Archive of Our Own

A language does not die with its last speaker. It dies one death before. It dies when you become the only person who knows your words for love, who knows the songs, when nobody speaks it back to you.

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ACT I. (SAUDADE/HIRAETH)

Hob Gadling loves the way living language changes.

He loves how words are picked up and passed along from one group to another, like a lump of unbaked clay taking on a different shape from each set of warm hands that hold it. He only wishes, sometimes, that he could hold onto it for a little longer.

It’s a foolish wish, because if it was granted, he knows he would find himself wishing again to hold it for a bit longer still. Granting it even once would only make him want more, and more, and more, want to clutch a word for as long as his hungry heart beats on from one century into the next.

It would be impossible regardless - he can no sooner speak all his language at once than he can live all his lives at once. It is a gift enough to keep living, he reminds himself, and a gift enough to be able to watch the language changing around him.

Still - he can’t help himself. He misses odd little things. Words and euphemisms and endearments spread out over six centuries and a small slice of the continent, heaped onto his plate next to all the language of the United Kingdom too, clear back to when it was just Engelonde.

Most of them are attached to people he once knew, friends and associates and lovers, which must surely be part of pang of it: the bright wonder of hearing a turn of phrase from someone dear for the first time, whether it was popular or their very own invention; the warm familiarity of associating it with them if he ever heard it elsewhere after leaving, as he always did, ever dying off to keep on living somewhere else and someone else; and, inevitably, ending up the last man standing with their words, clinging onto the memory of them by stubbornly using it still, clutching fading ember of it in his bare palm until it finally grows too queer and cold and dead within the living blood of language to keep on using.

Sometimes he gets a few decades out of it. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

He’ll share them, of course, if he finds it in a primary source somewhere, but by the time language makes it to print, it’s not on Hob’s shoulders alone to remember it anymore. The dearest ones have no documentation he can dredge up. He’s looked. But he chips in anyways, because it’s the closest thing. He presents them as a little gem of trivia in one of his introductory courses, a weekly Saying Of Yore at the start of his slides, and has the kids guess what it might mean first, to warm them up a bit into participating more, offering their ideas, which are so often refreshing and wildly bizarre that Hob remembers why he puts up with the rest of academia.

From a pedagogical perspective it’s all very justifiable. From a personal perspective, he just hopes they’ll catch anew again, that someone will steal it, and breathe it to life again when they tell a friend.

The rest, he stores away. The rest, he slowly loses. The rest, he translates.

Language changes so much faster now. Or it doesn’t. He wonders if it’s a sort of temporal trick of the light, the years speeding up as more pile behind him. He’s too unfond of either answer to actually set about quantifying it or not - but God, it feels like it does. Feels like he witnesses the birth of a word, the transformed meaning of a phrase, sees it for the first time christened in a dictionary, and then just as quick it dries out, gets forgotten again, each appending note next to its definition a shovel of dirt, first (Lit.), then (Archiac) then (Obsolete), and then it falls back out of the dictionary altogether.

He’d muddy it up, if he wasn’t careful, so he doesn’t use older words at all, except during courses, where he can make safe boundaries around things like the shape of U of M’s The Middle English Dictionary, and still he has to check his tongue sometimes. He makes it a rule, and then he constantly finds exceptions for it.

They come easier these days, now that he’s a professor. Before that, he was a businessman with a very devoted interest in 16th and 17th century English literature. Now it’s a role he can perform: the impassioned academic, the eccentric subject matter expert, the lecturer holding forth.

The original pronunciation of Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays has been his cause lately - he considers the Bard of Avon a sort of friend, given their mutual acquaintance, and feels a nearly proprietary protectiveness over his works. He couldn’t bear the grudge of being walked out on for long - he had, after all, received the greater boon. And if Will was going to be immortalized in memory instead of the flesh, it only was fair that they read his words correctly. Hob had gone to a production of Romeo and Juliet in 1890, in part sulk and part nostalgia, and had been appalled to hear the reverent and over-serious way the players said their lines. Received pronunciation, thought Hob, ought to stay on the BBC and away from the boards. It was like trading a crackling, warm, fierce little hearth for the flat and steady glow of an electric bulb. And at least half the jokes were ruined. He’s gotten a reputation for it lately, and at parties, he’s always asked to do a soliloquy or sonnet or two, the proper way, and it feels like drinking something hot and comforting. He’s just very careful to take a long swallow of his actual drink after, taking the time to gather himself, making sure that when he speaks again, he sounds like someone born in the late twentieth century.

If he’s not careful, though, his academic rants borrow too much of himself, bits he can’t possibly share or explain. At last year’s faculty Christmas party, he’d been thoroughly soused and making a case for why there were no good words for brotherhood in the twenty-first century, and everyone had been nodding along, or laughing at his fervor, until suddenly he felt his eyes hot with stupid tears, and he’d had to pass it off with a joke. But after he’d made an excuse to leave the moment it wouldn’t look strange, gone out for a smoke to steady himself, Paul from Classics had come outside a moment later, bummed a cigarette off him, and even smoked with him amicably for a minute or two before touching his arm far too kindly and asking, “Alright, mate?”

Hob had thought, Christ, I need to be more careful, and said instead, “Yeah, alright. S’the whisky, innit?” and made like he was drunker than he was for the rest of the evening, slurring his modern English words around the hot knot of fear and fitful longing that was stuck in the back of his throat.

A moth can’t get to the moon and so it finds flame instead, and Hob finds more excuses in guest lectures and conference presentations and symposiums. Warms himself on the familiar honey-taste of words from three or four hundred years ago. Sinks into Lyonais Francoprovencal, into Middle French, into Old English, into sweet agony, just for a term, just for an hour, just for a sonnet, and always he catches himself at the last second, running headlong into memory and then teetering on the edge, swaying toward things he cannot say, definitions he cannot document, and a language only rooted in the testimony of one.

He never does the recitations drunk anymore. He needs all of his inhibitions to pull himself back from that ledge, to fumble his way back through centuries of syntax and lexicon and vowel shifts and arrive again in present day.

Never even allows himself to talk about old words while drunk, after the last time.

He’d gone to bed that night and laid awake until he was sober again, and longer still, thinking of men whose faces he was inventing because memory had scrubbed them clear, but whose voices he thought he still remembered, whose quiet words of comfort he had once held close, the night before Saint Crispin’s Day, on their way to muddy cold Calais.

Shaxberd had made a popular speech of it, and Hob pretends he can’t remember that one whenever it’s requested.

