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prologue
Once, Hob had taken Dream to Kew Gardens. The main draw had actually been the Palm House, which Hob had helped build back in the 1840s, but between anecdotes of Augustus Pugin’s smear campaign against the architect, and fondly reminiscing about the eerie green glow of the original hand-blown glass—it became apparent that Dream was as much there for the botanicals as he was for the slapdash historical walking tour.
In particular, he kept stopping in front of a little bushel of drooping purple flowers. After the third time Dream subtly steered them back around to the Mediterranean Garden, Hob took the time to squint at the placard before it.
Haberlea rhodopensis
“You like this one,” he’d said, pulling Dream to a stop with a tug at the arm linked through his.
Dream looked down at the Haberlea, and then back up at Hob.
Hob raised an amused eyebrow. “I’m not completely dense, you know.”
“It is very beautiful,” Dream allowed.
“Never heard the name before. Haberlea?” Hob frowned down at the little plant—not just purple, now that he’d had a proper look. Their exteriors were a dark lavender, but the insides of their long, curling petals were almost pure white. In fact, now that he was looking closer— “I’ve seen these before. Huh. Can’t think where. They’re not native, are they, or they wouldn’t be in the Mediterranean section…”
“They are primarily found in Bulgaria, and some of Greece,” Dream said. “But nevertheless, it is understandable that they feel familiar to you. You have dreamed of them for over six hundred years.”
Hob blinked. “I have?”
“Every mortal dreams of them, though rarely in such an overt fashion. Haberlea are crafted into the curves of the clouds and the scent on the breeze and the grain of the wood of the floorboards—they creep into dreams, both grand and trifling alike. Always, they are there.”
“Oh,” Hob said, and stared at the flowers anew. “So you really like them, huh?”
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter,” Dream said—quoted, going by his cadence, though the hell if Hob knew what the quote was from.
And then Dream had said no more.
(Hob looked it up later—Wilde, of course it was bloody Wilde.)
Several days after that, Hob had been passing the local nursery and in the window display, amongst the ficuses and the begonias, were none other than Dream’s favorite flowers. The universe was clearly sending him a message. Hob, with more confidence than foresight, had bought three pots on the spot.
The shopkeeper had said they were excellent plants for a beginner—”Hardy chaps, these, there’s a reason they’re known as the resurrectionists!”—but Hob had still done the requisite googling for Care and Keeping Of upon returning to his flat.
Common names, Wikipedia informed him, include the resurrection plant, or the Orpheus flower.
i.
“You are discomfited,” Dream announces, as they exit the wine merchant’s shop.
Hob takes in a deep breath. “I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Nope,” Hob says.
Dream follows Hob down the pavement. “If your concern stems from the potential prejudices of the shopkeeper, I can assure you, he bore us no ill will.”
“Ta, love, I’d got that from the pride flag stuck on the till.”
“Then," Dream says, "it is the marriage itself which you find objectionable.”
Hob grips the neck of the hundred quid wine bottle tightly—bought specifically to celebrate the fact that Dream had returned to him after nearly a month’s absence—and takes in a deep breath for patience.
They’ve been together almost four years now, though that ‘together’ has consisted almost entirely of sporadic evening visits from Dream once or twice a week, occasional long weekends, and last August, a miraculous five days in the Maldives. Hob has never minded. Six hundred years of living will certainly change your perspective on what constitutes a long wait, and moreover, he’s a pretty independent guy. He doesn’t need Dream to be here to make him happy.
But after a month apart, Hob had been pretty excited to celebrate.
They are going to celebrate.
He doesn’t know why Dream has chosen this particular bit of muck to dig his heels into, but Hob isn’t going to let it get under his skin.
Which is why he does not roll his eyes, and instead takes in another deep breath and says calmly, “Nothing was objectionable. He asked for your ID. You magicked one up, and you needed a last name to put, and you picked mine. We got the wine.”
“You repeated it. In the shop, you said ‘Dream Gadmore’, and your tone of voice was not affirmative."
"Well,” Hob says, with patience, “you have to admit that it does sound a bit odd, as names go."
There's a beat. "Does it?"
"Yeah. You know, first name like Dream, you'd expect the last name to be like… I dunno. French? Californian?"
"...Californian?"
Hob waves a hand. "You know. Hippies."
"If it is the mismatch of my given name and your family name which displeases you, I have others which might substitute."
"Oh yeah?"
"Morpheus," Dream supplies. "Onieros. Yume. Pangarap.”
“Pangarap Gadmore,” Hob wheezes.
Dream scowls.
Snorting, Hob turns off the high street and onto the quiet little lane that will lead them back to his flat. Dream trails behind him in a sulk.
“When you read my name aloud in the shop, it was not merely surprise in the tone of your voice,” he says, half a block later.
“Oh, for crying out loud, Dream.”
“The words were spoken in a register approximately ten percent higher than usual, and your vocal emphasis was placed upon the last two syllables, indicating both shock and dismay.”
“I don’t know how many different ways there are to say that I wasn’t upset. But I’m glad we’re going to spend our evening finding out, apparently,” Hob snips, and he wants it on record that he really tried not to let this devolve into an argument.
“It was a decision made in haste. There was no intention behind the use of your surname,” Dream presses.
“Grand. Didn’t think there was."
“I apologize for the discomfort it caused.”
“There wasn’t any.”
“Is it the thought of remarrying after the loss of Eleanor that displeases you, or the thought of marrying me specifically?”
Hob spins around on the spot, almost sending the wine through someone’s sitting room window. “Dream, you— what?”
To the unlearned observer, Dream would appear to be devoid of any expression at all.
It's only years of study that allow Hob to eventually detect the slight pull of his shoulders and the strain of his jaw.
Nervous.
Bloody hell, he’s nervous, why is he nervous.
“Dream,” Hob says, because. No. No, surely not. “Dream, what’s—what are you—”
Dream stares back.
“Are you—sodding hell, do you want to marry me?” Hob demands.
Dream’s eyes go wide as saucers, and his hair puffs out like a spooked cat’s. “No.”
Hob opens his mouth to say—to ask—to fucking propose?—
But that’s when the air con unit falls from the sky and crushes Dream like a pancake into the pavement.
“Oof,” says Despair.
“Oh my,” purrs Desire.
A giggle wafts between syringes of haldol, and a head shakes as another page in the great book is turned, and in a nursing home in San Ignacio, Death closes her eyes and groans.
“Oh!” she says, eyes snapping open a beat later. “Sorry, my friend, not you.”
The old woman blinks back at her.
“Just my brother,” Death explains. “He’s a bit of an idiot, you know?”
At this, the old woman nods, and then retrieves her flip-flop from her left foot and holds it out in silent offer.
A few years ago, back when they had only been a Them for a few months, Dream had barehanded a pot off the stove just as Hob had shouted out a second too late, “HOT, that’s hot, Dream, puttitdown puttidown puttitdown—” and Dream had bemusedly allowed Hob to chivvy him over to the sink. “You are aware that this corporation cannot be injured,” Dream had said, somewhere between entertained and condescending, and Hob had made him hold his pale, perfect hands under the water anyway.
Knowing this does not make it any less terrifying to see your lover crushed to death before your eyes.
