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whisperprime · 1 year

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Hob has not had this dream in a very long time.

Even before his stunt as a stand in, he hasn't seen it in a while.

He remembers the first time he'd dreamt of that wretched orb. The first time he'd seen Dream - the Dream of the other timeline - within it.

He'd thought it was just a morbid recreation of the story he'd heard. That his mind was just trying to process this horrible thing he'd heard.

He'd descended down into the basement as if in a trance only to become aware with terrible clarity upon passing through a gate that had opened far too easily. He remembered the horror and rage at seeing his friend contained and demeaned in such a way. Remembered the grief that he had gone through such a thing.

Remembered the no small amount of guilt at the fact that he had never looked. 1989 was a poor time to start, but it would have been something.

He had been completely lucid from the moment he passed through the gate, but had retained all the power that came from being within a dream. He'd used it to smudge the circle and shatter the glass.

Dream had later explained - apologized - that he had not meant to draw Hob there. He would have better control next time, he'd promised.

Hob had in turn countered that this was what friends were for: to help each other in their darkest moments. If Dream didn't want his help, that was his choice and Hob would understand, but the immortal human highly recommended talking to someone who could lend him support.

Dream had not been thrilled with the vulnerability that came with admitting he needed help, forgetting asking for it.

Still, when it happened, not once more but twice more, he had given in. Had called Hob for help. Even if it was only subconsciously. To this day, Hob didn't know what he'd said to convince his friend to trust him, but he had done his upmost best to help where he could.

It had seemed like it might be helping.

And then, the Other Dream had died.

And the dreams continued to happen. Not frequently, but they did happen.

Each time, Hob followed the stars down into the basement. Each time he found the same set up.

But, in these sequent revisitations, the orb was always empty.

Hob had heard that the Dream he had known was just an aspect. A point of view. That a new one had come to reside over the Dreaming

He had always wondered if this was a lingering wound that persevered, but didn't affect the new Dream.

Hob never got the chance to ask. He supposed he never would, now.

Hob pulled his eyes away from the cage, turning to face the gate he had been leaning against. He raised his hands and then pressed his palms to the metal. Every time he had come here in the past, he had passed through this gate.

Yet this time, he hadn't.

Since the Other Dream's death and Hob's visits here since, he had always found the gates open, before and after he passed through them. He could always leave at anytime.

But now, the gates were closed. When he presses on them, they hold. He could feel, somehow, that they would yield if he pushed, but there was also the intuitive knowledge that if he did do so he might cause damage.

Slowly, he withdraws his hands. Something is different, perhaps gone sideways. He just doesn't know if it is good or bad. He weighs his options, what little he knows about his situation. Comes to the conclusion that he can afford to wait a bit and see how things progress before making any hasty moves.

It is while he ponders that he feels something shift behind him. There isn’t any sound, per se. Just this sudden absolute knowledge that he is not alone in the dream anymore.

Hob spins around, not sure what to expect. Nothing has ever come in here save for the Other Dream, and he hasn’t been here for over two hundred years, so who--

He spots the intruder and freezes, all thoughts tumbling out of his head in confused fear. There is a familiar figure within the orb where none had been before. Although he is curled up, Hob would know this being anywhere.

“Dream?” The name falls from his lips without his consent. For a moment, he thinks this is some specter, a shadow of the original having taken form within the dream. But nothing like this has ever happened before. He knows how this goes. There is only one Dream of the Endless and for him to be here is for this to be the original. The Dream of the new timeline.

To dream of me is to invite me in.

Hob near catapults himself across the basement in his haste to reach the cage. Dream doesn’t respond to the sound of his voice or to his approach. Doesn’t respond when Hob knocks on the glass to attempt to get some kind of reaction.

“Shit!” Panic is clawing at his throat and Hob is barely keeping to his calm by the skin of his teeth. “Dream, snap out of it.” He again knocks on the glass.

And again he receives no response.

He curses to himself, mutters, “Why is he being affected by this?” Hob presses his hands to the glass, willing the being inside to respond. He doesn’t understand. “This didn’t happen.” So how is it affecting Dream to the point that he seems lost in it?

Hob glances frantically around the room, until his eyes land on the pair of chairs the guards used to sit at. The table is still set to some random hand of cards. All at once, Hob remembers that he isn’t powerless. That the Other Dream had given him the power to help drag him back from the edge of this waking nightmare. It cuts through his panic like a hot knife through butter.

Plan in mind, Hob turns back to the unresponsive Dream. “Hold on,” he tells him. He is loathe to leave, but he must to retrieve the chair. “I'll get you out of there.”