Hob had learned to write in the sixteenth century.

It had started with his meetings with the stranger, the first century he’d learned his letters, and seen something interesting and new, and thought, I will put this down, and remember to tell him about it. He had written, in the graceless hand of child still learning his forms, ‘pencels of blak lede’.

The thrill of it had stuck with him. In 1589, he reread his whole little book of them, thrumming with excitement over it. They hadn’t got to talking about any of it.

He had stopped writing in the book, piteously unsure if he would even meet with his stranger again. Then he made use of it instead for recording Robyn’s life, a wonder of constant changes: his first steps, his words, his dreams of manhood. He hoped he might treasure it later, when Robyn was older, grown, and gone.

In the end, he had only filled another six pages, and the rest of the book stayed blank. It had been on his bedside table the night he was drowned. It was the only thing he had ever lost that he had tried to find again.

He doesn’t keep proper journals.

Once, an elderly colleague had died on campus, in her office, actually; she’d been part way through editing a submission to Humanities. Hob had found her, knocking on the door and letting himself in, already part way through asking a question, and drawn up short. Her hand was still on the mouse, so absorbed in the act of creation the he imagines Death had to tap her on the shoulder like a wife reminding her partner to eat or drink, and told her it was time for a well-deserved break. He imagined her waving Death off at first and then finally rolling her shoulders and straightening up, away from her body, acquiescing. Setting off to argue with the dead scholars themselves. He’d smiled.

These days, in spite of there being so much less of death - or perhaps because of that - there was a deeper horror of it. They’d called in a grief counselor for the department and everyone had to meet with her at least once. Hob had felt faintly baffled by it, thinking that of all the death he’d seen, it was one of the loveliest ones, but once more, culture had washed around him, like great rock lodged in a riverbed, and changed faster than he had. So he’d tried to keep up, and nodded along when the counselor - who couldn’t be more than forty, he’d thought - had spoken of How Unexpected It Must Be to come in and see his colleague like that, she didn’t even say dead, just like that, as if he’d come in on her changing her clothes or looking at porn, and maybe he’d nodded along too vigorously to compensate, because then she’d hummed and made a little joke that he must normally be the one assigning the work but today she would, and asked him if he ever journaled.

Hob had laughed a bit and said he wasn’t really the type, and she gently but firmly told him to Give It A Try.

So he did, really, and after three wooden and performative attempts that made him feel like the first time he’d gone to university and tried to write an essay, he abandoned it. He skipped out on going onto campus on the next day he knew she’d be back, and that had been the end of it.

He doesn’t keep proper journals. But he still keeps notes, sometimes. After 1689, he began taking notes for the stranger again. At some point it had turned into a habit, a sort of reflexive dragnet. Four and a half centuries of it had given him a messy dialect riddled with old spellings, forgotten words, and shorthand borrowed from several different languages and centuries, delightfully freed from the yoke of autocorrect. A c for c’est for this is, the point of admiration - later renamed the exclamation mark, a scant 150 years ago - ! for emphasis, that he remembers setting into type in fifteenth century, before he even understood the letters. The long s, in favor of the s coiled fat and short. He thought it always more elegant as ſ. And recently, v for very, which seems to have made a surprising and delightful resurgence after a century of torpor. There’s something, he thinks, about a Victorian efficiency being used online.

It’s the only time he doesn’t think carefully of what words to use before he writes, because it’s for shopping lists, paint swatches, annotated recipes - marginalia. He stopped writing them with his stranger in mind after the millennium. They’re plastered all over his fridge, among bits of poetry and translations in French and Czech and Middle English. Small paper detritus, staked temporarily into place by souvenir magnets. Nothing important, nothing meaningful. Nothing bigger than could be easily abandoned. Things like:

teſco tmrw!
milk 🙰 veg for potage 🙰 bourbon cremes

tyme seeds??

spag bol - ſub. wyn nxt time

Nothing it would hurt to see in clumsy hands. He thinks his hand would be illegible to anyone else reading it now. That’s important to him too, these days. He’d found a series of letters he’d written, years before, on exhibit once. They were under glass at the Royal British Musuem, penned in an elegant longhand much improved from his first attempts three hundred years before.

They were well-enough legible, but the interpretive placard had been all wrong about what it had meant. He’d felt dizzy, and left.

They’re in storage somewhere at the British Public Library now, he knows. He fantasizes, sometimes, and stealing them back.

People mistakenly think Hob loses his words easily. He’ll stop, mid-sentence, hunting for something, before resuming. It’s not for lacking, though. It’s for finding a dead word first.

He has a better leash on his temper these days. But when it’s loosed, it’s loosed upon himself, and it’s nearly always for the same thing. It’s when he looks for a word he knew, once, and finds it missing. Careless, he thinks, angry and agonized with the feeling of a word on the tip of his tongue that defies its summons. A word nobody else knows. A word nobody knows, now. An unmarked grave. And it doesn’t matter that he can’t speak it to another, he thinks, in those awful moments. It mattered enough that he knew its shape and meaning in the privacy of his closed mouth. It mattered that it was there.

It’s frustrating to bite his tongue and chase off the perfect word. It’s so much worse, though, when it doesn’t show up at all. When there’s a space where a word should be, fresh enough to notice something is missing, and cold enough to leave no tracks for him to follow.

If languages are preserved with dictionaries, his is written in constantly, joyously, with wondering new pages. If languages are preserved with dictionaries, his is blackly censored, filled with strike-throughs, and if he tries to flip through it, he finds the tattered spine of old pages, torn out. He can’t remember what was there before. So he moves forward. He learns new words. He replaces what was lost.

Hob comes into the department drenched one day, and gets spotted by Bill Calhoun, the visiting lecturer in American Lit, a jowled man with a lovely baritone who’s so affable that it makes Hob feel aloof by comparison and unnerves most of his colleagues entirely. Hob adores him.

Bill salutes him with his coffee and says “Sure is raining cats and dogs out there,” and Hob laughs and bites back saying, No, we fixed that problem ages ago, the trick was to not let animals sleep on poorly thatched roofs.

“Cats and dogs,” he agrees, instead.

He goes to his office, suddenly remembering Luiz Lessa. Googles him before he even sits down, still in his sodden jacket, and sees he’s tenured and grey at the temples now. Still as beautiful. More, actually. He smiles.

They’d met in the nineties, as PhD students, and Hob had already been staring smitten at him from across the bar: a tall man with warm brown skin and hands that moved like swallows as he spoke animatedly about meter in poetry. But he’d fallen for him properly the moment they’d shook hands, and Luiz had said he was from Rio de Janiero and pronounced his name - Rob - with a soft H at the front, like Hob.

