Chapter Text
*
A gaggle of kids rode past the old White Horse inn on their bicycles, swerving from one side of the street to the other. They giggled like a pack of monkeys, delighted by the sun finally shining upon London after weeks of heavy rain. It rested large and proud and blindingly white in the mid-morning sky, casting yellow light onto the maple trees, painting the undersides of leaves in shades of deep green and the sides exposed to the heavens in that sweet colour of young grass. Hob couldn't help but smile. June always did look good on London, no matter how many times he'd seen it.
He leaned back onto the metal fencing with a thump. It was so warm he hadn't bothered bringing a jacket along and wore only simple blue jeans and a brown-yellow plaid shirt. He turned his head sideways to study the White Horse behind him. It was a poor sight, its windows cracked or boarded shut or both, the facade crumbling and painted over with crude graffiti, the lawn in front of it a patchy mess of weed and construction rubble, the nooks in the roof serving as nesting places for swallows. The years had truly taken their toll. Two birds landed on the edge of the roof, then squawked and flapped back into the air as a tile dislodged itself beneath their feet, tumbling to the ground with a crash and an explosion of clay and–
A flower pot which used to contain an unnameable purple plant was knocked down from its windowsill by Dream's dangling feet as Hob fought to carry him up the creaking staircase.
"Watch out, you nincompoop!" snarled Cain from the landing, and Hob grit his teeth with effort not to curse back, instead focusing the last of his strength on not dropping Dream's limp form to the ground. His shoulder hurt like a bitch.
"Hob…" Dream murmured into his friend's neck, eyes still pressed shut. Hob’s grip had grown slack in the last few hours. "Where are we?"
"The House of Mysteries," he said. The step beneath his foot creaked and wobbled dangerously. "Lucienne helped me bring you here."
"Lucienne…" He seemed to be losing consciousness again. Hob's heart constricted, and he hugged Dream closer to his chest even as another stab of pain shot through his shoulder.
"Don't worry, we'll get you to a proper bed in a jiffy, and then we’ll stay there as long as we bloody want."
Dream just hummed a weak little hum and finally closed his eyes. Hob sighed and closed his as well.
And opened them to the sight of the sunlit inn in front of him. Figuring he better turn away before he starts reminiscing again, he looked out onto the street. His eyebrows shot up. At the centre stood a little girl, barely tall enough to reach Hob's hip, holding a tiny pink bicycle with tiny hands, two straw coloured pigtails atop her head, framing her plump face. She must have fallen behind her friends and was now staring at Hob as if he were a riddle she wanted to puzzle out.
"What are you doing?" she asked as bluntly and inquisitively as children are wont to. Hob chuckled. Sights like that would never stop reminding him of Robyn. He knelt down to her eye level.
"I'm waiting for a friend of mine."
She tilted her head sideways, wrinkling her nose.
"Why here? It's all icky."
"'cause it's our special place," Hob explained in a quiet tone. "And it doesn't stop being special even if it's falling apart."
She narrowed her eyes at him, then giggled and winked as if she understood all his secrets better than he did himself. Perhaps she did. Children always knew things adults had long forgotten.
"I have a special place too," she whispered and giggled again, then, refusing to elaborate, took hold of her bike and stalked off down the road, pushing it beside herself and yelling for her friends to wait up. Hob watched her go, the sound of soft shoes growing ever more distant and drowned out in the rustle of leaves and the chirping of birds. As he clambered up with a grunt, another sound came to replace it all. A slow, steady padding of boots against asphalt, as graceful as the gait of a feline. A smile bloomed on his face.
"Hey, you," he chuckled without looking to his right, keeping his gaze fixed on the skyline of London. The steps stilled just beside him and waited, then their owner huffed and took the one step still separating them to lean against Hob’s side.
“A special place?” he asked back, a loud smirk in his beautiful voice.
Hob gave the swallows nesting in the canopy of the nearest maple tree one last look before turning around without missing a beat to wrap his arms around Dream’s waist and press him so tight to his chest his not-yet-healed shoulder protested. Then, just because he could and just because he’d missed Dream so much in the last few days and decades, he leaned back, lifting his boyfriend off of the ground only to hold him there for a long second, revelling in the feel of his body safe and healthy and still so goddamn thin in his arms, a familiar heart, human like his own, beating fast in surprise. Arms came to wrap themselves around his neck in turn, both for balance and to bridge any gap left between them.