He doesn’t wait for a response. He sprints back across the moat and near yanks up the chair. It should be heavy, but like the three times he’s wielded it before, it’s light as a feather. He pivots, prize in hand, to return back to the orb.

Dream has still not moved. Hob’s fingers flex around the chair, worried. He only had a handful of experiences with this to judge by with the Other Dream. He has no frame of reference for the Dream in front of him. He swallows back his trepidation.

Dream can get mad at him later. As soon as he’s back to himself.

“Got just the thing to get you out,” he says, because he always explains what he’s doing. Tries to use outside stimulation as an anchor, because he’s so far out of his depth. “You might want to move away from this side.”

Like before, he does not wait for an answer. He can feel that time is of the essence and he does not want to wait around to see what it will take before Dream comes back to himself. He swipes a foot through the damn summoning spell, perhaps taking a little vicious satisfaction in seeing it break like he’s never been able to see it in the Waking world.

Coming around, he raises and draws back the chair.

Dream has finally moved. Startled, wide eyes catching his, just as Hob brings the chair around and shatters the glass.

Dream gasps like he’s been under water and has just finally reached the surface. He doesn’t resist as Hob reaches in and gently pulls him out like he’d done with the Other Dream the handful of times they’d done this. Clings tight as he shudders, as if a weight has settled on him.

Dream weights the same as he always does: light in physical form but heavy in concept. Hob’s mind struggles with it, can never get used to it. Bears it regardless, as he makes his way across the moot and away from the cage. He’s just thinking of putting Dream down, when all of a sudden, the Dream Lord seems to just dissolve, shadows slipping through his arms like water.

And just like that, Hob knows that whatever weakness he’s witnessed has passed. He stares at his empty hands and mourns the fact that this is likely the last time he will ever feel that weight again. He lowers his hands and turns in the direction the shadows had slithered away in. Finds Dream, fully clothed and on his feet as if nothing had ever been amiss. Still, he asks, “Are you okay?”

Given past experience, he’s not surprised when he receives no response to his query. He watches as Dream takes in the room. Sees the moment it dawns on him what he’s looking at. What this place is. Hob wonders how much of the truth was contained in whatever he’d experienced when he entered this place.

Dream turns on him with a certain level of hostility. His often blue eyes in the Waking has been replaced by a dark, deep vastness that near screams with barely checked threat. In one instant to the next, he goes from being across the room to bearing down upon Hob.

“If you ever wish to leave here, you will not dodge my questions. What is this place?”

Hob feels a wave of regret, of resignation, for this thing that he could not hide. For this thing that has somehow followed him and affected the being before him. He had so wanted to spare him this knowledge, yet is seems that choice is gone now. “This was your prison, the first time around.”

Dragging his gaze away from those bottomless pits takes Herculean effort, but their pull holds little candle to the weight of his guilt. He looks out across the room, eyes no longer seeing the shattered remains of a construction that only exists in his memory and this dream, but rather the basement as it existed for the last one hundred years. “It's where I was imprisoned, the second time around.”

The temperature around him plummets. It is this that makes him shiver, instead of the way that Dream’s eyes flash with intensity of a distant super nova. The shadows around them darken as he demands, “Hob Gadling, what have you done?”

Hob is all too aware of what this creature can do. Knows there’s so much more he isn’t aware of. But he spent the better part of a century under the knife of a literal Prince of Hell and he feels that entitles him to a little recklessness. It is with this thought that he rounds back on Dream, glaring at him as he snips back, “I saved the universe from being prematurely destroyed.” He draws himself up until they’re nearly nose to nose with each other. “The rules demanded a fair trade and we gave it one as best as we could.”

And oh, how the time line had fought against the changes. But in the end, the changes held. Hob clung to that victory, to the fact that Dream had not spent that century here this time around.

Dream’s expression turned tumultuous in the same way it had just before he’d gone storming off in a hissy fit. Was this ire over the idea that a mere mortal could be a stand in for an Endless as far as the rules that governed the universe were concerned or was it something else? “You have messed with things you cannot understand. There is no telling what consequences you have invited upon yourself.”

This isn’t telling Hob anything he doesn’t already know. He doesn’t back down. “I’ve made my choice. Better me than someone else.” Including you, he does not say, but Dream seems to hear it anyway.

For the first time in their long acquaintance, Dream loses his cool first. To drive him to frustration. “Imprudent human!” The edges of the dream waver as the shadows around them roil with his fury and Hob is very, very nearly is thrown back into the Waking. “Why would you do something so foolish?”

