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Hob knows he is dreaming.
He is passing through a dark forest in the dark of night, between trees straight and tall as palisades, massive like nothing he has ever seen in the waking world. Watery silver moonlight slivers down from above, piercing through the leaves and branches, lines on lines on lines. It is cold as winter, but he cannot see his breath, and neither can he hear his footsteps, and the effect is a dizzying optical illusion where he knows he is walking, putting one foot in front of the other on the narrow path that threads through the landscape, without seeming to move at all.
He also knows he’s being hunted. He knows it by that feeling specific only to dreams, the cold paralyzing helplessness of knowing something vague and unseen hovers just behind, growing ever closer. Every so often, a pale shadow flickers at the edges of his vision: a man, Hob thinks, or something like that, one who moves like a beast of prey, only showing itself because it wants to be seen.
He knows running won’t save him, so he walks, on and on, until between one blink of his eyes and the next, his pursuer steps out of the trees in front of him.
It is a man — a tall, handsome man with ash-blond hair in a dove-grey suit. Even in the darkness, he wears glasses with lenses tinted black as ink, but his friendly-not-friendly smile suggests to Hob he would be better off not seeing the man’s eyes, anyway. He holds a long knife loosely at his side, idly toying with it so that it glints and flashes in the weak light, all veiled threat, all warning.
“Hob Gadling,” the man says, and steps in close, pushing Hob against a tree and putting his blade to Hob’s throat in one smooth motion.
Hob does not struggle or try to flee, just as he did not try to run before. It is just a dream, he tells himself, a creation of his own subconscious. He will wake up from this no matter what.
“Yes. And who are you?”
“Consider me a friend of a friend,” the blond man says, inclining his head. Hob gets the sense that had the man not been otherwise occupied with holding him pinned down at knifepoint, he would have taken a little bow.
“Okay then, friend of a friend,” Hob says easily. He can work with that. “Who is it that we know in common?”
“You’re a smart man. Think about it,” the man says. “Tell me the next time we meet.”
Rattlesnake-quick, he jerks his arm and buries the knife in Hob’s throat before Hob even sees him move. There’s a flash of pain, something slick and warm — the man’s face draws close to his and Hob flinches back as he sees the sight that lays behind those glasses, and it’s the last thing he sees, and then nothing at all but red blooming into black.
--
The forest again, the darkness again.
“It’s the Stranger, isn’t it?” Hob calls out. His voice rings through the trees, carrying much further than it should. “My centennial friend.”
Out from the shadows appears the blond man-shaped-thing, dressed the same, smiling the same, wearing his dark glasses again, knives out again.
“Right in one,” he says, like he’s honestly pleased about it. “Though friend is a strange way to call someone you’re so hopelessly in love with.”
A pit yaws in Hob’s stomach and an echoing hollow in his chest even as he thinks, of course. He should have guessed earlier. It haunts him near-constantly in his waking life, so why wouldn’t it haunt him in his dreams as well — this whatever-it-is he has with his cryptic Stranger, this whatever-it-is he wishes it was.
“You called him a friend too, last time,” Hob points out, somewhat unkindly, which knocks the complacent look right off the blond man’s face. And that tells him all he needs to know, doesn’t it. He smiles ruefully, already regretting his tone. “Ah, I see.”
There’s a sudden shine of metal in the moonlight but this time, Hob is ready for it, and when the blond man lunges he ducks and twists, catches the man’s wrist in his hand, stopping the point of the blade mere inches before his throat.
“Who is he to you, if not a friend?” Hob asks, calmly, reasonably.
“Well,” the blond man says. “Let’s just say he made me who I am.”
“I see,” Hob says. He could say the same, in a way. The Stranger, his one universal constant, forever out of reach. “He is a hard man to love, isn’t he?”
No, Hob thinks immediately, but that’s not right. It is not hard to love him at all, the mysterious dark-haired man with the sad, pale eyes and velvet voice, noble as a king, distant as a king, bearing untold weight on his slight, strong shoulders. There is a light about him, like midwinter sunshine, or the glint of a diamond, or a dying star. Brilliant, beautiful, mesmerizing light, but light without warmth. Not uncaring, but merely uncomprehending for how cosmic and unceasing it is. It’s like loving the law of gravity and expecting it to love you back in a way you understand.
