Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Thirty-three years. He doesn't say it, but thirty-three years. And he knows the entity—the man—his friend, for lack of any better word—isn't going to say a damn thing. 

Theoretically he could ask but if it starts another fight he's not ready to wait another thirty-three years for the aftermath. His friend is sitting across from him now no worse for the apparent wear but his usual haughtiness, the arrogance so profound it barely qualified as anything that mundane, is nearly gone. The man looks relieved, genuinely, to see his friend. To sit.

To eat. Jesus. “I can order another,” Hob offers, eyeing what was a plate of venison hand pies—so what, some things change but his taste hasn’t. 

His friend pauses mid-bite as if he hadn't noticed the plate go empty. It's more than Hob has seen him eat in their collective five hundred years of meetings. At best, he usually picks at the plate, pinches single morsels from whatever Hob has presented for him—because it’s always a presentation, honestly, he’s been caught a little flat-footed this time—and nibbles them with all the delicacy of a mouse.

“No need,” replies his friend, soft and deep and false. He’s lying. Hob tries not to show his delight that he can pick a lie out of this man.  

Hob raises hand hails the waiter for another round. His bar, after all. His inn, all three rooms of it, one his because that's what happens when you liquidate every cent you made coming off the nineteen eighties to rebuild a historical landmark you met a man at five hundred years ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It seemed like a good idea for most of the last thirty-three years, give or take a low point. Still, he never expected it to prove out.

“Thank you,” says his friend and means it.

Hob is fascinated. Don't stare, he tells himself. 

The sad hell of it is that it's hard to lose one's, well, best friend, if he's being honest. Not like anyone else is waiting in the wings to take the job. No one else around to qualify for it, really. And it’s hard to lose that. Harder, maybe than starving to death and waking up the next day still starving. Hard to regret it for a century and some change, too. Oh, the book of his regrets. If he started writing, he’d be writing it for the next five hundred years at least. 

This one, though. This took the cake. 

So he says and Hob knows what's coming. Still happy to be alive? Of course he is. But maybe happier to be seated in current company. Can't admit that. But then his friend opens his mouth and it isn’t the old question at all. “Death said to say hello.”

Hob doesn’t drop his drink. He does choke on it, for long enough that his friends brows tighten in real concern. Hob waves him off. “Can't die, remember. Death, huh? Ol' death. She says hello. Well, that's something.”  

His friend smiles. God, Hob missed it. “Anything else I should know?”

“I’m given to assume friends should know each other's names.” He reaches across the table, hand out, a frightfully human gesture for a man who is anything but. “Morpheus.” 

Hob waits too long, and then takes the offered hand with too much force. The skin against his palm is improbably soft and damn cold. Death-cold. “Morpheus,” he says. “Hob Gadling.” And then repeats to himself, “Morpheus. Like the Greek god?”

Morpheus goes very still. It's as close to shocked as the man gets and as good as confirmation. Hob raises his hands. “No, I don't want to know. Keep your secrets.” 

“Since when does Hob Gadling study Greek myth?”

Hob bows his head, laughs. “I’ve had a long time. A long damn time.” Reading, once one got into the regular habit, was quite addictive, and then he'd gotten into philosophy and it was all over from there. Men thinking thoughts no one had any business thinking and making a real meal out of it. Something else to love about life, something else to explore. He nods down the the papers in his hand. Always something to learn. 

Morpheus smiles. “I think this time you truly are the one who's changed.” 

“I am sorry for that conversation. Can't tell you how much I regret it.”

“You were right. I simply had not the cause to see it.” He pauses, considers his glass. “I, too, have had time enough to think.”

That’s the question burning a hole in his tongue. That's burning a hole through his head, honestly, has been for the last minute. Part of him, the smallest part, because even after half a millennia he’s still human, is bitter about it. Wants to know why it took exactly this long and not a day longer for Morpheus to decide to show. “Only a bit,” Hob says, tamping down any show of that fatal humanity.

Morpheus’s eyes darken, still focused on the glass with a rare intensity, even for him. Hob looks closer and realizes the man’s fingers are white knuckled around it. “It was not by choice.” He looks up, and the full force of his gaze is HOb’s to bear at once. “I am sorry. Truly, my friend,” he murmurs, voice at the edge of a fall. 

And what the fuck does that mean? Something ominous hides in the phrasing and the exact instinct that had him hurling his glass at those goons that damn Constantine woman hired when they pointed their knives at two men who can’t die rears in him again. You need not have come to my defense. Yeah, right. It occurs to hob to ask, “This is a dumb question a bit late, but you are immortal right? You know Death. She's not gonna to just—ah, you know.” He starts to make a slit-throat motion with his hand before it occurs to him this might be crude. 

“If I fell, she would bring you word.”  

That’s—the opposite of comforting. “Right, but like you said. We can still be hurt, right? Can still be captured? Or can you use that sand of yours and…”

Morpheus is looking at him now, eyes that troubled dark despite the blue, and the man always looks a month past a good night's rest but there's a defiant gleaming now, a line of water at the edges of his gaze that can't be tears but can’t be anything but. He's seen it before. Rage, maybe. Some other emotion that defies human category. Maybe the only one a God of Dreams is capable of feeling. Because that’s what he is. That was always the answer. 

“You were hurt,” he says, surprised at his own voice, at the fear in it, at the thing roaring in his ears like a terror. “It took you this long to recover?”

“Captured,” says Morpheus in bare answer, and nothing else.

Captured. The mere thought of it would be laughable for a man who always seemed more spirit than flesh but the tense set of his shoulders, the thinness of his fingers and jaw and the body beneath his dark jacket that have gone from lithe to emaciated tells him all he needs to know.

“What kind of prison could hold you?” 

And Morpheus smiles, a shade off bitter. “Not a very nice one.” He picks up his glass and rolls it in his hand. His mouth opens and closes in a rare show of indecisiveness and then he takes a slight breath. “It was an orb of glass and iron.”

And Hob is lost in that moment. In that notion. In the image of it. “For how long?”

“A century,” Morpheus breathes. “Give or take.”

A century. A fucking century. He wishes he hadn’t eaten; the meal rises in his stomach. A hundred goddamned years. “Where?” Hob asks nonsensically, as if he could have done a damn thing. He could have, though. He would have found a way. A man doesn’t live as long as he has without some damn determination. 

Morpheus’s expression melts into unreadability. “Would you have come to my rescue again, Hob Gadling?”

“Yes. God, yes, I would have. Of course, I would have.” You’re my friend, my only friend, he doesn’t say, but it must be obvious. He’s leaned across the table, now, practically in the man’s space. Morpheus’s hand has gone lax about his cup. Hob brushes the back of his hand with a knuckle—too forward by half, and he means it as nothing but what it is: solidity. This man might be made of dreams or dust or whatever else but Hob isn’t and if some glass needed breaking, he could have done it with these hands of his. He would have bled for it. He would have been glad to. 

Morpheus doesn’t flinch away but releases the glass entirely, and lets himself but touch and be touched. It is a painfully human gesture. Perhaps that’s what’s changed about him. “I think you would have,” he says, in softest surprise.

Hob can say nothing else, but press that small point of contact, draw the back of one too-rough finger against skin smooth and pale as tissue.

“When did you get—out?” he asks at last.

“Oh. On Wednesday.”

Hob is the one who flinches then. “Jesus Christ. What are you doing here?”

“Attending a long awaited date,” he says, as if it’s obvious.

That's not how they use date anymore, someone should tell him. Not Hob. And fuck. He gathers himself. A hundred years of confinement might be nothing for a god, except it's not nothing for this one because a single conversation about friendship brought him nigh to tears and them both to ruin and a century locked in a fucking fishbowl has to have done something. If the table weren’t between them, Hob might pull him into a hug. And that would be too forward. 

“I would have come sooner, but I had… work.”

Hob holds himself to stillness, afraid of what he’ll do if he doesn’t. “You don’t owe me an explanation. You don’t owe me a thing, Morpheus.”

Morpheus twitches oddly. “Dream, actually.” 

Talking to him was always like puzzling out a riddle, a century between to chew on each one. “Dream,” Hob repeats in question.

“Dream of the Endless. That is what I am. That is what you should call me.” He looks up from their hands which are still touching in the most deliberately accidental fashion. “Dream.”

A laughable name on anyone else. A name straight out of nightclubs Hob tired of in seventies before they really picked up, a name too short for a creature like this. And two names in one night. Must be a blow out. “All right. Dream, then.”

It’s become night, he realizes. The old sodium lights he paid an arm and nearly both legs to have installed outside, because the light reminded him of the torch and lantern he could never quite let go of, cast the street outside in orange, and Dream, too. It’s in this way Hob notices for the first time that his eyes are lit from the inside, like a nocturnal animal’s. That is what he is, after all. This is his time. Ridiculous, really, that a god of dreams has taken five nights—six, really—off the job to spend with him. He could almost be flattered. 

“Answer one more question for me.” 

“...There’s a price for that sort of thing, in some circles.”

Hob scoffs, “I’ll pay it,” and then sobers. “Where are the ones who did that to you now?”

Dream’s soft smile crystallizes. “At their end.”

“Good, then. That’s good.” One less thing to worry about.

The lights cast him so odd. He could almost come across warm, until he cocks his head, almost bird-like. “That was your question?” Hob has to be imagining the disappointment.

“I can ask another if you'd like.”

No answer but those eyes, and that’s as good as a yes. He’d made a list once, all the best questions to ask, as if his friend were some, some entity bound to obfuscate any revelation that he could bind to him with the right wording. He lost it back in the sixties, but he can still remember every item on it. True names, true-truths, and all that rubbish. But the pressure of his gaze is back, a physical presence as real as the press of skin against skin and for all that it’s alien and strange it is still skin. This is still his friend. His friend he’s been waiting, give or take, a hundred and thirty-three years to ask just one more question. 

“How have you been?”

Dream laughs. It’s only a small thing, only a huff of air, really, but Hob slips it away somewhere secret inside himself to pull out again and admire. “I have had better centuries.” 

“I figured. But you—are you happy? To be alive?”

“That’s another question. And we still haven’t discussed my price.” But he’s grinning, an actual smile, one that shows his teeth, and then the fingers against his shift and turn and open palm-up, an offer in waiting. 

This is a question, too. His philosophers would know the answer, perhaps, or have one to give. Good thing Hob’s not one, then. He slips his hand into Dream’s with the caution and care that’s kept him in alive in one piece, and with the joyous abandon that’s kept him alive at all. The man isn’t really so cold after all, palm to palm. “You know I’m good for it.”

“Then I have your answer. Yes. I am happy, my friend. And you?”

Hob laughs, long and true, and grips a bit tighter. “Yeah. Not a complaint. Well. Not anymore.”

Chapter Text

“Hello,” the woman in black says, the only preamble before she sits herself across from Hob’s spot in the booth seat at the Inn. That’s more forward than anyone has been with him, in oh, a decade at least. He appreciates it, but—

“I’m waiting for someone, actually,” he says, not unkindly.

A smile spreads across her face, cheek to cheek. She’s stunning but something at the edge of her expression is too knowing by half, eerie in its familiarity. 

“Let me guess. Tall, dour, black coat, absolute mess of hair?” She conjures the form of a man with her hands, and yeah. That’s the one.

“Maybe. We haven’t been introduced. Robert,” he says, but doesn’t offer a hand. It doesn’t bode well when people know who he is, and someone knowing Dream is miles worse. A shame, too, because he was fond of the Inn. Fond of this newest life he built. God. He’ll have to get word to Dream somehow. Probably can’t spray paint another message on a wall and hope he figures it out.

She doesn’t give her name. “It’s funny. I thought you two only met in summer. June, wasn’t it?”

Ice pours down his spine. He picks up his drink and downs the rest of it. Harder stuff in the evening, for his sins. “Constantine, right?” It has to be. One of her ilk.

“No! No, don’t worry. Nothing like that. I had work in the area and thought it was about time we met. My little brother is such a creature of habit. I didn’t think he’d be by today, out of season. Are you really waiting for him?”

“Always,” he says, and wishes he hadn’t finished his drink. He studies the table a moment, but when he looks up, the woman is still there, still smiling, lovely as a summer day. “Little brother. You’re Morpheus’s sister.”

“Did he not tell you about me? I think I’m offended. What is it you two have talked about for the last six hundred years?”

“Oh. Ohhhh—” He laughs and shakes his head and sets both hands flat on the table. “I can’t—I just need a moment. Who are you then? Sleep? Fear? He doesn’t really tell me about these things but I’ve done a bit of research on my own.”

“Death,” she says, amused and chagrined.

His mirth drains from him.

“He really didn’t tell you about me. Oh, Dream.”

“He’s not exactly forthcoming about his home life.”

“A bit of an ass actually, if we're being honest.”

“Well now,” he fumbles, “I wouldn't put it that way.”

“I would.” 

Sitting across from Death on a Thursday night in September. It ranks somewhere in the listing of strangest occurrences in his life, but he lost the thing a century ago and decided it was a sign. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Yes!” she says brightly.

It’s past sunset outside, a bit later than Dream usually shows, which means he might not. And why feel glum about that when he’s spent generations in waiting? But he’d been around more often. Once a month, more. Two weeks in a row was too much to hope for. At the bar, Sam pours him two cups of the old whiskey he keeps set aside and then musters himself before he returns to the table. 

“So, are there just the two of you then?”

“No,” she says, but no more than that. 

“And are they all like you or are they all like him?

“No one’s like him.”

“Good,” he says and means it. “I have enough trouble with the one.”

“You and me both.” She reaches across the table to clink his glass. “To our insufferable Dream.” She leans close then, conspiratorial. “Do you know the other day I caught him moping in the park feeding pidgeons with a baguette?”

Hob’s mind refuses to form the image. “Where did he get the baguette?”

She waves one hand. “The dream of some aspiring baker. Stole it from a shop. I have no idea. Anyway I told him, you know what you get when you feed pigeons—”

“More pigeons?”

“Close enough. But you know him. Not even a smile. A century since I saw my little brother and not even a smile.” She sighs, as though this is the greatest tragedy the incarnation of Death herself has witnessed.

“He’s not that bad, is he? If he laughed at all the jokes, it wouldn’t be special when he did, would it? It makes me feel like I’ve really got to work at it, you know.”

“He laughs at your jokes?” 

“Well, once. Usually it’s more of a smile, but I know he’s laughing deep down. Deep down.”

Her head tips to the side, considering, and it should feel more disconcerting to be analyzed by death, but her eyes are kind and her smile is nearly as good as Dream’s. “You make him smile.”

He ducks his head from her gaze. “Sometimes.”

Every time, actually. He hadn’t realized Dream’s smiles were in rare supply. 

She takes a deep breath. “Well. You might be one of the only creatures alive who can say that. I knew, you know. The night this started, I asked him if he wanted me to tell you or if he would. Closest thing to excited I saw him in, oh,” she rolls her eyes, ”centuries."

“Why me?” He’s at the edge of his seat now. That night, a night he’d almost forgotten before he realized he had to remember it, had to, like his life depended on it, because so much more than that did.

“I know you, Hob Gadling. He needed… Proof, I guess. Proof there are reasons to live.” 

Can they die, then? It’s a continual fear, a question Dream has never answered except in the not-answering itself. “But—but I’m human. It’s not like he’s going to get excited over a Tesco sandwich or hitting all greens on the way home.” Can he even drive? God, there’s a horrific thought. “He doesn’t care about mortal things like, like—”

“Like feeding birds?” Her brows are wrinkled like she’s seeing right through him, like she knows every corner of him and Dream both. “He’s less different than you’d think. Than he thinks. And you’re not there to list reasons for him. You, forgive me, you were the reason. For a long time. You gave him something to look forward to.” She shrugs one shoulder slowly, shyly. “You gave him hope. Dreams are made of that stuff.”

The Hob of yesteryear wants to sit back, push away the table and her both and deny it. If he’s Dream’s reason, they’re all fucked. But something holds him back. Some learned grace, hard-won. Hope. A thing hard to come by when you’ve seen enough of time and man and all the shit between. 

“I’m just saying… Don’t sell yourself short, Hob Gadling. This is his longest relationship by several hundred years. You ought to be proud.”

“No, we’re not—no. It’s not like that." Did it seem like that? Did she think—no. 

She raises a brow. “We’re not, ah,” he fumbles, but she spares him.

“I know, and thank god for that. Mark my words, that man…” She laughs and spreads her hands wide as if to encompass him, in all his mercurial oddness. “He thinks he’s the tragic hero of every story. I guess if I made them all I might, too. It’s not as though he can help it, but his moods are contagious, to say the least.”

“We did fight once.” The thought slips out. She’s easy to talk to, and maybe he needs it off his chest. A hundred thirty year sour note that’s still ringing in his ears, aimless now and curdled to guilt with the revelation of Dream’s unwilling absence. “You know what about? I called him my friend. He apologized later. Water under the bridge, I guess.”

“He apologized? My.” She gives a single shake of her head. 

He gives her a wry look. “People change. Even gods.”

She opens her mouth, but whatever she’s thinking she doesn’t find a voice for, or rather, doesn’t have the chance to. It’s odd because for all that she’s the incarnation of death, her presence is light, like the relief of slipping into cool water on muggy day. It’s odd because between the two of them, between Dream and Death, he wouldn’t have bet on Dream being the terror. He is. His presence is, when he wants it to be. It is in that moment. 

Dream looms over the table as if he appeared there. Maybe he did. Usually he at least pretends to have to walk places. 

“Sister,” he murmurs, and it’s a question, and it’s a threat. 

No. It’s fear. 

It’s certainly not the warm welcome she expected by the confusion on her brow. “Hello, little brother," she says with good humor. “Oh, don’t give me that look. We’re just having a friendly chat.” She gestures to a seat across the table, the seat in the booth next to Hob. 

Dream takes it but what he’s doing barely qualifies as sitting. More, perching, a bird ready to take wing. He’s too close. If he were human, Hob would be able to feel the heat coming off him. 

“About what?”

She gives Hob an intimate look. “Nosey. We won’t tell.”

Oh, Hob will. He absolutely will. But he’s not getting between these two. In a family spat between Death and Dream, old Hobs hasn’t got a chance in hell—literally, most like. 

“Just a bit of small talk,” he nods. 

“You lie.”

“I lie? Excuse me?” Hob’s shock is genuine. Dream, petty. But then, it’s not exactly a first, for a man who walked out over being called a friend. 

Death reaches across the table to slap his hand. Don’t get all twisted up. I can’t believe you never told him about me.”

“It wasn't my secret to tell.”

“I’m a secret?” She raises both brows dangerously. Hob barely remembers what it was like to have a sibling but this is ringing a bell. He feels like a rind of bread being fought over at the dinner table.

Dream frowns.

“I only came to say hello to him, truly.”

Dream looks at Hob instead, as if to confirm this. He nods. Dream says in a small voice, “Perhaps I was mistaken.” It’s an apology so grudging, Hob laughs.

Death shakes her head and pushes back from the table, her chair squeaking lightly on the wood floor. “Well. It was good to see you both. And I am going to miss my next one if I don’t go. I’ll let you two sort this out.” She stands and winks at Hob in what Hob is sure is a gesture meant only to ruffle Dream’s feathers. “Thanks for the conversation. It was… enlightening.”

“Enlightening, right.” Hob raises his glass. “Good to. Meet you. Officially.”

She waves behind her and is escorted out the room by the stares of several interested patrons and the unreadable look Dream has focused on her back as if it were a physical thing. Like a predator watching something bigger than itself.

“So that’s what you meant when you said Death said hello. Not what I was picturing.”

“No. I imagine not.” 

Hob chances a look at him. This close, Dream of the Endless is disconcertingly strange and the better portion of that strangeness is beauty. True beauty. Not pretty, and not handsome, but beautiful as some work of avant garde art. Every piece of him is put together: the clothes, the absolute wreck of his hair, the sharp lines of his face and his expression so hard it might be carved by hand. The only part Dream can’t seem to control is his eyes. They’re shuttered and barred now; he’s in a mood. They haven’t had one of those in a while. “What’s the matter?” Hob bites.

Dream focuses on the door where Death departed as if it owes him something. Hob waits him out, because talking more has rarely gotten him anywhere with this man.

“If you seek an end to this life,” he says at last, “I will understand. You’ve proven your point.”

So it's going to be one of those nights. “It may shock you to learn this, but I’m not alive solely for the sake of proving a point to you. I do actually enjoy it.” And because he’s close and because he can, he nudges Dream with his shoulder. “Come on. You know me. You don’t really think I’d want out after all this time.”

The way Dream’s eyes shift seem to say no, he hadn’t known.

Hob turns to him fully. “I’ve lived through wars and revolutions and the plague and, and the eighties, for Christ’s sake. They have internet now. Hot water everywhere. Take out food. Phone games—games you play on your phone, which you can carry in your pocket now by the by. Didn't even have time to get used to landlines before they came up with that.” And he mutters to himself, “Anyway, I didn’t live with fleas for four hundred years to let those little bastards win now.”

Dream purse his lips. “...Four hundred seems excessive.”

“Oh, like you’d know.”

At least he’s cheered up. Dream gives him the smallest of smiles. “Of course I wouldn’t.”

“Wait, look at this. You’ll love it.” Hob works his phone out of his pocket and taps the screen. “You can listen,” he says imperiously, “to any song ever written. Tap of your fingers, bam. Just like that.” He pulls up the music app and within seconds the outro of Starman fills their small corner of the Inn. It’s too loud for anyone to really notice or be bothered.

When he looks over, Dream is smiling. “Not every song.”

“No, I guess not.” Bastard probably knows them all. Songs that were written before anything was written. Probably helped come up with most of them, if that’s how it works. It would be intimidating if the man weren’t so ridiculous. 

But mostly it feels like he’s explaining this the way he would have to any stubbornly luddite friend. “I got this one last week,” he says of the phone. “How they come up with this stuff…” He shakes his head. “Sometimes it’s a little much, even for me.”

“The creativity of man is truly boundless.”

That might be a joke, somewhere in there. Closest as Dream will ever get to it. It’s wondrous enough that when Dream holds out his hand, Hob puts the phone in his palm without thinking twice about it. What secrets can one keep from a man who walks in dreams, after all. “And what do you call this?”

“Ah, that’s an iPhone.”

“Eye phone?”

Hob winces. “No, it’s more like—” He reaches for one of the napkins on the table and the pen he keeps in his pocket, probably the truest marker of his age if anything is, and spells it out. Dream watches him as he writes and Hob gets caught in them a moment when he’s finished, as he always does, in that blue that could be anyone’s but Hob knows with certainty he could search the world over for and never find again. 

“Ah,” Dream murmurs. “I see.” 

It’s hard to tell if his smile is real joy over absorbing this tiny fact of human minutiae or some other humor. Maybe everything humans do is amusing to him.  

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. He nods to the phone. “You know, I had the first portable phone model back in the eighties. Was going to show you then, but, well. Bought the stock at the right time, at least. I guess I have a sense for it now. Might as well. Had about long enough to make every wrong choice, didn’t I?” He laughs at himself but it isn’t all humor.  

“You and your technology. Your… printing, was it?”

He could be embarrassed about that, but he’s not going to give Dream the satisfaction. “On the ground floor, every time. That's my gift. We’ve got everything now, haven’t we. Don’t get me started on social media—Facebook Instagram, all that rot.” It’s made staying off the radar a practical impossibility outside of hermitting himself away somewhere. Dream would probably approve of that. Dream frowns at him and Hob shakes himself. “Ah, those are like, these programs on the phone that let you share photos and little bits about your life and such.”

Dream sighs delicately. He sets the phone down flat on the table. “I rule the dreams of men. I know what the Instagram is.”

“If that were true, you’d know no one calls it that. The Instagram. Jesus. Give me that.” He grabs the phone from the table. “There’s no impressing you.”

“I can be impressed.” He almost sounds offended.

But Hob is no Shakespeare. All he has to offer are these small conversations, these peaceful moments for a man who seems hellbent on the tragedy of existence. 

“No, I think the spark’s gone out. If I live to be a thousand, I’ll never forget the look on your face when I tried to explain chimneys to you.” Dream’s eyes narrow. “No, not that look. How have you heard of Instagram but not smoke getting in people’s eyes?”

“I was… less engaged then.”

Which is only confirmation that Hob is his social life. Hob is considering if there’s a way to bring this up that won’t have Dream gusting out the door in his indignation and hurt when the phone pings with a bright sound. A message pops up at the top. Dream glances down at it as if it’s offended him with the act, and then enunciates carefully, “Cecilia? You have a lover?”

“No! No, god no. Student.” Hob should never have let them text him. It seemed more convenient than accepting phone calls, or at least less painful. He looks the missive over and then silences his phone and turns it over and gives Dream a sour look. “Asking for an extension. You wouldn’t believe how many grandmother’s die on due dates. The government ought to look into it honestly.”

“Hob Gadling,” Dream says in that particular and rare tone than indicates Hob has managed to both please and surprise him. “Are you a teacher of men now?”

“Something like that."

Dream shifts in his seat to face Hob, which is not easy given it’s the same seat Hob is sitting on. “And what is it you teach?”

“History. What else?" Easy when you've lived through it, but sometimes he wonders if he likes it because it helps him not to forget. "I like being around kids. They keep me on the up and up.” 

Dream nods at this, just so, and then pauses. It’s a physical thing, a full body-stillness that holds him as he says in studied lightness, “You could have a family again.”

Hob doesn’t know how to say that some sorrows deserve to be suffered only once in one’s life, and watching his son die. Well. But it was always going to end that way, wasn’t it? Once he realized that, the decision was easy to make. “No,” he shakes his head. “Not for me. Not anymore.” For the first time, it occurs to him to wonder if there’s something like that for Dream. If a personal life is something an incarnated god is capable of having. “And you?” 

