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scifrey · 5 months

Note

you requested more Keepsakes prompts, and I have to say, I LOVE the way you write Eleanor. perhaps some little scene from her married life with Hob? general domestic bliss? or something less blissful, like getting into their first bad argument and figuring out how to deal with it?

alternatively, Hob and Morpheus go on holiday and Morph is very bad at taking vacations...

xo @hardly-an-escape

Oooooooooh. What an excellent prompt. Thank you!

Keepsakes: A Kissing Bough

Fandom: The Sandman Series: Hob Adherent Series Rating: Slightly Spicy. Please curate your experience accordingly. Pairing: Hob/Eleanor

Hob and his wife have been charged with finishing the decorations before Christmas Morning and the start of the Twelvetide celebrations.

Eleanor's parents call her 'Nell' at home. It is a common enough diminutive for Eleanor, as common as 'Hob' had been in the mid 1400s, when it seemed that every Robert he met went by it.

The problem is, Hob didn't know that was her nickname. They'd been married eleven months, and he'd been calling her 'El' the whole time.

But how was he to know? The Giffords only ever called her Eleanor in public, and called him the full 'Sir Gadlen' or, 'my son-in-law', even after his marrying into the family.

No friendly "Robert-my-boy!"s from Master Gifford as Hob had secretly hoped for, as his own father had once chortled while thumping him playfully on the shoulder. The man still resented Hob for his lack of old-family connections, for all that he'd mellowed toward Hob after seeing how seriously Hob took his duties as Husband and Father. And where Master Gifford led, his wife dutifully, dolefully followed.

Not even a nice cordial "Robb dear" from Mistress Gifford in all those months.

So it is quite a surprise when, after the elder Mistress Gifford's after-supper lamp had finally burned down, and she declares her old eyes too weary to continue her needlework by firelight alone, she calls Eleanor 'Nell'.

Her husband had gone straight to bed after their meager supper, grumbling heartily about the privations of the Advent fast and how a morning of eggy pies and the Twelvetide feasts could not come fast enough.

With no husband to chivvy along before her, Mistress Gifford rises from her stately chair by the hearth in the Great Hall, and bestows each of the three Gadlens arrayed on the piled furs on the floor before it a fond kiss on the forehead. One to Hob, who helps steady her with a gentle hand on her elbow as she stoops, her own hand on his shoulder, to offer the kindness. Then one for her daughter, sat opposite him. And the last to her grandson, dozing with all the abandon of a small creature who knows that it is utterly safe and utterly loved, in his moses basket beside Hob's knee.

As she kisses them, she murmurs, "Happy Christmas Robb, Nell, my wee little Redbreast."

"Nell?" Hob asks, as soon as his mother-in-law has creaked her way out of the room. "Why have you not told me you are called Nell?"

"It is grim," she pouts. "It sounds very much like knell , wouldn't you say?" This is accompanied by a theatrical shudder that makes her bosom jiggle, and so burns its way into Hob's memories for that alone. "Death knell."

"Ah, never mind that. Death's a mug's game," Hob says, and cups her fire-warmed cheeks in his palms to bestow his own kisses on his wife. "I'm never going to die, so you shall never need ring out for me." Eleanor giggles as he digs his fingers into her hips for leverage, and scoots her closer to him, so he can bury his face against the pleasing softness of her neck. "Though you may keen in other ways for me, should you like."

"Hob!" El laughs. "Pray, do not leave a mark , we have to sit at the top table with my father in the morn—"

He had promised El that he would tell her his secret when they'd been married forty years, but here, sitting by the fire in the Great Hall, surrounded by warmth and plenty, the proof of his devotion to this life wheezing out the sweetest little snores a babe could make, he was tempted to break that oath and confess all.

There was something about the Twelvetide that encouraged confession, even now as a Protestant celebration, without a confessional to be had in a Catholic church.

"Enough," El gasps at length, pink-cheeked and panting prettily. "We have work to do, and if you wake Robyn I will be very cross with you."

The elder Giffords had left their daughter and son-in-law, with their youthful energy, to finish the kissing boughs before Christmas morning. It was well on midnight now, the feeble light from the rush-tapers dwindling and the fire in the big stone hearth beginning to fade to nothing but toasty-red coal. It was just the right sort of fire for toast.

Hob says as much.

"It is always one appetite or another with you," El huffs with a roll of her eyes, but rises. "I shall go to the kitchen, but I will share not a morsel with you when I return if these last boughs are not woven when I return. And do not throw the remaining greenery into the fire to make it look like you finished, Robert Gadlen," she scolds, catching him thinking that very thing. "There are to be twelve Crowns of Green, and I know how to count."

Hob plucks the hem of her skirt off the furs, and brings it to his lips for a revenant kiss. "As my Queen commands."

She frees herself with a smirk and an imperious tug, and sways away to the kitchen.

"There, Robyn my lad," Hob says to his son, who has opened his dark eyes just long enough to take in the spectacle of Hob's oath. "That is how you keep your wife happy. Learn the art from me, my fine wee apprentice, and you will make of me a very indulgent and biddable grandfather in no time at all."

Robyn smacks his lips, clearly unimpressed with his father's training, and returns to sleep.

Hob is in the process of tying off the ribbons of the final garland when El returns with a napkin bundle consisting of a fresh bottle of wine, an old loaf of bread, and a tiny pot of new butter.

Hob prefers old butter, likes the tangy burst of salt on his tongue, and his darling wife knows this. As such, she has also nicked one of the leftover bundles of sea salt that are meant to be gifts for her father's servants at his annual St. Stephan's feast, so Hob can powder his toast as he likes.

This is what love is, he muses, as he cuts them slices of bread with his belt-knife, and El retrieves the toasting forks from their hook by the hearth. Old bread, and stolen salt, a sneaky taste of butter before the advent fast is officially over, and a babe sleeping with his little milk-pout mouth gaping open like a little boor.

As Hob threads the bread onto the fork tines, and holds them carefully over the coals, El busies herself by tidying up the leftover sprigs of greenery. Bringing the winter growth indoors to remind the world that no winter lasts forever, that life persists and waited under the snow even now, is a tradition older than Hob himself.

He's seen Twelvetide traditions come and go, but this one persists, as immutable and comforting as knowing that in a year ending with eighty-nine, Hob's Stranger will be waiting for him.

It is nice to be younger than something.

El bundles her posy of leftover holly and mistletoe, finishing it with a crimson-red ribbon, then stands and dangles it over his head to coax a kiss out of Hob. He leans back against her legs, tips his chin up obligingly, and lets her fold down to meet him.

"If you continue to distract me, I will burn the toast, dearest wife," Hob murmurs into her mouth.

"That would be a waste," El agrees. She releases Hob to his duties, but does not relinquish the posy.

They eat toast, and brush away the crumbs and butter grease on the napkin, and share the bottle of wine between them, and laugh, and whisper in hushed voices. El holds the posy over the moses basket, and they kiss Robyn's fat cheeks. She dangles it over her head, and Hob kisses her eyelids, the tip of her nose, the dear swell of her chin. She loops the ribbon on his belt, and takes him in her mouth. When he has come to his pleasure with his fist jammed in his own mouth to prevent waking the baby, he hooks the posy on her belt and breaks his fast in the cool darkness before the dawn.

In all, they have quite a splendid Christmas morning indeed.

Like her mother before her, El chivvies her boys up to bed before the night grows too light. Robyn wakes long enough to whimper for his own break of fast, and Hob cuddles El up between his legs on the bed so he can hook his chin over her shoulder and watch Robyn's eyelashes flutter as he drinks his fill.

Morning will come soon enough.

The Christmas cake would be served to mark the official end of Advent, Hob's father-in-law would get his eggy pie, and they would all go to church so Eleanor could show off her new son to her old parish. The days of the Saints would be filled with acts of charity, feasting, dancing and delight. Someone would find the Bean in the Bread and be named the Lord of Misrule, and they would play silly games, and drink too much, and wrestle, and jest, and sing. On the Twelveth Night, Hob would gift his wife with the handsome leather-bound notation book he'd commissioned for her, a place for her to record her favorite composition. To Robyn, who was too young to know what presents and Twelvetide were, he would gift a handsome toy duck he'd spent the Advent carving. It had slappy leather feet attached to little wheels with hobnails, which clattered and flapped when one towed it along on a string.

And then the decorations will be removed from the house in order to preserve the good luck accrued through the Twelvetide, and the Gadlens would bid the Giffords a Happy New Year, and tromp home to their estate on the unfashionable south bank. Hob would review the profits for the year with Mr. Fletcher, his steward, and visit his warehouses with a gift of ale and an afternoon's leisure for his dockworkers, and come Candlemas, he'd join his groundsmen in rolling up their sleeves and readying the fields to feed the estate anew on Plough Monday.

But for now, Hob will keep his peace.

Christmas is not a time for such a confession as the one that teased at him.

"Dearest Nell," he says. "Darling Nell. My sweet call to ruination."

"No, no, you brute, stop calling me that," she gasps as he wriggled the three of them down into a comfortable nest of feathered pillows and thick wool blankets.

"My ruin?" Hob asks, mouth resting against her nape as Robyn stretched and unlatched, offering his fist to his father now that his tummy is full and he is ready to be spoiled in other ways.

Eleanor rolls over to hand the baby to Hob to wind.

"That name, you wretched, wretched man," she complains, burying herself into his side as he pats Robyn's bottom obligingly. "Call me Nell again and I shall really make you regret it."

"If that is your command, my queen, my wife, my Eleanor." He kisses her crown, her forehead, her shoulder with each oath. "Sweet El."

He expects her to reply to him with haughty teasing, but when she does not, he shifts Robyn out of the way to look at her face. She is already asleep.

"You see, my wee lad?" Hob whispers to his son. "That is how it is done."

Robyn spits up on his shoulder to show his appreciation for the lesson.

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scifrey · 1 year

Text

Carpe Diem

Status: One-Shot

Series: the Hob Adherent series

Fandom: The Sandman (TV 2022) Includes some comics canon, and some cameos from the wider Gaiman-verse (including the Good Omens and Lucifer television shows), but it’s not necessary to know to enjoy the story.

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Discussions of grief and in-canon character death.

Relationships: Morpheus | Dream of the Endless/Hob Gadling, Eleanor | Hob Gadling’s Wife/Hob Gadling (past)

Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Hob Gadling, Lucifer, Patrick the Bartender, Crowley, Aziraphale, Johanna Constantine, Matthew the Raven

Summary: Hob turns six hundred and sixty-six, invites some fellow Immortals to his bar to celebrate, and receives a gift from Satan herself. Or, the Key to Hell was always going to Be a Problem(tm).

Set between the epilogue and chapter one of Cling Fast.

READ ON AO3 OR READ BELOW:

Hob tells Patrick he’s turning thirty-six.

About five minutes before the party is set to start, he takes immature delight in adding a tiny little x2 between the 3 and the 6 on the poster wishing him a happy birthday with a sharpie. Normally Hob doesn’t make much of a fuss about his birthday–it’s too easy for his fellow, aging humans to start tracking them that way–but it’s May 1st in the Year of Our Lord 2022, and Hob Gadling is turning six hundred and sixty-six years old.

He figures that deserves a party.

They close The New Inn for the private event, and Patrick, grumpy bastard that he is, refuses to hire in a catering staff so he can enjoy himself, too.

“It’s your birthday, Bob,” he says, as Hob is tying off the last of the bunting above the banquettes. “I’m not having a stranger back here screwing up your orders.”

“We do need to hire a server before the summer, though,” Hob points out, jumping down and wiping the tread-prints from his shoes off the leather seat. “And a new kid for the kitchen.”

“Well it’s not happening any time today, so just… let me celebrate you from my happy place.”

“Fine, fine,” Hob grants with a smile. Patrick is very, very good at his job. He also has an anxious fear of crowds, when there isn’t wood and fridges and pint-glass washers between him and other people. “But tell me you’ll try to relax a bit, please. It’s my party, and I want you to have fun.”

Patrick gifts him with a set of bowfingers and turns his back to resume prep. Hob wonders what the Signature Cocktail du Jour is going to be, with that many sliced limes, peaches, and strawberries.

Hob is generally very pleased with himself and the world. He’s in a university and profession he loves, he’s inspiring young minds and hearts towards kindness and generosity to their fellow humans, he’s very slowly restoring the White Horse one city council fight at a time, he is master of The New Inn and it’s domain, and he is swiftly becoming best friends with a magical talking raven.

And, of course, in the nine months since Morpheus has broken free of his prison and returned to Hob’s life, he has become a fixture of his Tuesday afternoons and no small part of his attention and affection besides. That's something worth celebrating, too. Hob's Stranger has somehow, wonderfully, become his friend. And he’s agreed to come today, which is even better. Hob has been getting better at couching his requests in dares, and highlighting his pleas with sad puppy eyes. The two things Morpheus, humanity’s facet of Dream of the Endless, seems to be weak against are a bet, and Hob showing any unhappiness or disappointment.

These facts are carefully recorded in his mental List of Things I Know About The Stranger. The list is growing longer, slowly but surely, which is thrilling in itself. Hob is starting to feel like he knows Morpheus, for a given value of ‘knowing’ when it comes to interacting with a singular facet of anthropomorphic personifications of vast universal concepts.

He’s also not above using this knowledge to his advantage, although he’s careful to deploy this hoarded wisdom to his own advantage very, very sparingly. No point in tipping his hand this early in their fragile friendship.

Hob is immortal, he’s happy, he loves his life and the people in it, and it’s his birthday.

What isn’t there to celebrate?

The first guests arrive around happy hour, and clump together on one of the banquettes. They’re his colleagues in the History department, with the addition of a PhD hopeful who’s clearly tagged along in order to get into Doctor Gadlen’s good graces before the mad race for a thesis supervisor begins in the summer. Patrick knows some of them, as Hob’s dragged them here from the university often enough, and is happy to take care of them while Hob fiddles with the music.

He's curated a playlist of his favorite songs from the last six and a half hundred years (the ones he could find recordings of, of course), and damn anyone who complains that the mix is weird.

Hob’s offering up beer and wine on the house, as well as soft drinks for those who prefer it, and platters of nibbles. Word must get back to the school because soon a second wave of professors and TAs slide through the door. The maxim is entirely true: academics are cockroaches and will pop up anywhere free food and booze are on offer. Hob’s happy to welcome them in, even if he only knows a few of them on sight, and even less by name.

A party is a party, and it fills him with joy to know they’ll be going home full and happy. Hob is High Priest of the Last Temple of Morpheus. It’s his duty to ensure everyone who comes through the doors of The New Inn leave in a state of mind and body to rest peacefully and fully.

Hob’s colleagues are joined soon enough by some of the bar regulars, folks from the social charities and organizations that Hob works with to keep the people on his little patch of city well-cared for and housed, and a few people who serve on the same Heritage Protections board as he’s a member of on behalf of the White Horse.

But there’s one particular person he keeps craning his head around to see, every time the little bell above the door jangles. The one particular person who has not yet arrived. Hob distracts himself with gracefully accepting presents he very specifically told people not to bring, offering up cheek-kisses and handshakes in return for the collection of cards, wine bottles, and novelty teacher mugs.

The sun sets, bringing along with it Johanna Constantine, and Ric the Vic, both of whom Hob knows peripherally through the Goings On (™) of London. They offer him their congratulations, and slide into one of the tables in the corner to enjoy their free libations and pretend strenuously that they’re not not planning to leave to fuck in the next few hours.

Hob had spread word through what passes for a grapevine in the sparse community of Otherfolk of the city that they, too, would be welcome at Hob’s birthday party. After all, they’re the only ones who’d understand–and enjoy the irony–of the number. He doesn’t actually expect many of them to take him up on it, but manners are manners.

All the same, he’s fairly sure he sees some of the Doors slipping in and out between his supply cupboard and the bar with a platter of pigs-in-a-blanket, and Bod Owens chatting up the PhD hopeful by the loos. The Marquis de Carabas’s coat catches his eye and Hob turns to welcome him, only to come face-to face with a very different imposing nobleman in a long distinctive coat.

“Happy Birthday , Hob Gadling ,” Morpheus greets him. He’s got the world’s tiniest potted cactus cradled in his palm, and he holds it out awkwardly to Hob. The tips of his ears, mostly hidden by the puff of his dark hair, are delicately pink. They’re the same shade of the seductive-slick curve of a conch shell, of the secret inside curve of his lips when he pouts, the tip of his tongue when he chases a stray drop of wine in a startlingly mortal gesture.

It’s adorable.

It’s not fair .

Hob really needs to get this stupid crush under control.

“Aw, is this for me?” Hob asks, delighted, as if the cactus pot wasn’t already embraced by a silky red bow.

Morpheus just raises his eyebrows, as if to say, Are you daft? so Hob takes it. He wonders if it would be too forward of him to buss a kiss off Morpehus’ cheek in thanks, as he has been doing with all of his other gift-givers this evening.

It’s a step more intimate than the hand-holding they do when one or the other of them needs comfort during a difficult confession. But Morpheus is Hob’s friend now, and it’s how he greets his other friends. Morpheus deserves no less. He decides to go for it.

The King of Nightmares takes the kiss with startled good grace, and Hob pulls back quickly so he’s not imposing on Morpheus’ personal bubble. His friend can get prickly when he feels his sovereignty threatened, or his independence violated, for very understandable and obvious reasons.

He fiddles with the cactus, turning the pot around in his fingertips and admiring the single dusty-purple bloom at its apex. He hopes it’ll get enough sunlight in here.

“Where’s Matthew?” Hob asks, to fill the awkward silence.

“Behaving extremely poorly for a denizen of his station. ”

“Come again?”

