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“Does your sister like pizza? Please tell me she likes pizza, or I’m going to look and feel like an arse.”
Dream blinks. Hob stands before him in the space where his living room fades into his kitchen, an open design suffused with warmth. The entire New Inn carries that warmth. Dream enjoys it.
Hob is getting more adept at sensing his presence- it had amused Dream greatly to take his offer of ‘any time’ quite seriously at first, and he had taken pleasure in Hob’s so-called ‘heart attacks’ (and the blinding smiles that followed them, but that was another matter). Now, though, he is rarely surprised when Dream arrives unannounced, but is never any less pleased. Today he looks harried; there are small smears of flour on his t-shirt and cheek, and larger ones on his forearms where his long sleeves are pushed up. It is October, but he is still tanned from his time spent in the sun during the warmer months.
This pleases Dream, too.
He frowns, taking a step toward him and allowing his coat and boots to melt away with it. Hob would have asked him to remove them anyway, and he has learned to keep the thermostat at a sufficient temperature without Dream asking. Dream has elected to not acknowledge it, because to do so would be to discuss his imprisonment again, and he cannot make Hob understand why he should no longer be affected by his time there. He doesn’t wish to argue about it, and the removal of his clothing always seems thanks enough anyway.
“The extent of our conversations surrounding food begins and ends with her telling me that I should try it. We have never discussed pizza specifically.”
Hob’s face breaks into a grin despite his previous unease. His negative emotions are always fleeting, so at odds with Dream’s. Dream finds, though, that his own are at least lessened in Hob’s presence. It isn’t a feeling he is used to. At least, it isn’t one he’s had in circa two millennia.
“I didn’t realize it, but I think I kind of just wanted to hear you say pizza.”
It’s teasing, meant to rile Dream up. Dream is riled, but not angrily. He enjoys sparring with Hob this way, their pleasant, playful back and forth. He has always been an excellent conversationalist.
“What an odd objective,” is all Dream says, not fully rising to the bait. “I’m sure that she’ll be content with whatever you’ve prepared.” Closing the rest of the distance, he offers Hob the bottle of wine in his hands- a cabernet sauvignon plucked from the dream of a chef, a memory of a once-in-a-lifetime trip she’d taken to Italy after completing culinary school, the best wine she’d ever had made better for the wonder and elegance of her surroundings. She works now, seventeen years later, in a high-end restaurant in New York and hasn’t gone back, but she still thinks of it with the same reverence. Hob accepts, taking a moment to read the label for all that he won’t understand what will make it taste so excellent later. “There is flour on your cheek.”
Hob blinks up at him, doe-eyed. As he attempts to brush it away with a muttered expletive, only succeeding in smearing it more around and adding to the mess, something in Dream’s infinite being clenches. He feels it in the place this human vessel’s heart resides. It’s supremely uncomfortable, warmth rushing up his neck and making him feel flushed, and he sternly grasps for control over the body’s functions, forcing the feeling to cease. The distraction of it is perhaps why he surprises them both by reaching up to brush the flour away himself, willing it gone with a miniscule expense of power. He lowers his hand immediately, barely clamping down with finality on the fond smile that tugs at his lips, and Hob continues to stare for a moment. His lips have parted, and at odds with the strange, ever-present tangle of emotions that he wrestles with, Dream finds him uncommonly beautiful.
“Right,” Hob says hoarsely. “I’ll just... this is... gotta breathe. The wine, I mean, not- Jesus,” he finishes in a mutter, finally turning away from Dream and retreating further into the kitchen. Dream watches him go, unsure of how to proceed. Nevertheless, he follows- he does that, now: follows Hob, here in the Waking, and it’s only become more apparent to him since his sister had shared her gift in the park. Hob is like a beacon, had always been blinding to Dream for different reasons, but now that he has seen just how brightly his soul shines, the way it touches everyone around him, Dream is helpless. Like a moth, looking for the moon and finding a bulb instead, knowing as soon as it touches the glass that this will be its doom but unable to escape. He shifts in the seat at the dinner table he had slipped into, feeling momentarily panicked like he’s really that winged insect bouncing off the lamp before shoving the feeling down and away.
