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Of all Hob’s talents, he is probably the best at getting on with his life.
As much as he’s kind of sort of heartbroken that Dream is gone, Death had been right, saying that he’s been very good at waiting. So that’s what he does. He teaches his classes, goes to his office hours, tries not to stare at the magnets on the whiteboard above his desk as he works. He works the bar at the Inn more nights than not just so he doesn’t stare at his refrigerator in the same way. He goes out with his coworkers in the History department, sometimes, lets a little looser than maybe he should even less. He’s pining quite pathetically, but.
That’s nothing new.
Death visits, too, when she can. Pops in every week or so to say hello, and though it’s annoying to feel as though he’s being checked up on, he knows that she means well, and he enjoys talking to her almost as much as he enjoys talking to Dream. It’s nice to have others who know him, the true him, and not have to hold back or worry whether he’s telling an anecdote from ten or a hundred years ago. She has a few of her own; tales from the earliest days of the Universe, before even Dream was... born? Brought into existence? Hob doesn’t think she really understands it either, though the Endless apparently had (have?) parents, which is more than he ever learned from her brother.
“Destiny was always... like that,” she says one evening in mid-spring.
Hob’s approaching finals season, but it’s not like he’s a student. He just has to worry about the torrent of grading that comes afterward, and since he hasn’t been preoccupied with Dream’s presence, he’s quite ahead of the curve for once. His heart demands that the ends don’t justify the means, but it’s not like he has much of a choice. So, he sits with Death in his living room, nursing a Syrah from California in his armchair and thinking vaguely on the fact that she’s in his usual spot, and that there’s a very Dream shaped hole next to it, as he listens to her tell the story of Dream’s birth.
“It was different for him. Had to be, I suppose, knowing all of our stories. It was like I didn’t really have a brother, though, so it was pretty lonely. Anyway, when Dream came along it all felt... new. No one had ever really created like that. Things were, or they weren’t, but when the first dreamers came around... Anyway, he wasn’t always like this, all brooding and... removed. He always took his job seriously but back then the emotions were simpler and he didn’t know how to control their effect on him. He had this sort of… wonder about him, you know? Used to smile a lot more. Real smiles.”
Hob wrinkles his nose playfully. “Can’t imagine that.”
“It’s hard to explain,” she says for about the millionth time over the course of their little ‘engagements’ as Dream would call them. “We weren’t- babies, but it was kind of like going through the same mental development sometimes. They smile reflexively when they see familiar faces, cry every time they encounter something that suddenly affects their comfort. Obviously it wasn’t so dramatic, but with him… he is the Dreaming. He is every single one of his Dreams and Nightmares.” Hob’s heard all this before, but then she says, “He’s constantly full of all these emotions that aren’t his own, but at the same time, they are, because he is the Dream that’s making them happen. All of the happiness and imagination and love but also all of the rage and hate and fear, all of that’s constantly just… at war in him. And I’d never had to deal with that, so he had to learn to regulate it on his own.”
The thought is at once so awe-inspiring and heartbreaking that it takes Hob’s breath away. Creating and being the collective unconscious of everything. He’d heard those words so many times but hearing Death lay out the fundamentals of how it must feel makes it almost more incomprehensible.
“But how does he?” He swirls his glass, looking at it. “Handle it, I mean. Does he at all?”
“It’s his purpose,” Death says like it’s obvious. “His function. He was built to handle it.”
Hob laughs in disbelief. “Have you met him?”
“It’s hard for someone not- Endless to understand, it’s-”
“No, hang on,” Hob says, suddenly aggravated (due in no small amount to the condescension), setting his glass on the coffee table and standing to pace. “Because he doesn’t handle it, Death-” Is that really what he must call her? Something to revisit later, probably, because- “-Not to mention he’s got feelings of his own- Christ, does he even know how to differentiate between the two?”