“Hard to be in love with,” Hob corrects, swallowing against the lump in his throat.
The disarming point. The blond man snarls and pushes his knife a half-inch closer, but in it is more despair than there is anger.
“I’ve been alive for a long, long time,” Hob says. “But he’s something else, entirely. It doesn’t even compare. So I’m not sure that he — like, I think it’s different, for him, what he feels, or maybe how he feels. Than it is for us. Well, for me, at least, I don’t know what you are.”
“Closer to his type than yours,” the blond man says, with a wounded sort of pride, then bitterly concedes, “but not close enough.”
Hob understands exactly. An overwhelming rush of pity courses through him, tinged through with selfish relief. He knows that on some level he is Narcissus at the lake, talking to an echo chamber of his own subliminal self — but it feels good to be able to say these things out loud to somebody. This isn’t something he can talk about in the waking world. The only person who could even remotely understand is the one person who can never know.
“I’m sorry,” Hob says. The look on the blond man’s face — it’s like nobody’s ever apologized for anything to him before.
“As am I, Hob Gadling,” the blond man says, and Hob releases his grip, and accepts the knife.
--
The shadows, the moonlight.
The blond man is there when he arrives, and he doesn’t already have his weapons drawn, which Hob takes as an improvement.
“An honor guard. I’m flattered,” Hob says. The blond man sneers, but straightens up to parade rest like he’d been handed an order, and keeps a general air of watchfulness as they start their nightly walk. Hob gets the strange sense it’s mostly to impress him, given that the man is the most frightening thing in these parts. “So are you meant to be my personal demon? Do you have a name? Or are you meant to be a metaphor, or some kind of abstract concept, or.”
“There is a version of me for most. So most have their own names for me,” the blond man says, which both does and does not answer the question. He smiles his by-now familiar unsmile. “So the question is, what am I to you?”
“A doppelgänger,” Hob declares. “A mirror that talks back.”
He’s had a lot of early mornings, of late. He’s had time to think about it. And it’s obvious now, in retrospect, why this is what his subconscious has conjured up to plague his dreams. Why this is the thing that should cut his throat for speaking of the Stranger and take his eyes for presuming to look and show him nightmares for daring to dream. A sly hungry beast that reminds him in an abstract way of the constant, strangling ache in his chest, the insane want that at times is nothing more than a shadow flitting in the background, and at other times has a knife at his throat, threatening to consume him entirely.
The blond man seems unsurprised by this. He lets out a dull, humorless laugh.
“Yeah, okay. That’s what he calls me too, you know,” he drawls. “The dark mirror. Always showing people things they don’t want to admit about themselves. I think I do the same to him. That’s why he despises me.”
“Don’t say that. That’s not true,” Hob says. He pauses for a second, trying to gather up his half-formed thoughts. “What you do is good. Important. He just doesn’t understand the value of it.”
The man laughs again, mocking. “You don’t think?”
“Like, you know those sealed-up jars with the plants and the water and the little fish,” Hob says, waving his hands around, grasping for words, some professor of literature he is, “and the whole thing can keep itself alive forever without needing anything else? In fact, if you give it anything else it would probably mess up the plants and kill the fish.”
“The jars with the little fish,” the blond man repeats, with the distinct tone of what the fuck.
“He’s the jar, his own little self-contained world, and it’s been that way and will always be that way for him, and we’re the other things you’re not supposed to put in there. I’m just saying it’s not on you, is all,” Hob says, flustered. “I don’t even think he is capable of hate.” Or love, for that matter, but to say that would be both redundant and cruel.
“Rationalize it how you want,” the blond man says. He shrugs, casual, but there is a vicious edge to his voice. “It doesn’t make it hurt any less.”
“No, it does not,” Hob sighs.
A mirror, truly.