Well. Not to death, Hob reminds himself, as he sets to work shoving the air con unit off of Dream’s crumpled body with a, “Fucking shit, love, what the actual ever loving god forsaken Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick fuck—”
The air con unit hits the pavement with a metallic screech.
And Dream is not okay.
His body is unmoving on the ground. A byzantine halo of crimson is slowly spreading out around his head. There’s a gash down his left cheek bleeding freely, and another slow dribble of blood comes from the corner of his mouth. The lining of his coat contains no longer the expanses of the night sky, but stitched pleats of plain black silk.
Hob stares for one second. Two seconds.
“Fuck,” he says, and calls 999.
Dream is drooling in a C-spine collar when they wheel him off to CAT scan.
He returns having lost the collar and the drool, but apparently having acquired a hefty dose of valium.
“Poor Mister Smith had a rough time wakin’ up in the scanner,” says the orderly who drops him off, “so ‘e’s a bit drugged up, but it’ll wear off soon enough, right.”
With the hive of navy blue scrubs that are removing and stabilizing medical bits and bobs, Hob catches only glimpses of bony white feet, of a pink hospital gown sliding down a slim chest, and the array of electrodes that run across the pectoral line like fingerprints. He sees dried blood on ghostly skin, and gauze banded through messy black hair.
One by one, eventually, the medical team dissipate through the curtain and Hob gets a better and better view, until finally the last nurse steps away from the head of the bed and Hob sees Dream's face for the first time.
He’s crying.
Then Dream catches sight of Hob, and he’s lurching upright with unsteady limbs. The noise that leaves his mouth is human and terrible.
Hob moves so fast his knees hit the stretcher.
“Ohhhhh, dove,” he says, aching. Dream's grasping hands are corralled with ease, and he presses him gently back down into the mattress. “It’s okay, you’re okay, I’m here.”
Dream sobs and shakes his head. He struggles weakly against Hob’s hands, but human and valium’d and injured, Hob might as well be holding down a newborn. His hands together span Dream’s entire chest, shoulder to shoulder. He feels like if he leaned into it, he could crush right through this delicate ribcage and hit the mattress below.
“It’s okay,” Hob soothes, as Dream blinks up at him wetly, somehow managing petulance even through the haze of drugs and concussion. “It’s okay, dove, you’re safe. I’m here. We’re going to figure this out.”
Dream sniffles. Slowly, he goes limp. Silent tears track down his bloodied face.
Hob slowly allows himself to relax back into his chair, taking the closer of Dream’s hands between his own.
“Hob,” Dream croaks, staring at him miserably through the bars of the stretcher.
“I’m here,” Hob promises, rubbing a thumb over Dream’s knuckles.
Dream’s eyes flutter closed. “Daniel.”
Hob pauses. “Daniel?”
“This’s.. wrong,” Dream slurs.
“Who’s Daniel, dove?” Hob asks, squeezing his hand to wake him back up. “Hey. Who’s Daniel? Is he the one who did this to you?”
Dream’s face screws up. “No.”
“Then who’s Daniel?”
“Hob,” Dream says, with a little hitch in his voice, and then he’s crying again. “Hob, it— hurts.”
Oh, bloody hell.
“Okay,” Hob sighs, and starts rubbing a hand up and down Dream’s arm. “I’m sorry. Try to rest, dove, and I’ll ask about some painkillers when they come by again, all right?”
Dream lets out a quiet whimper that break’s Hob’s fucking heart.
“I’m here,” he says, helpless to do anything else. “I’m here, okay, and I’m not going anywhere. You’re not alone. I’m here.”
He says it over and over again, maybe as much for himself as for Dream, until Dream finally loses the battle against sleep and the tears stop at last.
Hob has just spent three pounds on another hour of unlimited lives in Gardenscapes and is about to spend two more on the shovel and rainbow boosters so he can finally pass this damn level, when Dream says, “Saint Dunstan.”
Hob freezes. On his phone screen, the Horticulturist Kit glitters with the promise of victory.
“We don’t talk about Saint Dunstan,” he says.
When there is no reply, Hob is forced to look up, and finds Dream gazing at him between the bars of the stretcher with eyes that are bright blue and painfully human. The look on his face would not be out of place on an individual about to announce the death of a beloved relative.
“I do not invoke it lightly," Dream rumbles, and though his voice is the same baritone timbre it's always been, there's an edge that's been filed smooth by the constraints of human vocal cords.
It's weird.
Also. Saint Dunstan.
"Why," Hob asks carefully, "would you need to invoke it at all?"
Dream's eyes shift, and then he licks his lips, which is… new.
"Does it have to do with Daniel?" Hob asks, raising his eyebrows.
"...perhaps," Dream mutters.
Hob's face splits into a grin. "Are you stepping out on me, darling?"
Dream's eyes go wide, and he scrambles to sit upright.
“You slag.”
"I would never—"
"I should have known," Hob sighs, shaking his head. "All those business trips. That lipstick on your collar you said was mine, last week. I'd never wear a coral lip."
"It is most reassuring," says Dream, with narrowed eyes, "to hear you are able to jest regarding my hypothetical infidelity.”
“Well, it is three o’clock in the morning, dove, and it’s been a bit of a day, between the accidental marriage proposals and my eldritch boyfriend getting turned human by a structurally unsound household appliance—and now we’re on Saint Dunstan, and whoever the hell Daniel is.”
Dream presses his lips together, and says nothing.
“And,” Hob adds, lighter, because the last bit had come out a little cranky and Dream probably didn’t deserve that, “I’ve spent ten pounds on Gardenscapes in the last two hours and I still haven’t fixed this fucking fountain.”
He smiles a little, and after a beat, Dream’s mouth crooks upward in response.
Then he abruptly frowns, and reaches up to touch his left cheek.
“Hurts?” Hob asks gently.
“No,” Dream says, clearly perturbed. His finger presses on the neat row of sutures that had been left there.
Hob reaches up and pulls his hand away. “Stop touching it. They stitched you up when you were still pretty out of it. Numbed you up, too, so enjoy it while it lasts.”
Dream digests this. A bulge appears in his left cheek as his tongue probes the injury from the other side.
“Do you want anything for pain?” Hob asks tentatively. “Or nausea, or something? Humanity has cooked up some pretty good drugs for that sort of stuff, there’s no need to just suffer through it.”
“I am… not unacquainted with pain, as an Endless. I have fought in wars which would collapse your mortal mind for the mere attempt at comprehension. I have known ruin upon my flesh and deeper still to the very essence of my being.” Dream reaches up slowly, left-handed this time, and presses tentatively at a point on the side of his head. He winces. “These hurts are different.”
“Worse?” Hob asks.
“Different,” Dream repeats. “They are… superficial. But sharper. More intimate, and yet foreign at the same time. It is an amaranthine sort of ache.”
Hob can’t wait for the nurse to come by and ask Dream about his pain score.
Dream huffs in response to whatever amusement has trickled into Hob’s expression. “You’ll excuse my ineloquence on the subject, you brat. I am certainly faring much better in speech than other mortals do at six hours of life.”
“Just so everyone here is on the same page—and by everyone I mean me—you are actually human now.”
“...Yes,” Dream answers.
“You’re taking it rather well.”
“I should say the same for you.”
