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If you had asked Hob a few years ago, he never would have called his friend, Dream of the Endless, relaxed, or content. Those words would have been some of the last he applied to his oldest friend, and that had only continued to be true the more time went by after they were reunited. But now, contentedness had settled around his shoulders and there was a pleased nature to him that had never been there before. It suited him.
“You look pleased with yourself,” Dream observed, settling into the seat across from Hob Gadling, the echoes of seven centuries past resonating between them. “You have been well, Hob Gadling?”
Hob chuckled and raised his glass to salute Dream. “You saw me only last week, my friend. I reckon that you would know if I had not been keeping well.” He took a deep breath and sip of his beer. “What a difference a hundred years makes,” he said, his voice gentling.
“I have found,” Dream stated, his voice as equally soft. “That my existence continues to benefit from your continued presence, Hob. I enjoy meeting with you.”
Hob grinned, feeling a blush heat his cheeks despite himself. “Even if I had to convince you to meet this often as a repayment of a debt you owed me?”
Dream’s lips quirked a fraction. “Even then, my friend.”
“I feel the same, you know,” Hob said, looking back down at his drink. “Even if you tried to convince me to go back to once a century. I’d fight that tooth and nail. I love meeting with you like this, Dream.”
Dream nodded once, acknowledging the point. It was the perfect segue for the request that he needed to make of the man in front of him, yet he found himself unable to take that final leap forward, even though he knew he could delay it no longer.
“Is something wrong, Dream?” Hob asked, studying his friend carefully. There was something, clearly, that was on his friend’s mind, clearly heavily. “You know if there’s anything I can do to help you, I will. Doesn’t matter what it is.”
Dream dropped his eyes to the table and tapped briefly at the lacquered wood. “I am aware of this. Perhaps more than any other creature in existence.” It had been over fifty years since Hob Gadling had performed the impossible. Had stepped in the way of the Erinyes themselves, had brought Daniel safely to his mother, and had even brokered an arrangement between Lyta Hall and himself for Daniel’s future.
It had been… unexpected.
But it had allowed for a future Dream had never dared to imagine, or even think of. A future where he sat across from Hob Gadling with an impossible proposal. Something far kinder than he ever should have deserved after the cruelty he had leveled against others for so long. However, he was excruciatingly aware of the magnitude of the favor he was about to ask his friend, and forcing himself to do so was difficult.
“Good,” Hob said with a nod and a smile. “As long as you know.” He settled back into his chair. “So tell me, my friend. How have you been keeping? It has been only a week for me, but well I know how impossibly time can pass in your Realm.”
Dream paused and tapped his fingers against the stem of his wine glass. “I find myself at an unexpected crossroads, unsure of how to proceed. As you have faced many such decisions in your life, I thought to seek your wisdom in such a thing.”
Hob sat up abruptly, all of his attention on Dream. “Of course, Dream, anything. What is it? What’s going on? Are you in danger?”
“I am not in danger,” Dream answered immediately, if only to soothe the growing concern from Hob’s face and brow. “I find myself unneeded, and as such, at a loss.”
“Unneeded,” Hob repeated, derision in his tone. “What are you talking about, Dream, you are always needed, you’ve told me how important your function is and-”
“And,” Dream interrupted, his voice soft. “You know that I have been training Daniel to be Dream of the Endless since he was old enough to make the decision about whether he wished to take on the responsibility.” He kept his eyes on Hob, even as he watched his oldest friend begin to panic.
“Have…” Hob swallowed around the agonizing realization, his heart stuttering in his chest. “Have you come to say goodbye, Dream?”
Dream shook his head. “No, no I have not. I have come to ask you about the crossroads I am now facing. I have been given a choice and I do not know what to do.” He knew what he wished to do, what he ached for at the very core of him, buried and hidden deep beneath duty. But once that duty had fallen away, this would be what remained of him, a piece that belonged to him, and not his function. The piece that belonged to the man in front of him.