Turnabout is fair play, but Dream looks as if he’s been lightly stabbed. “No."

"I suppose it's difficult finding, ah, someone with shared experience." And that's another reason. Not that you need a long conversation to spend the night with a stranger but the part of him that might want something deeper, that's long put to rest in the sureness of what he won’t find. Hob nods to the rest of the Inn's patrons: a group of girls by the door, a couple in another booth, a woman offering all her life's woes to the bartender. "Not many people around here that can appreciate your work, I imagine.'

"Attachments with mortals are forbidden.”

“Good thing I’m immortal then, eh?”

A silence takes their space, so profound and so complete that one might have heard a feather drop if it had dared to try. It must be h Dream's magic; the sounds of the bar are gone. Starman plays but distantly, as if from another room. 

A starman waiting in the sky, he’d like to come and meet us, but…

It’s in him to explain what he meant—nothing like that, not at all like that, but Death’s words echo in his mind. Longest relationship in centuries? Well, Hob's too. She had a point with that one. Death often does. He sighs. "I didn't mean—"

“You are mortal,” says Dream in a breath, the closest to strained his voice has ever been in Hob’s presence. “For all that Death spares you her gift, you are mortal.” 

Mortal he says, like it’s a fatal condition. For most, maybe, but Hob isn’t most. Hasn’t been for a long time. 

He frowns. “Doesn't that make me immortal, by definition? Anyway, we’ve been meeting for what, six hundred years? If it were forbidden wouldn't someone have told me by now?” He laughs. Forbidden, like one of Will's stories—the one about the teens in love, and really, is that what this is? Starcrossed, after all this time?

He makes himself look at Dream then. It’s worse than that, worse than the final act of any two-bit stage production. His expression is stricken, three parts resignation, one part misery. Naked honesty. He means this, in his quiet way, this talk of the forbidden. It's serious. "The rules for my kind are explicit in consequence," Dream explains as if Hob is very slow and this is something he ought to have known all along.

"Damn the rules?" Hob says without really meaning it to sound like a question. "What consequences?"

"Those I would not see you face for my sake."

Dream flinches. 

"We've been doing this for six hundred years. What's the difference now?" 

Dream flinches, and then Hob knows. It makes a sick sort of sense: of course it didn't when Hob didn't know his name, when Dream couldn't admit they were friends. His acceptance changes something, makes some admission of need, if only in his head. His tragic hero. Death was more right than she knew. 

"An oversight," Dream murmurs with finality. His or someone else's, it isn't clear. An air comes up about him, a breath of something unearthly and bleak that draws up the hair on the back of Hob's neck. It might have intimidated him at one point. 

“You're serious," he says, as if Dream knows any other way to be, and then shakes his head. "Will you please let me buy you a drink?" He hates the way his voice sounds. 

Lately Dream takes him up on it, but tonight it's like pounding his fist on a wall for all the good it does him. "I must decline, Hob."

Like he's being let down easy, he thinks with a stinging behind his breastbone. "So that's it?"

Dream inclines his head, and stands. Of course he does. Hob follows, graceless because no one can get free of a booth without looking an idiot except apparently for one of the Endless. “Dream," he pleads, too loud in the small Inn dining room. "Morpheus. Please, sit down. Can't we just talk? Like friends?”

It's the wrong thing to say. Dream makes for the door like he means it; Hob bids for boldness and catches a handful dark sleeve and sinuous wrist. Dream tenses and glances back at him with one gleaming eye. As if Dream does anything by anyone's leave but his own. The look he gives Hob says this in its entirety and much more beside. And then something odd happens. The eye darkens at the white and the bead of light always caught at the center gathers light from within. He seems to grow, to become greater than himself and colder and the hand he's all but holding Dream's with goes briefly numb. Hob releases him with a flinch.

Dream's gaze slides away. He's proven what he meant to: Hob is human, he is not. It was only ever that simple. Death had nothing to do with it.

And all that aside, they are two grown men having a—a public discussion on the topic of their friendship in a bar on a Thursday night. Sam stops tending his sole customer at the bar to watch openly. The new waitress hire stands politely out of the way as Dream stalks toward the door. 

“Go on love, go after him,” the woman seated at the bar says.

Hob ought to tell her it's not like that, but it feels perilous close to a lie. He follows, but damn the man and damn his long legs too. By the time he gets to the door Dream is halfway through the small park outfront and turning a corner around the rusted fence that's been up a decade now, his steps eating ground like nothing made of true flesh and bone could manage and still seem to be only walking. Hob runs to catch up, feeling a fool.

More of one when he gets to the corner and finds nothing at all but a wisp of sand suspended in the consoling beam of a streetlight. Dramatic to the end.

The sand evaporates into the air like sugar into water even as he rolls it between his fingers. 

“You fucking fool,” he says to himself, and isn’t sure which of them he’s talking about.

It takes Hob two entire days to notice the raven following him. 

After his share of unsavory moments, he’s gotten good at picking this kind of thing out. You get noticed when you stick around for so long. It’s inevitable. Right now he’s the son of the younger brother of the man who built The New Inn, a part time lecturer living off the Inn’s meager profits and the truly disgusting dividends of his assorted savings and investments he’s managed to squirrel away, eternally bequeathed to the only heir he’ll ever have: himself. He’s even got a couple caches buried off in the English countryside that he could probably find again if put to the task. 

So he’s gotten good at noticing people who notice him. He’s had to.

Birds? Less so. But it’s not as though the city is teeming with giant black ravens, and really. If Dream was going to have a pet, this would be it. 

It lands on his windowsill at the upper floor of the Inn half past seven in the morning, and he knows. Leave it to Dream to leave him in grandest fashion and leave a minder, too.

“You want a snack?” Hob offers, gesturing to the plate on the table beside his chair. 

The raven carefully shuffles out of view, which is not nearly as subtle as it might think seeing as Raven’s weren’t really made for this shuffling business, were they? “What do you eat? I’ve got… let’s see. A scone. Apple. Coffee. Little cold now but not bad, really.” The bird peaks its head about the edge of the sill, interested. “Come on,” Hob urges and plucks a crusty bit off the scone.

It steps fully into view.

“Can you talk?” he asks.

“Maybe,” it says.

Of course. “Will you pass him a message for me? Tell him I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset him, truly.” Never does, but it doesn’t stop him either. And he’s been around long enough to learn that it doesn’t matter if one meant to or didn’t mean to or even if the upset is the right kind or not. It’s his fault.

“What did you say to him?” the raven asks. 

Hobs gives him a pained smile. “That’s a bit complicated.”

“I love complicated. I’m great at complicated.”

“...I’m not sure he’d like me telling.”

The raven sniffs. “Fine.”

“How is he?”

“Well. He told me to go follow you around and it’s been raining for about three days so I didn’t really mind getting out of there. But I still don’t get why if you’re the one who jilted him, I have to sit around babysitting you.” He jabs at Hob with his wing.

“Jilted! If anyone’s jilted, it’s me,” he mutters to himself.

The raven makes a sound between a caw and a rasp that Hob supposes is the closest he can manage to a sigh. “That figures.”

“It does?”

“Well, look at you. No offense."

Deep breath. Stay on point. Do not fight a sentient raven. “How long do you think it will take him to come ‘round?”

The raven jiggles from foot to foot, and asks, “How long have you got?”

“Forever.”

It nods at him. "Forever, then." 

And, well. What did Hob expect, really. “What’s your name?”

“Matthew.”

“He named his bird Matthew? Well, Matthew. I’m Hob.”

“My mother named me Matthew, excuse you. What’s a Hob?”

“Nickname for Robert.”

“That’s fucking stupid.”

Can’t argue with that. Matthew hops up to his shoulder and peers down at the plate. “What kind of scone?”

“Ah… Raspberry and white chocolate, I think.” The girl who tends the bar on weekends bakes and brings them in and he’s got no shame about helping himself to whatever doesn’t get bought at the counter. Hob offers him the piece and Matthew takes it in a single inelegant beakful that lands at least half of it in the form of crumbs on Hob’s shirt. 

“That’s pretty good,” he says. 

“I’ll give you more if you can answer a question for me.”

The bird eyes him. “What’s the question?”

“Where’s Dream now?”

“In the Dreaming. Duh.”

“How do I get there?”

Matthew cocks his head and presses close, until Hob can’t really make out the eye he’s being given but all he can see is a blurred mass of black feathers. “Are you stupid? I’m genuinely asking.”

Hob rolls a shoulder. "Most of the time.”

“You get there by dreaming.” 

“Yes, but is there a faster way?”

“You could try knocking yourself out.”

Hob stands and brushes the crumbs from his pants. “All right. You think the wall will do it, or should I go for something harder—”

Matthew flaps up from his shoulder and into his face. “No! No, he’ll kill me if you get hurt on my watch.”

“Fine then. Are you coming to class with me then?”

He is. 

And it turns out having a raven on one’s shoulder isn’t so odd as all that. He gets used to it fast, and the looks he gets, but honestly it’s a persona he might have cultivated back in the fourteen nineties if he thought he could have gotten away with it. A brief flirtation with falconry didn’t work out when he realized he’d have to be training a new bird every decade. Maybe if he had a bird as immortal as Dream’s almost certainly is…

“You are immortal, right?” Hob asks.

“No. Sort of. I think it’s kind of like Dream. We can live forever but we can die, too.”

Hob pauses mid-stride. “Dream can die?”

“No. Morpheus can. Dream can’t.”

“Wait—wait. So he dies a new Dream pops up?”

“Pretty much. That’s what happened to me.”

“You woke up one day and you were a raven. What were you before?”

“Human. And let me tell you, it’s been a weird few months.”

A few months. “So what happened to the last raven?”

“We don’t talk about Jessamy." He makes an odd sound, a low titter. "Lucienne told me she went missing when Dream did, but I guess whatever happened to him, I couldn’t exist until he got his power back. He told me she died trying to save him.”

The image of it comes to him. A being locked in glass. A friend, dead. And all the time in the world to think about it. What had he told Dream? That he would have come for him, too? Hob closes his eyes. He is the fool.

“You should be with him,” Hob says. “If he won’t keep me as a friend, he at least needs you.”

Matthew clacks his beak. Silence reigns as Hob continues past the sign that indicates they're technically at the campus that occupies a few odd buildings around the block. 

“How long have you known him?” Matthew asks, after a time.

“A bit. Since the thirteen hundreds."

“Holy shit! Seriously?”

“Yeah. Look, I’ve got class. You can come in but only if you want to get photographed by sixty or so kids.”

“I’ll pass.” 

He flaps up to a tree and Hob tries not to be disappointed. It would have at least given his lecture on the two princes in the tower a little flare. Only one student falls asleep anyway, and Hob doesn’t mind it as much as he ought. Hob never wakes them now. Maybe Dream needs the sound of a friendly voice now and again, if that’s how it works. And if it isn’t, well, at least the kid is getting some rest.

And he likes this. Likes teaching kids, likes their enthusiasm, their silliness, their jokes and slang and the surprise—he would have told Dream that if he'd had the chance. Every day, they learn something new, and every day he's here, he learns a little something. It keeps him young by some definition, and isn't that why Dream kept coming around, he thought? Not just the loneliness; that wasn't fair. But god, isn't he lonely, after a hundred years in a cage? After an infinity of life without attachments. 

By the time he gets out of his lecture, he's decided he hates the word. Matthew is waiting for him after, perched on the back of a blackened bronze statue as if he’s a part of it. It’s the kind of overcast that precedes a real storm more than light mist. 

“Good wait?”

The raven bows his head and hops up to his place back on Hob’s shoulder.

“Can I ask you about him?” the raven queries after a long while.

“About Dream? I'm sure there's nothing I know about him that you don't.”

The click Matthew gives might be a snort. “How’d you become his friend?”

Hob laughs, a sound he hopes is self deprecating. “It took him six hundred years to tell me his name, so I don’t know. My good luck, I guess?” It was. It was good luck. In every damn way. “You know how… how bizarre it was? To have this stranger all in black and ghastly pale show up once a century to ask me about my days? Thought he was a devil at first, and then I thought he was the devil—”

“I’ve met Lucifer. They’re nothing alike.”

Well “Good, I suppose—”

“Dream is much worse.”

Hob barks a laugh. “Yeah, I might believe that. Then, oh, I don't know. I figured he was some other bored immortal. A vampire, maybe? A, a faerie. You should have seen him back then. Black robes, hair down his shoulders, big ruby at his neck. Eyeliner, I think, or he was getting less sleep then.”

“Oh, it was eyeliner. He just kind of magicks his clothes on.”

“So the hair is intentional?”

“If you were him, would you bother?”

“Guess not.” He sniffs. “Honestly if I looked like that, I’d probably go around naked all the time, just because I could.” Matthew stares at him, beak ajar. “Just facts. You know I’m right.”

“Yeah but there are things you don’t say.”

“When you’re six hundred and sixty seven you might not care either.” Give or take a year on the front end when no one was keeping track. Ironic how one doesn’t keep track when it really counts. Now that he’s got all the time in the world, he counts it by the hour. “So tonight when I sleep, if I dream, I can find him. We can talk.”

“Theoretically. But look, you seem nice so I’m going to level with you. When Dream gets in a mood…”

“I know.” He takes a deep breath of the damp air. There’s a dell of moss he used to sit in a few blocks from the spot he’s walking; the smell reminds him of it, though it’s been a car park for half a century now. The nostalgia always brings him home. So much he’s lost, places and people and possessions, names and lives and memories. Dream may be one of the last tangible wonders left to him that was there from the start. “I’ve got to try.”

“But do you?”

“Yes. I do. Look, I don’t know even the half of what he’s been through. This business about ruining things and mortal attachments," Hob throws up a hand, "whatever. I don’t care. He needs a friend. He needs one now. He’s—god. If I’d known where he was…”

It’s been years since Hob got truly angry and longer since he had a good reason to be. Anger is a compass, he heard once. Better to let it lead him where he’s needed most. “He was here, wean’t he. Close to the city. A hundred thirty years I spent tripping about doing jack all, moping about a fight, and he was here. What damn use am I to him now if he won't talk to me? Yes. I have to try. Whether he wants me to or not.”

Almost certainly the latter. 

Matthew’s wing brushes him as he stretches it. “You really like him.”

“Seems I do.” God knows why. Hob knows why, more like. A dozen, dozen reasons, but he lost that list, too. 

“Good luck.”

“I’ll need it.”

Matthew picks at the feathers beneath one wing and then sets a beady eye on him. “...I might be able to help.”

The bar isn't the same empty. He used to sit in it all afternoon in the mid-nineties,right after the construction was through but the opening was delayed and he had all the time in the world to doubt and regret and wonder, but mostly to watch the street outside and the lazy river. Acquiring the land was a nightmare, but it was good, too. Something he'd never done before. It gave him something to focus on. Learned about property law. Learned about restoration. Learned about all the things money can't apparently buy, no matter how much you throw into the ring. And he spent more than a few nights seated at the door telling himself he wasn't waiting for a familiar stranger to walk in, another man out of time and space, like him.

It was lonely. Damn lonely. The irony wasn't lost on him.

It's different, now. Waiting on someone he knows isn't coming. The drink in his hand has to be his fifth, sixth—he's lost count. So unlike him after so long, but it has to be the drink because there's no other reason he wouldn't remember how the night started. Something is tapping at the window. He raises the glass to his lips and tastes—sand.

"Let me in, idiot!" 

He spits and wipes his mouth. Sand, right. A dream. He's in the dreaming.

The tinkling sound of bells on a wind that's never come off the Thames in all his years filters through as Hob opens the door for the bird. It's hard going—like pushing against a heavy weight. 

Matthew slips in the door and onto his shoulder. "Okay. Now we just have to find Lucienne."

"Right. Easy. Where is she?" Hob glances around the empty Inn. A shiver chases up his back. The place looks all wrong, like it's been moved a foot to the left and painted over in the same colors.

"Through the door. Duh."

Hob steps through, and into a storm. 

Matthew flaps off his shoulder. "See? I told you." For a moment he thinks he's standing on an ocean suspended in time but it's sand—of course, it's sand, again, a desert of it but not soft dunes. The sand is caught in crests and waves, an ocean suspended in time. He doesn't want to be standing there when it starts moving again.

"This is a bit much. Dream. Morpheus! Please, I just want to talk."

"Don't call him! We need to get to Lucienne. She'll know what to do."

"I'm not here to talk to Lucienne. I'm here to talk to my friend." Hob picks a direction and starts walking. The only way out through. That's been true for all his days; no less true now. 

Matthew flaps along with him and finally seizes his shoulder in a claw grip, fighting against the wind for purchase. "This is bad. Can't you dream about something nicer?"

"I don't think so." He isn't even sure it's his dream but he's not going to say that. "Look, I can handle this."

"Okay. Okay, I'll get Lucienne. Don't go anywhere."

"I won't," Hob promises. Matthew hovers above him a moment and then beats up into the storm and out of sight. Hob resumes walking. It's not even the worst storm he's been in. Not even the worst storm in a desert. "Sand? Really, Sandman?" he mutters? "That's trite. Please don't make me wait another hundred years to apologize this time. Dream!"

The sand is so thick in the air he can't hear himself, can barely see. The darkness builds around him like a physical thing until it's complete.

And then, stillness.

Hob blinks the dust from his eyes. A snowglobe is suspended in the air ahead of him, but no.. The perspective is off. Hob steps forward and stumbles down steps he hadn't realized were there. At the bottom, he pauses.

There's no light in the room but the filter of sun from a glass window above the globe. And what he took to be snow settled at the bottom of the glass is not snow at all. His eyes adjust. It's a body: palest skin stretched over sinew stretched over bone. Hob approaches, trying not to make a sound, and almost stumbles into the moat of water around the platform. When he looks up again, he's close enough to see it, the head of black hair. That mess of black hair. 

"Mercy," he prays. 

He knows where he is now. He knows what this is. He knows whose dream he's walking through, if it isn't his, and it isn't. Even in his nightmares, he didn't imagine his friend hadn't been granted even the grace of his clothes. 

He's small like this. The orb of glass isn’t as large as he imagined it would be. More industrial, less romantic, the nuts and bolts of keeping a being born of a concept captive for a hundred years. Nothing could be more ugly, more utilitarian. 

But the worst part is the way Dream is lying there at the bottom. Not cradled in the curve of it but convex against it, as if he refuses to settle into the space, his knees bent oddly, his torso twisted, one arm folded beneath him and one splayed out across the glass, his long fingertips pressed to it with their long, preternaturally perfect nails. 

He can't tell if Dream is awake inside it. He doesn't have the courage to duck down and look at his face, which is pressed now between the flex of his own arm and the iron strut holding the glass. Instead, Hob sets his hand against it, as he imagined doing. In his mind, he could have broken it with a tap.

“Is this what you would have freed me of?” Dream asks, low and rough. His voice comes not from inside the glass but from without, beside and behind Hob.

“I would have.” He’s proud his voice doesn’t waver.

“You might have tried.”

“No. I would have. Can't you—can’t you just trust me?”

“I trust you,” Dream says faintly, and he might actually mean it. “But I do not trust myself.”

Dream steps forward, to the space beside Hob. This image of him is unclothed too, but too inhuman for anything so banal as modesty. He puts his own bone-thin, bone-white hand to the glass, a twin image of the thing within. 

“I could have left at any time,” he murmurs in a threadbare voice. “I could have conjured some dream of words and convinced my captors of my compliance. Made a promise I had no intention of keeping. Death visited me once but in my pride and in my rage I had not the vision to see her, and so she left me. What more could she do for one who had chosen his cage? After a decade of captivity, a promise was asked of me: simply that I not seek vengeance.”

His hand falls from the glass. 

“But I could not accept the terms. Not even with a lie. And I could not give them what they wanted. Wealth, power…” He looks aside, to Hob. “Immortality.”

Hob’s breath catches. It had never occurred to him to ask for the nature of his gift. If he was the only one. This is tacit answer.

“So, you see: I am the reason I was kept here. In my pride I have made error after error, banished dreams and loosed nightmares, hurt those who cared for me and the dreaming most.”

A heartbeat passes. 

“I cannot afford to trust myself. I cannot walk a path where I might misstep again.” 

Looking at it now, this is too cruel. Hob wants to grab him and shake him and say, this wasn’t a choice. This wasn’t his fault. Capture, loneliness, starvation, solitude—whatever other horrors. They weren’t earned. And certainly not deserved. But Dream would no more listen to him about this than he has about anything.

“You trust me,” says Hob instead. 

Dream nods once, surely, slowly.

“Then can you trust me when I say that I trust you?” You'll make more mistakes, he wants to say. You'll make a thousand and a thousand after that and the same ones over again and that’s existence, when you’re stuck living and have a conscience to go with it. “Every day I find a new way to mess it all up. I’ve made an art out of it. But you know why I’ve stuck around this long? Not because it's fun. Not because of you. I’ve stayed because there's always a way to fix it. Even if it takes me a hundred years or so to get it right. I can always change. Always.”

“I wonder you would be so circumspect if your mistakes had the capacity to ruin worlds.”

“Being my friend is not going to-to ruin the world.” He waves his hand as if to say there: that's the world and your silly fears too. “If it was, it would have by now. Why are you so scared?”

The look Dream gives him this time is a definitive glare. Something dark whispers through the air. “Why am I scared?” he asks, as if it’s a word he's hearing for the first time and can't imagine the meaning. “I am the King of Dreams. The Lord of Nightmares. As the first creature capable of sleep closed its eyes and dreamed, I was there. Why am I scared? Why, are you not?”

But no. That's not going to work. Not here, not now, not ever. Hob turns to him. “You think I care you're—you’re some nightmare king. Royalty doesn't mean shit to me, not anymore. The queen slept at my house, remember? I respect you because you're my friend. We are friends." He emphasizes this, the reality of it, offering it forward with a bullish bowing of his head. "I’ve seen mud and death, and death in mud, and now I’ve met Death. No matter how bad it got, I was always there at the end. Always had to pull myself up out of the muck and walk out and find myself a meal and a hot bath. You don’t scare me.” 

Maybe nothing does anymore. Not really. But even as he thinks this, he eyes the glass again, the catatonic figure within, and realizes that isn't true.

“This is where they kept you.” Dream has no reply; it's a dumb question. “Do you dream about it?”

“I do not dream.”

“Then this is—”

“A memory.” He turns to the entrance. A bird wings in, white shouldered and dark. “A memory I cannot escape.”

And Hob knows then what's about to happen. He knows, even as he sees the figure caught in glass rise and raise his hand to greet his friend, even as he hears the quiet steps on the stairs behind them. He reaches out and grabs his Dream by the shoulder. Pulling him in on impulse and instinct, Hob turns him away before the gunshot and the burst of red against the glass and gentle, terrible sound of flesh and broken bone hitting the painted stone floor.

It’s a calculated error on his part. Morpheus is very close now, looking at him and not at that death, looking at him unreadably, almost as if in offense at his boldness but for the lining of tears Hob has come to realize are the surest expression of any emotion. Rage and sorrow, anger and terror.

“You don't have to watch that,” Hob tells him. “Not again.”

There are more footsteps on the stairs. Someone running in. More than one body. Hob has no eye to spare for them. “I’m sorry,” he offers.

“For what?” Dream asks, a study in extracting all emotion from any two words.

“For this, happening to you.”

“Was it of your design?” His mouth is set as close to a sneer as he can get it.

“People can be sorry for bad things happening to people they l—they care about. And please don't tell me you don't need my care. You have it anyway.”

“You and Death are too alike.”

It’s an odd thing to be told. Behind, there’s shouting. A gathering of a body and blood-wet feathers. Dream closes his eyes. Hob takes the chance to look at the scene playing out behind his friend. The figure in the sphere is crying openly. From this angle, he can see it all, the tears dripping from his chin in disconcerting stillness, in silence.

Hob's hand is still on his bare, bird-boned shoulder. It's nothing to drag him into a proper hug. The body against his might as well be a statue for all that it gives, but it's been damn many years since Hob had a cause to hug anyone and rarely this close with this little clothing between them. Dream's not all that cold, after all. A moment passes and the dream—the memory—wisps to sand around Hob, and they’re standing in a desert again, not fraught this time but a calm emptiness cast blue with eternal night.

As easy as that, Dream sinks into him. 

One arm comes up about Hob’s waist, at first in a loose hold and then like steel. This close, he can hear Dream breathe. He hadn’t realized a creature like this had the need for it. The sound is a little wet, a little rasping.

If he needs to breathe, how did he for all that time? If he needs to breathe, does he need to eat, too? If a man doesn't die but doesn't eat…

They stay that way a long time. A long damn time. Dream's hand fisted against his back, his own arms curved awkwardly around one boney shoulder and the hard edge of his bare ribcage as it rises and falls and rises and falls, was breath calmer than the last until he can't feel them at all anymore and the body in his arms is returned it its eerie quiet. Only then does Dream release him. He unwinds his body from Hob's and steps away, but not far. 

"It wasn't your fault, you know," Hob says because he needs to.

Dream grants him a last look before he turns his eye to their surroundings. "It was."

It is the best he's going to get. On a whim Hob pulls his jacket off and offers it to Dream who he expects to disdain it but who can apparently take a handout when offered by an old friend. He doesn't put it on but grips it about his shoulders like a cape, keeping it clasped tight across his chest with pale bone fingers that look more like claws. It occurs to him it's a concession to Hob's modesty and not his—false, because Hob lost his four hundred years ago—but if that's enough to keep him warm then Hob will take it. "Thank you," he says. Not for that jacket. Even Hob can tell that much. After a breath he adds, "I owe you an apology again."

"You don't. But why did you run?"

