Chapter Text
On a day in November, much like any other gloomy autumn afternoon, Hob Gadling stands in front of a lecture hall of undergraduates and feels the world change. His students remain much the same as all the classes before them, the usual range of keen interest through abject boredom, a sea of faces gazing down at him expectantly.
The difference comes from outside the school, outside of London, perhaps outside the world itself. He does not know what it is or where it originated, but he understands, indelibly, at the core of himself, that nothing will ever be the same again.
Hob pauses, gazing out at the ocean of expectancy before him, a frisson of fear lancing through him. His bones tremble and his soul aches, all of his hard-won certainty in the world falling to ruin.
He cancels his office hours and goes home early.
There is a sleeping person in Hob’s bed.
Not any person though, not just any strange man, but his longest friend, his companion through the centuries. Morpheus.
That was the name that Hob was given when he had arrived at the New Inn some months ago, with an apology ready and a smile across his mouth.
“Your name is Morpheus? Like the King of Dreams?” Hob asked, confidently pressing his luck, blood buzzing at the celebration of their mutually acknowledged friendship.
Morpheus smiled, faraway eyes glancing out the window.
“I am a great many things. But—that is perhaps one of them. You may also call me Dream if you like.”
Hob had received little other information about his mysterious companion, and at the time he was only glad, achingly, sharply glad, to see Morpheus again at all. After decades of expectation, hope, and fear, all bubbling sharply through his veins like clean oxygen, seeing him again had been an aching, wonderful relief. Such a pure joy that Hob will remember the feeling forever, no matter how long he lives.
Now, he lies sleeping on Hob’s bed, as deeply unconscious as the dead, except for the occasional rise and fall of his chest.
“What are you doing here, friend?” Hob whispers, heart beating painfully hard in his chest.
The man–or being, perhaps–does not rouse at the words. So Hob settles himself in the chair at his bedside, waiting for his guest to wake.
Dream has three questions when he awakens, and each one shatters Hob’s world a little more.
“Where am I?”
“Who are you?”
“Who… am I?”
The first two questions have simple enough answers, though “I’m an over six hundred-year-old man whom you meet once a century and never dies,” is not exactly the most easily expressed point. The final question is cause for a great deal of concern.
For starters, Hob does not know very much about his friend’s nature. In fact, all he has is a name and a few meetings throughout history. All he truly knows is that Morpheus briefly called him a friend.
“Did you kidnap me?” Dream asks, his fingers clenched in the bedsheets, his spine as ramrod-straight as ever. He does not look scared, even as he sits in a puddle of duvet and gazes at Hob with wide, blue eyes, silently begging him to know the shape of the emptiness in his memory. A haughty, proud child begging Hob to lead him out of this nightmare.
“No, Morpheus, I did not kidnap you.” Hob swallows away the dryness in his throat. His mind whirls with possibilities and panic, little making sense to him when his one constancy stands wobbly and crumbling. “I’m not sure how you came to be here.”
His face does not fall, exactly, though the hope drains from him, leaving him as barren and wasted as a dry ocean bed. Morpheus’s gaze drifts down to the bedclothes, his fingers running through the soft cotton until they catch on something left in the bed near him.
A piece of paper, a note written on heavy, grey stationary, few words but full of meaning.
365 days, a full year. Guard him as he has so often guarded your dreams.
Over the first few days, Hob and Morpheus carefully navigate the holes in Morpheus’s memory trying to discover the real shape of it. He can remember much of the world, how to speak, read, walk, and see to his ablutions. Morpheus seems perfectly capable of functioning as he sees fit, really, but nothing specific comes back to him. Nothing from all the centuries that Hob knows he lives and the many more he suspects he had.
No memories, no names, no faces, no events that rise to the surface of his mind upon prodding for recollections. Simply the emptiness of amnesia, the hole within himself like the ragged tear of a freshly missing tooth.
“How will I go on?” Morpheus asks, sitting cross-legged and unmoored on Hob’s sofa. A single sailboat, bobbing uncontrollably on storm-tossed seas.