They both remain silent, though it isn’t uncomfortable like whatever charged moment had passed. The longer Hob continues to work the dough, pressing it to the edges of the rectangular pan before him until he’s satisfied, the more he seems to relax. Dream’s gaze wanders as he leans back in his chair, hands folding in his lap. The small sink is piled high with dishes from the various stages of Hob’s preparation- measuring cups, a glass bowl, half-filled with water soaking the sticky remnants of flour, water, salt, yeast, oil, a grater and cutting board smattered with shreds of cheese, a pan and spatula used to cook the ground meat whose seasonings fill the air with a spicy, savoury aroma. On the other side of the preheating oven, there is a large ring of flour on the counter where the dough had been kneaded. The flour contaminates almost every surface of the kitchen, really, in the form of puffs across the warm oak cabinetry or the smudge of Hob’s fingerprints on drawers. It is reminiscent of a powdery natural disaster; the layer of ash after the eruption of a small volcano. Even the now-decanting wine bottle has not been spared.
“This is more effort than you would normally put forth for our engagements,” Dream comments, his gaze coming to rest on Hob again: the flex of his forearms as he pinches the last edges of the dough into shape. When Hob looks up to smile at him- more of a smirk, really- Dream’s eyes snap to it, etching it to memory as they do every time. His grip on his vessel’s functions is flimsy but holding.
“I have someone to impress now.”
Dream raises a brow in mock offense. “Then perhaps I should leave you to impress her.” It’s a gamble. The subject of Dream’s ‘Great Swan-Off of 1889,’ as Hob so lovingly refers to it, is still somewhat sensitive. Hob’s expression wavers, but Dream holds himself still, casual, until he finds his footing once more.
A successful wager.
“So you admit it’s impressive!” Hob says triumphantly, pointing a dough-sticky finger across the table at him. Dream looks at it in disdain, then down at his own clothing. The floury contamination would undoubtedly be stark if he allowed it. Here, he is straying into dangerous territory. To contaminate would be to touch. Hob would have to touch him .
Hob is very tactile, but he consistently holds himself apart from Dream. Dream has watched the casual touches he gives friends, the arms around shoulders in greeting or affection, the hands on elbows when he needs to pass behind someone occupied helping a patron as he works the bar downstairs. He feels out the world with the same sensation-seeking drive as a child, fiddling with pens and rubbing his fingertips across the pad of his thumb, tangling his hands in the grass or scritching the neck of a pigeon, and tugging at his own earlobe when all other options have exhausted themselves.
Each time Dream sees his fingers toying with something that is not him, he aches .
Hob would likely tell him this is a side effect of his time in imprisonment- had done so months ago when he’d caught Dream running his fingers in the folds of a century-old cashmere throw on his sofa- but Dream does not like the explanation, nor does he think it is correct. It is far more likely, he thinks, that his sibling is the one behind this. His sibling is oft the one behind these fancies and never ceases in their search to find ways in which to meddle. Dream will speak with them. But first, he is to have dinner.
“There you are,” Hob says gently when he looks back up. He wears a soft, patient smile as he works; his hands and arms are clean, now, and he’s made great progress in the assembly of his pizza. Sauce has been spread across the surface, still steaming from its time on the stove, and cheese and the aromatic meat are now being layered generously atop it. The scent of fennel is slightly stronger for the proximity. “Where do you go?” When Dream doesn’t answer right away, he barrels forward, apparently needing to explain himself. “You go quiet, like you just... leave your body behind. Sometimes your eyes even go all-” he frowns, chewing on the inside of his cheek, and tsks. “-well, I don’t really know how to describe it, actually. Like little windows into space. Like stars. They didn’t this time, just... sometimes.”
It should perhaps alarm him that he so thoroughly turns inward on himself in Hob’s presence that he would lose track of his faculties in such a way, and so often that he would notice, but he can’t bring himself to be. At the very least, he can be assured that were Hob to do something, he would have by now, and that over six hundred years was a bit of a long game, even for an immortal. Dream does not share these feelings with him. “I am Endless, Hob. I exist beyond the small facet of myself you see here. I exist everywhere. I do not... go anywhere.”
For a moment, Hob looks disappointed, but it is gone with the flash of a fond eyeroll, his smile, as always, winning out. “Begging your pardon, O Dreamlord.”
“I will consider your plea,” a small smile of Dream’s own playing at his lips, “If you tell me a story.”
“Sometimes I think you just like the sound of my voice,” Hob says cheerfully, He sprinkles yet more cheese over the second layer of meat.
Yes, Dream thinks despite himself.