“It’s not his function to-”
“But he’s not a function,” Hob says, pausing his stride to look at her, to try to make her understand. “Neither are you. You’re just people with jobs. And you can’t tell me that you weren’t built to feel things- you just got finished telling me you grew up lonely and neglected- no, no, I don’t care about the semantics,” he says, cutting her off. Her jaw clicks shut, a primordial personification of an abstract concept stunned into silence. “And he was raised the same way, with no one to show him how to handle emotions that no one in the Universe had felt before and that he feels on behalf of almost every living thing there is, and-” Christ, he doesn’t even know where he’s going with this. How deep must it go for Dream? Where does it end within him? It doesn’t, Hob supposes. That’s the whole point. “Has anyone ever shown him how to feel for himself?”
“We aren’t meant to feel for ourselves,” Death says, no less stunned but sounding just as sure of herself as she had before. “We exist in service of Them. Of you.”
Hob is going to rip his hair out.
“It’s his job as the collective unconscious to feel those things,” she continues. “We have feelings. I’m not saying we don’t. I was lonely; I used to be more like Dream. Like Destruction. I almost gave it all up and just... left. I was callous, cold... tired. But I forced myself to be here, to remember why I do what I do and who I do it for. I forced myself to understand humanity. We feel for you. Because of you. It’s why I brought Dream here. He was so detached after the death of his son, and he’d already faced so much... heartache that he’d completely closed himself off to feeling at all, which was just as bad for the Dreamers. He held you all in complete disdain because he couldn’t understand your complexities anymore. He was too caught up in his own mistakes.” She smiles softly. “And then he met you.”
Hob deflates.
“He could see someone find hope and joy in the smallest things, and then he could see someone face his same heartaches and still find the hope to keep going. He could feel it because you did. And I think he was finally well on his way to understanding, to remembering when he got captured.” He can’t really be mad anyway, when she looks so heartbroken as she says it (even though it damn well proves his point. Fuck.).
“We’d had a fight,” he says eventually, barely managing above a whisper. She watches him patiently as he stands awkwardly in the center of the room now that all the fight has left him. “The meeting before. I thought... I thought he was changing, too. I called him lonely and he- I'd fucked it up. I’d meant to say I was lonely, too, but I’d already hurt his pride. I- I'd called him my friend, and he... And then in 1989, when he didn't show...”
“He saw the worst of humanity while he was locked in that cage. By the time he got out and finished recovering his tools, he’d forgotten all about the good he’d seen in his time with you. But he would’ve always come back to you. You’re so good for him, Hob,” she says emphatically, her eyes shining. “And he hasn’t been as happy as he is with you. Not for millennia.”
That does it.
“I love him,” Hob whispers, the feeling bottoming out in his gut and clenching in his chest, wrenched out of him as though it can’t be leashed any longer. Louder. “Christ, I love him so much.” He presses the back of his shaking hand to his lips, horrified at the confession, never once uttered aloud before now. But there’s no thunderclap, and no lightning to strike him down. No rainstorm or the glow of oil lamps or dark silhouette receding into the shadows of a Victorian alley. The Earth does not shatter beneath his feet. There’s only the abstract entity sitting on his couch and smiling softly at him, as though she might be just a little bit proud.
“I know."
He doesn’t know exactly when it happens, but suddenly, his flat is full of little tokens. Maybe it’s the dam that burst that night with Death, or maybe it’s just that he misses him, but suddenly he can’t stop himself from collecting things that remind him of Dream. It starts small: those little plastic glow-in-the-dark stars you stick in children’s rooms that he’s never had need for before, but now has a couple pasted onto the wall behind the table in the entryway. He’d moved the bird magnets there when he’d finally needed to do away with the distraction of them in the kitchen, and they sit now, propped up against the wall, just beneath the stars.
Then comes the cat. It’s a little clay figurine of a midnight-black thing with elegantly painted white eyes, its fur spiked as though it’s been out in the rain. It comes from the craft section of a Poundland and looks like it was made for a fairy garden, just small enough to not look out of place. So, the birds get pushed to one side of the little table and the cat goes on the other, and each day, when he gets home, they greet him, and he feels just a little bit warmer.
The awful drawing of them was already in a frame. He’d kept it for centuries, sentimental bastard he is, and it just sort of feels right to put it with the other things. It’s a little bit more difficult to explain should anyone visit, but he avoids visitors when he can; he’s got too many centuries crammed into the space to avoid uncomfortable questions. As he settles the drawing in its new spot, bookended by pigeons and ravens and cats and haloed by mint-green stars, he decides that whenever Dream does return, one of the first things he’ll do is somehow convince him to take a picture so that he at least has something nicer than a two hundred year old, offensive piece of scrap paper.