Hob laughs. “I’m taking my cues from you, dove, and you don't seem too worried."
"This is a temporary state," Dream says. "We will begin the process to restore my powers upon leaving this place."
"Does it involve hitting you over the head with another large, heavy object?" Hob asks.
“No.”
“But it involves this Daniel bloke.”
“We will discuss it at home,” Dream pronounces.
Hob’s heart skips a beat at Dream referring to his flat as ‘home’, as it always does. He’s never been able to prove that Dream uses it specifically in situations where he’s on the verge of not getting his own way—but there’s definitely enough precedent for probable cause.
And he has the nerve to call Hob a brat.
“There are more pressing matters that require attention, at this time,” Dream adds.
Hob raises his eyebrows.
Dream prods at his lower abdomen curiously. “I believe I am having sensations that indicate my bladder is at capacity and should be emptied.”
“Oh,” says Hob.
Dream turns to look at him assessingly. “I have never micturated before.”
“Right,” Hob says. “Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t have.”
Dream waits expectantly.
Hob sighs. “Let me go ask.”
He returns ten minutes later, with bounty.
“Bad news, dove,” he says, pulling the tartan curtain closed behind himself. “They don’t want you walking just yet ‘til the doc’s come to see you.”
Dream eyes the plastic jug and diaper wipes in Hob’s hands.
Hob smiles without humor, and waggles the jug. “This,” he says grimly, “is called a bedside urinal.”
They're turfed out of A&E pretty much as soon as the doctor confirms that Dream is awake and mentally intact and able to drink one (1) sip of water without vomiting. Hob thinks, privately, that this may be related to their inability to produce an NHS number for Dream, but what does he know. Maybe everyone gets discharged seven hours after getting brained with twenty kilos of HVAC.
They sit in the back of the cab in silence.
Dream is huddled into a corner with Hob’s too-large woolen overcoat, which hides the crinkly paper scrubs that the hospital had gifted them with after they’d scissored all of Dream’s clothing from his body in the trauma bay.
Dream is spinning his hospital bracelet around his little chicken wrist over and over, eyes unfocused.
Carefully, Hob snakes an arm around his shoulders, and when he gets no resistance, he pulls tight and tips his forehead against Dream’s temple. His eyes fall shut almost of their own accord, a combination of relief and exhaustion overwhelming him.
The sound of laminated plastic on skin stops.
Dream shifts, then, rearranging both Hob’s limbs and his own until they’re resettled, now with Hob wrapped up under Dream’s arm and the curve of Hob’s skull against the bony angle of Dream’s jaw.
“Rest,” Dream murmurs, rubbing small circles into Hob’s bicep with his thumb. “I will keep watch.”
This position—those words—Hob has done this at least a hundred times before. It’s a pavolian sleeping pill, at this point. His half-asleep brain protests distantly that this isn’t fair, not now that Dream is human and also needs sleep and is also injured, but it’s a battle lost before it properly begins. He’s already out.
ii.
The first order of business, when Hob wakes up mid-afternoon, is a run to the chemist to procure several bottles of children’s Neurofen and Calpol.
(On returning to the flat at dawn, Hob had provided Dream with a handful of tablets to swallow for pain before they went to sleep. This had ended in an undignified mess of gagging and spitting over the sink, with Dream’s tongue stuck out in the affronted fashion of a toddler who's bit into a lemon slice for the first time.)
Hob does some math on milligrams and milliliters, and on determining that one adult dose is about half a bottle, cleans out the entire shelf. Hopefully Dream likes the taste of artificial oranges.
He returns home to find Dream in the living room, cross-legged on the floor next to the plant stand that holds the three potted Haberlea. All are somehow still alive, despite suffering through three years of Hob’s lackluster gardening skills.
“They weren’t flowering last time you were here, were they?” Hob comments, setting the bag down on the armchair and divesting himself of his coat.
“The human olfactory system is atrocious,” Dream declares, looking up at Hob quite crossly. “It is a mystery how you move through the world only able to smell that which is directly under your nose.”
“Remind me to take you into a Lush,” Hob says.
“Though this does explain much regarding your race’s mystifying tolerance for the stench of your own bodies,” Dream muses.
“Get over here and take your meds, you tit,” Hob sighs.
It turns out that Dream finds artificial orange goo rather agreeable. The scrambled eggs Hob serves him next, however, result in another lemony toddler face.
“It is,” Dream says, while scraping his tongue over the roof of his mouth repeatedly like a dog with peanut butter. “It is. Ech. Rubbery.”
Jam on toast is met with approval, however. Hob makes an entire stack.
"So," he starts, settling back down at the table while Dream scrapes apricot jam onto the topmost piece of toast. "I reckon you didn't bring up Saint Dunston because you wanted to rehash that time I broke your heart, eh?"
Dream's gaze flickers upward briefly, and then returns to his toast.
"No. It has to do with the part where you forgave me."
Dream sets down the knife, and lifts the toast to his mouth. He takes a single, delicate bite.
"Because now it's going to be my turn to forgive you for something," Hob continues.
"Perhaps not forgive," Dream replies carefully, after he swallows. "A… an extension of grace, might be more accurate."
An extension of grace.
Good grief.
When Dream does not continue, Hob decides to give him an opening.
"What I'm hearing is," he says, "it's going to be my turn to inspire a top forty breakup anthem in a fit of angst."
Dream chews his toast darkly.
He's still sour about Matthew spilling the beans on that one.
"You'll have to do it on my behalf, once we get you back to rights, obviously," Hob continues. "So I've got some time to pick my artist. You already took Miley Cyrus, voice of a generation, so you've got me starting off on the backfoot, but—"
"No ballads of heartbreak will be necessary," Dream interrupts.
"Would you call Flowers a ballad of heartbreak?"
Hob has apparently been successful in his efforts to annoy Dream into giving him some actual answers, because after Dream swallows his toast he announces: "We must travel to New Jersey."
Finally.
"To Daniel?" Hob asks.
Dream inclines his head. "To Daniel."
"And who's Daniel?"
"Daniel is the child that inherited full control of the Dreaming, when I was… briefly incapacitated. He is four years old, and therefore obviously unfit as Lord of the Dreaming. We must unseat him and restore myself to the throne."
Hob has—
Hob has a lot of fucking questions, Jesus Christ.
Six hundred odd years of living have him instead take a bite of scrambled eggs and chew while he processes all that. It also gives Dream the opportunity to expand on any of those little bombs he'd just dropped.
Dream, of course, does not. He's working his way through his next piece of toast.
"Okay," Hob says, after three more forkfuls of eggs. "So, from my understanding, you've been Lord of the Dreaming since the dawn of time."
"I have."
"But a knock to the head, and suddenly you're out? It goes to some poor sprog in America?"
"I told you once that no harm could come to my corporation," Dream says, spindly fingers tearing a piece of bread in half. "This is not strictly true. It requires conscious thought to prevent injury to it—though of course the mind of an Endless works at a far greater speed than that of a mortal's, and so it is almost impossible to render harm upon us. To see the fall of a blade or the arc of an arrow is child's play."
Unless, apparently, you get caught accidentally proposing marriage, Hob doesn't say.