Hob feels equally at a loss, seeing his friend laid low for the first time in over six hundred years. He dares to reach across the cushions between them and take Dream’s hand.
“You don’t need to go on alone, old friend. I will keep you here with me for as long as you want to stay. I can remember for you until your year has passed.”
With no idea of how he came to be in this situation, Dream feels little confidence that his amnesia will only last a year. After all, what does Dream know of how he came to be in this state? He does not even know anything of the world outside this flat, except for a certain intrinsic knowledge of the rhythm of things. The seasons, the weather, the days of the week, the way the world turns upon its axis.
Hob is accommodating of him, almost too accommodating, considering Dream looks upon him as a stranger, but his relative ease almost puts Dream at ease. Almost.
For the first weeks, a pervasive melancholy keeps him in the flat. Though he does not truly feel a true pull to any human needs (and Dream somehow understands that he is not human), he still indulges them, especially if Hob is. They eat meals together, drink tea, and Dream sleeps, mostly during the day. He prefers to be awake at night, the darkness and quiet enveloping him like a comfortable blanket or a familiar cloak.
There is also something peaceful about being close to a sleeping mind; as if Hob’s dreaming is a white-noise machine for the constant ache of unknowing in Dream’s mind.
So at night he reads or watches inane television that makes him aggravated, or once, memorably, picks up the half-finished knitting project that one of Hob’s former lovers left behind and finished it over the course of several days. Then there is a new throw on the back of the sofa, and Dream is bored once more.
Despite Hob’s coaxing, he does not wish to leave the flat, but three weeks after his arrival, he consents to be escorted down to the New Inn by Hob for dinner. His reasoning is as blunt as most of his wants.
“I can’t stand another meal of my own cooking, mate. You better come down for dinner with me.”
“I did not mean to inconvenience you regarding your dining habits, Robert Gadling.” Dream sits stiffly across the table from his affable companion, pointedly ignoring the other occupants of the pub, even as an almost constant procession of people arrive to greet Hob, shake his hand, and exchange a verbal barb or two.
Hob snorts, waving at yet another greeting lobbied across the pub. “Don’t think on it. It’s been an adjustment for us both, I think. Sharing a space.”
“So this is the first time we have shared such intimacy in our acquaintance.”
Hob’s breath stutters and Dream can admit he does not understand why.
A slow, halting smile spreads across his handsome, slightly rugged face. “No, Morpheus. Our association up to this point wasn’t filled with much intimacy.”
His words touch on something Dream has not dared look upon yet. Hob is his only link to the memories of his past, and it feels like a very fragile link indeed.
“I wish you to tell me of it. Our past together.” Dream belatedly recalls that perhaps he should have asked more politely, but Hob seems unbothered by his manners.
A smile, a nod for a passing patron who lobbies a friendly greeting. Hob meets Dream’s eyes with something like determination.
“Beer, first, I think. Then you’ll have your tale.”
Dream is not entirely aware of what his expectations were, but it was not a procession of centennial meetings between a man who does not die and the being that seemingly inflicted the condition upon him.
“You thought I was the devil?” That amuses Dream, though he cannot quite tap into the source of why.
Hob laughs heartily, still toying with his cutlery, though his meal is gone now, his glass empty. “I did, for a time. I thought up many explanations for your influence over the years. The devil, a demon, a saint, perhaps even the Almighty Himself. I even thought you were a ghost at one point, early on.”
“A ghost?”
“Indeed, and my condition a very peculiar haunting indeed.”
“I do not think I am a ghost,” Dream muses. He picks up his fork, gingerly spearing a piece of chicken and bringing it up to his mouth. The flavours are pleasant, though slightly dull on his tongue.
“I don’t think you are either, mate. Not for a long time.”
“But I shall always be haunting you, after a fashion.”
Hob’s gaze is sharp upon him, those eyes bright and seeking under a furrowed brow and the fall of shaggy brown hair. “If you like. My ghost to guide me through this eternal life I’ve been granted.”
