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Hob’s Stranger is dead. 

Hob’s Stranger, Dream of the Endless, Lord Morpheus of the Dreaming, Prince of Nightdreams and Sovereign of the… Unconsciousness and Shaper of. Of. Of. Shaper of Shapes. Worlds. Weaver-thingy. Dreams. 

Is—

“S’dead,” Hob chokes out, the heels of his hands digging into his eye sockets, elbows digging into his knees. He tries to take in a breath, but all that results is another sob. 

He hadn’t started out like this. 

He’d woken up after dreaming about a funeral the same way he’d dreamed about that bloody toast—hyperrealistic scenes with edges that fuzzed and shadows that shifted and all the hours of it condensed into a single point in his brain just as real as his commute home on the tube yesterday—and first, there had been the shock. The processing. The gut-stalling knowledge that it had all been real, every second, the clowns and the ivory marble and the bridge of hands where he’d talked to Death herself because.

Because Hob’s Stranger is dead. 

Then Hob had sat in a daze long enough that his phone had rung. Suzette had wanted to know if he was okay, as it was twenty past eight and his students were waiting for him. Hob had said some appropriate things about a death in the family—yes, another—and promised to send a formal email and apologized for his absence. 

Then, he had not sent the email. 

He had set the phone down, and continued staring at the wall for some time longer. 

Because his Stranger is dead.

His eventual stumble out of bed had led him to the bathroom for a piss, and then to kitchen for coffee, but on the way to the kitchen he’d been distracted by the bar cart that had been dragged out of storage after Audrey, and the inviting dimness of the living room, and the softness of his own throw pillows.

And so, here’s Hob, on the sofa with the dregs of an Ardbeg Ten Year Islay Single Malt, facing down the prospect of eternity without his Stranger. 

A-fucking-gain. 

On one hand, at least this time it doesn’t feel like it’s all his fault. 

On the other hand, at least last time—

At least last time, even in the dizziest highs of cocaine and the blackest lows of heroin withdrawal, Hob had still held onto the shred of hope that one day his Stranger would return. That forgiveness was possible. That one day Hob could apologize, and explain, and he would sit once more at a table with the man who had defined the turns of his centuries for half a millennia and hear his name shaped with that particular, singular edge that has only ever come from Dream of the Endless.

But now—

Now—

“Fuck,” Hob gasps, pulling his head up and looking around the room, but it is unchanged. No eldritch shadows creeping from the hall, not a single one, and there never will be again. “Fuck. Fuck. FUCK.” 

The world spins, as he rockets to his feet. He registers his shins barking against the coffee table, but doesn’t feel the pain of it, and so he allows himself to stand there for several seconds while the carousel comes to a complete and final stop. 

His rug, he thinks, is the exact same pattern as the one he’d stared at between his knees through Dream’s fuck-off-long funeral, in a room full of the wrong kind of strangers. 

Church pews, Hob has heard, are deliberately angled too high on the same principle that offices are deliberately kept two degrees too cold. 

Why had he shown up in his sodding too lazy for laundry this weekend outfit?

Hob needs to call his therapist. 

Instead he stumbles over to the bookcase where he’d stashed a certain bottle of Chateau Lafite in the middle of the night, months ago, before Audrey could wake up next to a ten thousand pound bottle of wine that hadn’t existed when they’d gone to bed. Hob had… sort of left it there. Then Audrey had died. And now Dream has died. 

At this rate the department is either going to start demanding death certificates or just out and fire him for abuse of the bereavement leave policy. 

Hob grips the side of the bookcase as he extracts the bottle of wine, and only manages to knock one stray volume to the floor in the process. Steinbeck. Cunt. Oh well. 

The bottle is exactly as Hob remembers, perhaps minus the part where it keeps turning into two bottles. 

Cunts. 

Oh well. 

“Back to the sofa,” Hob announces, and does just so. 

His reentry into the cushions certainly won’t win him any prizes with NASA, except perhaps on the Richter scale, but he ends up more or less upright and the bottle intact. 

It occurs to him that he should have a wine glass, for the wine. 

Dream would be appalled. 

Dream is not here. 

Dream is dead. 

And Hob has ninety-nine years to accumulate a string of therapists and hobbies of the anger management variety in order to deliver a version of Robert Gadling who can sit across the table from Wrong Dream and not punch him in his stupid Wrong Face. 

Fuck and cunts. 

Hob stares at the bottle. 

It is, as he remembers, a little over half full. The cork is only loosely pushed into the top. One of the corners of the label has been bent, just slightly. Had it been Hob’s hands, or Dream’s? (Hob’s, obviously—but it’s nice to think it was Dream anyway.) 

Concerningly, though, the bottle is also is… vibrating.

Hob frowns, and pulls the cork. 

“HOB GADLING.” 

“JESUS MOTHER MARY AND—” 

“Do not drop me!” 

“Sorry!” Hob yelps, scrambling, and then gapes slack-jawed at the wine bottle clutched in his hands. “Er.” 

“You,” the bottle grouses, “have been gravely misinformed on the management practices for an uncorked bottle of wine.”

“What the fuck,” says Hob. 

The wine bottle slides into two wine bottles. Then one bottle. Then two again. 

“Hob,” the wine bottles say, in what is unmistakably, irrefutably, inarguably Correct Dream’s voice. “You must return me to the Dreaming—”

“Nope,” announces Hob. 

“—at once so that I may—”

Hob shoves the cork back into the bottle. “Nope.”

There is a muffled, rumbled mph mphmph! from within, making the bottle wobble threateningly. 

“Nope, nope, nope, nope,” Hob says, shaking his head, and creaking slowly to his feet. The world spins. The wine is sloshing in the bottle. Dream is dead. “Nope and nope.” 

If six hundred and fifty years have taught him anything, it's that when you are drunk enough to start hallucinating—you are drunk enough, full stop. 

The wine bottle goes in the refrigerator, between a carton of chicken stock and an embarrassingly large stash of Freddos. 

It rattles against the glass of the shelf, mph mph!

“Nope,” says Hob, and closes the refrigerator door. 

Hob dreams of a dozen hooded Jedi standing in the ruins of a maze, but instead of lightsabers, they each hold an enormous book. 