"My last entanglement ended… poorly." Knowing him, it's a vast underestimation.

"When was that?" Something is chewing on him like an old bone; Hob tells himself it's not jealousy.

Dream's mouth opens and closes as if he's trying to decide if he should tell the truth, and then he says, "Ten thousand years ago. I brought a city to ruin, and a mortal. And nearly much more than that."

Ten thousand damn years. "And how long did that take?"

It takes Dream so long to answer that Hob wonders if he's trying to demonstrate it, but then he says with some degree of chagrin that might be the closest to embarrassed he gets, "A night."

It's his truest test of compassion that he doesn't reply to that. The reality of it is too sad, too much. One night, ten thousand years of regret. Nothing human could bear that. But at the same time relief courses through him, not because their entanglement has lasted several more nights than that. Maybe next time Death is about, he'll ask her what else his immortality can buy him. "I'm sorry.

Dream looks away. An open wound still, it seems. He's composed of them. Hob shouldn't have let him get too far away to touch. 

Hob sighs. "You told me once there was a price for questions, you know. But you never had me pay."

"The furies. They can answer any question but ask a steep price," Dream explains and explains nothing at all. Was he joking?

"You're not a fury."

Dream smiles. His first in some time. No less valuable for the wait. "No."

"Then what's your price?"

"Forgive me, when I misstep. Death once told me I was selfish. It's true."

"Only once?" Hob jokes, but it misses. "I forgive you. Just don't miss our next appointment. Dinner, maybe? Next week?" Hob winces at his own forwardness, at the way it sounds like he's a college student trying to pick someone up outside of class. God the number of times he's had to hear that secondhand. "Or whenever you're up for it." Bad, bad, bad.

But Dream only smiles at him again, bright and quick. "I suppose should it prove world-ending, I'll at least have less work to do."

"See? Always a silver lining."

"My Lord?"

Hob turns to find Matthew and the most impeccably dressed librarian he's ever seen walking towards them at a fast clip. "Oh my god," Matthew says. "What did you do to him?"

"Nothing," Dream intercedes, sounding a bit offended and pulling the jacket tighter around himself though it's doing nothing to cover anything below the thigh. "It seems my control of the Dreaming is still in flux."

Matthew is, however, still glaring at him.

"My Lord, is this…" The woman turns to Hob. "Are you Hob Gadling?"

"The very one."

"Oh! It is a pleasure to meet you." This seems genuine for some ungodly reason. "I am Lucienne," she introduces herself. "Welcome."

"He's not staying," Dream says quickly. "Lucienne. Matthew." Dream nods off toward a long wall set far in the distance, one that Hob hadn't noticed—or hadn't been there a moment before.

"Of course, my Lord." Lucienne sets off with a last nod to Hob and another true smile. Matthew joins her with a last glare.

My Lord, Hob mouths.

Dream does have the grace to look awkward about that but he turns back to Hob and pulls his free hand from under his makeshift cape. "Sleep well, Hob,'' he murmurs.

"Sleep what?"

Sand spins from between Dream's fingers and Hob's breathed it in before the offense of having it blown in his face can register. He'll wonder later if the sensation of being caught in thin arms and lowered to rest was real or part of the dream, or what the difference is in the sum. Either way, he wakes with sand in his hair and his own jacket spread over his chest, warm and smelling of moss decades gone, a storm just passed, and some indefinable thing he has to bury his face in the pressed wool and breathe to name. When it comes to him at last he raises his head to the quiet dark and laughs. 

What else? Dream.

Chapter Text

One takes for granted the presence of those things which refuse to change. Hob Gadling is one. Sure as tides and time and stubborn, too, maybe more than either, and this is why it's such a surprise when he’s late to their meeting.

Dream can count on one hand the number of moments in his life he’s been left waiting for someone. An hour passes. Two. Really nothing compared to a century in a box, but an odd itch starts up at the back of his neck, a raise of hair that’s uncomfortably human. The usual waitress gives him an odd look. 

“He not coming?” she asks. 

Dream can imagine no answer that wouldn’t invite further question. “I suppose not,” he says at last. 

The corner of her mouth tugs up in sympathy or in pity.  “Doesn’t seem like him.”

“You know him so well?”

“No, no, I just mean—you two had a good thing going.”

A good thing going. Yes. Maybe so. He searches his memory for any slight, for any suggestion of a reason he might be sitting here alone but comes up empty. Even if there were some transgression, Hob keeps few grudges against him. It leaves a sour taste at the back of Dream’s mouth; his friend wouldn’t be absent willingly. Of course he wouldn’t. Not without sending some word. 

Yet, no word comes. 

When the night is heavy and the bar is near to closing he takes his leave. There is a place to search for wayward friends but he's never dared to, boy for this particular friend. It might ruin the game to see what a man like him dreamed of, he thought at first and then it was politeness. All dreams compose him but it's one thing to have arbit all dreams and another to seek out only one, only to see its dreamer. This is not a thing a friend would do.

He does it, now. 

As he steps out the door of the Inn, Matthew wings to his shoulder. “What happened—“ he starts, but the brush of sand from the tips of Dream’s fingers steals his words. 

The sand he thought once was like his subconscious, the part of him he cannot be possessed of and still take any form at all. It knows what he refuses to. He sets his mind to doe-brown eyes and a spreading smile and the sand whispers around him into a swirl. But there is a wrongness within it; it spins and spins and it isn’t the gentle brushing of some evening’s breeze urging him forward but a storm. It twists in itself and eddies like the great cyclones of wind and dust that scour other planets. It steals his breath. He raises a hand to cover the bird perched on his shoulder and bows his head against the gale and knows before it settles that he hasn’t found what he’s looking for. 

The last of the grains fall from the air like sand settling at the bottom of an hourglass, and he is standing in the Dreaming, with the gates of his own domain ahead of him and Hob Gadling nowhere at all. 

Something that cannot be panic prickles at his skin. 

“Dream?” Matthew asks. 

“I cannot find him. He is… hidden from me.” He’s gone. This last he cannot say. 

It can’t be true. Death would tell him. And Dream recalls the two of them across from each other in that bar, but it can't be because these are the only two people in the world, perhaps in many worlds, perhaps in this universe, that care for him for no reason but care, and they would not could not keep this from him.

And the Sunless Lands are still somewhere. Even in death, dreams live on. No. He's not gone. He's missing.

Dream forces a steady breath into his seeming of lungs and the bird on his shoulder presses his beak into the hair at Dream’s temple, sorting through it. The gesture is comfort and calming. Dream thinks.

If Hob is not in his own dreams, he must be in someone else’s. 

This time he closes his eyes. The sand has it's power but he's learned his lesson about keeping power in objects instead of his own hands. He casts it out and himself with it until he isn't Morpheus and the sickly thud of his body’s heart behind its bones but is only Dream and only dreams come to him. 

Time becomes immaterial. He finds a shag of brown hair in the dreams of a boy who wants to be a writer who took history on a whim and because it seemed like something a writer would do and Hob is there at the front of the classroom with a voice deeper than it is in real life. This is a dream, the boy knows it is one, because his professor hasn’t been to class in two days and the substitute puts everyone to sleep. He finds those hands in a dream of a dog Hob has made a habit of petting outside the cafe he gets his second coffee on Tuesdays at, and he finds those eyes in the dreams of a woman who works with him and wishes he would give her more than a smile and he finds that voice in the death sweet dreams of an old woman who knew him once, like a friend.

And there, in the quiet, curious work-harried nap of a nightshift nurse who can’t imagine why no one has visited the handsome man in Room 237, Dream finds him.

He opens his eyes. This time, the sand knows where to take him. 

In a bird’s whisper, Matthew says, “Fuck.”

The word is crude and apt. An alien emotion is swelling within Dream’s chest and he cannot speak past it, would not know what to say if he could because Robert Gadling has never in all their acquaintance looked like this. 

Someone has washed him and clean bands of white wrap his forehead. A patch covers a portion of his jaw. The hand lying over top of the sheets is bruised and taped with long thin tubing, the purpose of which he cannot begin to guess. Hospitals are not his favorite of human inventions but there is a kindness to them, to their existence. In not a thousand years did he think to be grateful for that but he is now as he watches the rise and fall of the chest beneath the sheets. 

After a moment’s watch, Dream takes the chair by his bed, and then his Hob’s hand, and thumbs over the point of his pulse to feel life beating there, strong. 

Matthew hops down to the bar at the side of the bed and cocks his head. “He looks worse than usual.” 

Dream opens his mouth but he still can’t find words to force pass his chest. Could it be that in all his long years, the only boon sustaining this man was luck, and the Devil’s own. Time has kept his features young and Death has kept him living, but neither preclude injury. Neither keep him from all the little ways humans might break. 

Rarely has it occurred to him to wonder what age time froze his friend at, but younger than he thought. Far younger. Not long past thirty years and human lives are already so short. He’s young, Dream thinks, and can think nothing else. The oldest man alive and eons younger than Dream and fragile. Frail and faint as a cobweb stretched across all his long years. Dream warned him. Even the strong-boned hand in his is only mineral and marrow, easily crushed.

Humans, he is reminded, are made of dust.

Dream realizes his breathing his odd and he’s holding the hand too tight—far too tight. So tight that it pulls against his grip and then Hob is blinking and wincing. His head rolls to the side and it takes a long while for his eyes to open all the way. As they do, he groans. “Wha’ happened?”

What indeed. A nurse walking by sees him waking. She doesn’t cast a glance at Dream and won’t; he is shadows to her, a place she won’t look, a chair she won’t be sure was pulled to the bed at all when next she enters. “Good morning,” she offers, though it isn’t morning at all. “Good rest?” She hands him water, checks charts, performs the minutiae of care that Dream finds himself again grateful for, the feeling so strange. 

At last Hob’s vision settles on Dream. His notice is her notice. The hands, Dream still holding is as if cradling a relic—easily broken, infinitely valuable, irreplicable.

“Who’re you?” Hob asks. “Is that a bird?”

A great something falls through Dream then, and down through the floor, far and away. He is frozen. 

“Excuse me?” he asks in a soft breath.

Hob eyes their twined fingers. The nurse does, too, and then Matthew, but evidently the loss of a man’s mind is worth more consideration. “You might have some fog from the accident. You’ve been out for days—you took a good tap on the head. I’ll tell the doctor. Can I get you anything?” she asks. “Did the man out front say you could have a bird in here?”

Dream takes too long to realize she’s speaking to him, and then has no answer. She gives Dream a look like she thinks he ought to eat. Everyone does that lately. And it’s not that he isn’t hungry, isn’t starving. It is an acquiescence to what he ought to be, to something inhuman, when all he seems to make are human mistakes. Hunger in his cage made him. The hollow constant eating away the pit of his stomach, keeping him from any facsimile of peace in that place. Compounding the weakness of his capture, the summons that tore through him, the loss of so much essential to his power. Hunger is part of him as much as his power.

It yawns inside him, and it is nothing beside the new hollow. Who’re you?

“I’ll bring jello,” she says definitively, and leaves them.

Hob is still staring at him, the open kindness of his eyes undiminished. Is this how he looks at everyone, Dream wonders. 

“I am your friend,” he answers at last.

Hob, to his credit, has settled into the grip on his hand. Always good at adapting to newness. “Friends, are we.” He eyes Dream with a look he hasn’t given in five hundred years at least. 

“For a very long time.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“No. You missed our date. I sought you, but it took me time to find you. Your dreams—you were hidden from me.”

Hob gives him a funny look and then makes a study of Dream’s face. Dream wonders what he finds there that settles peace over his features. “Sure I wouldn’t have missed it on purpose.”

“No. You would not.” 

“What’s your name? I’m sure it’ll come back to me.” 

“Morpheus,” he says, though the name can hardly fit in the beige walls and Hob wrinkles a brow at that but seems to decide with usual good humor to take it in turn. 

“That's a mouthful. What's the bird’s?”

“Matthew.” 

“Matthew?” he repeats in incredulity. “Wait, what’s mine?”

“Robert,” Dream answers after a delicate pause.

“Oh, don't tell me it's Bob for short.”

“Hob, actually.”

He groans again. “That's so much worse. You should have lied to me.” Matthew twitches oddly on the bed, but seems to have decided that subjecting the man to a talking bird is too much for the moment. “Hob? No. Please call me Robert.” 

Dream raises his brows. Robert. Dream called him that once, but when they became friends he thought it too distant. Besides, to be the sole keeper of a memory, of friend’s name, was something precious, though he hadn’t thought of it like that then. 

Hob looks aside to him. “You don’t have to.”

“It's fine.”

A woman in a long coat walks in then with two cups of something blue that cannot possibly be meant for human consumption. She, too, misses Dream at first, but frowns an instant when she sets her burden down, as if she can't recall why anyone wanted this man to have two. “How are you feeling?”

“Good,” Hob tells her. “Great. Except I can’t remember what happened. Or him.” He gestures at Dream. “Seems pretty memorable.”

Again, the spell is broken. She frowns and looks at their hands as the nurse did. He cannot let go now. “Oh, forgive me.” She frowns and sets the cups down gingerly. “You did take a hit. It might take some time. We’ll keep an eye on your progress.” Again, she looks at Dream, like she wants to ask. 

“What happened to him? Specifically.” 

“You’ll have to ask the officers. They’ll be in to take his statement. My understanding is an accident.”

“An accident,” Dream repeats, letting frustration color his voice. “What kind of accident?”

Her frown deepens. “A car accident. A pileup. It was on the news.”

Dreams of steel, of twisted metal smoking, rubber burning. The slide of gasoline across hard top. Yes. He knows now. It slots into place when he knows what he’s looking for; the images were projected on the television, on the little screens they stare at and embedded in hundred nervous, eager, voyeuristic minds. Yes, he knows.

Hob squeezes his fingers. “It’s all right. I lived, eh?” 

Dream might laugh. It is actually all right, but he doesn't know that. Ever the optimist. 

The doctor leaves them to their shared space and the little cups of hard, sweet water that Hob insists is food after all, and Dream attempts to not be offended that he remembers this, of all things. Dream concedes to a bite and sets aside to let Matthew have his way with it, and then there is nothing to distract him from Hob’s regard. 

“So…” he begins, and finishes, a prompt Dream is clearly supposed to know how to follow. When he doesn’t, Hob adds, “Who am I?”

“I’ve told you.”

“You’ve told me my name. That’s nothing. Do I have a family?”

“No. Not living.”

“And friends? Other than you, I mean,” though he lifts his eyes in some common humor Dream does not know.

“You might.”

“You don’t know? What—okay. what do you know about me then?”

What does he know about Hob Gadling. “If I had years, I am sure I couldn’t tell all you all there is to know about Robert Gadling.” He would not know where to start. Dream can no longer meet his gaze, can no longer conceive the bounds of this loss. Selfish, of course—nothing has been lost in truth. He’s alive. That should be enough.

A hand curves over his cheek. “I’ll remember,” Hob says then. “I’ll remember you. I will.” When Dream looks at him, kindness has gathered his features in a familiar set. 

Dream wonders how many times he was being consoled by this man without knowing the shape of it. He swallows; his body finds pain in the attempt, and he know he has been here too long. 

Dream takes the hand from his cheek and stands but keeps his grip on that hand of human bone and human flesh and tape and tube. He drags his thumb across across the mess of it all as Hob’s expression turns to panic. “You’re leaving?”

“Only for now.” Dream stills him with a look. 

Hob’s gaze is near doleful. “Sorry again—about the date. Think I could get a rain check? Unless you count the, uh, jello.”

Dream doesn’t, of course. “Perhaps,” he says, and means yes. The periodic care of things outside his domain is still new to him. He might spend a decade creating a nightmare and think not at all of the world beyond the gates of Dreaming, but he will be back. At last he releases Hob’s hand and ignores the way his hand feels odd and empty without it. 

Matthew hops to his shoulder and as they walk to the door he says over Dream’s shoulder, “Try not to get dumber while we’re gone.”

“It talks?” 

Dream strides into the Dreaming with a wind at his back and some directionless mass at the center of him urging him on and nowhere, as if there is some place he might walk and something he might do to fix this. Gods are oft forgotten; it is a common enough thing. He wonders how many of them were friends with mortals, or if this is a mistake only he is fool enough to make. 

Lucienne is waiting for him within the throne room, typical composure betrayed by a nervous set to her shoulders—his late return, his ascension to the castle. She always know somehow. “A good outing, my Lord?”

Replies come to him one after the other, and they all sound in his head like nothing she deserves to hear. He stares up at his throne, rebuilt in glory, and sets himself on the steps before it. “What do you know of memory?” he asks at last. 

Matthew adds, “His human forgot him.”

He can feel the looks she exchanges with Matthew behind him and Matthew says only. “Idiot got himself hurt.”

No one else would note the change in Lucienne’s demeanor. Dream does not know what else he would find it in him to say that would not sound like whining or sorrow, neither of which suit him according to Death. 

“He was hurt?” she asks. “But I thought Death…”

“My sister preserves him in life. But immortality does not absolve us from injury, does it not.” The knife wound in his hand smarted for days after the rent sealed. It hurt considerably less than this does. “He has forgotten me.” And he wonders if the surprise of the agony of putting this to voice is conveyed inn the telling. 

“He has amnesia.” This is the word for it, and she says it with a kindness, a sympathy he hasn’t earned. “So who does he think you are? Who does he think he is?”

“I told him his name.”

“Is that all you told him? My Lord,” she adds though it isn’t an expression of deference but as close as she gets to admonition. “He thinks he’s mortal,” she says to clarify. “He thinks you’re mortal.” She closes her eyes, takes a breath, and settles her hands in mid air as if smoothing away her own emotion. “You must tell him.”

“He’s still in the hospital,” Dream says defensively. Hospital, like it’s a word he says all the time, a word they all know the gravity of. “Do you know of anything that could cause this—loss?”

“Aside from blunt force trauma?” she asks and then must realize she’s overstepped. “There are stories. There are stories for everything, my Lord. Artifacts that take memories, poisons and curses and demons—”

His look stills her. “Demons?”

“Nice work,” mutters Matthew from the side. 

“Rare stories. Mostly complete fabrications. Would Hob Gadling really become involved with a demon, though?” 

Not willingly. But he has made enemies. It would be passing easy to determine where he’s been spending his time in the world of humans, for all that he spent so little of it there for so long before his captivity. And his enemies are many. Lucifer and Desire and the countless others he has wounded in his long life, or slighted, or who covet power in their way. After all—what did he do to Burgess to warrant his capture. No. He was fatally optimistic to assume something so precious would go ignored for so long. 

“My Lord,” she all but wrings her hands, though she is far too dignified for that. “Do you think it advisable to return to Hell so soon after your last—visit?”

“I’m not going to Hell.” But he stands and his hand is already within his coat, reaching for the bag of sand and for his power. 

She tries once more. “It pains me to say this, but he is human. This could be natural.” As decay is natural to man.

That's worse. Nothing he can bend to his will, make right, or transform. “Perhaps. But if it is not.”

Lucienne nods. Matthew wings to his arm. “Where are we going? Please don’t say Hell again.”

It may come to that. That he would walk into Hell for this human is not lost on him for its foolishness, but it has not come to that yet. “We’re going to talk to an old friend.”

Friend is a stretch of the definition. Johanna sees him waiting at the corner and turns on her heel, but she only gets to the end of the street before she turns back, the click click of her heeled boots beating out her anger before she’s close enough for Dream to see it in her eyes.

“Hello,” she says in a tone as clipped as the tap of her boots. “What is it you want then?” But her tone is colored more with curiosity than anger. 

“Have you ever heard of a demon that can steal a memory?”

She frowns and leans back from him almost. “Steal a memory. No. Demons deal in deals, not theft. What have you forgotten?”

“It’s not my memory.” 

This grabs her in full. “Oh. Well then. What makes you think it’s a demon that’s done it?” He hopes his lack of answer will make it seem like he’s keeping a secret other than his own hope. At his silence she only nods. “You’ve caught me on a good day. I’m free for the afternoon. I could come take a look, if you like. Where are we headed?”

He realizes it’s not past noon; time passes differently in the Dreaming. Either a full day since he visited Hob or mere hours. Likely the former. When he pulls a handful of sand her eyes get wide and she takes a stumbling step back before he remembers the last time she saw his sand and under what circumstance. He lets it dissipate from his fingers. “We can walk.”

She falls into step beside him. The good weather hardly matches his mood; the Dreaming is much better at conceding to his emotion. After a time she nudges his shoulder, and then steps away as if embarrassed. “And I thought you were morose the last time we met. What’s happened?”

Morose. It isn’t in him to lie. “Something I care for has been lost.”

“Not your sand this time, I see.” 

The distance to the hospital is not all that far. When they stand across from it, understanding comes over her. Pity eclipses curiosity. She turns to him at the crosswalk, a mirror of his pain across her features, but she says nothing. Not on the walk in or on the elevator she silently operates for him when he gives the room number in quiet syllables. 

Whatever she’s expecting to see when they get to the room, it isn’t what she finds. 

Hob is sitting up this time, the black plastic device for operating the television in one hand and a magazine propped on his knees. At Dream’s entrance he smiles and a knot he had no notion he’d been tying in his chest unravels at once in the unbridled joy of that grin. “There you are,” Hob says. 

Dream could almost fall into the room. But he makes himself measure his steps. “Hello,” he says, unable to keep the adoration from his voice, unable to try. 

Johanna is still frozen at the threshold. Dream motions to her with a quiet introduction. 

“Johanna Constantine,” Hob repeats. “You know, I think you do look familiar. Are we friends?”

To remember a creature he met centuries ago in the shadow of her inherited appearance but to have no memory of one much closer. It reminds Dream why they’re there; a loss of memory so specific must be targeted. There can be no other reason, be it demon or some other ill. It’s within his fixing. To Dream, Hob says, “Oh, don't look at me like that. I have been trying, you know. Come sit down. I’ll have the nurse bring you something. Water? Crackers?”

“This one hasn’t been bringing you proper food?” Johanna asks, taking the doctor’s stool as Dream takes the proper chair, closer. 

“He hasn’t offered.”

One could write novels in the looks Johanna is casting between them. “I was sorry to hear about your accident,” she lies smoothly. 

“Ruined my car. Thing is burnt to a char, I hear, you but you know. Lucky to be out of it in one piece, so I’m not complaining.” He taps his head, where the bandage still has his hair pasted down oddly. “Well. Except for the, you know. Have you told her?” He reaches out then as casually as if he’s done it a thousand times and offers his open palm to Dream, who can do nothing but take it and hold it and mean every bit of the gratitude that comes over him in the heat of that touch. 

Johanna says, “Oh my god.”

Dream sneers at her. 

“Oh! I mean. Shouldn’t we say a—a prayer?” 

Hob gives her a look of sheer panic and then turns the same on Dream, who has only the loosest conception of how one tests for demons. He shrugs one shoulder and then Johanna is saying her words in their esoteric Latin. Dream has never understood how a simply language could have such desperate power, but as with all it is the belief that give sit such power. If Lucifer believes in the laws that govern his people, it is so. 

The recitation is short at least. At no point does Hob begin to smoke or transform; at no point does he clutch his head in a sudden fit of memory. Dream watches him watch Johanna at each moment. The subtle agony of what he’s being made to sit through is the only sign of discomfort. 

Johanna is watching, too. As she finishes, she meets Dream’s eyes the the subtlest shake of her head. 

“Are we, ah, religious?” Hob asks him. 

“You are. Sometimes. Or were.”

“What changed?”

“I don’t know. I never asked.”

“Do you believe?”

“In most things.”

“That's quite new agey.”

“New agey?” Dream repeats, ignoring the laugh Johanna almost stifles. “I suppose you’ve always liked new things. You welcome change. Thrive in it, as few do.”

“And you?” His eyes are almost amber in the afternoon’s light. The shade of something sun-warmed, old, well-loved. 

Dream wishes they were alone. “I’ve tried to learn. You’ve tried to teach me.”

Hob exhales softly, a sound of understanding, and Dream wishes he knew precisely what this man understands of him. A bright fear, a hope: he knows more of Dream than Dream knows of himself.

No—he did. No longer.

The silence that settles then is a misery. Johanna clears her throat after a time. “I should head out. Glad to see you in one piece,” she says to Hob as if they really are the oldest of friends.  

Dream nods and rises. “I’ll see you off.”

She waits until they’re far enough down the hallway to be well past earshot before she turns to him. “If a demon had its way with him, I can’t see any sign of it. And you can tell with this sort of thing. Your— friend hasn’t sold his memory to a demon, and near as I can see, no one’s sold it for him.”

“Constantine. Your discretion.”

She waves. “Yeah, yeah. I won’t say a word. What you did for Rachel. That was… I owe you.” Better to be owed than to be used, and he knows enough of this woman to know that a mind like hers leaves few other options. “Anyway, I’m glad you have someone. Makes you a little more like us, doesn’t it?”

“I am not like you.”

“But you are,” she says as they reach the elevator. “I mean, if you can love a human.”

And yet humans are composed of so much deserving of love. The beauty of a song well played, the artifice of their dreams and the grace of their kindness. The delight of their unpredictability. The ferocious joy of living without end, really living, every moment of it. This is not an accusation he can deny. Love, yes. He loves. He did not for a great long time, but how could he not come to it, in his way? In his grudging moments and his glory. 

He inclines his head the barest degree. 

She nods. “You take good care of him. Don't go getting trapped in anymore basements. He won't wait for you.” The elevator opens for her. She steps inside.

“He’s waited centuries for me.”

She blinks at him and blinks again, some emotion he’s not yet human enough to read playing there. But she has nothing else to say. The elevator door closes on that expression and she is gone. And Dream is left in this beige hall, in this temple to human kindness and ingenuity and sorrow, now a part of it.

