Chapter Text
Hob wakes to the sour bite of bile in his mouth, a pounding head, and the sound of his doorbell ringing.
He remembers a wake. Which explains the bile, and the headache threatening to pop his right eyeball out with the force of the pressure. Funerals have always made him a bit unsteady, usually from the crying. He turns his head into the cooler side of his pillow and wishes that immortality granted him immunity to worldly ills, but no – he suffers the slings and arrows of misfortune no less than any mortal man, with the only added comfort being that the headache won't spontaneously turn into an aneurysm, probably, and even if it does it won't keep him down for long.
He's ignoring that the doorbell rang. His heart feels too heavy for it. His heart feels scuppered. Like it's been dragged up out of his chest and laid to bear on the shore of his ribs, exposed to the salt-air of grief. He keeps thinking of the cat woman, looking down on him all curled on the ground like a newborn creature. How kind she'd been. Bast, some hidden thing whispers, and that feels...correct. It'd be just and right that his friend’s wake be attended by gods.
The doorbell rings again. Coming, not from the front, the stairs leading down into the New Inn, but from his kitchen door, leading out into the more secluded side yard. Maybe it's his imagination, but there's an air of frantic energy to the sound. There's something about electronics that always has that feel, of busy coming and going, and that it's only the hubris of man that holds it down. Fire can be tamed. Fire can be snuffed. What are you supposed to do with lightning? The 21st century has caged tigers in glass jars, and expects that they'll never escape.
Hob hauls himself out of bed. He's trying not to think of the wake. Trying not to think of Dream. His mouth shapes around it as he looks for a shirt to wear. Dream, Dream, Dream. From the tongue to the soft palate to the murmuration of lips pressed together on the final consonant. The hum of the 'm.' If he says it enough, maybe it will finally mean something. If he says it enough, maybe it will have been just a dream.
He realises that he's crying. The sour taste in his mouth is stronger, and Hob swallows against the sudden urge to vomit as he finally gives up on making himself look presentable. He grabs a t-shirt from the hamper and slips it over his head; the cotton sticks to his cheeks, wet, nearly scalding. When he rubs his nose, the back of his hand comes away shiny with snot. Lovely.
Whoever is at the door will just have to deal with it.
He leaves the bedroom like a sleepwalker; only rote memory puts one foot in front of the other, because all of his thoughts are occupied by what he can remember of his dream that wasn't a dream. He hadn't been dressed in a suit, he remembers that much – that's even more upsetting, absurdly. He would have liked to be dressed nicely for his oldest friend's wake.
He would have liked to be there for his death. To try and stop it, maybe. Or to make sure, at the very least, that he wasn't alone.
Five years, though. Five years they’ve had together and he didn’t see. Five years of increasingly-frequent meetings and conversation and new discoveries. Five years. He’d invited Dream into his home, he’d…he’d sat with him on the sofa, there, playing music for him that he’d missed during his long absence, his hell of iron and glass. They’d gotten drunk together – or rather, Hob had gotten drunk, and Dream had indulgently helped him up the stairs to his own flat. He’d shared so many of his griefs…had Dream ever shared any of his?
"Bunch of little deaths," he mutters to himself. He wonders if his stranger has been dying for a far longer time than he's let on. That it's only no one has noticed before now. Hob's had plenty of spates with melancholia. He knows that old beast well, and he's always managed to defeat it by dint of having time. Time to find the next apex of the hill, the next horizon, the next one good thing to keep him going. All it's ever taken is one good thing.
How old was Dream, when he finally gave up? When the stink of death on him finally overpowered everything else? At what point did time become a curse instead of a blessing?
Hob opens the side door and squints into the sunlight. There's bright, refracting halos around the beams, dazzling the eye, and it takes him long seconds for his vision to focus through the prismatic blur of his own tears.
There's a man standing on his doorstep.
Technically two men. One carrying the other.
"I am sorry," says the man who's standing. He's tall and thin and pale, familiar and beautiful, beautiful like ancient statues or like lithographs, like all the sharper edges of him have been carved, and all the rounded softness has been wrought by nature Herself. "I could think of no better place to bring him."
The other man, cradled in the arms of the first, curled up like a foetal doe with his long legs tucked up and his arms folded inwards, is Hob's stranger. Is Dream.
