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Initially, the daydream wasn’t so much a daydream as a very real fear, born of his third, disastrous meeting with the Stranger from the White Horse, and the tangled host of feelings that came with it.
He sees the man before the Stranger does. More accurately, he sees the knife. And he sees the Stranger, who sits in taverns frequented by thieves and murderers while dripping with jewels, who makes no attempt to hide his otherworldliness, to avoid raising suspicion or worse, who has never seemed to understand that anything in this world could be a danger to him. Who is, even now, caught up in conversation. And Hob doesn’t have a weapon, doesn’t have a plan, other than to throw himself bodily between the two men, watch as the dagger pierces his stomach instead of the Stranger’s back.
The pain hollows him out.
He hits the ground without fanfare.
“Why the hell did you do that?” the Stranger asks, sounding less like himself and more like the very human friend Hob had pulled this stunt in front of six decades prior. But he looks himself, remote and cold and beautiful, and it might be Hob’s vision blurring but his eyes look like they’re shining with unshed tears. He wipes a smear of blood from Hob’s chin. His skin is so cold it burns, but his touch lingers in a way Hob could almost call fond.
“Oh,” Hob says, the realization both distant and crushing, “Is this what it takes to impress you?”
As much as that fear had stuck in his heart and lodged there, even buried and compounded by a thousand other more potent griefs, it had also been relatively short-lived. He’d shown up to his fourth meeting with the Stranger with nothing to his name except the clothes on his back and anger baked into his bones. He’d received nothing but a hot meal and an evening’s easy conversation in return.
How could he fear someone, even an inhuman someone with unknowable motives, who showed him more kindness in an evening than any of his fellow humans had in decades? How could he possibly worry about repayment, about impossible goals he’d be asked to achieve, in the face of that kindness? The memory of that evening had kept him warm in the miserable decade-and-change following it, and he still pulled it out when he needed comfort centuries later, a beloved heirloom. Even as the exact things he’d said, the exact details of the meal fade with time, the steady regard in his Stranger’s gaze is fixed in his memory like a star.
He’d had much better things to daydream about in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but even so, he’d found a certain comfort in defying that old fear.
He sees the knife coming toward his Stranger’s unprotected back, but he’s quicker on his feet this time, stepping in to disarm the assassin with the ease of someone who’s spent more time as a soldier than most people do just living. The crunch of the man’s nose breaking is one of the most satisfying sounds Hob has ever heard.
When he turns around, his Stranger is staring at him in awe.
Or:
The knife goes in but he doesn’t collapse, instead takes the hilt and unsheathes it from between his ribs and slits the attacker’s throat and stands, triumphant, hand pressed to the wound, because he’s not fucking dying like this, not today.
Or, later:
Hob is cradled in his Stranger’s arms. He’s too far gone to feel pain, now, too far gone to care overmuch. His Stranger’s eyes are full of tears, though, and that is unacceptable.
Before he can do anything to fix it, the world slips away.
His Stranger chokes back a sob, presses a single, burning kiss to Hob’s forehead-
And Hob wakes. Blinks bemusedly up at his friend, reaches out to wipe a tear from his cheek.
Finds himself crushed in an embrace that knocks the newly-gained breath from him, one he sinks into easily, as though his was how they always greeted each other, and he’d been too long away.
“What’s wrong, Love?” he asks, still confused enough that the word seems natural.
“I nearly lost you,” his Stranger says, and hauls him in for a kiss.
Hob died and swapped identities and attended his own funeral more often than any one man should, to the point where he’d started a list, in the back of his mind, ranking his funerals. 1927 was shockingly tasteful. 1808 was a nightmare for all involved, especially Hob, because someone noticed the body was not in the coffin. Thankfully for Hob, no one figured out where it was.
And as the centuries passed, the defiance became, well, fun.
“Yes there’s a sword embedded in my lung, it happens sometimes. Do you want to be rescued or not?”
His friend does. Hob is rewarded for his efforts. All is right with the world.