He wakes after sunset, which is good, because his head is throbbing something awful and the darkness is welcoming.

Water is… so far away. He is somehow both sweaty and clammy. Everything hurts. He’s pretty sure he’s out of neurofen. Why had he told Death that he thought he might want to live forever, he doesn’t even want to live another five minutes. 

And his Stranger is dead. 

His friend is dead. 

His Dream.

He rolls over in bed, and proceeds to further dehydrate himself into his pillow for a while longer. 

Hob feels too gross for normal clothes, but too hungover for a shower, and so it is old boxers and an even older dressing gown that he dons for the eventual trudge to the kitchen. In the drawer, he discovers that he actually does have neurofen, but it’s expired. He takes it anyway. Can’t kill him.

He makes himself drink a glass of water.

Then another.

Then, in the incipient wave of nausea, he lurches over to the refrigerator to pull the door open for a nice cool blast of air, but inside he finds—

The wine bottle is rattling at him. 

Hob pinches himself. 

Mph mphmph!

“Right,” says Hob faintly. 

He grabs a Freddo in one hand, and the wine bottle in the other. 

“YOU,” the wine bottle thunders, the second the cork is out again. “DARE.” 

“Dream?” 

“I will not,” the wine bottle snarls, “be held captive in your refrigerator like some bottle of common sherry.” 

Hob gapes. “But,” he says. 

The wine burbles angrily inside the bottle. 

“But you’re dead.” 

There is a pause. 

Then, somewhat stiffly: “Evidently I am not.” 

“Because you’re a wine bottle,” Hob says. 

“I am in the wine bottle,” says the wine bottle. 

“You’re in it,” Hob repeats.  He pauses. “You’re… in it?” 

Before he even finishes speaking, he’s seizing the bottle and holding it up to the light, squinting through aged glass for a tiny submerged Dreamlord somewhere in the depths. 

“I am not visible to the likes of mortal eyes, Hob,” the wine bottle says, at length. 

Dream says. 

Dream is talking to him. 

“Right,” Hob says, setting the bottle down. “‘Course not.” 

He opens his Freddo as he surveys this new and interesting fuckery. 

“It is… rare. That I leave fragments of myself in the Waking world such as this one,” Dream offers, eventually. “I did not consider such a complication, when I took my sister’s hand.” 

When he—

Right. 

“Are there other fragments of you, y'know, floating about in the world, then?” Hob asks. 

“No.” 

“You sure?” 

“Yes.” 

“‘Cause there’s not very many people out there that’d be handling this as well as I am, s’all I’m saying.” 

“You locked me in a refrigerator.” 

“I thought you were a hallucination!” Hob protests. 

“And I thought you were sensible enough to know that when you are left with an uncorked bottle of wine, you ought to consume it, not store it behind your least favorite American literature for nigh on two months,” Dream seethes. 

“Well maybe you should have left possible possession by dead people in the fine print, then, eh?” Hob shoots back. 

The bottle does not reply. 

Hob bites the head off his chocolate frog, and chews in silence for some time. 

It is nearly eleven in the evening, and he’s slept all day, which means he’s fucked for tomorrow. He still hasn’t sent that email to his department head. Last night at this time, he’d been doomscrolling Instagram and thinking his Stranger was off being unnecessarily dramatic in far away realms with far away problems. 

“Told you that you’d be back,” Hob says, eventually. “You really ought to listen to me more often.” 

“I am not back.” 

“Oh yeah?” 

“I am.” Dream considers. “Incompletely demised.” 

“I’m going to remind you of this, the next time you come to me with one of your stupid, vaguely ominous farewell speeches,” Hob informs his friend, cheerfully breaking off a frog leg. “And you’ll give me one of those looks that could scare the Devil out of Hell itself, like you always do, and I’ll grin at you like an idiot like I always do, and then after you’ve had your fill you’ll change the subject real subtle-like. And we’ll have a nice drink along the way. Probably wine. Hah!” 

He eats his frog leg, and then the other, and then at last stands to retrieve the water glass he’d left on the counter. 

“Hob,” Dream says, as Hob deposits himself back at the kitchen table. 

“Yeah?” Hob asks. 

“You must return me to the Dreaming.” 

Hob nods. “Makes sense. Gotta get you put to rights, eh. How do we go about getting you back home, then?” 

“Hob.” 

“Mm?” 

“Please swallow your water. I should not like for you to aspirate.” 

Hob, mid-drink, pauses and lowers the glass to look at the Chateau Lafite on the table across from him. He swallows what remains in his mouth. “What?” 

“You must return me to the Dreaming,” the wine bottle says, “so that my successor may call upon my elder sister, who will help me to join the rest of my spirit in the Sunless Lands.” 

Hob blinks. 

Seconds stretch out between them. 

“Excuse me?” 

“Hob, I am dead.” 

Hob slams the water glass down. “No, you’re not.” 

“I am.”

“No, because if you were dead, you wouldn’t be in my fucking kitchen being a fucking lunatic. As per fucking usual.”

“I am a fragment of that which was once whole,” Dream says calmly. “And I am not meant to exist in this world.” 

“Says who?” 

“Hob.” 

“No.” 

“I am sorry, my friend, to have given you false hopes—”

“No, no, no, listen—” 

“Hob—” 

“Listen,” Hob insists. “The new guy, new you, he brought half your staff back to life after you died! Back to life. And you’re not even dead, you’re just, just a bit bottled—he could absolutely help!” 

“He—" says Dream, sounding brought up short. 

Hah. 

Hob folds his arms, and awaits his victory. 

But when Dream eventually speaks, it is with a question, tentative and uncertain as Hob has ever heard him. 

“He has brought… my subjects back?” 

Oh. 

“Er,” says Hob. “Yeah. That’s what I heard at the funeral, anyway. And a lot of people were real excited to see this pumpkin guy?” 

The wine bottle is silent. 

“Was he… not supposed to do that?” Hob asks. 

“He may do as he pleases,” Dream says coolly. “He is Dream of the Endless, now, and. He shall use those powers as he sees fit.”

“So he wasn’t supposed to do that.” 

“He has violated no laws.” 

“Right. But?”

But Dream does not reply, because of course he doesn’t. 