“I had to help one of my students find an RSPCA today,” Hob continues, ignorant to Dream’s thoughts as he provides the requested tale. “Brought an injured squirrel to office hours like I’d know what to do with it- swear, sometimes they flock to me like your pigeons...”
Hob continues to share the account of his day until he runs out of words for it, and by the time he’s finished, the pizza is in the oven and the counters, cabinets, and table have been wiped clean. He’d shoved the rest of the dishes in the already overflowing sink with a vague promise to do them later and retreated to his bedroom to shower the muck off of himself, leaving Dream alone with a quarter glass of wine and his thoughts.
Dream swirls the contents of the glass and eyes the sink. Hob often bemoans the dishes, calling them one of the wort parts of being alive. You do them and they just keep coming back. Have to eat to live but have to do the dishes to eat. I should've just put in a dishwasher when I had the place redone- We have machines for that now! I'll never understand why I didn’t. Bit distracted, I guess- I was in the middle of changing identities at the time. Managed the whole thing over the phone and email. No chance you have a secret relation with time travel capabilities you’re not telling me about?
Dream does not (discounting his Father, which had felt a bit much to explain at the time), but he also knows that Hob has the resources to purchase and install a dishwasher whenever he so chooses, and that he does sometimes enjoy the hard work of scrubbing them himself. Dream wonders what it feels like and why Hob would seek out a task that annoys him so. Given his attitude toward them today, at any rate, he would probably appreciate the assistance. With little conscious thought, Dream rises from the table and pads across cool tile to the sink. He’s watched Hob do them sometimes, and it’s easy enough to skim the dreams of an errant soul or two to learn the rest.
The water is cold and the sink too full to do anything with it, and so he pushes his sleeves up and takes some of the larger items out as he waits for it to warm. He rinses a smaller bowl out and fills it with the dish soap Hob uses- it is supposedly scented to smell like oranges. To Dream it smells more of chemicals, but regardless, it is pleasant: one of the many smells that permeates Hob’s space, his clothes, his body.
There are... many dishes, but Dream finds the act soothing, to scrub away the residue and leave them clean. The feeling of food under his nails is distinctly unpleasant, but the satisfaction of smoothness in the clean dish makes up for it, especially if he occasionally scrubs at his nails with the nearby brush. He is over halfway finished when he reaches the glass bowl. Having soaked for so long, it comes away clean with relative ease, but as the suds are rinsed away and he pulls it from underneath the stream of water, he catches his reflection.
It is something he struggles less with now, and the grey-blue of his fingers, pinkened too by the warm water, pressed up against the underside of the bowl is a comfort. He is not in the bowl, and he exists outside of it. He is bigger than it. He holds it in his hands, and he is not trapped. But the faded image in it, the glassiness of his eyes, is hypnotizing. The hiss of running water fades as he stares.
“You wash, I’ll dry?”
His sister’s voice, suddenly behind him. He drops the bowl into the sink, startled, chest finally heaving with a single breath. There is no lack of oxygen here, he is reminded. She smiles at him, but her face quickly drops in concern as she takes him in. He tries to control the shuddering of his breaths, to rein them in quickly before she can ask, but he knows it is too late.
“Your eyes are bleeding out of their sockets there, little brother,” she says, approaching him apprehensively, as though he is a horse not to be spooked. She’s right; he can feel his eyes, his true eyes, escaping from the confines of this vessel’s skull, spilling out across his cheeks and temples in wisps of black stardust. He reins them in, too. Feels them solidify in their usual Earthly presentation. He turns back to the considerably emptier sink and turns the water off. The bowl had not broken, for which he is grateful.
“Hello, my sister,” he says, voice even where the rest of him feels askew. She comes to stand next to him, glancing in the sink. She must see the bowl, but she does not mention it, for which he is grateful. “How have you been keeping?” She gives him another small smile, her eyes no less concerned, but accepting that she will not get more out of him.
“I’m well, Dream. Looking forward to dinner. And wondering how Hob has convinced you to do the washing up,” she says, an amused glint lighting her eye.
“He. Did not,” he says, turning the water back on and going back to his task. She grabs a dish towel from the handle of the oven door- it's warm when it grazes his forearm as she flips it open, it’s texture lightly scratching through the fine hairs there- and takes the bowl out of the sink before he can to dry it. He takes up his sponge and continues with the washing. “I wished to know how it felt. He doesn’t like to do them.”
“And?” she asks, sounding genuinely interested.