“What choice?” Hob asked, reaching out to take Dream’s hand in his, even though he knew his friend would consider it an imposition, to not touch Dream in this moment felt wrong. He licked his lips and cleared his throat, keeping all of his focus on Dream.
“Once I am no longer Dream of the Endless, and Daniel has stepped fully into the role, I wish to be there to support him,” Dream explained, dropping his eyes to stare at their hands in the middle of the table. “Either I can shift to a facet, with him in control, always a part of him-” he paused and met Hob’s eyes briefly. “-but gone.” Hob’s hand tightened around his to the pain of what would be debilitating pain for a human.
“Or?” Hob managed, his mouth dry and tears already threatening. “There’s, there’s an or, right?”
Dream nodded once. “Or,” he continued. “I choose to live as this facet permanently. As Morpheus. No longer Dream, but the self that you have known for seven hundred years. As a human.” He paused, pointedly, and gave a faint smile. “While I have no guarantee of my elder sister’s grace, I do not believe she would deny me a final request to live as an immortal, as you are.”
Hob’s heart leaped into his throat and he gave a wet laugh, looking down at their hands again. “My friend, I think you know me well enough to know precisely what my answer would be if given such a choice. I don’t understand your dilemma.”
“If I were to make the choice to live in the Waking World, in your world, cut off from the expertise and knowledge I have, without resources, I cannot imagine…”
Hob sucked in a frantic breath from behind his teeth when he realized the problem Dream was carefully speaking around. “You’d, you’d stay with me, if you wanted,” he blurted in seconds, staring at Dream with wide eyes. “I don’t care if, if it’s for centuries, Dream, just stay, please, please don’t go, I can’t, I don’t want to lose you.”
Dream gave Hob a small, private smile. “I had thought that you would make such an offer, but it is important that you know one final thing prior to committing to this.”
Hob shook his head. “I won’t change my mind.”
“It might,” Dream corrected.
“No, Dream, my friend,” Hob shot back, certainty in every syllable. “It will not.”
Dream paused again and stared down at their hands before slowly and pointedly twisting his own hand within Hob’s, until their fingers were tangled together. “It was not until I thought of never seeing you again, that I realized the depth of my care for you. It is an ardent, desperate, grasping thing, greedy for any and all that you could offer me, and were you to become my guide in this world, I have no doubt that these feelings would only manifest stronger.”
Hob’s breath caught. “Dream.”
“I do not mean to coerce you into anything, only to fully inform you of that which you would so readily volunteer yourself for,” Dream explained.
“Do you…” Hob let out a weak little laugh and tightened his hold on Dream’s fingers. “Do you truly not know, Dream? Have I not been obvious this entire bloody time?”
Dream frowned, tilting his head. “What are you referring to?”
“Dream, I spent,” Hob huffed and shook his head, glad that they had chosen the far corner for privacy. “I spent a decade wild with jealousy when you walked away from me in fifteen eighty-nine. I fell so hard for your smile in sixteen eighty-nine when I said I wanted to live I felt like was flying.” Now that he’d started, Hob couldn’t stop the words that had been hundreds of years in the making.
“I have re-lived that moment, that look from you in seventeen eighty-nine so many times, fantasized about what would have happened had I taken what you offered, that it is all I thought of for decades,” Hob let out a slightly hysterical laugh. “I spent the next century hoping, praying, that our following meeting would lend clarity, only to walk away with a broken heart that perpetuated until I met you again after you missed our nineteen eighty-nine meeting.”
His chest was heaving and the silence, Dream’s silence, was growing, but Hob couldn’t stop here. “A part of me has been in love with you for as long as I’ve known you, Dream. To know that you could, perhaps, return a fraction of those feelings? To know that a part of you might be as greedy, grasping, and desperate as I am?” Hob licked his lips and stared at Dream’s wide eyes and the darkening flush on his cheeks. “I’m tempted to demand you retire tomorrow morning, first thing.”
Dream stared at Hob Gadling, at his heaving chest, his flushed cheeks, and the laughing joy that had been in his eyes from the very first moments they had looked at each other. “You would have me stay with you?”