"Furthermore, in the event that an Endless is dealt a killing blow in the Waking, the corporation will decease, but the Endless does not. We are not flesh, and so cannot be ended by its failure. We merely reform."
"But you didn't," Hob points out, unnecessarily, but Dream tends to move faster through these sorts of laborious explanations of the unfathomable magics of the multiverse if he's routinely prompted to continue.
"Some might say I am reforming," Dream offers, with a hint of a smile. He traces a finger over the line of stitches down his cheek. "Only at a more glacial pace."
"Pull the other one, dove," Hob says flatly.
"I am recently different from my siblings, in that I of late have acquired… an heir,” Dream admits.
“Daniel.”
“By pure accident and sans precedent amongst any of us. I care not to discuss the details, but in summary, the child was conceived in the Dreaming, and therefore he is… mine, mortal though he is. Mortal though he was, I suppose, until last night. Regardless. It is because of this anomaly that when my corporation was momentarily deceased yesterday, the authority over the Dreaming passed on to him, instead of returning to me.”
“Which is why we need to fly to New Jersey. To usurp the child autocrat of the entire human unconsciousness,” Hob concludes.
Dream nods.
“You know,” Hob says casually, “I’ve told you before that monarchies are an inherently unstable form of governance.”
Dream ignores this. “How soon may we depart?”
Definitely not as soon as Dream would like.
However, more importantly—
“Getting your kingdom back—are we going to have to hurt this kid?” Hob asks.
Dream studies him for a moment, before answering, “No. The transfer of power will be harmless and painless.”
Hob knows that if Dream had to kill Daniel to get the Dreaming back under safe rule, he would. He knows that Dream does not operate on a scale of size or time small enough to share a moral compass with humanity, and that he has committed atrocities in the name of the greater good.
He’s committed atrocities not in the name of the greater good, too.
What Hob also knows is that if Dream had to kill Daniel to get the Dreaming back under safe rule, he would not lie about it.
“Okay,” Hob says, and splays his hands out on the table. “Okay. Let me make some calls.”
Dream takes it suspiciously well, when Hob informs him a few hours later that it will take at least a week to fabricate a US-Customs-worthy passport for him.
“Do you think I had not prepared for this?” Dream asks, when Hob prods him on it. “Failsafes are in place. The Dreaming is stable.”
“Right,” Hob says. “Well, then I guess it’s you and me for… the next week.”
Dream inclines his head.
Hob grins. “What do you suppose we should do?”
Dream’s eyes, wholly human, still somehow manage to glitter. “I have,” he says carefully, “a few ideas.”
The first idea Dream has is obvious.
The second is a tad more irregular.
“Ooo wha?” Hob asks, trying not to spray Dream with toothpaste foam.
“I would like to brush my teeth,” Dream repeats.
It wasn’t that Hob was planning to let Dream walk around with stale breath for a week. Probably. Hob isn’t all that fussed about a bit of halitosis in a partner, to be honest, as humanity has only been brushing their teeth with regularity for the past hundred years or so. Also, it’s not like Dream has to worry about plaque build up.
Actually, it’s not like Hob has to, either. He just enjoys the minty freshness of Oral-B.
“Sure,” Hob says. He spits out the foam in his mouth and digs through two drawers before he unearths a spare toothbrush. “Knock yourself out.”
Dream holds it knife-like at first, and then his eyes flicker to Hob’s hand, and his grip changes to mirror it.
“Run it under the tap,” Hob tells him, when it becomes apparent that Dream does not know how to begin. He uncaps the toothpaste as Dream obeys, and then provides Dream with a healthy dollop of it. “It’s gonna be… very minty. Might sting your eyes a bit.”
Dream frowns a little at that, but slowly lifts the toothbrush up to his mouth.
“And don’t hit the back of your throat. You’ve got a gag reflex, now, remember?”
Dream scowls at the reminder.
Hob grins, because the memory of Dream pouting at his newfound inability to suck cock is fucking precious.
Slowly, Dream starts to rub the brush over his front teeth. He picks up a bit of confidence when Hob restarts his own brushing, as he watches and mimics the movements Hob makes. Hob’s sink isn’t really designed for two people to share, so they’re clustered a little too tightly and Dream keeps accidentally elbowing him, but Hob doesn’t step away. He meets Dream’s eyes in the mirror and grins around his toothbrush, open-mouthed and foamy.
The following morning, Hob decides to maximize his unexpected vacation via emergency family leave by taking Dream on a trip to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Of course, Hob plans to regale him with his memories of the nigh-operatic funeral of Vice Admiral Lord Nelson back in the 1800s, but also, he thinks climbing one thousand-plus steps up to the top of the dome will help impress upon Dream what it means for human bodies to have built such a structure.
The road block he hits, though, comes unexpectedly from the shoes.
“I can just do it for—”
“No,” Dream says stubbornly, from his seat on the floor. “I will learn.”
Hob looks at him, and then at the shoe laces grasped in either hand. There was a rhyme, he thinks, that he used to teach Robyn all those centuries ago. He doesn’t remember it.
“I’ll do the left,” Hob compromises, sitting down opposite Dream. “And you do the right.”
The right lace comes untied twice on their way to St. Paul’s. The third time, though, it finally sticks.
Hob is, in general, as lazy as possible when it comes to food. He has enough money that he could live off takeaways for—if not the rest of his life, then at least for the next century or two—and to be honest, most nights he’s perfectly content with a spag bol made from jarred sauce and an oxo cube anyway. If he wants something fancier, he buys it.
Unwillingness to do something, however, does not translate to an inability.
“It’s sticky,” Dream complains, trying to remove his hands from the lump of dough, with limited success. Great globs of it cling to his fingers like oversized albino leeches.
“It’ll get less sticky, the more you work it,” Hob advises, chin on Dream’s shoulder.
He doesn’t need to see Dream’s face to know it’s screwing up in distaste, although he sort of wishes he could. On the other hand, he’s pretty comfy where he is, pressed up against the line of Dream’s back.
Dream grudgingly sinks his hands back into the dough. Hob covers them with his own, and gently guides him into a proper knead.
“Now you know what the bakers at Tesco go through just so that you can eat your daily loaf of toast.”
“There are no bakers at Tesco’s,” Dream grouses, as he kneads. “The quality of bread which you purchase is most certainly made in a factory.”
“That’s a right bit of judgment, from the professional mooch,” Hob observes.
“I am aware that your personal wealth outranks the annual income of some countries, Hob Gadling.”
Hob grins, and presses a kiss to the angle of Dream’s jaw. “I’ll try to be a better sugar daddy.”
Dream grumbles something inaudible.
“How about I take you somewhere nice this weekend,” Hob offers, as his hands creep up Dream’s shirt so he can feel the abdominal muscles there tense and relax with each knead of the dough. It makes Dream feel solid, in a way he never had before. Real.
“Your bed is somewhere quite nice,” Dream replies.
Hob laughs. “I was thinking back to Kew Gardens, actually. They’ve got some special exhibition going on, a famous glassblower. Weird art plant shit. You’d love it.”
“Far be it from me to argue against—’weird art plant shit’?”
Hob grins, and thinks he could die happy right here in the kitchen.
He closes his eyes, inhaling the scent of yeasty dough and the blackberry jam that Dream never remembers to reapply the damn lid to. Dream’s body moves against his in rhythm with the dough, and Hob keeps his hold just strong enough that he can savor this feeling that he’s got his whole world in his arms right here.