“Fine,” Hob sighs, rolling his eyes. “Keep your secrets. But you’ve still not given me a reason why we can’t ask the new guy to fix you up.” 

“Because I am meant to be dead,” Dream replies shortly. 

“If you were meant to be dead, then you wouldn’t be in my wine bottle, would you?” 

“Call the Dream Lord, Hob Gadling.”

Hob crosses his arms. “You call the Dream Lord.” 

“I. Cannot,” Dream bites out.

“Well, too bad for you, then,” Hob says, “because I’m not calling anyone or anything that is going to help you commit suicide. Christ’s sake, Dream.” 

The wine bottle begins to tremble. “You would—deny me?”

“Yeah, I’m a real crap friend,” Hob says. “Keeping you alive and all.”

“We shall see about that,” Dream says darkly, as the wine sloshes higher and the bottle begins to rattle against the table—harder, and harder still—

“Look,” Hob says, over the increasingly loud rattle, “I know that you’re upset—can you—I know that you’re upset—” 

“MY SISTER I CALL TO YO—” 

“JESUS FUCKING—” Hob just barely catches the wine bottle before it tips off the table. “DREAM.” 

The wine burbles furiously. 

“Is that even going to work?” Hob demands, heart pounding. “Or are you just going to go spilling all over my lino?” 

“It is worth the chance.” 

“No it's not.” 

Dream is silent. 

Hob grips the bottle—his friend, his friend who is not dead but apparently determined beyond reason to change that—and takes in several deep breaths. 

“All right,” Hob says, when he no longer feels like a stitched-together thing pulled too hard at the seams. “All right, my friend.” 

No response. 

“I need to have a shower, and put on some clothes. You need to be alive when I finish doing those things.” 

"You will not retire me once more unto the refrigerator," Dream says dangerously.

“No,” Hob agrees, eyes roaming over the expanse of his kitchen until he at last alights on a roll of duct tape atop the microwave. “Not… the refrigerator.” 

“You are failing to present an appealing alternative to death,” Dream informs him, on his return to the kitchen. 

“I’d like to think my entire presence creates an appealing alternative to death, actually,” Hob replies. 

There is a sulking silence from where the wine bottle is presently in the middle of the table, duct taped to the heaviest thing Hob could feasibly lift and leave there: the concrete pot for his banana plant. Banana plant and all. 

Hob’s never done a suicide watch for a wine bottle before, but he thinks he’s done a half-decent job of it. 

“So I am to be your prisoner, then.” 

“Don’t be dramatic,” Hob replies, opening the fridge and surveying the contents. “I didn’t bottle you up, did I?” 

“You unduly spurned a gift from a friend,” Dream retorts. “Thus chaining my undead spirit to this world.”

“I didn’t spurn it. Told you, it’s a fantastic vintage.” 

“And yet you left it untouched.” 

Hob pulls turkey, mustard, cheese, and the pickle jar from the shelves, and lines them up on the counter before he goes in search of bread. In an ideal world he’d get out the panini press and do it properly—he adores his panini press—but it’s unfortunately going to be a cold sandwich sort night for Hob Gadling. 

“Are you hungry in there?” Hob asks, when the thought belatedly occurs. “Other than for the sweet release of death, I mean.” 

“...No,” the wine bottle replies darkly. 

“Thirsty?” 

“Being in a permanent liquid state of matter at present, I do not require. Beverages.” 

“What would happen, if I poured a bit more wine in there?” Hob asks curiously. 

“I suspect that the bottle would then contain a bit more wine,” Dream answers, predictably unhelpful. 

Hob wants to ask what would happen if he drank some of the wine in Dream’s bottle, but he is uncertain he wants to know the answer to that. He’s not entirely sure it wouldn’t end with him having to piss into a spare water bottle to make sure none of Dream’s beveraged spirit essence ended up in the London sewage system.

That certainly wouldn’t improve Dream's current outlook on life. 

Hob sits down at his kitchen table, across from where the wine bottle is taped to within an inch of its life to the concrete planter. He’s going to have a devil of a time getting that off. Label’s going to be ruined, no question about that, and the glass’ll be all nasty and sticky from the tape. 

Fuck. 

“Went to your funeral last night, you know,” Hob tells Dream. 

The wine bottle is silent. 

Hob bites into his sandwich, and takes the time to fully chew and swallow. It would have been better with a little toast in the panini press. “Thought it was a bad dream, at first. Believe it or not, it’s not actually the first time I’ve dreamed about you being dead. Not the first nightmare I’ve had, about you being dead. Did you know that?” 

“I have made it a point to preserve the privacy of your dreams, since our first meeting,” Dream says. 

“Decent of you,” Hob remarks. 

“It would have violated the sanctity of the wager.” 

Hob grins, and then laughs outright and hopes Dream doesn’t notice that there’s an edge of tears in it. “Oh, my friend. Of course it would have. But surely you’ve called this wager by now—you both must have realized that I’m categorically insane.” 

“Yes,” Dream agrees. 

“So what’d your sister win?”

“Something that my death will make extremely difficult for her to collect,” Dream replies. 

“That’s cheating, it is. Dying to get out of debt collection.” 

“And you, of course, have never crafted your own temporary demise to flee an unsavory situation before?” 

“So you agree that your demise is temporary?” Hob asks, raising an eyebrow. 

Silence. 

Hob takes another bite of his sandwich. 

“It was a nice funeral,” he says, after a time. 

“I have no wish to hear of it.” 

“Don’t you?” 

“No.” 

“Some people fantasize about that. Their funeral, I mean. Everyone cryin’ over them, saying how wonderful they were, how much they’ll be missed, how irreplaceable they are.” 

“Grief can provide a generous perspective on even the most heinous of lives led,” Dream says ominously.

“My therapist says that grief also gives us a reminder to appreciate the people that are in our lives right now,” Hob replies. “You know. Don’t let moments pass by unlived. Go out to the pub with your friends. Tell people you love ‘em. If you get the choice to sit out or dance, I hope you dance, or however that bloody song goes.”

“I do not dance.”

“But you do go out to the pub with your friends, eh? Well. Friend. Me, anyway.” 

A pause. “As you say.” 