Even so, the fantasy was never truly important. A minor fear turned self-indulgent daydream. One of a complex, ever-evolving menagerie of daydreams. Not even the best of them.
That changed after 1989.
It was easy- perhaps too easy- to slip back into an older version of the story, a new fear attached-
His Stranger storms away, not noticing that there’s someone else on that rainy street, watching him, calculating. Hob notices, though, steps in again- he would, he always would, whatever else had passed between them.
It’s not much of a fight. The woman following his friend is powerful, absurdly powerful, barely needs to wave her hand to break Hob in ways he hadn’t known were possible.
He screams.
His Stranger walks away.
Or
He hauls himself, half-drowned, from the pond, coughs up water and bile and silt. “Please,” he grates out, despite how speaking pains him. “Help.”
His Stranger stares down at him in disgust and shoves him back, and the water fills his lungs again.
Or
The White Horse is demolished, and Hob crumbles and ages with it, the centuries he’s avoided hitting him not in one fell swoop, but slow enough that he can feel them.
New flats are erected where it stood, and a century from now, his Stranger will meet a poet there, and not think to realize where he is standing.
When the White Horse finally, officially sold, he’d taken a conscious step back from that particular daydream (if ‘daydream’ is still the correct word for something you use to torture yourself).
He’d thrown himself fully into acquiring the New Inn, into making sure his Stranger had somewhere to meet him, as perfect as he could make it. He’d faked his own death and returned as his younger brother, gotten a professorship to keep himself occupied. He’d immersed himself in a new life and friends and a profession that handily masked most of his eccentricities. Still, when the 7th of June passed each year without incident, he felt it was his right to wallow a bit in feeling sad and hurt and abandoned, and he’d dust off the daydream again.
Which is all to say that, when his thoughts turn in that direction while falling asleep one night, three months after his reunion with his dearest friend, he’s not particularly expecting consequences.
Dream might not have noticed the summoning on any other occasion. It is only an invitation, without any force behind it, but he’s become more attuned to those of late. In that brief extra moment of consideration, he realizes Hob Gadling is the one summoning him.
He goes to him without a second thought, stepping into a daydream. The specifics of it are foggy and poorly-defined, but it has a solid foundation, the feel of a daydream that’s well-loved and often trod.
Hob and a man dressed in black, the only other detailed player in the dream, are standing in a tight corridor plucked directly from Hob’s memory of medieval castles. There’s a battle going on- somewhere- Hob doesn’t currently care for the details of it, so that piece of the daydream hovers nearby, waiting to be needed.
Dream cannot fathom why Hob would have summoned him here, until he gets a better look at the man Hob is talking to: pale, with messy black hair and blue eyes. He doesn’t look like Dream. But he looks, very much, like Dream would appear to Hob.
He should leave. He’s deliberately avoided looking in on Hob’s daydreams since they met, at first because he didn’t want to devote any more attention to him than necessary. Recently, it’s been more a matter of principle: he shouldn’t spy on his friend. According to that principle, he should leave. But he can’t determine if Hob called him here on purpose or not. The appearance of the other figure in the dream could be interpreted either way, with equal weight.
Before he can decide what to do, Hob calls his name again, so urgently it momentarily roots him in place. He turns his attention back to the scene playing out in front of him.
He’s just in time to watch Hob shove… his companion… aside, an arrow that would have hit the other man piercing through Hob’s torso instead.
The daydream wavers for a moment there, a memory of blood and viscera and pain seeping in at the edges, and then Hob sends an arrow flying in the direction of his attacker before collapsing into the arms of his companion.
Dream can only watch, horrified, as he speaks to the man in a quiet murmur, even as blood pours from his stomach and his skin turns ashen.
It’s not the scene itself- Dream, of all people, is entirely unphased by the quirks of the human subconscious- it’s the longing that threads through every facet of this daydream, a bone-deep soul-crushing longing for- this.
