Chapter Text
It’s not much, this long-awaited meeting, in the end.
“Have a pint, then?” Hob asks, first thing he can think of. Not good to see you or how have you been or where the fuck were you. He’d like to ask all of those, sure. But. Never polite to let a guest go wanting. He’s a bit old fashioned like that.
He doesn’t wait for an answer before he waves at the bartender, points to his own drink, then to the man sitting across the table from him. Hob knows the other man will barely touch it, will rest his long fingers on the glass, may even bring it to his lips once or twice, a pantomime of courtesy. Still.
“Decent stuff, beer, now,” Hob proclaims before that unasked-for pint arrives. “Don’t really have to drink it anymore, water’s safe. Modern sewer systems, there’s an improvement for you. But old habits, yeah?”
The man across from him stares. Then a grin dances on those lips, cracks that ivory façade into something…human. “How have you been these long years, Hob Gadling?”
That deep voice rumbles in Hob’s bones, echoes through the hollow in his chest. Hob smiles, lips closed, to hold it there, next to his heart, for another moment longer. “Well.” He looks across the table. “I have been well, my friend.”
His…friend’s lips move, form the shape of some word before they settle.
“Would you like to hear about it?” Hob asks.
“Yes,” his friend answers. “I should like that very much.”
“Lovely. Where do I start…”
Never had a problem talking, did Hob Gadling. His mother told him he had the devil’s own tongue when he was a child, threatened to switch it out of him every now and then. Was a while, in the 15th century, when Hob was a bit worried he might’ve bargained for more than just a tongue.
Not devil nor demon nor mere man in front of Hob now. His tongue flaps all the same, mouth running like it’s making up for lost time. He covers the first century easily enough, skims over the Great War, and then the next Great War, and then all those not-so-great ones after. Marvels at man splitting the atom, breaking the sound barrier, reaching up to touch the heavens. He did have this song rehearsed, once.
He splutters a bit through the next thirty years, grunge rock and Y2K and coffee shops popping up on every corner. Food trucks and mobile phones and the bloody internet, now that one he didn’t see coming. He loves it, of course, but he’s still not sure if it’s the best thing humanity’s done or the worst.
Hob’s friend says little, as is his wont, sips daintily at his beer like it’s the finest tea from China, like he’s in the Queen’s parlor surrounded by dignitaries, and not in this modest little pub, surrounded by postdocs and pensioners who come here during the middle of the day because they get a quid off their drinks.
Was why Hob started coming here, some years back, when he styled himself as one of those postdocs. Course, he had more money salted away in accounts in the Caymans, and Geneva, and Dubai, than any of his drinking mates would make in their lives. And he’d paid those bar tabs, nearly every time, waved off any coins shuffled his way, told them they could get a next round that they never did.
“That about covers it, really,” Hob concludes. He leans back in his chair at last, casts a glance toward the window to see night’s fallen while they were in here. There are a few pint glasses he doesn’t quite remember emptying stacked precariously next to his elbow. His friend’s beer is half full, probably warm by now and tasting of piss. His friend still sips at it politely, eyes rarely straying from Hob’s face.
“What about you?” Hob asks. “How’ve you been?”
He doesn’t expect an answer, not a real one. And his friend doesn’t give him one. But the other man’s thin fingers still on his glass and that stillness settles into his face too, in the shadows that linger in the corners of his lips, in the ghosts that haunt his eyes. Or maybe that’s just a trick of the amber glow cast by the wall sconces on the bar behind him. Hob blinks and it’s gone.
“These years have been…I am well,” Hob’s friend says, a shade softer than Hob is expecting.
Hob takes a long swallow of beer, easier than replying. He studies his friend’s face, pale and perfect as ever, though Hob spies an openness there he’s not seen before, a door left ever so slightly ajar.
“Good,” Hob replies breezily. “I’m glad. Had me worried, when you didn’t show up.”
His friend’s eyes flicker up to his, catch a slant of light. “I did not intend to worry you.”
Hob hums a reply, points at his friend’s pint. “Get you a fresh one?”
“No, thank you,” his friend replies primly. “I should depart.”
Right. More than Hob’s ever gotten from his friend, in the past hour or so. But it’s a hunk of stale bread to a starving man, and all Hob wants is more. He watches his friend shift the chair back, press slim hands to the table to lever himself upright. Hob holds out his own hand before the other man can rise. “Well? Are you going to ask me?”
“Ask you?” His friend’s brows raise, symmetrical arches.