+++
Hob's hands are shaking when he gets down three mugs from the cupboard. He doesn't think he's going to need the third one – Dream looks about as wrecked as Hob currently feels, and hasn't moved an inch since the other man brought him inside and deposited him on Hob's ancient sofa. Without the glare of the sun searing through his eyes he's finally been able to put a finger on why the pale man seems familiar, and it's impossible, but when has his life ever made sense? It stopped making sense back in 1389, when he'd made the choice to get too into his cups and insult Death to her face.
The pale man, also, is Dream.
Different, in some ways. Softer. He's got hair like white cotton clouds and where the light shines through his skin it illuminates him all in shades of pink and orange, like the thin skin of fish roe, curves where Hob is used to angles. He's still sharp, still looks as though he's been wrought from marble, but there's a deeper softness to him that Hob's not used to. His stranger has always seemed so sleek and stiff he could cut himself on the edges. This one is...is a funhouse mirror. Is a reflection done so lovingly and so realistically that if he's not looking right at them his brain tries to revert them into one creature.
He picks up the kettle when it whistles and tries to pour without splashing boiling water all over the counter. He fails, miserably, his hands too unsteady to bear the weight for long. Scalding water sloshes over onto the back of his hand, and Hob hisses, long and low and pained. His hands are shaking worse when he clatters the kettle back onto the hob and rushes to the sink. His luck, that little things like this still sting, and seem to take their sweet time to heal, though he knows a few hours of healing for him would be a few days for any normal human. At least they don't leave scars anymore – that's reserved only for the things that kill him – but they still hurt like the bloody devil.
"Hob?" The voice of the second Dream floats in from the living room. It's a bit higher than his...his twin? His brother? Still a profoundly deep rumble, but he feels it in his muscles, instead of his bones. "Are you well?"
"Yeah. Yeah, bloody hot water. Sorry." The urge to start talking, and to not stop, is absurd and huge and clambering at the back of his teeth, expanding like a balloon. It's going to pop at any moment, and all the words that he wants to say but shouldn't are going to come flooding out. What the fuck is going on? Who are you? What are you? What have you done to my friend?
He runs the cold tap and sticks his hand beneath the water. The burn's a spreading red blotch, overtaking a few silvery nicks and notches from his life before immortality. He can't remember where he got any of them. It's gotten to the point that if he wants to remember more than the last hundred or so years, he's got to write things down. He's got whole journals, now, not written in code, because that'd be lunacy, but written in all the languages he misses. Old French and Middle English and Latin. Sometimes he takes them out and reads them aloud, just to hear the syllables of them again, not academic jargon, but real words, the way they were when they were alive. Christ, he misses his own language. Sometimes, in conversations with his stranger, he'd found himself slipping into dialects that hadn't known a living tongue in centuries.
He's trying to ignore the real problem, which is that there are two men in his living room, one of whom looks like a corpse lightly warmed over by the sun, and the other an almost-identical but photo-negative copy of the first. The copy Dream, at least, seems physically hale. Hob turns off the tap and shakes his hand out to loosen the sting, then wipes it haphazardly on his joggers. He has the sudden, stupid thought that he ought to be dressed better for this. Ought to be wearing the suit, maybe, that he'd felt robbed of at Dream's wake.
He manages to steady his hands enough to pour the kettle the second go around. He's got lemon in the fridge, milk, but the thought of trying to put together a proper tea while his head is still throbbing and his heart is pounding in his chest makes him feel nearly violently ill. He takes it slow, instead. Brings the first two mugs out to the living room, where Dream and...and Dream are precisely where he'd left them. One folded up on the couch like a dead spider, the other sitting primly in his battered armchair, hands tucked neatly in his lap. He looks like a sheepdog at attention, one of those great, white fluffy ones with the fur like brushed wool and the delicate pink ears.
Hob offers him a mug, and Dream takes it with both hands. Their fingers brush, and Hob thinks again of electricity, of beasts caught in bell jars, as a tingle rushes from fingertips all the way to his chest.
"I owe you an explanation," he says. His fingers curl around the shape of the mug. It reminds Hob, for reasons he can't quite articulate, of holding shells to his ear, the first time he'd ever found them washed up on the beach. Listening to the roar of the sea inside a conch. It would be centuries before he learned that it wasn't the sea at all, but only a reflection of his own rushing heart.