“It is... grounding,” he replies, flexing his bare toes against the tile once more, remembering her words on the day she’d taken him to work with her. “The sensations feel... real.” She glances down the length of him to his feet, blinks, and allows her own shoes to melt away. Then she grins up at him, something simultaneously teasing and proud in it, and he is overcome with a rush of affection, and satisfaction that he’d pleased her.
“I thought I told you I’d do those later.”
Hob’s voice. Hob standing in the doorway to the kitchen. It doesn’t startle Dream as his sister had, but it kickstarts some feeling in the beating of his vessel’s heart that he has to grab hold of before it strays. He turns to look at his friend, feeling strangely chastised even as he is doing a service for him, and a quick glance to his sister tells him that she feels the same. She recovers more quickly, raising her hands in surrender, the towel in one and saucepan in the other.
“I just got here, and he put me to work,” she says, her voice raising in pitch as she defends herself. Hob grins as he approaches her and wrests the saucepan from her grip, his other hand coming to her arm as they both duck in to kiss each other’s cheeks as if they’d been doing so forever. Dream stares at the different points of contact they share, the envy in him writhing like a living thing.
“Sounds like him,” he says fondly, glancing to Dream as he reaches around her to balance the saucepan precariously on the growing mound of clean dishes. He retreats, walking back around them both to the oven. He has changed into a thick olive-green cardigan with a cream-colored shirt underneath and slim-fitting khakis and has also donned his glasses, apparently having removed his contacts for the night. His still-drying hair flops over them as he crouches to check on the pizza and he pushes it back absently. Dream’s fingers twitch where they rest on the counter. “Just about done. Would you like a glass of wine? Dream brought it.”
Hob doesn’t often say his name. He usually falls back on pet names as he does with all of his friends (though there are certain ones he only uses with Dream), but when he does, it runs through Dream like a thrill, like the invocation of a muse or a prayer to a god. In this place that Hob built for him, for the hope that he would return, the faith that he would, the feeling is amplified to an unknowable degree.
“Oh? What Dreamer did you pluck that from then?” Death asks, walking to the bottle to observe it.
“Is that how you do that?” Hob asks in alarm, standing as his body is suddenly effused with excitement and wonder. His attention on Dream is addictive, and Dream can’t help the small smirk that tugs at his lips in response.
“You didn’t know?” Death says incredulously.
“Do you know how hard it is to get answers out of this one?” Hob shoots right back, barely looking away from him. “You take it right out of people’s dreams? Does it go missing then? From their memories? What happens if they’re using it in the dream? Do they see some brooding young Robert Smith-” Dream doesn’t know who this is, but Death veritably cackles- “-snatch the bottle right out of their hand, or does their mind just gloss right over it because of dream logic?”
“I do not. Snatch,” is the feeble response Dream manages under the deluge of questions, and Death laughs harder.
“Oh, we should have invited you so much sooner,” Hob says to her with a wicked smile, and Dream feels very slightly afraid, but very, very warm.
“Where on Earth did you learn to make pizza?” Death asks around a mouthful. Hob hasn’t even finished serving himself yet and she’s already dug in. Dream is certain that etiquette would denote this rude behavior, but Hob doesn’t seem to mind, only giving her a disbelieving look.
“I’m immortal,” he says blandly. “Italy. Where else?”
“I think you’ve succeeded in impressing her,” Dream says when she doesn’t reply, save to moan around another mouthful. Hob gives him a brilliant smile, his eyes seeming to glow from within.
“And now it’s your turn. You know the rules. One bite and I won’t bother you again.”
He nudges his plate toward Dream before lifting it slightly in offering. The table isn’t very large, only seating four, and Death had taken Dream’s usual seat across from Hob, so they sit next to one another. The novelty of it is... not unpleasant. Their knees knock together for a brief moment before Hob jolts, stretching his legs out toward the middle of the table. Dream crosses his feet under his chair, biting down on that strange disappointment and regarding the pizza.
He cannot remember the last time he ate before one of his siblings, but when his gaze slides to her, Death doesn’t seem to be watching with any sort of anticipation, too focused on her own meal, so he takes a slice. His first bite is small, but immediately it hits him; it’s not the flavor (though that is as immaculate as anything he’s ever had in the Dreaming), but the intent. Hob had made this with the express, meticulous purpose of feeding one of his family, and Dream can taste every ounce of love and care and worry that it had entailed. He’d seen a glimpse of it when he’d arrived, but it speaks to hours of work that he hadn’t witnessed, evident in every layer of flavor in every ingredient.