Hob rolls his eyes, and stuffs the last of his sandwich into his mouth in the spirit of biting off a bit more than he can chew. The quiet, in his ensuing chewing, stretches on. 

“Listen,” he says, after the too-large swallow goes down the hatch. “I might be categorically insane but I do realize that I cannot cohabitate with a haunted wine bottle for the rest of my life. And. And if you really do want to go with your sister, then. Then that’s. That’s—” 

Dammit he’d rehearsed this in the shower for a reason. 

“Then that’s fine,” Hob forces himself to say. He takes in a deep, steadying breath. “But if it’s all right with you, I’d just—like a few hours. First. Please.” 

Hob’s sniffle is too loud, in the midnight silence. 

He attempts a smile. “Six hundred and fifty years, and I’ve never actually gotten the chance at a do-over of my last goodbye, you know? And. I wasn’t listening very well, last time. I think. I do that sometimes. Talk more than listen. So. If you can spare a few hours for old Hobsie before your great big sleep in the sky, I’d, um. I’d really appreciate it. Yeah?”

There is no response, for a long moment. 

If Hob had thought his Stranger was hard to read before, it’s nothing compared to the inscrutability of a bottle of wine duct taped to a banana plant. 

Finally, there is something like a sigh. “If,” Dream says slowly, “that is what you truly wish.” 

Hob is helpless not to smile. “Of course it is. You're my friend. That means I like you. Don’t you know that by now?”

“It is an. Exceedingly irregular notion,” Dream replies. “I am poor company at the best of times.” 

“Yeah, well,” Hob says, pushing back his chair. “You’re entitled to your opinions, and I’m entitled to mine.” 

“Categorically insane, was it?” 

“Hush, you. I’ve got to go and find a knife.” 

“Comfy?” Hob asks. 

“I do not experience physical sensation in this form,” Dream replies bleakly. 

“Ah, well. It’s much comfier for me, leastways, and I don’t have to worry about you getting accidentally tipped over halfway through the film. Win-win.” 

The wine bottle, blanket-swaddled in his arms, does not reply. It’s currently rotated so that the side not covered in duct tape is facing outward.

“You can see all right?” 

“Yes.” 

“Good.” 

Hob holds on tight to his precious little bundle, as he stretches toward the far left of the sofa where he’d inconveniently left the telly remote. It’s sort of like holding a baby, if the baby in question had crippling self-esteem issues, the voice of a double bass, and a hole in the top of its head where its brains will come spilling out if you don't keep it nice and upright. 

“You sure you don’t have any requests?” Hob asks, as he begins to click through menus on the telly. 

“No,” says Dream. 

“You have seen a film before, right?” 

“I contain every story that has ever been told, written, spoken, drawn, or filmed.” A beat. “Contained.” 

“What, no access to the cloud from in there?” Hob asks curiously, glancing down at this new piece of information. “The glass bad for reception, is it?”

“The transference of power to Daniel Hall was complete,” Dream replies. “I can no more access the library of the Dreaming than I can shape dreams, or summon sand. I am, truly, naught but a shade of my former self. A spirit.” 

“Mate, you’re not a spirit,” Hob says, patting the neck of the bottle. “You’re a wine.” 

The bottle radiates its displeasure, as Hob cracks up. 

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, trying to collect himself. “Rude of me to kick a man while he’s down. Let’s get a film going, yeah? Hm.”  

The Netflix menu stares back at him. 

“Perhaps,” Dream suggests, “your favorite?”

“Haven’t got one,” Hob replies. He exits Netflix, and moves over to Hulu instead. 

“Do you not?” Dream sounds genuinely surprised. 

“Well,” Hob allows. “More like, I’ve got lots of favorites. Too many. And it depends on who’s asking. If I’m out with the lads, then it’s definitely Ocean’s 11. If I’m at work then we go a little more vintage with Good Morning Vietnam. If I’m on a date, then it’s—hah—well, depends on the date, really, but usually Vertigo or Monty Python does the trick.” 

“And,” Dream says tentatively, “if you are with. A very old friend?” 

Hob blows out a breath. “Suppose we’re about to find out.” 

“Sorry,” Hob sniffles, wiping away tears with a corner of Dream’s blanket. “I forgot this movie makes me fucking cry.” 

The wine bottle is silent. 

Hob blows out a wet breath. “Jesus.” 

On the screen, Nani and Lilo uncurl their hands, and release their flowers into the winds of the night. 

“Surely, you are old and learned enough to understand humanity’s predilection for familiarity in story,” Dream says, with more judgement than should be possible from a wine bottle currently wedged into a cookbook stand. 

“Okay, but it was one thing when we were just sticking King Arthur into any old tale ‘round the fire,” Hob complains, as he dices his onion. “What I’m talking about, is that there are only a handful of studios producing films these days, for a very limited number of theater releases, and over half their projects are soulless, uninspired remakes of films they already did before. Better. Just because it’s an easy way to make money!” 

“Art made with indifference,” Dream replies, “is not art made to endure.”

Hob makes a noise of disgust. “Yeah, I’m sure I’ll get the last laugh in fifty years when no one remembers this god-awful CGI remake. But that doesn’t help me now, when I want to go to the cinema and my only options are bloody Pirates of the Caribbean 12, Mission Impossible The Re-Re-Re-Reboot, and Avengers 3.0. You know?” 

“I am. Unfamiliar with these stories,” says Dream. 

Hob waves the knife. “No matter. Just as well you’ll only ever see the good version of Lilo and Stitch, I suppose.” 

It wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, the film he’d been dreaming about sharing with his Stranger for decades and decades. To be entirely honest, Hob had actually never thought of it in terms of if I had to pick just one. He’d imagined, perhaps, that he’d recommend The Godfather in passing at their meetup in 1989, or maybe Star Wars—and then following that particular disaster of a not-meeting, Hob had not thought about film recommendations for his Stranger at all. 

Here and now, after a year of semi-regular nights at the pub and Sunday walks in the park, Hob had tentatively begun to think of a future where he might get to show Dream a whole catalogue of his favorites. The stupid ones. The artsy ones. The extra-long Lord of the Rings ones, and the old roadshow epics that people think are dull and overdrawn these days and never want to watch with him. 

But instead, it had come down to one night. One film.

And he'd panicked, a bit. 

