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scifrey · 11 months

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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.