Artifacts, Lucienne said. Poisons and curses.

At the door of the room, Matthew is standing on Hob’s shoulder, the two of them reading the magazine together. There is no artifact in that room. No poison, no curse. There is only a human made of his breakable human pieces and his thinning luck.

The two of them see Hob home that evening. He’s in perfect health, the doctors say, and each time they do Hob looks to him as if this is a thing he should be sorry to hear. He remembers where he lives, and he remembers how to hail a cab and it’s only Matthew’s whispered advice that gets Dream through the ritual of paying for it. He remembers the Inn and the particular way he has to jiggle the key in the lock to get in the door—but he doesn’t remember that he built that room, built the whole building, to wait for a friend he had no reason to think would return to him. 

Dream wants so desperately to take him by the shoulders and tap his forehead to Hob’s, to force his way into that mind and search out the part of him that was Dream’s alone. But in the end he can do nothing but say his goodbye at the door and trudge his way down the stairs and off along the river walk, the sole keeper of the memory of what the Wharf looked like when it was and field and farm, a bend in the river and no more, and little copses of forest.

“It’s good it’s not a demon, right?” Matthew asks. 

“I won’t make you return to Hell.” Yet.

“I’m not scared! I’m saying it’s good, isn’t it?”

He mulls the shape of his sorrow. “I’ve exhausted my options.”

“You could wait.”

“Wait,” he quotes. “I suppose.”

And so he waits.

Patience is not his best virtue. It runs from him. All the more when he has nothing to do with his time. 

“I can go watch him again,” Matthew offers. “You want me to do that?”

In two weeks, he’s seen Hob a half a dozen times, and Hob has seen him half that. He attempted to busy himself in the Library, aiding with a minor reorganization effort before Lucienne expressed in the most forgiving of terms that he might busy himself literally anywhere else and she be happier for it. 

“No.”

“But, sir, have you ever been to a class?”

“Only once.” But the dreams and nightmares of students are enough to fill several Dreamings all on their own. He knows something of classrooms; as much as he knows of anything humans fear. 

Nowhere with Hob Gadling could be so terrifying. The lecture hall is a small one, old wood with tiered seats that manages to look elegant. Dream seats himself in the back and then recalls the last time he had cause to do so and the grotesquery of that time and memory is unfitting of this place. He leans instead, against the back wall, and listens to Hob’s wide syllables as he describes recent history. A now familiar jealousy that Hob remembers this and not himself courses through him; he doesn’t have the will to quash it—though he could never admit to being jealous over some Margaret or the other.

Hob notices him almost immediately and spares him a wave. He glances at his watch. “You know what, you’ve got a test next week, so why don’t I let you all out early today?” The low din of notebooks being shoved away floods the room. “I know you’ll all use this time to study!” Hob shouts over the noise and waves Dream down the steps. 

Dream makes a concerted effort to ignore the stares he gets. Hob pulls him in with a motion Dream thinks is going to be a handshake until Hob makes it into a one-armed hug. This gathers them more stares. 

“Everything okay?” he asks.

“Okay?”

“Yes. Why are you here? I mean—do you usually come here?”

“Sometimes,” Dream lies. No—insinuates, accurately. He was here earlier in the week, but only to check in. “I wanted to make sure all was well.”

“I’m no about to keel over.” His hand is still gripped around Dream’s forearm. He releases it but they’re no less close. “I’m fine,” Hob says, for him only. “You worry too much.” 

Dream resists the urge to remind him of why that might be the case, searching his face. But it’s true—he’s no worse for it. Even the mark on his forehead has nearly faded. Dream brushes his hair back from it to see the extent. Not wide. So small a wound and it’s taken so much from him. It still beggars belief. 

Hob’s gaze slides to the side, and Dream steps back when he realizes they have a small audience of lingering students. They scatter at his look. 

Hob laughs at this. “I should invite you back next class. They might actually pay attention.” Whatever this means is lost on Dream. He waits as Hob gathers his notes and joins him on the walk. Late summer looks good on him; he’s down to a t-shirt that might on anyone else look understated but all his wardrobe speaks of casual wealth now. He doesn’t brag about that anymore, or didn’t when he recalled it. And as before, Dream is reminded of how young he is when he’s not wearing his years. He could be anyone in London in this moment. The memories across the river they walk by are still his alone.

“Honestly, I don’t know how I’m managing this,” Hob says. “I might just ask them to read Shakespeare for the midterm and write about that.”

Dream stares at him. “You recall Shakespeare.”

“Yes. Well, a lot of it. But it’s odd, I couldn’t find a single volume of it at home. It’s like I memorized it. But that’s crazy, right?”

“You recall Shakespeare,” Dream repeats faintly. “Yet nothing of me. You hated Shakespeare,” he adds, not hiding the bitterness of those words.

“I would give anything to remember you.” He means it. He was never a gifted liar. Perhaps honest to a fault. His gaze lingers but not on Dream’s face. On the hollow of his throat. “Anything.” He sets both hands upon the railing, staring out at the river and the land beyond, now edifices of glass and pale stone. “It's been weeks. Look, you deserve to know they said what I haven't already remembered, I might never at this rate. I understand if that changes things.”

“Changes what, Hob Gadling?”

“See,” he says and shakes his head fondly, and wags his finger at Dream, but when he speaks again there’s something of pain in it that Dream recognizes like his own. “See? Right there. No one else calls me that.” His smile twists. “I’ve asked. I’ve asked everyone.” 

For a moment then he’s quiet. It’s the hang in mid air before the fall. 

“I asked them about you.” He pulls his phone from the pants pocket he keeps it wedged. “Got a new one of these—most of my stuff was in the cloud, and you—you aren’t in here. I don’t have pictures of you. I don’t know where you live or what you do. I don’t know how old you are. Your last name, how we met—”

“At a pub. I was with my sister. You’ve met her. You were with your friends. I think they thought I was mad.” His voice is distant, even from him. 

“Are you?”

“I must be,” he echoes. This is as true as anything. He has his illogics, his angers, his despairs, for all that it is his sister’s province. Dreams are half madness, after all. “I was absent for a long time,” he says then, because it’s something else true he can offer  a man who deserves far more. “Not by choice.” Not by will, at least.

Hob gathers a breath. “Are you okay?”

“I’m trying to be.”

“That’s the most anyone can ask,” Hob offers in his honest way. A man of infinite patience to wait six hundred years to learn a man’s name. Patient still. 

Too patient.

“Are you asking that of me?” Dream steps closer. “We had an argument before I left—I apologized too late, but I’ll do so again. You are my friend. You may doubt me, but never doubt that.”

He takes the hand Hob once offered to him. Even if he can’t recall doing so, it’s still Dream’s, he thinks. This is still his to take when he needs it. Before the lights of the city built across from their Inn, he leans into Hob’s space, only to share it. Only to be close. A small thing, miniscule in the grand shaping of dreams and worlds twists within him. Something his and not the Dreaming’s at all. It tangles over on itself, and over again, and makes something altogether new. 

“I never doubted you,” Hob confides, with the same earnestness he once confided his love for life unending. And he’s so close Dream can feel the words across the bone of his cheek, can feel them brush through the hair at his temple. He’ll take them to heart.

He shouldn’t. But he will. It’s too late now to do otherwise. 

Dream forces himself to make a space between them, back a step, though only a step. Hob says with almost half a sigh, “You could come back, you know. Have a drink.”

If he did, he would not want to leave. This is intoxicating and he’s already over indulged. “I have work to do.”

“At this time of night? No, I won’t ask. Be safe.” He puts his full meaning into that last word. 

Dream returns it. “You too. Be safe.”

Hob smiles in his wide way. “I think I may have a little luck. I’m due for some, aren’t I? You know, I had a dream about you last night.”

This stops him. “You did?”

“Yeah. It was nice. Eyes were different, though.”

Dread grips his limbs, his body, turns him to something hard and cold and unbending. The evening light turns from inviting to something looming, to shadows casting across them and across the river, turning the water black. “What?” he asks, that single syllable, and he already knows. Hob’s eyes catch the failing light and look not brown at all but something altogether else.

“I prefer the blue.” And Hob smiles at him, guileless. Offhand he adds, “Gold isn’t your color.”

Chapter Text

The roar in his ears is more than the myth of blood that runs through his veins. His vision goes red. Hob can’t know what his words mean. He steps back. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Did I say anything? In your dreams.”

But Hob only shakes his head, mouth parted. “Your eyes,” he says, and doesn’t mean the remembered gold.

Dream can feel the grip he has on his form loosening, knows his eyes must be black and stars and that if Hob looks too close at any one part of him he’ll see shadow and night and whatever predator Hob imagined walked the dark woods about his village when he was a child, manifest. He’s so careful, always, to keep his same self around this man and Hob can’t know, not now. Not yet. His coat is becoming a cloak, becoming wings; his hair scatters long in a wind that isn’t there. Night comes early. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You will?”

Dream nods. And you’ll remember me. But it doesn’t do to speak without action.

Finally he has something to sink his teeth into. Something to ruin for what it’s taken from him.

When he enters the Dreaming, it’s in a pall of night, stars in clouds and banners stretching above the castle that’s more shadow than building now. His throne room is only columns stretching up into night, Matthew but a fluttering black against the stained glass windows behind the throne. The windows, which are all of one image now, spread across three panels which shift into place as he sweeps in: a curling beast with eyes of perfect gold.

“My Lord,” says Lucienne. 

Once he demanded reverence, but it sounds odd on her now. He notes it but distantly, too caught in his rage to do better by her. Somewhere north of the sun a wolf dreams of blood between his teeth; the sense of it floods him for a moment until he regains himself. In his infinity of existence, in his lonely loves and self-made losses and drudging, indulgent boredom, he has had this one small joy. This one thing, his. Desire will pay. There are as many ways to make someone hurt without making them bleed as there are stars above him now—even someone Endless.

“I don’t know—I don’t know what happened,” Matthew is saying to Lucienne. “Something about eyes! Is this normal? I’ve never seen him like this, Lucienne—” 

Dream casts his gaze from the windows with a glance and says with softness, “I’ve appeared in my friend’s dreams.” He raises a hand to window and the beast there curls on itself as if to hide, scales shifting, golden eyes narrowing. “Or so it seems.”

Lucienne makes a small sound. “Oh, no.”

“I think I know what manner of creature could steal a memory. Only something endless.” He bites this word, as if a curse. That’s what it is—what they are. A curse, after all.

“What will you do?” she asks, perhaps knowing the answer he won’t give: there is little he wouldn’t do. She bows her head. “It may not be what it seems. Please.” 

He turns to find Matthew perched on her shoulder, the two of them almost cowering, and forces himself to take a breath. “I can’t allow this. Even had the man lost none of his memories, I could not. Not in my form. Not in my realm.” Not to the sole creature in this world that counts him as friend for no greater reason than they are, in fact, friends.

“But if Desire is truly taking your form in the dreaming… tread carefully, sir.” 

Her full meaning comes to him. Desire can take whatever form they please but the hearts of men give form to Desire, too. The heart of this man. It must have made Desire giddy to find someone who knew what Dream looked like in one of his truer forms, who knew who he was, who wanted him—even if in passing. He flatters himself no more than that. In six centuries, a man might dream of many things. Dream can only berate himself for being too stupid to see this coming.

“Take Matthew!” Lucienne says and he realizes he’s at the door already, heading for the water.

He pauses and concedes a shoulder; the bird takes it lightly, demurely. It occurs to him to ask a thing he’s never let himself before. “Does he have a book in the library?”

“He has shelves, my Lord. Would you read them?”

“No.”

His waters are still unkind to him, but today as he reaches a hand into the coolness he sees nothing below but the stars above reflected back at him. The world swings around him as the water takes him, and for a perfect moment it’s all stars up and down. Matthew tucks his head against Dream’s neck, against the folds of his cloak, but the journey is easy. The two of them drop like black smoke into the dream. 

Into air that smells like honey, into a field of gold. 

In dreams he can make himself whatever he likes, learn what he wants to about the dreamer, take what he needs. With a single hand he could reach out and tear this place to cobwebs but this dream is different. This dream is made of dust, like the man dreaming it. A limning of light tells him all he needs to know: this is a memory.

And no man's memory has ever been more precious to him. 

He rises lightly and feels the dirt beneath his fingers, feels the dried stalks crack beneath his palm. The shed barley and hulls are sharp, and the pricks of pain real. Too real. And then the honey scent fades as wind brushes past his face bringing something sour and sharp with it.

“Oh, that doesn’t look good,” Matthew supplies helpfully. 

Dream turns and at first thinks he’s looking at a cloud of smoke—but no smoke moves like that. Crows en masse, he realizes. Crows at feast. And only one creature on earth drags its dead to the same place. It must be a battlefield. Or some other manner of grave.

“This is kind of a fucked up dream.” Matthew trills and puffs his feathers.  

“It isn’t one.” 

Or wasn’t. Not when it first appeared. He can still stretch his senses to the end of it, knows it like a part of him. A stone church ruin waits for him, where the crows gather and beside it a presence as light as a spark. The one thing he cannot sense is Desire. Good. It would be daring for them to spend all their time in Dream’s realm; at least they have some fear of him still. Together they pick their way through the untended field, the weeded road, the presence ahead his guiding star through a dream that feels like an antique. The detail of it is horrific and beautiful—something that’s been held long and close, refinished and thousand times. A hallowed place. All dreams are, to him, but not often to their dreamers.

As they round a bend in the road the scent hits him in full. The wind had been sparing them. Scent in his world is a rarity, but if one were to remember any, this is the one any man would. 

When humans speak of death’s evil, when they fear his sister’s touch, this is what they speak of. Not death but rot. 

It isn't this that stills him, though. It isn’t the pit as wide as a field. It’s the figure past the edge of it, bent to task.

Hob is younger than first they met. A man, but not far into it. His hair is tied at the back of his head, a concession to the sweat and mud streaking his face and his arms above the worn leather gloves he’s wearing. His sleeves and pants are rolled, as if this is a dream of a beach and not a necropolis—and that is what it is. A sea of bodies, limbs and odd portions sticking up from the earth where they were poorly buried or something has dug them up.

But there’s a peace about it, too, thinks Dream. It’s only flesh. Only decay. What all dreamers return to.

Except the one. Hob is humming as he works, a light tune, a half-mumbled string of words. “...Color of my true love’s hair,” he murmurs, “and his lips are like some rosy fair.” He stops as he toes a body over and sets to their pockets. “Sweetest smile and gentlest hands,” he croons and works a button free from the cloth to pop in the bag slung over his shoulder. 

The motion brings Dream in sight. Hob jumps and turns to him fully, his brown eyes wide and yet unlined by age.

“Who the fuck are you?”

And really, what did Dream expect?

Hob scrambles out of the grave with the devil on his tail. They hang men for this—at best, they hang men for graverobbing. Usually worse. Much worse. “I’m not stealing anything! That’s my—my uncle. We forgot he had, ah… my mother’s precious button… family heirloom?” It’s useless. He can probably run faster than this man. It looks like he can run faster than this man. “Look,” he tries instead, “he isn’t using it anyway. What if I give up half and you forget you saw me?”

“Half a button?” the man asks calmly, in an accent so high-born and his tone so openly affectionate it brings Hob to a still. 

“You’re not with the sheriff,” Hob accuses. 

“No.”

No, definitely not. No sword, either, unless there’s a dagger somewhere under that black cloak of his. Not likely since it’s most of the way open and there’s no belt there. The man’s got gravitas but that doesn’t mean shit in a fight. Hob tugs his gloves off; he has got a dagger under his belt and it’s damn hard to use with muddy gloves on. If it comes to that. 

The man shifts his head, cocking it as he studies Hob. The motion makes something thing at his neck glitter, and then Hob sees it. The man has a ruby the size of a bird’s egg hanging around his neck. It’s so audacious he almost laughs, helpless. 

“Piece of advice?” he says, stepping close, to see if the lad will let him, and he does. It’s a good thing Hob is so nice. Good thing he’s a sucker for an odd soul and a pretty face, more like.

Hob picks the jewel off his chest and the man lets him do it, only stares at him, searching his face from a foot away. Hob swallows reflexively.

The gem is massive. Heavy, bloody red, warm to touch—like holding a heart he thinks and then wonders since when he got so fancy. With his other hand he pulls the collar of the man’s finespun tunic from his pretty white neck and drops the gem inside, lets it fall against the pale chest he glimpses beneath. His skin is too smooth, too strange, like carved marble. 

And he still hasn't shown the slightest bit of self preservation. Fuck’s sake. Hob steps away, unaccountably awkward and mad that he's the only one who seems to be. 

The man’s sky-blue eyes flicker from Hob’s hand to his face. “Do you not know me? Even here?”

“Should I know you? God, you're not the—“ he struggles, “—the duke’s son or something?” But of course, he's in fucking black. Who else can afford sable. And he's wearing a ruby worth more than Hob will make if he lives a hundred years and picks graves every day of it. Hob closes his eyes. “I truly meant no offense, your Lordship.”

When he opens them the man is smiling at him, openly, as if he’s amusing. Hob gets the sense it's as close as the man comes to laughing.

“I’m not the Duke’s son. Nor do I need you to call me by a title.” But he doesn’t say what Hob should call him. Fair enough.

“What are you doing out here anyway, your—ah. Right.”

“Looking for a friend.” 

“Any friend, or one in particular?”

He bows his head. “This particular friend can't seem to remember me. I’m trying to figure out why.”

“Can't be much of a friend if he forgot you.” 

The man’s half-smile gains an edge. “I don’t think he meant to. I hope he did not.” 

“He didn’t. No one would.” 

“Oh?”

But what explanation can he give? Only that he had to say it. Only that he looks so damn sad, and why? What’s to be sad about if you’ve got that much money? Hob heaves his bag on his shoulder and comes to a kind of decision, one he knows he’ll regret. “Look why don’t we get you out of this—heat?” Smell, really. He’s used to the stench; doesn’t even need the thieves oil the others use but for someone like this it must be nauseating.

The man nods, slow. Animal. God, he’s passing strange.

One of the crows that’s been winging a little close gets bold and lands on the man’s shoulder which is only marginally better than being shit on—which Hob has, more times than he’d like to admit. “Shoo!” Hob waves his hands, and the man is once again totally guileless which means it’s not only Hob he trusts with his personal space but gore crows. “Don’t let them land on you. Crows have fleas.” And worse. 

“Crow!” the bird says. “Raven, thank you.”

“Sorry,” Hob says. “I think ravens carry fleas too.”

“I do not have fleas.” To the stranger the bird says quickly, “I don’t, I swear. I bet you do though,” he squawks at Hob, who can only shrug in reply. 

“Maybe. Probably. But I don’t want any more than I’ve got.”

“And you touched him with your hands! I saw! Sir, that’s unsanitary—“

“I was wearing gloves! I don’t root around in a grave barehanded.” 

The raven flaps at him and what it says about Hob’s day that the least weird part is that he might fight a bird for his own honor, he can’t imagine, but the man stills the creature with a quiet, “Matthew.” 

“Sorry, sir.” 

The man is watching Hob now, a very odd look on his face. A pinched agony that’s almost imperceptible, but Hob is good at reading people. “How old are you?” he asks. 

“Old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyway?” Hob ducks his head; the man deserves a better answer, not that he has one to give. “I don’t know. Last person who did died before they bothered to tell me. Come on.” 

Hob throws his gloves in his rucksack and steps up the small slope and out of the grave pit and up beside the stranger, delighted to find they’re of a height. It always feels better back on dry land; his mood rises. He nods to the road more traveled—the one they bring the carts in on. Or did, when there was a village left to cart from. Most of whoever lived there has moved on, one way or another.

He sets off and calls over his shoulder, “Let’s hear your story, rich boy.” 

“I would rather hear yours.” He falls into step beside Hob, and the raven with him. 

Hob eyes him. “Morbid thing, aren’t you?” But the grin on his face is set and he can’t cast it off. Better air, out of the grave, and better the further they get. Better company than corpses and crows and—and something else about the sight of him at Hob’s side, something about the act of looking upon him eases the twist Hob gets in his chest whenever he spends too much time with the dead. Probably a sign the heat and fumes have driven him half mad. Or the sick is taking him at last, but no. It won't. He won't let it. 

Still, he can't stop looking. 

The bird catches him staring. “You stink.”

“Matthew,” the man admonishes quietly.

“Everything stinks. And I don't want to hear it from someone who eats corpses.”

The man pauses. “He does not eat corpses.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Sorry,” Hob mutters. He was going to bathe, actually, though doing so now seems like a concession. They reach the stream that flows toward the graveyard—infinitely better than one that flows away from it, in his experience—after a minute’s walk. Hob leaves them on the high bank and steps into it mud-coated boots and all. He unlaces them under the water, works them off, and sighs in satisfaction.

From behind him, the bird asks, “Isn't grave robbing illegal?”

“Why? You going to tattle?” He tosses his boots back to the shore next to the man standing stiff as a board in a mock of casual, hands stuffed in his pockets, and turns back to the stream and strips his shirt.

“But what if you get sick?”

“Nah.” Hob bends to the water and cups it to his mouth for a slow drink, and wipes his mouth. “Lost my family to it. Must be immune.” He frowns. “You aren’t though,” he says over his shoulder. “I don’t care how boring being unbearably rich is—you can’t go wandering around. It isn’t safe.” While he waits for an answer he strips his pants, but when he looks back the stranger is watching him with a peculiarly dark gaze and his eyes aren't really a sky blue like he thought. More a sky before a storm. It's those lips parted that are his undoing; too red by half. Hob nods to the bird instead. “You ought to look after him better.”

“Hey, I do fine. Worry about yourself.”

Hob scoffs and turns back to the water to scrape the cloth against itself and work the mud out, humming the song that's been stuck in his head all day. Black is the color...  

When the shirt is more wool colored than mud colored, he rings it out and tosses it back to his new friend who catches it a foot from his face—though it doesn’t stop the spray of water from hitting him head on, and the look Hob gets for that sears and tickles him down to his toes.

“Hang that up for me, will you?” He puts the leggings right back on to dry in the heat of his skin and the day around them, and then he bends once more and dunks his whole head in the water and comes up revived. 

Can’t even smell the graveyard from here, he thinks, slicking the hair back from his forehead. Well. Used to be a graveyard. More of a grave area at this point. It occurs to him to be embarrassed for what the man saw him doing but shame was never his strong suit, and the man doesn’t seem to want it from him anyway.

Not that, at least. But when Hob looks at him, he’s seated in the grass and his eyes are closed and his long black hair is half-fallen in front of his face. 

Hob hops up the bank in two long strides. “Hey, hey, are you well?” 

The man glances up as if surprised to find him so close, and his eyes, oh. Not blue. Not blue at all, but dark as a night, stars reflecting back at him as the light from the stream webs across his pale face.

Hob’s breath leaves him. A well inside him opens for that space between heartbeats, echoing so deep it aches. I want you, he thinks, the way he hasn’t thought about anything since he was starving in the deathless infinite of his existence, but he can’t have this, can never—

He blinks, swallows, and tries to remember what he was thinking or why he’s a foot away from his handsome stranger with one hand on his shoulder, dripping water into the man’s lap. The bird is watching him from a tree branch, perched beside his drying shirt. Hob steps around the man and grabs the shirt away from the bird and his rucksack from beside the tree, fighting the wild and foreign panic that’s beating through his chest.

“If you’re coming, let’s go. Maybe we’ll find that friend of yours on the way.”

Some dreams are the patter of rain on stone; some a faucet left on in a full tub, flooding a house; some pools that spread in a spring forest. This dream? This is a cataract. A river, canyon-carving. This will sweep him away. Perhaps only moments are passing in Hob’s world but his world is not Hob’s and the hours stretch into night as they make their way to town. 

The tavern Hob takes them to is disconcerting. The music weaves between times, the beat and tone of instruments that will not exist for centuries. Neither memory nor dream but something between and dangerous. Dream excuses himself as Hob makes small talk with the other patrons, selling what he can from his day’s haul. It’s a grim spectacle; Dream wonders how much of it happened and how much of it he’s filled in—with other memories? With imaginings.

“What’s the plan?” Matthew asks as they wait outside.

“Stay with him until Desire returns. And then.” He doesn’t need to fill in his intent; it should be obvious.

“Why not wake him up?”

“I have more power here than in waking.” He gestures to the night street, the way it falls apart in Hob’s absence, the buildings rippling: now wood, now brick, now nothing. Matthew cocks his head and then makes a small sound almost of a bird’s fear when he sees it. A woman walking in front of them is dead beneath her hood and hardly freshly so. She looks at them, and smiles, and then is young, again, and lovely, full of bright blood. 

“This isn’t right,” Matthew whispers.

Dream can’t disagree. 

“Boss… What will you do if he never remembers?”

“He will.”

“But Lucienne said—”

“What did Lucienne say?” His voice sounds petty; he banks it. “What did she say?”

“That you should tell him?” A small plea. “Tell him what he’s forgotten and maybe he’ll remember.”

It isn’t his nature to wake one from their dreams. To do so would be sacrosanct. But this is not the reason. “He hasn’t forgotten.” The evidence is around them. Hob’s bare acceptance of a talking raven, of the fact that only he believes: no one would forget someone like Morpheus on purpose. And that look, by the water. Whatever it meant, it was not the look of one who didn’t know him. “These are his memories. And it isn’t in our nature to steal from mortals what they wouldn’t give willingly. Memories are one of the few possessions that are ever truly theirs. We wait.”

“For Desire.”

He inclines his head. 