Ah well. 

“You said you were captured in… 1916, right?” Hob asks, dumping onions into a bowl and then reaching for a bell pepper. “So you must’ve caught the film industry as it was just starting to come to life. Must have been incredible. When was the last time humanity just came up with a new way to tell stories like that, huh?” 

The wine bottle is silent. 

Hob dices an entire pepper, dumps it into the bowl, and is reaching for the next one when he glances over once more and says, “Dream?” 

“This is how you would spend your requested hours?” Dream asks. He doesn’t sound angry. If anything he sounds… confused. “Children’s films, and your meal preparations?”

Nevertheless, Hob can’t help the flip of anxiety in his stomach. “Are you bored?” 

“No,” says Dream at once. 

Hob waits. 

“But. I had expected…” 

Oh. 

“I see,” Hob says gently, a smile easing onto his face as realization kicks in. “Yeah. You’re right. If this was a story, I’d probably be taking you to all the great places in the world, wouldn’t I? Or, or our old pub, or at least someone nicer’n here. Probably make a big speech or something. Cry.” 

He takes the silence as agreement. 

“Well, don’t you worry, there’ll be tears enough, when it comes to it,” Hob tells his friend amiably. He focuses on the next pepper in hand, to keep his brain from chasing that particular thought too far down the rabbit hole. “But for one thing, it’s three in the fucking morning, my friend, and there’s just not a lot you can go and do with an open bottle of wine in hand at this hour.” 

He looks up, and offers a grin. 

The wine bottle, of course, does not smile back. But Hob can imagine the slight crinkle at the corners of Dream’s eyes anyway. 

“But even if it were high noon on a Tuesday and the whole world was our oyster…” Hob shakes his head. “Well. You already know all the great and beautiful places, don’t you? Been there. Seen them. Made some of ‘em, probably. Don’t need me to show them to you, or tell you about the meaning of life, or, or yammer on tryin’ to change your mind about death. We both know I’m rubbish at speeches. No. The truth is that I’m just doing what I do best, here: being greedy.” 

“Greedy,” Dream echoes slowly. 

Hob nods at the half-diced green pepper on the cutting board. “Taking the one thing I knew you were never going to give me—not really. Not wholly. Not enough.” He exhales slowly, and looks up at his friend with a smile gone rueful. “Your time.” 

The wine bottle does not answer. 

Hob inhales, then, relishing the feeling that a weight’s been lifted from his chest. The smile stays on his face, as he turns back to his chopping, and he lets the silence stretch out a few minutes longer. 

“Your sister asked me if I wanted to call it a day,” he eventually says, when the last of the peppers are chopped and he’s moved on to the mushrooms. “After your funeral.” 

“Then she does not know you so well as I do,” Dream replies—more than a little smugly. 

Hob laughs. “Well, then I’m afraid I don’t know me as well as you do, either, because I tell you what, I did have to think about it. I really did.” 

“You… considered—” 

“Yeah,” Hob admits. 

Silence. 

Hob wishes, not for the first time in this night, that he could see Dream’s face. 

“I didn’t, though,” he adds, eventually. “Obviously. I turned her down, same as I did you. It kept going round in my head, see, what your other sister said about you at the funeral. About how in a hundred thousand years no one is going to remember you anymore.” 

“You should take care, Hob, in the truths you choose to accept from Delirium,” Dream tells him gently.

Hob looks up. “No. Not Delirium. The other one.”

“Despair?” 

“Yeah,” Hob says, nodding. 

“Despair… spoke at my funeral?” Dream asks.  

Hob frowns. “Dream. All of your siblings spoke at your funeral.” 

“I see,” Dream says, after a beat. 

Hob would bet good money that he doesn’t, actually, but he keeps that to himself and goes on slicing his mushrooms. Then he minces the garlic. Then, just as he’s opening the tin of anchovies— 

“I do. Recall the nascent dreams, of those earliest filmmakers,” Dream says tentatively. 

“Oh yeah?” Hob asks. “Go on, then. Tell me.” 

And Dream does. 

Hob is laughing so hard he’s crying. 

“You—you didn’t—”

“Up until that point, Desire’s function had primarily consisted of the concepts of hunger, and warmth, and light. Survival. And mine, of course, the primordial dreams of prokaryotes and minerals,” Dream says. “There was not even the notion of the concept of… such things.” 

“Oh my god,” Hob wheezes. “You poor thing. Your poor sibling.” 

“You can imagine that by the end, we had many questions.” 

“You stayed until the end?” 

“And so of course,” Dream continues sensibly, “we journeyed to the best authority we could imagine on the subject.” 

“Please don’t say your father.” 

“Our eldest brother.” 

“Oh thank god.” Hob pauses. “Although. Although, having met him, I’m not convinced that he’d be the reigning family authority on arousal.” 

“In retrospect,” Dream says, “he was remarkably patient, for someone who had first had to read a comprehensive account of our mother’s erotic dream of our father in his book, and then upon our arrival, listen to Desire and I recount the same thing in exacting detail.” 

"Bloody hell, and then he had to explain—wet dreams—"

"I believe it is the most uncomfortable I have ever seen my brother in all the years of his existence," Dream says serenely.

"Look," says Hob, over a plate of chicken cacciatore. "It's not that I hate Shakespeare. Stop looking at me like that, I don't."

"Hob," says Dream. "I am a wine bottle."

Hob stabs a fork in its direction. "And yet you're still in there with that little judgemental eyebrow of yours up to the ceiling. I don't have to see it to know it's there, my friend."

Silence.

"Anyway. Point is, I don't hate him, but I do think it's unfair that he's become such an, such an all-encompassing fixture of the time period, that the rest of his contemporaries go completely ignored. There were other plays, you know! Whole other movements, other controversies, other—Shakespeare wasn't the only bloke with a quill back then, he's just the one lucky enough to have had the most works preserved." Hob eyes the wine bottle, and then repeats with fingerquotes, "'Lucky'."

"Fortunate," Dream suggests.