“Thass what it is,” he said as he dropped a smiling Dream back to the ground and met that familiar blue gaze, no longer wet with tears or muddy with exhaustion but alive like the world around them. He wore all black, shirt, jeans, boots and coat, too thick for the sunny weather. There was no ruby in sight. “It’s where we first met, isn’t it?”
Dream reached up to remove a stray strand of hair from Hob’s forehead and pecked him there.
“It was hardly a romantic meeting.”
“We should rectify that,” Hob grinned and let go of Dream’s waist. He nodded his head towards the inn. “C’mon.”
Dream crossed his arms and watched, eyebrows raised so high they disappeared beneath his messy fringe, as Hob picked up the bolt cutters he’d brought with himself and proceeded to cut through the chain keeping the metal fence locked. He pulled it open with a grunt and, with a deep and a bit self-satisfied bow, held it there for Dream to enter the courtyard. One amused huff and insolent smirk later, they were both walking towards the entrance of the inn.
"Why were you waiting outside?" Dream asked after Hob had pried the door open, its hinges long rusted into place.
"I guess I…” Hob stilled, looking down at the floor, then smiling a sad smile and meeting his luv’s inquisitive gaze. “I just didn't want a repeat of last time."
Dream placed a comforting hand onto his bicep, nodding but keeping his eyes closed while a memory of why exactly he hadn't made it to the date reared its ugly head up. They entered, arms interlocked and closed the door behind them.
*
The inn stank of decades old dust and mould. There were cobwebs hanging off of the rafters and ceiling in thick ropes and spiders scuttling into their hiding places. Only the bar and a few chairs and tables remained, anything else of value long removed or stolen. A few empty bottles and profanities spray painted across the walls were the only decoration left. The bar countertop was a worn cherry brown laminate, greasy with dust. Morpheus had managed to wipe it clean enough with a conjured-up rag - black, of course - and sat atop it. His arms were wrapped tight around his chest, trying to pretend his heartbeat wasn't elevated and his breathing shallow while his feet dangled freely in the air. Looking around through the half-darkness, he found Hob was currently panting with the effort to open a boarded up window. He pulled at the remaining plank with his bare hands until it cracked and fell off, giving him access to the hook. He opened the window with a victorious cackle, and golden light streamed into the inn, illuminating a trail of dust that floated in the air and falling onto a chair smashed on the ground and further up onto Morpheus’ boots. It made the place feel just a little bit less forlorn and more like the inn it used to be when people sat and talked and drank and sometimes fell in love within its walls.
A rat scuttled out of the way, but Hob paid it no mind, just moved on to the second window. Morpheus sighed as that all-too-familiar feeling of humiliation settled over him, sour like the air before a storm.
“There is no need for this, my love,” he offered, kindly, but with a bitterness to it he didn’t know how to mask. Perhaps he should have expected the response he got.
“There sure as fuck is,” Hob gritted out crudely, almost falling onto his arse as the last window crashed open. He wiped his hands on his jeans and stalked back over to stand in front of Morpheus, leaning close with hands braced on the counter on each side of Morpheus’ hips, meeting his gaze head on. “And you know dang well why.”
Unable to keep eye contact with those sweet browns he loved so much, Morpheus looked away. The half-darkness had been so easy to hide in that he couldn’t help but miss it a bit, even though he knew in some distant part of his mind that his breathing had calmed now all the windows were open and the interior of the White horse looked more like a sunlit park than a basement.
“I do not need your pity,” he whispered, his voice hardly a command, but a pathetic little thing with its wings cut.
Hob actually dared to snort at that.
“You may be ten billion years old and one of the most powerful buggers in the universe at that, but that don’t stop you from having PTSD.”
Morpheus remained silent for long enough that Hob moved away, only to jump onto the counter and sit down beside his lover, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. The gesture reminded Morpheus of that first time they’d touched, so long ago in 1389. Just like back then, warmth was spreading down his back like the softest of blankets.