“But in the meantime—“

“No. Tell him nothing.” What would he tell Robert Gadling about their acquaintanceship—their friendship—when he was the one who had to be taught. What could he say about why immortality is worth having and life worth living, a once-in-a-century man worth knowing? He can’t tell Hob. Hob knew the trick of it, but he never explained to Dream what about him was worth the devotion, and he can’t begin to guess. The first smatter of rain hits the dirt of the road in front of him, and then drips from the eave onto his outstretched hand and it feels real. Six hundred years of memories in every drop.

“Let’s go inside,” he murmurs.

Hob is leaning against the counter, his eyes low-lidded and his expression sour. It gains a lightness when he sees Dream walk in, and he sees him at once, the way he always did, as if he’s always waiting. “God, I thought you’d gone!”

At Dream’s silence, he sighs. “Look, I’ve got a room. It won’t be what you’re used to, but I can’t let you stay out tonight. Wouldn’t be right. You’ll get your throat cut and I mean that.”

Dream gives him a slow nod. The better to keep watch. But sleep in dreams is strange, and Dream has no need for it in any world. The room Hob leads him to is up two flights and small with a smaller bed. Matthew says quickly, “Hob, you’re on the floor.”

“It’s my bed. I paid for it.”

“With money you stole from dead people.”

Hob shrugs and starts stripping. It’s the second time in a day Dream has seen this much of his skin and the surprising lines of his body are no less incredible in candlelight than in sun. The easy muscle of a man born with them, or someone used to using their body for pay. Dream wonders if he’s been a mercenary yet, or if that came later. If it doesn’t matter and all memories are here in this room with them. He keeps the leggings on, the dark cloth no distinct color at all. Hob seems to realize there’s no dream in which his roommate would take the floor and slips into the far side of the bed silently, keeping to the far side of it. It isn’t large enough that it makes a difference.

Dream divests nothing but half-lies, half-sits on the bed and leans against its head—which is the bare wall. After a time he sets his hand over the bare blanket covering Hob’s hip.

Muscle jumps under his touch. “Is that what you want?” Hob asks roughly.

Yes. “Rest.”

And perhaps to both their surprise, even in this place, he does.

In his dream, he’s standing in front of a classroom and he knows it’s a dream because there’s no fucking way he would dress like he did in his twenties again willingly, but that’s a hose and belt and a tunic, unmistakable. He’s never been one to bemoan new fashion; zippers and polyblend fabrics are two of humanity’s greatest inventions. Wool? It scratches. 

“Professor?” someone in the front row says. “You would have been the hottest peasant in 1330.” 

“Ahh, common mistake, but I actually wasn’t born until 1355.” 

They laugh. And the powerpoint behind him shows the doodles on the side of an illuminated bible page, a knight jousting a snail—why the fuck is he dressed like this. 

His voice says, “As promised, if you all managed an eighty average on the midterm, I swore I would demonstrate period appropriate clothing—“ Someone wolf whistles, “—for today only.” 

Groaning. He rolls his eyes and searches the back of the classroom for a familiar mess of black hair, but nothing. That makes a week, he thinks, and doesn’t know why he’s thinking it because it feels like Dream is there, like he’s at the edge of Hob’s vision and hiding there. “Right, that’s enough. If you all get a 90 average on the quiz next week I’ll consider it.” 

That smell—that’s it. Storm rain on moss. On sand. On the dust of a memory centuries buried. He closes his eyes and breathes. It is there. It’s all around him. 

Hob wakes with an arm around his chest and no memory of why he’s not alone. But that’s a press of heat at his back and a hand laced with his, thin and long-fingered.

When he opens his eyes, a bird is staring at him from inches away.

“Do you remember?” it asks. 

Still dreaming. Gotta be—though he can’t remember what the dream was about, he’s sure he had one. He scrambles away from the bird—fleas, fuck no, not again—and into the man behind him who makes a quiet sound and steadies him palm over Hob’s palm, over his bare chest, and god the man is strong. There’s no way he’s that strong. 

Hob sits up and looks down, and he remembers. After a fashion. “You’re that duke’s son. With the bird. Fuck.” He groans and pushes his face into his hand—his free hand. “Did we…”

“No.” 

He looks at the man in shock and shoves his next question—Why the fuck not?—down as deep as it goes. Pouted, easy, morning-sweet smile, his night hair spread around him in the sheets. Why the fuck not? But the man isn’t lying; Hob isn’t loose limbed or sore the way he would be and he’d remember that body if he’d had his hands on it properly. God, he would remember. And maybe it’s good they didn’t. This man could break his heart. 

And then, Hob’s heart skips a beat in the realest sense, and he has an odd moment where it feels like the man already has broken his heart once. Like he has felt that jaw against his fingertips, that body inside the curve of his arms. Felt those eyes cut with a glance the way they cut now—double edged sword, he thinks manically, at the tears lining them. Bright blue again. Were they ever else?

“What’s wrong? Did I drink last night?”

“No.” 

Their hands are still laced. For a moment, his own looks wrong, like it’s bruised or too heavy or got strings sticking out of it. He blinks and it’s normal again; he tears his hand away and stands with no thought but that he has to get out. If he wants to stay sane. 

So the man isn’t a duke’s son—so what. He’s still wealthy beyond reason and dangerously so. He grabs his shirt from the chair and tugs it on and he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, but it feels like he has. “I’m sorry,” he tells the man watching him from the bed, and then he goes. 

The inn is nicer than he remembered, though he only had a passing memory of it and maybe things always look worse in the night. Must be, because he wouldn’t have agreed to whatever went on upstairs with a man like that if he'd known that was how he would look in the morning. Guilt stills him for a fatal moment, and then he hears steps on the stairs behind him, steady and heavy. 

“Fuck,” he murmurs to himself. 

Even at a glance and the man is perfect. His jacket—was it a jacket?—and the long boots and the jewel the size of a paperweight at his neck. Hob turns on the stairs and takes the two steps up to him in one stride to take the ruby in his hand, covering it from view. 

“Didn’t I tell you to put that away?” he hisses.

The man smiles. “So you did.” And so he does. 

Hob takes a breath and feels himself give up. So this is his lot. “I don’t suppose you want breakfast.”

“He dreams about food a lot.”

“You would if you had ever starved. Animals don't forget. Not even men.”

“I thought he would remember if he dreamed.”

“He didn’t dream.”

Dream had held that soul within his arms all through his imagined night. It was like holding an ember. No spark at all. And when even Matthew had slept, he’d bowed low to his friend’s ear and whispered to him pleas he cannot admit to now, knowing they came to naught. I cannot have him, he’d thought to himself in a brief despair that would have made his sister near joyful. I cannot have him even in a dream within a dream. 

But he is not lost. 

“Boss. This place is uh, getting kind of weird.”

It has. It’s become strange, even to itself, memory nested in memory, trapped together. Nothing is truly lost. It’s as if someone’s taken a menagerie and locked it away within a glass box, the mass of scale and fur and feather left to roil and roil over on one another. The clothing of the inn’s patrons shifts. A man wearing a graphic tee is seated anachronistically in one corner; when Dream looks again, he’s in a frock coat. To anything human, this place would be far past exhausting.

To Hob. It can’t be sustained. “Men can’t live in memory,” he says. 

“Is that what he’s doing? On purpose?”

“He isn’t the one doing it. Desire—“ he stops himself, peels the thought of that being from his consciousness like a leach picked from flesh. All in time.

“But Desire isn’t even here. Are you sure it’s not a curse? Wait—are curses real?”

“Most stories are.” In dreams, all of them.

“Well that’s an easy one at least. Everyone knows how you break a curse.”

Dream levels him with a look. Blood and love are how curses break. Hob already loves him; that’s a certainty, in some fashion, as friends do. Dream can’t let him bleed for it. 

“Why so long faced?” Hob asks as he returns to the table with a plate piled so high with food it makes Dream wonder for a moment if Hob isn’t aware he’s dreaming after all. “Eat something, come on.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Yes you are. Eat.”

Dream recalls his first real meal after captivity under this man's watch and he is hungry, but he needs hunger. He needs focus. And then Hob is peering up at him from below. “Eat,” he says definitively. “I hate watching you starve. I can tell, too.”

He sets back to forking potatoes onto his own small plate. When Dream searches his face, there’s still no greater recognition, no knowledge of what he’s said or that it doesn’t fit. It’s the muscle memory of care. 

Dream pulls a bowl of stew off the platter and a spoon with it, and draws a portion to his lips. Warm, and sweet. Someone’s added wine and spice and herbs, too, the kind that are rare to this place but won’t be in two, three centuries. A now familiar wound bleeding at the heart of him stings. “You always enjoyed feeding me.”

Hob coughs and red dusts his cheeks. “Someone’s got to. Can’t eat that ruby, can you?”

He feels himself smile. He has eaten it, but only the once. It didn’t taste quite like this. 

Hob finishes his bite without choking, somehow, and then turns his gaze on Matthew. “I already know he’s not going to tell me, so—why is he on the run? Terrible family? Step mother trying to marry him off to a hag? Brother trying to steal his throne?”

It’s perhaps closer to the truth than he knows. “I told you. I came seeking a friend.”

“You could have chosen anywhere else on Earth and been happier.”

“I doubt that.”

But Hob’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “That grave you saw yesterday—that’ll be this town before the new moon.”

It’s the breaking of a gentle spell. When he looks about the room now he sees it for what what it is. What it was once. The patrons seated only in far corners, the haunted faces, the miasmatic smoke of rosemary and clary and clove thatch smoking in the hearth, a fire far too hot for a summer’s morn. Fear of sickness, evergreen. But this is Hob’s memory and so the smell is good and the heat is comfortable and Dream wishes with a desperation he could set his hand across the table and have Hob take it his rough grip the way he’s made a habit of in the waking world. Dream would turn his hand over and trace the lines of birth and scar in it, the pulse of blood and joy jumping with every beat—but it isn't joy, and he knew that. It isn’t anything so simple, to look at a room and know everyone in it will be dead before the season is out and to enjoy it anyway.

“Why stay here?” he asks.

Hob’s smile is helpless and wide. “The work is good. Pays well. We've all got to do something.” With a sigh he sits back and stands. “Come on, lordling. What estate am I walking you back to?”

“Can I not stay with you?” he hates how petulant he sounds.

Hob frowns. “Do you want to?”

“Yes.” His voice breaks on the confession. A beating pounding longing, that thing again, that twisted new thing at the center of him, the thing that had him in hours of dreamed sleep gathering this man’s body into his arms as if he were some treasure that anyone else might come and steal, takes hold of him. “I can’t lose you. I can’t—your memories of me are more precious to me than my own and even in your dreams I cannot find them—“ He gasps when he realizes his vision is hot and he’s been too honest, far too honest. This isn’t how it works, this game they’re trapped in. 

For a moment hanging in time he sees understanding in Robert Gadling’s eyes. Memory returns to him; he reaches out and his mouth opens soundlessly but his figure ripples as the other memories. The room tilts and shifts, the fire brightens, the heat unbearable and Hob’s image flickers in it like a waning candle in a breeze. 

Hob lunges for him wildly. Dream does reach a hand to him then, knowing all the good it will do. He has power here. He should have power here, enough for this, but his hand slides through Hob’s as if sliding through sand. 

And then he is sand, slipping from the tips of Dream’s fingers.

The inn is nothing. A few blackened posts sticking out from the ground at odd angles, like the arms of a corpse, Dream thinks faintly, ignoring the cooling wet on his cheeks. 

“Fuck,” says Matthew. Dream can’t help but agree.

Chapter Text

Finding Hob Gadling in his memories is profoundly harder the second time. 

“Are we there yet?” Matthew asks, presumably to hear his own voice.

Dream closes his eyes and says in what he hopes is a level tone, “He’s half a mile ahead.” They’ve been beating a path down the riverside road for what feels like an endless day, eating miles, his boots getting dustier by the minute because he’s realizing with distant horror that he, also, was not meant to exist in memory for this long.

“That’s what you said an hour ago.”

“Then I suppose he’s on a horse.”

“Can’t you go faster than a dream horse?”

“I am choosing not to go faster.”

“Why?”

Dream waves his hand at the everything, at the utter mess of this place. For ten solid minutes they were walking on blacktop; that’s done. Now it’s back to a dirt road, but for the worrying moment the land around them was dunes and the path underfoot like unto sand. He’s taking what he can get as good news. “I would prefer his mind intact.”

It’s had two Endless in it recently, he reminds himself with a bitter twist.

“Can’t you just—”

He stops. “I do not control dreams, Matthew. I’m  made of them; I make them. Would you prefer I be their dictator? I can’t force this place to be what it isn’t.” He steadies his breath; the autumn air is so fully realized it manages to be bracing. “Just as I may order you to return to Lucienne, repeatedly, and you may refuse. Repeatedly.”

It cows him, as much as anything cows a raven. For a time, after Dream came to himself in the ruined shell of the inn, he’d wondered this exact thing. If he couldn’t bend the place around him, to his will, force the memories back into his friend and put it all to right. And he’d tried for an instant, for a breath, to change the place. To breathe the street back to life, to raise the buildings, to make roads—to make their roads, to make the inn and the railing by the river and all the places his friend had shared with him, once upon a time. 

But it was like trying to mold stone with bare hands—and he’d the sense he could break it if he wanted, crumble it to shards and dust, but that’s not an avenue he’s eager to explore. No; he’s as near to powerless in this place as he was trapped in that basement and admitting that to Matthew is not something he’s eager to do.

Matthew is quiet for a while, and then remarks, “This is your hero’s journey isn’t it.”

Dream has to stop. “It isn’t. That’s not what a hero’s journey is.”

“But you’re his hero. And we’re on a journey.”

“It doesn’t mean we exist within that narrative. Were you a reader in life?”

“Sort of. Mostly airport books.”

Airports are something he’s still catching up with but the dreams people have in them are particularly fraught. “Those are still books,” he murmurs and stops, because that sense of something ahead of him on the road has shifted and there’s a star so bright he can feel the heat of it from here falling toward him. 

He’s singing that song again. 

When Hob gets to them, Dream has found a well-placed stump to sit on and watch the river go by. 

The first surprise is that Hob is on a horse; the second is that he’s not a terrible rider. The third is that he’s older—still younger than when they first met but not by long. The dream stabilizes around him. The soft light of it becomes the perfect memory of their river on a lazy fall day, the lazy eddies gaining depth, the sound of it growing to a bubbling rush, joined by birdsong.

He pulls up short. “Hello—o?” he says in a particular tone. The once-over he gives is almost too much; Dream feels as if they’re crashing toward something, the two of them, and then Hob says, “You look familiar, friend. Have we met somewhere before?”

The wording, the open affection in it; Dream’s gaze flickers from his, down to earth. His question is one Dream finds he can no longer answer; the cost of it closes his throat to any he would give. And it’s as likely a line as a real question. 

This man doesn’t know him, he tells himself. A now familiar refrain played poorly. 

Hob crosses his arms over the bay horse’s withers and rests them there to peer down at Dream. If he was cocky telling off Death when first they met, he’s more so with a few fewer years on him. “Ah, you know, I hate to be the one to tell you but there’s a bit of a war on. Wouldn’t do to go wondering around, sir. Sirs,” he amends with a raised brow at Matthew. 

That explains his patched leather armor, and the sword-in-scabbard at his hip. Graverobber, bandit, mercenary—Dream cannot begin to wonder which hat his Hob is wearing today. 

“There’s always a war on,” Dream says.

“Profound.” Hob ducks his head to hide his smile. His brown hair isn’t streaked grey yet but the hints of it are in the sun streaks that fall about his eyes at the temples. It drives something in Dream to brief madness. How many of these memories will he walk through, wanting, he wonders.

Hob gives him one last appraising look, and comes to something. “Come on, lordling. I’ll walk you to safety.”  

He swings down and gathers the reins of his horse. It shies away from him and he shushes it with a hand to its neck, and it’s then Dream sees the wild look in its eyes, and blood on its cheek. 

“That isn’t your horse,” Dream says to himself. Killer, he adds to his list of occupations. That’s the hat Hob is wearing today, as much as any other. 

“Ah, ah,” he clicks his tongue. “Technically wasn’t my horse until about an hour ago? But I came to an agreement with his former owner, isn’t that right, beauty? Shh, shh.” He cups its cheek, soothes it. Mostly, it works. Then he glances at Dream. “Do you want a ride? You don't look dressed for walking. I can be your footman for the afternoon.” As if to demonstrate this he unsheathes his sword and gives it a wide  flourish with a half-hearted bow that's at once both embarrassing and so enthused that it tugs a smile out of Dream.  

“I'll pass,” Dream murmurs. 

Hob stares at him, the corner of his eyes pinching, and there are the laugh lines starting, the first edges of them. “I’m certain we’ve met before.”

Dream opens his mouth and closes it, finding himself at a rare loss for words. He knows all conversations, all dreams, all stories, but he hasn't lived them. His clothes are dusty, he’s hungry again, and he’s never felt more human. “If you don’t remember, I won’t tell you.”

“I love a good mystery. Not even a hint?”

“No. Tell me who you’re fighting in this war, Hob.” A poor change of subject, but he’s tired and more tired of not using his friend’s name. 

Hob takes it in stride. “Those Tyler fools. Do you really not know?”

Dream knows. “Farmers,” he remarks tonelessly. “Craftsmen. How noble.”

“Rebels,” Hob corrects, and stops. He props himself on his blade like it’s a cane of fine make—certainly not the way one treats good steel but then it probably isn’t. Wasn’t, Dream reminds himself. Everything here is past and prologue. “Look when men start fighting, doesn’t matter what for. They’re all the same. All fools.” 

“Profound,” Dream repeats back to him. “A beautiful excuse.” 

“It’s keeping you safe. Look at you,” he says, with another long draw of his brown eyes from Dream’s leather boots to the top of his head, which he know he carries as someone accustomed to wearing a crown. “You think they wouldn’t tear you apart if they found you?”

They might try, but he doesn't say this. It is strange to be worried after, as if he were no more than what he seems. Dream draws a breath in. “Always so concerned for my safety."

“You look like someone who would get hurt doing something stupid.”

Matthew coughs a sound half crow and half agreement. Dream shrugs the shoulder he's perched on, and tries not to be too satisfied when it succeeds in unbalancing him. "I've made my share of mistakes." The echo of Hob's words back at him, and Dream smiles in the telling.

"Haven't we all." Hob nods to the trees and ducks onto a trail half hidden by the bracken. "Roads 'round here aren't a great idea,” he explains.

In one hundred years this game path will be a crude road to a cruder well where two loves meet on the new moon. In two hundred, it will lead to an old oak beside the ruined stone pile of the well, the tree only a sapling now. It  will house a whole family of red squirrels, all of them dreamers. In three hundred, the path will  lead to the house the oak was culled to build and the family born there will dream, too. Dream knows them all. He’s thinking of them as they reach the clearing at the end of the path, and a  camp where three men somehow dressed worse than Hob are seated around a campfire. 

They aren't expecting company.

"Well f—" Hob cuts himself off. He dusts his hands on his jacket and hands the reins off to Dream. To the strangers, he offers, "Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

"No gentlemen here," says the one idly turning a kebab of dripping meat over the fire. "But if you’re looking for one, seems  like you got one there." He gestures with a nod and a gleam to his eyes to Dream.

Hob turns to him with comical surprise. "Oh, would you look at that." 

"Yeah," says the man and props the stick back over the fire  and wipes his hands on his filthy linens, “would you just." 

He nods to his companions and that's it.

It happens fast. Dream’s own memory of Hob shattering a tea cup in the face of a man aiming a knife at Dream overlays the image before him as Hob steps in front of him.

Hob offers his name and his hand to the closest stranger, as if they’d never laid eyes on Dream, and if anyone had enough charm to talk then down it would be him—but it's only a ploy to get close. The first one makes that mistake; Hob runs him through with practiced skill and draws his blade back in almost the same motion. The wet sound is familiar. Personally familiar. Jessamy, Dream realizes, as the second man turns to run for a weapon. 

Hob runs after him and hacks him down. 

The last man standing raises both hands. He's looking at Dream, but his words are for Hob. "How much is he paying you to be his guard? Is it enough you can afford a lay or do you have to ask him for that, too?" 

"Oh, can’t you tell?” Hob steps in close. “I pay him for that.” 

The man is dead before he can reply. A moment’s heat frissons up Dream’s spine at the implication, but it’s gone in the sight of the dead before them. The utter speed of it is shocking. Three lives, three dreamers, ended on a whim. 

Hob stares down at them for a long moment. "They look so…" he casts his gaze aside to Dream and mutters as if embarrassed to have started the thought, "so damn stupid. They always do, don't they?" He speaks as if this is their fault. Some wrong they’ve committed, letting themselves be cut down so wantonly.

"Is that what you fear?" Dream asks, hoarse to his own hearing. 

"Looking a fool? Aye. Won't be me." It won’t, but the Hob of this moment has only his determination, his stubbornness, and his foolishness—Dream allows, for that was what first drew him to Hob, that audacious fool—to back him. 

A smear of blood lingers on his cheek. Not his own. Dream is unbothered; dreams of blood are common enough. He reaches up not to clean it but to touch the edges of the mark. “You, my friend, have an unfailing skill at finding yourself in the wrong.”

Hob picks the hand off his cheek, but keeps hold of it. “If I live long enough to regret it, that’s fine by me.” His voice has turned low and sweet and intimate, as if there aren’t the corpses of three men bearing witness to their conversation. He cradles the hand in his own and considers Dream’s palm. “Met a palm reader once. Picked up a few tricks.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” he says with defiance. as if he can distract Dream from what he’s just done. As if he wants to. As if he needs to. “Yours says…” He draws the word out and squints lines around his eyes as he brings Dream’s hand almost to his lips, “...you’ll meet a handsome stranger.” He winks. He actually winks, blood on his cheek, hand in hand with a stranger. 

“Half right,” Dream concedes. “What did yours say?”

His expression sours from its flirt. “Don’t matter.”

“You don’t care about your fate.” It isn’t a question.

Hob releases him, steps away, cleans his blade on a strip of cloth he borrows from a corpse’s jacket. “Nah. I’ll make my own.”  From him, this is a particularly irony—but he has, hasn’t he? In some fashion.

“By doing this?” Dream nods at the dead.

Hob scoffs. “It pays, so yes.”

Dream allows himself a sound that’s almost a sigh but he hopes can be mistaken for a part of the wind gusting through the clearing now, cold with a season centuries past. “I suppose if you never changed, neither would I.”

His words are  quiet, he thinks, but Hob hears. And it’s brushing too close to the edge of something. Hob’s image shifts with a flicker of light across his face and Dream holds his breath while he waits for the gasp of a dream dissolving to sand—but it doesn’t come. Instead, something far worse edges over the tops of the trees and this is the light playing on Hob’s face. A sun rising from the wrong direction. 

Dream is no longer the only Endless in this place. He looks over his shoulder as if he’ll be able to see Desire through the gold bowing birch trees. 

“You do look—you look do so familiar. I swear I know you. I know you, don’t I?” Hob all but begs, that eerie light still on his face. A small part of Dream preens that even with Desire here, he’s still enough, all on his own. 

But then he remembers what face Desire has been using here. 

“Do you remember where we met?” Dream asks. Here, it won’t be the White Horse. It won’t be a dingy tavern—Desire would never allow that. They’re still close enough Dream can touch the tips of his fingers to Hob’s stubbled cheek again. “It’s important.”

Hob shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says, and means it. He means everything he says to Dream. That’s the trick to him. 

And then Hob swallows and his eyes drop. “You aren’t—oh, god. You aren’t related to the King, are you? Some bastard brother?” 

Of course. Oh, of course. What else would Desire deign to appear as?

“You’ve met the King?” This can’t be a memory. Can’t be even a  piece of a memory. Mercenaries don’t meet kings. Desire has changed the memory itself to do this, to be this, and Dream feels again that tang of metal at the back of his mouth, between his teeth.

“Once or twice…” Hob looks ashamed at this.  He has no need to be. 

Dream lets his fingers slide to Hob’s neck, to the nape where his scruff of hair meets his sun-heated skin, and then drops his hand. 

He hasn’t ridden a horse in this body—in any body—in a long while, but there are a thousand thousand dreams of horses playing out and the dreams of those creatures, too. It is like the say it is, like riding a bike, though he’s only done that the once at Hob’s insistence and only where no one could see. He swings up into the saddle and Hob gapes at him. 

“I take you up on your offer.” Dream smiles at him. “I find I do prefer to ride.”

“Hey, wait—”

“Matthew,” Dream says sharply. 

“Yeah, got it, boss. I’ll keep an eye on him.” He flaps over to Hob’s shoulder; Hob starts and reels his gaze between the two of them. 

“Hold on,” Hob tries with no more success. 

Dream bows his head to raven and man. “If I haven’t returned by midnight, go back. Tell Lucienne. Wake him.” He nods to Hob and tries to find a better set of words but can settle only on what’s most honest. “Keep him safe for me.”

“And here I thought I was the one keeping you safe,” Hob says wryly.

Dream pauses; the horse clips the ground with his hooves. Desire is caught in the Dreaming now. One reason why they’re loath to enter each other’s realms. He can sense Desire’s presence like a gaudy tumor pulsating beyond their clearing, waiting to draw their quarry to them. 

“‘Keep me safe,’” Dream quotes. “Is that what you want?”

It’s an honest question. Hob’s motivations have always been particularly strange to him. 

“No,” Hob laughs, and then, “Yes, but  I want one of those pots from the stories that never run out of stew, more. I want my weight in gold. I want—” His eyes drop to Dream’s mouth and rise back to his face quickly. “Doesn’t matter what I want.”

But it does. If Desire is here, it does. Dream tightens his grip on the reins.  “Matthew,” he repeats.

The raven bobs his head. “We’ll be waiting,” he says, and knocks the shoulder of one wing into Hob’s cheek. “Won’t we?”