“Yeah,” Hob says. “For old time’s sake?”
Something else in that still face, a sparkle of unease. “Very well.” Hob’s friend straightens in his chair, tips his chin up so he’s looking down the long line of his nose at Hob. “Hob Gadling. Do you wish to live?”
Hob sets his shoulders, elbow jolting the stacked pints on the table as he leans in, until his face is a foot away, level with his friend’s. He pulls a wicked grin across his face. “Always.”
An even stare from his friend, a small huff. “Very well.” He uncurls himself from his chair, presses up to his feet in a liquid black line. “A hundred years, then.”
Hob blinks up at him. “Oh? Already broke with tradition, mate. Why stop now?”
His friend stares at him. Face carved in stone, but for a hairline fracture at the corner of his mouth. “Goodbye, Hob Gadling.”
His friend turns on his heel, slinks away, footsteps quiet as a shadow on the floor, dark coat swirling in his wake. Yet no one notices his dramatic departure, no one tracks his figure as it slips through the doorway. Save Hob.
“Still haven’t told me your name,” Hob mutters wistfully to the empty chair across from him. “Next time.”
The next time is here.
Atop a spire that scrabbles up to the sky of an ancient era until it twists back the way it came. Hob sits at the edge of a steep, circular roof, watches the tessellated tiles beside him swirl and spin, spiral into galaxies of their own.
He looks up at the earth above, to the base of the tower, perched on a jagged coastline where phosphorescent waves dash against iridescent stones. Then down to the heavens below, an unbroken sky aglow with the new moon’s light.
Then there’s a shape beside him, a form he feels before he sees. He meets his friend’s eyes, the endless blue of a clear September sky. “Hello,” Hob’s friend says simply.
“Hello,” he says back, just as simple. “This isn’t the White Horse,” he adds, only understanding the truth of that statement as the words pour from his lips. “Or the New Inn.”
“No. It is not,” his friend agrees.
“Then…” Hob looks out, towards where the horizon might be, but he can’t discern where the sea meets the sky meets the sea meets the sky. “Why are we here?”
“You asked a question,” Hob’s friend answers at some length.
Hob frowns. He glances up and spies a path climbing the side of the tower, a staircase ascending upon itself, like the ridges of a conch shell stacked on one another. “I’ve asked more than one, in my time.”
His friend nods. “Many of which I lack the ability to answer. But there is one, in particular. I feel at last I owe you that.”
Hob looks around again, at this impossible structure looming over an unknowable world. “Oh. This is…” His eyes flicker back to his friend, mark the self-satisfied half grin on that pale face. He lets out an aggrieved sigh. “Truly?”
“Truly,” his friend confirms.
“Ah,” Hob says. “Is this my reward for getting stood up for thirty years, then?”
A flash of light past that non-horizon, a rumble that ripples through Hob’s body. His friend turns from him, gazes out into the void. “I…did not intend to miss our appointment.”
Hob scries for answers in the alabaster profile next to him. He gets what he always gets, which is to say nothing. “I see,” he says, though he doesn’t. “Well. Imagine you were a bit busy, what with the…” He waves a hand around him. “All this.”
“No. I was…” His friend’s form grows hazy around the edges, shades to the same inky un-glow of the distant horizon. “Elsewhere.”
A crackle of something, that silence between mortar blasts. Hob looks up to see the bright waves have transformed to dark clouds, roiling black and midnight blue against the rocky shore. He glances back at the other man.
“My friend?” he prods.
A flash this time, lightning past a horizon that doesn’t exist. Hob searches it out, feels the prickle of static across the back of his neck. He turns to his friend once more. “Are you…” he starts, before he realizes he’s speaking to open air.
“Goodbye, Hob Gadling.”
He whirls, finds his friend a league away at the other end of the small roof. “Wait,” he says. “Am I—"
Then his friend swirls into shadow, disappears. Then the tower, and the coast, and a thousand tiny stars tumble up into the sky, pinpricks in the ether. Then Hob’s rising with them, spiraling in the slipstream, then he is the sea, then he is the storm, then he is the sky, and then—
His eyes fly open to his bedroom ceiling, dawn’s first blush limning the edges of the blinds covering the window. He blinks at that ceiling and sighs.
“Dream?” he asks it. “Fucking really?”
Then he turns over, buries his face in the pillow, and sleeps through his alarm, ends up ten minutes late to class, a razor nick on his jawline, a coffee stain on his favorite shirt, wearing mismatched socks. And yet he’s smiling when he gets there. Smiles through his first lecture, and his second.