“ Out front, entertaining some of your regulars by repeating filthy words for peanuts,” Morpheus says, amusement and disdain warring in his tone. Morpheus is forever despairing over Matthew’s constant desire to be in the spotlight.

Hob laughs, delighted, and chivvies Morpheus over to the bar for a glass of his teeth-suckingly sweet wine. He directs his friend around to the empty place where the bar meets the wall beside the tiny area cleared of tables and chairs for dancing. No one has moved to that side of the pub yet, so it's empty of the press of dreamers that Morpheus sometimes finds overwhelming.

Hob slips behind the bar to pour Morpheus's libation himself, ignoring Patrick’s eye roll. He doesn’t understand why Hob wants to be the only one to touch the wine. Sure it’s expensive, but it’s not like Patrick is going to pour it wrong or something.

But for Hob, it’s a ritual. It’s a gift.

It’s an offering to his friend and god.

It means something that Hob is the one who pours, who presents, who proffers.

Morpheus takes the cup with all the dignified grace that the gesture demands, and backs into the shadows to enjoy it in peace. Hob moves the cactus to pride of place on top of the coffee machine, and goes about fetching himself his own first drink of the evening. Now that Morpheus is here, he can finally relax and indulge.

“Don’t get any ideas above your station,” someone hisses at the little plant, and Hob peers around the machine to find The Bentley Snake hunched forward on his elbows, propped up behind the hidden corner of the bar, whiskey in hand. His dark red hair is shorn short on the sides this time, a long standy-uppy flop at the top, and he’s wearing the latest in a long line of painfully slim-cut black suits.

Sometimes Hob wonders if he’s doing Immortality wrong, being the only one of the lot who seems to like wearing more than black or white.

“Please don’t threaten my new plant friend,” Hob asks him.

“Needs ssssssome threatening,” the Snake says, sunglasses trained on the cactus. “Thinks its high n’ mighty just cause it sprouted in the Dreaming.”

Hob processes this as he pulls a pint for himself. “You know about the Dreaming?”

“Sleep, don’t I?” the Snake mutters.

Hob refills the Snake’s whiskey glass, and clinks his pint off the Snake’s tumbler. “I don’t like to assume.”

“Oi, I sleep, don’t I, Lord Shaper?” the Snake says, with a jerk of his chin at where the bar meets the wall.

Morpheus is little more than a black shadow and starshine eyes. He must be feeling a bit crowded, to have retreated so thoroughly. Hob doesn’t blame him–it’s starting to get stuffy, what with all the bodies and the salt-rank whiff of booze and sweat. The music is a touch loud now that there's so many voices competing to be heard over it, and Hob is thinking that now’s a good time to open the windows, let the pre-storm breeze that’s kicking up wash the place fresh.

Though he doesn’t point it out to the man, Hob’s Stranger has been different since his return.

While before he was reserved and formal, now he’s skittish about touch, always buttoned up to the throat in whatever clothing he manifests for himself, and reluctant to allow himself to be crowded or contained. They're working on it, with long walks along the quay or visits to farmer's markets, but overcoming trauma is never a fast process. Even the occasional therapeutic hand-holding Hob imposes on him has to be well telegraphed, or Morpheus will shake him off without realizing he’s done so.

These are all very understandable and normal reactions to the torture he’d suffered at the hands of Burgess. But while Hob has done his best to comfort and guide Morpheus toward healing in his limited, mortal way, it’s not like he can he can force the God of Sleep to make an appointment with a headshrinker.

Hob flashes a glance over at Colonel Williams, by the front door, who is one of the social support folks Hob knows from helping the unhoused get back on their feet. She specializes in suppressed trauma and PTSD, and Hob wonders if there’s a way he could maneuver Morpheus into an ‘accidental’ conversation with the woman sometime tonight.

“ So deeply that I cannot oust you from my realm for decades at a time, Serpent, ” Morpheus rumbles, and right, Hob’s forgotten that he’s supposed to be mediating between two otherworldly entities. Morpheus turns his gaze to Hob. “What is he doing here?”

Morpheus sounds two thirds curious and one third jealous.

He doesn’t mean it like that , Hob tells himself. It may be my birthday–well, the date I chose to be my birthday–but I’m not going to get that lucky.

An odd tension frazzles the air, and the Snake rolls his impossible spine backwards a bit, not retreating, exactly. Just not standing so close to Hob.

Huh.

Who knew that Morpheus would be so territorial with his head priest?

Hob laughs, trying disperse the feeling that if he’s not careful, he may inadvertently start a supernatural brawl. “Come on, my friend. You think after six and a half centuries, you’re the only creepy-crawly I know?”

“I am not a creepy-crawly, Hob Gadling,” Morpheus rumbles, with all the theatrical offense of a maiden-aunt. “But I did not think you would consort with the likes of him . Not with your upbringing as it was–”

The Snake bristles. “Hey! I was invited!”

Morpheus steps out of the shadows just enough for his face and hands–and empty wine glass–to be visible in the dim pub lighting. Night has well and truly fallen outside. He sets the glass on the bar top with a challenging tink .

“ Invited ,” Morpheus repeats flatly.

“I just let it be known among the Othered set that they were welcome to drop by,” Hob hisses, low enough that Patrick won’t be able to catch it over the conversation and music around them.

“It’s a special number, you know. I felt like it should be celebrated with everyone , especially those who really know what it means.”

Morpheus inhales sharply and turns narrowed, laser-focused, glacier-blue eyes to Hob’s face. “ How did you phrase this invitation? ” he asks with no little urgency.

Hob blinks.

“Uh, something something freely welcome to partake of my hospitality, all those who know the number something something?” Hob says, nerves flooding him. He tugs on his ear. “Did I… um… say something I shouldn’t have?”

“ All those who know the number ,” Morpheus groans. “The number of the beast.”

"Six-one-six," the Snake says.

"Six- six- six," Hob corrects, "According to modern translations. Which is also the number of years I've… oh. No. No, it's my birthday ,” Hob says, sweat beading by his hairline and trickling down the back of his shirt. “That’s… that’s what I meant.”

“But that it is not what you said .”

The Snake straightens up all at once, eyes popping wide behind his glasses if the sudden height of his eyebrows are anything to go by. He slams back the rest of his whiskey and chokes: “That’s me out, then. Many happy returns, you poor doomed bastard. If you ever get any.”

“That’s not ominous at all,” Hob says, and chugs half his beer.

The Snake wends his way to the front door and is gone in a gust of chill spring breeze, and the sound of the rain just starting up outside. Hob hopes Matthew has found a good roost under one of the table umbrellas. One of these days, he's going to make good on his threat to get the raven a Service Animal vest, just so he can come inside in weather like this.

Morpheus fully manifests, posture tense, nostrils flaring. He scans the crowd. For who, Hob can guess, but he doesn’t like to think on it.

Morpheus has, after all, told him all about his trip to Hell.

And then the lights flicker.

Hob is… well, he’s almost disappointed by how dramatic the Devil’s entrance is.

In the last six hundred years, he’s come to learn that people like him tend to lay low and not bring attention to themselves. Even Morpheus, with his fine clothes and fist-sized ruby, behaved as a mortal might at their meetings–walking into the White Horse, sitting down, no excess displays of power or even wealth, really, save for the handful of dreamsand he’d blown in Lady Constantine’s face.

But Hob has to give the Devil their due. When they play, they don’t play small.

The storm that’s been brewing since sunset suddenly, and violently breaks. Rain cascades against the roof like the rush of an oncoming train. A clap of thunder loud enough to rattle the martini glasses in their hangers above the bar shakes the room, making more than one person yelp. The crack of lightning that follows flares like an atom bomb, white light blasting in through the windowpanes, casting everyone in harsh, dramatic black-and-white chiaroscuro.

Ears ringing and eyes sparking, Hob sets down his beer and scrubs at his face.

(Okay, so he’s also a little disappointed there’s no fiddle sting to accompany their appearance. But then again, the New Inn is hardly Georgia.)

When his vision has cleared, Hob whirls around to check on his friends and colleagues. There’s probably something dangerous about turning your back to Satan, but he’s got the King of Nightmares guarding it. He’s more worried for the humans than the two celestial entities that are, if he knows his friend, puffing up and posturing. Hob skims out from behind the bar, heading for Patrick, who has stopped a few steps away from the service gap.

And he's… he's just standing there.

Fear seizes Hob’s throat, and for a terrible second, he worries that the light really was an atom bomb, that everyone he’s ever known and loved in this life are nothing more than people-shaped pillars of ash, and it’s his fault. He invited them here, and then he invited the literal Devil as well, and now they're—

But no, when he reaches Patrick, his friend is alive. He breathes, he blinks, his flesh is soft and warm. But he’s frozen. Hob looks around and… yes, the humans in the room–well, the mortal ones, at least–have simply stopped moving.

“Are they…?” Hob crackles.

“ They will be fine,” Morpheus assures him. His hair is sticking straight out, like a furious cat, and he’s starting to lose coherence around the edges. His coat swirls off into shadow like heavy ink in water, his eyes are as fathomless as deep space, and his fingers elongate into razor-sharp and obsidian-tipped claws. “Time has stopped for them. When it resumes, it will be as if the lost moments never happened. ”

Not all of them, Hob thinks, seeing Johanna’s eyes darting around the room with terrified fury. He decides not to point it out, though, in case the Lightbringer decides to do something permanent and terrible about it. He just gives her a long look, and tries to put as much reassurance in his expression as he can. I’ll get us out of here safely, don’t you worry.

Johanna blinks back once, slow and squinty like a cat. Message received.

A quick glance also confirms that the rest of the Otherworld denizens have made themselves as sparse as the Snake. He doesn't blame them.

Then, finally, when he’s assured himself that everyone under his roof and thus in his care is as safe as they can be, with the literal Ruler of Hell sharing that selfsame roof, he skirts around the bar to join Morpheus on the empty dance floor. Only then does he allow all of his attention to settle on his new visitor.

They are… tall . ‘Grand’ is the adjective that comes to mind first, followed by ‘statuesque’ and ‘ literally awe-inspiring’.

That’s an angel , Hob things. Or at least, they used to be. Of course they’re so… present. So overwhelming.

It’s like having all of his senses buffeted all at once–all he can smell is the acrid tang of sulfur, all he can hear is a high-pitched screech, all he can see is an overwhelming brightness that might actually be an overwhelming darkness, and his skin feels like it’s covered with biting fire ants. He gasps, reaching out clumsily behind him to clutch at the bar, the crush of the gravitas emanating from the corner stealing the breath from his lungs.

One of Morpheus’ fingers stretches out, impossible and eerie. It taps Hob gently on the forehead, right where his third eye would be, if he was that kind of spiritual. The drowning rush of screaming discomfort snaps off, like a faucet cranked shut. Air rushes back into the room.

“Be not afraid,” my hairy arse , Hob thinks, as he coughs and scrubs his eyes again. It’s a wonder the blessed virgin didn’t shriek her head off and go running off into the night.

“I’m… I’m fine,” he reassures Morpheus, as his friend shuffles a step closer, hand resting protectively on Hob’s shoulder.

It takes him a few seconds to actually see what he’s seeing. Satan themself is presenting as a white woman, with fair, severely arranged golden curls that resemble nothing so much as a crown of thorns across their forehead. What Hob took for giant bat wings is actually a luxuriously patterned black pashmina, draped artfully over across one shoulder, over a rich white tea-length dress.

For being the ruler of Hell, Hob has to admit that they actually look… well, glamorous .

“Hello, Robert Gadling,” Lucifer Morningstar purrs from the empty stage in the corner of the pub. It’s little more than a triangular riser jammed against the wall, just big enough for a tall stool, a mic stand, and some folksy performer on Sunday afternoons. But it gives them an even greater height from which to look down their nose at him, so of course that’s where they manifested. “I am ever so grateful to be included.”

“Er, yeah,” Hob says, pushing himself upright and wiping his clammy hands on the thighs of his jeans. “Welcome, then.”

“ Hob ,” Morpheus says, scandalized. Shadows writhe anxiously in a puddle by his feet, the Nightmare side of Dream closer to the surface in his worry.

“What?” Hob says. “Doesn’t hurt anyone to be polite.” Hob steps forward and holds out his now-dry hand for the Devil to shake.

“Certainly not,” Lucifer agrees, and takes his hands between theirs. They pull him forward a few more steps, pressing his fingers between their palms as if they could taste his sins on his skin, and peers down at him with intelligent eyes the same color of the storm clouds outside. “And it’s been ever so long since I’ve been to a party .”

Hob cranes his head back to look up at them. They’re just a handspan away now, only their entwined arms between them keeping them parted, and for an absurd moment, he thinks that Lucifer is going to kiss him. Morpheus must think so too, because he lets loose a ripping growl, warning and threat in the sound to rival the thunderstorm outside.

Lucifer laughs and lets Hob go. They take a dainty step down from the stage, and sashay their way toward the bar on totteringly-high bleach-white pumps.

“I, uh, I‘ve got wine and beer,” Hob says, spinning around and scrambling to catch up with them. “Or anything harder. Or softer. Whatever you like, really. What can I pour for you?”

“Red wine, naturally,” the Devil purrs.

They stop at the bar just an arm's length from Morpheus, a clear challenge. They lean elegantly on one elbow against the padded edge, eyeing him up like they’d either like to eat him alive or gouge his eyes out. Possibly both. Hob slips between them like a fleshy immortal shield. Maybe it won’t actually keep them from lashing out at each other but, meh, he can’t die if they do.

He reaches over the bar, grabs one of the open bottles of Syrah, a glass from the rack above their heads, and pours a generous measure. He holds it out genteely to the Devil, and they accept it with good grace.

Hob then immediately refills Morpheus’ abandoned glass with his Vinsanto, and tops up his own with an awkward backwards reach for the amber tap.

“So… are you gonna release them?” Hob asks, once Lucifer has raised their glass for a clink, and he’s very cautiously obliged. It feels like bad luck to drink from it right away, though, so he turns to offer the same toast to Morpheus, who stares hard at Hob as they clink glasses, as if he’s drilling a blessing into Hob’s skull.

“No, I think not,” Lucifer says, taking their first sip, and offering Hob an appreciative eyebrow bounce at the taste. “No need to cause a panic. But don’t worry; I shan’t stay for long. I only wanted to pop in and wish my new friend many happy returns.”

“Is that what we are?” Hob asks, with a huge gulp of beer. “Friends?”

“Of course!” Lucifer says, their eyes narrowing a little, shoulders tensing up, lips slimming tightly and… “We are friends, aren’t we Robert Gadling? Why else would you have extended your invitation to all who know the true number of your years?”

Which is… a bit of an odd thing for the Lightbringer to be worried about, honestly.

Hob looks again. There’s nerves there. There’s concern. Why would…

Oh . Hob thinks. They’re lonely, too.

Hob risks a glance back at Morpheus, who is clutching the stem of his wineglass tight enough that it’s creaking. His eyes are leaking purple-black starstuff around the perimeters, which whisps away like the leading edge of a fast-moving cloud. Otherwise, he's perfectly still, posture ramrod straight.

“Yes,” Hob answers, turning back to Lucifer. “Yes, we are friends. Why not? I’ve no quarrel with you, unless you’re here to drag me to Hell?”

Whatever it was the Devil was expecting Hob to say, it wasn’t that. They look first genuinely surprised, then flattered, then secretly pleased, then distraught in such quick succession that Hob barely has time to pass each expression as they pass over their face.

“Of course not!” Lucifer says, so quickly and so completely surprised that it comes out in a rush. They sound genuinely hurt at his assumption. “My kingdom only contains those human souls who believe they should be there. They send themselves to Hell. Please. I have better manners than to drag anyone against their belief and will.” They narrow their eyes at Hob and take another sip of wine, struggling to regain their teasing nonchalance. “Why, have you done something worthy of punishment?”

Many things, Hob thinks. Terrible things. Things I just hope one day I live long enough to be able to atone for.

“Ah, well, this isn’t about my death,” Hob hedges. “Which I am still not interested in, thank you very much. This is a celebration of my life!”

“It is indeed. Happy six hundred and sixty-sixth birthday, Robert,” Lucifer says, and they clink glasses once more.

“Hob,” he offers up. “My friends in the know call me Hob.”

“ Hob, ” Morpheus hisses again. “ You are being unwise. ”

“I’m being personable ,” Hob corrects, but takes a tiny step back, closer into Morpheus’s orbit, to appease him. One of the swirling black shadows wraps around Hob’s ankle.

“Dream Lord!” Lucifer greets him, sounding as if they have just noticed him behind Hob for the first time. “What a delight to see you again so soon.”

“Lightbringer, ” Morpheus growls in return.

“And how do you know our dear little birthday boy?”

Morpheus lets out another grumbling snarl, all without changing the placidly haughty expression on his face.

“Robert Gadling is my head priest, as well you know, ” Morpheus intones, voice as deep and dangerous as the fathomless darkness at the bottom of an ocean. “ You stand in my temple uninvited. ”

“Just as you bullied your way into Hell?” Lucifer asks silkily. They sip their wine showily. “Besides, I was invited, wasn’t I?”

Both pairs of eyes fall on Hob, their weight like a physical blow, and he buys himself some time by taking a long drink of his beer. Which, of course, goes down the wrong pipe, and leaves him coughing like a complete tit in front of two of the greatest powers in the universe.

Oh yeah, that’s me. Hob “embarrassingly human” Gadling.

Morpheus sets down his wine and hastily lays a hand on Hob’s curved back. It’s probably meant to be as possessive as it is calming, but at this point, Hob doesn’t mind. It feels good to have the comfort of his friend’s proximity. And the very visible gesture of his claiming and protection.

“I see I am in danger of wearing out my welcome,” Lucifer sighs, as if put upon. They finish their wine in a serpent-like gulp, opening their jaws wider than the mouth of their human-shape ought to allow, and set the glass aside.