At the end of the term, five months after Dream had gone and in the first of the warmer days, one of his students, a graduating regular, gifts him a ceramic piece they’d made in one of their electives. It’s a little dish shaped like a crescent moon; a bit wobbly around the edges but clearly made with care. The inner surface is glazed black and speckled with white around the words, painted in cursive, ‘ Mon in the mone stond and strit,’ the opening line to a Middle English lyric he recites to all his classes on the first day. Next to the words is a poorly painted but intelligible and endearing white silhouette of a boatman and his pike pole. It makes him a little misty when he places it in front of the picture; she had been a fantastic student, bright and funny, one that he’ll remember for a long while and maybe even keep in touch with, and she’d somehow managed to capture the way Dream’s eyes look when he zones out so perfectly that he aches with it.
The next day, without thinking, he tosses the contents of his pockets into it as he walks in the door. Keys, a receipt from a Tesco Express, and the quid he’d gotten in change from the self-service kiosk.
An hour later, Dream shows up.
Much in the same way he still doesn’t quite recall how he’d ended up decking Desire, he doesn’t know how he ends hugging Dream. One minute, he’s sitting at the kitchen table inputting the last of his grades into Canvas, the next his arms are around Dream’s shoulders, fingers digging into his great woolen coat even as his shock melts into anger and anguish and worry. Dream doesn’t return the embrace, but then, he never does. Only ever wordlessly requests to be held, and Hob is more than happy to oblige, getting his fill just from the act of service.
“First, you would build me a temple,” Dream rasps, and Jesus, he’s missed that voice, the sound of it going straight to his head until he feels drunk with it before spilling over into the pit of his belly. “And now, an altar.”
“Didn’t mean to do either,” Hob says, somewhere between giddy and desperate. “But yeah.” He shifts as best he can to maintain his grip on Dream as he glances at the apparent altar, suddenly embarrassed that most of of it came from Poundland and the grocery. “Was it the quid, or the receipt?”
“Who taught you this magic, Hob Gadling?”
Hob pulls back with a frown, a little irritated. “What?”
“This is old magic, rites that few practice, and none of them in devotion to me. Who taught you?” Dream is stiff, seemingly angry himself.
“No one- taught me anything, what-“
“Your tithe was finally more than I could continue to ignore. It was purposeful. I do not have reason to believe that you would know of these magics without some sort of outside influence-“
“Dream-“
“-So I ask again, who taught you? So that I might deal with them accordingly.”
“Deal with- Ignore- Did it not occur to you that I might, maybe, just miss you, you git? God knows why.” Hob’s fists clench at his sides, suddenly furious. “You take off without a word and disappear for months- and this time I didn’t even do anything wrong, by the way- yet for some reason, I still missed you so much I decided keep a couple things around to remind me of you. A thousand apologies, my Lord.”
Dream’s imperious façade cracks for just a moment. “Then it was not Desire-“
“No,” Hob says, turning around and stalking to the kitchen, angrily pulling the reusable cork out of a three-quarter full Merlot on the counter from the night before and dragging it to the table, dropping heavily into his chair. He shuts his laptop with more force than is strictly necessary and pours himself a glass. Dream slowly approaches the table, his mask back in place but with an uncertain tension around his eyes. Hob takes a sip of wine. “I don’t know how to build an altar .” I only know how to love you , he doesn’t say, but only because it doesn’t seem like Dream is in the headspace to hear it right now. That, and frankly, he’d rather be swallowed by the Earth. (Not die. He’s gotten very careful about thinking it even ironically lest he face Death’s wrath on the off chance she hears it).
“Yet you have.”
“Yeah, d’you see how this conversation isn’t going to go anywhere but in a circle?”
“It is clearly the effects of Desire still-“
“The effects of Desire - for God’s- Is that what this is about?”
“Desire is manipulating you to manipulate me. I did so warn you this would happen,” Dream says, eyes narrowing slightly.