Dream eats another bite of his meal, allowing himself some enjoyment in it. The New Inn hums and pulses around them, stuffed with humanity, people laughing and flirting, bonds being forged and broken every moment.
It is not such a bad place, Dream thinks, to try to discover who (and what) you are.
Dream begins venturing down into the New Inn more after that, mostly when it’s Hob’s turn to tend the bar. Unfortunately, it proves more difficult to coax him out of the building entirely.
“There’s a whole world out there that you’re missing out on!” Hob insists. He draws a Guinness as he speaks, movements impassioned but not a single drop of alcohol spilt.
“Somehow I do not imagine I am missing out on much. Humanity is hardly a fascinating lot in the waking world.”
“Well,” Hob pins him to his seat with a hot look, “oh Price of Dreams, Lord Morpheus, since you cannot currently venture into the world of sleeping, from whence you apparently came, you will have to settle for us mere mortals.”
Dream’s supposed titles make him wary and uncomfortable, and he places them off to the side of his mind where he doesn’t have to look directly at them.
“I am happy to settle for you, Hob Gadling. You, at least, always have a new book for me to read, or an opinion to argue with.”
Hob pauses in wiping down the counter, giving Dream his undivided attention. It sends an unexpected shiver through him, all that focus and regard. His body feels oddly molten and liquid, his centre of gravity swaying towards his friend.
“Is that all I am to you? A library and a debate partner?”
Dream allows himself a small smile. “No, you also appear to have become my roommate.”
Hob’s laugh echoes raucously around the pub, the sound music to Dream’s ears.
“That,” Dream says haughtily, gazing at the creature in Hob’s arms with something akin to alarm, “is a cat.”
“Yes, it is, mate, good observation skills, A plus, ten out of ten.” Hob gently places the new member of their household on the coffee table, a long-haired silver tabby just out of kittenhood. She’s a sweet, friendly beast who purred up a storm and wouldn’t let the cuddles end when Hob met her in the animal shelter. “She’s our cat, now.”
Dream has an exceedingly interesting look on his face, his nose wrinkled and forehead creased as if he’s smelled something bad. Or perhaps as if another creature has invaded his domain. Hob can almost hear him thinking, ‘I did not consent to be replaced by this new being.’
Outloud, Dream marshalls himself, raising an eyebrow. “And why do we have a cat now, Hob?”
The dainty feline picks her way across the table, and jumps onto the sofa near Dream, approaching him cautiously.
“Because, ghost, I thought that if you wouldn’t go out into the world, I would bring a piece of the world in to hang out with you. I admit I went in for a puppy, but I took one look at the little tail and bright eyes and knew that was a bad idea. So I got Destroyer instead.”
Dream's eyebrows climb his forehead with glacial slowness, a look of such perfect disapproval on his face that Hob wants to hoot with amusement at drawing such a reaction from his old friend.
“What did you call her?” Dream asks, danger hidden beneath the careful modulation of his voice.
Hob shrugs, putting the bag of cat paraphernalia down and flopping into his armchair. “That was her name at the shelter.” He makes a sweeping hand gesture. “The Destroyer of All. Apparently, she was quite the huntress in her time as a stray.”
Dream examines the cat, tentatively reaching out a hand to stroke one velvety ear. She reacts blissfully, leaning into his palm and offering a pleased purr. He hums, a low rumble in his chest, and Hob thinks it’s likely to be the best approval he’ll get from him.
Hob stands, feeling triumphant. “Have fun getting to know her,” he calls out as he heads to the kitchen to set up her feeding station.
“I am not calling her ‘Destroyer,’” Dream sneers, a protective note in his voice. “We may call her Jessamy.”
Hob pauses just inside the kitchen, glad his face is turned away from Dream. His chest tightens painfully, a well-known clog of grief-worry-yearning rising up to choke him. Does Dream remember Jessamy? Or is the name merely a sense memory tripping off his tongue?
"Right," Hob clears his throat painfully. "Jessamy it is."
Behind him, the cat climbs into Dream's lap, and Hob isn't sure which one of them starts purring first.