He takes another, larger bite without thinking, too caught up in chasing the sensation, but Hob drops the edge of the plate he’d been holding in shock with sharp, quiet inhale, snapping Dream out of his reverie. He freezes with the slice still pressed to his lips; Death stills, too, watching them in the periphery of Dream’s vision. Wordlessly, Hob pushes the plate in front of Dream as nonchalantly as he can and adds another slice for good measure. He is seemingly unwilling to take his eyes from the sight, and slowly stands as Dream begins to chew again, not enjoying how the bite has gone slightly soft in his mouth. Hob grabs a clean plate from the cabinet above the microwave, watching him all the while. It should annoy Dream, being scrutinized so, but instead it all feels...
Dream is uncertain how it feels. But it is apparently incomprehensibly important.
They finish their meal in silence.
“So who did you snatch this from then?” Hob asks, looking at his wineglass as he swirls its contents. The liquid hugs the sides of the vessel just so.
They’d moved into the living room after they’d finished eating. Hob had hardly looked away from Dream the entire time. At points, he’d looked poised to speak, his eyes shining with emotion that Dream hadn’t been able to place, but each time he’d finally looked ready, he would shut himself down again, a familiar fear clouding his eyes with doubt and regret. Dream despises himself for a great many things, and tonight, their meeting in 1889 is chief among them.
Now, Hob sits in the armchair closest to the fireplace which is alight with flame. Usually, he would sit with Dream on the sofa, but tonight, his sister has taken up that position- stolen while Hob had been gathering their wine glasses and drink. She has her feet in Dream’s lap. Dream does not mind. The heat from the fire and the satisfaction of the meal suffuses him with a pleasant haziness.
“I do not snatch,” Dream repeats after a sip of his own. “The realm of Dreams is mine, Hob. Everything within is mine because it is of me. But to answer your question, it is from the dream of a chef who once visited Italy. She regards the wine fondly, and that regard is what makes it exceptional.”
“’Exceptional,’ he says,” Hob says sarcastically to Death, who giggles. “You’re lucky you’re right.”
“It isn’t luck,” Dream says mildly. Hob only rolls his eyes.
“So can you do anything like that?” Hob asks Death, who sits up a little as she’s addressed.
“Nothing quite like that. Not the most creative anthropomorphic personification, me. Del- that's Delirium- could, though. Sort of. It would be getting it to stay an exceptional wine that would be the problem.”
“She cannot even maintain her own form half of the time,” Dream murmurs. Last he’d seen her, he’s fairly certain she’d become a kaleidoscope of butterflies.
“Dream’s kind of unique in that regard, actually,” Death says thoughtfully. “We all have our realms but none of the rest of us besides Dream and Del really create anything, you know? That’s probably why she likes him so much. And why he likes her,” she says teasingly, nudging him in the stomach with her foot. Dream looks down at her, indulgent. She is his favorite, and he knows that she knows it.
He does carry a particular fondness for Delirium, though.
“You would be a doting older brother,” Hob decides.
“You would know,” Death says with a smile. Dream blinks even as Hob laughs.
“You had a sister,” he says quietly.
“What on Earth have you two talked about for the last six hundred years, exactly?” Death asks incredulously.
“Chimneys,” Dream says at the same time as Hob, and is filled with a heady rush of pleasure at the shared joke and at Hob’s subsequent, blinding smile.
“You’re both insufferable. Is that a euphemism?” Death asks.
“I wish,” Hob says with a grimace. “In my defence, I thought he was fae for the first hundred fifty or so.” He sighs. “By the time I’d decided he wasn’t- or that I didn’t care, anyway- I wasn’t thinking about her all that much anymore. But aye, I had a sister. And a mother and father,” he says with a small, cheeky smile at Dream. “My father- never really knew him, actually. Rarely home, soldier that he was. Died when I was a boy, thanks for that,” he says teasingly to Death. “’Bout a year after my sister was born, in the Hundred Years’ War. Very same one he started in. I did a couple times, too, so I consider his legacy honored.” His lips quirk as his gaze slides to the ground, but the cavalier attitude fades. Dream tilts his head, watching him as he remembers.
