Archive of Our Own ^beta

Motifs.

For several years of his life, Hob had no idea the concept existed. He couldn’t read at all for a good hundred-fifty years to begin with, and it took a while even after getting involved in printing before he progressed to actually reading literature on his own.

But what Hob has always known is that life runs in patterns. Resonances. He doesn’t believe in fate—told Destiny that to his face actually—but clearly there are forces in the universe beyond his understanding and one of those is recurrence. Motif. Plays upon a theme. Things always come back around. They always come back.

Fashion trends. Moral panics. Political movements. Places. Memories. Tiny coincidences that may or may not be only deja vu.

Dream.

Which is why, though Hob owns a pub—which he currently wants to burn to the ground—he finds himself at the White Horse. Not his White Horse. But there’s a trillion of them in London. Can’t turn a fucking corner without being reminded.

His intentions for the evening had actually been:

Alas, instead he’s at the (wrong) White Horse Tavern, on his third bottle of wine (still working on the alcohol poisoning), playing lute music on his phone because it reminds him of The Past and the present’s kind of shit at the moment. Finding the past in the present always feels a little weird and wrong, except it always comes back, everything always comes back around, and at this point Hob would take a little bit ‘weird and wrong’, actually he would take a lot weird and wrong, is there someone he can kill to make it happen? It might make him feel a little better to just fucking kill anybody whose hands touched this. He’s just so goddamn angry he’s going to explode. 

One thing that helps with anger that doesn’t involve killing someone is finding a like mind, and Hob could probably go talk to some of the people in Dream’s life who feel similarly, except if he does he’s likely to run into that kid that’s sort of Dream but mostly not, not in the ways that matter to Hob, and even though he knows it’s not his fault, Hob feels kind of homicidal when he looks at that kid so. Probably shouldn’t. 

God, would it be too unhinged to throw a couple shots of tequila in this wine? Would ruin it, but what does that matter. 

He orders three shots of tequila at the bar and is in the middle of pouring them into the bottle when there’s a flutter of feathers and Matthew lands on the table in front of him. “Dude, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“Trying to die of alcohol poisoning?” 

Hob points at him. “Bingo. You want some?”

“No.” 

“Your loss.” Hob pours a glass and tries it. Dear god, that’s awful. 

“I’ll take some fries if you have ‘em, though,” Matthew says. 

Hob orders some chips on his phone. Why does this pub have a fucking app? Is nothing sacred? 

“I didn’t know you were allowed to leave the Dreaming,” he says when he’s done. 

“Yeah, whatever.” 

No one says whatever with as much clinical disdain as an American. Why does Hob know an American raven? Do they even have ravens in America? You know what, it doesn’t even matter. Nothing does. 

“I’m not taking orders from a two-year-old,” Matthew continues. 

“Quite frankly, that is the least of my problems with the guy,” Hob says. “Known some wise infants in my time. Someone who thinks he can take the place of my friend—?”

It’s not his fault

It’s not his fault

It’s not

his

fault

He tsks in disapproval. “Well. S’a different matter.”

“Hob, how many people have you killed?” Matthew asks.

“In what time period?”

“Jesus Christ. I dunno, forever?” 

“I don’t know. Plenty. Less in the past half-century. Killing people used to be more normal. Now you can only do it at war. Or by starting a chemical company and poisoning the water supply with Teflon. It’s too stupid now to bother with.”

“Okay, so you are actually insane,” Matthew says. 

Hob shrugs, drinking more of his unholy wine concoction. “You never saw your boss kill someone?” 

“Actually, he usually tried not to.” 

“Huh.” 

“Scared the bejeezus out of people, but killed them? Not really.” 

“Too bad,” Hob says. 

Matthew snorts. 

“Too fucking bad.” Shit, he’s out of wine. “Wait, why did you ask me that? Did you want me to kill someone?” 

A server comes by with their chips just then. Hob doesn’t know why he doesn’t get kicked out for having an enormous bird on the table. Maybe they think Matthew’s fake. Maybe he’s invisible. Maybe Hob’s getting a pass for having spent at least £300 on alcohol in two hours. 

Matthew starts scarfing down the chips. “Not really,” he says, between huge mouthfuls. “I was wondering if you were gonna do it on your own.”

“If I find someone whose death’ll make a difference. Otherwise, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I really don’t.”

“Tell me about it.”

For the time being, Hob opens the stupid pub app and orders another bottle of wine.

Shockingly, they deliver it instead of cutting him off.

He pours another glass and drinks half of it in one go. He’s starting to feel sick, headache-y, but doesn’t stop drinking. “Fuckin’ hate funerals.”

“Kinda glad I missed my own,” Matthew says.

“I’ve been to a few of mine. S’fuckin weird.” What Hob wouldn’t have given for Dream to have walked into his own, though.

