Chapter Text
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang bang!
“So help me God, Robert Gadling, if you don’t open this fucking door right this fucking second I’m kicking it off its fucking hinges and calling every single emergency service in London and—”
The banging and shouting continues. Hob flings himself out of bed and very nearly falls flat on his face; his legs feel like pudding. He scrambles out of his bedroom, down the hall, and to the door.
Tabby and Peter are on the landing outside his flat. Peter seems to be trying to hide behind Tabby, which is an interesting choice, since he’s about three times her size. They both look worried, but Peter only looks worried—Tabby looks worried and absolutely livid.
“What day is it today?” Hob asks them, wild-eyed.
“Thursday, you absolute wa—”
“No, no, the date!”
“It’s, uh, November second.” Peter says, when Tabby just gestures violently, opening and closing her mouth like a confused and angry fish.
November second. It’s November second! The second of November. Hob can feel a grin splitting across his face. He wants to do a little jig, or sing, or hug his friends—but he doubts any of those are the safest route to convincing them that nothing weird happened to him, and he totally didn’t just spend almost an entire month experiencing Halloween.
“I—I’m sorry, guys, I was really sick.” Hob says, trying to sober his expression. “I was asleep for most of yesterday.”
“And today!” Tabby corrects him. “It’s almost four—we were waiting to see if you’d appear to open up the pub with us, since apparently someone’s too sick to type…” she pauses to count on her fingers, “seven letters to let us know you weren’t dead in a fucking ditch somewhere—”
“For the record,” Peter interjects. “I just assumed you went to Majorca and forgot to let us know, or something.”
“—or hell, even one letter!” She rounds on Peter. “And I told you, they have cell service at the beach, that’s not an excuse!”
“Well, he coulda lost his phone along the way,” Peter reasons.
Hob conjures up a semi-believable fake cough. “I’m sorry to have worried you, but I should probably, uh, go back to bed. I might be contagious.”
“Sure, we’ll get out of your hair,” Peter says, gently guiding Tabby back down the stairs. When her back is to them, he looks back to mouth “sorry” back at Hob. Hob gives him a thumbs-up to indicate that there are no hard feelings; he’s pretty sure Tabby has delivered an even more profanity-laden rant at him within the past year.
Once the door is closed again, Hob takes a deep breath, then silently punches the air with his fist.
Looking around his flat yields about what he’d expected, from what little he remembers of his original Halloween. His outfit from the party is laid out in the living room. His pumpkin bucket is sitting on the kitchen table, empty. Best of all: there’s instant coffee in his cupboard; he suspects he’ll be keeping an extra container on hand for the foreseeable future.
Hob checks his phone with trepidation. There are forty-nine notifications; ten are calls and texts from Tabby, and there are a few more from Peter, which all read as notably less frantic. Most of the rest are emails from students, asking if class was canceled, and when he’d be back for office hours, and if their essays are still due on the same day since he missed class (they are). Hob marks everything as read. He can deal with it all tomorrow.
Instead, he grabs a tin of tuna from the kitchen and goes for a walk.
In all his years, Hob has only been happier to see clouds in the sky on one occasion; that would be the time when he’d been part of a seventeenth-century expedition attempting to map the Gobi Desert and his caravan had run low on dangerously low on water rations, due to some very poor planning. November second—Hob gets a little thrill just from thinking it—is overcast and frigid; nothing like the immaculate sunshine that had come to torment him on the thirty-first. As he walks, he revels in the occasional shiver that passes through him and nearly laughs aloud when a single drop of rain falls on his cheek.
Dream finds him kneeling on the sidewalk, scratching the black cat behind her ears. She has finished her tuna, and now appears to be making a game of seeing how long she can keep Hob attending to her by exuding feline cuteness.
“Think she’d let me take her home?” Hob asks the dark shadow looming over him. “Or does she have one?”
“She does not,” Dream says, couching down beside him. He does not touch the cat, but the cat looks into his eyes and blinks slowly. Dream blinks in return. Hob watches the hypnotic movement of dark eyelashes against pale flesh. “I do not think she would be opposed. This will be only her second winter, and her first without her siblings. She fears the cold.”
Hob strokes his fingers down the cat’s silky flank. “I’ve got electric blankets,” he tells her, even though he’s not sure if she can understand him, or that’s just another odd Dream thing. “Loads of ‘em. The wonders of modern life, and all.”
They both accompany Hob back to the New Inn; the cat in his arms, partially draped over his shoulder like a tiny, furry bandoleer, and Dream alongside him. Dream’s arm brushes his every few steps in a way that seems quite deliberate.