Hob has told him a great many stories over the course of their friendship, and shown him a great many more in dreams, but this is… different. This story feels close to him, to the core of him, before his life had ever touched Dream’s. In the early days, Dream had hardly been interested in him at all, had been more interested in winning the wager with his sister. As Hob had said, by the time his interest became more genuine, it had been well over one hundred years, and by their next meeting Hob had married and had a child of his own. The immediacy of that joy and his successes had apparently overshadowed any mention of his birth family, and Dream had been too distracted in his quest for a gift for Titania to listen. He is listening now.
“My ma and my sister- well, you know this, I suppose,” he says to Death, who gives him a sympathetic smile. “They, ah. Well. 1300s, eh? What else could it be? I should’ve- well, for a long time I didn’t understand why I didn’t go with them. I never left that house. Of course, now we know that some of us had a gene, made us less susceptible to the thing, but back then, it didn’t make sense.” Dream’s gaze slides for just a moment to his sister, wondering if what she’d shown him of Hob’s lifeline had anything to do with it, or if it was truly a triumph of the genetic lottery that had saved him. “Think that’s where my delusions of grandeur started. Anyway. I don’t remember my ma’s name, never called her anything else. I don’t even remember her face. But my sister’s name was Adeline. And her hand was very small, right until the end. Whole thing fit right in my palm.”
In his recollection, as he sits before them, visibly sifting through the centuries held in his mind, his voice changes, his tongue curling around r’s and his vowels elongating. He doesn’t speak in that older English, exactly, though Dream knows that he can, but he speaks with an accent, as though modernity were a second language he’d acquired late in life and not grown into with the rest of the world. It filters across Dream’s mind like music, his story a mournful ode sung like the tragedies of Greece. As he finishes, it is a whisper, replaced with the crackle and pop of firewood, and Dream’s eyes burn.
“Sorry,” Hob says after a long moment of silence. The accent is gone, but his voice is still hoarse and he surreptitiously reaches beneath his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose, pushing them up briefly. They settle back down as he swipes at his eyes with his thumb. Dream’s hand tightens where it rests on his sister’s shin and he removes it immediately, tucking the tips of his fingers under his own thigh and gripping his wine glass so firmly instead that it would break were he not willing it to remain intact. “Poor form, host crying at a dinner party.”
“Would you like it?” Death asks, then sniffs, and Dream looks down in alarm to find her teary-eyed, too. “Your mother’s name.”
“You remember her?” Hob is breathless, his eyes going wide and glassy and glinting in the flicker of the firelight.
“I remember them all, Hob,” she says, shifting her legs off of Dream’s lap so that her feet rest on the floor, her forearm on her knee for balance as she reaches across the coffee table for Hob’s hand. He takes it. The sight is still disturbing to Dream, but he won’t interrupt. “That’s my purpose. Our purpose. We exist for them in different ways.”
“I hate when you two talk like that,” Hob says, like Death’s presence is a common occurrence, a single tear finally escaping down the side of his cheek. Dream wants to wipe it away, thinks that Hob might let him, but he stays where he is and allows his sister to share her gift without interference.
“Her name was Eva,” Death says, ignoring him.
Hob smiles anyway.
Death leaves shortly after and Hob is in much higher spirits as he hums his way around the kitchen. The conversation had turned from its dire straits towards Hob’s work, and then what movies he’d made Dream watch in the approximate year they had been having these engagements. Dream had been mortified when he’d revealed that the first had been Mary Poppins, resulting in precisely five minutes of Death’s teasing and Hob defending him, in whatever manner calling it sweet and kind of cute could be considered a defence.
Dream is still seated on the sofa, nursing only his second glass of wine and thinking of Hob. What an existence that he’s taken for granted, to have others who remember things that even he had let slip away. Someone else to care for those memories when he cannot. He hugs his knees loosely with one arm, running a crease in his jeans between his fingers.
“I like your sister,” Hob says cheerfully, and Dream is jolted back from his thoughts to the sensation of his body flopping down beside him at the other end. He sets his glass on the end table next to him to bring his other arm around his knees as he regards Hob, enjoying that they have resumed their habitual places.
“She has always liked you.”
Hob beams at him. “Maybe I do need more immortal friends,” he muses as though he’d read Dream’s thoughts.