“Quite.”

"In which case, allow me to present me with your gift unto you now, Robert Gadling of Essex," Lucifer says.

With a flourish, they're suddenly cupping something spindly and large in both their palms. It is the ivory of old bone, gnarled and pitted, and looks nothing so much as a big, eldritch key. There’s a circle at the top, crowned with four spikes, and the teeth on the shaft look as if they may be made of actual fangs.

And, of course, much like Morpheus’ cactus, it is topped with a whimsical, cheery red bow.

Morpheus lets out a horrified gasp.

“I had intended on bestowing this differently,” Lucifer drawls, eyeing Morpheus meaningfully. “But as it is in poor form to attend a birthday party with no gift for the celebrant.”

She turns the full weight of her gravitationally heavy gaze on Hob.

“Er… thank you?” Hob asks.

“You will not, soon enough.”

Yeah, okay, that sounds like a trap , Hob thinks. But with no clue how or even why he might refuse the gift from a literal fallen angel, and what the eternal ramifications of that action might be he does, Hob reaches out to take the key.

“ Do not accept! ” Morpheus all but wails. “ If you become ruler of Hell, you will never again cross the threshold into my realm.”

That’s saying a little more than I think Morpheus means to , Hob thinks, fingers frozen in the air, hovering above the ribbon. It sounds less like “you’ll be barred from my realm” and more “I’ll never see you again.”

“Is that true?” Hob asks. "This will make me ruler of Hell ?"

Lucifer smirks triumphantly. “I have already emptied Hell of all its demons. The gates are shut. Even now, the fires ash and grow cold. I have renounced my crown. A new King is required. They who next touch this Key will become that King.”

Hob shudders, short hair springing up, skin crawling with horror. Demons. Loose on Earth. Loose everywhere . And unable to be commanded to return to Hell by exorcism or spell, for the gates would be barred to them.

He cuts a look to Johanna, who is clearly following all of this. There are tears running down her cheeks. Sweat breaks out on Hob's brow, heart pounding hard behind his ribs, dread creeping down his spine. He hasn't felt this sunk with terror since he first came face-to-face with a machine gun in a muddy trench.

He's being given a choice.

It's not much of a choice.

Hob licks his lips, hoping his voice is steadier than his trembling, hovering hands. “What happens if I don’t accept your gift?” he crackles, voice barely above a whisper.

“Then I will think that you have very poor manners indeed,” Lucifer pouts.

Hob's breath shudders out of him, leaving his skin cold and nerves on high alert. “That’s all?”

"Of course, I will then have to bestow the Key upon the next most worthy candidate,” Lucifer says, eyes slinking up to Morpheus over Hob’s shoulder like toxic honey and, ah, there it is.

There’s the trap.

If Hob accepts the Key, he will become King of Hell, and never see Morpheus again. But he could command the armies of the damned back into their pits, and possibly, like he has in his little kingdom here on Earth, find new and better ways to help those there punishing themselves.

But if Morpheus accepts the Key, then Dream of the Endless will become King of Hell, plunging every sentient being in existence into unspeakable horror every time they fall asleep.

Which makes Hob’s choice a very, very simple one.

Before Morpheus can stop him, Hob plucks the key out of Lucifer’s hand.

" Hob !" Morpheus wails.

He reels back, as if all the places he was touching Hob suddenly burn him. The floor shudders beneath their feet, the foundations rumbling without warning. Thunder? Hob guesses, then, No, earthquake!

The room shakes with the power of Morpheus' fury and agony. Hob grasps at the bar to stay upright, and wonders if now that its head priest has become overlord of another realm, the temple of the New Inn will defile and crack apart around them all.

Morpheus keens like a wounded hart, clutching at his chest. He staggers, rocked by the judder of the floor, what little color he had manufactured for this humanish form draining away entirely. Outside, Matthew is cawing furiously, battering against the window in a desperate attempt to break in.

Hob's stomach heaves, and he's not sure if it's from the shaking of the building, or the enormity of what he's just done. What he's just accepted.

“What, no kiss for my gift, your Majesty?” Lucifer laughs, shrill and triumphant.

They seize Hob's face between red-taloned hands, and press a fire-hot, acid-slick mouth against his. Hob screams , the crawling burn of his flesh melting from his lips outwards throwing his animal mind into a mindless, terrified panic. Someone's hands fist in the back of his jumper, yanking at him, but the Devil's grip has seared him down to the bone, fingers embedded in his cheeks, nails scraping against the side of his teeth and tongue. The searing agony reaches his eyes, sizzles in his tears, so all he can see is the poisonous green steam of his own eyeballs boiling in their sockets.

Glass shatters, a bird cries out, a door slams open, cracking against a wall, a sonorous voice calls his name, and Hob flails, kicks, screams, and screams, and screams and—

"Forgive me, I am a titch late. I got caught up reading and… goodness me!" a prim voice gasps. "Well, this won't do at all!"

A loud noise, like a fleshy crack, rings out.

As suddenly as a snap, the pain is gone.

Hob gargles on the tail end of a scream that aborts somewhere behind his teeth.

His nose is filled with the scent of the rain and the petrichor from the gravel drive beyond a broken window and a wide-standing door, not with the reek of burning flesh. His heart races wildly, but it is still within his body. The rigid tension of his hell-electrified muscles ceases and Hob flops backwards, dropping against Morpheus' chest. Strong arms come around his chest Morpheus tilts his pelvis to cradle Hob's sacrum, one strong thigh behind his legs to keep from folding. He plays one hand up Hob's throat, caressing, paling his face, checking for damage and soothing all at the same time.

Hob pries his aching lids open, and finds his eyes have not boiled away after all.

The New Inn is unshaken, all in one piece, save for the way the front door is hanging off its hinges, cracked straight down the middle. The person who did it is obscured by Hob's view by the coffee machine, and the little, forlorn-looking cactus.

"What did you do to him?" Matthew caws from the mic stand, puffed out to twice his size, wings spread and a murderous gleam in his eyes. "What the fuck did you do to him?"

" I will end your miserable existence! I will throw you into the sulfurous lake from which you should never have crawled, you worthless, lothesome, hateful—"

"I'm fine!" Hob chokes out, feeling like he's vomiting up half his esophagus with every syllable. "I'm fine! "

" Your dare! I will tear your atoms apart and scatter them across so many universes that you will never again—"

" — peck your fucking eyes out — "

"Oh, dear! I do apologize, I believe I broke your door in, I'm so sorry, my dear boy—

"Guys," Hob gags. "Just let me catch my breath…"

And before him, unmoving and unperturbed by the overlapping, rising threats and verbal assaults, Lucifer watches him with a knowing, miserable look on their face.

"Enough! Quiet!" Hob thrust the Key into the air, and silence drops like a guillotine. He heaves on a few more breaths, then swallows hard, licking his lips. In an agonized, throat-shredded whisper he adds, "Please."

Because it never hurts to use one's manners.

Slowly, agonizingly, with the gentle help of Morpheus, Hob gets his feet back under him. The first thing he does is reach for his half-finished pint and drain the glass. The alcohol burns its way down, and Hob tastes the faintest touch of blood. Christ's nails, how loud had he been screaming?

Feeling more settled, he turns to face Lucifer.

Whose lipstick and painted fingernails are still utterly pristine.

They… they didn't kiss him.

"You…" Hob pants. "You didn't do that?"

"No," Lucifer says softly, and folds their hands together with elegant contriteness, fingers pointed downward in a reverse prayer.

"But you," Hob starts, then has to stop to swallow the bloody spittle that his screaming has produced. "You know what just happened?"

"The Key does it," Lucifer whispers. "Changes you. Every Devil needs a Face."

"I don't want a Devil Face," Hob says stubbornly.

Lucifer smiles, but it's thin and pained. "You don't get to choose."

Hob snarls and drops the Key onto the bar top. He half expects it to be stuck to his palm, or burned into his flesh. But it falls from his grip easily and lands with an unsatisfying clack . Morpheus, still hovering at Hob's side like Peter Pan's shadow, reaches out for it.

Hob smacks his hand away. "Don't you fucking dare."

" I would not see you suffer—"

"And I would not see all of humanity suffer, so you just fucking back right up there, friend."

Morpheus lowers his arm, but utterly fails to back up. If anything he presses closer. If the skinny little fuck had any bodyheat to speak of, Hob was sure he'd be feeling it through his own clothes right now.

The man by the door steps out of Hob's blindspot behind the coffee machine, and comes around to stand a respectful distance away, and peer at the Key. It's the queer little Bookseller of Soho. Late to the party, because he got caught up in reading, and Hob couldn't be more grateful for his perpetual absentminded tardiness.

“Well!" the Bookseller exclaims. "That’s where that silly old thing has gotten to! You would not believe the fuss that has kicked up in The Silver City. If you’ll give me just a moment…” He snaps once, a downward motion, as if yanking on an old-fashioned Edwardian-era bell pull.

A golden chime rings through the air and the Bookseller nods as if he's done some sort of momentous good deed. "Help is on the way, dear boy. But, ah, I would be ever so grateful if you did not tell them it was me who alerted them? I couldn't bear the paperwork."

And with that, the Bookseller is straight back out the door, which, miraculously, isn't actually broken off its hinges like Hob had thought it was. Turns out the window isn't broken either; it must have been a glass Matthew knocked over on his desperate flight inside.

Lucifer, very graciously, and very apologetically, refills Hob's pint glass by reaching over the bar for the tap, as Hob had done. Hob takes the pint (half head and spilling over the side; Hob guesses the Devil can't be good at everything ) with a nod of thanks. His hand is shaking so badly that Morpheus has to steady his arm just so he can drink.

"Well, friend," Hob says to Lucifer, once he's had a few long pulls on the cold fizz. "That was a hell of a party trick."

Lucifer snorts extremely inelegantly. "Pun intended?"

"Entirely."

" After what you suffered, you would still call the Morningstar friend ?" Morpheus asks, horror in every syllable.

"They didn't do whatever that just was to me," Hob points out. "The Key did. In fact, if that's what it feels like to hold it, then honestly, I don't blame you for wanting rid of the literally damned thing."

Lucifer's red, red, red lips part in gentle shock. They touch one lacquered nail to their own soft, pale cheek, then brush their palm across their neck as if double checking that the flesh there is indeed intact.

"You are generous in your forgiveness, sire," Lucifer says demurely.

"No more generous than all those who punish themselves in Hell for their past deeds deserve, I think," Hob says back. Including you , he doesn't add. But he doesn't need to.

Lucifer offers Hob a grateful bow.

Matthew makes a confused sort of snorfle sound. He hops his way down and across the room to Morpheus, who stoops to allow Matthew to perch on his hand, then transfers the raven to his shoulder.

"So now what, my lords?" Matthew croaks tentatively.

"Now we wait for whatever help was supposedly—"

Another unexpected surge of light interrupts Hob, and he squints against a golden flash-bulb flare of it. When it clears, two male-presenting beings that could literally only be angels stand before them.

This corner of the pub is starting to get awfully crowded, Hob thinks with all the hysterical sarcasm his ordeal allows him to muster.

The angels are both statuesque, both blonde, both clad in raiments of glowing white, with enormous golden wings. Hob glances at Lucifer, who rolls their eyes as the pompous way the angels carry themselves.

"Dream King," one of them says in deferential greeting. Both of the angels bow low to Morpheus.

" Remiel, Archangel of Hope. Duma, Archangel of Silence. Your presence in this moment is most welcome."

Morpheus inclines his head in a shallow bow, not letting on that it was the Bookseller who called them here, as asked. Hob doesn't know much about the hierarchy of celestial beings, but if the depth of their bows and nods to one another are anything to go by, Morpheus is a lot higher on the celestial pecking order than Lucifer's address to him has made it seem.

"Thank you," the one who is clearly not the Archangel of Silence says. "And our gratitude, also, for summoning us."

As one, the two archangels turn to the fallen one.

"Lucifer," Remiel says.

"Brother dearest," Lucifer sneers.

"The Divine Creator demands that you take up the Key and return to your throne."

"It's not my throne any longer," Lucifer sneers. "It's his now."

Remiel spares a glance over his shoulder at Hob that makes it very, very clear that the imperious twat thinks Hob is not much more evolved than pond gunk. The angel turns back to Lucifer.

"A mortal cannot rule Hell."

"Not mortal," Hob speaks up, just because he does not appreciate being snubbed in his own pub. And on his own birthday, to boot.

"Still human , though," Remiel sneers, the facade of literally-holier-than-thou superiority cracking a bit.

"And what's so wrong with being hummmuph," Matthew harrumphs as Morpheus reaches up and pinches his beak shut.

"Oh, well, guilty as charged then," Hob sneers right back, shoving his hands into his pockets and slouching his shoulders in the most insolent way he knows how.

Duma strides silently to Hob's side. Gently, but inexorably, the angel takes Hob's chin between his fingers, and holds his face still for his gaze.

"Doesn't hurt any more," Hob answers the ethereal creature's silent question. "But now we've got a bit of a problem, if you say a human can't rule Hell. Because it looks like it's either me, or Morpheus, and we all know what will happen if Dream of the Endless is forced to don that crown."

Duma's gaze grows tearful and sad. He shakes his head, just once, then releases Hob. Then, with the same hand, he reaches for the Key.

"Brother!" Remiel gasps, grabbing at his draped sleeve to stop him.

Matthew shakes free of Morpheus's fingers and, in a resounding voice that is clearly not his own, booms: "Hell cannot be entrusted to other than those who serve the Name directly… I shall take over Hell." The raven shakes himself all over, blinking rapidly. "What the fuck was that, boss?" He turns his sharp beak toward Duma. "Hey, don't use me as a puppet, man, that's violating!"

"Duma, no ," Remiel protests, but halts in the face of Duma's implacable silence. Remiel curls into himself in shame. "Very well. I cannot allow my fellow to drink from a cup I have refused. I will go with you."

"Have fun, boys," Lucifer sing-songs. "Oh, and there's a bit of a trick to getting the cold water in the palace pipes. There isn't any! Ha!"

Remiel sends Lucifer the stinkiest stink-eye Hob's ever seen in six hundred and sixty-six years.

Duma reaches for the key again and Hob is struck with a sudden flash of inspiration.

“Wait!” he shouts, throwing out a hand to block the Key. He doesn't touch it again though. He's reckless, not stupid.

"Wait?" Remiel echoes, agog. " Wait ? Who are you to command the Host to—"

"I'm the King of the Hell," Hob challenges back, puffing out his chest. "At least until you touch this Key."

"You are no Demonic Monarch, you lowly—"

“Oh, stuff it,” Hob snaps at Remiel, sick to the teeth with being polite to Celestial entities to clearly don’t feel the same courtesy toward him. “Before I give you the key, I want something in return. And I'm not giving up my one and only chance to do a deal as the Devil.”

Lucifer laughs, overjoyed. Morpheus makes a worried, confused sound. In the corner, Johanna's eyes narrow in concern.

But none of that matters. Because Hob’s remembered, all of a sudden, what Matthew had gossiped about, when he was recounting the parts of Morpheus’ trip to Hell that his friend had left out.

The boss stopped at this… this window in a spire, and a woman had called out for him with a name I’d never heard before, the raven had slurred, deep in his cups one evening while Morpheus had been trapped in the Library and sent Matthew for Tuesday Hangs in his stead. She’d reached for him through the bars, tugged on his coat, sobbing. She thought he’d come to rescue her and instead he just left there, like some heartless– He’d mantled his feathers then, shaking his head in a very human gesture like trying to disperse a bad memory. I asked Lucienne about her. She was sixteen, man, she was a kid, and the boss did her pretty dirty. She was heartbroken. It’s ugly.

Remiel bristles, the small feathers along the upper curve of their glossy white wings frazzling in irritation. “You do not bargain with God,” they hiss.

“But our absentee parent not here, my sycophantic sibling,” Lucifer purrs. “And Robert Gadling has not yet abdicated. Hell is his gift to bestow. Or to hoard. Oh, do say you will hoard it instead, little man. It will vex our creator so.”

“No,” Hob says, horrified by the idea of being sole ruler of all suffering for the rest of eternity, and being barred from Dream and the Dreaming to boot.

Lucifer shrugs, like it was worth one last try.

"Very well," Remiel grits out, sounding like every word is costing them a gallon of golden ichor.

“Nada,” Hob says. "She goes free."

Morpheus clutches hard at Hob's shoulder in his shock. " How do you know her name? How—"

"Not now," Hob says gently to his oldest friend, taking his hand from his shoulder, and twining their fingers together behind his back. Then turns his best flinty, bandit's glare at the angels. "Nada is released in exchange for the Key. Those are my terms."

"We cannot simply release a soul from Hell," Remiel says slowly, as if explaining to a toddler. "Without a corporation, it will be naught but a ghost."

"Then give her a corporation," Lucifer says, studying their nails as if bored. "We both know the paperwork is not as persnickety as the Quartermasters make it out to be. There's stacks lying around, waiting to be inhabited."

"Sibling!" Remiel hisses at Lucifer in warning. The former devil just bares their teeth at him. Remiel tries a different tack: "The Dream King condemned her to Hell himself. We cannot give her leave until he recants—"

Hob steps on Morpheus's foot.

Hard.

" I recant!" Morpheus yelps, glaring daggers at Hob. Then he clears his throat and resumes his customary haughty expression. "Nada has been unjustly punished, and it has gone on far too long. I recant my oath, and rescind my ire. Nada is no longer prisoner by my will, nor my pleasure."

Remiel gawps.

"A new life for Nada," Hob repeats firmly, bringing the conversation back to its point. "Reincarnation. A chance to do it all again, without suffering, in return for the Key. Are we agreed?"