"Hold on," Hob says, and sets the other mug down on the table. He goes back to the kitchen to fetch the last of the mugs. If Dream – his Dream – wakes up, he's going to wake up to good, strong British tea and a bone-crushing hug from Hob.
If he wakes up.
He doesn't know how this works.
Dream, the other Dream, hasn't moved when Hob returns to the living room and takes a seat on the floor near the head of the sofa, folding his left leg up beneath him and letting the right stretch out. Stress is bad for that knee, an ancient injury from before he was given his gift. Stress, and cold, and overexertion. He'll feel it tomorrow if he isn't careful, but keeping it positioned is more a habit than anything else. All of his thoughts are still turned to Dream. Dreams. Plural.
"Talk," he says, and the white Dream nods congenially at him. There's something about him. An aura, maybe. Hob's never been one to believe in things like auras and crystals, but Christ, maybe he ought to start. He's got a dead man on his sofa, chest rising and falling softly in the light that streams through the living room window, and the dead man has a twin, or nearly a twin, soft as lamb's wool in his armchair and holding a mug that says World's Okayest Professor.
Shock had previously done wonders to stop his tears, but now he feels the sting of them again. He takes an overlarge gulp of his tea, adding a burnt tongue and scraped-raw throat to his current collection of hot liquid-related injuries, but it at least makes the watering in his eyes seem like the result of pain, instead of...instead of a different sort of pain.
"My name is Daniel," the Dream-doppelganger says. Hesitates, and then adds, "I am also Dream of the Endless."
Hob holds his tea against his bottom lip, letting the smell of it waft around him in a wreath of malt and cut-grass. He's not sure what to say to that. How? maybe. What now? or How does this work?
Daniel, too, seems to be floundering. He lifts the mug to his mouth and holds it there like he intends to drink, and then slowly brings it back down. As if the motion is familiar to him somehow, but completing it goes against some intrinsic nature. "I admit that I do not know where to begin."
"The beginning is tradition," Hob says. The words slough ripples across the surface of his tea, and Daniel cracks a tiny, bewildered smile. Dream, he calls himself – Daniel, he’d named himself first – but the Dream that Hob had known had smiled like that only rarely.
But it’s the same smile.
"Yes. Perhaps. But while I think we have the time to review several billion years of history...perhaps it is time that would be better spent tending to my...My previous self."
The man on the sofa hasn't moved, not once in all the time they've spoken, all the time that Hob's spent making tea. He could still be dead, except for the fact that his chest rises and falls like clockwork, and Hob can see the faint flare of his nostrils as he breathes. His mouth is slightly open, a breezy whistle sucking past his teeth; his lips are pale. Hob remembers his stranger's lips, like pinkish garnets. He remembers thinking, all the way back in 1389, that he'd gladly have that strange lord tup him over a barrel if it meant he could steal a single kiss.
Funny, the things he remembers. Can't remember Eleanor's face, or the sound of Robyn's laughter, but he remembers every single time he's died. Remembers Dream of the Endless and all the sordid fantasies he's had of him over the centuries, everything from the platonic to the distressingly erotic. He'd long since resigned himself to the sort of distant acquaintanceship that had seemed this creature's wont. When Dream had come back to him, he’d dared to hope for more. For friendship, at the very least. Two lonely immortals, not so lonely anymore, walking the road of eternity together. He’d dared…he’d dared to imagine more. Not to hope. Hoping for it had seemed counterintuitive. But to imagine a hand slipping into his, or Dream’s mouth shaping around his name in affection. In love.
He's not sure where that all leaves him now.
"Is he asleep?"
"I am…holding him. Yes. He was..." Daniel hesitates for a long time. He does that more, Hob thinks. Pausing. Thinking. Whenever he'd met his stranger for their centennial meetings, every word he'd spoken had seemed graven in stone. Sometimes it had taken him a moment to bring them forth, but the words themselves had had weight to them. When Daniel speaks, it's like clouds. There's a terribly human indecisiveness to it.
"He was distressed," Daniel says, finally. There are worlds of meaning in that word. Hob can see, suddenly, with terrible clarity: Dream, expecting death, expecting an end, and suddenly not. Hob's been shot in the head a few times in his life, and every time after he's woken up frightened, disoriented, with the feeling that something was still missing. The feeling's always gone away with time, but if Dream had woken like that, even close to that...
Yeah. Distressed is a word for it.
