentation, and yet in the depths of it, it remembers. Remembers a man who sang to it, and spoke stories into being, and called it, once, an angel.
And Hob Gadling, for the second true time since his death, opens his eyes.
He immediately shuts them again, retinas newly-made struggling to parse the fierce glare of a white-blue sky, of sunlight in unobstructed fullness, of an endless plain of yellow.
“Welcome back,” he hears, very close by, a voice he knows, a voice he’s been waiting for. A voice, in hesitation, that says, “Beloved.”
“Dream,” he says, and his own voice is a scraped thing, a thin thing, like a well-loved leather glove, the palm flat to the skin. He gropes in front of him, and everything is an unfamiliar weight, a new sensation, a feeling. His throat hurts. He can’t remember the last time his throat hurt, properly, and not the almost-sense the Dreaming has always afforded him. His legs feel as wobbly as a newborn foal’s, and his arms are too heavy to keep aloft for long, and so he lets them drop to his sides in frustration. “Where?”
“You are safe. You are home.”
Home. His home, and Dream’s. The muscles required to smile feel new and untested, yet he cannot think of a greater reason to try them. He’s sure he looks a fool, standing with his arms hung loose at his sides and smiling into the middle distance with his eyes closed, and yet he cannot seem to make himself stop. Smiles ever broader, in fact, when a familiar hand touches his cheek, neat nails scratching through his beard.
“It will take time to become accustomed to a body again,” Dream says, and Hob risks an attempt to open one eye, squinting still against the blinding glare. Dream’s face swims into monocular focus, pale as moonlight, beautiful as the dawn. “To walk, and speak, and fly.”
“M’good. At speaking,” Hob says, faltering between words, but yes, he has done nothing but tell stories these past five centuries, and they are still waiting for him, there, if he but reaches for them. He categorizes his body, comes to the conclusion that everything feels different, such that recognizing almost any part of himself feels impossible, from the weight of his shoulders to the unfamiliar musculature of his thighs. He tries to open his other eye, and Dream is there, close enough to touch, to breathe in, to kiss.
“You’re real,” he says, and Dream nods.
“Yes. You did. A foolish thing. But I am here. Freed.”
“Bedeviled by only one suitor,” Hob says, and the dear brows, smooth swatches of ink on paper cream and soft, furrow in confusion, and wrench from Hob a laugh. The sound of his own voice is strange, like a friend he has not heard for a decade suddenly turning up on his doorstep. “Me. I’m the suitor.”
“Yes. If you…” And here Dream stops, and Hob marvels again at how close he is, at the hand that still touches his cheek, unlined, slender, perfect. How in Dream’s expression he can read doubt, and fear, and confusion. How he wishes to kiss that wrinkle between his night-dark eyes into smoothness. “If you wish to be so.”
“You lunatic,” Hob says, and finds at last the strength and coordination to raise his arms again, driven by the sheer need to touch, to have. He slings them around Dream’s neck, pulls him in until their chests touch and their mouths are an inch apart. He is, he realizes, nude, the sun a beating warmth on his skin, a blanket of heat across his shoulders and back, and yet that is something that can be thought of five minutes from now, when he is not so preoccupied with Dream’s mouth, and the combustive sweet smell of his breath, and the eyes that are wide and star-sparkling in front of him, and the hand that settles on his naked hip, a thumb stroking the crest of bone there. “You bastard. I love you. Do you know that? Do you realize how much I love you? I rode a magic horse across an ocean for you. I, I tried to rewrite fate for you. Of course I pledge my suit. My fealty. Of fucking course.” He brings their foreheads together, a flash of a memory – a dark basement, he limned in light, Dream’s face so close, thin and lovely and there – and a thread of doubt creeps in. “I’ve asked you thrice before, and you never accepted. It’s not a good story if I have to ask a fourth.”
“Have you not said you are no story? Ask me again, Hob Gadling.”
“Dream,” he whispers, and in that movement their lips brush, for one shining second. “Dream of the Endless, my lord, will you accept my troth?”
“Yes,” he says, and Hob feels his eyes grow hot with tears – joy, for once, instead of tragedy – and closes the distance between them, the unfathomable final mile of fear and uncertainty along the sea-road to home, covered at last, at last, at long last.
He is busily mapping the shape of Dream’s palate, the velvet softness of his lips and the wet slip of his tongue, the burning taste of him, finally, finally, when a single word trips across his mind, said so casually it had seemed unremarkable at the time, and yet which he now pays some measure of attention to. He leans backwards, a glistening spiderstrand of saliva, thin as gossamer, stretching dainty between them, breaking when he swipes his tongue across his lip to catch the receding taste of Dream’s mouth. His body still feels new, and newly-born, yet the weight across his shoulders has not changed, and he is growing hot. More so, and quicker, than normal.
“Dream,” he says, and catches, from the corner of his eye, a shivering rustle. “You said. Fly.”
And Dream, his lips turned up in a smirk, reaches with one hand over Hob’s shoulder, and buries his fingers in something, some soft and flexing mass, that makes his knees grow weak and shaky, his mouth a breathless gasp.
“It is only fitting,” he says, “that my raven has wings of his own.”
“Oh,” Hob says, wondering, marveling, and stretches out his wings into the sunlight, and in them enfolds Dream in glimmering gold and amber, returned at last to home.