Duma looks between Remiel, Morpheus, and Hob.

" Agreed ," Matthew booms, and then squawks: "Man, fuck off!"

"It is done."

Hob removes his hand from the bar.

Duma grasps the Key.

The only indication that it is paining him, that it is burning his face off even as Hob is staring at him and nothing is happening outwardly, is a slight squinching of his features. Remiel makes a disgusted sound and gestures with his hand, and the faint echo of a newborn baby's cry vaults through the room, perfectly audible over the susurrus of the gentling thunderstorm.

New life.

And she shares Hob's birthday.

How about that.

"The bargain is fulfilled," Remiel spits with disgust. "Brother, come."

Both angels snap their wings out—one of Remiel's slapping Lucifer in the face, clearly intentionally by the snarl they let loose—and in the powerful thrust of a gong-like wingbeat, are gone. The Key is gone with them.

Hob immediately squeezes Morpheus's hand tight and turns to gauge whether he's fucked up their friendship forever.

Surely, surely, Morpheus must be furious at Hob for overstepping so completely. Nada had gone to Hell because she'd died by suicide, but she'd only killed herself because Dream of the Endless had seduced her against the rules that forbade him for lying with a mortal ( Do I count as a mortal? Hob wonders frantically, Would we be punished if—focus, Gadling! ) and her people had been slaughtered in retribution. And Morpheus, in his pride, had left her to rot there when she refused his hand in return for rescue. It had all been, quite frankly, some epically toxic masculinity bullshit , and Hob is prepared to square off with his friend about it if he has to.

He doesn't want to, of course, but for the sake of a soul left suffering through no wrong of her own, he will.

But instead, he finds Morpheus limp with shock, silently weeping.

"Hob," Morpheus gasps. " Hob, my priest, my devoted one." He surges forward, anoints Hob's forehead and palms with holy, reverent kisses. The last of the lingering pain from the Key's hold is washed away in the cool calmness of deep sleep and deeper night. It flows down his skin, making him shiver as Hob is consecrated Head Priest once more. "How beneficent your human heart is. And how shamed I am, that it took you to force me to do right by one I had scorned unjustly and unkindly."

"Yeah, well, don't you forget it," Hob says, when Morpheus pulls away. He rubs his face, weary in a way that he hasn't felt in… well, ever. "So, are we done now? Can we… can we be done now, please? I have a party to—" he looks around the room, at all the people here under his invitation, under his burden of care. "To save."

"By all means," Lucifer says. "They will awaken as soon as I go."

" Then go," Morpheus invites, with no little amount of bitchy snark.

Lucifer offers him a hard stare, but after a moment, relents without retaliation. "I shall make my farewells to you then, Robert Gadling, from one former Monarch of Hell to another."

They lean forward and buss a gentle, warm kiss off of Hob's cheek.

“Where will you go?” Hob asks, as they withdraw. “If Hell isn’t your domain any more, what are your plans?”

“Why, stay here, of course,” Lucifer says. Then they look around at the cramped room, the stuffy air, the frozen mortals. “Well, perhaps not here , here. But as I said, it’s been ever so long since I’ve been invited to a party. I’ve forgotten how fun they can be. Perhaps I will find some space to host my own sinful little celebrations.”

“Like… a nightclub?” Hob asks, wracking his brain for what they may mean.

Lucifer’s eyes spark with intrigue. “Now that is an idea,” they murmur. “A nightclub . There’s all sorts of wicked things a soul may get into there. I’ll send you an invitation to the grand opening, Hob dearest. In thanks for tonight.”

“You know what,” Hob says, finding he really means it when he says: “I look forward to it.”

The former Devil blinks, obviously not anticipating or expecting his favorable response.

“See you then, my friend,” Hob says, holding out a hand to shake.

“Is that a binding promise?” Lucifer asks slyly, reaching back.

“Absolutely not,” Hob laughs. “I know better than to make a deal with the devil. Again.” He cuts a wink at Morpheus, who wrinkles his nose petulantly. “But you tell me when and where, and I’ll try.”

“That is acceptable,” Lucifer acquiesces, and shakes his hand not to seal a deal, but in a companionable farewell.

“Oh!” Hob says, as a dark cloud of absolutely rotten-smelling smokes begins to billow around their smart white pumps. “I used to play some violin, in the 18th century. Should I bring it?”

Lucifer breaks into a wide, frankly dorky grin of sheer delight. “No, friend. I haven’t picked up a fiddle since I lost that bout. I’m more of a piano man, now.”

And before Hob can think of anything clever to say to that, the cloud envelopes the Devil, and they are gone.

“-- the hell was that! ” Patrick shouts from beside Hob, right in his ear, and Hob startles away, nearly falling on his arse in surprise.

Hob catches himself on a bar stool, heart hammering in his throat, as all around him the humans resume moving and talking as if the massive clap of thunder that had shaken the Inn had occurred just a second ago.

“Someone should go check if that hit the pub!” one of Hob’s colleagues says, and grabs an umbrella from the stand of forgotten ones by the door and ducking outside before he can see who it was. “No! All good! No fire!”

Johanna Constantine bounds across the room like she's a bolt of lightning herself. Hob braces for a punch in the nose, and gets wrapped in a tight embrace instead. "You mad bastard," Johanna hisses in his ear. "You mad, incredible, pig-shit bonkers bastard ."

"Yeah, that's me," Hob says sheepishly, squeezing her back.

"Happy birthday!" she says, smacks a ridiculous kiss off his mouth, and then crosses back across the room, grabs Ric by the sleeve, and pulls her through the kitchen and—by the sounds of the slamming door—into the back where the bins make a conveniently shadowed corner.

"Yeah, nobody go back there for a while," Hob announces to the handful of people watching what had just happened with open curiosity.

"Ew," Patrick grumps. He does a double take when he catches Morpheus and Matthew on the far side of the bar, several empty glasses before him that he obviously didn't put there.

For a moment, Hob is worried that his co-owner is going to put up a fuss about the live animal in the building, but then Patrick shrugs in the way that mortals encouraged to overlook Morpheus' oddities by the very nature of his existence do. He busses the empties, and moves on to the next customer.

Hob, not inclined at all to overlook Morpheus, leans on the bar beside him, and grins up at his oldest, and strangest friend.

" Are all your birthday celebrations this eventful, Hob Gadling? " Morpheus asks, eyebrow raised coyly, as Matthew attempts to preen the last of his wet feathers into laying right.

"Nah," Hob promises. "Just the milestones."

" Then I already dread the party you will throw to mark your first millennia."

Hob, who has just enough beer left in his glass to toast Morpheus and toss back the mouthful, does so. Then he chuckles ruefully. "I don't, my friend. Not in the least. As a former Monarch of Hell, I have a feeling my life will be even more interesting in the decades to come." He drops Morpheus a cheeky wink. "And I have so much to live for."

On the far side of the pub, someone shuts off all the lights. A spark of candlelight goes up, and, raised in chorus, everyone that Hob holds dear—in the here and now—begins to sing.

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#Cling Fast #Cling Fast adjecent #The Hob Adherent series #Losyark #Sandman #The Sandman #The sandman fanfiction #the sandman fanfic #dreamling #dreamling fanfic #dreamling fanfiction #hob gadling #lord morpheus #dream of the endless #lucifer morningstar #pre-slash #matthew the raven #morpheus needs to learn to use his words

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scifrey · 11 months

Text

Deleted Scene: Take Root

For those who love the "Cling Fast" / Hob Adherent series: this is, regrettably, not a new story. The series still ends where it ended.

However, it used to have a different ending. In that different version, instead of "Hold Tight" and "Keepsakes: A Plane Ticket", I planned to resolve the Daniel Hall and Orpheus storylines by writing a much longer multi-chapter fic about Hob finding out he still has living descendants through another TV show. In this story, Morpheus would have gotten jealous of Hob's living children, and spend more and more time asleep, with Daniel, until Despair & Desire finally came to Hob to tell him the truth about Orpheus.

I wrote this first chapter and then really, really struggled with the story after that. A long conversation with @late-to-the-magnus-archives led me to realize that if I did the Walkers/Daniel/Orpheus thing this way, by making them a negative thing in Hob's life, by choosing to stretch the trope of miscommunication between lovers, and by basically reverse-uno-ing all the work Hob did to grieve his brief mortal family, then I was doing a disservice to events and character growth in "Cling Fast".

Thematically it might have been a good fit, but it was perilously close to manufacturing unrealistic dissent for the sake of drama, and not because this is how the characters would have actually reacted in this situation.

So, I abandoned this tale, found better, kinder ways to resolve the Walkers/Daniel/Orpheus storylines, and reworked the series to be as it currently stands.

However.

I am still a little in love with this tiny fragment of a tale, and wanted to share it with you. Just for funsies.

Happy reading!

-J

Status: Deleted Scene from a story I won't be completing.

Series: the Hob Adherent series.

Fandom: The Sandman (TV 2022) Includes some comics canon, and some cameos from the wider Gaiman-verse, but it’s not necessary to know to enjoy the story.

Rating: Gen

Warnings: Discussions of grief and in-canon character death.

Relationships: Dream of the Endless/Hob Gadling, Eleanor | Hob Gadling’s Wife/Hob Gadling (past)

Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Hob Gadling, Matthew the Raven, Destruction of the Endless, Patrick the Bartender, Harriet Butler, Maisie Hampstead

TAKE ROOT

When the camera crew walks into The New Inn, Hob assumes it has something to do with Cardenio. The filming request had come through Harriet, and as Hob trusts her not to chuck him into any situation that would endanger him, or his husband, and their secret, he'd said yes without really looking into the details of the television program.

They'd asked to film inside the pub, and to interview him on camera. As this was just one in a long line of such requests, he'd set the date, and thought nothing more about it.

(When this lifetime was over, Hob was going to have to ask for a very heavy favour from little Daniel Hall, to ensure that no one remembered that his face matches that of Robert Gadlen the Sixth, sometime media darling of the mediaeval history studies world. Dream of the Endless had already pledged to make his uncles' transition as smooth as was in his power, thank goodness, but Hob was still nervous about all the footage floating around out there.)

What Hob didn't expect was for the crew to come in full guns blazing, so to speak.

"Oh, hello," he says, standing up from the banquette as a steady-cam, followed by the operator holding it, enter the pub. "Welcome to The New Inn."

The red light at the camera's lens is on, warning the world that it's recording. He's suddenly very glad he let Matthew talk him into wearing his hot-professor outfit, and the very light makeup required for this sort of thing. His hair is still shorter than he’d like, the scar on the left side of his head from a gunshot wound finally hidden by the longer style, for which he’s grateful. He wouldn’t want anyone to see it and worry.

Hob had kind of assumed that the crew would be dolling him up, but in the years since Elizabethan Manor he's learned that it never hurts to be camera-ready, just in case.

A man in a wireless headset enters behind the camera operator and waves at him, then points at the red light.

Yeah, I got that, Hob thinks but doesn't say. He's not sure why they're filming right away, but he doesn't want to spoil whatever shot they have planned. Maybe they spoke to Surinder and found out what a terrible actor Hob is, and have decided that it's far better to get his First Reactions on camera than to ask him to pretend.

Hob doesn't mind, but it would have been nice to be warned first.

Actually, if he bothered to read Harriet's email with any kind of depth, he probably was.

Patrick, the only other person in the pub at present, drops behind the bar like a WWI private tripping into a trench, and then scuttles into the kitchen, presumably to warn Destruction to stay hidden if he doesn't want to be filmed. Dee is in the middle of making the day's crusty loaf, so nothing will pull the Endless from the kitchen, unless it's serious.

Dee means business when he bakes.

"Thank you!" a young woman behind the PA says. She ducks around the other two folks, who are lingering in the doorway, and moves purposefully across the pub. Once she's firmly within the shot, she sticks out her hand. "I'm Maisie Hampstead."

"Hi Maisie, I'm Bob," Hob offers, shaking and then holding out a chair at his usual two-top for her because he's a gentleman, and old habits tend to kick in when he's wrong-footed. "What brings you to my humble pub?"

Maisie sets a heavy leather folder on the table between them, and for a second, Hob is terrified that this is a set up. That someone had hacked Harri's email, got him cornered, is about to reveal his terrible truth to a live-streamed audience, with a phalanx of nondescript cars and government scientists waiting in his front garden if he tries to run.

He reminds himself that the literal god of warriors is just one wall away, covered up to his elbows in flour, and that even if he was taken out of here against his will, his inlaws are the most powerful and immutable forces in the universe. Nothing and no one can harm him. Also, he can't die, which makes him ruthless and vicious when it comes to protecting himself—he doesn't have to avoid injury the way other people do when engaging in combat. While bullet and stab wounds hurt, they can be ignored in favour of finishing a fight.

But Maisie just smiles at him, flush with genuine excitement, and flips back the cover of the folder to reveal a… a family tree.

Okay, so not a clandestine setup or sting operation.

But something just as fraught.

Hob's eyes go wide as he skims the names on it, he knows they do, and he's pretty sure he must look absolutely pole-axed, because that's how he feels. He knew the BBC Historics department had mocked up a family tree for Elizabethan Manor, but he's never had occasion or desire to sit down and study it. He was already chastined enough by the fact that they found him in the first place. He had no patience to read in black and white where exactly he screwed up in hiding his past identities.

Hindsight, as the saying goes, is 20/20.

But the cameras are on him and he can’t exactly snap the cover shut and shout them all out the door. Not after he’d told Hari that he’d be game. So he reads on.

At the top of the tree, in computer-generated font, it reads:

Hob's breath catches in his throat as he runs the tips of his fingers over first Eleanor's, then Robyn and Wee John's names. It's taken a lot of work, but he's proud that he's able to have this out-of-the-blue reminder of their love and loss, and not immediately react negatively. He is joyfully reminded of that time of his life, seeing their names, instead of triggered.

But… no, wait, something's different…

"There's a… there's another line here," Hob croaks, following the dots downward from Robyn's box. This wasn't part of the graphic when they shared it on the show. "There shouldn't be another line here. He never…" Hob flattens his palm over the next row down on the family tree, not ready to read it yet.

Instead, he looks up at the young woman across from him, drinking in the sight of her like a parched man at a wholly unexpected, but nonetheless welcome, oasis.

She's blonde, hair flaxen-yellow and straight as a pin. But her eyes are dark, soulful brown, crinkling just enough at the corner to put her in her late twenties, he guesses. Detached earlobes. Complexion a few shades darker than his own, but still within the realm of olive-skinned. She's wearing light makeup, eyelashes mascaraed dark and lips painted and funky plum red. They curl on one side when she realises what he's doing, what he's looking for, the smile secret and mischievous in one corner.

And she has a cleft chin.

"Oh my god," Hob breathes. His eyes burn. There's a lump in his throat the size of a fist. He swallows hard. Excitement and fear and confusion swirl up in his middle, nauseating and fluttery.

He wants to reach out and grab her face between his hands, and hold her there, cataloguing everything. He wants to shove away from the table and race up the stairs and start shouting at the framed sketches of Robyn over his bed. He wants to curl up under a weighted blanket and hide from the truth until his husband coaxes him out.

Instead he just sits at the table, mouth hanging open like a landed fish.

He wishes Morph was here, and at the same time is unaccountably glad that his husband is in the middle of his daily ramble through the nearby Wapping Woods park. This is, he thinks, something he wants to discover on his own, first. Something to cherish and to hold, just for him, before he has to share it with the wider world.

Entirely on camera, of course.

Like all his major emotional revelations lately, it seems.

Ha.

"You… he… did he…?"

"See for yourself," Maisie coaxes him gently.

Slowly, tremblingly, Hob lifts his hand away from the paper.

"Robyn had a son," Hob whispers, voice wavering. His hands are shaking. He presses them between his thighs, under the table, where the camera can't see. "I had a—" he cuts himself off with a choked noise, wet and thick with longing.

"They weren't married," Maisie explains, not oblivious to his surprise and distress, and quick to reassure. Though, from her perspective, he guesses it must be very odd, to see someone falling to pieces over family revelations that are already centuries past. "They never got the chance to."

She slides another piece of paper out from under the family tree, a copy of a handwritten letter, and Hob snatches it from her hands perhaps too eagerly. It's an account of a fight in the alleyway behind a tavern, written from the perspective of a bystander—no, not a bystander. A witness.

A patron at the tavern the night Robyn died.

There's a sentence highlighted but the letters blur and slide across the page.

Hob wipes at his eyes. "I… sorry, can you read it to me…?"

Maisie takes the letter back and reads:

Young master Gadlen protested that he had no quarrel with the brothers of the distraught maid. He shewed that he had drawn neither dagger nor mayde a fiste. He did then call them brothers of his owne and did swear his intent to wed, but his oath came too layte for a knife had been thruste under his rib. Martha did wail and forswear the murderer as her kin, and held fast the lad until his heartsbloode had ceased to flow into the street. Mister Hampsted took his daughter awaye inside to the warmth. The undertaker was called for piteous master Gadlen and the lad was borne awaye to the house of his lamented father.

Hob remembers that night with the clarity that four hundred years of reliving it in his nightmares, and wishing he could have found a way to prevent it, has gifted him with. The smell of the tobacco he'd been smoking in the study mixed with the fatty funk of the tallow candles; the squeak of the undertaker's cart wheels as they bumped up the drive; the crunch of boots on the gravel as Rob's friends accompanied his body in an honour guard of misery; the gasp of horror Fletcher quickly stifled when he caught sight of the solemn procession; the taste of the claret Hob had been enjoying turning to sour bile on the back of his tongue.

Maisie mistakes his grave silence for incomprehension of the archaic English.