When he opens his eyes several minutes later, he finds a dough that looks too runny for how long Dream has been at it.
“Hey, let me see for a sec,” Hob says, releasing Dream and reaching for the dough.
Dream readily hands it over, and Hob gives the dough a few turns before deciding it needs more flour. By the time he’s done incorporating it with a couple more kneads, he looks up and finds Dream has abandoned him completely in favor of scraping at his palms over the sink.
Hob rolls his eyes, but keeps kneading. “Don’t get your hands too clean, dove. Can you oil the bowl for me?”
By the time said bowl is ready, Hob has gotten the bread to a good consistency, so it goes straight into the bowl, gets covered with a towel, and goes to prove in the oven. Hob joins Dream at the sink, where Dream is picking dough out from underneath his fingernails.
“Oh, hey,” Hob says, gently catching Dream’s wrist. “Guess your magic nail polish isn’t holding up so well, huh?”
The usually glossy black nails have retained their neat manicure, but the polish has chipped and cracked in a way that may work for certain grungy teenagers, but isn’t a particular match for Dream’s aesthetic.
“It seems not,” Dream agrees.
“We’ll add it to the shopping list.”
They’re on the couch that night, each of them buried in a book, because Dream loves reading just as much as Hob, and being abruptly downgraded to humanity hadn’t changed that a bit. Hob’s knees are over Dream’s lap, the whole flat still smells like fresh bread, and the only sounds are the turning of pages and the soft clinking of the gnomes that live in the radiator.
The sudden grumbling groans of bowels are therefore shockingly loud.
Hob peers over his book to see Dream staring down at his own stomach curiously.
“Hungry?” Hob asks, eyebrow raised.
“No,” Dream replies, and pokes at his stomach. The bowel sounds are quieting. “Not hunger. But. It does feel strange.”
Hob sets his book down and props himself up on his elbows. “Does it hurt?”
Dream shakes his head, and continues to prod about. After several moments, he looks up at Hob in bewilderment.
Hob waits.
“I think,” Dream says, and then his face does something very strange.
This is followed by an astonishingly loud fart.
Hob’s jaw drops.
Dream stares back at him in wide-eyed shock.
Hob tries to hold it together—and he manages, for about five seconds, and then he cracks. A grin splits over his face, and then he’s giggling, and then his head is thrown back and he’s laughing so hard his stomach hurts.
He’s laughing so hard, in fact, that it takes him at least a minute to register the nightmarish croaking from the other end of the couch that he has come to know and love in the rare times he’s been privileged to hear it.
It only makes him laugh harder.
Perhaps the strangest part of all of this whole week has been settling down to sleep with Dream each night.
Sleeping sleeping.
It had started out a little rough, but after a few nights of trial and error, they have learned that Dream is a stomach sleeper and a blanket stealer, and also that he sleeps cold except for the one foot he leaves stuck out from under the blankets, even though said foot always ends up even colder than the rest of him. Dream is consistently unable to provide an explanation.
It’s illogical and petulant and probably the most human thing he’s done all week.
“Do you see your friends, when you dream?” Hob asks, as he pulls the covers up over them. When there’s no immediate response, he adds, “Matthew? Lucienne?”
“It is not within the scope of their duties, to visit the dreams of mortals,” Dream says quietly.
“Pretty sure being your friend isn’t a duty, love.”
“They are my subjects. Former subjects. I do not blame them for not enduring in loyalty to a deposed king.”
Hob can’t see Dream’s face. He’s on his stomach and his face is toward the nightstand.
“Maybe,” Hob suggests, as he sidles up close to Dream’s side, “they’re busy babysitting the toddler you left in charge.”
Dream makes an unhappy noise.
Hob presses a kiss to his shoulder. “Maybe they’re still trying to find you. You said yourself that this isn’t usually their job, to visit dreams. Maybe they’re still reading the instruction manual.”
Silence.
“Or maybe,” Hob says, because he’s nothing if not stubborn, “they are visiting you, and you’re like every other human and you lose all the details of your dreams a second after you wake up.”
“...Maybe,” Dream grumbles.
“Have some faith in the people who love you,” Hob tells him, slinging an arm over Dream’s back and resting his forehead against Dream’s shoulder. “We like you. We want you in our lives.”
The email arrives the next day, indicating that Dream’s passport is ready for pickup. Hob reads it twice before he admits to himself that the heaviness in his chest is... grief.
He’s never been sad to be left alone. He’s never been more than mildly disappointed to bid Dream goodbye. Their relationship has always existed in precious snatches of time—hours and meals and weekends, where other couples get years—but what they have is centuries, so really, it’s all the same.
Why should it be different, to lose this human version of Dream?
So Hob books them two tickets to Newark International Airport, pastes a smile on his face, and goes to deliver the news.
“Passport’s ready,” he announces.
Dream looks up, continuing to rub the cotton ball back and forth over his ring finger. “So soon?”
Hob shrugs, and joins him at the table. “She said I can pick it up tonight. I’ve got us on a flight to Newark tomorrow morning.”
“This is good news,” Dream decides.
“Yeah,” Hob says, and makes sure he’s still smiling. He is, but he brightens it for good measure. “You can finally go back to normal.”
Dream discards the blackened cotton ball, plucks a new one from the bag, and dips it in acetone before he starts in on his pinky finger. “We will miss the glassblowing, at the gardens this weekend.”
“There’ll be other shows,” Hob says, and that is definitely not a lump in his throat, no sir. “We can—” He swallows. “They do a lovely show with fairy lights, at Christmas. We can do that instead.”
They probably won’t. Dream’s appearances are rarely scheduled, and when they are, they’re also unreliable. Hob would have to buy a pair of tickets for each night of the festival for a week to even have a chance of attending.
(Which would be ridiculous, and he is absolutely not even considering it as an option.)
Dream finishes with his pinky finger, and then flexes his hands a few times, clearly intrigued by the sight of his bare nails.
Hob waits.
“Will you help me?” Dream asks, lifting up the bottle of black nail polish they’d picked up from Boots this morning.
Hob holds up his hands, shaking his head. “Dove, I have never painted fingernails before in my life.”
“Then we are on equal footing, for once,” Dream replies, with a tiny smile.
“You know you can just magic them black, like, tomorrow night,” Hob tries.
“I will do the left,” Dream answers serenely, as he unscrews the cap. “And then you will do the right.”
iii.
It doesn’t occur to Hob to ask until they’re sitting at a Starbucks in Heathrow at six in the morning.
“Dream,” he says slowly.
Dream, who had been gazing down at his boarding pass and swirling the contents of his five quid Pineapple Passionfruit Lemonade Refresher instead of actually drinking it, looks up. His eyes are bleary.
Between the hospital and the airport, Dream really is getting a stellar sampling of the absolute worst human experiences.
“Do you know where exactly we’re going in New Jersey?”
“Daniel Hall. Fifty-three Dundar Road, Edison, New Jersey,” Dream recites.
Hob raises an eyebrow. “Visit often?”
“I have never been.”
Hob sips at his latte.