It’s only when he’s back in his office, sipping at a fresh cup that he is determined will not end up on his clothes, that he remembers those black clouds, too. The smile slips from his face. Was a strange thing. But he’s rarely had a dream that wasn’t. So back to work. These papers aren’t going to mark themselves.
It's not a hundred years, this time. Not a decade. Not even a year.
It’s a few weeks later, when he’s hunched over his desk in a position that would leave him with a terrible crick in his neck if those things still happened to him, that he becomes aware of something else in his office. Like a noise on the edge of hearing, easy to ignore until it…isn’t.
Hob glances up from his papers to see a form perched on the edge of the elegant wingback chair across from his desk. He picked the thing up at a car boot sale from a disgruntled chap who didn’t realize Aunt Grace’s favorite chair was worth more than the car. Another man might have stored it away, protected it under a dust cover, donated it to a museum where it would be kept under lock and key. Hob likes to believe old things can still have a use, though.
But it’s not the chair, with its gleaming sage and lilac jacquard, that captures his eye. It’s the man sitting in it, black boots and black jeans and black coat, dark hair ruffled like it’s come through a maelstrom.
Hob shifts back with an overzealous groan, presses his shoulders into his own, far more modest, chair. “Ah. Is that another hundred years gone? Time does fly.”
An expression on his friend’s face, one he might name a pout, were his friend another man. Were his friend a man at all. “You are well aware it is not.”
“Well then. To what do I owe the pleasure?” A smile flirts with his lips. “Dream?”
“I wondered,” Dream intones, “if you might have…questions, after our last conversation.”
“I’ve had plenty of questions over these past centuries,” Hob counters. “Ones which you very studiously avoided, might I add.”
“I am told I can be less than forthcoming.”
Hob can’t help the snort that burbles out of his chest. Something closer to a scowl flits across Dream’s face, and Hob relents. “Well. I do appreciate you stopping in. I’ve got a few, yes.”
“Please.” Dream tilts his head. “Proceed.”
Hob learns more about his friend in ten minutes than he’s learned in centuries. Yes, his friend’s name is Dream, though he has others, none of which Hob can ever imagine using. Yes, he is named Dream because that’s what he’s in charge of, or it’s what he’s made of, or it he is it or it is he. The metaphysical particulars are somewhat lost on Hob.
And yes, Dream is old, older than old, with responsibilities far beyond Hob’s not-quite-mortal ken. And no, it was not Dream who granted Hob his immortality, but rather his sister, Death, who says hello, and doesn’t that raise a whole host of other questions Hob intends to revisit someday.
But on that topic of visits…
“You said you didn’t mean to miss our last meeting in 1989. I wondered if it had something to do with what I said to you at the one before,” Hob comments, forcing his voice easy as a spring breeze, recalling dark clouds and bright lightning.
A heavy pause, Dream’s eyes searching out the window at Hob’s back. “You bear no responsibility for my absence.”
“Right, good,” Hob says, his words almost tripping over Dream’s. “So.” Hundreds of years of questions, and suddenly they’ve fled his mind. He worries at the mug on his desk while he scrambles. “Ah,” he realizes. “Here you’ve paid me a visit, and I haven’t even offered you a cup of tea.”
“I do not require tea,” Dream replies.
Hob chuckles. “Maybe not, but that isn’t the point.”
“I suppose not.” Dream’s gaze wanders around the rest of Hob’s office, lingering on the pewter flagon full of old pens, the diplomas on the wall, the bits and bobs scattered across his bookshelves. “Do you enjoy this iteration of your life, Hob Gadling?”
“Think we’re past you needing to use my full name all the time,” Hob says. “Now that we’re finally on a first-name basis. Dream.”
“As you wish,” Dream agrees airily. “Hob.”
Hob grins. “And the answer to your question is yes. I enjoy it very much. Getting a bit more challenging to keep coming back as my own son.” He waves at one of the diplomas, granted in a name that is certainly not the one he was given at birth. “But this life…the world…it’s amazing. Medicine, music, technology. It’s all still changing. So fast. Faster than anyone can keep up with. Maybe too fast. The last hundred years…I saw more change than in the rest of my life. It’s incredible.”
Dream’s face is perfectly placid. It’s his hands, though, his fingers gripping the armrests tightly enough the fabric folds under them, that tell Hob he’s hit a sour note.