Hob shakes his head. Dream knees the horse to explosive motion, but Hob stops him with a word. “Stranger!” he calls.

 Dream rears the horse to a halt.

 “Come find me again, and I’ll tell you what I want.”

His gaze is steady, his expression is unwavering. The humor is gone. His meaning is unmistakable. Dream feels a heat rise in him, invisible. He raises his fingers to his forehead in a small salute and bows his head. The next time he sees Hob, the one responsible for taking his memories will have suffered for it. He vows that to himself.

He’s always had a particular talent for revenge.

Desire cannot sense him. This is Dream’s province, and his alone, and he’s walked the bloody dreams of a thousand long-toothed creatures, red-clawed, ravening. Dream spares a single thought to how he’ll appear to Desire, but not by his own design or choice. He can feel his hold on the edges of his form changing and extending, becoming something new. Something wild. Dreams are rarely anything but, after all.

The horse panics beneath him, its mouth foaming around the bit. Dream lets him run himself to a stop and hopes that even in memory it can find its way back to its master. He’s at his destination, anyway. 

A long stretch of cobbled road rises before him, a path to a castle that’s disgustingly opulent. Desire’s flare for the dramatic rivals even his own; maybe that’s why they were friends once. No longer, Dream reminds himself distantly. And this isn’t Desire’s dream to do with what they please. His anger mounts. The roses that line the path wither at his passing. Roses. He wonders vaguely if Hob has ever dreamed of roses and if so why and then sours his mood further when he imagines some tryst—or worse, Hob in this place, coming to meet a creature wearing Dream’s own face. The roses wither as he passes. He feels his hair lengthening, his black jacket turning to a cloak again, his black leather boots rising like a second skin. It would shame him, for Hob to see him like this. Even for Desire he would prefer to be more put together but days of this charade have changed him and he can remember waking hours ago—years ago?—with a warm body in his arms and his chest full of something twisted so tight that even now he wonders at the fact he hasn’t snapped with it. 

And Desire is waiting. 

Dream keeps his steps steady, slow and loping like some predator, as he throws open the great doors at the top of the path. Stairs twist before him. A great hall waits  at the top, the doors already wide, the light of a false sun casting the wood in gold. Here, too, the dream is real. The presence of two Endless has made it so. This is what’s tearing his human apart. His rage seethes out of him as he mounts the top of the stairs and sees Desire waiting for him at the end of the hallway, seated on a small throne—

—wearing his face. 

The rosy cheeks Dream has never once had in any form drain to sickly white as Desire sees him. For a moment, Desire’s mouth works uselessly. “Hello, Dream. Love the new look.” Their words are full of confidence that would make Dream laugh in any other place, at any other time, for the way the shake in Desire’s voice betrays them. 

Desire sits back on their throne, to put that small distance of inches between them. They know no distance will be enough. And for all Desire’s meddling they’ve never overstepped like this. Perhaps they cannot even comprehend how far they’ve gone. 

“You and Death have been keeping your pet—I wonder what would Destiny say? Does he know?” 

A fool’s question. Dream can hardly look at his own form upon that thrown. Gold crowns his form, nestled in black curls that drape about his face. Dream’s wide strides eat the space between them. 

Desire laughs his own laugh back at him. Giddy, crowing—scared. “Of course he does! You’ve all been conspiring, haven’t you? Keeping this treasure.” 

Dream takes the stairs up to the throne two at a time. Desire’s eyes get very big when he doesn’t stop and then Desire’s gold  is staring back at him, pupils blown wide as Dream pins Desire’s shoulder to the wood throne. A small sound of shock wrests from their throat. 

“You’ve touched him,” Dream says. 

It isn’t a question. A statement and a sentence, all in one, and Dream thinks of Calliope, of her grace unwarranted and of Hob’s guileless joy. The wide spread of his fingers against Dream’s cheek. Fury stings the corners of his eyes. Calliope forgave her violator but Dream can’t. Not this. Never this. “You’ve touched him,” he repeats, his voice breaking and low as the shaking of the earth.

“I didn’t,” Desire says quickly, eyes darting between Dream’s hand on their shoulder and Dream’s eyes which must be black pits.

Dream ignores them. The lie must come easy.  “In this body, in my form,” Dream says. 

“No. I wouldn’t. Dream. You know me better than that. I haven’t laid a finger on your toy. Have you?” Their flicker flash of a smile is alien on Dream’s face looking back at him. It makes him look mad. “You’re in trouble with this one, aren’t you? Oh, Dream.”

“No.” His voice is more growl than speech. “No, but you are.”

“Ah, ah.” Desire picks the hand from their shoulder by the wrist, growing bold. “No violence, remember?”

Dream brings up his free hand to Desire’s throat and presses. “I warned you,” he says, keeping his tone as quiet as the deep flow of water, a sub-ocean circulation, a threat so sure it makes promise into a joke.

At last, a flicker of real fear casts across Desire’s face. True fear. 

“Desire cannot exist without dream.” His voice is drawn taut. “But dream has no need for desire. I don’t need you. This was a mistake.”

Desire swallows against his palm. “Dream—”

“This was a mistake. Repeat it. You’ll never haunt his dreams again.”

Desire shifts, tries to gain space, though there’s none to be had. “Haunt,” they quote. “He isn’t haunted. He wants something. Everyone does.”

“Desire,” he bites out, hard, and his voice almost breaks, almost snaps. “Give him back his memories and go.”

“His memories?” A new fear eclipses their gaze, a fear born of stepping into water without knowing its depth. Of sinking. They’re breathing now, fast and panicked, throat flexing against Dream’s fingers. “I can’t take memories, Dream." They strain against his grip, terror running wild in their gaze. "Does that really seem like me?”

“It seems exactly like you.”

“Not this time. I promise. I swear.” 

“Your promises are worth nothing. You keep him trapped here. This is the province of obsession, not desire.”

“I’m not keeping him here,” Desire spits back. “I wanted to check how your pet was doing. I never touched him.” They stretch against Dream’s fingers. “Do you know how rare it is for a man to want the same thing for a hundred years? And then you left him, all alone. We all like a friendly face now and then, don’t we? Even in our dreams. I thought I was doing you a favor.”

It isn’t a lie. “You came to him in my form, in my absence? You dared?”

Desire swallows against his fingers, but Dream’s grip has gone lax. “Sometimes they want something so much—I have to, I have to see it in their eyes. Aren’t their dreams ever too beautiful to ignore?”

“And you want me to believe you didn’t touch him.”

“Jealousy is a terrible look on you, brother. But you were always embarrassing in love, weren’t you?”

Dream releases them, his hand feeling as if its been burned. Love. He loves Hob, yes. They love each other. As friends do. As he’s come to fall in love with most humans in their small ways— 

He steps back, off the stairs, away from the throne, gripping his head, his long hair. Desire grabs their throat, soon as they’re free, and relaxes against the throne. Their breaths come reedy, and now the panic shows. “I didn’t take his memories,” they repeat. “Dream. You know I didn’t. Why would I?”

And it’s true, he finds. Desire is borne of memory. Envy and want and need are nothing without memory. He wants to rebel against it, to pin Desire back to their mockery of a throne and beg them for answers but again that thing is twisting in his chest and now it feels like panic. “You didn’t do this.”

“No,” Desire says, in a tone almost of pity. “Dream—” 

“Go.” He bites the word between his teeth as it will bleed for him.

“I will,” they promise. “I will.” They’re massaging their neck, considering, staring down at Dream. For a moment, silence reigns in the hall. It’s too real. the floor is too cold, and Desire’s skin against his hand was clammy, solid. The kind of thing a person could touch. Could revel in. Hob has given too much of himself to this dream, and dreams of memories are always like that. Always more. He should have known what this would cost from the first moment he walked in the man’s dreams. The setting sun outside the hall’s windows goes dark; a wind like ice bursts in from the stairs behind him, from the door he left open.

“Dream,” Desire repeats. “Do you know where you are?”

“His memories, “ he almost gasps past the panic taking his breath.

Desire leans forward. “But which ones?” Their eyes are a dark gold—the shade of a forest in the prime of autumn, of the crown on their head. As if reading Dream’s thoughts, they remove it, and offer it to Dream who makes no move to take it. With a light sigh, they let their arm settle to the side of the chair, tapping it against the wood absently. 

All of them, Dream thinks, but he finds at once this isn’t the answer. Not the most-right answer. He’s seen worlds born and destroyed, some by his own folly, and he’s seen the dreams of every creature within them, and he’s lost. Which memories are these, specifically? A thing not unlike dread creeps up his spine and into him.

The answer comes to him as Desire voices it: “Only the ones before he met you. I think that’s funny. Don’t you think that’s funny, Dream?”

Funny. A terrible word. Dream can’t bear to look at them any longer, but he hears as they rise from the throne and tap-tap-tap down the steps with their capricious grace. They come up on him, their booted feet entering the corner of his vision. At last he makes himself look, and there again is his own face staring back at him. He wears that smile well. Desire always looks young, and they make Dream look young, too. Joyful. Relieved to be making it out of here in one piece, perhaps. Dream wants something raw between his teeth. He sneers at them as they pass. It’s only a small change, only a wolf’s drawing of his lips back from his fangs, the widening of the pits of his eyes to a void.

Desire swallows. “I’ll never come to his dreams again. Not as myself. Not as you. But Dream—you’ll still be here. We both will.” Their expression is sickly, the ever-present smile sour. They tip the crown onto Dream’s head. The act, audacious, pushes his now-long, now-wild hair into his eyes. “Piece of advice? If you want him, want him. Desire has power, too. Even here. Here most of all.” They blink, the gold shutters, and step away lightly, dancing as if to keep him at bay.

It’s almost as if they did care, in their small and fickle way, after all. Their steps are light as they go, happy to be free. Loathing grips Dream, the desire for revenge like a living thing within him, now aimless in its violence. 

“Desire,” he snaps, ordering them to a halt. “If you come to him again, I will see you unmade. I don’t care if you bleed for it.” 

He doesn’t, he finds. 

Without turning, they say, voice shaking, “You know, I just had a thought. If you’re so sure something’s keeping his memories trapped here, I do know of one being powerful enough.” 

Night and Time, Dream thinks. Lucifer, perhaps. The list of those more powerful than the Endless are few, but then Desire turns back to him and gives their wild, wide  grin. Abandon plays in their gold eyes. In Dream’s face, it looks like madness. And then they say, as if it’s a secret they can’t help sharing, “You.”

A cut opens in him.

“I wonder, is it that it went so poorly the first time with a human? But I thought you’d never be cruel enough to make him forget you entirely. At least this time you didn’t banish the poor thing to Hell.” 

They wait a single moment to see their words hit fast—they do, a bolt at the center of Dream’s chest, long and sharp—and then they fly down the steps and out of the hallway, all but fleeing his realm. Their presence fades from the Dreaming. The pulsating madness of Desire is gone and in its place is only silence. Only Dream, standing in the cold hall, the mockery of a crown on his head. Nowhere in Desire’s words can he sense a lie. Not a single falsehood nor manipulation. His sibling has been honest with him, for once. But then, only honesty could feel like this. 

A storm breaks across the dreaming, and the storm is him.

Chapter Text

“I can’t help but feel this was a ploy to hand me off to a bird.”

“Hey.” The raven eyes him, but only with one eye, its head turned oddly as if Hob’s existence is as offensive as it is confusing. He’s perched on a wisp of a branch that doesn’t look like it’ll bear his weight for much longer. He’d been on Hob’s shoulder but Hob had mentioned fleas, and, well. Some differences are irreconcilable, it seems.

“He’s coming back with my horse, right?”

“Your horse? Don’t you mean the horse you literally stole? That horse?”

“Permanently borrowed,” Hob corrects. “A dead man doesn’t need a horse.” 

The raven stomps his little clawed foot on the branch. “You killed him? How many people have you killed today?”

“Only the four—” Hob sniffs and eyes him. “But not a single raven. Odd, that.”

“Buddy,” the raven says. “You wish you were fast enough.”

Hob rolls his eyes. “I’m joking, Matthew.” 

The name trips off his tongue. The cadence of it comes out like a familiar insult, like a curse, but when he runs it over in his mind, he can’t recall where he first heard it. And then he almost falls on his ass because the damn bird is right there, right in his face, flapping at him until Hob puts out a hand, which he takes as his new perch.

“How did you know that?” the bird asks, eyes so close Hob can’t focus on them.

“Know what?”

“My name!” 

“Well, I—I mean he said it, earlier.” He did, Hob recalls now. Of course.

“Oh.” 

“He did,” Hob assures himself. “Right before he left. God, you’re already giving me a headache.”

“Okay. Okay, fine.” He hops to Hob’s shoulder again and it seems like he’s going to drop it for a solid minute before he peers in close. “What’s his name?” he asks after a moment.

“The man in black?” No. That’s—that’s the name of a story. Of something else. “I don’t know. ” He blinks but it does nothing for the pain piercing through his skull. He presses a hand to his eyes until his vision resolves into nothing but spiraling points of light. That’s what he gets for drinking the night before. That’s where he ought to be at this moment, neck deep in ale with food in his stomach and not waiting by a river on some dying day with a talking bird and exactly no horse. 

After a moment the pain relents enough that Hob can think solid thoughts. Productive thoughts. He picks his blade up and settles it back below his belt. Fuck waiting. Fuck this day, really, but the man’s face keeps returning to him, stuck in his head like the better verse of a song. “Where’d he run off to, anyway?” he asks. Little hope of seeing him again, but something’s keeping him waiting, no better than some lovestruck maiden. 

Matthew doesn’t reply right away and when he does it’s with a wistful tone. “Do you believe in curses?”

“Curses. Do I believe in curses. Fairy stories? Old women on the side of roads that turn you into an ass if you don’t give them bread when they ask for it?” Which reminds him that his meal was in the bag currently tied to the saddle of the damn horse. Incredible.

“To be fair you’re already an—”

“An ass, right?”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine.” Hob waves his hand, and mutters, “Walked right into that one, didn’t I.”

“Yeah, you kind of did.” 

“Curses, you were saying?”

“A friend of his got, ah, cursed. And he’s trying to fix it. That’s where he went.” The bird seems proud of himself for this explanation. 

Hob isn’t. Hob thinks it’s bullshit. Perhaps the crowning masterpiece of bullshit he’s heard that month, and coming from a bird. The truth dawns on him at last. “You’re trying to pull one over on me, aren’t you. This is a scam. I don’t have money, you know.” 

Matthew glares at him. “Do you really think he would do that?” 

“I don’t know.”

“Does he look like he needs your money?” 

But he says money like he doesn’t think Hob has a coin to his name. Which is fair. He doesn’t, unless he can pawn the bird off to a traveling fair. Which actually isn’t a bad idea. 

“He thinks his family did something to his friend,” the raven is saying.  

“His family. Are they all—rich?”

“I don’t know, actually.” 

Despite himself, Hob asks, “Does he need help?” It shouldn’t matter a single wit, but it does.

“No.” The raven picks a bit of fluff from his feathers. “Probably not. He fought Lucifer once and won, so.”

“Lucifer some guy or Lucifer the Devil?”

“You know a guy named Lucifer?”

“No, but—Christ, you can’t just fight the Devil, can you?”

“If you’re stubborn enough, I guess. And if you win.” 

That’s fair. Hob snorts. “This is a bit elaborate if you’re trying to get money out of me.” 

“Be honest: do you have a penny? Anywhere?”

“Yeah, in my bag, on the horse your friend just stole. My god, wait—” Hob puts a hand to his head in faux dramatics. “You’re the curse, aren’t you? And now I have to find some unsuspecting stranger to pawn you off in. Lo, I’ve been tricked.” 

Matthew buffets him with one wing and Hob isn’t fast enough to dodge so a feather ends up in his mouth. Gross. “Stop. It’s serious. He’s really worried about his friend.”

“Are they in love with each other or something?”

The bird is quiet for so long Hob has to uncurl from his wince to stare at the thing and then he’s treated to sight of a raven with beak hanging open and it’s not quite a sight he felt he’d missed out on in the previous years of his life, really. Their tongues are odd.

“It was a jest,” Hob says after another moment. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Your jokes aren’t funny. They aren’t in love.”

The denial leaves a bloody cut in its wake, one he has no right to. I’d want him, he thinks dully. Another hour—less—he’d have been on his knees for whatever that man wanted given or taken. If it was a scam, he’d have fallen for it with both arms open and willing. the one that got away, he thinks wistfully, with his horse. “You really think he’ll be back?”

“He doesn’t break promises.” 

“Everyone breaks promises.”

“Not him.”

Hob swallows. He can’t meet this bird’s eyes, and the thought of devotion like that—well. Maybe he’s getting old, after all. Past thirty now, or thereabouts. In a better life he would have settled down. Better. He stares off across the slow eddying river, the swallows winging here and there catching their dinner and calling to each other. “Where’s his friend? The cursed one.”

“...Waiting for him,” the bird says. 

What’s wrong with him that he can’t un-curse himself, he wants to ask, but that’s never how the stories work. “How do you break a curse, anyway?”

He assumes the bird will have an answer for that, but before he can give it, the air changes. All at once, the swallows stop their feast and wing upward and then away, off to the west. A gust of fast wind that doesn’t belong in the calm twilight runs down the corridor of the river and sends the water rippling in the wrong direction. Hob turns into the wind and faces a sight he would have sworn on all three of the pennies and the single half-loaf of bread in his bag wasn’t there a second ago. A bank of storm tall as mountains, like the ones he saw once in the north, are rising over the horizon from the far straight. The setting sun ought to color them gold, but they’re moving too fast and building faster. An involuntary shiver works its way through him. “The fuck,” he murmurs. “What is that?”

“I think he’s in trouble,” the bird says faintly, in a voice so small a raven shouldn’t be able to make it, as if he’s scared. 

The hair on the back of Hob’s neck and arms rises so fast his skin stings. Questions come to him by the dozen and he discards them all like worthless corpse pickings. A beautiful stranger steals your horse and puts his hand on your cheek and maybe that’s enough to make a true fool out of him. “Curses, huh,” he says as he sets off in the direction the stranger rode, the storm at his heels. “How do you break a curse anyway?”

The bird grips his arm so tight he can feel the prick of claws through the cloth and into his skin, and tells him. 

Hob catches the horse by the reins as it dances away from him, riderless, at the bottom of a path he’s never seen the like of in his life. It’s well past evening and into night; a wedge of moon rises over the trees and a castle that can in no way be real but is. The good humor died in his throat along with his good mood with the first fall of rain. It’s soaked him through now and the raven has nestled under his hair to hide from the worst of it, for all the good it will do him. Fleas, he thought to himself dully, but spared them both the argument. Now he’s happy even for that bit of warmth. 

“Tell me he’s not in there,” Hob whispers. “Do I have to climb to the tallest tower or something to find him?” 

“Probably,” the raven says miserably. 

The castle looks forgotten in the most insidious way, like the forgotten room in a too-large house, covered in dust, remembered only in guilt for its neglect. Flowers along the road up to it have died in full bloom and the petals of some litter the road now like scattered drops of something black and vile swept along by the storm. Nothing in Hob wants to move an inch closer to the edifice before him. It seems to grow with the shadows, with each passing moment, even as it crumbles. He hasn’t seen much of the world but he’s seen enough of it to know that he’s left it entirely.

Hob squeezes the reins between his fingers until his hand aches. “Your master. He’s not human, is he?”

“...No.”

But he knew that. You don’t meet handsome strangers on the side of the road, do you? You meet witches and spirits and fae things, and all the tales they tell about this sort of thing are the same: stay far away, don’t cross them, and never make a deal. 

Hob swallows. “He’s in there.” he repeats. 

The bird says nothing. “Look. If this is a scam for—for my money or soul or something, I’m telling you there are easier ways to get it than this.”

“You know it isn’t. We should wait. We should get Lucienne. He said if he wasn’t back by midnight—” 

“It’s not midnight. And he’s in there.” He’s mustering himself to something, to a commitment he know he’s already made but can’t bring himself to fully look in the face of because it means going in a fucking deep dark castle in the dead of night to get a man who stole his horse. The horse he’s already got back. 

Just go, Hob. Leave the bird and go.  

His feet have come to a separate decision. He takes a small step up the path. The second one is easier. The bird trills a sound of misgiving. Hob sets a hand over his wings, and shushes him. “You can stay with the horse. I’m not leaving him there.” 

Anyway, who says the stories don’t go both ways? If the man is one of the fair folk or some spirit manifest, he’s having a shit day at it. Hob wonders if they don’t tell stories to their children about staying clear of humans, too. This is the fiction he tells himself as he walks up the dark road, one foot before the other, one step at a time. 

The horse he leaves outside. He eases the saddle off and then the bridle and bit, too, before he goes. No telling if he’ll be walking back out, after all, and now something like guilt does ease through him, at last. The horse might have had a better day with anyone else. He wipes his hand over its nose one last time and scratches at its wet neck and then forces himself up the stone steps and inside the great doors. Someone left them open, and well that they did, because a glance upward leaves his stomach lurching; he can’t see the top of them. From afar he could, and now it’s only black above. They could be a mile in the air and he wouldn’t know. 

Only a trick of the light, he tells himself. 

“Hello,” he calls. The dark seems to swallow his words. No one and nothing respond. 

The whole damn place is wrong. Twisted. At the periphery of his vision he sees a figure and spins towards it, but it’s not a person. It’s the banister of a stairway that’s the wrong way round, that seems to lead straight up the wall and over top of the arched hall that’s so far above him in shadows he can’t see any of it. 

He’s nauseous. “You’re his familiar. What’s gone wrong? This is magic, isn’t it? Is it his?”

The bird doesn’t answer. Hob shakes his shoulder. “Did he make this place?”

“I think he is this place,” the raven says. 

Hob chooses the set of stairs that are the right way round and takes them two at a time, because speed seems easier all of a sudden. At the top of the stairs, the door is already open again, which is good because the door way is sideways. Castles have anterooms and servants and this is more like a house, he thinks to himself as he steps over the door that’s fallen open on the floor. This place is as real as a child’s plaything, built of sticks and straws. As real as a dream. 

He stops. “A dream,” he says aloud to himself, quietly. 

The word has too much weight for the size of it. Almost enough to bear him down. It’s only the wind shuddering past him and into the hall that keeps him moving. The place is wide and paved in pale stone. Columns like those in a cathedral are set at intervals here and there. Not real, something whispers to himself. Nothing in here is real. Nothing except the pile of black at the base of the throne at the far end of the room. The chair itself is tipped on its side. The black spot looks like a pile of cloth removed and forgotten, but as his eyes adjust, he realizes the size of it is wrong. The shape of it is body-like and the cloth is too thin.

Hob’s nausea mounts. The pile shifts as he approaches. Not a dead thing. A figure, wrapped in a cloak, bracing itself against the stone. 

It looks up at him.

Eyes meet his from under a crown. In the night, the metal gleams silver, but the color resolves to gold. Gold, nestled in hair as black as a starless night, and the eyes are the same dark but glittering through and through. Hob sighs but only in himself, only at the center of his chest. This is his stranger. His horse thief. It's terrible when people try to be something they're not. His blue eyes looked good; this does too. Even the red rim around them, and the gleaming wet beneath them.

The rest of him is a tragedy. His clothes are in tatters—or missing. The cloak covers most of him and he’s got something on beneath it, the shred of something around his waist, but not much. His position on the floor makes it look like he collapsed there.

Hob kneels beside him. “You’re a mess,” he remarks. 

The man doesn’t seem to hear him.

“Matthew,” he croaks to the raven. “Take him back.”

“Where’s Desire?” the raven asks instead. 

It takes the man a minute to respond, but it looks more like he’s remembering how to talk than like he’s looking for an answer. “Gone.” 

“Gone? But it didn’t work, he doesn’t remember—”

“Matthew. Take him back. ”

Hob flinches. The reflexive need to put a hand on the man’s shoulder is hard to fight; he gets as far as reaching out before he stops himself. 

Matthew squeaks, “But—”

“Desire didn’t do this. I did.” The man slams his hand onto the stone, with a sound that has more weight than any part of a body should. It sounds like it hurts. Hob flexes his own fingers. He feels like the eye of a storm on the water, the conversation rushing around him and dragging bird and stranger with it. 

“Let’s at least get you warm,” he tries. 

The man meets his eyes this time at least. Pupil-less, they ought to be unreadable. Hob reads them fine, even in the dark. Regret. He knows regret like that.

“How?” the bird is asking, wings akimbo. “How does that make sense?” 

“He will remember everything but me,” the stranger says without looking away. “ I did this. Destruction would be proud,” he chokes and says nothing at all after, and even Matthew has run out of words. His wings are slack at his sides in a way that would be funny in any other place and time.

“Destruction,” Hob repeats. He’s nearly at his limit of this. Of this twisted place, of this beautiful thing on the floor in tears and ruins. He lets himself reach out, finishing the motion he only half-started before. The man’s shoulder is like ice; at Hob’s touch he flinches back so violently that the cloak falls open all the way. There’s a ruby hanging from his neck on a string, over his bare chest. The ghost of a former greed haunts Hob for a moment, but it isn’t for the stone. “Tell me what’s happened?” he begs. 

The man centers his dark gaze on the floor, as if Hob isn't’ there at all. God. Hob sighs to himself and the sound is reedy, his throat tight for some reason. “All right. Up, come on—up.” He grips the man under his arms and pulls him to standing all at once—he is weightier than he looks, far more muscled, but he lets himself be pulled. “You’re freezing. We should get you warm, at least. Whatever you’ve done you can’t fix it without rest and food. And shoes, Jesus,” he mutters when he realizes the man’s barefoot. “What happened to those boots? You’re a mess, love.”