Like, without knowing it, his oldest and dearest nickname, the one his mom and sisters had called him by. Like the one he couldn’t use often, because it had been strange and distinct enough by the fifteenth century. Like home. Luiz was preparing for his thesis defense on poetry in the Brazilian diaspora. Hob was having what he was jokingly calling a ‘midlife crisis’ and switching from business to history. They’d argued about Canterbury Tales and Luiz had grinned at his frustration. Hob took him back his flat that night.

He falls easily, and quickly, and he’d fallen for Luiz again when he read Canção do Exílio to him. Exile Song. In its original Portuguese first, then the ‘least lacking’ English translation, by Ascher.

My homeland has many palm trees, and thrush songs fill the air. Hob was sat in a flat less than forty miles from where he was born, while he listened and felt his chest squeeze tighter and tighter. He hadn’t left his homeland. But his homeland had left him, hadn’t it? England’s old smells. England’s old language. He had been exiled, by the forces of time and change, from those who would understand him. His own fourteenth century diaspora of one, he’d thought wryly. A land he only carried inside of him, and no longer existed to return to. Luiz had been smiling by the time he finished reading the last lines. Don't allow me, God, to die without getting back to where I belong, without enjoying the delights found only there, without seeing all those palm-trees, hearing thrush-songs fill the air.

“You understand it,” Luiz said, before Hob could speak. “I can tell.”

Hob had swallowed thickly. “You know,” he said. “I think somehow I do.”

Then there was the night Luiz had almost understood him. Had come closer than anyone, before or since. They’d been in bed together, and Hob must have let himself go away a bit, into memory, because Luiz had put down his book and asked him what it was.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Don’t worry yourself.”

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Luiz parroted. He shook his head and smiled. “Isso aí é tapar o sol com a peneira.”

Hob laughed, because he didn’t understand the words but he heard the tone of them. He repeated it carefully back, determined to get it right and commit it to memory, until Luiz finally nodded. “There you go,” he said, dark eyes twinkling with mirth.

He pulled Luiz closer. “Alright, how are you teasing me, then?”

Luiz chuckled. “It’s like - ah, peneira, how would one say it? The thing for flour, when you bake.” He shook his hand a little.

“A sieve?”

“A sieve!”

“You’re calling me a sieve?” he asked, laughing.

“No, no. You are using a sieve to block the sun.”

Hob could translate that. “I’m obvious, you’re saying.”

Luiz laid his head on Hob’s chest and looked up at him. “As obvious as the sun still shines on a man holding a sieve over his head like it’s a parasol. What is it you’re longing for, hm? A place? A person?”

“Longing, am I?” he replied. His pulse picked up a little, and he tried to keep his face neutral. “Maybe you’re just used to seeing longing because of your studies.”

Luiz raised his eyebrows, smiling. His eyes crinkled a little at the corners, the beginning of crows’ feet. He’ll be beautiful when he’s old, thought Hob. He was sorry he wouldn’t be able to see it.

“Ah, again!” exclaimed Luiz. “Like that. You get this look.” Luiz clutched his chest and contorted his face into a mien of bright-eyed yearning that was certainly not Hob’s alleged look.

“I don’t,” he protested, then adjusted his goal at Luiz’s incredulous expression. “Well, it’s not that bad.”

Luiz only snorted. “You are so much more obvious than you think.”

Hob groaned and reached for a cigarette, just for something to do with his hands. Luiz rolled off of him and took one too. He lit them both up, then took a deep drag and held it in his lungs until he felt the wash of nicotine ease him a little. He let it out as a gusty sigh. He’d never had a lover who had seen it as longing, and not just being strange, or sometimes melancholic, if they saw it at all.

He’d never had someone who knew what they were looking at. He realized he wanted to tell Luiz more. So he had.

“I miss home,” he began. Luiz frowned in confusion and he shook his head. “I miss what it used to mean. What it meant. Not the place of it, but a place at all. I miss a mother tongue I’ve forgotten because-” and he stopped himself, about to say, no one else speaks it “-because it was never spoken in my time. Lost diaries. Forgotten people. Abandoned languages. The little spaces where all the living used to be, a hundred years ago. Two hundred. Six hundred, even.”

Carefully, he’d explained it as feeling like he belonged in the past, sometimes, like it was a hypothetical. That knowing there was so much history - his history - that went unwritten - words, unremembered, that he cannot use - made his heart ache.

He knows someone who might remember the words. One friend, if he could call him that, who seemed to know everyone. Hob’s not sure he’ll see him again, though. He had told himself at the millennium he would stop waiting. He hadn’t. But that bit of him was buried too.

He remembers, also, that his eyes were stinging after, and Luiz had kissed his cheeks, then put his hand on Hob’s chest. “All that longing has to go somewhere, huh?”

“Think I’m just old,” he said, and smiled in earnest, savouring the bare honesty of it. Luiz nuzzled into his temple.

“Still handsome,” he murmured. “I like the silver. It’s distinguished.”

“It’ll look good on you too,” he replied, unable to stop himself.

Luiz smacked him on the arm in protest. “I’m thirty!”

“Give it another ten years,” Hob had said, laughing. “People will be calling you distinguished.”

When Luiz passed his defense that spring, he went back to Rio to teach. He left Hob with a copy of an old photograph, and written on the back:

Looks just like you! See?
The past is always with us.
Nothing is really gone.
Quem não tem cão, caça com gato.
You will be a brilliant teacher, old man.
-L

He flipped the photo back over, and touched the faces of the men in his company standing around him. It was unlabeled, but he knew it. The 4th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment. Fall 1914. Mons.

Hob had looked up the Portuguese, hands still trembling. Those who don’t have hounds hunt with cats.

He’d reached out to Luiz by the university e-mail, and asked him for his new number. Then he called, long-distance.

“Cats, eh?” he said, when Luiz picked up. His heart had ached a little to hear the sound of his laughter over the phone, instead of next to him.

“You like it?”

I had forgotten what Arthur looked like before Ypres. I had forgotten how tall Francis was. I had forgotten how young half of them were. He swallowed. “Yes. It’s incredible. How’d you find it?”

“A carioca friend in London was doing research on the pal battalions of the Great War. He found it first. Told me he’d seen a photo with a guy that looked just like that older Englishman I’m always with. Is it your grandfather, maybe?”