"The night Robyn Gadlen found out that Martha was pregnant, it looks like her brother jumped him for taking her virtue," Maisie explains gently. "Martha said in later letters that Robyn had proposed marriage as soon as she'd told him, and they'd conspired to elope. But her brothers stopped them as they were sneaking out the back of the tavern. They never made it."

I never knew, Hob realises. There was a child out there, Robyn's child, and I never even knew it. I failed Robyn. I failed this little Harry. I was so busy wallowing in my own grief and self pity, too busy getting drunk each night with Despair, too busy calling for and rebuffing Death, that I never… did she bring the child to the house? Was I too insensible, too pathetic to even be sober long enough to see the baby when I had the opportunity—

Hob's breath shudders out of him in a soft moan. "Why did… why did she never bring the babe to Robyn's father?"

"Her own father sent her away to a convent that same night," Maisie says. "Here, here's another letter. She wrote often to a cousin during her confinement. She says that she would have fled to Gadlen House if she could, but her brothers had carried her off so quick that she was in a nun's cell before the blood was dry on her hands."

"Oh Christ," Hob groans, both a prayer for that poor girl, and a curse against those who had kept her from him. He is awash in relief that he hadn't actively driven his grandson and his mother away, and both regret and anger in equal measure that the baby was hidden from him. "And after the birth?"

"Martha returned home with little Harry and married a man who agreed to care for them both so long as Harry's parentage was never mentioned. The man took over her father-in-law's tavern eventually, but he died of cholera a few years later."

"Hampstead," Hob repeats dully, his brain clicking over slowly, like his gears were filled with fluffy, grief-coloured cotton. "That was… that was the proprietor. Of the White Horse."

"Yes."

He looks up, feels the blood draining from his face. "Robyn died in the White Horse?"

Maisie cuts a confused glance at the camera, not sure what this has to do with the conversation they're clearly supposed to be having. "Yes."

Hob fists his hand in his shirt, over his heart. Surely, surely, he was going to die now.

This had to be it, after six hundred and sixty-some-odd years. Surely, there was no way to survive a heartbreak like this. "I thought… they said a tavern brawl, but they never said which one, and I—"

Maisie reaches out as if to touch his arm, and then stops halfway across the table, unsure of her welcome. "I'm sorry, do you need a minute?"

"Yes," Hob hiccups, and stands from the banquette. He doesn't look at the camera, doesn't make eye contact with the PA. He just walks straight back to the kitchen, pushes open the door, and zombie-shuffles right into the arms of Destruction, who has clearly been waiting for him.

The door has barely shut behind him before his face crumples and his lungs seize up. "He died in the White Horse," Hob sobs quietly. "Right there, where I—"

"I'm so sorry, Hob," Dee says, and rubs his back.

"All that time, I never marked it or… I feel like I should have known. I should have felt it."

"He went to the Sunless Lands in peace, Hob. There was nothing of your son remaining in that place for you to have felt. Don't feel guilty about that."

"I wish I'd known."

Dee hums gently, soothing, and hugs Hob harder as he weeps. Being hugged by Dee is like being gently crushed by tree-trunks. Hob presses his face against his brother-in-law's chest and lets Dee squeeze his soul back into his body.

After a few long minutes, Hob steps back and gives Dee a grateful pat on the arm. "Where's Patrick?"

"I sent him out for lemons," Dee rumbles.

"I bought a whole bag yesterday."

"I know."

"Thank you."

Dee studies his face. He must not like what he sees there because he says, "Do you want me to kick them out?"

"No," Hob replies. He sighs and scrubs his mouth, tries to pat down his hair. "No, no, it's fine. It was just… unexpected. Serves me right for not reading Harri's email more thoroughly."

Dee peers out of the porthole window in the kitchen door at the film crew. Hob can hear the murmur of their discussion, but not the contents of it. "Still, that's a hell of a thing to spring on a guy."

"I'll say," Hob snorts. "Oh, hey look, it's noon. I can drink now."

"Don't go overboard," Dee says, eyeing him.

"Don't worry," Hob reassures him, patting his massive forearm again. "I'm not going to fall back into my self-destructive ways. I spend enough time with you as it is, new-new kid."

Destruction snorts. "I was more thinking about how Despair would worry about you. She hovers like a brooding chicken."

Hob chuckles at the image, which was likely the point, and appreciates Dee's concern for his well being. Hob finishes putting himself to rights, squares his shoulders, takes a deep breath, and shoves the rest of his freak-out down, down, down to share with Morpheus when his husband gets back. And the cameras are gone.

On his way back to his table, he stops at the bar to scoop up four champagne flutes, and pulls one of the nicer bottles of prosecco out of the back of the fridge.

"Well," he says, feeling if not settled then at least more centred, when he sets his glasses down on the table beside Maisie's folder. "I think I can guess what happens next in the story, and if I'm right, then I figure we'll have something to toast to."

Maisie lights up, and Hob can see it, right there, in the way her eyes sparkle—here is his son's many-times granddaughter, come back to him. His blood, in her veins, seeking him out like a loadstone.

Oh christ, Hob thinks, falling a little bit in love with the kid on the spot. I'm going to have to let her dictate the pace of our family bonding, or else I'm going to be selfish and grabby.

"To be fair," Maisie says, "until we found some new documents, I thought I was a Fletcher."

"The Steward?" Hob asks, startled.

"After Martha's husband died, the tavern went to one of Martha's brothers and she came perilously close to abject poverty. She had other children to feed, and thought it was time for Robert Gadlen to know about his grandson. But by then they say the man had fully gone mad, and the Steward decided it was unsafe for the kid to live with him," Maisie explains, sliding the corresponding photocopy of a much older document out of the pile to show him.

It seems I owe that filthy cheating thief my gratitude for this, at least, Hob thinks as he pursues the paper. I absolutely was not in my right mind and this would have absolutely made it worse.

"When Fletcher just showed up at the civil courts one day with a kid, everyone assumed the little boy was actually his. Up until a month ago, my whole family thought we were the illegitimate descendants of the Steward. But the dates weren't adding up, and… well, then we joined the show and they did some digging. The historian found Martha's letters in the Gadlen Fell Crate papers, along with the documentation from the Court of Chancery, and suddenly it all made sense."

"Chancery?" Hob echoes, startled. "Little Harry was a ward of the Councillor?"

"Oh, you know what that is!" Maisie says, delighted. "I didn't."

Hob chances a look up at the P.A., who shrugs, and gives a go-head wave. He taps the family tree still between them, bringing her attention to the fake younger brother he had invented for himself in the early 1700s, Richard Gadlen.

"Maisie, besides what it says on the family tree, did they tell you who I am?"

"Just that Richard Gadlen was my, uh, eight-times great uncle," Maisie says, blithely unaware of how Hob's heart is threatening to burst apart behind his ribs. "Which means you're my, um, no wait, we figured this out, my ninth cousin, once removed because you're one generation older than me."

Hob huffs a chuckle. More than one generation, he thinks.

He's taken to putting silver at his temples in the last year, just a speckle of bleach with a toothbrush, followed by some of the grey-pastel dye that the kids are into these days. He used to have to do this with chalk, so it's much nicer to not shed faux dandruff every time he turns his head. Morph, peacock that he is, isn't ready to start putting on airs of age. Doesn't matter, though—his hair is so black most people already assume it's coloured.

"And did they tell you what I do for a living?" he asks, reaching for the prosecco and unwrapping the foil.

"No," Maisie says, looking around The New Inn. "I assume you're a publican?"

"Well, yeah, but that's not my full-time gig." He works the cage off the bottle neck, and shoots a look at the camera operator. They give him a thumbs up, prepared for the loud noise. He begins to wiggle the cork. "I'm a professor at the University of York. I teach Medieval and Early Modern History and Language. My name is Doctor Robert Gadlen—"

"The sixth!" Maisie squeals in delight, finally putting all the clues together. "Oh my gosh! You're the Witch Knight!"

Hob groans. "We are not calling me that," he says, just as the cork jumps free with a delicious little pop.

#losyark #cling fast adjecent #cling fast #the hob adherent series #hob x dream #hob adherent #dreamling week #dreamling #centennial husbands #centennial boyfriends #deleted scene #the sand man #sandman #dreamling fanfic #dreamling fic #lord morpheus #feel free to fanfic my fanfic

48 notes · View notes

scifrey · 1 year

Text

Keepsakes:

A Hospital Bracelet: Hurt

Status: Ongoing Ficlet collection; unbeta’d

Series: the Hob Adherent series

Rating: Mature. There is medical violence, gun violence (including a gunshot), and some pretty gross wound descriptions in this chapter. Please curate your experience accordingly.

Warnings: Discussions of violence. Some whump and hurt/comfort.

Relationships: Morpheus | Dream of the Endless/Hob Gadling, Eleanor | Hob Gadling’s Wife/Hob Gadling (past)

Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Hob Gadling, Delirium of the Endless, Death of the Endless, Dream of the Endless | Daniel Hall, Destruction of the Endless, Desire of the Endless, Despair of the Endless, Destiny of the Endless, Matthew the Raven

Set about five years after the end of Cling Fast.

READ ON AO3 OR READ BELOW:

A Hospital Bracelet: Hurt

Inspired by a prompt from @hummingbird231 on Tumblr.

As that bitchy little twink Shaxbeard once wrote, there are more things on Earth than can be dreamt of in men’s philosophies, and Hob should know because he is married to one of them.

He’s also acquainted with several more–the Bookseller, the Snake, a young lady who once lived in a world where everyone’s eyes were buttons, and of course the actual Devil themself. Hob knows a handful of people who summon and exorcize demons, are creatures of the night themselves, were raised by ghosts, or live in the metaphysical gaps between tube stations.

But Hob is nothing particularly special. He’s just a bloke who chooses not to die.

Which is, you’ll agree with him, very different from someone who cannot die. There is a chasm of difference there. A whole grand canyon of difference.

And one that his kidnapper is not grasping.

“It’s… it’s not… it’s not in my blood,” Hob tries, using his most reasonable Professor voice, from where he’s strapped the lab table. Well, the massage table that’s been repurposed with camper tie-downs and BDSM gear. Poor quality BDSM gear, because the cuffs are cutting into his wrists unpleasantly. “You’re just gonna make yourself sick if you inject it into your own veins, mate. Who knows what’s still swimming around in there? Bubonic plague, Smallpox, Syphilis, Spanish Flu, all the ‘s’es really, AIDS for certain, and I definitely had Covid-19. I did the grocery run for all my elderly neighbors, so of course it got me.”

The mad scientist, who gave her name as Jill when she’d first started hanging around the New Inn a few months ago, sneers at Hob.

“I’ve read Dracula,” she says, as she continues to fill the blood donation bags that she clearly stole from a clinic, if the labels on the equipment are correct.

“I’m not a vampire,” Hob protests. “Trust me. Besides, you’ve seen me in daylight–”

“Dracula could walk under the sun!”

“Dracula was fiction,” Hob points out, in what he feels is a very reasonable tone, all things considered.

He’s starting to get lightheaded from the blood loss, which is not a good sign.

He’d be alarmed, except this woman is one-thousand percent amateur, and while he’s absolutely mortified that he didn’t catch her dropping the roofie in his beer, he’s not at all concerned that he’ll be able to get himself out of this mess. He’s almost wriggled his way free of the cuffs–the only bonus of them being poor quality, otherwise they itch–and he feels pretty confident that he can get himself free and back home before Dee even realizes he’s not sleeping off a hangover upstairs, and starts investigating.

Of course the bitch waited for the weekend where Morph and Matthew are at a comics convention to play Frankenstien, or this stupid little garden shed would already be in cinders.

(Hob has to give her credit, she has soundproofed it very well, considering the amount of grey foam on the walls and the fact that no one came running when he began shouting his head off as soon as he woke up and realized where he was. There may have been some hysterical, terrified screaming before Hob registered that he wasn’t in some sort of government lab. But then he took a moment to breathe and think, and realized he could get out of here with enough time and focus.)

(Hob is totally changing the keypad on the door between the bar and his flat to a biometric thumbprint censor when he gets home.)

“The Bible was not fiction,” Jill insists, pulling out the blood draw needle and stopping the flow in Hob’s arm with a cotton ball and a bandaid with such expertise that Hob understands immediately that she must actually work at the clinic she’s stolen the supplies from.

Well, worked. She’s getting sacked the minute Hob can get to a phone.

He supposes he should be extending some of his usual charity and understanding to Jill, who just seems to have fallen into an unhealthy obsession, and definitely needs professional medical help. But she drugged him, broke into his flat, and kidnapped him, goddamn it. He’s allowed to be bitter and vengeful. At least for now.

“Parts of it are,” Hob says. “But that doesn’t mean every book is true.”

“Some fairytales are true. Some myths,” Jill presses, eyes glittering with manic delight.

“Well, yes,” Hob allows. “But–”

“I was there, the night the Devil gave you the Key to Hell,” Jill goes on, as if Hob hadn’t spoken. “I tried to get into the pub during the storm, but the door was locked, and when I looked in everyone was frozen, and there were angels bargaining with you, and you told them you were over six hundred years old–”

“That doesn’t make me a vampire!” Hob protests, furious with Lucifer for this oversight and honestly, already writing the scathing letter to his penpal in his head.

Dear Luci, did it not fucking occur to you to freeze the people who were outside in the parking lot too? Love Hob, 🖕

Jill looks down at him with pity, of all things. “It’s alright, Robert,” she says softly, as if he’s the one who’s confused. “I know it must be terrible, to be a monster who wants to do good things. I promise, you won’t be alone in that soon. We can be good monsters together.”

“I’m not a monster,” Hob gasps, horrified. “I don’t drink blood!”

Jill tilts her pitying look the other way. “You don’t have to lie to me, Robert, not me.” She crouches by the table, a comforting hand on his and a conspiratorial look in his eye. “Your thrall is always so pale and wan. There are marks on his throat.”

“My thra—do you mean my husband?” Hob says, incredulous.

Jill scowls. “He’s not your husband,” she insists. “You’re not gay. You were married to a woman. I watched Elizabethan Manor.”

“I’m bi!”

“That’s not a real thing,” Jill scoffs, and pats his hand as if he’s a silly child. “You don’t have to pretend with me. He’s your thrall, and that’s fine, that’s ethical, having an arrangement with one donor. I approve. I won’t mind that you keep him.”

Hob feels his face do something thunderous. “You won’t mind.”

“Of course,” Jill says, standing and turning away to do something with the bagged blood on the shed’s crumbling potting table. “When we’re married.”

“That is not happening,” Hob growls. “And if you even try it with Morph, I swear–”

“I just want you to know it’s fine,” Jill says consolingly. “I’m telling you right now, you can keep your pet. I’ve already come to terms with it. No need to quarrel about it.”

With her back turned, Hob can’t see what she’s doing, and he does not like that. However, it also means that she can’t see him, so he puts some real effort into getting the wrist furthest from her out of its cuff.

He stills when Jill turns back to him, a fat syringe filled with his blood in her hand and her sleeve already rolled up, a rubber band around her bicep.

“I don’t have to do it this way,” Jill says, reasonably. “It doesn’t have to be clinical.”

“Don’t do this–” Hob pleads.

“We could do it the fun way. I know you’re attracted to me.”

“I flirt with everyone while I’m tending bar, it’s my job, it doesn't mean–”

“And then, when eternity stretches out before us, you will share your secrets–”

“I have already!” Hob protests. “It’s not something that happened to me, it’s not, it’s not genetic, or, or… it’s not something that someone infected me with and it’s not something I can pass on. I know for a fact because I’ve had kids, and they died. I just… I made up my mind not to die, and so I don’t.”

He doesn’t mention Dream, or Death, or the Endless, because this bellend hasn’t brought them up at all, and he’s not about to give her more folks to go after.

Jill laughs, as if he’s a toddler who thinks he’s told the world’s funniest joke. “I can’t wait for you to drop this charade. Oh, Robert, we’re going to be so good for each other…” She lines up the needle, and slides it under her skin.

“Seriously, Jill, you’re going to hurt yourself and I’d hate to be the reason for it–please, please don’t–”

Jill pushes down the plunger.

Fuck.

As Hob predicted, Jill starts to take a turn for the worse about an hour later.

Never mind that you can’t just Van Helsing your way through blood transfusions–even Hob knows that the body will reject a non-compatible blood type, and sometimes violently–Hob wasn’t joking when he said that he’s had every major disease ever. Antibodies are a thing of course, but there’s no guarantee that every fleck of illness in him has been subdued.

“You’re not looking so good, Jill,” Hob says from the massage table. He’s got one arm free and has been trying to subtly work the other one. He doesn’t want to alert his captor that he’s loose until he can get his legs free first.

Part of the reason he says it is because he’s hoping she’ll leave to take care of herself, so he can get himself the rest of the way free and the fuck outta the shed before she comes back. The other part is because she genuinely does not look good.

Her skin is rapidly paling, leaving only feverish splotches of colour on her cheeks. She’s got her arms wrapped around herself where she hunches over the potting bench, shivering non-stop. The sweat is thick and clammy on her forehead.

“It’s just my mortal body dying,” Jill gasps around a wracking bout of chills.

“And that’s the problem,” Hob agrees. “You need to go to the hospital.”

“No,” Jill grunts.

“Jill, I’m not a vampire, but I didn’t lie when I said I was immortal. I’ve watched a lot of people die. Don’t make me watch you, too, not when there’s all this amazing modern medicine that can help you–”

“No,” Jill repeats.

Both wrists freed, Hob unclips the belt around his chest, and sits up. “Fine. We’ll do this the hard way, then.” He reaches for the straps holding down his ankles.

“No!” Jill shouts, and shoots him.

Hob’s first thought, when he comes to, is that he hadn’t expected her to have a gun.