“But,” Hob says, forcing another smile on his face. “You must know by now to expect an answer like that from me.”
“I do,” Dream agrees. “However, it is…” A flash of white teeth past his parted lips. “Reassuring to hear.”
“And what of you, my friend?” Hob asks. “What do you make of these latter days? Have you been enjoying them?”
Worse than that sour note, a tattered bow screeching across violin strings, Hob sees it in Dream’s face. He’s convinced for a moment this will be like their last meeting in the old White Horse, Dream shoving to his feet and storming out. Or like Hob’s dream atop that spire, his friend dissolving into mist.
But Hob blinks once, blinks twice, and Dream remains. Looking like he’d rather not, though, his fingers clenched around the chair’s arms, his shoulders and jaw square. “I find them…vexing, at times,” Dream answers, enthusiastic as a man trudging to the gallows.
Hob makes a sound in the back of his throat. “I don’t think you’re the only one.” He works a few questions through his mouth before he voices one. “Anything in particular?”
Dream’s eyes flit to his, and his lips form a few answers before he voices one, too. “Nothing is as it was.”
“Sure,” Hob allows. “A real shame about the White Horse. Tried to petition the council, but it was too late. A damned tragedy, that place getting boarded up.”
“I am not speaking of the White Horse. I speak of…other things.”
“Ah. Right.” Hob sighs. “That is generally how things go, though. They change.”
A furrow grows between Dream’s dark brows. “I thought you didn’t change,” he reminds Hob.
A full laugh, this time. “Well. Maybe my mistakes don’t change. Maybe my…I’m not certain…my desire for life hasn’t. But a great deal of other things have.”
“You said I had changed,” Dream notes.
Hob nods, picks his way to the right words. “Haven’t you?”
“Perhaps. But…perhaps I should not have.”
“Why?” Hob asks. “Because you’re…” He searches for the word, an impression, a notion, from that dream. “Endless,” he remembers.
“I am.”
Hob shakes his head. “Alright. But that’s not the same as…unchanging. Because you have changed.”
“Is that such a terrible thing?” Dream asks, but it doesn’t sound like the rhetorical question it would be from someone else.
“No,” Hob answers. “It’s not such a terrible thing at all.”
“This does not bother you? That something endless may not be entirely immutable?”
“It doesn’t,” Hob answers. “If anything, it’s…reassuring to hear,” he echoes.
“How so?”
“What would…what would the point of it all be? If it always stayed the same? If we never changed, never grew?” Hob asks. “Sure as hell would have made my life a fair bit more boring, that’s certain.”
A sliver of a smile on Dream. “As always, I find your observations most interesting.”
“Well,” Hob muses. “That was the deal, wasn’t it? I tell you what I think, I get another hundred years?”
Dream tilts his head. “It was.”
“And now? You know what my answer will be. Do we have to keep meeting up so you can ask the same question?”
“No,” Dream allows. “But I…” Hob’s got an inkling of what Dream might say. But he holds his tongue, for once, raises his eyebrows in what he hopes is an encouraging gesture. “Would not be opposed to meeting with you, regardless,” Dream admits, voice barely above a whisper.
Hob doesn’t bother trying to quash his smile. “Well. I suppose I would not be opposed to that, either.”
It goes like this, then.
Dream showing up at the pub on a slow Tuesday night. Ignoring the posted hours on Hob’s door to let himself into Hob’s office whenever he damn well pleases. Materializing in the produce section of Tesco to lay that discerning gaze over the pineapple Hob’s holding.
And here, again. The tower at the cusp of creation, this time standing sentinel over a sea of gilded waves, an ocean set alight. Hob watches the sea, looking up from his peculiar perch hovering a hundred feet away. He sees baby Robyn’s soft golden curls in the breakers below, feels a matching soft curl grow across his lips.
“Did you build this?” he asks when he becomes aware of a dark figure sat a few feet from him, legs also dangling over the roof’s precipice.
“No,” Dream answers. “And yes.”
“Ah. Wonderful,” Hob remarks. “Thank you for clarifying that. Extremely helpful.”
A susurration at his side, Dream making the motions of a sigh. “It is your dreaming.”
“But also your dreaming. Or…you’re dreaming? The dreaming?” He trips over the words that seem so crude, so bounded by rules that don’t apply here.
“Yes,” Dream agrees.
Hob huffs. “Why do I get the feeling you are being willfully obtuse?”