To, as far a Dream can tell, bleed out in the arms of someone who’d show him all the sympathy of a mannequin.
It is… troubling.
“Go,” Hob says, “I’ll hold them off for as long as I can.”
“But you-”
“Are here to keep you safe. That’s my job, love.”
Dream can’t see Hob’s companion’s face from where he stands, rooted to the spot.
But this daydream is an extension of himself, so he can feel the man’s shock, just as he can feel Hob’s pain, burning as though he’d been the one shot.
“Yes, ‘love,’” Hob whispers. “Since we met, I’ve- I love you, my lord.”
“I don’t-” his companion says. The daydream buckles momentarily with the sheer amount of loathing Dream feels in that moment, the desire to step in, tear this effigy to pieces, and give Hob a proper response to that confession.
Hob continues speaking, unbothered. “I never expected you to. But you see, don’t you? I can’t leave you here to get hurt, not while there’s breath left in my body. So go.” He steps away from his companion, wincing in pain that sends sympathetic shockwaves through Dream, and turns to face a wall of faceless attackers.
To face his death.
With joy pounding through his veins, the longing Dream had felt earlier redoubling, a wordless chorus of yes this if only that would leave Dream nauseated if it were possible for him to feel nausea.
He forces the dream to crumble around them, shoving Hob deeper into sleep as he does so.
It’s-
It’s not unexpected, he tells himself.
He knew this day would come when they met.
He shouldn’t have become this invested.
All lies, lies he might actually have convinced himself to believe, if circumstances were different.
If he hadn’t believed, since 1689, that he might be able to keep this. If he hadn’t come back to Hob, to a safe harbor in a storm, after so long. If he hadn't considered, for a brief moment, how he'd like to respond if Hob had called him 'love.'
Instead of slipping back into the Dreaming- he can feel, even now, the maelstrom tearing through the place- he steps into Hob’s Waking world apartment and waits.
Hob wakes slowly, sleep clinging to him like a lover. It stays wrapped around his shoulders as he gets dressed and showered and shuffles into his kitchen for breakfast, which is, frankly, lovely. He’s been sleeping like shit recently and it makes for a welcome change.
Of course, sleep flies from him entirely when he turns away from his coffeemaker to find Dream of the Endless looming about a foot away.
Dream looks haunted. Three months ago, when Hob last saw him, he’d looked like he was recovering from some long and severe illness. And he’d told Hob, by way of apology for missing their original meeting, that he’d been attacked and forcibly detained for decades. Hob shouldn’t be surprised that he isn’t looking his best. But certainly he shouldn’t look worse, like he’d spent those three months not sleeping, or watching everyone he loves be torn apart by rats.
“Woah, hey,” Hob says softly, stepping closer to Dream. He raises one hand to cup his cheek, offer some comfort, but thinks better of it at the last second. “What’s wrong?” he asks, scrutinizing Dream as closely as he dares.
The look Dream gives him at that redefines ‘mutinous.’
“Alright,” Hob says gently, letting his hand drop. “Nothing’s wrong, then. Do you want coffee?”
He deeply doubts that the living personification of Dreaming has any interest in coffee, but if he can’t ask what’s wrong he’ll care for Dream somehow, and the coffee machine is still chugging away merrily behind him. “Or breakfast?” He might have simply have made Dream breakfast without asking, but he has gained back some weight since the last time Hob saw him, which is an unfathomable relief.
“How have you been faring?” Dream asks. It is not, Hob would like to note, a response to either of his questions. And yet Dream staring at Hob as though Hob were the one inexplicably showing up in his kitchen for casual conversation, looking like he'd shake apart at the next loud noise.
“I’ve been. Well,” Hob says, slowly. Just as slowly, he starts to ease away from the counter, trying to subtly herd Dream toward his couch.
He manages to keep up a steady stream of babbled trivia most of the way there- interesting customers at the New Inn, highlights and lowlights of what his students have said in class- even if the trip through the kitchen, across the hall, and to the edge of the couch in the next room takes about four times as long as it should with their strange, shuffling pace.