"Start with...with how he died," he says. His hands have started to shake again, sloshing tea over onto his wrist. It's not so hot, now, but it patters in little drips onto the hardwood. If he leaves it there it'll water-stain the wood.
He leaves it there.
"Morpheus...my predecessor. Made the choice to sacrifice himself to prevent further damage to the Dreaming. I am still unclear on the specifics. I have been told by my sister Despair that the knowledge will return to me with time. As I grow into my power once more. She is the only one of my siblings who has also been through this...process." Daniel lifts the tea to his mouth again, and this time actually takes a sip. He makes a soft, startled sound, and licks his lips. He has the sort of mouth that could sink ships. Inspire wars. Pink like the throat of a honeysuckle bloom. Hob looks away; he's confused enough by everything that's happening, and he doesn't want to add...whatever those thoughts are to the mix.
"Process," Hob repeats.
"Yes. The transfer of power. There must always be dreams. There must always be Dream of the Endless. In the event that there is not, the forces that govern all of reality will rectify the situation. Morpheus had planned for this. I think...I think he had been planning it for a very long time."
Fuck. That's...that's a thought. That's a thought that Hob hates with every fibre of his being. He remembers telling his friend to be careful. You stink of death, mate. If he hadn't been so caught in his own woes at the time, his stupid, human grief, would he have noticed more? Would he have said something else?
If he'd been a better friend throughout the centuries...if he'd tried to push harder, in the few years leading up to Dream's – to Morpheus' – death, what would have changed?
He can't. He can't think of this right now, or he's going to start bawling, the great, rocking, hiccoughing sobs that he gets when the world's unfair and he knows it and it still hurts. He ducks his head over his mug, the steam puffing perfumed up into the fall of his hair.
He takes a deep breath, relying on the warmth of the steam to keep his nose clear enough to actually inhale. It's only slightly successful – he's still stuffy from apparently sobbing all night, and he makes an ungainly squeaking noise when he tries to breathe too deep. Daniel regards him steadily, showing no indication that he's heard or, if he has, that he cares.
His eyes are kind, though. Dark from edge to edge, not like a spill of ink, the way Morpheus' had been when Hob had seen him in dreams, but dark like a twilight sky. There are shades of indigo and woad in those depths, and bright white highlights of galaxies. That's still the same, then. His starry-eyed stranger.
Not his stranger, though. Someone different. But someone still the same. Christ, his head hurts. He ought to have gotten some paracetamol while he was in the kitchen, but he'd been so distracted. Hob reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose, trying to massage some semblance of order back into his sinuses, and when that doesn't work his thumbs drift to his temple instead. If he presses hard enough, maybe he'll drill right through the bone to the soft grey matter beneath. If he massages it directly, maybe the pain will stop.
There's a shuffling of cloth, and a movement, very close. Hob startles, lifting his head to find that Daniel has slid down to the floor, kneeling in front of him. He's set his mug of tea down on the hardwood, and Hob has the fleeting thought that it'll be another circular stain in the finish that he doesn't have to care about because wood rots, stone crumbles, he remains, and then Daniel's hands are pressing flat to his temples. Palms inward, cradling Hob's aching skull with surprising tenderness. There's a look in Daniel's eye – he's not sure what it is. He's too overwhelmed with everything else to try and parse through it, but it's...it's kind. That's all that matters, maybe, is that it's kind, and Hob sighs as he feels a shuddering coolness start to bleed out from his temples. The pain ebbs, beaten back by the rising tide of frost, and his head seems clear again. His sinuses are still stuffed and his eyes still sting, but he no longer feels like he wants to beat his forehead against a wall to make the aching stop.
It makes him suddenly aware of the softness of Daniel's palms. How they feel similar to the few times he's taken his stranger's hands in his. Morpheus had let him – not often, but sometimes – in the later years of their friendship. Before that stench of death had started to cling to him like foxtails to an unwitting dog.
Hob shivers, and Daniel slowly takes back his hands. Is it his imagination, or do they linger on his cheeks? Does a thumb stroke the orbit of his right eye?
"Thanks," he whispers, and Daniel nods. His hair flops over his eyes, not the static charged bird's nest of Morpheus, but wildly fluffed curls and waves. Again, the comparison to lambs. He looks younger, that's why. Morpheus had looked (does look) about Hob's age. Daniel could be anywhere between twenty and thirty. He has that sort of androgynous slightness about him. Another little difference. Hob clears his throat. "How...how did he get like this?"
