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*
1389.
Dream knows, as soon as they set foot in the inn, who it is that sits inside. It is like the same instinctive intimacy of knowing one's own name.
When the Endless came into existence, they arrived as all do in this plane: bearing not only their name, but the name of the one to whom they belong.
And his is presiding over a table of mercenaries, holding court like king and jester both. His eyes brighten in the dim, his laughter light, and he is just like the rest of his kind: burning so brightly because they shine so briefly.
His sister doesn't return his gaze as he turns to her. "You've brought me here on false pretenses."
"If you'll recall, I did not actually give any pretenses," she says, flagging a man over for a flagon of ale.
He scoffs. "We will leave." He glances at the man - at his soulmate - and catches himself. He is already a distraction. "For his sake, if not mine."
"Dream, he cannot die."
"And this is your doing?" Even as he asks the question, he knows the answer. His sister could not do something so intentionally cruel. Desire, perhaps, or Despair, but not her. "How could anyone endure an eternity of this? This is a curse."
"No, it wasn't me." Death gulps down the rest of her ale and sets a hand on his shoulder. It is a familiar stance for her; in the back of his mind, he imagines the sound and shadow of wings. "I'm sorry to surprise you like this. I thought you would've already seen him in the Dreaming."
"I have not. There is no reason to give him undue consideration." He cuts Death off before her objection is fully formed. "I have responsibilities and duties to my realm that preclude this kind of attachment."
Soulmates are not a distraction he can afford. Not again.
"I didn't realize you were Denial of the Endless, my sweet foolish brother." Death punches him in the arm with enough force to back up the passion behind her point. "None of us are above this. Not even you or Destiny."
She does not mention herself. He asked her once, about her mark, if she had one, not expecting any answer. When my job is done, she had said.
She should not be so surprised at his reluctance.
"Enough. I will speak to him, so that it will not come as a shock and so that he may prepare for it. I owe him that at least.
Death looks contrite, but stubborn. She is not, right now, his priority to convince. He gives in to the pull and heads in the direction of the man who would be his soulmate. As he approaches, he overhears their conversation.
"Look, I've seen death."
"You're a fool, Hob," his friend says, and to hear the name the universe printed on him spoken aloud sets skin and sand aflame. It is the flashing clarity of hearing one's own name in a dream, and the sudden subsequent slam into the waking world.
Hob catches him hovering over their table. He has the kind of friendly, wry eyes that invite someone into a shared joke they've not yet heard.
"I heard what you said," Dream says. "Are you not afraid you'll miss the chance to find your soulmate?"
Hob breaks into even more of a shit-eating grin. "I bet you another round my soulmate died during the bloody plague. There's more to living than waiting around for your fucking soulmate."
Dream grins at the unexpected, unrealized challenge. "Tell me how you feel in another hundred years."
*
1489.
"I've gotten into the printing business," Hob says. "Pamphlets and flyers with people and their soul marks. It's catching like fire. Church has turned around on the whole thing, too. Pope claims it's 'divine providence.'"
"Do you agree?"
"With the church?" Hob shakes with a full body laugh. "No, I don't. We've rarely found ourselves in agreement, even more so now. The idea of a person, fated for you… it's stifling, isn't it?"
"It is not always a person. Sometimes it is a place," Dream says, "or a passion."
"Wish mine were a pie," Hob says, mouth full of the very same as he washes it down with a large mug of mead.
Dream shocks himself with his own laughter, picturing the reaction of each of his siblings to this depiction of the domain none of them held dominion over.
"What?" Hob crosses his arms over his chest, the picture of affront. "It isn't any more preposterous than the reality. What do you think of it all, oh wise stranger?"
"It is a suggestion," Dream says, sharing a slight smile, "a dream, if you will. Acting upon that belief is what provides it power and presence."
"I'd rather the pie," Hob replies wryly. He gestures at his own, inviting the Lord of Dreams to a steak and ale pie.
They talk into the evening, Hob sharing the marvels and mundanities of living that delight and bore him in turn. For a night, Dream finds it difficult to distinguish living from the Dreaming.
*
1589.
His name is Robert Gadlen now, and he is greedy. For power, for wealth, for all the things someone might sacrifice even a soulmate for.