“I don’t think I’m being manipulated by Desire more than anyone else is, dove,” Hob says, forcing himself to soften, the vulnerability of the statement frankly scaring him shitless, but he’ll be brave about it if it means Dream will give up this particular line of questioning. “When they were over for dinner, sure, and in the grocery market, but- but if anything, that means I know what they feel like, and I’ve not felt anything like it since that night.” When Dream still wavers uncertainly, the tension hovering in the tightness of his eyes, he says, “I swear it.”
The line of Dream’s shoulders eases, though nowhere near as much as Hob would like to see. He regards Dream over the rim of his glass as he takes another sip. Dream looks as though he’s got a million more thoughts than usual running through his head, and like he’s not going to share a single one of them with Hob.
“What did you mean, ‘Continue to ignore?’” he asks when it’s clear Dream won’t be the first to speak.
“I could feel. The moment you began to place dedications to me. With intent,” Dream says haltingly, the words grinding out of him like stone. “I could feel the shape of it as though I could see it before me. When you made your offering-“
“My pocket lint,” Hob says in amusement, and is rewarded with a glare more annoyed than furious, which he counts as a win.
“-I could feel the pull of it. I was unable to ignore-“
But Hob’s stomach has already turned to ice, suddenly sick with the thought. “Fuck, did I- did I summon you?”
“Not in... so many words-”
“Fuck,” Hob says again, standing and going to him before he can think better of it. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He wants to reach out and touch, to assure Dream of his intentions, but Dream eyes them as they flutter uselessly, wary, with the same stiffness he’d shown prior to his return from captivity. “I didn’t- you know I wouldn’t-”
“I know,” Dream says, softening just enough to give Hob some hope to work with. “I did not come against my will. You could not have forced me, like this.”
Hob isn’t sure how to respond to that without spilling his guts, so he lets his gaze dart to the small collection of Dream Things. “I’ll take it all down. I didn’t mean to call you- not that I’m not glad you’re here, I’m fucking thrilled, but- but I don’t want to-“
“Do not,” Dream says, voice low in a way that makes Hob nearly shiver, that goes directly to his knees. His eyes snap back to Dream’s; there is something ancient and predatory about them, such that Hob is reminded of the first time they met. “If it’s truly of your own volition, I would have you keep it.”
“Do you believe that it is?” Hob asks quietly.
“I do not trust my sibling not to meddle,” he replies. “But I would trust you.”
“Dream.” It’s all he can say, but Dream closes his eyes briefly, almost a blink, and for just a second, it’s like the word, the name, spoken from Hob’s lips, gives him power. It's one of those moments, in which Hob can see the ways Dream is something larger, something beyond the figure before him. “Dream,” he repeats, a whispered prayer, or maybe a plea, because he doesn’t understand what’s happening here, not really, and so is reduced to his basest thoughts.
“My sister has called me a fool,” Dream rasps finally. “For a great many things. I see now that she was correct. We are friends,” he says, as though he’s reminding himself, and his eyes turn distant. “And I have not treated you in a manner becoming of one who deserves the title, though I warned you also that Desire would bring out the worst of me.”
“You must know I would’ve waited,” Hob says, hesitantly reaching for Dream’s hand, drawing it out of the coat pocket it’s stuffed into by his wrist when he doesn’t show any sign of agitation. Still, Dream’s eyes close again, fleetingly, at the contact, and Hob believes however foolishly that he might’ve missed it just as much as he had. “As long as you needed. I truly didn’t mean to rush you.”
“Yes,” Dream replies, allowing his hand to be clung to. God, but Hob would kneel before him, even now. He imagines a ring upon that hand, and he would kiss it for whatever purpose that would serve Dream, be it respect or intimacy. “I am here now.”
“You are,” Hob agrees, unable to stop the happy grin that spreads across his face. If Dream cannot believe that he would do it himself, that he only would for some outside force, he will restrain himself and his love, if just barely.
“Then tell me, Hob Gadling,” Dream says with a small smile of his own, just as cautious as Hob feels, and still a bit wary, but undeniable, “Of your experiences these past months.”