He's not sure what 'like this' even is. Asleep? Breathing? Not dead? He feels different. It's not something that Hob can quite put his finger on, but. Morpheus feels different. Daniel glances aside, still kneeling. With one hand he reaches unerringly for the mug of tea and brings it back to his lips. Sips, almost contemplatively.
"I believe there was a moment, between his death and my manifestation. A moment which one of my other siblings took advantage of. Has he ever told you of our siblings, Hob?"
Our siblings. Hob wonders how much of Daniel still recognizes Morpheus as part of himself. "Not really. I've met Death. Delirium, a few times. Nice girl. I saw Desire at the wake, but I've never talked to them."
"That may be for the best. Desire and I have had a...historically tempestuous relationship. I do not like to think of how they might try to harm you, if only in some way to harm me." Daniel's eyes slide towards him, the flick of his lashes like a fall of snow. They're dense enough that they look like the fan of a paintbrush; his eyes the same slick beauty as oil paints. "You were...you are...very dear to us. To me. I remember...a promise? The White Horse?"
The White Horse has been gone for decades, but there's something new and spring-fresh and hopeful in Daniel's expression, and Hob...doesn't know what to do with it. It makes something in his chest twist, all coiled and knotted like mating serpents. He wants to reach out and tuck a curl behind the pink shell of Daniel's ear.
He wants to go to Morpheus and check to see if he's awake yet.
"Your siblings," he prompts, and Daniel's expression...it doesn't die. But it shrinks. Gets tucked down and folded away, maybe.
"We have a brother. The Prodigal. Destruction. He abandoned his duties many years ago, but...it was he who brought Morpheus to me. Much changed, as you see now. He appeared in my throne room not long after I came to be. He was...frustratingly vague. Exhausted. But hopeful, I think. He reminded me...that his realm has also always been one of change, for good and for ill. Creation is the opposite of destruction, and thus falls somewhat under his purview."
"Which means what?"
Daniel takes another drink of his tea. Hob reckons his own has probably gone tepid, now, but with his head no longer hurting he doesn't feel quite the need for it anymore. Wishes, though, for the scald of it, if only to try and hide the tears that keep trying to creep up on him unawares. He watches Daniel reach out with a hand as graceful and soft as a swan's wing, touching the gaunt cheek of Morpheus still sleeping on the couch. Hob half expects there to be sparks, for some sort of...Ghostbusters crossing the streams moment. But there's nothing. Just one man touching another.
"I believe, though I am not certain, that Destruction forced my predecessor to acknowledge what he has always fought against. That all things must change, or die. Change comes slowly to the Endless, Hob. But it is not impossible. And it is eminently easier when one is human."
It all sounds so fucking dire. Change, and death, and prodigal brothers. It takes him a moment to latch on to what is probably the most important part of the whole thing, though, because he's distracted by the sight of Daniel's hand sliding back into Morpheus' hair. Cream spilled into ink. His mouth is suddenly dry.
"Human?" he asks, and Daniel blinks slowly, not at him, but at Morpheus. Studying the face of his other self, his former self. There's tenderness there, too. In the way his eyes crinkle at the corners, and the softness of his mouth. It seems nearly the same as when Daniel had looked at him.
"Yes, Hob. Morpheus is human. Like you, I believe, though I am not certain. I have not yet spoken to my sister. You are...the first I have sought out. I thought...if I were in the same position, I would wish for someone to comfort me. Someone that I have known for a very long time."
He's always referred to Morpheus as his oldest friend. He's never quite been sure if it's gone both ways, though within the past few years they’ve grown closer, and yes, he’d dared, he’d dared to hope...This is proof, he supposes. Straight from the horse's mouth, if the horse were a beautiful boy in his living room, sat next to the almost-corpse of the one creature in all the world who knows who Robert Gadling is. Not Rob Golden, not Robin Gadlen, not Rod Gadsby, but Hob.
A snippet of poetry floats through him, like a spiderweb on a breeze, just faint enough that to try and catch it might break the strand. You are in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you...
Then it's gone.