“There’s no shame in it, Dream,” Hob explained, slow and patient, and a few hundred years ago, Morpheus might have found the tone condescending, but he knew better now. He knew Hob better now. “I know what I’m talking about." Morpheus finally looked at Hob. His mouth was twisted into a grimace. "I got buried alive once. Buggers thought I was dead when I fell down with a sword in me gut and didn't bother double-checking. Had to dig meself out with my bare hands." He huffed and ran a trembling hand down his face. "It was a long time ago, but I still remember I spent months sleeping out in the open. Couldn't breathe with a roof over me head."
A beat passed in silence, then Morpheus placed a hand on Hob’s leg and rubbed soothing circles until the trembling stopped.
"Do you understand?"
Slowly, Morpheus nodded and locked their gazes.
“What do we do now?”
“We talk,” Hob said like it was the simplest thing in the world. After six hundred years, perhaps it should have been.
A thought occurred to Morpheus and took a pound off of the weight crushing his heart.
“I thought you said this was going to be romantic.”
Just as Hob always did, he had an answer for that too. He smiled his smile and lit the abandoned inn like the oldest lantern to have ever graced its spaces.
“What’s more romantic than having a real conversation?”
And there was nothing Morpheus could say to that.
*
The sun outside had settled in the centre of the sky, bright like a yellow lamp on a blue ceiling. Light fell onto the bar and melted the empty shelves and counters like water would an aquarelle painting, allowing reality to briefly give way to the illusion of pints of mead and beer exchanging hands, liquid and froth spilling over the edges and falling onto the cherry brown countertop. Then the mirage passed, and all that was left was a worn linoleum surface glinting like a field of daffodils. And atop it, rested two lonely hands, fingers intertwined, one pale, almost white, not a hair or blemish in sight, the other tanned with a smattering of barely visible scars.
“You should have let me come with you,” said one of them, voice gruff and filled with pain.
“What good would your presence do me in a battle against Lucifer Morningstar?” replied the other, melancholy but firm.
“I don’t know. No good, probably.” A shaky breath. “But you shouldn’t have been alone in a place like that. Not so soon.”
“Lucifer could have used you against me, Hob. Could have hurt you . Do you think I would have been able to live with myself had it come to that?”
“I…” he stopped and grit his teeth, slamming his free palm onto the counter in frustration. “I get that, but–”
“You kept me safe until I regained my strength, then brought me my pouch of sand from Constantine. You did so much, my love.”
“I should have done more.”
The pale hand extricated itself from the hold and came to rest instead on the plaid-clad forearm.
“You did enough.”
*
The light coming from the three windows faded from yellow to muted amber until the walls and the tables and the chairs and the long-forgotten stack of menus swam like liquid gold. For a moment it almost seemed that there were sunlit shapes sitting at the tables, their faces crinkled with laughter like paper towels or smoothed out in content like a clear summer sky. Then the fraction of a second faded into another, and the only figures that were left in the inn were the pair sitting on the countertop, wrapped in a hug so tight they might have seemed like one single creature from afar but for the difference in their clothing. The coppery red hair of the first one was orange in the afternoon light while the second one’s raven hair glinted blue and purple, like a river of oil but ten times more beautiful.
And yet, oblivious to the warmth of the sun and the embrace, he was crying.
“It hurt," he whimpered with so much pain in his voice the walls of the inn themselves whined in lament.
“I know it did, luv.”
“I never imagined anything could hurt so much.”
“I know, luv, I know.”
“I thought nobody was going to come for me.”
“I know, I’m so sorry.”
"I thought everyone had forgotten about me. That I'd-" A hiccuped sob. "That I'd be left there, for all eternity, forgotten and cold and- and alone and hurting. "
"Never," came a promise. "I'd never stop looking. Not if the world ended, not ever."
After that, they just held on, afraid that perhaps the rays of the sun had a mind to wind themselves around their torsos and tear them away from one another.
*
The sun was beginning to set. It rested just above the treeline, casting long shadows where window frames and support beams and chairs obstructed its path. The shadows flickered and shifted with the movement of maple leaves outside, and looked perhaps like silhouettes of dancers throwing their heads back with laughter, or fiddlers, moving among the tables as they plucked at the strings of their violins with bare fingers. But just as soon as faint traces of music had entered the inn, they were gone, allowing the light to fall onto the two forms sitting on the counter facing each other. The first one was hugging his black-clad legs to his chest, sunlit eyes facing downward. The dried tears on his cheeks gleamed like pearls. The other one had the sleeves of his plaid shirt rolled up past his elbows and was leaning forward onto the knees of his crossed legs.