"And I know that's the problem with all history, isn't it, that only based on the artifacts that survive—and god knows the kids in university these days are mostly just there to check a box off and not actually learn anything, and of course, there's the budget cuts, and the pressure from the trustees, and, and fucking Carol from English Lit who'd sacrifice both her children on an altar just to put her tongue on Shakespeare's crusty old bum hole—but it'd be such a good class! Marlowe alone would fill a fortnight's lectures. Do you know how many conspiracy theories there are about him? Or, or Ben Jonson? Thomas Middleton? You couldn't go to the market for months without seeing an advertisement for Masque of Cupids! And now he's a bloody footnote!"

"Does it not become tiresome," Dream says, in the way he usually does when he's doing that bird-like head tilt of his, "that you must teach something you know so intimately well, and yet for the sources at your disposal, you must often teach a version that you know to be false?"

Hob sighs, and spears a piece of chicken. "Well… I mean, yeah."

"I suppose. There is a certain satisfying element of tragedy, to the choice," Dream posits.

Because of course that's his little grimlord takeaway from all of this.

"But also," Hob counters, after he's swallowed, "I think of it like—who else was going to spend a year of their free time constructing an entire class that no one asked for on the lesser Jacobian authors and the sociopolitical impacts of their works?"

"A class your department head refuses to permit in the curriculum," Dream reminds him.

"A class this department head refuses to permit in the curriculum," Hob corrects, tipping his head. "I might not be able to stay at this university forever, but I'll be a history professor again one day. And I'll ask that department head. And if they say no, then I'll just give it a go in another fifty years or so. Got the notes. It's not like the references are going to change. I've got all the time in the world, don't I?"

"If there were any man in this world stubborn enough to glean enjoyment from this highly irregular long-form revenge," Dream says, with unmistakable fondness, "it would be you, Hob Gadling."

Something warm that is not chicken cacciatore suffuses Hob's chest.

"Too right," he says, and wonders if Dream's vision is good enough through that glass to see the faint blush on his cheeks.

"I wish you… luck, in your endeavor henceforth."

"But not fortune?"

"You have no need of it. My friend."

If Dream couldn't see the blush before, he definitely can now.

"So," Hob says, pushing peppers around to look for one last slice of mushroom. He gets a little distracted by this, as there's a piece of chicken thigh that looks like a mushroom but betrays him in the end—but eventually his hunt is successful. He looks up at the wine bottle that's currently placed next to the actual, non-possessed wine bottle he'd decided was a necessary component when eating dinner at five o'clock in the morning with your sort-of-dead best friend. "You don't have to answer, if you really don't want to. But now I'm curious."

"You are always curious," Dream sighs.

"No, really."

"Ask your question Hob Gadling."

Hob closes his eyes and laughs, just a little, and tries not to die from the sudden sharp realization that he is going to really fucking miss this.

"Earlier," Hob says, "you didn't seem to like that Daniel had brought back a bunch of your friends from the dead."

"They were my subjects."

"Okay, fine." Hob rolls his eyes. "You didn't seem to like that Daniel had brought back a bunch of your subjects—"

"And they were not dead."

Hob frowns. "They weren't?"

"Dreams," says Dream, "do not die. To die, is for the spirit to vacate the physical world and pass into the Sunless Lands in the keeping of my sister. Dreams… are unmade. As blown glass is crushed back into sand."

Hob's stomach turns. "Okay?"

"My successor has not brought them back to life," Dream says. "He has taken the raw sand of creation, and cast it into the fire to forge a replica of what once was."

"Isn't that… the same thing?" Hob asks, after several moments of trying to turn it over in his mind with no explanation for Dream's disappointment making itself apparent. "Different process, sure, but—same end result?"

"If you ask an artist to craft a replica of his finest vase," Dream replies, "even with his most careful attentions and the use of his every talent and skill and hour of his time—the vase will not be the same as the first. Not perfectly. It is not possible."

"Oh," says Hob.

That's… it? he thinks.

But of course, this is Dream.

Dream, who gets grumpy if his seat at The New Inn is taken, and spent weeks glaring suspiciously at Hob's recent addition of a beard. Dream, who had needed six hundred years to come around to the idea that he could be someone that had a friend.

Dream, who had taken I think it's you that's changed like a knife in the fucking back.

"Well," Hob says carefully. "Maybe the subjects he brought back are all a little bit different than how you made them, now that Daniel's recreated them."

"Imagine that you ask, not the artist, to craft a replica of his finest vase," Dream sniffs, "but instead the artist's apprentice."

Hob inclines his head. "True. That's true. But I bet you anything that—even if those people aren't exactly the same as they used to be—they won't be any less loved for it. Hm?"

Dream is silent.

Hob pushes a piece of pepper out of the way, and makes a happy noise at the discovery of a bonus mushroom.

They're only halfway up the hill, and Hob is out of breath.

He'd stopped going to the gym after Audrey had died, but he'd made a plan with Jesse just last week to try to go at least once before their next session. As part of his healing process. Won't Jesse just be thrilled to hear that not only did Hob not go to the gym, but that the explanation for it is because his entire reason for existing has died now too.

Hob should pay Jesse more, probably.

"Okay," he gasps, grabbing a lamppost for support and coming to a halt. "Okay, break."

"Once, you sat across from me and complained of the men around you going soft—no longer able to walk twenty miles in a day. No longer able to haul wheat, or throw spears."

"Oh piss off," Hob retorts, between breaths that are only just starting to come easier. "Easy for you to say, you're being carried up this bloody hill."

"It was through no design of my own, that I have come to exist as a wine bottle," Dream snits.

"You knew you'd left it with me," Hob points out.

"Yes. Careless and unreasonable of me to assume that, on gifting a half-drunk bottle of wine, it would have been consumed and not left to rot on a shelf for months."

"Right, again—how was I supposed to know that this could happen?"

"I was given to understand that on the exchanging of gifts between friends, it is respectful to be honest if one does not actually like the gift they receive." Dream pauses. "Instead of lying."

"Oh for the love of—" Hob exhales, thrusting the wine bottle out before him. "Dream, you ridiculous thing, do you know why I didn't drink your bottle of wine?"

"Ingratitude," Dream supplies.

"Because Hatton Garden Safe Deposits were one of the first casualties of the Blitz, during World War II," Hob says, "and my vault was destroyed. Portraits of my friends. Quilts. Jewelry. Photographs. Letters. All of it, gone overnight. Including—"

God.