The soft curl on Dream’s graceful mouth now. “Because I am.”
Hob laughs, a gentle sound that burbles from his chest, spins itself into luminous bubbles when it reaches the air. He watches the bubbles sink and swirl down to the endless ocean below. “Great. Aren’t you a delight.”
“This is your dream,” his other Dream insists. “You define its parameters. I merely enable it.”
“But you are really here?” Hob presses. “I mean, not really…really. I mean…” Another sigh at the smirk on Dream’s face. “You know what I mean.”
“I am here,” Dream allows. “At least this aspect of me.”
“But…why?” Hob asks. “Did I…do you have to be here? Because I’m dreaming you’re here? Or I am dreaming you’re here because you’re…here.” He shakes his head. “Bollocks. This is confusing.”
“You are the dreamer,” Dream insists. “This is your dream. I am here because you are dreaming about me. And I am the dreaming.”
“That’s not as helpful as you think it is,” Hob grumbles.
“It does not need to be helpful. It is simply the way of things.”
“But am I…keeping you from doing…whatever it is you need to be doing?”
“This is what I need to be doing,” Dream answers. He continues, at some length, “And, even were it not…I would not mind.”
Not much to say to that, so Hob doesn’t try. Language, that language, doesn’t seem to suit this place. Action, though, that seems more appropriate.
He pushes to his feet, throws a daring glance at Dream, waiting for the raised eyebrow he knows he’s going to get. He lifts a foot, gingerly sets it down past the roof’s jagged edge. His foot hits air, the midnight sky. And sticks.
A delighted shout, and he brings his other foot over to join it. More steps, until he’s a yard from the roof, suspended. He looks down at the sky. Up at the sea. Over to Dream, looking back at him.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Dream asks.
“Oh, very much so,” he answers, practically giggling. He jumps a few times, lands wherever his feet stick.
“Should I tell you to act your age?”
He smirks back. “I am.” More hopping, skipping across the ether, a grin that splits his face in two. “You see, my friend? Always something new to experience.”
Dream casts a considering glance around him. “I suppose.”
“What?” Hob plants his hands on his hips. “Don’t tell me someone else has already had this dream?”
Dream considers that. “Billions of dreamers. Trillions of dreams which form the warp and weft of the dreaming since time began.” His mouth shapes a few words. “And yet…you are correct. This particular dream is…new.”
Hob laughs again, triumphant. “You’re welcome.”
An actual snort from Dream this time, he hears it. “You are too kind.”
“I am.” He spins again, holds a hand in front of him, watches the empty distance float between his fingers. “You know, it’s been so long since I had a dream I could remember. Or at least that I think I could remember. But I guess that isn’t too uncommon.”
“I…know.” Something in that pause, the heavy silence, pulls Hob back around. He considers his friend.
“Oh. I suppose you would. Do you know what they were? The dreams I don’t remember?”
“I…some of them.” Again, that hesitation, a quiet that speaks volumes.
“But not all of them?”
Dream saws his head back and forth. “Not all of them.”
“Why not?” He regrets the question when it’s out, feels the shift, a wind coming from everywhere and nowhere.
“I was…indisposed. For a time.”
“Oh?” he forces his tone flat, tries not to look down…or up…suddenly worried about the not-ground beneath his feet.
“I was absent.” Dream’s voice is equally flat, but Hob has the sensation of being on a gentle river that’s shifting to rapids as it rushes downhill. “The dreaming suffered.”
“The…ah.” Hob picks his way back to the roof, planting his feet with far more care than he did on the outward journey. He continues when his shoes hit the tile, “But, it’s better, now?”
Dream nods, not meeting his eyes. “I have mended what was broken.”
“Well, that is…lovely,” Hob tries. He speaks his next words carefully, like he’s stacking priceless china. “And if…you said the dreaming suffered…so did…are…did you?”
The soft sway of Dream’s legs over the roof’s edge stops. His shoulders tense, his jaw draws tight. “I am well.”
Hob casts a glance over his shoulder, notices a gray mist rising along the horizon. He clears his throat. “Good.”
Dream makes no move to reply, doesn’t shift from his perch, doesn’t turn that imperious stare on Hob, looming above him at his side. Clearly the countenance of a man who has no wish to speak further.
“It’s only…you don’t seem it.” But Hob has never known when to leave well enough alone.
Dream’s head shifts to look at him, a glacier calving. “I do not seem…what?” His eyes are dark, swirling. Hob finds himself leaning forward before he catches it, draws himself back.