“I don’t have photos of my grandfather,” said Hob, which was true. “He looks like he could be a relation,” he added, which was not. “I looked up the translation, by the way. What does it mean? It’s not enough to know the words.”

Luiz laughed again. “See, I knew you would say that. I needed to give you a reason to actually phone me, Bebeto.” Hob felt the guilt twist up a little in his gut. He’d told Luiz, of course, that he was bad at staying in touch, and not to expect anything. He tried to make it easier for them that way; for all the people he’d have to leave first, one way or another. “It means to make do with what you have.”

“I’ve historically been poor at that,” he said, but his self-effacing smile didn’t make it through the phone line, and he heard Luiz sigh with exasperation that he hoped was mostly fond.

“Many people can’t go home, Rob,” he said, patiently. “And none of us can go to the home that lives only in our parent’s or grandparent’s memories. But we can write about the memory. We can share it.”

Hob hummed. “You’ll be a brilliant teacher too, you know.”

And they’d talked about their classes and plans, until Luiz had to go, and all the while Hob had wanted to ask: Why do you think it is I struggle to make do with what I have, when I have so much? He wanted to ask: When I touched you, could you feel how much I wanted to hold on? Could you tell how dearly I want to keep things that aren’t mine to keep?

But he can’t, so he hunts with cats. He translates. On good days, he thinks of himself as a knight errant, on a noble quest. On days like today, memory singing through him, words beating against his chest, swarming in his mouth, tongue waiting to be bitten again like a cowering animal, he suspects it’s his price: that his language, lacking his own gift of immortality, must be buried, over and over again, and each time, a part of him with it.

At the tail end of winter break, a holiday meant for time with the family he does not have, he breaks into the two hundred year old French wine. It’s corked. Tastes like wet newspaper. He drinks it anyway. He reads Chaucer aloud to his empty flat, just for the warm sound of it and the dipthongs that taste like home. He thinks, I am my own dead language.

Then he has a biting hangover the next day, because immortality did not spare him of that, and he swallows some ibuprofen, and goes to the university, and teaches the best goddamn introductory lecture he’s ever given on Middle English to a hall of bleary-eyed first years.

A week later, Hob marks an analysis of Tennyson’s Ulysses, and thinks about the beauty of I am a part of all that I have met. He thinks about outliving all you meet.

Well, almost all.

He thinks about outliving most of yourself as well. Outliving the words you used to describe the world. He doesn’t really change, not him. Can’t afford to.

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ACT II. (LE RETOUR)

One day, in spring, he comes to the Inn.

Hob looks up and he’s there, and the relief is blinding. He thinks tu m’as manqué, fuck, because you were missing from me feels more true than I missed you ever has. English missing was ruined for him the moment he learned the French way of it. Longing is meant to be a reflexive verb.

It would be a bad faith translation, even for him. He tells himself this is why he doesn’t say it.

He thinks at last, and that’s a doable one. So he smiles, says, “You’re late.”

His stranger smiles back and tu m’as manqué, tu m’as manqué, tu m’as manqué rings through Hob like carillon bells.

“It seems I owe you an apology,” say his stranger, still standing. “I’ve always heard it impolite to keep one’s friends waiting.”

His stranger sits down, and after six hundred and thirty-three years, introduces himself, because friends should know each other’s names.

Dream does not go back to missing from Hob again.

The first time Hob sees him standing outside of the lecture hall, he can’t hide the expression of shock. For a moment, it’s mirrored on Dream’s face too, like he’s surprised Hob has actually found him, even though it would’ve been impossible to not find him, standing like a dark shadow among the bright hurry of students. He is, incongruously, holding a takeaway coffee cup.

Hob grins at the sight, and Dream recovers himself and mildly says, “I am given to understand that friends share each other’s company more often than once a century.” The corners of his mouth are curving upwards. He looks satisfied with himself.

Dream hands him the coffee and he takes a sip of it, then tries to decide what the more bizarre novelty is: his friend making something like a very dry joke, or bringing him a coffee just the way he likes it.

“How’d you know?” he asks, as they walk off campus.

Dream glances at him. “Such knowledge is within the purview of my function.”

Hob does not say, you sound like an android from an early sci-fi novel, but it’s a close thing. Dream has never answered a direct question about who he is, only corrects him when he’s wrong, so instead of asking what his function is he just bumps his shoulder against Dream’s. “Ah. The immortal patron of warm beverages, is it? I was close, then, with saint.”

Dream huffs. “You would assign me such a petty station?”

“Knowing everybody’s coffee order is hardly petty. Could make a lot of friends, that way.”

“I have no need for friends.”

“’Course not, Prince of Hot Cocoa.” He bumps his shoulder against Dream’s again. He’s distantly worried he won’t be able to stop making excuses to touch him now.

“You are being purposely obtuse.”

“Friends tease each other, Dream.” And the last time I made a proper earnest guess about you, I didn’t properly forgive myself for over a century, for how much I’d distressed you. Dream looks uncomfortable beside him, and he gentles it. “I’d like that, if you would. To not be bloody serious with you.” He’d like a lot of things with Dream, actually. But it would be a start.

“If you were any less ‘bloody serious’,” says Dream, with audible air-quotes, “I would think you aspire to write comedies.” He looks at Hob and his lips quirk in amused indulgence. “Is that to your liking, friend? Do you feel teased?”

Hob trips over his own feet and Dream catches his arm. “Uh,” he says. The urge to kiss the smirk off his friend’s face has just caught up with him and is now crashing greedily around his ankles like a riptide. He firmly starts walking again.

Dream continues, oblivious. “Do not mistake my indifference to levity for the incapability of performing it. I am the Prince of Stories, not Hot Cocoa.”

Hob laughs, until he sees Dream staring blankly at him.

“That wasn’t a joke,” he says, not quite believing his luck. Dream raises an eyebrow a fractional, unimpressed distance. Giddiness bubbles up in his chest as he scrambles for better words. “Sorry. I think I expected to never know. Makes sense, though. Knowing everyone’s stories. Being a patron of the arts.” He figures he’ll fit in the bits about supernatural powers and immortality in due time.

“I have been uncommonly reticent,” says Dream. “For a friend.” On someone else, it might have sounded apologetic. But princes, thinks Hob, are meant to be haughty.

“Well,” he says, trying to smother a manic grin and utterly failing. “It’s early days, Prince of Stories. There’s bound to be an adjustment period.”

As with all good changes in life, adjustment period or no, Hob becomes accustomed to it all horrifyingly quickly.