He should have expected her to have a gun, because it was a safe assumption that anyone kidnapping and hoping to hold another human being against his will was likely to have a weapon of some kind. And Jill wasn’t exactly the type to be proficient in the art of the blade. A gun is the easiest weapon for an untrained civilian to use.

If one of the most painful to survive.

“Ow,” Hob says, unsure where exactly the pain was the most intense just yet, but deciding that it really does have to be said.

“Oh, you’re back to life,” Jill says from somewhere to his right.

Hob rolls his head in her direction, at peers blearily at her. It’s too bright, whatever window is behind her blurred and glaring, making it hard to pin her in his sights.

“I’m not back to life, because I didn’t die,” Hob mutters.

“That was very rude of you,” Jill says, and then hunches over the steering wheel to cough hard for a few seconds.

Steering wheel?

Yes, steering wheel.

“That was rude of me?” Hob asks, struggling to sit up.

The side of his head screams in burning agony, and Hob bites down on a matching one that’s trying to crawl up his throat. Something hot and wet trickles over the shell of his ear and down his neck. He squeezes his eyes shut at the revolting sensation and realizes that most of the pain is coming from a spot just above his right ear.

Oh my god, she shot me in the head!

Or, at least, the side of his head, he figures, seeing as he’s conscious right now. He wants to touch it, wants to see how much of his brains the bitch blew out, but his hands are bound behind his back with zip ties, and he’s strapped into the passenger seat of the junky old van they’re in.

Hob’s never been shot in the head before. He hopes he’s not losing any memories along with the grey matter.

“You’re not healing fast,” Jill says, ignoring his incredulity. “Are you hungry? Did I take too much blood? We can, uh, pick up a hitchhiker, I guess?”

“I’m not a vampire!” Hob snarls. “And I don’t have supernatural healing, either! I’m just a guy who cannot die! Ow!” he adds as his head throbs and another gush of what Hob assumes is blood and brains plops onto his shoulder. “This is seriously gross.”

Jill gags as a response, which turns into another series of coughs. She’s clutching so hard at the steering wheel that the van wobbles on the pavement in response. Agonizingly, Hob turns to look out the window and is relieved to see that they’re on a country road at least. Jill can’t accidentally drive into a crowd or oncoming traffic out here, thank god.

Jesu Maria, Hob’s head hurts. The pain and the whizzing landscape are combining to make him nauseous and he swallows his own spit and bites the inside of his cheek hard, because the last thing he wants to do is vomit when he’s strapped back like this, and his goddamned brains are leaking out of his goddamned skull.

“Where are we going?”

“My mum used to have a caravan in a park,” Jill slurs. “S’mine now. She died.”

Hob digests that. “Recently?”

Jill’s already blood-shot eyes well up with tears. “Last week.”

“Ah,” Hob says, but doesn’t add: So that’s why you decided to do this now. Her death scared the shit out of you. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Jill blinks hard, tears rolling down her cheeks, and then is taken by another coughing jag. The van skids off the asphalt dangerously, skidding in the gravel of the shoulder, bumping on to the grass for a heart-stopping few seconds before Jill jerks the wheel and rights it.

“WHeE! ThIs iS fUn,” says a voice from behind Hob. He doesn’t bother to turn to look, because he knows said voice well enough to place it immediately.

“Hey sis,” he greets Delirium. “You here for her or me?”

Del just reaches out to stroke Jill’s cheek kindly.

Jill, who can’t see the Endless in the van, nonetheless jerks at the touch, then turns to blink owlishly at Hob. “Who are you talking to?”

Hob shrugs. He sees no point obfuscating the truth. Not if Del’s presence means what he thinks it means. “My sister-in-law.”

Jill glances in the rearview mirror. “There’s no one here. Are you, like, communicating through telepathy?”

Hob groans and lets his head fall back against the seat instead of answering. “Ow.”

“Ew,” Del says, her face right up against his wound. “THaT iS sO cOOl.”

"Is it big?"

"MmmMmm, SiZe of A gOlF bAll?"

He feels something, small and warm, touch the edge of the wound, just on the inside curve of his skull.

“Gross, don't stick your finger in it, Del.”

“Who are you talking to?” Jill demands again, twisting in her seat to check the back, eyes darting and rolling wildly. “Cut it out!”

“Pull over,” Hob says.

“No!��

“HoLd On,” Delirium says gently.

“How?” Hob chuckles.

All the same, Hob closes his eyes. He doesn’t like being in car crashes. He’s had enough nightmares about them to add fodder by witnessing what’s about to happen.

“Jill, please, for your sake, pull over.”

“No!”

“You’re not well, you need help. Please let me help you.”

“You are helping me,” Jill says, a stubborn set to her voice.

“Then, I’m sorry,” Hob says.

“Sorry for what? Hey, why are your eyes closed, are you–”

Hob wakes in the grass. His body must have been flung from the wreck, because when he shifts, he can’t see the van anywhere around. He feels like one giant bruise, and wriggling around to get his arms under his feet and in front of him is made easier (more painful! But easier!) by a dislocated shoulder.

Once his hands are at his front, Hob decides to pass out again.

“Uncle Hob,” Dream of the Endless says, when Hob collapses at the foot of his throne. “You can’t stay.”

“I’m exhausted,” Hob complains. “And I don’t hurt here. Can I rest just a little?”

“No,” Dream says, emerald eyes glittering, and blows sand in his face. “It's not safe for you to be unconscious right now. This dream is–”

Hob gasps back to reality, screaming as his consciousness slams back into his body. His voice echoes across the night sky, scaring some birds from the nearby hedgerows. Hob pants and whines as he takes stock of the extent of the damage–the side of his head, his dislocated shoulder, scrapes like fire on the exposed skin of his cheek and arms, and, yeah, that’s a broken ankle.

Fuck.

He lays still for a very long time, watching the stars wheel overhead, and after a while he realizes that nobody is coming. The road is deserted, there are no sirens in the distance, and Hob has no idea where his phone is.

Del is gone.

He would have liked the company, but he's feeling tortuously clear-headed from the pain right now, so he understands why she couldn't stick around.

Hob rolls and jerks around on the ground until he gets his shoulder popped back into its socket, grunting and sobbing with the relief of it. Then he slides his zip-tied wrists between one knee and jerks hard until the plastic snaps. Not before it gouges deep into the flesh on the backs of his hands, though, leaving thin, weeping cuts behind.

Hob manages to get himself upright, and take stock of his surroundings. Several car-lengths behind him on the road, the balustrade of a small one-lane stone bridge is smashed outward, a piece of the van swinging from one of the poles.

Fuck, again.

Hob limps over to the side and peers down at the wreckage of twisted metal resting against the stone pier cap. He watches for a few minutes. He's just about to give up when he thinks he sees something moving inside.

Triple fuck.

The water rushing under the bridge is deep and likely to be cold, this late in the autumn. Bracing himself for the shock of it, and the pain swimming will cause his ankle, Hob throws himself over the side. He surfaces a few meters away from the van, and struggles against the current until he can get his hand on the dented fender and haul himself close enough to heave his torso over the side and get a good perch on the crushed remains of the passenger door.

By the time Hob has caught his breath enough to try peering through the window, Death is already perched beside him on one of the wheels.

“Oh,” Hob says. Sinking realization makes him slip a little.

“I’m sorry,” Death says, reaching out to offer Hob both a hug and a more stable perch against the crumpled metal.

“Me too,” Hob agrees, burying his face against his sister-in-law’s shoulder and letting her hold him up. “Damn shitty way to die.”

Death holds him until Destruction rescues him from the river, a few hours later, with an ambulance and half a fire brigade following in his wake.

PART TWO "A HOSPITAL BRACELET: COMFORT"

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scifrey · 1 year

Text

Keepsakes:

A Hospital Bracelet: Comfort

Status: Ongoing Ficlet collection; unbeta’d

Series: the Hob Adherent series

Rating: Mature. There are discussions of medical torture and wounds in this chapter. Please curate your experience accordingly.

Warnings: Discussions of violence. Some whump and hurt/comfort.

Relationships: Morpheus | Dream of the Endless/Hob Gadling, Eleanor | Hob Gadling’s Wife/Hob Gadling (past)

Directly follows the previous part, A HOSPITAL BRACELET: HURT

READ ON AO3 OR READ BELOW:

A Hospital Bracelet: Comfort

Inspired by a prompt from @hummingbird231 on Tumblr.

“Let me in!” Matthew shouts. “I’mma peck his eyes out myself, the stupid, noble fuckface.”

The noise is enough to rouse Hob. He who opens an eye to take in the vision of Matthew buffeting at the small window in the hall-side door with gimlet-eyed fury. He is resplendent in his little neon-blue coat that declares him a Service Animal Do Not Pet.

The door pushes open, and a startled-looking nurse immediately flattens himself against it. “I’ve never heard a crow speak in full sentences–”

“Raven!” Matthew and Morpheus correct together.

Morph flows into the room with all his magnificent, royal fury, dragging his sleek wheeled suitcase behind him and practically flinging it into the corner. He must have come straight from the airport.

“Get out,” Morph snarls at the nurse, and before Hob can even work up the spit to scold him for his manners, the fellow is off like a shot.

Morph locks the door behind him. Matthew lands on the bed rail behind Hob’s head and actually does peck him. But it’s just once, on his bare cheek, and gently.

“Ow,” Hob moans softly.

“You deserve worse,” Matthew complains, fluffing up in agitation.

“You are foolish,” Morph adds, as he drags a chair right up against the side of the hospital bed. He sounds so wrecked that anyone would think that Morpheus was the one who was in a car crash. “Jumping in filthy, frigid water, Robert! With a hole in your head!”

“I had to try to save her,” is all Hob says.

“Foolish,” Morph repeats. He takes Hob’s nearest hand between his own and presses his forehead against it, bowing into the bed. It causes the thin, plasticky hospital bracelet to rub against Hob’s road-rash, but he doesn’t say anything about it, too happy to have the warmth of his husband against his skin. “I know you cannot die, erasti, but I will kill you myself if you do this to me again.”

“Hey,” Hob croaks. “Not my fault.”

“He sounds worse than me, boss, get him some water,” Matthew says, hopping over to the bedside table where someone has left a pitcher, a cup, and a paper straw.

Morph pours, and Hob takes the opportunity to look around the room. Besides registering that he was now in a hospital, he hasn’t had much time awake in here to take in his situation. He’s been drifting in and out of consciousness since the ambulance, swapping so frequently between this bed and a soft bit of meadow Fiddler’s Green that they’ve sort of blended together in his scrambled brains.

God’s bones, he hopes he doesn’t have permanent brain damage. Or memory loss.

Matthew extends a wing and holds the straw still as Morph uses one of his hands to hold the cup, and another to help prop Hob upright enough to drink without spilling all over himself. He knows enough to go slow, to take it in little sips, and is grateful for Morph’s patience as he wets his throat.

"I won't be able to stay awake for too long, duckie," Hob says when Morph sets the cup aside. Hob fiddles with the morphine pump button on the side of the gurney but doesn't press it yet. "But I'm glad you're here."

"Hob," Morph says, miserable. He lifts Hob's bandaged hand and presses a long, slow kiss around the bruised flesh of the IV port.

"I am fine," Hob reassures him. He wants to brush his hand through Morph's hair, more wild than usual, undoubtedly from his fretting. He wants to smooth it down, and then smooth down Matthew's ruffled feathers. He wants to put them all back to rights, so this can be behind them.

But it hurts too much to move, so he lets his head flop back, carefully resting on his intact right side, and takes in the hospital room. This is the longest stretch he's been awake so far, and he's been here… hours? Days? Hob's not actually sure.

There was surgery at some point, he remembers that. Daniel had come to keep him company on the Green while he’d been under anesthesia.

It’s probably only been about twenty four hours, considering the fact that Morph would have had to make his way back from the convention in Glasgow, then hired a cab to bring him to Hob in… whatever hospital they're in. An eye-flick at the window on the far wall offers Hob a view of pastureland and a small garden, dotted with other patients, close to the building. So definitely not in London. They must be close to where the crash happened.

Good. Small hospitals in out-of-the-way places are easier to vanish from, and the doctors are less likely to want to perform expensive and unnecessary tests. They’re easier to bribe off with cash, too.

While he and Morph aren't wealthy, they live comfortably enough that their health insurance is sizeable, if only for exact situations like these where a private room and a dedicated nursing team would make it easier to explain away their strange physical conditions. Like surviving a bullet grazing past one's head and taking out a chunk of skull the size of a golf ball, and not dying from it.

"Beg to differ. You got a hole in your head, Hobsie," Matthew argues, hopping down to roost on Hob's belly, pretty much the only part of him that doesn't hurt right now. "And a wrenched shoulder, a broken ankle, and your hands look like you went ten rounds with a hellcat."

"And all of that will heal," Hob assures the bird. Then he squeezes his husband's hand in his. "Though if your mom wants to speed things up for me this time, duck, I wouldn't say no."

He tries to wink at Morph while he says it, but it comes out as a wince instead, which seems to upset Morph even more.

"I should never have gone," Morph says, his voice little more than a broken rumble. The way Matthew scoffs makes it clear that this is already well-trod path between them.

"You couldn't have known, boss," Matthew reassures Morph, but it falls on deaf ears.

"I ought to have," Morph growls. "I was King of all Dreams, I should have—I shouldn't have been surprised—I—"

"Hey, hey," Hob says gently. He uses his grip on his husband’s hand to slowly pull his hand up so Hob can kiss his knuckles. "Shhh. You're not Dream of the Endless anymore. There's no way you could have seen her fantasies."

"Maybe I was hasty in abdicating," Morph says in a miserable, red-eyed rush. He fits his free hand against the side of Hob’s face without the crisscrossing bandages, soothing the little spot where Matthew had poked Hob with his beak. "If I had remained in my role for a few more years, I could—"

"No," Hob says firmly. "No, we're not playing what ifs. And you're not going to beat yourself up for not seeing something coming every time something happens to us. This is what human life is, duckie. It's just rolling with the punches as they come, getting back up, dusting yourself off, and moving forward."

Morph runs his thumb back and forth over Hob’s temple, the place where Hob’s started to bleach and colour his hair into a charming grey stripe.

“This is Desire’s doing,” Morph grumps.

“I doubt that,” Hob soothes him. “Desire doesn’t give a shit about your old rivalry any more. Stop looking for people to blame. Jill’s already dead, poor thing. There’s no one else.”

“Poor thing,” Matthew snorts.

“Well, I feel sorry for her,” Hob says. “Imagine, going through what she did, losing her mum, and then figuring out that some other bastard gets eternal life and you don’t, she didn’t, and it’s not fair—that’s enough to drive anyone mad. Believe me. I should know.”

“Yes, speaking of knowing, how did she?” Morph snarls.

Hob tells him.

It just makes Morph angrier. “Lucifer, that flamboyant, self absorbed–”

“Cut it out,” Hob barks, trotting out his Professor Gadlen voice.

Matthew startles enough to puff up, and Morph jerks back, stung. His face falls from surprise to hurt. Morph draws his hands away and curls into a ball on the hospital chair, and Hob wishes he could chase after him. But even raising his IV’d hand to follow tugs and burns painfully, and Hob hisses and drops it to the bed instead.

Matthew looks like he’s about to say something, but Hob shoots him a warning glare, and the raven snaps his beak shut.

“Morph, babe,” Hob says gently. “I’m not mad at you. I just need you to stop thinking that this is anyone’s fault but hers. I know you feel lost and aimless because there is no one to punish, and no one to blame, and no one to yell at—it’s hard to have all that anger in you and nowhere for it to go. I get it. But you gotta let it go.”

He holds up his hand and Morpheus pounces on it, clinging like Hob is floating in the sea and he is the only life raft.

“Erasti,” Morph breathes, and his lower lashes sparkle with unshed tears. Where once they glowed sliver, mercurial as stardust, they’re now just regular old saltwater… but no less beautiful. “I was… I was so frightened.”

“Me too,” Hob assures him. “But nothing was going to keep me there. Nothing will ever keep me from you.”

“I couldn’t… the… glass… I couldn’t stop thinking about…” His sentence devolves into panicky little breaths, and, by god, does Hob wish he was the kind of immortal creature that heals quickly, so he could be over all of this nonsense and out of the hospital already. That he was able to fold Morph in his embrace and kiss away every one of his terrible fears and memories.

For half a moment, he enjoys the extremely bitter irony of not being a vampire.

“Here, come up here,” Hob says, wiggling as much as his bound shoulder and casted foot will allow. He makes a small gutter of space between his side and the rail of the bed.

Matthew rides him out, waiting until Morph has folded his skinny arse on the mattress, and then picks his way over Hob’s chest to hunker down on the pillow, right behind Morph’s upturned shoulder. He lays his head over Morph’s pulse and watches Hob with worried black eyes. Morpheus presses himself so close to Hob it’s like he’s trying to crawl through his skin.

“I can’t do this without you,” Morph warbles.

“And you never will. No one is ever going to take me away from you.”

“Dee said that when you didn’t show up for class, he went to check on you. He said it looked like someone dragged you out of the flat, and Destiny gave us the CCTV footage and you were so limp, and so alone, all I could think about was… the… the basement…”

The glass prison, Hob realizes. Being trapped while a demented human demanded boons and power that are not within you to give.

“That’s fair, duck, I would think of that first, too.”

“And then I… I didn’t know… I’m powerless now, Hob. I can’t–”

“Shhh, shhh, you’re not powerless. You’re here. Right here. Right now. Right where I need you to be.”

“I had to rely on my family to find you. To save you.”

“And they did. That’s what family is for.”

“I felt so helpless.”

Hob decides it’s worth the pain and effort to stop up Morph’s mouth with his own. The kiss starts desperate, dislodging Matthew, who flaps back to Hob’s belly, but Hob is able to slow it down into something sweet and reassuring.