For all that it was something of a reconciliation, Dream still does not visit in the way he used to, at least not in the Waking. Hob begins to dream again, though. Not that he’d stopped entirely before, but he really dreams . It’s not exactly like lucid dreaming, when he comes to awareness in Dream’s realm; it’s no fantastical (or to be frank, mundane, which is far more common) world of his own imagining that he suddenly gains the ability to manipulate and control his actions in. Rather, when he wakes as he does tonight, beneath a tree in Fiddler’s Green, it’s like coming to a second consciousness. There’s no sudden shift to lucidity, unless Dream has interrupted one already begun.
Fiddler’s Green is warm, but not unpleasantly so like the July that drags on in the Waking. Hob rolls onto his back and stretches, his old spine cracking even here as he goes. He spends a moment gazing up at the branches, the way the sunlight dapples through the leaves and shines in flares with the movement of the slight breeze. He raises his hand as though he might catch those little sunbeams, is only mildly surprised when they wrap around his fingers like tendrils of gold dust.
He senses Dream more than sees him, at first. Lets the wisps of golden light rejoin their brethren in the leaves like puffs of pollen as he turns his head slowly to his friend’s shadow against the bright sky.
“Would you walk with me?” Dream asks, unsmiling, voice soft and melodic as ever. Christ, what Hob would do for that voice. He tries very hard not to think about it while in Dream’s element.
“Aye,” Hob says. “I would. But would you lay with me?” he asks, and gives him a grin. Is pleased at the near eyeroll the double-entendre earns despite his friend’s serious mood. And then Dream is reclined next to him, leant up against the tree, his thigh close to Hob’s still-turned head.
Hob hums, turning back to the canopy of the tree, reaching back up to his sunbeams. They snap to his fingers once more, like they remember his touch, and feel like honey on his skin. Not sticky, just fluidly solid. After a few moments of watching him play, Dream’s hand enters his line of sight, a glass of wine held in offering. Hob frowns as he sits up to accept with his free hand, the tendrils of light reluctant to leave his other. He lets them cling to him, their warmth soaking into his skin pleasantly.
“What’s this, then?” he asks after a cursory sniff. “And what dreamer did you snatch it from this time?” he grins again at his friend, teasing.
“Chateau Lafitte. 1828. The memory of a young girl, now an old woman.”
“Quite old,” Hob agrees with raised brow. “What’s the occasion? Is it your birthday? Is it my birthday?”
Dream looks about to respond and frowns. “I do not have a birthday because I was not born.”
“You do. Death and I calculated it.”
“You calculated…” he sounds like he’s trying to do the calculations, now. “It is not my birthday,” Dream says. “But it is a gift. I wished to speak with you.” Hob thinks, unbidden, of pigeon magnets and transactional flirting, and clamps down on it before it gets loud enough for Dream to hear. “It’s possible I won’t be able to visit for some time.”
Hob’s stomach drops, and the light playing about his fingers wraps around his palm and wrist as he clenches it reflexively into the grass. He considers, however briefly, throwing a tantrum. “But you just came back,” he points out reasonably, definitely not petulant. Dream’s lips quirk upward.
“There was a time,” he begins in a tone Hob is convinced would melt him if he held it like he does the sun, “We would only meet once a century.”
“Yes, until my charming personality won you over. Now I’ve been spoiled with your presence, and you have to deal with the consequences.” He leans back against his elbow, and lazily takes a sip of the wine, which he hates to admit is very good. Dream’s face turns serious once more as the joke fades.
“I’m going on a journey,” he says, squinting out at Fiddler’s Green and setting his glass down. Hob watches as he slowly reaches out in front of him, drawing tendrils of light to his own fingers and watching them dance with a gentle expression. He wonders what it means, that they appear threadier around Dream’s fingers than his own, but at once is more fascinated by the concept of Dream playing. He’s never seen Dream at work more than to conjure an image or an item, never seen Dream handle his power like he handles furs and fabrics in his home, just for the sake of it. “And perhaps it won’t take long, but there is equal chance that it will.”