Dream wears the new mantle of friendship as solemnly as that of his office. He shows up on campus at least weekly, preferring to sit on a bench in George Square, right between Hob’s walk from his lectures to his office, and solicits the pigeons while wholly ignoring the solicitations of several of Hob’s own grad students, faithless bastards, not that he can blame them for their taste. When Hob comes up, both pigeons and students scatter, and Dream waits until Hob is standing over him before he slowly tips his face up, just like Hob had, once, at the White Horse, so many years ago, and says, “Hello, friend,” and each time Hob thinks he might spontaneously catch alight from affection.

The way he likes his coffee, and later, the knowledge of the lovely boulangerie that sells his favourite croissants, Hob learns - after pleading “How?” around a mouthful of buttery crumbs - is plundered from his daydreams. Dream’s function isn’t just stories, evidently, but all the narratives spun in the waking and sleeping mind. King of Nightmares and Dreams, he’d told Hob, which Hob supposes he might’ve guessed, from his name, did it not somehow seem even more fantastically hopeless than pining after a mere vampire or demon.

Hob had asked him things like, Do flowers dream? and What dreams do people have the most? instead of How much do you know of men’s individual dreams? How much have you seen of my daydreams? He doesn’t want to be a prude about it, only there’d been occasions, particularly in the late eighteenth century, where he’d had daydreams that weren’t about coffee, or croissants, and he wants to know if he should be apologizing to Dream. He wants to know if he’s allowed to daydream about him now. But Dream says nothing on it, so neither does he. He’s had more practice not saying things now: almost two hundred and fifty years’ worth. He won’t allow himself to fuck it up this time.

One day, Hob accidentally notices from afar that Dream always sits a little off-centre on the bench in George Square, as if already holding a Hob-shaped spot next to him. It keeps him awake that night. He gets up and fitfully opens his work on translating Erben’s Kytice into English. He’s on a poem about a lover coming back from the dead for a year and a day.

It doesn’t help him sleep at all.

In the first hundred years, that distant century he remembers as fear, and disbelief, and horror, and beneath it all, an untrembling sharp-toothed joy, braver and smarter than the rest of him, he had left his second meeting resolved of two things: to better please the stranger that gave him this gift, and to lose a great deal for having it. He had. But he had not understood how he would lose his own language. Had not prepared for hearing words change around him the way his friends aged; slow and impossible to stop. It is harder to part with than the people he’s loved, because they’re still people unto themselves, but his language is his own, with no one else to take care of it, and that still is not enough to keep it by his side.

He wonders, again, about asking Dream. He could never, he thinks. Couldn’t risk losing that hope. Couldn’t risk losing him. Couldn’t risk looking back and finding too much of it gone. An island of himself where there were once mountains, connected to others, now eroded and unrecognizable.

Dream shows up in other places, too, outside The New Inn, although never inside again, after that first day. It would be less disconcerting if he’d had the decency to at least chain smoke, but he just stands there, like one of those statues people put outside their homes for good luck and protection from robberies. It’s mostly protecting them from doing good business, but the way Hob’s chest sort of crackles with electricity whenever he spots him there makes it impossible to care.

“You don’t need my invitation, you know,” he says, one day, grinning and walking past him with a carrier bag filled with citrus for the bar. He steps over the threshold and then turns to Dream and asks in mock-horror, “Unless you do?”

“I do not,” says Dream. “I did not want to impose upon your hospitality.” His voice does not go up at the end but it’s somehow still a question.

And Hob thinks of how his friend always shows up outside, wherever he is, and he says, “Oh. Oh, no. Please do. Impose away.”

Hob, of course, is used to the contemporary language and culture of Englishmen, where please do means alright, but he’s speaking to someone who is evidently neither contemporary nor actually English, and Dream takes it literally, as a plea to impose upon Hob and his hospitality, and Hob finds he cannot be upset about the mistranslation at all. Even if he sometimes nearly jumps out of his own skin to come into his flat and see Dream sitting in his kitchen, or leafing through his books.

This is also how Hob finds out Dream has been engaging in the art of translations as well.

This is how Hob finds out Dream had arrived at keep one’s friends waiting despite starting from being imprisoned. Hob is too comfortable, speaking to him in his own flat, and makes some shite joke about a third of their hundred years being through already, and thinking he’d never get a chance to catch Dream up on photocopiers or smartphones, and Dream looks so gutted for a moment that the rest of it dies in Hob’s mouth, and he puts down his cup in a nauseous wave of shame and starts to say, “No, it’s alright, I didn’t mean-” and Dream just shakes his head to stop him.

Then he says, looking right at Hob, “I understand you are not meant to lie to one’s friends either.”

Hob bites back cheerfully saying, Oh, I lie to you all the time, to lighten the mood and tell a truth that sounds enough like a joke.

“Listen,” he says, “It’s alright. If you were just upset with me. I was being an idiot-” and then he catches himself, realizes he should be the one listening, not babbling, and asks, very, very softly, “What did you lie about?”

Dream tells him, unfaltering, as if he was reading aloud from a composed letter. His voice does not change in the slightest, but by the end his eyes are bright and he lapses into silence, looking at Hob, unblinking, and Hob belatedly understands he’s waiting for a pronouncement, a decision, like a student caught out cheating, and his pale jaw is working, and he thinks he’s betrayed Hob for having spent months being friends without first excising his pain for him.

There are no words, or too many, or none of them are right, but he can’t be silent a moment longer or Dream will leave anew. He reaches across to Dream like he’s drowning again, and then he’s standing up, crossing the table and thinking fuck it and saying, “Dream, pocem prosimtě,” come here, please, you, in desperation, not even hearing that he’s departed from English, and Dream looks stricken but allows himself to be gathered into Hob’s arms.

After a moment, Dream’s arms twine around Hob’s waist, like he’s decided this, too, is what friends do. Something inside of Hob lurches sideways and slides horribly loose. Dream’s chest is heaving - no, not Dream’s, his chest, no matter, the problem is it’s still not enough because he can’t cover his friend with his body alone. He has to patch all the gaps with words. He lets the anger and guilt and grief pour out of him on frantic tongue. He thinks he’s soothing Dream but he distantly hears a ragged edge to his own voice, like he might be coming apart.