“A hundred years, Dream,” whispered the second one. His voice shook. “A hundred bloody years I spent racking my brain about our fight, trying to understand if I could have done something different.” He smiled a wry smile. “Couldn’t even think about getting laid without feeling guilty. Kept thinking I’d be betraying your trust, when I worked so hard to gain it.”
The raven haired one raised his head to look at the other intently.
“I would have done the same for you,” he promised with enough gravity to hold the moon still. “I would remain faithful until the end of time, I would forget everything and everyone else in the world to bring you back to me and never let you go.”
“I know, I know, but that’s not what love’s about. It’s not moulding yourself to fit the other person and walking on eggshells in hopes they’d keep you. It’s staying who you are ‘cause that’s what made them fall in love with you in the first place.” He shook his head. “I know you love the Dreaming, I’d never ask you to abandon it for my sake. But I love the waking world too, Dream. I love life, and I won’t stop loving it just ‘cause I love you as well.”
“I do not understand…”
A weary sigh as the coppery haired one dropped his head into his hands.
“No, you don’t, do you?”
Then that pale hand came up again to catch the bearded chin and tilt it back up.
“Please, explain it so I will.”
So, after a bewildered second, Hob smiled and did his best.
*
The sun was gone, hidden behind the trees and the metal fence, taking the gentle light with it. A twilight fell over the inn, grey and musty with specks of dust and residue warmth left to flicker through the air and resemble, perhaps, the clouds of smoke patrons puffed from their cigarettes. Up on the counter, Hob lay on his back, arms crossed beneath his head as he stared up at the wooden ceiling, rafters as sturdy as they had been six hundred years ago but criss-crossed with cobwebs. Morpheus rested between his legs, head laid down on Hob's belly, breathing in satisfied breaths into the fabric beneath him as he toyed with a misplaced string on Hob's shirt. He let one of his arms dangle off the side of the counter when Hob reached down to stroke that soft nest of raven hair.
"D'you think he's fed up with us?" Hob asked out of nowhere. Dream looked up with a quirked eyebrow.
"Who?"
"The White Horse."
"What?"
Morpheus' face had such a sweetly dumbfounded expression Hob couldn't help but laugh and muss the already messy hair.
"The inn, luv! I've seen Fiddler's Green walking around like your best approximation of Mr Monopoly, had the pleasure of making Miss London's acquaintance - twice at this point I think - and I swear I had a clock wink at me once, so it ain't that big of a stretch if the White Horse were a grumpy old landlord, leafing through his thick ledger, wooden nose and spider on his face and all that, marking down every drunk that threw up on his parquet."
Dream just blinked up at him a few times, then dissolved into a laughing fit as he hugged Hob tight around his waist.
"You are truly unbelievable, my love."
"Well, tell me I'm wrong then," Hob huffed, crossing his arms over his chest while his boyfriend giggled into his stomach. "Do your magicky thing and ask him."
Morpheus hummed and brought his arms up to rest his head on them, still smiling a dopey smile, eyes glistening with happy tears this time while he looked up at Hob.
"Why would he tire of us?"
"Y'know," he waved his hand indistinctly. "Centuries bumbling around each other in his rooms like two utter twats? Think anyone would wanna crack us over the head with a barstool after that."
"Perhaps," Morpheus said like the bastard he was. Then grinned. "But we are no longer bumbling, are we?"
Hob chuckled as he pulled Dream up his chest so they were face to face. He flicked his nose just because he could and got a scowl.
"We'll keep bumbling around until the Earth stops spinning and Mad Hettie finds herself a new alley to haunt."
"But not in the White Horse?"
"Not in the White Horse."
Morpheus placed a hand on Hob's cheek. He leaned in so close their noses almost touched.
"Hob?"
"Mm?"
The last vestiges of the setting sun made themselves known when a single ray of light shone through a crack in the metal fence surrounding the inn, then entered through the central window to illuminate their faces in its gentle orange glow.
"Are you scared?"
"Yes," Hob answered without hesitation or remorse.
Dream smiled that tiny smile of his that for once shone not like the crescent of a moon, but a sun.
"I’m scared too.”
And they kissed just as the light faded, and the windows fell closed with a kind little creak to keep the pair hidden from prying eyes.
*