“Daniel visits me in the Dreaming often,” Dream elaborates, at length. Then he smiles a little. “He is also of the age at which parents teach their children to recite their home address. He repeats it endlessly.”
“He visits you?” Hob repeats.
Dream inclines his head. “As I told you, he was conceived in the Dreaming. Even without the mantle of Lordship, he is connected to my realm as no other mortal is.”
Hob is honest enough with himself to admit that he’s a bit jealous. He may be immortal but he’s otherwise thoroughly human, and is therefore left just as guileless as any other mortal in the Dreaming. He’s never seen Dream’s home, or met his friends. He never will.
Hob is also six centuries old, and has enough maturity to recognize that it’s ridiculous to be jealous of a toddler.
“Your realm must be like one big playground to a kid, eh?” he says, returning Dream’s smile at last.
“The Dreaming… is a wonderful place to be a child,” Dream agrees, and there’s now a tinge of sorrow to his words that makes Hob ache.
They almost never talk of their children, he and Dream. Sometimes grief doesn’t have to be spoken, to be shared.
Overhead comes the boarding call for their flight.
Hob reaches over and takes Dream’s hand. “Let’s go get your kingdom back, then.”
It’s been a few years since Hob flew anywhere. The boarding process has gotten no less inefficient, though the airplane smells a bit more like disinfectant than it did prior to covid. They also apparently now play music overhead during boarding.
“Paint my nails, cherry red,” Miley Cyrus sings, as Hob waits for the woman in front of him to shove her carry-on suitcase, her jacket, a purse, a straw hat, and a bulging duty-free bag into the overhead space. “Match the roooses that you left.”
The highlight of the entire flight is in the first two minutes, when they start hurtling down the runway and the G-forces press you back into your seat and make your stomach swoop—and Hob, who had been at least a little worried that Dream would have a heretofore undiscovered fear of flying—turns to find Dream is not at all afraid.
He’s delighted.
With eyes wide and an open-mouthed smile of disbelief, their gazes meet and he lets out a single little nightmarish laugh.
“We’re flying,” Dream says, breathless.
Hob stares back with helpless adoration. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
Dream is visibly put out when he learns that the entire flight is not accelerations, dives and rolls, but a soporifically stable crawl across the Atlantic. Hob thinks for a moment that he should really get Dream to an amusement park—before he remembers that the corporation of Dream of the Endless probably doesn’t feel G-forces at all.
Hob coughs up for the in-flight wifi and settles in with Gardenscapes and the broken fountain that has been plaguing him all week. Dream pokes around his seat’s screen for a little bit before opening the book he’d brought. When lunch comes, Hob swaps his bread roll for Dream’s side salad, and then later, his ice cream for the rest of Dream’s mushroom pasta. Hob teaches Dream how to do the sudoku in the in-flight magazine, and they take turns playing some strange ball-launching game on Dream’s entertainment screen.
There’s still four hours left until landing when Dream falls asleep with his head on Hob’s shoulder.
Hob smiles a little, adjusting his head so that the angle is a little more comfortable for Dream’s neck. “Rest,” he murmurs, barely audible over the drone of the engines. “I’ll keep watch, love.”
New Jersey is cold as tits, even though it’s only November. Hob had taken two steps out of the airport, and then immediately doubled back inside and bought an I ♡ NEW YORK jumper. He offers to buy one for Dream, too, since his jacket is about as substantial as Hob’s.
But Dream says, “I will soon have no need of insulation.”
“Right,” Hob says. Swallows. And then he goes to pay for his stupid jumper.
The Uber drops them off at a modest suburban home that probably looks more charming when it isn’t about to fall into the depths of winter. The landscaping is largely barren trees and quiescent flowers, and the overcast sky does nothing for the browning grass. You’d have no idea that this was the home of the child king of the entire human unconsciousness.
Dream strides up to the front door without waiting for Hob, who is in the process of thanking their driver.
“Excuse me,” he huffs to the driver, and runs up the drive.
“So what’s our plan, exactly?” Hob asks. He’s asked this about four times before, and Dream has yet to provide a concrete answer.
Dream presses the doorbell, which is one of those fancy Google ones with the camera. “I will speak with Daniel, and he will return the Dreaming to me.”
Right.
Easy-peasy.
There is no immediate answer at the door. They wait, bitter wind whipping at their backs, and Hob would have pressed the bell again at the one minute mark but Dream waits at least another before he reaches out and rings the bell once more.
“Are you sure—” Hob starts, which is of course when the door opens.
There’s a young black woman with rainbow dreadlocks that appears first. The hard look on her face throws Hob for second. Then he notices the white woman behind her—and more importantly, the gun she’s aiming right at Dream.
Hob swears and drags Dream behind himself, pulling them back from the crazy American with the crazy gun, what the actual fucking hell.
“No sudden movements!” the woman with the gun barks, and the other one hisses, “Lyta!”
Dream is wrestling for freedom behind Hob, but without any supernatural force behind it, Hob easily keeps him in place.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” Hob says, gripping Dream hard enough to bruise.
The woman jabs the gun in his direction. “You shut the fuck up. I want to talk to your friend, the one who’s here to steal my baby.”
Oh, for—
“Dream,” Hob says, through gritted teeth. “Did you perhaps leave out some details?”
Dream gives up the fight with a put-upon sigh. From behind Hob, he calls out, "I am not here to take your child, Lyta Hall."
"Oh yeah? So you were lying, back in Florida? So you have nothing to do with what's been happening to Danny for the last week? You picked the wrong mother to fuck with, bucko. I knew this day would come, and I fuckin' prepared."
"Hob," Dream says softly. "You must let me speak with her properly."
"Absolutely not, she'll shoot you," Hob hisses.
“I want you to leave, and never come back, you hear me you freak?” Lyta screams from the doorway. “He’s my son. My baby. I don’t know how you’ve been getting to him all these years, but it stops today! If you touch one hair on his head—”
A wave of golden sand billows out from inside the house, enveloping Lyta and the younger woman, and they drop to the floor like ragdolls.
The world is silent.
Slowly, Hob releases his grip on Dream, who comes around to stand at his side. They exchange a look.
“You need not have come to my defense,” Dream murmurs, with a smirk.
“Oh, fuck you.”
Dream moves toward the house, and Hob follows him. They step over the bodies in the entryway—Dream unfazed, Hob more than a little creeped out. Hob also stops to grab the gun.
Inside, they’re greeted with a horribly normal home, with squashy furniture, and a bowl of fruit on the counter, and a child’s artwork on the fridge. It’s utterly silent.
Daniel stands on the far side of the room.
He could be any child—brown skin, curly hair, round face—except for the fact that he’s dressed in a tiny black cloak, which is swaying gently in a non-existent breeze, and also, his big brown eyes are sparkling with inhuman constellations.
“Lord Mo-fees!” Daniel says, face splitting into a grin.
Hob glances at Dream. “You make the baby address you by your title?”
Dream ignores him, and gets down on one knee before the child. “I believe it is you who are the Lord now, little one.”
“Mommy and Rose hadda sleep,” Daniel explains, and it’s surreal to hear the power of the Endless in the lisping voice of a toddler.
A raven flies in from literal thin air and lands on the sofa.