“Shhh, shhh, no, no, t'inquiète pas, tranquilo, I’m here, s’alright. Wouldn’t suffer those whoreson cunts to live, y’know. I’ll burn that place to the ground, my dove, maket me your kene man of armes, and I’ll kill them and salt the fucking earth, yeah? I will, I will. Oh, myn dereworthy frend, oh, my Dream, my darling, you mustn’t be sorry, not for this, s’not your fault, was it? You didn’t need to tell me. Shhh, shhh. Neboj, c’est bien fini, it’s done. Alles gut. S’okay. S’gonna be okay. Todo va a estar bien, je te promets, my friend. Shhh. Shhh. I didn’t lose you. I didn’t lose you. Vous estes ici. I’ve got you. I do. I’ve got you.”

Hob would keep going, would tear every page out of the entire glossary of comfort that he’s acquired over 600 years, would burn it all to warm his friend, but Dream’s arms have fallen away and he’s gone rigid in his arms, more still than even before, and Hob wishes he didn’t know what that sort of stillness meant, but he does.

A reassuring constant then, isn’t it, his ability to say too much, say the entirely wrong thing to his friend. “God, I’m sorry. Made it worse, haven’t I?” he says. “I’m sorry, Dream. I don’t know why I’m going to pieces myself, rambling nonsense like this.”

Hob extricates himself from Dream and stands up. Dream doesn’t move. His gaze is fixed on his lap. It’s like Hob wasn’t even there in the first place.

He sucks in a firm breath and turns back to the counter and to put the kettle on. “Right. I’m making tea again. For me,” he says, and sneaks a look over his shoulder. Dream is still sitting at the table, back to Hob. “For you, if you’ll stay.”

Dream turns in his chair, and looks up at Hob. His eyes are red. “You would call it nonsense?”

“I’ve made you more upset,” he says, by way of explanation, because that’s what makes the value of his words, doesn’t it, if they make people happier, make things easier, and he’s used them wrong and made it worse.

He notices, too, that Dream doesn’t say if he’ll stay.

“You have not,” Dream says, then looks aggrieved. “I am lying again.”

He pauses, and continues, words heavier than before. They push themselves right into the part of Hob’s chest that had just crumbled. “I do not need these words. I have heard all of them before. Countless times in countless dreams.” He looks at Hob, and suddenly stands, steps towards him. “And yet never at once. Never from one person. Never,” he says, and pauses again, “Never directed at me.”

“Oh,” says Hob. Dream is in his personal space. He’s frantically trying to do the sums of it: running his mouth, making Dream upset, Dream approaching him, Dream with wonder in his voice and anger all over his face. Dream reaches past him and removes the kettle from the burner, and takes him firmly by the shoulders. Hob abandons his efforts.

“It is different, to hear them like that,” says Dream.

“I’d imagine so,” he says, around a lump in his throat. How long would he have lived if nobody had ever comforted him?

“You are a singular creature. And you would extend me your comfort in every tongue you have known.”

“Of course. Always, old friend.”

“Then tell me. How long would you have kept this from me?” asks Dream, and suddenly the math adds up. “How long would you have denied me your full self? If you had not thought I needed it now?”

Somewhere from another decade or three to little shy of eternity, thinks Hob, with a queasy flush of guilt.

Dream does not wait for answer before he continues. Hob thinks he must know. “You have always so loved change. I thought you abandoned your dialects. I thought you forgot language as easily mortal men. I did not even know you spoke any other than English. Are we not friends? Am I not worthy of you outside of pity?”

“No,” says Hob, “No, no, that’s all wrong, not at all, it’s just-”

Dream cuts him off. His voice is thunderous. “You think I am not capable of understanding, then.”

“No,” he repeats, helpless. No, that’s the worst bit. It’s only him. It’s only ever been him who could, after that first century.

“Then show me. Let me know you.”

“You already know everyone from looking at them,” he says, desperately.

“Not in their own waking words,” says Dream. “It is a parlor trick. A pale shade. The way the story is told is what matters. Even when the events are fixed. Even when the end is known.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” he says. “There’s too much,” he adds, when he means to say you will see too much and there’s too much at risk in showing you.

“You are lying,” says Dream, looking betrayed. “You think I could not understand. You think I am too distant from humanity. As though I do not know the feelings that have led to the birth of every single word you guard from me.”

Hob’s face is afire. It’s anger or grief, and grief would be twice as mortifying, so he grits his teeth and takes a long breath through his nose. “Christ, Dream, you’re making assumptions.” Then he has to swallow down a sob and thinks maybe he had no choice after all. “No,” he says, “I think you could understand. That’s the problem. I think you’re the only one who could.”

“Why?” asks Dream. He’s worse distraught than before. “Why then keep your words from me? Do you think I would not cherish them? It is a marvel, Hob. The stories you could tell with such a language. The stories told by it already. You are a marvel.”

Hob doesn’t cry often for sadness, but he does for frustration, and his vision is going wet and blurry now. Dream will make him say it. But he can’t. He doesn’t want to. He will not say it if he might be right. He knows enough of assurances made, unpaid. His heart will break if Dream promises him anything. Dream should not be bound to him instead of the truth.

“Please. Please,” says Dream. “Myn ful dere frend,” he says, in a lower tone, and Hob shudders in his arms at the endearment. “Is it not lonely? Let me give you comfort too. Let me know your language.”

Hob shakes his head. “Yes,” he says. An awful sound of desperation claws its way out from his chest. “But it would be even lonelier if you left. You only just came back.”

Dream’s face softens. He makes no reassurances, only asks, “How would you intend on causing that?”

“It’s been so long,” he says, as steady as he can. “Just being only, only what there’s space to be within a normal life. I’ve been parts of myself for generations. I hardly know the whole anymore. There’s only ever been one who I could consider sharing it all with. I told myself I would tell him the next meeting, and the next, and I waited too long. And now I don’t- I don’t know if I am-” Hob ducks his head and winces a bit, then tears it out all at once. “I do not know if I am still fair to look upon, Dream. No one has looked in ages.”

Dream is looking past him, at his fridge, tacked with all the minor flotsam of a human life.

Hob continues. “And if I spoke freely I don’t even know what I would say because I don’t know what’s all there.”

“Come with me,” says Dream abruptly.

Hob takes his hand. He falls easily, and quickly. He would follow him anywhere.

═

ACT III. (VIA LUCIS)

He’s in an enormous library, and for a moment, he forgets everything else, and just stands awash in wonder. It feels holy, vast. It feels ancient. It smells like more than paper and wood. Shelves reach into the distance like a city of skyscrapers, and rise toward the ceiling higher than he can make out. He would compare it to a cathedral, except it seems closer to a vision of heaven. It is, he is certain, not an earthly place. When he finally speaks, he whispers, and knows he couldn’t bring himself to speak any louder.