It falls from his mouth so easy, he doesn’t note it, but the man goes to stone against him. 

“Don’t call me that,” he snaps. 

They’re his first words to Hob properly. Hob ignores the sting at the vehemence in them. “Fine. You’re a mess, your highness.”

But this leaves the man stricken in a different way. “You never called me that,” he says, ridiculously. 

“Then give me your name.” 

He doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. He says only, “I can’t,” and Hob sets about doing what he can. 

The throne is as good as he’s going to do. He keeps the man propped against one shoulder and uses his free arm to sit the throne up. The man stumbles once, oddly, weakly, as if drained. Outside, the storm is worsening by the moment. Little drafts of it reach them here and there, cutting through Hob’s wool like he’s wearing nothing at all. It’s a witch wind, he thinks, and then can’t recall where he heard the phrase. But there’s no water on the floor, and the man is dry at least. His luck, he thinks, with the last bit of humor he can muster. 

Once upright, he can tell the chair is covered in something like tarnished metal, or moss, or rot, but it doesn’t collapse when it’s standing and it doesn’t groan when Hob eases the man into it. Every time Hob chances a look anywhere else, his headache returns. The tapestries hanging around the room change at the corner of his eyes. The fact the hall is unlit is a kind of gift, in a way. His luck, he thinks again, at the edge of panic, headache splitting between his eyes. So long as he focuses on the man before him, it isn’t so bad. Hob kneels before him. 

Man, he scoffs to himself. Not a man. Not with those eyes that land on his when the man finally allows himself to settle into the seat. His hair is longer, Hob realizes, and caught up in the folds of his cloak and the tipped crown, making it stick up oddly. He radiates misery like a shroud. Hob gathers one hand in his own and tries to work heat back into it, thumbing circles against his palm. 

Hob feels a helpless smile break over his face. “Tell me what’s happened,” he pleads again.

For a long time, the stranger says nothing, but traces his eyes over Hob’s, searching. “I’ve done something unforgivable.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I hurt a friend.”

“Friend,” he repeats. the word is carrying too much weight he thinks to himself; it’s liable to break under it. “When you’ve done something unforgivable, you know what you’ve got to do? Forgive yourself.”

“Has that worked for you?” he asks numbly.

“No.” Hob grins. “Never.”

The man swallows and closes his eyes as if the motion pains him. “You have to leave this place.” When he looks at Hob again, for all that his gaze is full of stars, Hob can see that certain something in them again, like regret. “I don’t think we’ll see each other again.”

Hob’s heart stops a moment. It skips one beat, and then two, and then slams back to beating at double time. “If that’s true, what’s the harm in telling me?”

His stranger wets his lips. His fine pout of a mouth opens and closes and then in quiet tones that Hob isn’t sure aren’t coming from inside his own head, a story spills forth, like an apology. “A very long time ago, I made a deal with a man determined not to die.” He traces Hob’s face with his gaze, like there’s something there worth memorizing, though Hob can’t imagine what. “I granted him his wish believing it would break him. It was a game I played with him. With myself.”

The bird’s head is cocked to one side, at his perch on the back of the chair. It’s the first time he’s heard this story, too. Hob feels like it’s one of those one paragraph summaries a student turns in having missed all the important bits of the story. But this one is too real. His mouth is dry all of a sudden. “A game.”

“A game. And each passing century, I waited for his fall.”

“But it never came?”

The man looks at him with the ghost of a smile. “It came. But it didn’t break him.” He squeezes Hob’s fingers. His sorrow is so large it fills the whole damn room. 

“What’s so wrong with that?”

“Because it wasn’t a game. It was a man’s life. I stole him from time. From his own death. From any other choice he would have made. He endured these centuries on my whim. And then I had the audacity to—” He cuts himself off.

Hob’s grip on his hand is so tight now it must hurt. “If I were immortal and you were my friend—fuck. You haven’t stolen a thing from him. You’ve given him all that time. Look at my life—absolute shit, by the way—but I would take a thousand years of it, and a thousand more after if it meant I could see a thing like you every once in a while. He’s a lucky bastard. I’d give anything to be him.” The speech leaves his pulse skipping through his veins. The storm lulls outside, or he can’t hear it over the ringing in his ears, the pain beating behind his eyes. He knows. He knows who this man is. The name is past the tip of his tongue, a word he can remember all the sounds of but not the syllables and not the form.

He’s he felt this hand in his hand before. 

At least, the shadow of a true smile crosses reaches the man’s black eyes, and falls again as fast. It’s like watching a flame flicker forth from a dying fire on a winter’s night, and die again. He needs it, desperately, that heat. Hob leans in. “What’s there to be sad about?”

“I did something worse to my friend.” The ruby seems to be glowing now, a sickly red, and Hob feels panic equal to the pain in his head rise. This is power. That’s what the stone is. 

I don’t think we’ll see each other again.  

No. No, not an option. He keeps his grip on the hand in his like an anchor. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t do it,” Hob says. “Listen to me—”

 Matthew flaps free of the chair, restless in air, a gust of wind. “I’m getting Lucienne.”

“Return,” the man agrees, glancing at the bird. “I’ll take care of this.” The finality to his words is hideous. Take care. Fucking terrible euphemism. There’s no way. 

“I’ll be back,” Matthew promises and is gone before Hob realizes the bird was talking to him the entire time.

What he intends to come back to, Hob has no idea. He can’t tell anymore if the sound in his ears is the storm or his pulse.

“I know why you don’t remember me,” the man says, close to him, his voice breaking in the confession. “I know what’s cursed you.” 

Hob’s question can’t find his lips. 

“I have.” 

A tiny light plays on his stranger’s face and Hob looks down to realize it’s a crack along his own finger, light bleeding out from it in a flicker, like he’s an ember about to break in two. He lets the man’s hand go shock and tries to shake it out, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t hurt, either. It’s his power, or something worse. Something breaking between them. In him. “Don’t,” he says. “Don’t do this.”

“I took your memories without even realizing it.” He’s crying. 

“Why would you do that? You have to tell me why,” he says quickly. “Please.” The crack is spreading up to his wrist; he thinks briefly, madly of cutting the thing off, as if that would help, but his sword is downstairs and—

“I love you.”

He says that. Only that. Hob gapes at him. The sound isn’t his pulse. It can’t be. Nothing this loud could come from him. He can feel it, now, the wind finding whatever cracks in this non existent hall if can eek its way into, blowing through his clothes, through him. 

“You couldn’t admit it, so you took my fucking memories?” He asks over the rush. A name slams into him and then slams out of him. “Dream—” The man ducks his head again. “You’re so fucking stubborn,” he says in a rush. The silhouettes of memories, like watching shadows on a wall, run through him. The shadows of fears. Not his fears but this man’s and something about the forbidden, and Hob can think is that he might be a savant at self fulfilling prophecies.

It would never occur to him they could both end up happy. It’s so him. It’s the stubbornness of a man who would lock himself away a century for the promise of revenge. It took him six hundred years to admit they were friends—what did he expect, really? He wants to laugh at the idiocy of it, but he hasn’t got time for that.

The crack is up to his elbow now and another has opened on his cheek; he can see it at the corner of his eye; he can see it reflected on Dream’s face as Hob cups his face with both hands. Dream’s face goes bright, like he’s pressed his face right up to a fire. 

But his lips are cool, and soft, and solid. For a moment, solid. 

And then nothing is. 

“I’ve loved you longer.” He bites the words and hopes Dream can feel them as much as hear them, and can tell that he means wanted. He means marveled at, wondered after, followed, and waited for. God, he’s fucking waited. If there were books about how long he’s waited they’d take a mile of shelf and a half. 

He’s treated to a single perfect moment of shock in Dream’s face. His slack mouth, his eyes wide, his brows lost up beneath the crown that’s about to tip off his head. “What—”

Idiot.  

“I did say I’d tell you what I wanted if I saw you again,” he says, but his words are nothing. The room is gone, and so is he.

Hob rolls the whiskey in his glass before he takes a sip of it and takes solace in the sharp taste at the roof of his mouth and the back of his tongue, that burn. It’s been a long time since he let himself indulge this much but he consoles himself that there’s no better reason than a broken heart—and then laughs to himself, with only a little bitterness. The brick of a phone sitting on the table is a bit mocking. He’d entertained himself by imagining his peculiar guest would marvel at the sight of it. Or at least deign to look at it, with his peculiar brand of contempt and almost concealed amusement. That raised eyebrow. At least it might keep him from running off to any nearby playwrights. Actually, he’d thought it might be a way of keeping in touch, but Hob winces at that now. The optimism of hours ago has soured in his stomach.

In the hundred years since their argument, he’s replayed it a hundred times at least—daily—and most of the time he could convince himself he was right. They were friends. 

But it doesn’t mean much if someone doesn’t want a friend, does it?

God, he’s a fucking fool. 

A hundred years of waiting for someone who never intended to show. The length of his immortality stretches out before him now with only the memory of his friend—his friend —walking away from him in that mud and rain, untouchable as the day he first appeared.

Better to call him a friend than hope for something more honest and more desired, he’d thought at the time. For a moment, he’d really thought he had a chance—or would have, in a thousand years or so. 

No. That’s a lie. He hadn’t thought he’d ever have a chance like that, but he’d at least thought he wouldn’t be alone for the rest of his existence. And he doesn’t know if that makes him more the fool or less. 

He downs the rest of his drink in one go. It goes down hot. The bartender offers him another with a silent brow and Hob considers it before he shakes his head. “I’m driving,” he says, and pulls enough from his wallet to pay his tab ten times over. He slides the money across the bar. 

“He’ll come ‘round,” the bartender says with a certitude. “That friend of yours.” 

Hob gives him a wan smile. “I’ll be waiting,” he says. He knows that much about himself. 

He always waits. 

The bartender nods a consolation at him. Hob returns it with a half wave, already dreading the drive back to the penthouse he bought himself on a whim, to see if wealth in this century would suit him, already dreading the night alone.

He makes it exactly as far as the door. 

He’s reaching for the handle when it opens on its own. The heavy wood slams into the wall, rocking on its hinges—Hob jumps back, staring at the door first to make sure it’s still on its hinges, and then at the figure standing in the entrance, breathing hard. 

It takes a moment for him to recognize his stranger. He never looks the same way twice, but he’s never looked like this. He’s wearing a crown for one, and his hair is as long as it was three hundred years back, or maybe four, and he’s got a cloak gripped around his chest and too little clothes otherwise, even for an establishment as disreputable as their inn. 

“You came,” Hob says in disbelief, and then with some real offense, “You’re late. What are you wearing?”

The man’s eyes light on him, and his face is wet with what Hob is reasonably sure isn’t rain, and—something is wrong. It’s the hair that gets him, the total disarray of it. Disarray and him don’t exist in the same space. The man sways toward him and Hob puts his hands on both of the man’s shoulders to steady him. “Whoa,” he soothes, though for what he isn’t sure. He doesn’t want anyone else seeing the man like this; he glances over his shoulder—but the room is empty.

Completely empty. 

He turns back and the stranger is looking at him with those wet eyes. “I owe you an apology,” he murmurs, but his usual low voice has gone hoarse in a way that aches to hear. 

Hob shakes his head. “For being late? Or—” He glances up and down quickly, “—for the outfit?”

It’s a poor joke. The man stares at him with an unreadable expression. A beat passes. Something builds and Hob is thinking of the best way to give his own apology when a mouth presses to his.

A kiss, his brain supplies. He’s being kissed.

The shaking desperation of it takes him by surprise more than the act. It feels breakable. He feels breakable, he finds. In six hundred years, no one has kissed him like this. 

Hob’s hand finds the man's long hair—impossibly soft, like threading his hands through something made more of cloud. The action tips the crown off his stranger’s head and the sound shocks them both into stillness. Real gold, Hob realizes numbly; it hits the wood floor with a bang and crack and rolls to a stop against the open door with a heavy sound. It reminds him of dropping a pot in the kitchen. Like something that silly. His friend leans back and looks at him with eyes bleeding black, lips redder now, and those damn tears at the corners of his eyes, which Hob knows somehow don't mean he's sad—only that he's wanted this—and that's really all Hob needs to know. Long fingers grab for the collar of his shirt hard enough that he’s going to have a burn against his skin from the cloth. His friend holds him there and asks, "Do you know me? Do you know my name?"

"I know you," he says on reflex. Those eyes, this close, the shadow of inner light. He's so beautiful Hob could cry about it. He probably has. "But you never told me your name,” he starts.

The man’s face crumbles like a castle ruin. But no. No, that isn’t right, is it?

Hob shakes his head. Pain lances through his head with the motion; Hob pushes away from him in a stumble. He braces himself on the nearest solid object—the floor, because that's where he's landed—and the arm gripping his own, keeping him from smashing his face into the ground. 

"Hob," the man says. "Robert." And Dream sounds scared.

"I'm okay,'' he says, because it's what you say even when you aren't. The floor swims. It's wood. It's stone, cut. It's moss. He might be sick.

"Hell, what happened?" he bites out.

"You hit your head," Dream says with a breaking kindness, a softness.

"No, I didn't."

"There's a scar." A cool touch runs over his forehead. Dream’s voice shakes. 

There is a scar. He’s right. It’s tender to the touch. More tender than the pounding in his head. Hob rolls onto his back and stares up, because maybe if he’s still a moment, it won’t hurt so bad. There are trees above him now, big oaks. Old oaks. He’s in a clearing, and it smells so good. And Dream is staring down at him from close above his one hand still on Hob's cheek. His touch is insistent; it always has been. Like his words, nothing he can mistake for anything but the truth. His black hair is falling around his face.

Hob swallows the thing in his throat. "You had a crown,” he says nonsensically. “It suited you."

"I thought you said gold wasn't my color."

"It isn't. Who the hell—" He bites his tongue. Gold eyes. Right. Dream’s face, and the wrong eyes, and he didn’t know they were wrong. He didn’t know who Dream was, did he? Morpheus. He would laugh if he could manage it—who the hell introduces themself as Morpheus right off? Only a man who didn't introduce himself for six hundred years, he thinks madly, and maybe it was progress after all.

"Desire,” he’s saying. ”The younger of my siblings, but not youngest." He looks troubled. His eyes dip. "They said they'd come to you before." 

Hob winces. "I knew it wasn't you. I never—"

"I know. They won't come to you again here. And if they do you should tell me."

"Why? Is it that bad?"

His eyes flare with that cold light. "The things I call mine are few." Deliberate words.

Hob's breath catches, and Dream leans over him in the moss. His fingertips are inhumanly soft for so much strength. He draws them over Hob’s temple; the pain abates. His eyes ache, but the rest settles out, beat by beat. "I still owe you an apology." 

"An apology." Hob closes his eyes. "Why didn't you tell me who you were? You let me think I was dating a—a criminal, or something, which is fine by the way, if that's what you were. Fuck. You let me think we were dating. And the fucking bird."

"If you thought you were dating Matthew, we may have more to talk about," Dream says from impossibly close.

If he opens his eyes, he's ruined. "Has anyone ever told you you can be a bit—" Hob puts his thumb and forefinger together, "—just a bit of an ass at times."

"Less often than you would think. Look at me."

He looks. It's an order from the only king he's cared about in several centuries. And god he's so beautiful it bites cruel. Kings are that, sometimes, in stories, and maybe he's still dreaming, except of course he is and that doesn't make it less real when the King of the Dreaming taps his forehead to Hob's. "You remember me.”

Relief, and nothing but. Hob brings a hand to his back. The cloak has fallen most of the way; it pools around his waist, around both of them, really, since Dream is still bowed over him. It feels odd. He could be some dead lover being mourned over. I am stretched on your grave, and I'll lie here forever. He's had too many songs stuck in his head lately. Maybe he's getting old, after all.

"I remember." 

"I took you from me."

He snorts. "You're the only one who can." It's only honest. "Please don't, by the way. Not again."

"It wasn't on purpose."

It’s guilt—that’s what’s casting him over in shadow, still. How much regret can a thing gather in a lifetime as long as Dream’s? Hob shakes his head. "In comparison to when I told you we might be friends, I think it went okay."

"Never again," Dream promises fiercely. And his ferocity is something more and simpler than anyone else's. Animal, he thinks not for the first nor hundredth time. But Dream looks it today.

Hob draws one hand through the long stream of his hair. It's too fine to look truly elegant; each brush of the breeze through their clearing makes it dance into fly-aways. "What happened to your hair?" 

"What happened to yours?"

Hob pats his own head. Ah, slicked back. Right. "The eighties. Nineteen eighties. You missed a good time. They would have loved your look. I was so excited to show you off.”

He cocks his head to one side, surveying Hob like he’s something. “Were you?”

“Oh, yes.”

Dream climbs over him. Hob’s mouth opens under his, easy as that, as if it's the hundredth time they've done this and not the second. No, the third. The taste of him. The heat of him. It’s overwhelming. Rain on a road at the height of summer. Something fresh when all he’d smelled for days was death. 

Hob breaks the kiss. “You were there,” he says. “I remember—”

“Dreams,” Morpheus says. “You were dreaming of the past.” 

“I’m sorry you saw me like that.” Stealing, killing, surviving. Fallibly human.

The kiss against his jaw is wet, and then Dream’s lips draw to his neck, and then to the collar of his white shirt, and then over the span of bone at the middle of his chest when he pushes it up. He stops then, as if surprised. “What is there to be sorry for?”

“I was terrible back then.”

Dream arches a brow, as if to say, you aren’t now? Or, maybe, that all things are in small ways. “So was I,” he says after a pause. “And for longer than you.” He sits back on the seat he’s made of Hob. “You’ve learned faster, my friend.” 

“You keep using that word.” Dream is heavy against a part of him he’s trying to ignore now, and he’s wanted this for longer than he’s known he couldn’t have it. “Dream,” he says, or warns.

But there’s no one else there to see them. Dream stares down at him with his gaze inhuman, not because it’s dark and speckled with stars, but because there isn’t a whisper of shame in him. The misting rain clings to his hair in tiny droplets. Hob's white shirt is a film over his skin, where it’s still there at all, but the rain isn’t cold—only kind, the way rain is sometimes, washing away the dust and mess and everything that came before. He recalls stripping down to nothing and pointing his face to the sky a few days after their first meeting in the Inn, their first true meeting. He remembered everything from that time, later, like worrying at a bruise, trying to remember any moment that might have meant something outside of a stranger in a tavern offering him immortality. So he remembers the rain, remembers it sluicing away sweat and blood and, he imagined, because he believed in that sort of thing back then, maybe even a sin or two.

Hob laces their fingers. They’ve done it before; that’s easy. Pick the easy parts, he tells himself. Do that first. And he isn’t even sure if this all is something a thing like whatever Dream does. Dream shifts lightly, and he can’t be oblivious to the groan the motion works from him.

“Sorry,” Hob gasps.

Dream quirks a brow at him, and then seems to come to something, to some decision. He spreads a hand over the bare stomach before him now that he’s pushed the shirt up around Hob’s chest and out of the way. An odd fascination lies in the gesture, but at what part of Hob, he can’t guess. He hasn’t been vain in a good long while.

“If you apologize for your pleasure at every moment, we're going to be here for a long long time.” 

“That… that wouldn’t be so bad.” 

The grey jacket comes off; his shirt follows when Dream pulls him up to seated against him. The temperature around them rises like the season is changing. Dream’s skin reddens where Hob’s mouth passes. Kissing him—any part of him—is an act that feels at once like play and like worship. 

Dream would laugh if he said it, so he doesn’t. Not even when he looks up at the man sitting in his lap and finds his pale skin all dusted with blush and his eyes wide. 

A shaking hand comes to his cheek. “I want you,” he says, one hand spread from the corner of Hob’s eye to the corner of his jaw, the other spanned across his chest, touch full with greed. The red ruby is quiet against his neck. Hob wanted to undress him, but what little shreds of Dream’s black clothes remained on him are gone now. 

This is a dream, he reminds himself, and closes his eyes. “You have me. You’ve had me for a long damn time.” At least you finally know what do with me. But he doesn't say this last because Dreams fingers are long and dragging down his chest and lower still. He’s clever, and what’s worse, he’s sincere. His touch could undo Hob in a moment. But that isn’t how he wants it. In his mind, his fuck with the stranger behind the Inn would be loud and fast and leave him so wrung out he’d be thinking about it for weeks. Maybe later, he tells himself. Maybe, if he gets another chance after. Hob takes a handful of his damp hair and pulls his neck back and lets the cloak be Dream’s only cover, a single concession to modesty as Hob searches out all the pieces that put him together. One by one they fall into place under his hands. Parts of him so soft and so sweet it would bring him to tears if thought about it for too long. 

“How do you want this?” he asks when Dream is wet and his skin is warmed over and his mouth against Hob’s is lazy and lax. 

Dream’s arms are around his neck. He pulls away and says to Hob’s temple in a hoarse whisper of almost-exasperation, “Do you think it matters to me?”

It’s a shade too desperate. Hob huffs a sigh and squeezes him tighter, pushes his own face into Dream’s chest, right beside the ruby, which is really only in the way now. “You’ve had a bad few days, haven’t you?”

Dream laughs. An actual laugh. The sound is brief and bare. “Not so bad.” 

A filthy lie. He can lie—if even only to himself. Hob will remember that. He marks it down, right beside the quiet sound he makes when Hob presses into him at last. His need is such a quiet thing. It melds with the move of the rain through the trees, the fall of water against stone. Hob pauses there, forces himself to be still, to look up. 

Dream stares at him with the look of a man starving. Hob knows. He knows exactly what that’s like. 

He marks that down, too. And then the way Dream grips at his hair, and his shoulder, and then over Hob’s back, leaving a path of shallow burn in his wake. It’s him moving then, arching against Hob, rocking like a storm surge, washing away every other thought and every other want and every other body Hob’s ever had where this body is now. All of them shadows, he thinks, playing out against a wall. He hears himself muttering nonsense, the way he hasn’t since he was young and new to this. Praise and prayer. Foolish things he’ll be glad if he can’t recall later, a steady litany of them that only ceases when Dream takes his mouth and kisses him deeper than he should be able to manage against the tidal rock of his body. 

Later, in the mirror at the Inn, Hob will thumb at his mouth and the broken skin there. In the moment, it’s nothing. A small offering. The little bleed and pain are what’s owed for this. He’ll mark that, too. All these moments, all these pieces of this man, memories he runs over and over in his head in the hope he won't forget again. 

The rest he leaves for the two of them, in that place. After all, the best way to remember a thing is to return to it, time and time again.

“I think your definition of friend could use some work,” Hob tells him after, his head pillowed over the cloak pooled in Dream’s chest. 

“You wouldn’t call me friend? After all this?” Offense edges his words; nothing in Dream’s voice sounds like a jest, but this must be.

“Ha,” Hob gasps, body still weak. “You’ve got me there.”

“I have got you,” he says, far too pleased with himself. His words have a shade too much weight; Hob wonders briefly if this is it, if he’s sold his soul at last, but it’s putting the cart before the horse—or, no, the horse has already been out the barn a century or so. He covers his eyes.

“I can’t believe the bird was right,” he mutters to himself. 

Dream’s carding through his hair pauses. “About what?”

“Curses.”

He breathes and his voice shakes when he says, “I was the curse.” He enunciates it, as if Hob is very simple. “I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

Hob shakes his head, waves his hand. They won’t get anywhere if Dream believes that. It's a lie, anyway. Another one of those he's told himself. You can be happy, he wants to say. You can love a thing and have it love you back and not suffer for it. Instead he says, “It broke the same as they all do, didn’t it?”

“Love and blood?” Dream murmurs, almost a question.

Hob sits up and quirks a brow at him. “No. No—what? A kiss. True love’s kiss, you fool. What kind of books have you been reading?"

Dream stares at him. Hob replays the words in his head. Ah. Fool. He opens his mouth on the shape of an apology but Dream laughs at him then. Laughs, a real laugh, not his usual huff of helpless humor, a thing that’s been dragged out of him for the hanging, but a real living thing, beating and bright. 

“Suppose I deserve that,” he mutters to himself, and settles back into his makeshift bed of cloak and body and quiet.  

Dream bends to kiss him, the laugh still on his lips.

Chapter Text

Professor Gadling has been with them three years and a season the first time he walks into the staff lounge humming. 

He sets up by the printer while Linda tries not to stare. She's the only one—the only one trying not to, that is. Harold is looking at him like he's walked in with a bird perched on his shoulder, and Polly and Kevin are making an olympic moment out of their ability to gawk. The tune is familiar, but Linda can't place it. What about a Monday is worth humming about is lost on her.

"Going to the barbecue this weekend, Rob?" she asks.

He’s frowning at the printer now. He knocks at the side of it, in an apparent attempt to summon paper from it. "No, I can't,” he says absently. “We’re going to up north for the day.”

We? Kev mouths with a serious look. 

"What's up north?" Harold asks.

Gadling is still looking at the printer as if it’s challenged him to a contest. "Is there paper in this thing? I swear. Oh, north, right… Thought I'd take Morpheus around to see the sights. Go for a walk somewhere new. I think he feels a bit neglected lately. Needs to, ah, stretch his legs.”

"Morpheus?" says Kevin. Linda aims for his foot; she's too late, but it's worth it for the little pained sound he makes after. 

Gadling isn't listening, and that’s some mercy. The printer makes a plaintive beep. If he knows he’s let it slip, he doesn’t let it show. 

Linda says, "That's lovely. I hope you two have fun. Dev and I rent a little cottage around the Lakes every summer. Beautiful walking.”

At last the damn thing springs to life and starts spitting out paper. "Finally, Jesus," he mutters, as he grabs his prize. "Thanks, we will."