“So,” Hob begins, bracing himself to negotiate with the elephant in the room. Or on the sidewalk, rather. “What happened?”
Dream’s expression shifts to one of distress. “Surely you remember—”
“No, I mean, I know what happened,” Hob hastens to explain. He adjusts the position of the cat; she’s small but muscular, and only grudgingly permitting the indignity of being carried. “But, I’m not sure I understand it. I remember falling asleep…after.”
Hob is over over six hundred and fifty years old, he refuses to feel awkward about mentioning what had passed between them; not after wanting it for so long, and thinking it a hopeless fantasy for all that time. But for whatever reason—maybe it’s that Dream’s the only sentient thing he’s met that’s older than he is, or maybe it’s simply that love will never not make Hob’s brain cells die off in droves—Dream continues to awaken in him the impossibly distant memory of being a hapless, hormonal youth.
Dream smiles; Hob recalls exactly what those lips taste like, what they feel like when they graze across his skin. “You did sleep. I can only speculate that our time together undid the entanglement preventing you from returning to your realm.”
“’Only speculate?’” Hob echoes. “You were the one keeping me there!”
“Not consciously,” Dream says, indignant. “In any case, the place where you were trapped is no longer visible to me; I suspect its existence was at least somewhat dependent on the presence of your psyche to determine its form.”
After a pause, during which reach the New Inn’s block, Hob releases a soft “hah” of laughter. At Dream’s questioning look, he says: “It’s just—in fairy tales, it’s always true love’s kiss that breaks the curse, right?” Hob says. “Always thought that seemed implausible. It’s far too easy, as solutions go.”
“Is it?” Dream asks, his head tilting.
“Well, yeah,” Hob says, as though it’s obvious. “It’s the easiest thing in the world, to love.”
“It is almost never as simple as that.”
Hob grins, knocking his shoulder against Dream’s playfully. The cat in his arms squirms at the movement. “Maybe you’re just thinking about it too hard.”
Dream purses his lips and hums in response.
On November third—it’s going to take a while for the novelty of having the date change every day to wear off—Hob teaches a full day of classes. He has to pull a few students from each section aside to discreetly ask what the last lecture he gave to them was; it seems so long ago that he had to deal with anything other than Pre-Restoration English Literature 201. They don’t even bat their eyes at his inquiries; he doubts many of them remember what they had for breakfast that morning.
Oliver and Radhiya visit his office while he’s having lunch. Hob had forgotten that Oliver owns clothing other than skeleton pajamas, and that Radhiya is not actually a witch.
“I had the strangest dream about you the night before last, prof,” Oliver says by way of a greeting.
This ought to be good, Hob thinks.
Oliver plows ahead, oblivious to Hob’s wary expression. “So, the three of us were all here, in this very office, just like the other day, yeah? And we’re all eating candy. But then the demon Mephistophilis shows up with this talking raven and they tell me, in the voice of my mum, that I shouldn’t eat so much candy, because I’ll make myself sick. All the sudden, the floor’s on fire, and everyone but me has got the head of a bird and you’re all cawing at me, so I make a run for it, but Mephistophilis chases me—” his narration cuts off abruptly and his gesturing hands fall into his lap. “I can’t remember what happens after that. What do you think it means?”
Hob exhales slowly and steeples his fingers, pretending to ponder his answer deeply. “Clearly, it means you ate too much Halloween candy.”
“That’s what I told him,” Radhiya says. “He thinks it the raven gods are pissed at him for calling that bird that showed up the other day a demon.”
“They are pissed! I’m guilty of slander.”
“Dreams don’t have meaning, dumbass. It’s just you brain trying to make sense of your neurons firing while you’re asleep.”
“I dunno,” Hob says. “Could be on to something with the raven god theory.”
Oliver waves them off. “Alright, alright, laugh it up. You’ll be sorry for making fun when I get carried off by giant bird people one day.”
For a change of pace, Hob takes over tending the bar at the New Inn for the later half of the night. It’s been a slow day, according to Tabby—who’s tone suggests that she’s still a bit salty with him—but Hob doesn’t mind. It simply makes him happy that he has no idea who’s going to walk through the door at any given moment.
The most surprising visitor comes in around nine, while Hob’s wiping down the bar.The bell on the door jingles merrily and in walks Johanna Constantine; she’s wearing the same white coat’s she’d worn at their meeting (though she does not know it) paired with a look of mild confusion, as though she’d only popped out for a stroll and isn’t sure how she ended up at a pub.