“One of my advisees is graduating!” he says, when he runs out of recent classroom stories. “Her thesis was spectacular, I’m so proud. And it’s good timing, too, I was afraid I wouldn’t get to see her graduate.”
A hand clamps down, viselike and ice cold, on his wrist. Hob turns to Dream immediately. His eyes- aren’t. Are empty voids, a single pinprick of light shining far away. Hob gets the distinct sense that if that light were any closer, it would overwhelm him.
“Why?” Dream asks, the exact question Hob would’ve preferred to avoid. While he scrambles for a better way to phrase what he’s about to say, Dream’s hand comes up to cup his cheek, just as Hob had nearly done to him. “It will be alright,” he says, even though his hand is trembling slightly.
His voice, just-before-you-fall-asleep soothing, and the hand on his cheek, cool without being cold, have the combined effect of completely robbing Hob of any sense. “I’ve been here too long,” he says.
Dream’s face goes carefully, intentionally blank. “You’re certain?”
“Yes. I stayed here to see you, and I’m glad I did, believe me, I’d still be waiting if you hadn’t come back to me.” Whatever part of Hob’s sanity rebelled at admitting to ‘to me’ is effectively silenced when Dream drops his wrist to thread their fingers together at the words.
“So stay,” Dream says. No, pleads, his voice hitching around a sob. “If you waited all these years to see me again, why leave me immediately afterwards?”
It is absolutely, morally wrong that Hob wants to laugh delightedly while his friend stares at him like his world is ending.
But Dream is asking him to stay.
Six hundred years of being left behind in the White Horse, and he’s being asked to stay.
Hob lurches forward and pulls Dream into a hug before he can think better of it. “I’m not leaving you.” Dream nestles his head into the crook of Hob’s neck with a soft, pleased sound, and Hob immediately pulls him closer. “Whenever, wherever you want to meet, I’ll be there. As long as it’s not somewhere that gets me dissected.”
“Dissected.” The amount of rage in the single word quite literally cools the room by several degrees, but Dream hasn't moved his head from Hob's shoulder.
“I’m exaggerating,” Hob admits, and hesitates. He can’t work out a way to fully explain that doesn’t involve one key admission, something he’s never fully articulated, even to himself. He’s going to say it- of course he’s going to say it, he probably would have said it even if Dream weren’t currently curled into his chest- but it’s still difficult to voice. “It’s just that people are starting to notice I don’t look fifty-seven. Normally I’d give myself a bit more leeway, but… you hadn’t come back.” His voice goes rough at the end of the sentence. “This was the longest I’ve stayed in one place since Eleanor died.” It takes a moment for him to steady himself, and when he finally speaks again his voice sounds too chipper in his ears. “I’m ‘leaving for a new job’ at the end of the school year. I’ll fall out of touch from there, find someplace new to start fresh.”
“You still wish to live, then?” Dream asks, his hand clutching Hob’s tighter, as though he’s trying to keep Hob in the mortal world with the sheer force of his grip.
“Yes,” Hob whispers, giving his hand an answering squeeze, “I meant it when I said I don’t think I’ll ever change my mind about that.” Dream only gives him a searching look in response, so Hob adds, “You’re stuck with me. Until the stars burn out. Longer, if I can figure out how.”
At that, Dream relaxes. Just slightly, enough that Hob might not have noticed if he weren’t still holding him. Holding him! a small, selfish part of him crows. The rest of him is caught up in concern. Where is this coming from? he wonders, running one hand up and down Dream’s arm. He hopes it’s soothing. Dream isn’t pulling away, but given that they’d gone over 600 years without touching each other before this point, that’s not entirely reassuring. “You’re certain nothing’s wrong,” Hob finally asks, quietly.
“I saw what you were dreaming of, last night,” Dream replies. He sounds as though each word were being torn from his chest with rusty pliers.