“You’re not useless, you’re not powerless, and you’re not helpless,” Hob reminds his husband, in between lingering pecks. “Even if you did not have your siblings to turn to, I don’t doubt for a second that you would have found me. Not one second, do you hear me, beloved?”

“You suffered,” Morph whispers, so soft it’s nearly lost under the beep and whirr of the machines around Hob. “And I was not there to make it stop.”

“I’m not suffering now,” Hob says gently and kisses him one last time. “I am safe, thanks to you.”

Morpheus mumbles something, but it’s buried between Hob’s neck and pillow, and he doesn’t catch it.

“I’m going to reup my meds. All this moving around has me in agonies.”

Morph sits up. “Erasti, you should not have let me–”

“Nah,” Hob says, reaching over Morph to press the button to release a dose of his husband’s namesake drug into his IV. “I’m much happier with you here. Stay ‘till I fall asleep?” Hob asks, pleased when Morph both against the mattress to keep him company.

"It wasn’t me, you know," a voice drawls from the window-side of Hob's bed, the next time he regains consciousness.

"Hmm?" Hob asks, working to get his eyes gummy open.

The little birdie weight on Hob’s stomach is gone, as is the press of Morph next to him.

He reaches out, wincing, but finds Despair in the hospital chair next to him, and not Morph.

"They've gone to fetch tea," Despair says, with thin grey glee. "Hospital tea is the worst kind of tea."

Hob rolls his head the other way—or, at least as far as the wad of bandaging on the ventilated side of his head allows—and Desire winks from the narrow sofa under the window. They're lounging like it's a luxurious settee from a golden age starlet's dressing room, instead of the sagging, pokey thing it is.

"I didn't know that the woman had such designs. I would not have…" Desire makes a disgusted sound. "I’ve laid my quarrel with your husband to rest. It’s no fun, now that he’s a boring old human.”

“I’m making an effort not to be offended,” Hob sing-songs, then coughs against his dry mouth. Despair helps him get some pillows behind his back to sit up, and to take a few sips of water.

Desire only rolls their golden eyes. “I did not set the woman on you to punish him."

"I know," Hob says.

Desire pouts petulantly. "He doesn't trust me."

"He doesn't trust anyone," Hob offers gently. "Don't take it personally."

"He must trust you," Despair says. Hob knows that she’s saying it to hook anxiety and resentment into him, and that she can’t help it. It’s just who she is. He doesn’t let the barbs break skin.

"He loves me, which is not the same,” Hob corrects kindly. “There are still things he doesn't trust me with. I think maybe the only person he really trusts is Daniel. Maybe Matthew."

"But you are his spouse," Desire says, the confusion drawing them out of their sulk. "Surely he trusts you."

"To an extent," Hob says affably. He wishes he could shrug but he knows that it will just hurt, so he doesn't. "I'm not offended by it. He's been hurt a lot in his life—hey, look at me, Desire, don't pout, I'm not calling you out here—he's been hurt because he loved too much, too fast, and too completely. And he’s had the trust that this kind of love engenders broken a lot. Then to top it off, he naively believed that humanity was the sum of all its best parts–and it is, it can be–but he’s been disabused of that by some very awful humans doing very awful things to him. And to one another. And now that he's just human, he lives in dread of the day that I’ll succumb to the same thing every other lover he’s had has succumbed to–that I’ll find the size and intensity of his love too much of a burden. And that eventually I’ll resent him, or get bored of him, and send him off."

Desire bursts into howling, hysterical laughter. "You? You? Fall out of love with our darling Moron Morph? Ha! Better to think you could piss on the sun to put it out!"

"Colourful," Hob chuckles. "But accurate. He needs to settle into that realization himself. I can't do it for him. And," Hob adds, as Desire’s expression turns mischievous and thoughtful. “Don’t you go meddling either. Let him sink into it naturally.”

“My darling little brother,” Desire drawls. “I am Desire of the Endless. There is literally no force in existence more natural than I.”

Hob just levels them a flat, unimpressed look.

“Oh fine,” Desire says, throwing up their hands. They flip around on the sofa, irritable, laying on it head down with their long, long legs propped against the wall under the window, crossed at the ankle. “Spoilsport.”

“Thank you.” Hob turns his attention to the other twin. “And how are you, darling Despair?”

“Wonderful,” she effuses with a sated sigh. “I love hospitals.”

Hob grins at her. Some people might be put off by another’s joy in people’s misery, but that’s literally who Despair is. The sun rises in the east, water is wet, and Despair of the Endless revels in suffering. He’s just happy she’s happy.

“Your lovely hair,” Despair moans theatrically, brushing her hand through the ends of it visible on the side of his head. “You must be sad.”

“Of course. But it’ll grow back,” Hob assures her. He tries to reach up to tug on his ear, the little tick that has given away his embarrassment since he was a wee boy, and his mam caught him in a lie, but the motion pulls on the bandages on his shoulder, and he drops his hand to the bed instead.

“Of course it will,” Desire adds, grinning with their tongue between their teeth. “Handsome Hobsie.”

The urge to tug his ear grows stronger. "Where's Delirium?"

"She had her turn to sit with you while you slept through the drug-haze," Despair says.

"She's out pestering the nurses right now," Desire adds, gesturing at the door as if whatever Del was up to was simply childish nonsense, not worth remarking on. "Confusing them into allowing you a discharge tomorrow. After that, the files will simply vanish."

"The head nurse will berate herself for weeks," Despair adds with relish.

"That's… really thoughtful," Hob offers with a blink. "Thanks, guys."

"It's almost as if we love you, little brother," Desire drawls, stretching and rising to their feet, amused by the way Hob's gaze latches onto the bulge in their anatomically-impossibly-tight trousers, which of course they had done on purpose to fluster him.

"Destruction will pick you up tomorrow afternoon," Despair says, rising as well and setting the chair in just the right place to trip anyone coming into the room. "Oh! Morph should learn to drive."

"Oh, no, he absolutely should not," Hob rejoinders. "Not if he doesn't want to end up in one of these beds himself."

"But he'd be so bad at it," Despair points out, full of hope.

Morph returns with two cups of truly wretched tea, and informs Hob that Del’s pulled some unseen strings to get him released into Morph’s care. Apparently she’s convinced the hospital that Hob is being moved to a posh, ultra-private clinic under specialist supervision.

“So private it only has one bed!” Matthew jokes, and Hob tries not to wince at the volume of his caws. It’s not the raven’s fault that Hob is having problems regulating his sensory input due to a traumatic brain injury.

As Hob and Morph grimace their way through the appalling tea, Matthew pulls the chart off the foot of the bed and painstakingly flips through it, reading the most interesting bits aloud.

“Three-dee printed disk of human bone fitted into your skull, isn’t it a wonder what they can do with technology nowadays, with a skin graft to cover the wound…”

“Where did you learn to read the chart?” Hob asks.

“I was a cop, wasn’t I?” Matthew says with his version of a shrug. “Got lots of practice hanging around in hospital rooms with vi–witnesses and the like.”

Hob tries not to be offended that Matthew thinks he’ll be triggered by the word ‘victim’.

“Oh!” Matthew snorts, “They took the skin from your ass! You’re a real and genuine asshat now!”

Hob groans and shifts on the bed. “No wonder I can’t get comfortable.”

“Are you in a great deal of pain, erasti?”

“Only from this tea,” Hob jokes, handing it back to Morph.

Morph looks like he wants to protest, but instead just takes the tea and sets it aside.

“Sorry,” Hob fumbles, unsure how to parse Morph’s quiet thoughtfulness. “I… I didn’t mean to insult–”

“No, no,” Morph murmurs. “It is just…”

Matthew mantles and, after a moment, finishes Morph’s thought with: “We’re just worried about you, Hobsie. You seem a bit–”

“Am I slurring?” Hob interrupts, fear surging up his spin. “Do I sound funny? Is my brain scrambled, I mean, I sound fine to me, but am I–”

“You are perfectly intelligible, erasti,” Morph reassures him. “Only, you are being… unexpectedly genial.”

“What?”

“Your good mood is freaking us out,” Matthew clarifies.

Hob takes a moment to parse what they mean. “Wait, you’re worried because I’m not acting traumatized enough?” Morph takes his IV’d hands between both of his, looking theatrically sympathetic and worried. “Oh, come on! I’m fine.”

“There’s a hole in your head,” Matthew says gently.

“And they filled it with science fiction medical shit,” Hob grouses. “I can’t die.”

Morph looks hesitant to speak his mind, which, perhaps, a first for him. At least for as long as Hob has known him. Which is damn near seven hundred years, now. But he clearly has something he wants to say. It’s written all over his face like a ticking time bomb.

“Go on,” Hob says. “Spit it out, already.”

Morph blinks hard. Gently, he begins with: “You once told me that your greatest nightmare was to be captured and experimented upon. Despair told me what was done, and–”

“Stop.” Bile, hot and sour, rushes up Hob’s throat. He swallows hard against it, refusing, refusing to let that woman hurt him any more. He squeezes Morph’s hand hard enough to probably hurt.

Morph stops.

“No,” Hob says firmly, screwing his eyes shut, forcing his breathing to remain steady, to not speed up, to not betray his…no. No. “No. We’re not… no.”

“Okay,” Matthew says, wobbling over the blanket to press his head comfortingly against Hob’s heart. “It’s okay.”

“I’m fine,” Hob says, pushing him off gently. “I just don’t see what good dwelling on it will do. It’s over. I’m fine.”

Morph and Matthew exchange a look that makes it clear that they don’t believe him. It settles like a nettling irritant under his skin.

“You know, I fucking hate it when you guys conspire,” Hob snaps. “Makes me feel like a third wheel in my own fucking marriage, sometimes.”

Morph doesn’t outwardly react to Hob’s words, but the shine in his glacier-blue eyes gets brighter, his entire vibe closing off.

“Yeah, I guess that’s my cue to fuck off,” Matthew says, voice pinched.

“Wait, Matthew, I didn’t mean–” Hob starts, but doesn’t finish, as Matthew’s already leapt into the air and, in the span of two wingbeats, vanished into the Dreaming. Hob turns to look at Morph. He wishes he could cross his arms across this chest. “What?”

“Excellently done, erasti,” Morph says, and sarcasm oozes like sludge from every syllable.

“Well, I do feel that way, sometimes,” Hob snaps.

“Then why have you not said so before now?” Morph challenges. “Why bring it up only to weaponize it right when we’re all feeling at our most vulnerable? Do you seek to hurt us the way you have been hurt? Or in recompense for my failure to protect–”

“No,” Hob interrupts hastily, shame flooding his body and dousing the prickly standoffishness. “I’m sorry. I am. That wasn’t fair. My brain-to-mouth filter must have been in the glob of grey-matter that fell onto the van floor. I’m sorry.”

Morph sniffs, clearly not ready to forgive Hob yet, and that’s fair. That’s fair. He’s going to have to grovel to Matthew, too. “Was your emotional intelligence in that glob as well?”

“Ouch,” Hob laughs, but it’s thin and strained. “Okay, I deserved that.”

“Hob, we were scared for you. We are still frightened of what complications may arise from what occurred. Will you not concede that our fears are well founded, at least?”

Hob chews on that for a moment, and while he thinks that it’s all ridiculous, that it’s nothing, he won’t deny Morph the right to feel what he feels.

“No, yeah, of course,” Hob says softly. “I’ll… I’ll do better.”

“You do not need to do better at trying to lie to yourself and us about your mental state,” Morph warns him. “You need to allow yourself to process what happened and experience it.”

Hob makes a sour face at that. “Right now?”

“No, of course not in this immediate moment…” Morph heaves a sigh.

“Okay. Later,” Hob says, meaning not ever.

Morph eyes him like he knows, but lets it drop. After a few long moments of awkward, frustrated silence, Morph says, “What else was in that glob of grey matter, do you suppose?”

He’s trying for a joke, and Hob’s replying laughter is too forced, but neither of them remark on it.

“I dunno. Why don’t you quiz me?”

“In what year did we first meet?”

“2019,” Hob says promptly, just for the way Morph’s face transforms with shock and dismay, only to curl into sly amusement.

“Ah, you jest.”

“Of course I jest. 1389, June 7th. Best day of my life.” He uses their entwined fingers to pull Morph’s hand to his mouth for a quick kiss. “Give me a hard one.”

“Hƿæt ƿæs þīn earste inƿætling þū me?”

“I č ierēamde þīn ēagan for dæᵹ,” Hob replies.

"Menteur. Je suis revenu en arrière et j'ai regardé tes rêves à propos de moi après que nous soyons devenus amants."

"D'accord, j'ai rêvé de tes yeux et de te pencher au-dessus de la table, juste là, au milieu de the White Horse."

“Kinē sōhaṇē śabada. Tusīṁ mērē nāla kivēṁ rōmānsa karadē hō, isa la'ī.”

“Tusīṁ saca magi'ā, rōmānsa nahīṁ,” Hob says with a cheeky wink, feeling much more himself now that they were back to flirting.

“That’s not truth either!” Morph blurts out. “Þú virðir mig. Þú óttaðist mig.”

“Ég hef aldrei óttast þig.”

“I glóssa sou eínai asiménia ópos pánta. Den nomízo óti écheis chásei kamía glóssa.”

“Ti anakoúfisi,” Hob says, with a sigh, and indeed it is a relief. Whatever it was what made Hob Hob, that formed his personality, and his memories, and his core identity, seem to be intact.

Hob’s not entirely certain he trusts Destiny of the Endless to drive any more than Morpheus, considering he’s never seen the entity’s eyes through the curtain of his hipster-emo hair. But it’s Destiny who greets them from the driver’s seat of Dee’s junky little Jeep hatchback. As Dee lifts Hob from the wheelchair into the back seat, Hob supposes it makes sense for the big strong burly Endless to be the one to manhandle him around while his motor function is still shot. Still, he thinks he might prefer the one who’s lived among humans to be the one navigating.

“We will arrive at the New Inn safely,” Destiny sniffs as Morph scoots in the other rear door, and gets Hob buckled in.

Hob is reminded sharply that his in-laws can read his surface thoughts, so long as they pertain to their sphere of influence. A spike of annoyance flashes through him, but Hob shoves it down. It doesn’t matter.

“Fair enough, fair enough,” Hob laughs lightly, instead, trying to keep the mood light.

He’s already exhausted from their little escape. Okay, so said ‘escape’ is agonizingly slow, in broad daylight, and under the approval and supervision of a bunch of people who won’t remember it afterwards, but perhaps they were a bit hasty in getting him out of there so fast. He really does wish he’d been able to bring some of that lovely IV-strength morphine with him.

Destruction climbs into the front. “All set?”

“Yeah,” Hob says. “Good as it’s gonna get, at least. You know, it’s sweet of all of you to check in on me, but I’ll be fine.”

Matthew lands on Morph’s lap, and they exchange a skeptical glance as Morph shuts his door, and Destiny pulls away from the hospital carriageway.

“What?” Hob chuckles, leaning as far back in the seat as it allows to cradle his poor head, broken ankle propped on the wheel well. “Really, I’m fine!”

“Boss,” Dee says, turning awkwardly around in the passenger seat. “Not to make, you know, light of it, but you were drugged, abducted, imprisoned, medically violated, shot, and then in a horrific car wreck. You’re allowed to be not fine. Anybody would be not-fine.”

“I was not-fine after only two of those things happened to me,” Morph says softly.

“That was a whole century, though,” Hob says. “I was only gone a day. Twenty-four hours at most.”

“A short duration of torture lasts does not make it any less torturous.”

“Torture!” Hob echoes, with a forced guffaw. “Come on, guys.”

Morpheus lays a gentle hand on Hob’s thigh, and somehow the usually comforting gesture feels condescending this time. “Erasti, waking nightmares have been spawned by less. There is no shame in–”

“Stop pestering me,” Hob snaps, shoving Morph’s hand off, his good mood starting to strain.

“Hobsie, come on,” Matthew says, scrambling up Morph’s arm to perch on his shoulder and preen Hob’s visible hair under the bandages. “I thought you didn’t buy into the toxic masculinity bullshi–”

“I said I’m fine!” Hob snarls. “So leave it.”

Matthew jerks back with a startled squawk, landing on his back in Morph’s hastily cupped hands. No one else says anything, but the silence that descends on the car is thick with I told you so. Four pairs of eyes drill into Hob accusingly, worriedly; even Destiny's, while he still somehow manages to keep them on the road. Or so Hob assumes, cause he can’t see them.

“Ow,” Hob says, his head throbbing so hard that he sees dark spots in his vision.

Morph sets Matthew to rights. The raven faces away from Hob on Morph’s lap, Morph helping him groom his feathers smooth with stiff, pale fingers. Hob immediately feels like an arse.

But everyone is finally quiet, so he closes his eyes and rests the intact part of his skull on the cool window and closes his eyes, and tries to banish the vision of the needle coming toward him, over, and over, and over again.

Death and Delirium are waiting for them at the flat, and Hob tries not to be irritated by it.

He’s not a fucking child, he doesn’t need babysitting.

Hob is handed off like a grouchy baton, Destruction setting him gently on the sofa, Death covering him with the hand-knit blanket from the back of it. Delirium twines the stem of a flower—drooping, partially managed echinacea, which otherwise would be a sweet wish to get well soon—through the bandages around his head. Destiny reviews the uses of the medication the nurses had discharged Hob with in the kitchen, with Matthew and Morph.

“Brought you a present,” Death says. She holds up a stunningly beautiful art-nouveau style stoppered pitcher in emerald-green glass. It’s filled with what appears to be an ever-swirling golden storm of Dream Sand. "And it's not addictive, like opiates or morphine."