Fuck it.

"Including a certain pair of gloves and a top hat that my best friend left behind in a pub one time. All right?"

The wine bottle is silent.

Hob swallows against the burn of embarrassment. Dream has seen worse sides of him than the obsessive devotional.

"I… did not know," Dream says quietly.

"Well," Hob sighs, a bit rough around the edges, "how would you have? I never told you, did I."

"I am sorry for your loss."

"S'okay. I… I had two other vaults, in other cities. They made it through the war just fine. And I was off fighting, so I didn't even find out until I got back about a year later. But. When you left the bottle of wine behind, I… Well. I certainly didn't know this would happen. And I don't suppose I'll be keeping this one in the end, either, will I?"

"I suspect my successor will require it to transport me back to the Dreaming," Dream agrees softly.

Hob takes in a breath and tells himself not now not now not now. "Well, at least we'll always have Paris," he says, with an attempt at levity.

"We have never been to Paris, Hob."

Hob's laugh does a poor job of disguising the tears.

Dawn stretches gold and pink over the London skyline.

A man sits in silence at the top of Parliament Hill, an open bottle of wine beside him, taking in the sunrise. A breeze is stirring the budding spring leaves. The birds are beginning to chirp. Far below, a city is waking.

It turns out that Hob does have a few cinematic bones in his body, after all.

The sun is warm on Hob's skin, when he at last turns to his companion.

"Wish I could've seen your face," he says, thickly. "One more time."

"I am glad, my friend. To have seen yours again."

Hob swallows.

Swallows again.

"Thanks for—for staying with me tonight. It's been." Hob stops, and swallows once more against the grip of tears. "I'd've done this with you forever."

"I cannot stay as a wine bottle, Hob," Dream says gently.

"I know that, you pillock," Hob retorts, rolling his eyes even as he's knuckling away tears. He sniffles. Looks down at his friend with a watery smile. "But, categorically insane as I am, I. I would do it, you know. If that's how you came. If that's how I got to spend the rest of my life with you."

Jesus Christ.

Well. It wasn't like Hob had had that much more dignity to lose, after he'd already admitted to being ridiculous about the hat and gloves.

"I mean," he adds, with a laugh, "I'd probably have to spend the rest of my life posing as an alcoholic, carrying you around everywhere—have a hell of a time getting you on any trains, and flying'd be right out—but I reckon I could sneak you into the cinema no problem. Plenty of BYOB nights around London. We'd make it work, eh?"

"As ever, your optimism is… alarming."

"You like it."

"Nevertheless," Dream says, and then despite the presumable lack of lungs, can be heard to take in a breath. "Nevertheless, I. Have had a more enjoyable night than anyone trapped inside of a wine bottle should have reason to expect, and. I am grateful. I am more grateful than words can say. For all that you are, and have been to me, Hob Gadling."

"Oh, come on," Hob complains, voice cracking. "I just stopped crying."

Dream is quiet.

Hob wipes at his tears. "God, I'm rubbish at goodbyes. I love you, do you know that?"

"Yes," Dream says softly.

"M'sorry I didn't tell you sooner."

"You have told me, my Hob. You have told me time and again and anew and I…" Dream trails off. "I did not listen. It is I who should be sorry."

"Sorry bastards, the both of us, then," Hob concludes, and pats the shoulder of the wine bottle companionably.

A revoltingly fit jogger runs past, and gives Hob-and-his-wine-bottle-on-the-bench-at-dawn a double take as she does.

Rude.

Like this is the weirdest thing she's seen on her morning jog through London.

"Should get you—" Hob's throat closes up, but he forces the words out anyway. "Should get you back to the Dreaming, then, eh?"

"Hob."

"Can't stay a wine bottle forever, you said, and I'm already over here thinking about how to sneak you into Glastonbury 2024," Hob says, as a joke except that it's sort of not. (A fictional lung condition, a fake oxygen tank, he's got a mate who does props for Taskmaster that owes him a favor.) "Gotta get you out of here before I start really thinking about what it'll—"

His throat closes up, and this time, he can't force the words through.

What it'll be like to lose you forever.

Hob digs the heels of his hands into his eyes, and heaves once. Twice. He's not sobbing.

He's not.

"You must write my name upon a piece of paper," Dream says, at his side. "And then burn it."

Right.

Okay.

Hob can do that. As long as he doesn't let himself think even a little bit about what it's going to do.

"Seems sort of too easy, yeah?" he says, heart beating in his throat, hands shaking as they unzip the backpack he'd brought with the supplies Dream had listed for him earlier. "Summon a whole Endless with just a notebook and a lighter?"

"It is not a summons," Dream says.

"Ah. More of a ping, then?"

"A request," Dream corrects.

"Just," Hob says, somewhat hysterically, "texting the personification of the universal collective unconsciousness a little hey you up?"

"Yes," says Dream, who definitely does not understand the implications of sending that particular text message.

Hob stares down at the blank sheet of notebook paper before him. He's inhaling but his lungs aren't expanding. This doesn't feel real. "How. How do you know he'll answer?"

"He will know who has called to him," Dream replies.

"He met me yesterday."

"And he was brought into power with the fundamental tenets of my existence still imprinted upon him. And so he will know, that you are—" Dream pauses. "Ours."

"Yours," Hob says.

"Mine," Dream agrees, sounding much more satisfied.

Hob loves this creature.

Hob is going to miss him so much it physically hurts.

His hand is shaking, as he spells out the letters on the paper, and he can't seem to blink away the tears fast enough. His handwriting is, accordingly, atrocious. He wonders if that'll give the inter-dimensional postal service any trouble with the delivery.

He's being selfish.

Dream is a fucking bottle of wine.

"So I—I just burn it?" Hob asks, when he has the paper in one hand and the lighter in the other. He glances down at Dream, who of course, has nothing to offer in the way of facial expressions. "No, er. Special incantations or anything?"

"No."

"Right."

Hob stares at the innocuous piece of paper in his hand, with DREAM OF THE ENDLESS written in large, shaky capitals.

Fantasia.

Why had he picked fucking Lilo and Stitch. He should have shown Dream Fantasia.

He should have taken Dream to Alexandra Palace for sunrise.

He should have asked more questions, when Dream had last come to him.