They fall silent for a long, long time. And the forest unspools impassively before them, on and on. It does appear to Hob that he’s somewhere different than he was the previous few nights, that he’s making some kind of forward progress, but it ultimately means very little because practically, he’s gotten nowhere at all. There’s that old riddle, about a deer running into the woods. He wonders where halfway is, at what point he’ll finally be running out again.
He scrubs at his face with his hand. He’s exhausted, he realizes. Like whatever walking he does in his dreams translates into his real-life body.
“Do these woods ever end?” he asks.
“No. They don’t. But I see you’re getting tired,” the blond man says, with a hint of melancholy, and pulls his knife.
--
The silence, the cold.
The blond man is not there when Hob drops into the dream, but he isn’t far, either. Hob catches a flash of white-grey that breaks the vertical pattern of the moonlight and finds him a few steps off the trail, crouched against a tree.
Though he may have mouths for eyes, the blond man is apparently still capable of crying.
He’s crying softly, soundlessly, his face half-buried in the crook of his arm like an injured animal trying to hide it, lest it get marked as prey. But a dark stain is soaking through the light cloth of his suit, and when he looks up at Hob’s approach, Hob sees that the man’s face is streaked with ghoulish tear-tracks of blood.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Hob murmurs. He crouches down and opens his arms and pulls the blond man in close, falling against the tree next to him. The blond man struggles for all of a half-second — it’s not like he couldn’t break out of the embrace if he really wanted to — but when Hob refuses to let go, he immediately stops fighting and loops his arms around Hob’s shoulders and tucks his face into the crook of Hob’s neck like a frightened child.
“Don’t fucking say anything,” the blond man says. He draws in long, shuddering breaths, trembling minutely, full-body shivers. He’s getting blood on Hob’s shirt collar now, too, but it’s okay. What happens here stays here. He won’t bring it back with him when he wakes.
“Shh, shh,” Hob soothes. He’s not entirely sure what part of his psyche this is meant to reflect, but the man looks so wounded and alone that it hurts Hob’s heart. He strokes up and down the man’s back, maps out the lithe curves of muscle under the layers of gabardine and Oxford cloth. The blond man runs much hotter than a human ought, like whatever hurt festering in him is burning him up from the inside out. His tears, falling against Hob’s skin, sear like molten honey.
“He tells me I am his favorite, even as he tells me I disappoint him,” the blond man spits, through gritted teeth. So much for not saying anything, but Hob can’t blame him in the least. It doesn’t sound like the blond man has anyone he can talk to about this, either. It’s a hard thing to keep bottled up. “Why can’t he see? Does he not know? Everything I do, I do for him. I would kill for him and die for him, and he still — won’t, he can’t — what does he want from me? What more do I have to do?”
“You know what they say about the opposite of love not being hatred, but apathy,” Hob says. He cards his hair through the blond man’s fine, soft hair, slow, smooth, gentle. “He cares, love. In his own way. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t even try with you.”
“I would rather him not try at all,” the blond man says. “It has to be better than this.”
“It’s not,” Hob says. “It’s no way to live.”
He thinks about facing the rest of his immortal years alone. He thinks about an empty seat in a pub that remains empty forever. Thinks about the divine light of the Stranger’s eyes and being shut out from it forever. It must be like being banished from Eden. The thought must reverberate through the blond man, his looking-glass, his doppelgänger, because he wails piteously.
“I hate him,” the blond man says. “I hate that I want him. I hate that I hate him.”
“Good, see,” Hob says. “That means you still care, too.”
The blond man stops crying eventually, but he seems disinclined to move, so Hob doesn’t either. Just keeps idly running his fingers along the bare strip of skin at the back of his neck between the fringe of his hair and the collar of his shirt. It’s like having a particularly skittish cat in his lap, one liable to bite and claw, but Hob, he’s always been fond of strays. It’s sort of nice, actually, the radiant warmth of the blond man pressed against his body in this freezing-cold forest.