He's started a family, he says. Found a wife, had a son. Dream responds to the news with the echo of a ripple: within his subconscious, the faintest melancholy, the most subliminal jealousy. He dismisses it. It is a misplaced feeling.
After all, he's being proven right, he reminds himself. It is possible to live without one's soulmate. To thrive, even, in Robert's case.
He spies a man with his own name as a mark - or, at least, the moniker the man would inherit. Shakespeare. Legacy will be his love and his light will shine long after Death takes his hand in hers.
Dream leaves the immortal to his mortal pleasures. There were other fates to form and dreams to shape.
*
1689.
Robert barges into the inn with hair mangled, clothes torn, and face dirtied. Dream invites him to their table and he slumps into it, lunging for the food. He grips the bread in his hands like a sinner's last benediction.
Dream listens, impassive, as Hob tells of his last eighty years of anguish. He sees through the despair, into the hunger still hidden in his hooded dark eyes and hunched posture.
"What motivates you still?" Dream gestures at the general disheveled state of him. With a touch of guilt, he asks, "Do you persist for the prospect of your soulmate?"
He shakes his head between scarfing down bites of the lamb shank in his hand.
"I told you. I reckon they're dead. Maybe they haven't been born yet." He shrugs, shoulders thin under the cloak that hangs over his frame. "They'll age and die, and I'll live. Even I'm not selfish enough to curse someone to that."
"I did not expect such sincere selflessness from you," Dream says to this decidedly humbled Hob.
"Yeah, well." He runs a hand through his bedraggled hair, pushing it from his eyes, and holds Dream's gaze. "The hunger's not so bad. It reminds us there's so much to live for."
Hob returns to excavating the pile of food in front of him. Dream observes the ravenous delight with which he tears into the meal, cracking bone and sucking marrow and mopping up the leftover grease on his plate with a roll of bread.
Dream hands him a mug of water. Hob gratefully gulps it down, throat bobbing as he tilts his head back, neck exposed. He thinks of bruising it, setting teeth on hot skin and pressing his own mark into him like another signature of his soul - mine - but resists, the very act of restraint feeling like release. He's taunting himself with the temptation and he needs to be careful.
Hunger, Dream realizes, behaves like a dream. It requires nothing to feed on, but will consume someone out of that selfsame void.
*
1789.
"What's your name?" Hob asks, too casual and too serious all at once.
Names have power in this plane. It is not an innocent question.
"Why do you ask after four centuries?"
Before Hob can answer, a well-dressed woman and two men interrupt them. When the men strike, Hob bolts from his chair and subdues the smugglers. He dispenses with his usual bravado and opts for brutal, efficient takedowns, and Dream is reminded that Hob was a soldier.
Johanna brings a knife to his face and Dream rises.
"No!" his voice thunders, echoing with the crow of ravens, and the specter of his helm flashes over his face.
After they dispatch of Lady Johanna, Dream tells Hob, "You need not have come to my defense."
"It felt right." Hob regards him with a curious expression, a man bordering on epiphany. He steps closer, as if proximity will aid in the discovery. "Tell me your name."
Not a question, any longer - more plea than command. The hunger inhabits more than his eyes. It lies in the shadow of his cheekbones and the tense line of his jaw.
Dream surrenders to instinct. His fingers find the warm skin of Hob's wrist and he brushes a thumb where the veins form a delta of life blood into his palm. By touch he traces his own name and title, the imprint of a promise.
Hob shudders on a broken exhale and the heat of his breath against his own neck lands like the sigh of a kiss. Neither of them truly need to breathe and for a moment they suspend the charade, breathless.
Perhaps his sibling is right, and dreams are just mere echoes of desire.
Dream breaks away. He's all but revealed himself. It cannot happen again.
*
1889.
"I didn't think you'd show."
Dream doesn't have to reconcile the image of Hob in a new century with the old one; he looks like he did last night. Since their last meeting, Dream has broken his own promise to himself. He has spent the last century hovering on the edge of Hob's dreams. He hears the jokes that Hob rehearses in his dreams; sees the haunting faces of the men he's killed; remembers the faceless, faded visage of the memory of his mother; and feels the scenes of a life forever unfurling.
And often, he catches glimpses of himself.