Hob finally sets his tea down, relinquishing the hollow comfort of having something in his hands. He ought to be the strong one, right now. Daniel's brought his friend, his dearest stranger, his sweeting, here because he needs comfort, he needs care, and Hob just...keeps looking at his bone-white face, and how his lips are so pale they're nearly cream, and how they're chapped. Morpheus has never had chapped lips. Has always been as beautiful and perfect and untouchable as a star, and Hob has yearned for him like a star. With the knowledge that if he ever managed to touch him, he'd be consumed by it. With the knowledge that he never could touch, because the fact that Morpheus has even allowed their friendship is so far outside the realm of possibility that Hob's always felt a bit like he's cheated his way into it.
And now Morpheus is here, on his sofa. Human? Hurting. Distressed, Daniel had said. Magicked into a faerie sleep so that the horror of his new existence doesn't drive him mad. Was he given a choice? Did his brother ask him?
God. God, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
"Okay," he says thickly. Swallows sharp around the lump in his throat, unsure if it's grief or longing or some terrible combination of everything he's ever felt for his stranger. For the heartsoreness that has always hounded him after every blessed meeting. "Yeah. I can do that. I'd...be honoured? Fuck." He shoves his hand back into his hair, tugging to try and...he doesn't know. Ground himself, maybe. Give himself something to focus on that isn't the absurdity of the current tableaux that's set up in his living room. A flat isn't the place for these sorts of revelations, he thinks wildly. This is the sort of thing that takes place in a proper house. These sorts of...of issues.
What part of this could possibly be made better by taking place in a house instead of above your own bar? He doesn't know. He doesn't. He's flying by the seat of his pants, here, and he just. He doesn't know.
The only way to go is forward, though. What else can he possibly do? In all the years he's known him, Morpheus has never once spoken of other friends. Has never mentioned another flat he's visited, any other immortals, has never given the slightest indication that he wasn't (isn't) the loneliest bastard on the planet, and only stubborn pride had kept him from admitting it.
He doesn't have to be lonely anymore. He's got you. Daniel? Maybe got Daniel, too. How strange. How odd, to have yourself as your friend. He knows a few therapists who'd have a field day with this.
"Is he asleep because you're keeping him asleep?" he asks, and Daniel nods.
"Yes. I was concerned that if I allowed him to wake, he would...do harm to himself."
"What?"
Daniel lifts his chin. "I do not know if he would have. But it was a possibility. I did not wish him to try and seek our sister's hand when we do not know what will happen. This is all...new. Unprecedented." He's still touching Morpheus. Still has a hand in the dark hair, which is...which is not quite as wild and windswept as it normally is, Hob now sees. It looks a bit lank. Like Morpheus has been sweating. "There have never been two of me before. I am...even more at a loss than you, Hob. For I have memories of humanity, but they are a child's memories. Warmth. Light. Comfort. Not conducive to aiding a grieving man through his own death."
Hob's not sure what 'a child's memories' is supposed to mean. Resolves to ask later, when there aren't such pressing matters to attend to. Namely, preparing for Morpheus to wake up. Making sure that he's not going to hurt himself.
He wonders, again, if Morpheus was given a choice. Once upon a time, Hob was taught that suicide was a sin. He's done a lot of wrestling with his own feelings about the Church since then, and has come to the conclusion that a fair amount of it was based on politics rather than religion, and another goodly part of it came out of fear of the unknown, but suicide had always seemed...he's never understood it. Why someone would choose to end their life instead of trying to push forward, to reach the light at the end. Because there's always light at the end, if you just wait long enough.
But the idea that Morpheus had made his choice, and then had it snatched away from him...He's a person. He's a living, thinking creature. He deserves that autonomy, deserves the chance to make the decision for himself, so long as he's going into it with eyes wide open.
Were his eyes open, though? Or was he blinded by some grief that Hob's never been privy to?
There's so much he doesn't know.
"Help me get him into the bedroom," he says at last, and manages to get his good knee under himself so that he can start levering up to a stand. He's surprised when a pale hand appears in his vision, pausing with his knee planted firm into the wood. His bad leg aches from holding still for so long. He thinks a half-hour must have passed, maybe more. He hadn't been timing their silences.
"Let me help you."
How often would he have killed to hear those words from his stranger? In the 1600s, surely, he'd thought them every day. Had wished for a single kind word, or an outstretched hand. It's taken death and resurrection and fucking clones, but not really, to reach this point. Hob swallows hard around the dry lump in his throat.
He takes Daniel's hand.