Hob shakes his head. “Never mind.” He tugs a stiff smile across his face. “It is always going to be like this here?”
Dream blinks once, twice, and his eyes are a summer’s sky again. “Like…what?”
Hob waves a hand. “Like this. This place. This…tower, this beach. Will we always meet here?”
Dream frowns. “I have met you elsewhere. Your office. The New Inn.”
“No,” Hob drawls. “I mean, when we meet in…the dreaming. Will it always be here?”
“That is entirely up to you.”
“Well, up to my subconscious.”
“As I said,” Dream murmurs, hint of a smirk at the edges of his lips. “It is up to you.”
Hob rolls his eyes. “You would say that.”
“I did.” Dream eases to his feet, unfolding to his full height. His dark coat flares out, edges sharp against the distant gray. He tilts his head, narrows his eyes. “Perhaps you could dream somewhere more interesting, next time.”
Hob looks around him, at a landscape so alien he does not think he could recall it in his waking mind. “Am I boring you, then? Alright. You know, there was this beautiful beach on Cayman Brac. 1905. Course, I spent most of my time on the island dodging this psychotic old numbskull who thought if he ground up my pinky and dropped it in a mug of ale and drank it, he’d live forever. Take him and his men away, though, and I wouldn’t mind seeing that beach again.”
Dream narrows his eyes, lips pursed. “Your pinky?”
“Mmhmm.” Hob shoots Dream a look. “Don’t tell me the twat was right?”
“Most assuredly not,” Dream answers. “But perhaps you should visit the beach again.”
Hob squints. “I suppose I could try. New to this lucid dreaming bit, though.”
Dream hums, considering. “There are other ways. I hear you humans have crafted this new object. I believe it is called an…airplane?”
“Oh, yes, bloody marvelous, those are, did you know you can get from London to New York in…” He comes up short at the smug expression on Dream’s face. “Ah. Right. Wonderful. I’m being trolled by the King of Dreams.”
“You could go to that beach,” Dream allows. “If you wish.”
“Sure. Dreaming it would save me a few quid, though,” Hob counters.
A true smile from Dream, something close to a laugh in his chest. “I suppose. Now. Good morning, Hob Gadling.”
And Hob would say that’s not usually how you bid someone farewell, not when night has settled all around, waiting for a sun that will never arrive. But a moment later he blinks his eyes open to his ceiling, bathed in daylight, and he realizes, in this case, it is.
A bit longer before their next meeting, though Hob scarcely realizes it. He can track time, of course, has been increasingly amused with society’s eternal attempts to cage it, capture it, manipulate it. Sometimes he longs for the days of water clocks and sundials. Then he remembers smallpox and decides no, he much prefers this era to that one.
He’s not thinking about clocks, or orbiting numerals, gears catching and twisting around each other in an elegant symphony. He’s not considering the tenuous nature of his reality, the thin, braided wire that tethers people, keeps them from drifting into otherworlds. He’s not debating the balance of the universe, every rose with its thorns, bright lanterns blazing in an endless darkness, the silence between the stars.
He's thinking: if Dream just appears in front of him again, bounds from the nothing into the something that is the space right across from Hob unannounced one more time, Hob’s going to swinge his new-old friend right on the nose.
“Fuck’s sake,” Hob hisses, scrubbing at a damp patch on the knee of his trousers from when he jolted so hard that he spilled a bit of his brimming mug of coffee on himself. “Would it kill you to give a man a moment’s warning?”
Dream tilts his head, eyes narrowed. “No,” he decides. “But I would find it considerably less enjoyable.”
“Ah, well,” Hob says. “Heaven forbid I deprive you of any opportunity to experience the joy of schadenfreude at my expense.”
“Heaven forbid,” Dream echoes in a tone that suggests he knows far better than most what heaven might think about a great deal of things.
“I’ll have you know, office hours don’t start until noon,” Hob grumbles.
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Dream comments, leaning back in the chair Hob has come to think of as his. The chair’s back ends right at Dream’s shoulders, the elegant taper a colorful frame for the upturned collar of his coat. It’s a look so perfect Hob figures the bastard must have planned it.
“We also have these things called mobile phones,” Hob adds. “Text messages. Email. So you can set up an appointment, instead of materializing in here with no notice, almost giving your oldest friend a heart attack.”
“I am confident you need not concern yourself with heart attacks,” Dream counters.