Just to have something in his restless hands, he starts folding his napkin in half, then half again, smoothing the creases in brutal, sharp lines. “‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,’” he quotes. “‘Choose executors and talk of wills, or not, for what can we bequeath save our deposed bodies to the ground?’”

“Now I get why you guys got along. You’re both fucking cryptic.”

“It’s not cryptic, it’s Shakespeare, God poorly rest his soul.” He keeps working on folding his napkin into tinier squares. It’s only possible to do it so many times. One of the rules of the universe. “‘Throw away respect,’” fold, “‘tradition,’” another fold, “‘form and ceremonious duty,’” he can’t fold it any more, “‘for you have mistook me all this while. I live on bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus, how can you say to me, I am a king?’”

“I don’t know how you can recite all that while totally hammered,” Matthew says.

“Had a long time to learn it. Reminds me of someone I know.” He drains the rest of his glass and starts drinking straight out of the bottle. Manners are for those who have a reason to give a damn.

Matthew steps sideways on the table as he chokes down another chip. “I never got into that stuff when I was alive. You probably saw it in person or something.”

“It’s not that difficult to have seen a Shakespeare play in person,” Hob says.

“You know what I mean, dickhead.”

“I dunno. Probably did. I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember.”

“I had other priorities at the time.” Probably came out during the after portion of that time period. Yikes.

He unfolds his paper square and starts refolding it in the opposite direction.

“You know, I was alive then,” he says.

“Obviously?”

“In the time when the play was set.” He sighs. “Weird to look at a story like that, one that echoes back to your own experiences. Whenever they try to do a ‘realistic’ film adaptation they always get some of the details wrong… the clothes and the fucking, trees and shit— gets under my skin.” Asynchronous resonances. Weird rippling echoes.

Kinda feels like that being in this White Horse.

“Stage is better for it,” he says. “Abstracted. Doesn’t matter about the details.” He drinks more of his wine.

Things always circle back. Back and back and back again. Same but different.

“‘The great stories always return to their original forms,’” he says. Come back to me, he thinks.

“Is that Shakespeare too?” Matthew asks warily.

“No.” Hob grimaces. “Dream.”

“…Oh. Fuck.”

Hob slumps down in his chair, head tipped back, spine bent uncomfortably. Not uncomfortably enough to distract from how much it all hurts.

“Did you put more tequila in that wine?” Matthew asks.

“Not this time, you want some?”

“Yeah.”

Hob pours some out in one of the empty shot glasses and passes it to him. Then gets distracted for a few moments studying the mechanics of a bird drinking out of a shot glass. Always another new thing.

“Kind of appropriate, this place,” he says at last.

“Uh, how so?”

“The White Horse.” He taps his fingers along the stem of his wine glass. His phone is still playing Spotify’s Bardcore Lute Mix or whatever the fuck. “‘And I looked, and beheld a white horse, and her name that sat on him was Death, and all Hell followed her,’” he says.

“What is that now, fucking… Armageddon?”

“Come on, Matthew, it’s Revelations!”

“I’m not Catholic!”

“A pale horse, Hob,” says a new, but familiar voice. “Not white.”

“Didn’t know I could summon you with that,” Hob says as Death sits down at the table across from him. He doesn’t offer her a drink. He’s not feeling particularly charitable towards her right now.

“You can’t, I chose to come.” Death plucks a spare wine glass off another table and pours herself some. Takes, always takes, Death.

“‘White horse’ feels more correct to me,” Hob says, gesturing at their surroundings. “Life and death fall in the shadows of this place. Well, not this place, literally, but.”

“Its echo still captures you,” Death says, sipping her wine. “Cycles like the turning of a season.”

Her expression is kind. Hob fucking hates her.

“If you’re here to ask me a question, don’t bother,” he says. “I intend to drink so much of this that I die, and then come back and do it again.”

“I’m not here to ask you anything,” Death says. She studies them both shrewdly, cryptically. Matthew hops away from her and up onto Hob’s shoulder, nervous. “Have I told you about the Sunless Lands?”

“You told me you couldn’t tell me about the Sunless Lands,” Hob says.

“And I can’t, except that circumstances require that I do.” She studies the surface of her wine. She is so very still, even Dream would struggle to compete. “There are things outside of myself that govern my speech, so perhaps in a language that my brother would favor: ‘Everyone is right, as it turns out. You go to the place you always thought you would go, the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.’”

“Billy Collins,” Hob says, as Matthew whispers in his ear, “How the f—”

“So, you see,” Death says, folding her hands together.

“What I see,” Hob says, growing increasingly incensed, “is someone dead who shouldn’t be, and what I’m hearing is a lot of absolute bullshit about how it’s meant to be that way. Oh, death gives life meaning, life already has meaning! Dream’s life has meaning. I've killed people-- you think me putting a sword through a soldier's chest is what gave his life meaning? You wanna know what death is?” Why the fuck’s he ranting about death to Death. “You want another quote? A fucking poem? What is death? ‘Death is absolute and without memorial.’ Just—”

“Wallace Stevens.”