Daniel pulls him up without a single sign of effort, as if Hob weighs nothing more than a feather. His knee protests with a twinging, plaintive ache, but it's nothing that a few painkillers and a hot water bottle won't help later on, so long as he's proactive about it. For now, though, he leaves his tea on the floor where it sits and steps around it to get his arms underneath Morpheus' knees. He's so fucking skinny. A bag of bones. He's wearing a black version of Daniel's robe, for once not dressed in the most common fashion of the time. It looks nearly Greek, with a loop of cloth over one shoulder to hold it up, and the other shoulder falling bare as Hob hefts him into his arms. There's no sign of the ruby. Hob hasn't actually seen it in a long time, though Daniel's got something similar, an emerald of massive size hung in a gold setting around his neck.
"May I assist?" Daniel murmurs, and Hob feels a hand touch the small of his back, just a tiny, fluttering pressure, and then gone again.
"I think I've got him. Just...keep us both from going down if my knee goes, yeah?"
"Does your knee often trouble you?"
Hob takes a shuffling step towards the bedroom, and then another. It's not actually so bad. Morpheus really is very light, sort of distressingly so. He can feel each knob of his spine pressing against his forearms. His breathing is still deep and even as clockwork, and his eyes flick rapidly back and forth behind his closed lids. It's like a fairy tale, he thinks. Like Sleeping Beauty. If he leans down and kisses the pale, chapped, human lips, maybe Morpheus will wake and be himself again.
"Sometimes," he says, pushing the thought away. It's a stupid thought, anyway. "Usually when it's cold. Took a tumble on it during a fight when I was in my twenties. Came down hard on a rock, the other guy brought down his sword and, well. There weren't steroids or PT back then. Paid some physiker ten quid for a poultice that did naught but stink up my room and give me a right burn." It's easy, he finds, to slip back into dead words, dead languages, with Daniel. As easy as it had been with his stranger, who had always responded in kind, with an accent to match Hob's...though usually a bit more posh. Daniel just drifts beside him like a fair ghost, nodding slightly.
"And yet you choose to live," Daniel says. "Though you are plagued by pain?"
Hob snorts. "The knee was never going to get better. Only worse. Way I see it, immortality's kept me from needing to take this leg off. That was the cure, you know. For pain that wouldn't stop." He jerks his head in a way that he hopes is reminiscent of an axe's swing, and Daniel blinks at him. "That, or you drank until it stopped. No, I'm fine continuing to live, thanks. Are you…? Now that he’s…” ‘Gone’ isn’t the right word. ‘Human’ is a correct word, but not the one he’s looking for. Not in charge, maybe? Hob’s never fully understood the powers that govern his immortality. Death refuses to take him, yes, but what part does Dream play in it? Their centennial meetings? When Dream had failed to show in 1989, Hob hadn’t dropped dead on the spot.
His head isn’t starting to hurt again, but there’s a pressure behind his eyes that threatens future pain if he doesn’t stop this line of thought soon.
Daniel, thankfully, seems to divine his meaning. Or maybe plucks it wholesale from the air. Hears it in Hob’s daydreams. “If that is what you wish,” he says. “I will admit that I was concerned my presence would be…unpleasant, for you.”
“How so?”
“To wear a face so near to a friend’s, and yet to not be him in the way you remember. Morpheus would not have understood. Yet…I think I might. To have a favourite blanket, and then to one day find it replaced with one that is the same make, the same fashion, and yet…it is still not the same. It is not yours.” They pause at the threshold to Hob’s bedroom, where his sheets are still turned back and the stale smell of anxiety-sweat still permeates the room. He ought have changed the sheets first. Fuck.
He looks at Daniel. Daniel, who is biting his lip in thought, eyes flicking from Hob, to Morpheus in his arms, and back again.
“I am not the same as Morpheus,” he says softly. “But I would still be your friend, Hob Gadling. The part of me that is Dream remembers your steadfastness. Your loyalty. Your humour. The part of me that is Daniel is intrigued by your kindness here, and your strength of heart. I recognize these as admirable qualities. I…I would like to know more. In ways that Morpheus might never have been able to. Though he may be able to now.”
His arms are starting to ache a bit. Academic living’s done a number on his stamina, and while the muscles underneath the fine layer of fat on his belly are still the same, frozen in perfect soldier’s prime, remembering how to use them comes slowly, these days. There’s no need for a decent horseman when petrol and Hondas are a thing. No need for the particular muscles to swing a sword unless he’s visiting a Ren Faire. Hob steps into the bedroom and gingerly deposits Morpheus onto the bed, on the side that’s a bit less manky. He can change the pillowcases, he thinks, at the very least, and begins stripping them down. He’s careful to slip the pillow back beneath Morpheus’ head.