“What kind of ‘ journey ?’” Hob asks, sitting up again, putting his old soldier’s core to use. He's certainly stronger here than in the Waking. Being a professor has been kinder to his nerves than his physicality. He settles back against the large trunk of the tree, shoulder barely brushing Dream’s. “Sounds a bit ominous.”
“One that is long overdue,” Dream replies, not looking away from his task, though what he’s trying more intently now to form, Hob can’t tell. “An ancient wrong that has weighed on my mind since my sibling paid us their visit. One I would make right before...” his brow furrows ever slightly as he loses the words, mouth silently working to find them before falling still.
“But you’ll definitely come back,” Hob says, filling the silence. “Eventually. Right?”
Dream tips his head back to regard him, eyes black and star filled as they more often are here in the Dreaming. “Drink your wine, Hob Gadling.”
Hob frowns at the non-answer, watching Dream continue to try and bend the light to his will unsuccessfully. Slowly, he puts his glass down and reaches out with his own palm, wreathed in sunbeams, to cover the back of Dream’s hand. He’s not even sure why he does it, beyond the constant desire that thrums within him to do so, but its effect is immediate. The shapeless thing between Dream’s fingers expands and solidifies all at once, bursting into a three-dimensional stained-glass sun, varying rays of golden and daisy yellows, ambers and oranges, stretching out and out and out between them until it fills the very sky of the Dreaming itself.
A quiet noise of wonder escapes Hob’s lips as he looks up at it, at the way the beams of light drift slowly where they emanate from the sun, which now sits low on the horizon before them. Fantastical birds with ribbon-like tails take flight from the tall grasses in the distance, startled by the sudden change in daylight. Dream, who had tensed at the contact, goes slack, his hands lowering into his lap even as Hob still holds one of them. He either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, and damned if Hob will ruin it by drawing attention. He can’t help but sneak a glance at Dream’s face, and is mildly surprised to see his own awe reflected there in that muted way, Dream’s lips slightly parted as he gazes at the landscape, changed by their hands.
Delicately, Hob lowers his head until his temple rests upon Dream’s shoulder, feather light with most of his weight supported by the free hand he leans on. He isn’t sure how long they sit there, and the angle is entirely uncomfortable for Hob, but he is rewarded when, eventually, just as delicately, Dream’s head tilts to rest atop his own. Hob tries not to tremble, tries not to think too loudly about how it is (literally) a dream come true that this should be happening or about how this is the most contact they’ve had since Dream came back and that he’d been spoiled for that too. Tries not to let the joy bubbling up in his chest out lest Dream blame it once more on Desire. Friendly affection. He’s fine with it, genuinely, if only Dream would be, too, and their progress could stop being set back.
“I have... procrastinated. Long enough,” Dream says, his voice rumbling where Hob’s ear is pressed against his shoulder, even through his coat.
“You could procrastinate a bit longer,” Hob offers hopefully.
“I think not,” Dream says, sounding caught between regretful and amused.
“You’ll come back?” Hob asks again, because he is needy and insecure and grasping and still just slightly wounded, burned from losing him twice.
“As soon as I am able,” Dream eventually agrees, though not before a very, very long pause.
“Don’t sound too sure of yourself or anything,” he quips to lighten the mood. Dream huffs softly, his hand turning in Hob’s grasp to release a swirl of sand into Hob's face, setting him yawning widely. “Did you just sand me?” Hob asks rhetorically, and somewhere deep down, he is outraged, and would certainly show it were he not so tired.
“Goodnight, Hob Gadling. Lucienne presides over the Dreaming in my absence, should you need anything.”
“Only need you,” Hob mumbles around another yawn, trying and failing to fight the sudden heaviness of his eyelids.
His head leans more decisively on Dream’s shoulder as his body slumps under the weight of Dream’s magic. He is vaguely aware, too, of sliding off of it, guided horizontally by cool, steady hands under his head and back, the sensation of falling into the deepest of sleeps like landing in bed, eyes closed and pleasantly drunk, the room swirling around you even as you can’t see it.
When he wakes in his bed the next morning, he is profoundly rested, deeply upset, and greeted by a mostly-full Chateau Lafitte 1828, which has suddenly found itself to be real and the only remaining bottle in the world.
One week later, Hob wakes up in Hell.