Hob knocks over his glass.

Motherfucking Morpheus-of-the-not-Endless sits down beside him and steals Death’s half-empty wine glass. “He also wrote,” he says, “‘Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.’”

“Arsehole!” Hob yells, throwing his arms around him, dislodging Matthew, who jumps down to the table crying, “Boss!”

Morpheus startles at the contact. He’s actually physically there. He’s got a heartbeat and everything. Far too many glasses of wine catch up to Hob all at once and he starts crying against Morpheus’s shoulder.

“Hob—” Morpheus tries, awkwardly patting his back.

“Are you really here?” Hob asks. “Truly?”

“Truly,” Morpheus says.

“How?”

“I don’t make any decisions, once someone’s crossed over,” Death says, eye twinkling. “I’m simply… obliged to take people where they are meant to go. Where they believe, and hope they will.” 

So then… Hob? But then…

He’s not sure that makes sense, ‘rules of the universe’-wise. How can he be someone’s afterlife? He still lives in this life, for one thing.

But he doesn’t say so. He doesn’t say a damn word.

Death steps around the table, touching a hand to his shoulder as she goes. A chill runs through him. “Take care, Hob,” she says, then she’s gone.

“You must go, too, Matthew,” Morpheus says.

“But—”

Morpheus touches a light fingertip to the top of Matthew’s head, strokes his feathers. “Go back,” he says gently.

Matthew sighs. “Alright.” He pushes his head into Morpheus’s hand, then takes off and disappears.

When he’s gone, Hob pulls Morpheus tighter to him, pressing Morpheus’s head into his shoulder. “Hob,” Morpheus protests, but Hob keeps holding him, and eventually Morpheus sinks into his embrace, wrapping his arms around Hob in turn. “I am sorry,” he says quietly.

“Don’t. Oh my God.”

“I did not realize until… I did not know this would happen.”

“Just had it stashed away in the back of your head, eh?”

“Yes. I suppose I must have.”

God. Hob pulls back from him at last to look him in the eyes. “Welcome, then, to…” afterlife feels wrong, how can it be ‘after’ if it’s still a life? “your... second life?”

“Yes,” Morpheus agrees. 

Hob scrubs at his eyes, though the tears keep coming. “So much for death being absolute, sorry Wallace.”

“I believe it still is, there is no way for me to turn back, to become… Dream again. However, there appears to be a way forward that I did not anticipate. I am…” his cheeks go a little pink; that’s never happened before. It’s adorable. “Glad to be here.”

Hob must be really drunk because he takes Morpheus’s face between his hands and strokes his thumbs over that blush, which only makes it deepen. “Can never really go back anyway, can you? Only catch echoes and memories.”

“Yes,” Morpheus agrees. “Speaking of which”—he points to Hob’s phone—“this music is… strange and insufferable.”

Hob laughs. “Honestly, yeah, it kind of is.” ‘Bardcore.’ What the hell. “I’ll find you something you’ll like better.”

“You often do,” Morpheus says.

Madly, impulsively, Hob moves forward to kiss him. Morpheus’s lips are soft and warm, human, though Hob doubts he truly is, he’s something else, a shadow given back the shape that cast it, though not quite, exactly, the same.

Morpheus tilts his head back into the kiss. Is this just what you do in the ‘after’life? Finally let yourself have what you want? Hob could get behind it.

“I love you,” he says when he pulls back. “Always have.”

Morpheus’s cheeks go pink again.

“I’m glad you didn’t go,” Hob adds, pulling him back into another hug, pressing Morpheus’s scrawny chest to his.

“I suppose I did, but not as far as I expected,” Morpheus says.

“Good.”

Morpheus leans against him, tipping his head down on Hob’s shoulder. Hob’s heart sings. Forget alcohol poisoning, he might die from the emotional whiplash of it all. Doesn’t matter. He’ll come back.

"You get it now?" he says. "'Why should I give my bounty to the dead?'"

"'Shall I not find in comforts of the sun,'" Morpheus says, picking up the thread of the poem, "'things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?'"

"Exactly."

"Hmm," says Morpheus. "I suppose so. Yes."

Hob wraps his arm around his shoulders. “Glad I called it the ‘New Inn,’ and not, ‘White Horse 2’ or something,” he says.

“‘White Horse 2,’” Morpheus echoes. “That would be rather unoriginal. Not that ‘The New Inn’ is brimming with originality.”

“Excuse you.”

Morpheus chuckles against his shoulder.

“Nevertheless,” Hob says. “I think we picked well, with this place. Or. The original place. Whichever.”

“In what way?”

“‘Death rides a white horse.’”

“I believe the verse is, a pale horse,” Morpheus corrects.

“Yeah,” Hob says, smiling to himself as he squeezes Morpheus tighter. “Whatever.”