“Fine. But I’d rather not risk it.” He blots at the coffee stain with a leftover takeout napkin before crumpling it up and tossing it in the bin. “And to what do I owe this particular pleasure?”
A soft smile on Dream’s face, though Hob wonders if it might be a bit strained at the edges. “I found myself in the area.”
“What,” Hob scoffs. “Don’t tell me some poor student fell asleep in the library and had a nightmare about me lecturing in my smallclothes again?”
“I do not believe he counted it a nightmare,” Dream considers, lips pursed. “But no. That is not why I am here.”
“Why, then?”
“Is it so hard to believe I might simply wish to pay you a visit?”
Hob sucks at a tooth. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
Dream answers with a scowl. “I have paid you plenty of visits, these past few months.”
Hob nods. “You have. And I’m not complaining.” His turn to tilt his head, study his friend. “And if that is all you are here for, I will again consider myself fortunate.”
“Why?” The word slips so easily from Dream’s mouth, it’s only his widened eyes that tell Hob it wasn’t supposed to.
Hob leans back in his chair, drumming his fingers on his desk as he does when a curious student asks a piercing question. “I do not have so many friends that I would devalue my time with any of them.” He sighs. “And fewer still are the friends I have that know…me. Where I’ve come from. When I’ve come from. The things I’ve done. The things I…cannot undo.”
Dream drops his gaze, eyes lingering on the rug between his chair and Hob’s desk. Bloody expensive thing, a gorgeous piece Hob picked up in Isfahan before the revolution. He imagines the scowling teenagers who drag their mud-scuffed shoes across it haven’t a clue what it cost. He’s not too upset by that. What does upset him is the look on his friend’s face, scrying through that intricate pattern for some inscrutable insight.
“Dream?” he prods, after a long moment.
“There is…an issue to which I must attend,” Dream provides.
Hob blinks. “That sounds…serious.” It does. Though Hob suspects Dream uses that same imperious tone when he’s speaking about both the fate of the known universe and the week’s cricket scores.
“It is an issue of gravest importance,” Dream adds.
“Anything I can do to help?” Hob asks.
“No,” Dream answers, so straightforward it almost isn’t insulting.
“Ah.”
Dream dips his chin. “It is neither your responsibility nor within your capabilities to address.”
“And yet, here you are,” Hob counters pointedly.
“I did not mean to…” Dream’s eyes fall away. “It is a matter of the dreaming. One which I am capable of resolving.”
“Okay,” Hob prompts again.
“I am capable of resolving it,” Dream repeats.
“I do not doubt you are.”
“And yet I…find that I am viewing what must come with some level of trepidation.”
“Some level of trepidation,” Hob repeats dumbly. He wonders for a moment if he should be stocking up on bottled water. Or building a bomb shelter.
“Yes.”
“Dream.” Hob clasps his hands on his desk, leans over them like he’s advising a particularly recalcitrant student. “What is going on?”
“It is nothing with which you need concern yourself,” Dream answers at length. “As I have said, I am—”
“Capable of resolving it, yes.” Hob frowns. “But here you are.”
Dream’s brows flatten into a hard line. “What are you suggesting?”
“Why are you here?” Hob parries.
“I simply wished to…” The motions of a sigh, even if no air passes Dream’s lips.
“Have a chat with an old friend before you went off to do…whatever it is?” Hob volunteers. “All well and good. Makes me wonder if you might be a bit more concerned about all this than you’re letting on, though.”
“I came to…I was…” Dream works a tongue through his mouth, like a small child tasting something bitter for the first time. “It is no matter.”
“Dream,” Hob sighs. “Any chance this has something to do with why you missed our last meeting?”
Dream’s eyes flash up to him. They’re not in the dreaming, a clear blue sky shines through Hob’s window, yet he swears he hears the rumble of distant thunder.
“This matter is no concern of yours,” Dream growls, a note of warning ringing clear as a siren in his voice.
“I think it is,” Hob counters. “Else you wouldn’t be talking to me about it.”
“It is entirely unrelated to my absence,” Dream insists.
“And you still haven’t told me a thing about that,” Hob replies, a touch crossly. “Which is fine, I wouldn’t expect anything else. But now here’s some other crisis, something you are worried about, worried enough to come here, and you won’t tell me about it, either.”
“It is not of your concern.”
Hob’s lips twist crookedly. “It concerns you,” he says simply.