Hob wonders if she had any unusual dreams the other night, like his student had, or if this cosmic interference was some bizarre side effect of his ordeal. It seems like a stretch to be pure coincidence, though Hob is living proof that stranger things have happened. In any case, it’s surreal to know someone who does not know him, who he’s technically only met in a dream.
It’s a feeling Dream himself must be intimately familiar with, he realizes.
Hob tosses his bar towel into a corner and beams at her. “Hello again, Lady Johanna!”
Constantine looks at Hob sideways, but comes to sit across from him at the bar nevertheless. “I don’t know you, mate.”
“Robert Gadling,” he says, holding out a hand across the bar for her to shake. She stares at it skeptically, but eventually shakes it. She has a very firm grip. “You can call me Rob. Or Hob, if you’re feeling old-fashioned. This is my pub that you’ve wandered into.”
“How do you know my name?” She asks suspiciously.
"Now, that is rather a long story, and one I am fairly certain you’ll want a drink for...”
A few nights later, in the Dreaming.
Dream watches Hob navigate the stacks of his library, hanging back a bit so as to allow the human to look around without feeling rushed. He drinks in Hob’s wonderstruck expression, the reverential way his fingers stroke the spines of his books. When Dream focuses, he can almost feel the touch on his own skin.
Hob had accepted Dream’s invitation to visit his kingdom with even more enthusiasm than Dream had expected, given his most recent misadventure with that unruly limb of the Dreaming. He does not mention it to him, but Dream finds himself soothed by Hob’s presence here; nowhere does Dream have more power at his disposal. It is nigh impossible for any harm to come to Hob within the these walls, and the thought fills him with a tranquility that has been foreign to him for some time now.
Dream saves this particular part of the grand tour for last; in many ways, the library is as much the heart of the Dreaming as Dream himself is. Hob gives it its due admiration, and ingratiates himself to Dream’s librarian in the process.
“May I borrow this?” Hob asks hopefully, holding up a compilation of Lord Byron’s poetry that, in the Waking, had been partially consumed by the author’s pet bear in 1805 and subsequently lost.
“If you like,” Dream replies.
“It can’t leave the Dreaming,” Lucienne calls down from one of the upper levels. Dream casts a reproachful glare up at her for spying on them, but she is predictably undaunted.
“That’s alright, I’ll read it here,” Hob says. Then he looks down self-consciously, his free hand reaching up to rub his ear. “That is, assuming I’ll be invited back at some point...?”
Dream smiles indulgently at him, drifting closer. “You are welcome here at any time. I was...remiss in not sharing my home with you sooner.”
More remiss even than he’d care to admit. Dream little evidence to back it up, but he suspects that one of the reasons Hob ended up trapped where he did was because he had denied Hob for so long. The Endless creatures of slow change; of eras and epochs, not minutes and seconds. Whiplash—such as going from careful avoidance to obsession in the span of moments—can have devastating effects, and Dream had forgotten.
Hob seems willing to accept that what happened to him was an isolated incident. Dream hopes this is true, bit he still intends to do everything in his power to ensure it doesn’t happen again, particularly if it means he gets to spend more time with Hob.
Once Dream is quite certain that Lucienne has gone about her business, he moves closer still, situating himself in Hob’s space, taking pleasure in the fact that he’s allowed, even encouraged, to do so. Hob sets the poems down on the table nearest him and leans into Dream, smiling openly at him. Dream rests his hands on Hob’s chest, through the soft fabric of the threadbare shirt he’d worn to bed before Dream spirited him away.
Maybe Hob had a point, the other day. Or maybe it is that Hob himself is so easy to love. Dream has never had anything that felt as simple, as natural as this feels now.
“A penny for your thoughts, dove?” Hob asks. His look is so tender that Dream can hardly believe it’s directed at him.
“I was thinking,” Dream purrs, his fingers coming up to brush a strand of fine brown hair away from Hob’s face. “That you are the most glorious being yet to grace the halls of my palace.”
“That cannot possibly be true.” Hob laughs, bright and delighted, and in doing so proves Dream’s point for him, as far as Dream is concerned.
“It is so,” Dream says, enjoying the way his insistence colors Hob’s cheeks crimson. “I am the highest authority available on the matter.”
“Oh, stop it.”
Feeling merciful, Dream closes the last few inches of space between them to kiss Hob on his cheek, then again on his jaw, then again on his lips, and again, and again, and again...