“This library is a dream, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Every dream, of every library.”

Hob has never studied the ancient world, but he’s got friends who did, who do, and he’s heard them talk about libraries found from millennia ago. Bogazköy Archive. The Library of Ashurbanipal. The Great Library of Alexandria. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Cuneiform tablets, papyrus, vellum, parchment. He breathes in the more-than-paper smell and the hair raises on his arms. 

“It is more still,” Dream continues. “It contains all books and stories that have ever been dreamed or written. Nothing is lost to the Library of the Dreaming.”

“You know, there’s people that would kill for this,” he says, trying to lighten the terrifying reverence that’s stopping him from drawing a full breath.

Dream only looks at him, serious. “Yes.”

His voice is different here. He is different here, thinks Hob. Taller, paler, stranger. When he speaks, it sounds like an edict, and sinks into his skin like tar.

Hob follows him down the row and around the corner to another. He’s working up the courage to ask Dream to take him to the English Literature, 1400-1500 C.E. section, that he might read some of the books he laid type for, in the original blackletter that had stained his fingers, when Dream suddenly stops before a shelf. Dream turns on him.

“Here. Look first.”

He’s holding out a small book bound in leather, with gold tooling and cloth fastenings. It looks old. Ostentatious. Hob doesn’t recognize it.

“What is it?”

Dream presses the book into his hands. It’s warm. Like it’s alive, here. “I am not the only one who can understand. You can, Hob. This is belongs to you.”

“I’ve never written a book,” he says. His heart is in his throat.

“You have. You have dreamed of this particular book for years.”

“No, I haven’t. I don’t - I don’t write like that.”

“You did once. You do still. When you are not thinking about it.”

“You said you didn’t know me, in my own words. But they’re right here.” Panic is coursing through him like a hare.

“I have not read it. Not any of them. I will. If you allow me.”

“Any of them?”

Dream gestures at the row of books where he pulled out the volume. “You have lived remarkably long.”

Hob scrubs a hand over his face. He’d nearly forgotten the conversation that brought them here. “I- I feel like I should be wearing gloves,” he says. “I’m- my palms are sweaty, Christ, and I think I’m going to cry.”

“You cannot damage the books of the Dreaming.”

No, Hob thinks, wanting to laugh, except that will make him cry. Of course not. I’m stalling.

His hands are shaking when he unties the cloth fastening. There is only one book, really, that he’s dreamed about for years. There is only one book he’s ever wanted back. He can’t make himself look down, so he looks at Dream instead.

“It’s yours, Hob. Read it.”

He forces himself to look at the first page, and makes an involuntary sound in the back of his throat. He thinks he wants to see it so badly, that’s why it must be there.

“Is this a trick?” he asks, not looking away from the words. They’re less messy than he remembered them, more careful. Like a printer would write.

“No trick,” says Dream. How many centuries now had he imagined it wrong?

“Pencels of blak lede,” he reads, without looking back up at Dream. “I learned to write, y’know, before 1589. I wanted to put things down, to remember to tell you. So I wasn’t just, just going on about chimneys and playing cards. Have I told you that?”

“No,” says Dream, a strange catch in his voice. “You have not.”

“I’d thought it lost for so long now.”

“Nothing is lost. Only buried. Forgotten. Left in dreams. Left here.”

“You were talking about the great works. About clay tablets and ancient manuscripts, and-”

“All works, Hob. All stories.”

He sinks onto his knees and flips the pages until he gets to the ones that are just Robyn, with dates and details he’d lost long ago. He’d forgotten so much. Remembered so much not quite right. His eyes blur. He looks up.

“There’s more, you said?”

Dream is looking at him the way he’d looked at him in 1689, after Hob had said he had so much to live for. Surprise, he’d thought, then. Wonder and relief, he thinks now, knowing his friend’s face better. Dream wordlessly takes down dozens of books, laying them in stacks before Hob. More than he’d even known to miss.

He’s already started reading when Dream speaks, above him.

“May I?” His hand is hovering awkwardly, already stretched out to take Hob’s first book, his book of changes for his stranger. His book of Robyn. Hob is faintly surprised he didn’t just help himself to it. It’s his library. It makes something ache terribly in his chest.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, of course. It was meant for you, anyway.”

Then he looks back down and allows memory to rise up and engulf him. One book, and then another, and another. It feels like a wave crashing down on him from behind, tossing him into rocks and then dragging him back out to sea. There’s so much of himself. Poetry, in Middle English. A list of observations and theories on his stranger. Sonnets started, abandoned. Pastiches of Rumi. Framing stories about friendship. Love notes to a hundred lovers. Would-be love notes to one would-be lover. Dashed down furtive, shy. Things that were buried, straightaway, in the light of day, instead of the passage of centuries. But written, once. Remembered, here. Because they were stories. Because he has, forever and always, been a dreamer.

Dream is saying something again, distant.

All he can hear is his own voice roaring in his ears, speaking back to him through time. All the petty, small minutiae of it, all those things that make life living and not just historical record. The voice of ghosts, his voice, the way it sounded, long ago. It’s curious, it’s callous, it’s compassionate, it’s awful, it’s loving, and it’s him, every bit of it. Every shred of life he’d forgotten, tucked away, or translated over and over until it lost all meaning.

Then Dream’s hands are on his face, making him look up, and his friend’s words suddenly take meaning more than sound, the way written words turned from shape to ideas when he had learned to read.

“Peace, Hob,” Dream says again, and he’s wiping Hob’s cheeks, and he realizes he’s still crying only when Dream puts his hands on his shoulders and he feels them shaking beneath his touch.

I’m okay, it’s alright, he wants to say, but he can’t quite form the words under the weight of it all. Nothing was gone. Not really. Only heaped upon with soft forgetting of centuries and the rough touch of misremembering. His tongue is a stumbling revenant. His head is clogged with the mud of a thousand unburials. A legion of ghosts are inside him, all alive again.

All he can do, looking up at Dream standing over him, brow furrowed in concern, is grasp onto the words he’d first written about him - no, not even written, but dreamed of writing, yearning, night after night, before he knew how to put down words. He smiles up at him. “Min straunger with derkest cloth an heere. I fol-hope we schul be frendis dere.”

“No foolish hope,” says Dream.

Then the smile fades from Hob’s face as he remembers himself. “I can’t go back now,” he says, slow and stilted, pressing down hard on the rising panic in his chest like it’s a bleeding wound. He doesn’t even know if he means to knowing myself with so few words or to the place where I cannot use all of them. It’s all been pulled forth, all spilled out. All the centuries of him. Never could he bury it all again, not at once, not at all.