It nicely compliments the horror that slowly dawns on Hob, the sort of horror one could drown in.
“I normally ignore your dreams,” Dream adds, which would be an untold relief in any other circumstances, “But you called my name.”
-Dream, get out of the way!-
-I love you, my lord-
The flashback to exactly what that particular daydream was about is so vivid that Hob takes an involuntary step back, humiliation and guilt boiling through his veins. He scrambles for an apology- because surely that’s the thing to do when you realize you’ve unintentionally forced a friend to watch your lurid fantasies about him- but he only gets so far as, “I am so sorry. If there’s anything I can do to-” before Dream cuts him off.
“You have no need to apologize,” he says, “Just listen. You were dreaming of dying.”
“Well-” Hob says. He then realizes that it probably won’t be helpful to clarify that for him, ‘being shot and bleeding out’ is an entirely different activity from ‘dying.’ Dream’s glare only adds to this impression, and he closes his mouth, chastised.
“You were dreaming of dying,” Dream repeats, “In order to protect-” He hesitates.
“You,” Hob says, his voice rough. There’s no point in hiding it now, but that doesn’t make it any easier to say. He waits for Dream to pull away, to vanish, for another you dare. He’d be well within his rights, this time.
Instead, there’s a featherlight touch on his hipbone: Dream, wrapping an arm around Hob’s waist so gently Hob barely noticed. “Me,” he says. There’s a weight to the word, an acknowledgement. Hob doesn’t dare hope it’s anything more than that. “With such longing. I feared you’d summoned me intentionally. That you wanted me to know you longed for death. If not that then.” He pauses. Searches Hob’s face for several agonizing minutes, during which Hob factually does not breathe. “Why do you want to die for me?”
Well.
That’s a complicated fucking question.
It is far too early in the morning- Hob’s been fully conscious for less than an hour- for the sort of deep dive into his psyche a complete answer to that question would require. Not to mention that obtaining that answer would take- hours? Years? Time Hob doesn’t currently have, at any rate.
He opts for the most basic answer instead. “You should understand,” Hob says, gently, “That if you think of ‘dying’ in the traditional sense I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been killed.” It’s not a pretty sentence, but Hob assumes the best way about this conversation is to be blunt.
Hob is entirely incorrect. Dream’s arm tightens around his waist hard enough to crack ribs, hard enough that Hob stumbles toward him and knocks his forehead into Dream’s chin. Hob is sure Dream was shorter than him when this conversation started, but he can’t dwell on that dilemma because the next moment the whole room bends, turning into shadows and stars at the edges.
“And I’m still here!” Hob adds, “My point is I’m still here, no harm done!” The flickering star-shadows stop spreading, so Hob keeps up the mantra, whispered in Dream’s ear like a prayer, “I’m right here, I’m safe, it’s alright.” He wraps his free arm around Dream’s shoulders. “Didn’t even leave any scars.” Dream does not seem inclined to let go of him, or even loosen his hold enough that Hob can properly breathe, but at least Hob’s living room walls have mostly reasserted themselves. "I can't be killed. So if I can step into the line of fire to keep someone I love safe, I will. That's all I want."
“You can still be hurt,” Dream says, speaking over Hob's last few words. “I’ve told you, you can still be hurt, and I would not see you-”
“That’s the point, though,” Hob says, more urgently than he means to, unleashing a fear he’d been keeping dammed up in his chest for centuries. “You can be hurt too. Is it really so unfathomable to you that I would not see you hurt if I could stop it?”
“Oh,” Dream says, quietly.
It’s a noise of understanding, and yet Dream sounds… surprised. Hurt, maybe. Hob can’t place it, but there’s an ache to that single word that could hollow out a soul.
Hoping even for a moment to soothe that ache, he promises, “I wouldn’t. Not if there was any way I could help.”
That, at least, gets Dream to loosen his hold on Hob enough to pull back and look at him. In disbelief, to be fair, but still. Hob manages an embarrassed laugh. “I know,” he says, “I didn’t help you when you needed it last, but-”
“You’re wrong,” Dream says.