To Polly's credit, she waits at least until he's down the hall before she says, "When did he get a dog?"

"Dog?" Linda asks.

Kev jumps on it, almost literally, standing from his seat all at once. "No, no, I think you're right. He's been leaving early in the evenings hasn't he? And the other day he left for lunch."

"He left for lunch?" Linda asks. Oh the scandal. “Why do you two think it's a dog and not a person?"

Polly gives her an odd look. "No person is named Morpheus. And if you were you'd change it."

"To what?" 

She picks at her bagel. "Murphy, I guess?"

"Polly, one of your students is named Galadriel."

But this is only the beginning. 

Two days later, Kev rushes into the break room to tell them all Gadling is in his office listening to bad music. “It sounds like the Arctic Monkeys. Alt rock, or something,” he says, like this is news both breaking and tragic. 

“Alt rock,” Clement repeats, without looking up from the paper he always reads between his morning classes. When Linda told him about the recent revelations and the flurry of surrounding gossip, he’d arched a single well-groomed brow and shared a look with her . “Kevin, how do you not know Oasis? He’s been listening to it between classes all week.” 

“Oasis? Bit old for that, isn’t he,” Linda starts, but no one wants to restart the pool they had the year after they hired Gadling where the open bet was to guess his age. It’s still open. Officially. In actuality, someone —Kev, of course—spilled the beans. Or, rather, let the beans spring forth in a wave of speculation, directly to the man himself after he did recon on Gadling’s office and came back with no news whatsoever but that the man had a print of some old caricature drawing hung large on his wall and a single framed photo of a building on his desk. A building. It would have been monumentally less revelatory if he’d checked who was in the break room before he ran in talking about it. Gadling had, with all his grace and good humor, claimed the pot for his own, as the only person who could possibly win, and bought them all dinner with it. For his birthday, he claimed, with cheeky grin and lying eyes. The seventh of June is still marked nebulously on the mental calendar Linda keeps for her grandchildren’s birthdays and varied anniversaries. Older than he looks is the closest anyone has gotten to the truth and what he looks like changes based on whether or not he’s shaved or cut his hair or decided that yes, it is another month for cardigans.

Clement arches a brow but still doesn’t look up. “Never too old for Oasis, are we?” 

She snorts. “Maybe you aren’t. I think my youngest still listens to them sometimes.” 

“But isn’t that odd?” Polly says. “He never listens to music.”

It’s true. The things they know about Gadling are few. The students love him. He’s an absolute wealth of disparate facts, up to and including the edibility of the mushrooms growing in the planters outside the building—not, he’d said, with evident pain. He wears his emotions on his sleeve, which isn't saying much because he ranges between amicable to cheery, with only the briefest forays into something which she personally refers to in her head as quietly Lonely with a capital L.

He seems a bit dedicated to the prospect. In three years, she’s lost count of the number of prospective suitors and moon eyed students that have haunted his office hours—all hopeless. She keeps her office unlocked for moments when he needs to slip in the door and pretend he has a very important question about curriculum and it’s going to take fifteen to forty-five minutes to properly work it out.

In those three years, he's never once mentioned an affinity for, ah, alt rock. Or Scottish ballads, which he now hums as he walks the hallways with the wild abandon of a maid walking the moors. He dresses up. He leaves for meals—on time, even. He starts using his vacation. His Lonely moments give way to an absent smile. Oh, to be young and in love, she thinks. It’s almost enough to warm her heart, even in the throes of a new semester rampant with students who have yet to figure out how to that her deadlines are dead in the very literal sense.

And then Gadling gets in his wreck.

"I saw someone," Clement says quietly a week later. "In his room at the hospital."

Polly leans across the table. "Did you go in?" 

"No." He sniffs. "They were having a moment. It would have been rude."

Rude, ah. What constitutes a moment Linda decides to leave unasked. Her imagination is better. Watery eyes and hands held, and Gadling’s anguished paramour wavering between varied princely visages and winsome, waifish figures.

Clement looks between Polly and Kev and then to Harold who is truly trying to seem like he's not interested, but who did describe at length during lunch the day before his theory that this mysterious Morpheus was in fact a cat and not a dog. He'd even offered to go feed it after the accident, but no request was forthcoming. For her part, Linda brought Gadling takeout and chocolate and subbed his Tuesday evening class, and counted that as good enough. 

"No," Clement says primly. "I shan’t. It's his business." Linda loves him and hates him in that moment. Maybe she can ply it out of him later over drinks. "I will say they seemed very close."

The young set share a serious look. It's not clear which of them thinks they have a chance with Gadling or if they're both sure no one else deserves him—or if they're just that invested in a department dog. 

Gadling rebounds from it with rare alacrity. He comes back faster than she expected, with a scar and the occasional hangdog look, but no worse for the wear. Before long, it’s almost situation normal, though once or twice he comes into her office and almost seems to have a question. When he finally comes out with it, it’s an odd one. 

“Have I ever introduced you to the person I’m dating?” he asks, almost offhand, on his way out the door. 

“No,” she says honestly. 

His gaze clouds. “Why? Why wouldn’t I tell my coworkers?”

She laughs. “Because you make a sport out of being private. There’s debate about whether you’re dating anyone at all, and thank god if you are. You deserve someone good in your corner.”

“Good,” he quotes. One corner of his mouth tugs up and his gaze falls as if he has no idea what he’s asking or why but feels he must. “I’ve never said a thing about it? Truly?”

“No.” She quenches the sigh working its way out of her chest, and the urge to put a hand on his shoulder. It’s rather more and worse emotion than she’s seen him show. His hair is falling about his eyes and she notes the scar on his forehead has eased into a faint line. Might be gone before the year is out, if he’s lucky. What she wouldn’t give for genes like that. 

He turns to go and she has to say something. She has to.

“Rob. Whoever they are, you’ve seemed happier lately than you have been since I’ve known you, these past months. Trust yourself a little.” 

It eases a few of the lines setting in around his mouth. He nods. 

“Are they a looker, at least?” she shouts after him, only because she knows no one else will be around that early. 

He waves and says not a word, the grin he’s wearing is as shit eating as they come.

Privately, she credits herself with what happens next. 

Gadling returns from a long weekend with peace in his eyes, an easy smile for anyone he looks at, and a dozy one for everything else. He doesn’t bring up any pets, boyfriends, or Morpheuses. Morphe-i? What he does bring up, at length, is how lovely the weather is, and weren't the clouds gorgeous that morning, Lin? Here, he took a photo. And he saw a little hawfinch on his walk at lunch. Have you seen one, Lin? They're so bright. It's been years since he saw one around here—years! And oh when the sunset hits the river on nights like this…

On Wednesday, he brings donuts to the staff meeting, fifteen minutes late.

“Good morning,” he trills as he sets them down on the table. They’re the expensive kind, the ones that come in different colors with varied, whimsical toppings. Linda chooses one in blue, with star sprinkles, because she’s earned that for the week and she’s years past the vanity of pretending she doesn’t want one.

“What’s the occasion, Rob?” she asks. 

He grins at her in that way that dimples his cheeks and his chin too and says, “No occasion.” The one he selects from the box has what might be bacon studding the top of it; he shoves the whole thing in his mouth in two bites, and raises his brows, as if to say, isn’t it donut day every day? But it’s not. And he’s brought in baked goods exactly twice, when he had to pawn them off from the eatery he lives above.

“You’ve been in a sickeningly good mood lately.”

He shrugs, still chewing. Still smiling. Around the table, the brief sweets induced silence is being used as liberally as an excuse to gawk at the spectacle Gadling has made of himself with his sleep roughed hair and his donuts.

Linda would have begged off, especially if she had a reason like his for being late. 

"Traffic was terrible," he says. Lying doesn't become him, but the air about him does, like he's walked in from a gentle summer morning and not a gale.

She tells him, "You've missed the most important part of the meeting—we were just discussing trivia night." 

Harold recovers fast. "Yes, we’re short one.”

Linda glares at him. “No, we’re not—”

He looks directly at her and says, “Would Morpheus like to come? So we have even teams?" 

Terror flashes across Gadling's face and off again. "For trivia?" Total incredulity.

"They have outdoor seating," Kev says. "If he needs that."

Gadling pauses. "Uh, right. Thanks. I don't know—"

"I'm just saying. We would all love to meet him!"

Nods all around. Linda leans in. "Your shirt is on backwards."

His blush is almost pretty.

An unseasonable heatwave grips them in May. Not hot, but warm enough to warrant the field day the student outreach department comes up with last minute. In a desperate bid to make history seem cool, Kevin, Polly, and Clement come up with a water balloon themed booth where students can answer questions and get the chance to pummel their professor of choice if they get a correct answer. It's brilliant marketing because it ends up with Gadling, Polly, and Harold—who has a tweed sort of charm on his own—in utter wet misery. It also eliminates whatever modesty Gadling's typical white shirt was providing him. Adjuncts at other booths keep popping by and the occasional student has a passing giggle, but most move off with a well placed glare.

At minimum gets them several sign ups for the department club the younger set are trying to resurrect from near death. It also gets Linda personally the unfettered joy of watching Gadling go absolute ham on Kevin—his aim as impeccable as his specific knowledge of fifteenth century printing advancements.

And, after, when they set up in lawn chairs and Gadling pulls his wet hair up and bends to fetch them all drinks from the cooler, it gets almost everyone a rather clear view of the mark on the nape of his neck.

The bite mark. 

Lurid red. An incomplete double crescent of raw bruise. She had a boyfriend back in college who was fond of that sort of thing; she'd been wild for it. It appears Gadling is, too, because it's not the only one there. Now she looks, there's a line of scratches down his shoulder blade, too, almost hidden by the shirt. Goodness.

It's really such a warm day. "Rob," she calls in her just matronly voice. "You're going to burn like that without sunscreen, love." She tosses him a spare towel. 

He catches it and looks at her with the slightest confusion. "Looks like you've got a bit of a burn starting on your back."

"I don't—" he goes perfect white and then cherry red  "—oh." 

The towel becomes a little cape around his neck and he spends the next ten awkward minutes making small talk and keeping his back to the booth, while Polly and Kev exchange shell-shocked looks. Poor thing, she thinks of Gadling, but it's hard to feel very bad at all for him.

His phone going off rescues him. The tone is an eighties or nineties song she can't immediately place—something else her youngest would have listened to shut up in her room after school. He takes one glance at the number and whips right up with wide eyes.

"Hello?" he answers, ducking his head like that's going to do anything to stop his gaggle of coworkers from listening in. 

They can't hear the voice on the other line, she notes with more annoyance than she's willing to admit to.

"No—wait, why?" A pause. His brows gather. "No, don't do that. Please, can you put Matthew on?" The person on the other line is giving fast answers, or short ones. "No, he’ll know how to fix it—please put Matthew on." He pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "Matthew will tell you how to—Twitter? No, why have you downloaded Twitter? Love, please, just give the phone to—” 

Gadling seems to realize he’s having this conversation very much in public. “One moment.”

He hurries away, behind the booth, and off across the field, his voice trailing after him. “Don’t make an account!” he’s saying. 

Once he's gone from earshot, Poppy coughs and rubs at her nose. Her lovely red hair is a little poofed up from the excess water and warm day. “He can have a dog and a boyfriend,” she mutters.

“How do you know it’s not his parents?" Linda spreads her hands wide. "Or a girlfriend.”

Her brown eyes get wide and wounded. “You think he has a girlfriend?”

"Could Matthew be his little brother, you think?" Kev submits. He's got a conspiracy board in his office, she knows he has, yarn and all. 

Linda settles back with her cherry soda and lets get sunset shade her eyes and yes, she was right to bring the padded chair for a day like this.

Clement murmurs from behind his drink, "What if Matthew is their third?"

This is a cruel thing to say, because it sends what had simply been hobby speculation into the uncharted territory of factions. Kev comes down firmly on the opinion that Gadling has a dog—Morpheus, with a side fling, and loving but technologically inept parents. Polly won't hear a word of any fling but swears to support Rob if there is one and he gets his heart broke. Harold takes the variation of this that says Gadling is trapped in a lonely cycle of unfulfilling relationships, but must be a family man at heart, and—well, of course—cat. Clement says nothing at all but on his space on the sheet puts: Two boyfriends.

Linda doesn't deign to participate, but on her own sheet, kept in the privacy of her desk, writes: Long-term relationship. Later, she adds: Also has a son? Just for fun. 

This is all fun and games, in the way that watching half one's colleagues go quietly insane is. 

On Tuesday, Gadling mentions going to the park with Morpheus, and that Morpheus had fun with the pigeons. When asked for great date spots on his side of town, he demurs and says he's past all that. What do he and Morpheus do for fun? Walks by the river, he supplies. How did he sleep last night? Okay enough, but Morpheus had to go out twice in the wee hours; it kept them both up. Morpheus is quiet. Morpheus can sniff out a stranger at a hundred feet. Morpheus likes birds.

And then at an end of week meet up to celebrate the last of the department review squared away, they meet someone entirely new.

There's a bruise from a kiss peeking out from Gadling's shirt as he sits at his cafe table; Linda has been eyeing it absently for an hour while she sipped her chardonnay. Gadling has chosen to unbutton the top of his shirt which is perhaps unwise for the given reason, and because each time his arm shifts as he animatedly describes the last time he tried to ride a horse—middling success, it seems—the hair on his chest becomes increasingly hard to ignore. She's doing fine; Polly and Kev look at the edge of some sort of break.

It's perhaps a sort of cleansing fire when a stranger walks up to their table. 

He pauses behind where Gadling is sitting, on the other side of the railing that lines the eating area in the square. He looks like he's walked out of a nineties album cover; the sort where the title song includes a rain effect in the outro. Midnight hair and electric blue eyes. The black folds of his long jacket make him look nigh priestly—black like a murder of crows, she thinks to herself, and smiles. 

"Evening," he murmurs in a voice Linda wouldn't have imagined could come from a human throat. It's at once eerie and calming. 

Gadling shocks still and then his whole face changes. "Hello you," he says with bleeding affection as he stands, ever the gentleman. "Did you try to call?"

"No." That no is carrying a whole mess of something, as is the soft curve of smile on the man's rather too-red lips. 

Gadling introduces them all. One by one, the stranger's eyes settle on each of them with an impartial curiosity, as if he's dissecting them and already knows what he'll find inside. Kev squishes into his seat like he's done something wrong, and Linda suspects she knows exactly what—no man needs that many pictures of a coworker even if it for the display board—but it's fine. 

Morpheus, she thinks with crowing victory. Finally, Morpheus.

But Gadling gestures to his friend, and says only, "Dream."

A full and terrible two seconds pass of total silence, before Linda realizes this is the man's name. Great. World class, really. 

"Hi, Dream," she offers.

Looking at him, she tries to remember the dimensions of the bite mark on the back of Gadling’s neck with a purely professional interest. Could be. Could be the same. The way he's looking at Gadling, sure. It’s devouring. 

“You can sit with us!” Gadling offers his own chair, but the stranger—Dream—bows his head. 

“I have work.”

It’s fucking late, though, well past evening. Perhaps he really is in a band. The nineties aren't dead, after all. 

“Ah, a drive by,” Gadling says, and he better be referring to the nature of this meeting. “I’ll see you later.” A certain emphasis on the later makes Linda pull the glass to her mouth again. Dream stares impassively and then his lips twitch to an almost imperceptible smile.

“Later.”

Gadling sits again, with a little bit of a sigh, and then all at once looks over his shoulder and calls after the man, “Wait, are you bringing Matthew?”

“Yes. He wants you to cook for him.”

“Figures,” Gadling mutters with a snort. 

Polly and Kev are sharing the most desperate look. Clement simply smiles. "He seems like a nice young man. What does he do?”

Were she not mid sip, she might stomp on his toes. She can see the scrolling behind Gadling’s eyes while he tries to come up with something. Finally he settles on, “Bit of playwriting?” with a waggle of his hand back and forth as if to demonstrate exactly what that means. 

Unemployed, Kev mouths behind his glass.

Polly mouths back, Millennials, like she isn’t one.

“Anything we’ve seen?” Clement asks, smile twitching on his face. 

“Oh, definitely,” Gadling replies, and says not another damn thing.

An awkward minute passes where Gadling inspects his beer as if it’s the first he’s seen and Linda sends strong mental energy to everyone else at the table to not stick their foot directly in their mouth. It doesn’t work.

“Do you often, ah, hang out with playwrights, Rob?” Polly asks. 

He winces, but really it’s what he deserves for such a terrible lie. “Not on purpose.” Perhaps realizing there’s no getting out of this conversation with so little information. “We met at a pub, years back.”

“In what pub are they handing out playwrights that look like that? ” 

Gadling looks for a moment truly offended or like he’s trying to look truly offended. “First, he’s older than me, I’ll have you know, and he approached me first. It was years ago.” He taps at the glass absently and says with comical seriousness, “I was very impressionable. It’s quite scandalous, actually.” 

And?

“And we’ve been friends ever since. More or less.”

More, she thinks. Rather more. But something in the words is oddly gentle. They are friends, whatever else they are, and old ones. Familiar ones. 

“I didn’t realize you had such fashionable friends.”

“Why, because I’m not fashionable? I’ll have you know, in the eighties—” 

Groans all around. 

“It is,” Harold says with careful enunciation, “a cat name.” He sets his hand down on the table and says this. A cat.

Utter despair clouds the room. At the center of the table is their piece of paper, now written over two or three times, additions and arrows and really, they might as well upgrade to the pinboard and yarn at this point. “I think he must be fucking with us,” Kev says. “Who names someone Dream?”

“Who names someone Morpheus?” Polly replies.

Clement has simply crossed his entry out and added: Three boyfriends. “Harry, you cannot seriously believe a man would walk his cat that much. Take his cat up north on holiday ,” he quotes with his fingers. “Consider bringing his fucking cat to a barbeque!”

“He might!” 

“It is not a cat!” 

Which is, of course, the moment Gadling walks in, whistling his usual tune.

That song. She looked it up after she caught him putting words to it in his office. It’s a folk song. The kind those new traditional Celtic bands make a living off reproducing to polished perfection but really are better suited to this—just this, singing alone and in love about the black haired, bright faced, gentle-handed creature that's stolen one's heart. There’s a terrible charm to it, and now that she has a face to go with it, it's even better. Black is the color of my true love’s hair, indeed. And Gadling is onto something with the lips, too. She wishes now she'd paid better attention to the man's hands.

“Hell—ooo?” His eyes fall to the paper. “What's that? What are we fighting about?”

It all makes her, without warrant, a bit protective. She pulls the paper towards her and eyes it with real disdain. “Oh, trying to work out schedules for the holiday thing.”

“Holiday thing,” he echoes. “The end of year party?”

And like he can't help it, Kev, with madness in his eyes, asks, “Are you bringing Morpheus?”

For a bit, Dev got into manifestation. The art of wishing for things and simply making them appear. It was never really her thing, but fight now, she's manifesting that Kev’s coffee spill on his white sweater.

Gadling is still eyeing the paper under Linda's hand. A smile tugs at his mouth. “Oh, no. I think crowds over-excite him. Loud noises and all that. He's been a bit clingy since my little—” he taps his head, and leaves it to the imagination. “We might go to a new park—he does love playing with birds.”

“That's a shame. What about Matthew?”

Gadling takes the empty chair beside her and leans all the way back. “Oh, no. He’s got terrible table manners. Eats like a wild animal.” 

Without anyone noticing, except perhaps Gadling, she manages to pocket the paper. She'll burn it later—or, no, maybe save it for blackmail. He catches her eye as the conservation moves on, a quirk in his brow, a question. She leans over to him. “Your shirt’s on backwards again.” 

She does get rid of the paper. Nothing so dramatic as a burning, but the shredder suffices. What Gadling doesn’t know won’t hurt him—though it might have made him laugh. She resigns herself to living in mystery. And then, at the start of June, a student late for an exam hits Professor Gadling with their bike.

The damage isn’t bad. Most of the tragedy is the poor man’s jacket, which has an actual tire mark across the hem and a bit of a tear, too. She’d envisioned blood on the concrete when a student grabbed her in the hallway and told her he’d been “run over.” His left hand is missing some of its skin, but when she’d offered him a bandage for it, he’d refused. The real sin is his eye, which is bruised black and a bit swollen. He wears it well, for what it’s worth. 

“Maybe you should avoid roads for a bit,” she tells him. He’s sat on a bench with the ruined jacket beside him. The student who hit him had stayed with them for a while, her face a death mask of teary dread, until Gadling convinced her with his insistence that it was his fault for not watching where he was going—and his promise to write her a very convincing excusal note for being late to her test. He’s too nice.

He pokes at his eye, and winces. “I think you might be right.” His voice is strained, though. 

“You’re hurt, aren’t you?”

He gives her a one-eyed look. “Yes?” 

“Other than that, I mean. Rob. You should go to a hospital.”

He waves his hand. “Bah. No hospital.” Oh, he’s one of those men. She probably could have guessed. “What’s a rib or two? It’ll heal.”

“At least see the nurse.”

“No, please. No reason to make a big thing out of it. I’m strong as a horse, honestly.”

His confidence in his ability to overcome anything is almost inspiring. In some, it comes across as some false bravado, but in him it’s almost charming. “And as stubborn as a mule? Fine.” She resolves to stay standing there at least until he’s ready to move, if only to make his pained hunch a little less awkward.

He jumps when his phone buzzes in his hand. “Ah, fuck,” he mutters when he looks at it. “I told him it was nothing.”

It’s immediately clear who he’s talking about. And it’s even more clear when Gadling looks toward the corner of the street with a bit of something that might, on someone less cheerful, look like mortification.

Dream. The man looks more a nightmare—she's proud of herself for that one—with black murder in his gaze, to match his clothes. It's a bit extraordinary he's arrived so fast. His hair is longer than it was last time she saw him, and his eyes are darker in the overcast afternoon. He pauses when he sees Gadling, but only for a breath, and then he eats the space between Gadling and him in an improbably small number of strides for the grace with which he manages it.

When he reaches Gadling, he seems to fall more than kneel before the man. The open folds of his jacket, too heavy for the season, come up around them both as he wraps Gadling in a hug.

Gadling rocks back against his bench with an, "Oof."

They're both sizeable men and they make a bit of a spectacle together, the two of them, Gadling in his scuffed white and shag of hair and rounded off edges, and this pointed, precise, whip of a man and the cage he's made of his body around Gadling. It's good the small crowd cleared off; Linda tries to angle herself impartially away, as if she's keeping watch on the courtyard instead.

It's needed, because it's very clear that Gadling's friend is not okay.

"Hey, hey. I think it makes me look a little roguish,” he says, and he must be referring to his black eye. He pets the man's hair. Softer, he says, as if in confession, "You know, this sort of thing actually happens all the time. I just don't usually tell you about it on our, ah, dates. It'll heal."

And he's right about that. She noticed when she was looking to make sure his nose wasn't broke; the scar from his accident is no scar at all now. She couldn't pick the spot if Gadling paid her too. 

The man eases his death grip, but doesn't stand. "That—isn't the comfort you think it." He stays pressed there temple to temple, eyes closed.

"It's not even bleeding anymore." He stares at his hand from behind Dream, and he's right. "Morpheus. Look."

Ah.

Morpheus does pull away then, but he doesn't look at Gadling's hand. Instead he says, with all seriousness, "You can be hurt worse than this. You must take care." It’s unclear if this is threat, promise, warning, or plea. It sounds like all of those.

"I have been hurt worse than this," Gadling says.

It isn't a nice thing to say, but maybe sometimes the kinder road is honesty. She wonders what she would do if she got that call about her Dev. If she got the call a few months after he’d had a worse accident. If he’d forgotten her entirely, for a time. His hand that’s missing the skin on its knuckles squeezes the back of his Morpheus’s neck. Something passes between them, unsaid. 

Morpheus looks briefly stricken. "Hob…"

Cute. 

Gadling gives him a wry smile. "Fine. Yes. I'll try to avoid speeding students and falling pianos and any other comical injuries."

"Sometimes I wonder if things weren't better before the wheel."

“The wheel?” Gadling asks. “The wheel? ” He laughs. 

A bird then, a real live fucking bird, lands on the bench beside them. "Hello, Matthew," Gadling says. The raven bows its head to him. 

And so this is their little family, she sees.

It’s all intimate, in the way of two people who are so used to each other for so long that it’s odd. It’s odd to see it in two people so young. And then Gadling’s friend kisses him, and that’s odd, too, because it’s at the corner of his mouth. A chaste, sweet, familiar thing—possessive, in the way someone can be only of something they’ve owned long and treasured longer. The man glances up at her then, the look on his face impartial. He isn’t judgmental of her presence, or unkind. There’s no rage in his eyes, and no curiosity. It’s as if he knows her. 

“Linda,” she offers, unsure what else to do.

“Linda,” he says. “He’s taking the day off.”

She nods. “I’ll cancel your evening class, Rob. Good to see you again, Morpheus.”

He helps Gadling up and the bird hops to Gadling’s other shoulder, so it’s one on each side of him, after a fashion. She watches them walk off and then pulls out her phone to text Dev, because he’s put up with months of updates about this minor drama. Not for the first time, she’s grateful she married a man who likes gossip as much as she does. When she looks up again, Kevin is standing nearby, staring after the pair, and she hadn’t even seen him come up. 

“Who was that? Wait—was that Dream? He came to campus?”

“Mm-hmm. Said they were going home to walk Morpheus. You were right, by the way. Matthew is his brother.”

He gives a little whoop of victory. “Knew it!” And then understanding dawns. “Wait, they’re dating? No. Wait.” She nods. “Then what’s Morpheus? Is isn’t a cat, is it? If Harry’s right, he’s going to be insufferable.”

“You know, they didn’t say.”