"Well, not that much more," Despair says, from where she's appeared on the armchair next to the sofa.

"Tsk, this is so tacky," Desire says, grabbing his wrist without even asking Hob, and cutting away the hospital bracelet with one blood-red, razor-sharp nail. It drops to the floor with an anti-climactic flutter. "There."

Hob recoils from their touch, overwhelmed and feeling very much that he wants to be left alone. And also, very much, that he is desirous of a shower. He feels objectively disgusting under all the sweat and grime and reek of the hospital.

"Well, I'm not washing your back, Hobsie," Desire purrs. "Though if you got permission from Mister Morose, I think I could be persuaded to give you a sponge bath." With a seductive gesture, they're suddenly dressed in an extremely frilly, extremely skimpy candystriper costume.

"Bath?" Death pipes up from behind the sofa, where she was in discussion about security of the flat with Destruction. "Absolutely not. You’ll get your cast wet, and water in your cuts, and soap in your brain, and that can’t be good, even if it won’t kill you.”

“They put a skin graft over the hole,” Hob grumps. “Nothing can get in my brain.”

“They took it from his ass!” Matthew chirrups from the kitchen. “So Hobsie’s a real asshat now.”

“Yes, thank you,” Hob growls. “Ha ha ha. That gets much funnier the more you tell it.”

Matthew mantles and harrumphs, puffing up like a particularly irritated soot sprite. “Hey, I’m just trying to lighten the mood around here.”

“There’s no mood,” Hob says. The bandages itch. The adhesive is pulling uncomfortably on his hair, and he just feels so gross. He wants to brush his teeth, but he doubts any of the Endless will even let him piss in peace.

Despair smiles. “There’s definitely a mood.”

“AGGresSioN aNd uNUsUAl CoMbATiveNESS is A sIgN oF TrAuMaTIc bRaIn InJuRY. HaVe yOUr puPiLs ReTuRnEd to THE sAmE SiZe, oR—” Delirium floats far too close to Hob, peering into his face, the tip of her nose touching his.

"Okay, that's enough! Everyone out, out!" Hob snarls. Silence falls like an atom bomb. The assemblage of his in-laws all turn to blink at him with expressions ranging from amused to offended. "Please, I am exhausted. I appreciate your concern but please go. Please."

"Of course," Death says, graciously, as if it were her idea and not because Hob just bit off the collective heads off of six of the most powerful entities in existence. "We must let Dream have his time with our littlest brother, as he is still too young to step into the Waking."

"No," Hob moans. "No, I beg you. I don't want to be coddled in the Dreaming either, I just—" But then he's talking to an empty room.

Well, not quite empty.

Morph and Matthew are still in the kitchen. Morph has a pill bottle in each hand, and a raven on his shoulder, and a look of intense scrutiny on his face as he pointedly does not divert his attention from the medication.

Matthew shoots a few looks between Hob and Morph, and then spreads his wings.

"Yeah, good luck with that, bossman," Matthew says, and launches himself off of Morph and through the open window, into the sky.

"Fuck," Hob says with feeling, punching the sofa cushion beside his thigh. And then, once more, "Fuck!"

Which of course makes his head start to ache and his vision dance, and his stomach roil.

He wants to scream, and puke, and pass out, all at once. Instead he does his best to throw off the blanket, and shove himself furiously to his feet.

"Do not stand," Morph says, setting down the bottles and crossing the flat in floor-eating strides. He scoops up the discarded bracelet and shoves it in his pocket, then puts his hands carefully on Hob's arms. He tries to guide Hob back down onto the sofa.

"I'm not fucking made of glass!"

"I never said that you were."

"Stop treating me like it!"

Sneering bitchily, Morph obligingly releases Hob's arms. But Hob's honestly still struggling with his balance, and he wobbles, then steps down hard on his airboot. He yelps as his broken ankle screams its protest.

Morph simply crosses his arms and glares at Hob, unimpressed.

Hob grits his teeth, firms his chin, and gives him back a glare of his own, determined not to budge. He takes deep breaths through his nose to push through the pain.

A small part of himself is calling Hob a stubborn fool, and reminding him that he’s only hurting himself by pushing away everyone, by trying to power through instead of taking the rest that he needs, but laying down hurts in a way that Hob can’t describe.

It’s not physical, it’s… it’s in his head, in a part of his brain that the bullet didn’t scramble, and he’s so stupidly tempted to poke through the wound on his scalp, get his finger in there, hook into the place where the fear is writhing and yank it out, make it quiet, make it stop–

Laying down is too much like surrendering.

It’s like willingly putting himself on that table again and just letting—no.

Hob’s stomach interrupts their silent standoff with a frankly mortifying gurgle.

“You must sit. And then I will bring you something to eat, and your medications. They must be taken on a full stomach.”

Hob only lifts his chin and grits his jaw harder.

“You are being a brat.”

That gets a rise out of Hob. “Don’t bring your cute little BDSM terms into this, this isn’t the bedroom, I’m not… I’m not being sassy so I can get spanked,” Hob says, so offended that Morph would take something that is supposed to be fun, and intimate, and weaponize it against him like that, when he’s already feeling so–so…

Go on, he thinks viciously at himself. Put a name to what you’re feeling. Be a grownup about it.

No.

No, because if he names it, if he acknowledges it, then he has to feel it, and if he has to feel it then he has to admit to it, to deal with it, and he’s not ready to… not ready to…

“Erasti, sit.”

“No.”

“Hob Gadling!” Morph snarls, drawing himself up, clearly at the end of his patience. His voice booms deep and resonant: “Cease your whinging and do as I command!”

Hob plops down on the sofa, glaring mutinously all the while. Not because Morph commanded him to do so. Because he chose to do so. Because his ankle was really, really starting to hurt.

Yes.

That’s it.

“Now, please,” Morph begs, deflating a little but still ramrod-straight with his agitation. “Please, my beloved, just allow me to help you.”

“I don’t need help, I just need… I just need to get back to normal,” Hob says helplessly, and he hates how small and desperate it comes out. “I just want everything to go back to the way it was, before she… before…”

He squinches his eyes shut and shakes his head hard to dispel the sense memory of cheap scratchy cuffs at his wrists, and a hard table against his back, the prick of a needle in the bend of his elbow, the revoltingly violating touch against the intimate curve of his neck—

Which of course makes his head throb again, his stomach heave, his world slide. The discomfort in his gut increases, both starving after days of little sustenance and no solid food, and so nauseous that he’s afraid that even the smell of food may make him heave.

He wants tea.

He wants a bath.

He wants to cry.

“And you will, erasti, I promise. Things will return to normal. But you must allow yourself the time to heal. Body and mind.”

Hob scowls, even as he drags the knit blanket over his lap. He’s aware that it looks like he’s trying to hide himself in it. Or armor himself. He just needs something to do with his hands, he feels so useless. “There’s nothing wrong with my mind.”

“I never said there was anything wrong–” Morph starts and then stops. He heaves out a bone-deep, growling sigh of frustration and scrubs his long fingers through his already-wild hair. “You were not this difficult when you cracked your rib.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t strapped down to a fucking lab table then, was I?” Hob sneers, and then actually claps a palm over his own traitorous mouth.

Morph, in response, looks utterly stricken.

“Oh, no, no, duckie,” Hob says, voice and hands suddenly trembling as he drops them away from his face. “I didn’t… please don’t worry… I…” He blinks hard, refusing, refusing to give in to the—to the…

His stomach gurgles again.

It spurs Morph into action, sending him back to the kitchen, where he takes a moment at the counter to not-so-subtly wipe the tears from his eyes. Then he’s pulling a baking sheet from the oven, plating up something that fills the flat with the divine scents of buttery pastry, savory spices, and rich gravy.

The nausea Hob feared doesn’t rear its head. Instead, his stomach just growls louder.

Morph putters a bit more, setting things out on the tea tray, opening and closing the fridge door, but Hob is too busy flexing his hands on his knees and counting out some calming deep breaths.

Face dry and once more rearranged into something less wrought, Morph returns to the sofa with a glass of water, a bottle of pills, a meal-replacement shake, and a plate with two little wonky, misshapen pasties. He sets the tray on the coffee table within reach of where Hob’s slumped in the corner of the sofa, and takes the chair beside it.

“Did you make these?” Hob asks softly.

“Destruction did this morning, and if you say one word about how terribly formed they are, I do believe it will send him into paroxysms of melancholy.”

“I’m not going to get food poisoning, am I?”

“No,” Moph says. “Only the outsides are queer.”

Hob doesn’t move.

“They are venison.” Morph says it in such an achingly tender, hopeful voice that Hob’s eyes burn.

Something huge and hot and harrowing surges to life in his chest, stoppering up his breath. Hob leans back into the corner of the sofa and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “This is too much,” Hob gasps.

“This is how I show you how much I love you.”

“Duck?”

“Because this is how you show me,” Morph says, in a soft tone that nonetheless conveys his belief that he’s married an idiot.

“How…?”

"Do you think I am unaware that your love language is acts of service?" Morph asks, sitting forward to lay a calming, claiming hand over the crown of Hob’s bandaged head, just shy of the wound over his ear. "Especially when it comes to the provision of victuals?"

Hob feels his face flush. He didn't realize his little kink had been that obvious. Or that he'd been quite so transparent. "Awww, you know my love language, babe?” Hob teases, without looking up, trying to get his footing in this conversation back. “That's embarrassing for you."

“Stop deflecting,” Morph says. "Do you not think that I am also aware that you despise being babied, and greatly dislike the thought that you cannot provide for yourself? Or for me?"

“I… it’s not about being babied, it’s–”

“You have been alone for centuries, my dearest heart,” Morph says, sliding closer and pressing the side of his face to Hob’s, cheek to cheek, clearly not minding how greasy his hair is or how his breath must reek. “You have been forced to shift for yourself this whole time, and so you see accepting help as a weakness. But it is not a weakness, my beloved. It takes great strength to allow others, others who love you, to see you vulnerable and in need, and to allow them to meet those needs. As much as I cannot do this without you, you no longer need to do this without me.”

"I hate this," Hob grumbles mutinously. "I hate this. I hate this!"

And then, without warning, he's sobbing.

Great, horrible, face-twisting, throat-shredding, revoltingly snotty sobs heave their way out of the deepest, filthiest part of his guts.

“Go on, sweetheart,” Morpheus soothes him gently, sliding out of his chair to kneel at Hob’s side, to wrap his arms around Hob’s chest, press his ear to Hob’s heart, and hold on. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“I was so scared!” Hob gulps and splutters, gids his fingers into Morph’s shoulders and holds on, holds on. Doesn’t ever think he’ll be able to let go. “I was so afraid that she’d do something and it would be permanent, and I’d never get to tell you… never get to see you…”

“I’m here. I’m safe. We’re both safe,” Morph murmurs into his chest, deep voice buzzing against Hob’s rib cage, here and alive, alive, alive.

"She wanted me to marry her. She shot me in the head and then expected me to drink your blood and marry her and I was scared, I was so scared she would hurt you, that you would—I can survive anything, I've been through everything but I couldn't bare to see you hurt again, locked up again, I couldn't—I c-couldn't—"

Hob curls over Morph’s crouched body as much as his aching shoulder allows, pressing his husband into his stomach, wishing he could merge their skins, their flesh, wishing he could tuck Morpheus up behind his own bones where no hurt could ever find him ever again.

"I cannot die either, Hob."

“I know that, I know that, in my head I know that. But my heart… in my heart, I just, I j-just—”

Morpheus just squeezes him tighter.

This wrenches a new wave of horrified, whining sobs from Hob. “It’s my worst fear. The worst–the table, the needle, I screamed, I screamed and nobody came, nobody—I was alone, and I–I–I, I… I…”

Morpheus rises on his knees, slides his hands to Hob’s face, cups his cheeks and presses a revenant, worshipful kiss into the deep furrow between Hob’s eyes.

“I will never let that happen to you again,” Morph vows, lips pressed against Hob’s forehead.

“You can’t... you can’t promise that. You can’t be sure—”

Morpheus sits back. “Please look at me, Robert.”

Hob takes a moment to calm his stuttered breathing and pry his tear-sore eyes open. Morpheus’s expression is grave and gaunt.

“Be reassured that I know this is your greatest fear. You berated me for it so roundly in Gadlen House that it is seared into my heart, erasti. I shall not forget, even if we live for a hundred thousand years. Please also be assured that I am furious that this happened to you, and more furious still that I could not stop it.” Morph sweeps his thumbs across Hob’s cheeks, comforting and kind. “And so, I have spoken with Dream, and he has granted you a great boon.”

“A… a boon?” Hob echoes, reaching up to pull Morph’s hands into his own shaking ones, desperate for the long-familiar comfort of his fingers laced between Hob’s, needing the reassurance and the grounding like air.

“Originally I asked for a raven of your own to watch over you,” Morph says, with a disappointed twist in the corner of his fine pink lips. “But it seems that only Dream of the Endless—or his former incarnation—may be so blessed.”

Hob jolts with the memory of his childish, cringey accusation that Matthew and Morpheus’ relationship makes his marriage feel crowded and lesser. “I should apologize to Matthew.”

“Yes, you should,” Morph says, but doesn’t allow himself to be diverted. “Instead of a raven, Dream has gifted you this.”

He pulls back just enough to pull a golden ring from his back pocket. It looks so much like Hob’s wedding ring that he has to glance at his own hand to be sure, but no, the crazy bitch hadn’t stolen it off him while he was unconscious, thank god. This ring is slightly thinner, plain, but with a deep emerald chip embedded in the band in such a way that it would be impossible to prise out.

Slowly, with great veneration and ceremony, Morph slips it onto Hob’s finger, to settle snug against his wedding band as if made to go there. Which it actually, literally, was.

The stone flares bright, gold-green for one gloriously beautiful moment, then quiets down.

“Should you be in danger, the moment you fall asleep or lose consciousness, Dream will find you in your sleepscape. If necessary, he will alert the other Endless. Should the ring be removed by any but you or I, it will alert the Endless. If the ring is destroyed, or someone attempts to tamper with the Dream Stone, it will alert the Endless.” Morph bows his head and kisses the ring like a medieval troubadour making courtly love.

“Awww, babe,” Hob sniffles. The tight, searing bands of panic wrapped around his lungs ease away, and Hob feels like he can breathe again. “You microchipped me. That’s so romantic.”

Morph smirks at Hob’s trembling attempt at good humor, and holds up his own left hand. An identical ring of silver and green is snugged up against his own wedding band. “I microchipped us both.”

Hob snorts a laugh, but it comes out disgustingly wet and miserable. Very carefully, Morph joins him on the sofa. Morph tucks into the corner and pulls Hob back against his chest, sheltering him in the cradle of his pelvis, guiding Hob’s head down onto his own shoulder.

“I hurt,” Hob sniffles, in a tiny, broken voice.

“I know. Will you eat? Then you can take your medication.”

“Yeah,” Hob says.

“The pasties, or the shake?”

“I’ll try the pasties. If only so Dee doesn’t pitch himself out a window.”

Morph’s chuckle buzzles against Hob’s skin, comforting and alive.

He takes very great delight in feeding Hob careful, gentle bites of one pasty, alternating it with sips of water, until Hob feels full and warm, and cared for. Together they wrangle the morphine pill down his throat. And then, very, very carefully, Morph pours a trickle of Dream Sand out of the pitcher and into Hob’s eyes, all the while promising Hob that when he wakes, they will figure out the best way for Hob to bathe.

Hob’s eyelids grow heavy, and Morph tucks the heavy knit blanket over Hob, a pleasant, steadying, reassuring weight.

And in the Dreaming, Daniel greets them both with the waking nightmares that Hob’s ordeal has germinated at his side. They are small dark things, rambunctious and shy by turns, barely out of their infancy. Hob crouches on the pale marble floor of Daniel’s throne room, and lets them climb all over him, eager in their puppish devotion to their duty.

With Daniel’s gentle guidance, and Morpheus’ support, Hob spends the night diligently working through the trauma they leave clinging to his skin. He relives it over and over again, nightmare flowing into nightmare, until the dark, scrabbly little things begin to soften at the edges, becoming insubstantial and wisp-like.

Just before dawn, they fade away, returning to Dream Sand in order to be called back into existence and to another Dreamer, at another time.

When Hob opens his eyes, the morning light cuts across the room and into his eyes. Morph must have carried him to their bedroom sometime in the night, likely waking while Hob was distracted. Now he is sprawled against Hob’s side, feet carefully tucked away from the cast, head pillowed on Hob’s chest above his heart.

Hob kisses the pieces of Morph he can reach–mostly hair–and only then registers that there is more fluffy blackness there than usual. Matthew is asleep against Morph’s neck. Hob pets gently down Matthew’s back with one finger, and relaxes into the knowledge that he is home, and he is loved, and he is safe.

____

Morpheus and Hob's language-testing conversation:

Morpheus (Anglo-Saxon): "What was your first impression of me?”

Hob (Anglo-Saxon): “I thought of your eyes for days."

Morpheus (Contemporary French): "That’s not true. I went back and viewed your dreams of me after we became lovers."

Hob (Contemporary French): "'kay, so I dreamed of your eyes and bending you over the table, right there in the White Horse."

Morpheus (Contemporary Persian): "What pretty words. How you romance me so."

Hob (Contemporary Persian): "You asked for the truth, not romance."

Morpheus (Contemporary Icelandic): “You venerated me. You feared me.”

Hob (Contemporary Icelandic): “I have never feared you.”

Morpheus (Contemporary Greek): “Your tongue is as silver as always. I don't think you've lost any languages."

Hob (Contemporary Greek): "What a relief."

(If you speak any of these languages, PLEASE correct me. I am leaning heavily on GoogleTranslate. The French was graciously provided by UldAses.)

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