"We have an agreement. Every hundred years." Dream keeps his tone formal, trying to keep the emotional distance that he cannot maintain physically.
Hob does not get the memo. He leans in, close enough Dream can see the faint grain of stubble over his jaws and the reflection of the low inn lights in the shine of his eyes.
"I think you missed me. That's why you keep coming back," Hob says. His voice quietens to a hush, the kind that carries wonder. "You're my soulmate." He says it on an excited exhale, as if he's been waiting to for the last hundred years.
Dream freezes, his jaw twitching in barest recoil.
"You presume too much," he says.
"That wasn't a denial," Hob says, the blind hope in his voice building. He turns over his right hand. As if in offering, as if in prayer. "Your name is Dr --"
Hob chokes on the sound of sand, the silence of softened footsteps and tracks drowned by the tide. Dream rises.
"You will not see me again." Dream ignores the loophole he built into his promise. He storms out of the inn, keeping Hob silenced even as he follows him. He will give himself no reason to turn back.
He returns to the Dreaming. Perched on the dock over its endless sea, he unleashes a universe of feeling.
The water stirs, and the neck of a Nightmare emerges. It takes a tortured, twisted form. It drags claws over its grey skin, spilling black ichor in rivulets like tracks of tears, and sings in the voice of a lost siren. Possession is the poison of this particular nightmare. It is for chases that never end; for eyes that stalk from the shadows; for the last lunge from the dark that never lets go.
He doesn't notice Lucienne appear until she's standing beside him. She inspects the Nightmare eye-covered head to toe and glances reproachfully at it over her eyeglasses. The eyes, each a clever, wicked brown, blink back in multitude, hunger in every answering stare.
She tuts. "I'll have to catalogue this one for the Census before you release it. Have you a name for it?"
Dream closes his eyes and finds the answer in the shadow of his eyelids.
"Call it Pothos." He dares her to articulate what he can see being pieced together in the knowing gleam of her eyes. "Have you conspired with Death lately?"
"We converse." Lucienne closes the census with a firm clap. "Might I suggest you indulge more in conversation and less in creation?"
*
1916.
"What is your name?" Dream hears in memory.
Cut off from the Dreaming, he holds onto memories that blur into dreams. Dreams shape the world, and in the globe of his cage Dream weaves his own.
"What is your name?"
In his dreams, he answers.
Dream. Morpheus. Oneiros.
Yours.
He thinks of how dreams arise from the living. Perhaps living is not exclusive to the living. Perhaps it is not an abdication of duty to want to live (to want to want).
All this he mulls.
For now, he dreams to live a thousand lives, so that one day he might live a single life and dream a thousand dreams.
*
1989.
Hob spent a century planning what to say the last time they met and he fucked it up in a matter of minutes. Of course, he's spent the next century ruminating on the disaster. Clearly, whoever or whatever granted him immortality knew he'd need the extra time.
But today's the day. He feels the bizarre mix of anticipation and dread that is expectation as he navigates to a seat.
Dream. He has a name to curse, a name to beseech, but he can't find it within him to do either. Sometimes he still prefers to think of him as the stranger. He likes toying with the irony.
As he waits, time ticks and trickles to a crawl, the anticipation turning into dread. He heads to the bar when all of the anticipation has lost to defeat.
"I think I've been stood up," he says, ruefully, to the bartender.
"It's just not your time," the man replies.
Hob smirks. The statement is truer than he realizes.
The bartender gives Hob a generous pour of something hoppy and strong without prompting. "On the house," he says. "We won't have the place for long anyway."
When the bartender explains how the inn's getting bought out, Hob feels the decision made in his gut before his mind can even articulate it. It is not always a person. Sometimes it is a place.
And he has nothing if not time.
*
2022.
"You're late," Hob says.
The smile that lights up his face is the same one Dream saw when he envisioned hope. Dream returns it as he sits across from Hob.
"I apologize for the wait."
"Sometimes the wait is half the wonder."
He's seen it in dreams a thousand times, but something about living it feels different.
Dream bridges the gap between them, counting down the space in units of breaths held.
"We'll always have another hundred years."
When they kiss, they exchange eternities.
*
fin.
In this world, there are the Endless, but they are not the only things that last forever.