Dream contemplates this as he watches Hob fiddle with the fringe of a woven throw on the arm of his leather seat. Hob has always had friends. Rarely across their acquaintance had he stepped in on Hob’s dreams, but on those occasions he had, they were filled with a strange assortment of faces from across centuries. Hob dreams of him more often than any of them. As with his other dreams, Dream rarely intrudes, but he thinks on it with a vicious satisfaction. He remembers. He holds parts of Hob no one else has, as Hob does for him. He will not begrudge Hob his human friendships, but he will defend his unique place in Hob’s life, covet it like the precious thing it is.
“Hello, duck,” Hob says softly when Dream refocuses on his face. He smiles warmly, close lipped, half his face in shadow where the fire and table lamp do not reach it. “You’d gone again.” Dream does not respond. Only watches the way the firelight shifts, glances over the halo the lamp behind him gives, the way the edges of his hair turn golden with it.
Hob’s hand comes up, tentatively, toward his face. Dream tracks it immediately, willing himself not to move, to make any indication that he will disappear as calloused fingers come to the edge of his zygomatic bone close to his temple, grazing his skin through-
“Huh,” Hob hums to himself, a quiet, piping noise of contemplation, like pure curiosity is what drove him. It is a strange sensation, physical fingers touching the essence of him that drifts from his eyes, and he shivers with it despite his best efforts all evening to retain control over his vessel. This has finally broken it. Dream finds he cannot blame himself.
The movement, reflexive it may be, is enough to startle Hob away. His hand immediately springs from Dream’s face, tongue already tripping over stammered apologies, but Dream, catlike, nearly pounces on it grabbing it just before it is out of reach. Hob freezes, nervous and watchful as Dream wills his eyes within the confines of his vessel, human and blue.
“I-” Dream tries. I do not mind, he wants to say. I would not mind. He thinks, I would have you touch all of me, feel all of me if you so wished it. As much as you wanted. Feel the skin of this body and tangle of its hair, its muscle and sinew and bone and the essence of myself barely held within it. He thinks, I would know you the same. I would spend an eternity learning you, of your scars and callouses and the hair that seems to cover every inch of you. I would gentle, for you. I would offer you the succor in touch that you have given me in actions.
He says, “You touch. All others.” His traitorous eyes burn, though he keeps their tears leashed. He will not embarrass himself further than he has already allowed. “You would even touch my sister despite her gift, and yet-” He swallows, almost furious. Each word is wrenched out of him against his will. “I did not- A century -”
That is the crux of it, as much as he denies that it is, whether to himself or his family or his librarian or raven- He will not say more than he has aloud. But that is it. He wants touch. He wants Hob’s touch. Hob, who built a temple for him and then sat in it for decades, to welcome him back to the Waking as no one else could. He can nearly hear the purr of Desire in his mind, but cannot change the way he clings to Hob’s hand, anger and anguish warring within him like a physical force at the pit of his stomach.
“Oh,” says Hob. “Sweetheart.” The angle he must stretch to set his wineglass down on the side table over his shoulder while still allowing Dream to hold his hand is awkward, but Dream hasn’t the time to think deeply on it as he is all but yanked into Hob’s side. His free arm settles around his shoulders, his hand coming up to brace Dream’s head against his chest. The fingers of his other hand tangle with Dream’s, the callous on his thumb at the joint of his distal and proximal phalanxes catching as it drags across Dream’s knuckles, sending a shudder through him. Hob shudders too. “I’m sorry,” he says like a plea. “I didn’t think you- I've been so careful, I was too careful-”
“We are friends,” Dream says. A chuckle rumbles through Hob’s chest, shaky. It is deeper in the ear Dream has pressed to him, as is his voice.
“We are friends,” he agrees. He brings their joined hands up to nudge at Dream’s chin until, begrudgingly, he looks at him. “Friends tell each other what they need. Typically, before they explode with it.”
“I did not. Explode,” Dream says, looking away from his face once more. He cannot. Not like this. He enjoys this perspective, though. The way Hob’s laugh sounds like thunder and shakes Dream’s body. It makes Dream feel small. Manageable. Quiet.
Hob begins to play with his hair like he plays with pens and grass and pigeon feathers and blankets, chuckles again when Dream tries and fails to resist the way he leans into it. “Like a cat,” he says fondly.
This feeling will be the end of him, of them both, if he does not control it now. He will speak to his sibling at the soonest opportunity.
But. In the meantime.
“We are friends,” Dream says again.
“Aye,” Hob replies, whisper soft. “We are friends.”
That night, long after Dream leaves, Hob will dream of his mother and sister’s faces.
He will remember them when he wakes.