“Boss!” Matthew screeches. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Loosh and I have been worried about you! Holy shit, look at those stitches, does that mean the spell worked? Are you human? We thought so, we were looking for you in the Dreaming everywhere but we couldn’t find you and we were also, you know, a little busy with—”
Dream holds up a hand. “Thank you, Matthew.”
“Yeah, yeah, off to the peanut gallery, I know,” Matthew gripes, and hops closer to Hob. “Hi, boss’s wife.”
Hob rolls his eyes. “Sexist much?”
“Men can be wives. Homophobic much?”
“I am literally bisexual.”
“Wow, so gay people can’t be problematic? Reductive much?”
“One day,” Hob says, “I am going to have you shot, stuffed, and gifted to the biology department.”
There’s a gust of wind through the house that smells of perfume and summer grass, and Hob looks down in time to see Daniel with one small hand extending toward Dream. The breeze ruffles his curls and swirls his robes, and in his hand appears a single, perfect Haberlea flower.
Dream reaches out.
But as soon as his hand closes around the flower, it withers, and within seconds it is completely dead.
“The hell?” Hob mutters.
“It’s their thing,” Matthew informs him. “Every time they meet, they have to do this.”
Daniel turns to look at them with big, starry eyes. “It’s a prof-uh-see.”
Hob is fairly certain that prophecies about dying flowers do not portend especially cheerful events, but hey. He could be wrong.
"Can you be the king again now, Lord Mo-fees?" Daniel asks, grasping onto Dream's knee and swinging back and forth. “My head’s too small for—for all these colors and stuff, and I hadda miss soccer.”
“I am sorry for your troubles,” Dream tells him. “This responsibility was not meant to come to you so soon.”
“When I’m growed up,” Daniel agrees, swinging away.
“Yes,” Dream says. He tucks the dead flower behind one ear, and settles a hand over Daniel’s head, bringing him to standstill. “Do you consent to abdicate the throne of the Dreaming, Daniel of the Endless?”
“Yah-huh,” Daniel says, looking up at Dream with a toothy grin.
Dream turns to Hob and Matthew. “I recommend,” he says, “the both of you close your eyes now.”
Hob, just to be a dick, places a hand over Matthew’s head, and enjoys the resulting squawk. The sharp nip he receives in return is one hundred percent worth it.
Once his eyes are closed, he hears only the soft shush of fabric, Daniel’s soft giggle, and then Dream begins to murmur in a strange, atonal language that makes Hob feel like he’s just stepped on an anthill. His teeth start to vibrate and his ears start to ring, and it gets worse and worse, his skin crawling—
Blinding light splashes through his eyelids and sears the pattern of his own blood vessels into the backs of his retinas.
And then it’s over.
Hob doesn't open his eyes until he feels a cool touch to his hand. Slowly, the world comes back into focus, and he's met with familiar blue rings around the galaxies at the edge of another universe.
“Hello, Hob,” Dream says, with the smallest crook of his mouth, the smile that you wouldn’t know was there if you didn’t watch it appear.
The stitches in his left cheek are gone.
Hob wants to trace a finger over the smooth, perfect pale skin that’s replaced it, but instead he clenches his hands into fists and says, “Welcome back, dove.”
“Thank fucking god,” Matthew says. “Do you know how hard it is to babysit a toddler when you’ve got monocular vision and no thumbs?”
Dream shifts, and Hob notices for the first time that Dream is holding a sleeping Daniel against his chest. Gone are the miniature black robes, and in their place are soft blue pajamas with little ravens on them, which Hob is certain did not exist until about thirty seconds ago. Daniel’s head lolls comfortably against Dream’s shoulder, and one little hand is hooked into the collar of Dream’s shirt.
“Don’t think his mum is going to much like the new threads,” Hob offers.
The look on Dream’s face says that this is exactly the point.
Hob loves a petty, petty man.
“I will put him to rest,” Dream says. “Then we may depart.”
For lack of anything better to do, Hob follows Dream down the hallway.
“Should I book a flight?” Hob asks.
“Unnecessary. I will take you back to your home,” Dream replies.
On one hand, Hob is pretty sure getting stamped through US Customs and then mysteriously reappearing in England with no corresponding UK reentry stamp is a surefire way to get his passport flagged. On the other hand, he really doesn’t want to sit through another nine hour flight.
Certainly not by himself.
Daniel’s bedroom is no messier than any other four-year-old’s, an explosion of action figures and plastic food pieces and foam balls. There’s a child-sized table in the corner, and rows and rows of drawings taped to the wall above it.
A good number of the drawings feature a person with scribbly black hair and black clothing and a little black pillar on his shoulder.
“Gotta say, boss,” Matthew says, coming to rest on Daniel’s headboard, “I really hope you enjoyed this little preview of your retirement, because we are not repeating this again until that kid is at least able to purchase alcohol. Or even better, rent a car.”
Dream, pulling the blankets up over Daniel’s sleeping form, freezes.
“Retirement?” Hob repeats.
“Matthew,” Dream rumbles.
“Ohhhh so you still haven’t told him,” Matthew says, with a nervous raven-laugh. “Uh. My bad.”
Dream raises a hand, sand gathering.
“Well, hey, no time like the—”
Matthew disappears in a puff of sand before he can finish.
Hob is thinking about This responsibility was not meant to come to you so soon, and When I’m all growed up, and the one who’s here to steal my baby, and that dead flower that’s still behind Dream’s ear, and fucking Saint-Dunston-in-the-East Church Garden.
“Retirement,” Hob says, again.
“It is… a possibility.”
“Yeah, I can see that, you just put it to bed with footie pajamas and a stuffie. Dream, did you. Bloody hell. When you said he was conceived in the Dreaming, I thought… I thought you meant.” Hob pulls his thoughts into order, with effort. “Did you make him on purpose?”
“He is not my child,” Dream answers.
“That’s not an answer.”
“He is the product of a grieving woman who was lured into the riptides of a Dream Vortex. He is an aberration so unlikely that even in all our billions of years neither I nor any of my siblings had seen the like of it before, and I would have killed him before he drew his first breath,” Dream says—and then he pauses. Looks down at Daniel.
“What stopped you?” Hob asks, because he knows it wasn’t mercy.
Dream reaches up and plucks the dead flower from behind his ear. Between his fingers, it slowly begins to dissolve into sand. “A prophecy.”
Hob swallows. “The flower is you.”
Dream looks up at him. “The flower is my son.”
Haberlea.
The bloody Orpheus flower.
“It has been written that his death will be at my hands,” Dream continues, voice going lower and rougher as his eyes go glassy. “ I will spill family blood. His blood. This is immutable.”
“Dream,” Hob says softly.
Dream presses on. “In doing so, I will therefore violate the most ancient of our laws, and there is only one punishment for so heinous a crime. I will be put to death.”
Hob opens his mouth, but no words come out.
Horror is like a blade through his chest, sharp and hot. He can’t breathe.
“Daniel exists not by accident, as I told you, but by conspiracy of the Fates to preserve the existence of the Dreaming after I am gone.”
“So—so what the fuck was Matthew talking about retirement for? What’s—if you’re going to die, you just going to—” Hob thinks this may be what a heart attack feels like. “Is retirement a—a fucking euphemism?”