Like a wave, Hob can feel a sudden exhaustion wash over him. They have gotten so very far away from anywhere he wants them to be that he can’t see a way back. Wonders helplessly if there is a way back.

It is with the same stubbornness that urges him to rise with each day, no matter how terrible the night before, that he clings to the fact that he knows in his bones that things can get better, that they always get better. He shifts his weight and makes his decision.

Honesty is sometimes the only path forward.

“Because I love you.”

Silence. Then, “What?”

Hob places his hands on his hips to hide the way they tremble. “You heard me, you great spook. Because I love you.” He’s thrilled when his voice doesn’t even shake.

Dream seems to shake himself out of whatever stupor he’d fallen into, some of the steam taken out of his sails. Something between incredulous and confused crosses his expression. “Do you expect me to thank you for what you’ve done?”

Hob huffs, feeling insulted. “Oh, come off it. Of course I didn’t do it for anyone’s thanks.” He gestures to the ceiling in lieu of the universe at large. “I did it because I wanted to continue to experience everything life had to offer.” He softened, adds, “I would have done it regardless, but, yes, it was a massive bonus that in the process you were spared this experience.” He looks up at this ridiculous, impossible creature, and says with feeling, “Say what you will, but you did not deserve this either.”

There is a war going on behind Dream’s lack of expression. Hob waits, patiently seeing what is going to win out. Braces himself for the worse and he hopes for the best.

Then, “I do not know what you expect to come out of this.”

Could be better. Could have been worse.

Hob shrugs. “I don’t expect anything to come out of this.”

Dream seems to struggle with this. Slowly, as if parsing the words out, he says “And yet you said it anyway.”

Hob nods. “Because you asked why I would take your place.”

Another struggle. Another war. This is clearly not the direction the Lord of Dreams and Nightmares expected this conversation to go. “I am not him.”

I will not give you the vulnerability he gave you, lays like a gauntlet between them.

Hob suppresses the urge to roll his eyes, no matter how good the childish behavior would feel in the moment. It won't help. “I didn't just love him for who his trauma turned him into.” He gestures to the sphere. “I'm not going to lie. He did change after this.”

He brings that same hand around to point at the insufferable git in front of him. Dream's eyes somehow give the impression they have gone cross-eyed, despite having no pupils. Hob would have laughed at the sheer affront coming off him, if this was any other situation. “But don't you dare insinuate that's all it was. I have loved you for seven hundred years. I loved you when you showed me kindness when I was at my lowest and I still loved you when you turned your back on me and walked away. I will likely love you until the day I die. Lord only knows why, but I will.” At this last part, he withdraws, his ire dulling.

Dream, it seems, is not willing to let go of his stubborn streak yet, for he says, “You cannot pick up with me where you left off with him.”

Hob looks to the ceiling as if anyone up there will give him the strength to deal with this terribly, terribly dense creature. But he knows he has done this to himself and he must walk this path himself.

Besides, he thinks he knows what this is truly about. He's seen that look before. Seen that same look on men who would deny themselves what they want most for fear they shouldn't have it.

Well, bullocks to that.

“We were never together. I never told him.”

Dream blinks at him. It's the most off guard Hob has ever seen him. “Pardon?”

Hob, patiently, repeated himself, "I never told him."

“Why?” Why tell me? Why now? Dream doesn't ask, but it's heard regardless.

Hob does not feel like explaining that he had been a coward and as such had missed his chance, so he goes for a close enough truth. “It just never happened.”

The look Dream give him suggested he isn't quite satisfied with that answer, but thankfully, he does not push.

Hob can feel the dream around them start to get the first hints of haziness. The tell tale signs that he will be waking soon.

Dream must feel it, too. The shadows around them grow heavy, to pull at him with almost the same force. Hob knows that if this being before him wishes to keep him here, he will not wake, no matter what his natural circadian rhythm says.

As suddenly as they come on, the shadows retreat. The hold loosens a fraction to where the threat is no longer there, but Hob isn’t quite in danger of prematurely escaping this conversation until Dream is done with him.

“We will return to this matter another time. I will consider the information you have given me.” Dream eyes him up and down, something considering poking through his ire. “All of the information you have given me.”

Hob feels a thrill race up his spine at the implications of that particular line. Before he can respond, however, and because the cheeky git always has to have the last line, Dream commands in a voice that rings with power: “It is time to wake, Hob Gadling.”

And Hob wakes.

Part 12

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