They stay like that for what feels like hours, years — in any case, the longest he’s ever been in this dream — though what is time to a man like him, what is time in a place like this. Still, Hob eventually gets the sense he has to go.
“I am going to oversleep for my lecture,” Hob says gently. He feels, rather than sees, the blond man startle, and then nod. He straightens up and wipes ineffectually at the drying blood on his face — all he does is smear it a little, stark red on his golden skin. On an urge he neither wants to explain nor explore, Hob reaches up and tucks a loose strand of hair behind the man’s ear. His sunglasses lay on the ground nearby, and Hob hands those back, as well. Once they are settled on his face, the blond man looks almost himself again. He clears his throat.
“Here. Close your eyes. I know you don’t like this part,” he says, drawing his knife. Hob closes his eyes and accepts the gesture for what it is.
--
The tall trees, the narrow path.
“I could tell you his real name, if you want,” the blond man offers, after hours of walking along together in wordless companionship. They’ve been doing that a lot, lately. It’s almost become a comfort.
“Don’t,” Hob says, nearly cutting him off. “That’s — you can keep it.”
“Okay,” the man murmurs, and it sounds like thank you.
It’s not quite what Hob meant, but it’s okay — to yourself, for yourself, what’s the difference, anyway.
And they keep walking along in silence.
--
These familiar woods. This never-ending dream.
“I brought candy,” Hob says. He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a handful of hard candies wrapped in garish colorful cellophane, unwraps one between his teeth and nestles it beneath his tongue, savoring the artificial sweetness. “Would you like some?”
“Why are you doing this?” the blond man asks, falling easily into step with him.
“I wanted to practice lucid dreaming,” Hob says, smiling innocently. “Do you want one or not? They’re all the same flavor, if that matters. It’s mostly what color you like best.”
“Red,” the blond man says. Hob dutifully picks out a few of the red-wrapped ones and hands them over. The blond man meticulously unpeels one, folding the wrapper and putting it in his pocket. Hob watches with fascination as he slips the candy under the right lens of his glasses, where it crunches between his eye-teeth.
“What,” the man says.
“Oh, nothing.”
“Can you bring ice cream next time?” the blond man asks with a childish hopefulness. Sweet tooth, Hob thinks, and chuckles privately at his bad joke.
“Ah, I don’t know, sometimes it doesn’t work,” he says. “I have to fall asleep with it in my pockets, so it would melt, anyway. Sorry.”
The blond man looks at him, inscrutable.
“I can see why he likes you so much,” he says, which is unfair, for the way it knocks the breath out of Hob’s body.
Doubly unfair, for how it steals his breath again when the blond man puts his hands on Hob’s shoulders, pushes him back against a tree, holds him down with the entire weight of his body, and kisses him, soft, questioning, candy-sweet.
“What the hell,” Hob says.
“I thought you would hate me. I thought I would hate you,” the blond man breathes, an inch away from Hob’s surprised, gasping mouth, and kisses him again.
He knows it’s ten thousand kinds of fucked up to want to do this with his own ego-mirror, or that his ego-mirror wants this from him — but the blond man is so gentle with it, timid almost, especially since Hob knows how vicious he can be, and he gives in so easily when Hob finally catches up and kisses him back.
Hob slips his hands around the blond man’s wrists and digs his fingers in. The blond man shudders like he’s cold, and for once in this place Hob feels warm, waves of thrilling hot delirium burning through him. He is the one to urge the man closer, he is the one to guide the man to press a leg between his.
It could be enough, Hob thinks, elation singing through his blood, this could be enough. He has gotten far more than any one person should ever get in this life. Maybe this is the closest to everything he’s ever going to get. Maybe that’s how this dream goes.
He strokes a hand gently down the blond man’s face and the man whimpers, finally pulling away. He’s breathing hard, they both are. And Hob knows, knows, the man is thinking the same, because they are the same, after all. If the forest never ends, then they are forever at the halfway point between running in and running out.
Good enough is good enough. It has to be, Hob thinks. It is.
“It is,” the blond man breathes, as silver metal flashes beneath the moonlight, “it is, it is, it is.”