“I didn’t even say anything!”
“No.” Dream meets Hob’s eyes, holds his gaze steadily. It leaves Hob feeling weightless, breathless, like he’s off in space orbiting those stars. “You built me somewhere to come back to,” Dream says. His voice is quiet, but it resonates, as though he’s speaking not only in the physical world but also in Hob’s very mind, his soul. “You waited for me. It meant… more than you know.”
“Oh,” Hob says, quietly.
When he’d first seen his friend again, all those months ago, something had bloomed in Hob’s chest, a quiet hope he’d been nursing for thirty years, or a century, or possibly his entire life. It had been a homecoming for both of them, he thinks, a wound that had been bothering him for so long he’d stopped noticing it finally bandaged and set to rights.
That feeling reawakens now, all the stronger because he knows, knows with a certainty he’d stake his immortal existence on, that the moment meant as much to Dream as it did to him. Meant ‘more than he knew.’ Because another, older hope: that he could help his friend, be important to him in some small way, is blooming alongside it. The sheer joy he feels in that moment could lift him off the ground- he thinks the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth right now are Dream’s arms.
“I’ll do it again,” Hob says, beaming. He just barely resists the urge to pick Dream up and spin him around, but it’s a near thing. “I’ll build you another inn, wherever I go. So we always have somewhere to meet.”
Wonder of wonders, Dream smiles at that. Graces Hob with a genuine, shy smile he’s never seen the like of before. He wants to capture it in photographs that will never do it justice. He wants to write poetry about it.
He wants, with a fervor he hasn’t felt since the last time Dream smiled at him, to kiss those lips. To know what it would feel like, Dream smiling into a kiss.
He thinks- suspects- he could, without being rebuffed, but he’d need a great deal more than a suspicion to be willing to act. A multistep plan, some flowcharts, and much lower stakes would be a good place to start. If there is a ‘this’ between them- please, let there be- he wants to do things right, doesn’t want to scare Dream off or push him too hard.
Even so, he doesn’t want to be the first one to pull away, so he hovers there. Half-in and half-out of an embrace, still smiling at Dream like he’s the best thing that ever happened to him.
(Dream may, in fact, be the best thing that ever happened to him)
And then Dream leans close, one hand sliding up to cup the back of Hob’s neck, and says, “That would be acceptable. If you would allow me to correct one glaring misconception.”
Hob doesn’t dare draw in the breath to speak, so he nods instead.
“May I show you?” Dream asks, his lips brushing Hob’s as he speaks.
“Yes,” Hob breathes. Of course he agrees, he wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t. And-
He’s saying “I love you, my lord.”
Dream- who looks more himself than he ever has in Hob’s daydreams, who bends the dreamworld like a black hole, so that it all becomes more solid, more real around him- doesn’t respond.
So Hob continues, “I don’t expect you to reciprocate. But you see, don’t you? I can’t leave you here to get hurt, not while there’s breath left in my body.”
“Then you must also understand,” Dream says, more nervous than Hob has ever heard him, “Why I can’t leave you here to be hurt either. I apologize. For making you think otherwise.”
And he’s back, breathing like he’d just run a marathon, Dream clinging to his shirt front and staring at him in apprehension.
And all he can say is, “Oh, Love.”
He’d been wrong, all those centuries ago. When Dream crashes into him, finally, finally pulls him into a kiss, it doesn’t burn. It feels like coming home.
There’s another daydream Hob has that has taken many forms over the centuries. It’s one where he and his friend, his Dream, manage to build a quiet little life together, despite whatever would stand in their way. One that, in recent decades, has taken the form of kisses stolen in grocery store aisles or in between his classes, grading papers while Dream works on whatever eldritch Dreaming business he can do in Hob’s kitchen, slow-dancing to a song no one but the two of them remembers.
That one, he gets to keep.