“No,” Dream says, and he looks away. “It is... There is, an alternative to death. I had thought. I. I have made use of a loophole in the fabric of my being, that which constrains the essence of an Endless in a mortal corporation. It will ensure that when the Furies serve their justice upon me, Dream of the Endless will die, and the mantle of Lordship will pass to Daniel, but. My corporation will endure. And I will be human.”
Hob practically gasps for air, squeezing his eyes shut against the overwhelming relief of it all. “Jesus—fucking—Christ.”
Dream is silent.
He catches his breath, slowly but surely. “Okay,” Hob says. He takes in a deep, slow breath, and then lets it out. “Okay. So. You’re not going to die. You’re just going to be human one day?”
“I have… the choice,” Dream answers.
“The choice of death,” Hob reiterates, just to emphasize the insanity here, “or humanity.”
“I had thought. To determine my welcome, first,” Dream replies.
Hob stares.
“Dream,” he says, very, very carefully. “Were you going to commit Suicide by Fury if I turned down your marriage proposal?”
Dream curls a lip. “Do not insult me with such mundane a term as suicide. My life has spanned a length of time as to be beyond your comprehension. Thirteen billion years, I have existed. To choose to die tomorrow or in one hundred years is to shift atoms across the scales of the universe.”
Well.
…put like that.
And then just when Hob thought they might be getting somewhere near sanity, Dream adds, “So you need not feel guilt in your refusal, Hob Gadling.”
“Wha—refusal?” Hob splutters. “Refusal! You never asked.”
“You have repeatedly affirmed that you are content living on your own. You reacted unfavorably to both my using your surname in the wineshop, and to the idea of our marriage in the subsequent conversation. Furthermore, in the hospital, you gave my name as Dream Smith, and then again on my passport and plane ticket. You have given no indication that you wish to pursue a committed mortal relationship with me.”
Hob runs a hand over his face.
“As I stated before, you need not feel guilt,” Dream says, with military stoicism. “I am content to spend my remaining years as an Endless as we have done up until now. I will give you my hours and days when I am able, and I will give them happily. And then, when it comes time for—”
“Adele,” Hob says.
Dream stops. “Adele?”
Hob opens his eyes. “My top forty power ballad. You got Miley Cyrus, I want Adele. I want to be the number one single on 35, I want it to top the charts for months, and I want it to convey exactly how fucking patient I am with my absolute numbskull of a lover.”
It is Dream’s turn to stare.
“First of all,” Hob says, “for the record, Dream Smith is hilarious. Smith of Dreams? Top marks. Great name. Still can’t believe I came up with it in the back of an ambulance. Second of all, I would marry you in a heartbeat, you utter fucking lunatic, and I’d have you in my home every single day for the rest of our lives, because then when I introduced you as Dream Gadmore—as my husband—it wouldn’t be a lie, it would be the best damn thing I ever did.”
Dream blinks rapidly. “Oh,” he says, eventually.
“Yeah,” Hob agrees, a little taken aback himself.
He’s nothing if not resilient, though, because he then forces himself to take in a deep breath, puff out his chest, and demand with every confidence, “So? You got something to ask me?”
“I— ” Dream is wide-eyed. “I do not have a ring.”
Hob gets down on one knee.
Or he starts to, anyway, because halfway down to the ground Dream seizes him by the arms, hauls him back up and yells, “Marry me, Hob Gadling!”
Hob has to bite down on his lip hard to not burst out laughing.
Because Dream’s face is somewhere between terrified and astonished, his mouth hanging open just a bit, and his grip on Hob’s arms hurts. The stars in his eyes spin madly, a telescope on a turntable. And Hob is abruptly reminded that what lies at the bottom of this entire mess is that Dream has spent every one of those thirteen stupid billion years convinced that he isn’t something worth loving.
So, with the utmost care, Hob cups Dream’s face with his hands, and finally runs his thumb over that spot on Dream’s left cheek where his skin is now inhuman and perfect again. “Yes,” he says.
The kiss starts off gentle, just the press of his lips to Dream’s, but then Dream must fully process what just happened because all of a sudden Dream’s mouth is on him like an attack. Like a claim. His hands are greedy, grasping, roving over Hob like he can’t decide which piece to cling to, and he’s pushing Hob back, back, back, until there’s a wall against Hob’s back and Dream shoves him right up against it.
Hob breaks off long enough to gasp out, “You know Daniel is right there—”
And then his vision goes black and all his organs turn inside out in a way that should not feel as good as it does, and when Hob opens his eyes he’s flat on his back staring up at his bedroom ceiling, and a very naked Dream.
He looks down, and finds that he has also lost his clothes somewhere in the transcontinental teleportation.
When he looks back up, Dream is staring at him like Hob is something wild and miraculous. The stars in his eyes are still spinning.
“You know, that glass garden thing is tonight,” Hob says, reaching up to span his hands over Dream’s chest, to feel his ribcage expand in and out with breaths it doesn’t need to take but does anyway. “If we hurry, we could make it.”
Dream grabs both of Hob’s wrists with one of his own—that supernatural strength is fully back online, apparently—and pins them up and over Hob’s head. “We have other plans.”
Hob knows his fellow faculty are highly suspicious of his ‘family emergency’. Mostly because Hob has been walking around on cloud nine ever since returning to work—but that’s fine. In twenty years Hob will be living under a different name in a different city and he’ll be married to Dream.
He wakes up several days after his return to England, and the first thing he does is grin like an idiot.
Things only get better when he pads into the kitchen to find Dream at the breakfast table, munching on a piece of toast, and—
“Is that my phone?” Hob asks, startled.
“I tired of your battle with the fountain,” Dream replies, not looking up from where his thumb is tapping and swiping away.
Hob laughs, incredulous, and moves around to stand behind Dream’s shoulder. He bends over and presses a kiss to the top of his head, as his eyes take in the sight of Dream matching up little cartoon acorns and pears. “Thank you, dove.”
Dream hums, and then tilts his head back for a proper kiss.
When Hob sits down with his own plate of toast (with beans, because he needs actual calories to survive, unlike certain ancient beings in this flat), Dream surrenders the phone unprompted.
“Dreaming okay?” Hob asks, as he tucks in.
“Of course,” Dream replies. “I had foreseen this possibility and prepared for it well. My wards worked flawlessly.”
“And Lucienne?”
“Performed her duties as expected,” Dream answers, frowning.
Hob rolls his eyes. “No, you tit, was she happy to see you?”
Dream’s expression softens. “She is... already researching a way to make my human mind more easily found, when it enters the Dreaming. She is most insistent.”
Hob makes a satisfied noise through his mouthful of beans, and jabs his fork in Dream’s direction to emphasize his triumph.
Dream shakes his head, and rises from the table. Hob watches him disappear in the direction of the bathroom with no small amount of confusion, and has eaten most of his breakfast when Dream returns with an armload of supplies.
Acetone. Cotton balls. Nail polish.
“You remember you can do that with magic again?” Hob asks, as Dream settles back down at the table.
Dream unscrews the acetone, and gives Hob a significant look. “For now.”
Hob’s heart skips a beat.
Delicately, Dream dips the first cotton ball into the acetone.
“You want some help?” Hob asks.
“No,” Dream says, and starts to rub the cotton ball over his left thumb. There's a contented little smile on his face. “I want to practice.”