He should have listened more.

He should have been a better friend.

"Hob," says Dream.

"Okay," says Hob.

And he flips the lighter open, and sets the paper to light.

When Hob arrives back at his flat, the banana plant is still on the kitchen table, and there's still a blanket on the couch. He'd forgotten to put the rest of the chicken cacciatore in the refrigerator. He still hasn't emailed his sodding department head.

On the floor before his bookcase is the book he'd knocked over yesterday morning, when he'd first pulled that wine bottle from its hiding place.

Steinbeck.

The Grapes of Wrath.

Hob laughs so hard he starts to cry.

There's a knock at the door.

Hob takes a full five seconds to process that it was, in fact, a real sound. It's probably Bill coming on for his shift, wanting to update him on the latest in the saga of the dishwasher repair fiasco. Hob was supposed to call Winterhalter yesterday. This is going on day four now of the staff limping along without one.

The most insane thing about grief is that somehow, even as you're near catatonic under the weight of it, there are also still dishwashers that need repairing.

Fuck.

Hob can't move—can barely think—and yet somehow he gets up off the sofa anyway.

He's going to have to apologize to Bill. He's the reason they'll have to call in another set of hands tonight. Really, Hob doesn't know why he ever thought he was cut out for running a pub in the first place. He's too fickle. Too big-picture. Too prone to procrastination.

He was always going to have to sell it.

He doesn't know how he's ever going to step foot in it again.

Might as well uproot the whole thing. Forget teaching. Forget The New Inn. Forget everything about—

It's not Bill.

Hob grips the doorframe hard.

"Hello, Hob," says none other than his Stranger, his Dream, his motherfucking recurring nightmare of a best friend and probably, unfortunately, for his sins, the love of his fucking life.

Only.

Only his voice has lost that certain, unearthly rumble.

Only, there are no more stars in his eyes.

Dream is standing in the hallway in his customary black jeans and a black henley and black boots. His skin is still vampirically pale, and he's standing ramrod straight as usual. His nails are their ever-manicured black.

He's holding the sodding bottle of Chateau Lafite.

"You," Hob manages.

"Has it…" Dream's eyes dart around the general disaster that is Hob. He inhales, but then hesitates a second longer before he asks, "Has it been very long?"

He has pores.

He has nose hairs.

"Forty-five minutes," Hob replies, strangled. "A-are you—"

"I did not know if it was possible," Dream interrupts, just a little too quickly. He's breathing a little too quickly. He's anxious. "I did not know if I wanted—if I. That is. If you would." His knuckles are white around the bottle. "I did not intend to deceive you."

"But…"

"And I am not," Dream says, staring at a spot just to the left of Hob's gaze, "as I was."

It's true.

The longer Hob stares, the more he sees it. The voice and the pores and the nose hairs and the breathing, yes, but all these aside there is something… slightly different about the line of Dream's nose. Something fractionally off, Hob thinks, in the set of his mouth.

The tiniest details, not noticeable to anyone who hadn't spent six hundred and fifty years memorizing the exact shape of his face.

"Bullshit," Hob manages, voice cracking as the tears rise up once more. "You look just like my Dream should, you look—you look perfect."

Dream's expression crumples. "But I—"

Hob hugs him.

Hard.

"You do this," Hob chokes out, into Dream's too-bony shoulder. "I told you, you always fucking do this."

"It is not on purpose," Dream complains.

"Fuck you," Hob says, and holds him even tighter.

The leftover wine in the bottle is now, miraculously, un-oxidized.

"You know, it's only us. Do we even need glasses?" Hob asks, just to see the look on Dream's face. 

He does not disappoint.

"I may be human now, Hob Gadling," Dream says, poshly horrified, "but I am not a barbarian."

Hob's heart skips a beat that contains, in the space of it, a million and one questions that he knows better than to ask. They will come later. He understands enough, for now.

Dream is alive.

"Thanks for bringing the bottle back," Hob says, as two wine glasses are set on the table next to the banana plant. "I wasn't expecting—well. I wasn't expecting any of this, I guess."

"I asked Daniel to preserve it," Dream tells him, eyes on the very bottle he'd been trapped in not two hours ago. "I explained, about the vault, and the war. How upset you were to lose it."

Hob nods, and fills Dream's glass before his own. There's only about one serving's worth left in the bottle when he's done, and if it were anyone else Hob would just top them both up, overfilling be damned—but if Dream had had such feelings about the glasses, Hob imagines he's got a similar perspective on fill levels. Fussy bastard.

Dream raises his glass, and looks at Hob expectantly.

Hob raises his own in turn. "To luck," he says.

Dream inclines his head. "And fortune."

"And spurning gifts from your friends that end up accidentally bringing them back from the dead," Hob adds with a lopsided grin, and tips his glass back.

The wine is just as lovely on his tongue as it had been before, once upon a dream.

Across the table, Dream is blinking rapidly, mouth twisted, staring down at the wine in evident betrayal.

"Human taste buds not quite the same as your old ones?" asks Hob, with amusement.

Dream's nose scrunches. "…Evidently not."

Hob has another sip so he doesn't laugh outright at Dream's unreserved petulance, but he can't help the fond smile that's still in place when he finally lowers his glass. His very own ridiculous, lovely creature. Here. Safe. Content. Alive.

"Dream," Hob says, when his glass is at last drained dry.

Dream, who has been moodily swirling his own remaining wine, looks up with eyes that are starless and bright.

Hob reaches out, and carefully touches his fingers to Dream's wrist where a pulse beats gently against his bow-calloused fingertips. "You know," Hob says, "that it was never actually about the wine."

Dream's mouth quirks softly upward. "Yes, my Hob," he says, turning his wrist so that his palm slips in against Hob's. "I know."

Hob's throat clicks on the swallow.

Dream's fingers carefully encircle Hob's wrist. His pupils are dilated, and his lips are parted just enough that Hob can see that they are ever so slightly chapped.

These new little imperfections will surely be the death of him.

Then Dream tilts his head, and he tugs just once on Hob's wrist. Lightly. Perfunctorily.

He need do nothing more—Hob is already falling into him like gravity.

When their mouths meet, it tastes of Chateau Lafite.

It's a bloody good vintage.