A still moment, static crackling in the air. Hob swears he sees it again, the first hint of a shattering in Dream’s face, before it settles back into stillness. “I must depart,” Dream announces solemnly. He pushes to his feet before Hob can counter, coat swirling around his knees in a way no fabric could, stalks off like the dramatic git he is.
“Of course,” Hob grumbles. These steps, he knows all too well. He stays seated this time, doesn’t bother chasing. “Dream,” he calls when the other man is half through the doorway. He’s surprised when Dream stops, casts a wondering glance over one shoulder. “When you’ve…whatever it is you have to do. When you’re done. Drop in on an old friend, would you?”
Dream’s head tics to the side. In assent, in refusal, Hob’s not certain. A blink, and Dream is gone, just Hob’s empty doorway left. He stares at it for a long time.
“Fuck,” he snaps.
A face startles into view. Not the one he’s hoping for, this one dark skin under close-cropped hair. A white jacket on that form, a bag slung over one wide shoulder. “Oh,” a soft tenor calls. “Sorry. I can…come back later.”
Hob holds a hand up. “No, Raheem, sorry. I was miles away. Come in. Have a seat.”
Raheem edges in, drops himself into Dream’s…Hob’s chair. It groans under his heft. It’s never let out so much as a whisper when Dream settles into it, just cradles his slim form obligingly.
Hob shakes his head to clear it. “What’s on your mind?”
“Was wondering about this next assignment…”
It’s some time before he sees his friend again.
Hob’s back on that spire, atop a dark roof that claws toward a sea it will never reach. He’s barefoot, his toes hanging over the roof’s curved edge, shrouded in a gray mist so heavy he can’t see the shoreline.
What he can see is Dream, level with him, both a dozen and a hundred feet away. Dream’s feet are planted on nothing save the mist as he stares at that vast un-horizon, his cloak scrabbling greedily at his silhouette, thin and dark, curved like a wicked fang.
“Dream?” Hob tries, but the mist swallows his voice before it can leave his throat. “Dream,” he says again, loud enough to pierce the thick fog.
Dream turns like he’s on a spindle, slowly, until he’s looking back at Hob. Dark hollows blaze where his eyes might be, so achingly empty Hob can’t look at him straight on.
“Dream,” Hob says once more. “Come off there, then.”
Dream doesn’t say a word. A wind picks up, tugs at the edges of Dream’s cloak, blows Hob’s hair across his eyes. Hob holds it back with one hand, stretches his other into the ether. “Come over here,” he insists. “It’s not safe out there.”
I am capable of resolving it, echoing in Hob’s skull, echoing in the mist, though Dream’s lips don’t move.
“I know,” Hob says, ignoring the waver in his voice. “But, just come over here, won’t you?”
“I am capable of resolving it.” From Dream’s lips this time, a low tone that rattles a few of the spire’s roof tiles loose, sends them tumbling down into the unknown.
“Of course you are,” Hob agrees, a thin razor of desperation slicing through his words. “And you can do that from over here, can’t you?”
Dream turns from him. Reaches up into the mist and plucks a star from the sky. Holds it in his hand, growing brighter and brighter, so piercing Hob shields his eyes. He blinks them open an eon later to find Dream gone.
He turns himself, finds only the damnable mist in every direction. He reaches into it, pulls some of it towards him. He looks down at his cupped palm and sees a pile of gray dust before a gale blows in, snatches it from his hand.
The wind grows louder, stronger, spiraling the dust around Hob. The tower beneath him shakes and shudders, twists and rises. Turns in on itself, stretches too long, then it’s bowing under its own weight, imploding like a dying star. Hob stands above it, on nothing, watching it consume itself, until it swallows every brick, every tile, then it pulls in the coastline, and the water, and the gray of that distant horizon.
Hob glances around afterwards, pushes a hand through the fine gray dust that is his entire existence. His eyes search out a vanished horizon. “Oh, my friend,” he sighs, coughing.
He wakes in the dead of night, sputtering and choking on nothing. He levers himself out of his bed after some time and pads to his window, looking out into the darkness. It’s hardly darkness, these days, streetlights and headlights and a few distant windows still glowing. He remembers when this sky was black as pitch, home of a hundred horrors, a dark so deep he wondered sometimes if it might endure forever, absorb the land whole.
That sky is gone, at least here. He loves the city, loves civilization, loves electric lights and indoor plumbing and heated floors. But he misses that sky, some nights. He settles for watching this sky until the sun peeks above the eastern horizon, trying to shake the deep disquiet rattling in his bones.