“Dream, I,” Hob laughed, and looked down at their hands. “I would have you never leave me. I would beg you for the chance to court you, to do anything, bloody anything for the chance to show you how amazing you are. How much you deserve to be loved.”
“I believe…” Dream started and stopped, assessing himself, thinking through it before he lifted his eyes to Hob Gadling and gave him the faintest smile. “I believe I will like that, Hob Gadling.”
Hob stood up, ignoring their half-full glasses, and tugged Dream up and out of his seat, barely aware that Dream was not resisting at all. “I’ll show you just how much you’ll like it,” Hob promised, pulling Dream in closer, pressing his nose against the sharp edge of Dream’s cheek. “You’re stuck with me. This is the choice you’re making. To be stuck with me. I love you, and you are going to be stuck with me until the universe burns itself out.”
“And even longer still,” Dream promised, swaying closer to the heat lingering in Hob Gadling’s eyes, his body already beginning to react to it. “For one lifetime, a dozen, a thousand, is not enough to sate that which has grown over these few centuries.”
Hob laughed in delight and dragged his lips along Dream’s cheek. “Sounds perfect love. Ready to go get started?”
Dream hesitated, aware of the Dreaming in the back of his mind, and Daniel stepping more and more into the role by day. Hob would tell him to be selfish. To take what he wanted, when he so rarely did so. “I would not have either of us wait another moment.”
“Good,” Hob growled, and pulled Dream in those last few inches, kissing him with every single bit of expertise he had spent more than seven hundred years garnering.
A supernova burst in his mind, wild, bright, and ferocious, and Dream felt, for a few moments, that he would be blinded and destroyed by it, but once he let himself go, let go of the tether that had kept him his function and only his function for eons… there was nothing but Hob, and the warm, passionate press of his lips.
Dream kissed Hob until there was a whistle from across the bar, and their lips parted with a wet, slick sound. In his mind, he could already hear the Dreaming beginning to fade, moving to Daniel, to the new Dream of the Endless, and all that was left in front of him, was a lifetime of those kisses with Hob Gadling.
“Kiss me again?” Dream breathed out against Hob’s lips. He would never be alone as long as he had Hob.
“Happily, love. Always happily,” Hob promised, kissing Dream once more before pulling him upstairs to his old apartment above the New Inn. “Now come on. You have a life to begin living, and I plan to help you start off in style!”
As he stumbled behind Hob, a laugh burst free, and Dream, no, Morpheus now, he was Morpheus, felt the sand slip away, and his coat melt from his shoulders. Giddy laughter grew in his chest, his entire body shaking with it as Hob pressed him back against the apartment door to kiss him again. This was everything. Hob was everything.
The door opened behind him, and Morpheus nearly stumbled, Hob catching him seconds later as they hurried to kick off both their boots, meeting again and again for kisses that grew hotter and more desperate by the second. He surged into every kiss, until at last, he was being tumbled into a bed that smelled like Hob.
“Dream,” Hob groaned. “You’re going to-”
“No,” Morpheus answered and blinked. His voice sounded different, now. Hopefully no less loved by Hob, who was staring at him with wide and concerned eyes. “Not Dream. Not any longer. It is Daniel’s, now.” He took a breath, and his chest was lighter than he could ever remember it being. Was this what it felt like to release the burden of his function? To free himself, truly?
Hob nodded once and stroked his thumbs over Morpheus’ cheeks, crawling on top of him to straddle his waist, staring down at him. “I’m here,” he promised.
“You are,” Morpheus agreed, reaching up to tangle his fingers into Hob Gadling’s hair. “And you will call me Morpheus.” He paused, his lips curving upwards in a smile. “Perhaps even Morpheus Gadling.”
Hob groaned and pressed Morpheus back into the blankets on his bed. “Fuck, you’re going to kill me,” he growled kissing him once more, hard and possessive.
Here, surrounded by the scent of Hob Gadling, wrapped in his arms, melting into his kisses, Morpheus realized… he was home at last.