He doesn’t realize he’s speaking it all aloud until Dream joins him kneeling and firmly takes his hands. “Do not. Let me hold it with you. For you.”

“Dream,” says Hob, choked.

“I would do more than read your words. I would learn the tongue of you, that I might speak it too. Is that not what friends do?”

Hob had watched a heart surgery once. He remembers seeing the rib shears taken out, thinking they looked a bit like his garden loppers, big long handles for leverage and a small curved blade at the end, good for pruning tree branches, except the shears were all cold surgical steel. The surgeon had cut the breastbone and then opened the rib cage to reach the heart. Hob remembers the sound, and now he thinks he knows the feeling. Like he’s been cracked open and exposed. Like new arteries and veins need to be sewn onto him because now there’s too much, and Dream is offering to take it.

“I am already a vessel to all dreaming things. I would make a part of myself a vessel just for you.”

“I couldn’t take up an entire part of you like that,” he says, weakly.

“Do you not understand how you already do? You could. You will. It is an honour you give me. A gift of surpassing rarity. A new language. If you would not return it into yourself, let it spill forth. I will keep it safe always.” Dream is fierce. He is urgent. “Whenever you will it, you can dip back into it. Drink from me like a stream. Give me a way to fill your cup as you would fill mine now.”

Hob had always heard the euphemism a force of nature used as a laudatory exaggeration. The sort of thing said at endowment speeches with open bars. He understands now its original intent: neither praise, nor hyperbole, but the awe felt when facing something that looked like a person and felt instead like a storm.

“Please, I-” He doesn’t know what he pleads for. Dream does, he realizes, when he drops Hob’s hands and embraces him in arms like steel, a perfect mirror of before. Dream presses him so close that Hob can feel the frantic expanding of his own ribs against his friend’s chest that moves not at all. He clings.

He learns the sound of thunder murmuring into his ear when Dream says, “If your mind be fevered now with all the words you remember, speak. If your mouth be frantic, make use of it. Tire every tongue you have known upon me.”

It’s another edict. It is also a promise, and an offering, and a plea of its own. Everything he says sounds like vows, he thinks, absurdly.

“If you host my language, you’ll become my home, Dream,” he says, voice breaking. “Do you know that?”

He knows this feeling. This fear of the unknown, and underneath, the part of him, sure and hungry, scenting something on the air that it wants, that it would do anything for.

“Yes,” says Dream. “I will it. I would be named your bower. Your hearth.”

“My castle. My bastle. My holdfast. My keep.”

“Yes,” says Dream. “And you, a garden inside. Kept for six hundred years. A marvel.”

“A garden?” He flushes. “I’d have you look. It’s not in the best shape. But it’s yours. Whatever blooms.”

“Yes,” says Dream, again, his lips nearly pressed against Hob’s neck.

“Only don’t go missing from me again,” he says, into Dream’s shoulder. “Don’t you dare it. I’ve missed so much of myself too. Or go, but promise you’ll come back. Je vous attends. I would atone, for meaning to suffer my tongue alone. To say tous ces wordis olde and phrases queer, kept away from you, min frendis dear.” He hears himself speaking faster and faster, gaining momentum, until the terror of what he’s doing can no longer keep up. Until he’s falling once more, easily and quickly, held fast in Dream’s arms.

“Come home, Hob,” says Dream. “Come home to me.”

“Oh, min herte. You’re the centre, you’re the root. The sun, the night-stars. My gleaming pleiades. Every journey I have taken has been a journey back to you.”

“Then let your language be a map.”

And still he cannot say it aloud, cannot say I love you, not in any language. It catches inside of him, a too-large creature picking up all the burrs in his throat. He speaks of other things instead first, speaks in ways he hasn’t spoken in decades or centuries. Hob speaks to him of brotherhood in the words of a soldier of Agincourt, of community in the words of the eighties club scene in Berlin, of friendship in every tongue. Of liturgy in every religion he has known. He loses track of what languages he’s using, but he knows he’s talking about church organs and bells and minarets and whirling dervishes. About spring in Norway and summer in England and autumn in Spain and winter at sea, about snowflakes falling and dissolving into the dark water that swallows it all.

And as he talks, rough and certain, he feels himself circling closer, and he feels Dream softening around him.

He knows he’s talking about thatched roofs and hearth fires, about feeling the weight of the key to your apartment in your pocket, about hundreds of window-scenes of secret lives winking past while on a train going through the suburbs of Tokyo at five in the morning. He knows he’s talking about looking up and seeing Dream standing before him at The New Inn.

He knows he’s talking now about home. Found in waiting arms, and a waiting language.

He’s talking about hearing thrush-songs, and seeing palm trees, ones he’d thought were gone forever, or permanently altered by the greedy touch of memory, like a statue smoothed by superstitious touches. He’s talking about being brought to life, about Sleeping Beauty and Galatea and Christ hisself, about holy exhumations and rolling the stone aside and the way the sun feels on his face each morning after a day he should have died. He’s talking about the Library of Alexandria and ruins as old he feels, discovered anew. He’s talking about being found, unburied, understood, and trembling at being deemed worthy of understanding.

He can’t go back. He follows that part of himself that wants nothing more than to go forward. To lick flame across them both, to consume ancient forests, to forget every border he’s made between his love and the rest of him, between his love and his friend. He lets his words outrun it all.

And when he finally stops - voice raw, chest heaving, feeling like a foaming horse - Dream says nothing at all, only pulls back and presses their foreheads together. He begins murmuring in languages Hob has never heard, but they make pictures he sees in his head, so clear that they send a dizzy swoop of vertigo through him. They need no translation. It is the same feeling, over and over again. Dreams of sailors navigating by the stars. Dreams of pilgrimages, reunions, and lost gardens, found. Hob himself, in moments across centuries when he hadn’t even realized Dream was looking at him, amber portraits he’s never seen but know must be true.

Hob feels the heat of his own breath on Dream’s face. “Oh,” he whispers. “Oh, my Dream. My prince, myn man. My house, my heart.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” promises Dream, in a different language each time, one bleeding into the next. “I have you. I have you. I have you, Hob, all of you, in all your words.”

“Dream,” he says.

And he means to speak again, he does, but Dream tilts his head, slow and deliberate, and kisses Hob, catching his lips parting on the words I love you.

He doesn’t mind. He returns the kiss. It’s his finest translation yet.