“Do you want me to be honest?” he asks, not looking at Daniel.
“Yes. Always. I value your opinion. Both as a…a friend, and for your insight.”
Friend, friend, friend. He’s too tired to be angry. Too distracted by the man in his bed, deadweight and fast asleep. He can see the sharp line of Morpheus’ clavicle, and it makes him want to start weeping all over again. Christ, he’s so fucking thin.
“If you’d come to me, and he was dead, I would have hated you,” he says. He looks up just in time to catch the tail end of Daniel’s expression as it changes, from tentative hope into something almost like agony. Then it shutters closed, and his face is carefully neutral, no hint of that brief lapse into very human grief. He’d asked Hob to be honest.
“I understand,” Daniel says. And the shitty thing is, Hob thinks he does. Better than Morpheus ever would have, at any rate. He balls the pillowcases up in one hand, scrubs the other over his cheek.
“You don’t. Let me just…Sorry. I’m not thinking very well, right now. Very clearly. I would have hated you at first. I don’t think I could keep hating you. Because you’re…you’re him. You’re him backwards and through a mirror, but…do you remember in 1589? What you did, to make me so upset?”
A muscle in Daniel’s cheek twitches. He looks like he’s thinking very hard, and then, like a light going on, his eyes widen. “Shaxberd?” he asks, in the same tone as a student who isn’t certain they’ve come up with the right answer in maths. Then Daniels’ expression falls again, and he says, “I…left you. You tried so hard to please me. Fine foods. I was not…interested. I wanted your stories, not your wealth. But the stories you offered me…hearth and home, a babe in arms, a gentle wife. They hurt. Shaxberd was easier. And he suited my purposes at the time.”
It’s more of an admission than Hob has ever gotten out of Morpheus, but he nods all the same. “You’re still him. My stranger, sort of. And there’s…no matter how I change, the core of me is him. You, I suppose. At the end of every century, there’s you. So yeah, I’d have…I’d have processed it, I think. Eventually. But also, he’s not dead.”
Hob’s not sure how much of his little speech is true and how much is just what he hopes he’d be strong enough to feel. It’s a moot point, anyways. Morpheus isn’t dead. He’s lying, still as stones, on Hob’s bed, still breathing softly. Hob wads the pillowcases up tighter and tosses them into the hamper. Goes over to the linen closet to get new ones. He picks the ones that are softest, worn flannel that’s seen more years beneath his head than it ever saw on a shelf. He’d bought these as part of a set during a cold winter some twenty years ago, and they’re still holding strong. Outside, the sun is rising and the summer heat is climbing up, but every time Hob’s come back from the dead, from a particularly nasty one, even, he’s been cold. He doesn’t want Morpheus to be cold. He doesn’t want him to wake in unfamiliar, hostile surroundings, not knowing who or where he is. Hob changes out the pillowcases, and slides the pillow back beneath his friend’s head. His hair splays out like jellyfish tentacles; even consumptively thin and in need of a shower, Morpheus is beautiful. Possessed of that otherworldly sculptedness.
“He’s not dead,” he says again. This time to reassure himself. He hasn’t tried to touch Morpheus yet, except to move him. What if he tries to cup his palm to the thin cheek and finds nothing there? What if he goes to lift one bird-boned wrist and finds it dissolving into sand beneath his touch? He’s suddenly frantic to make sure, and Daniel watches him as he sits on the edge of the bed and, hesitantly at first, and then with greater desperation, starts to brush the hair out of Morpheus’ closed eyes, and rearrange his shoulders on the mattress, and fix the fall of his robe. Everywhere he touches stays solid. Morpheus doesn’t break beneath his hands.
“He is not dead,” Daniel agrees, and Hob bends his head over his prone friend and breathes, and breathes, and breathes.
After long minutes of nothing but the sound of his own heaving lungs, and the quiet but unmistakable presence of Daniel hovering near him, Hob finally feels as though he’s ready to do something. To move forward.
“Right,” he says. “Help me get some things set up? It’s bloody hard, coming back from the dead. And then…and then you can wake him up.”
Daniel blinks at him. Mild as the day is long.
He nods.