Chapter Text
Hob has traveled across the world over the centuries. By foot, then by horse, then by carriage, then by foot again. Inter-continental travel has become unimaginably accessible in modern years, but he’s made occasional trips across the ocean since the turn of the 18th century. His first visit was only a year or two after East and West Jersey were combined. He’d been barely back on his feet at the time and, like many, dreamed of a new start in the new land.
As beautiful as the landscape of his homeland could be, he hadn't seen anything like the vast, untouched land beyond the shores of the colonies in centuries. He’d forgotten such vast stretches of pure nature could exist. London had sprung up around him, and more cities seemed to appear each time he turned around. Sometimes it was overwhelming how quickly things changed.
Staring out at the unending forests of the Appalachian Mountains returned to him a perspective that he’d begun to lose in those exhausting, hungry years. The beauty of a growing world.
In a similar way, watching the colonies grow so rapidly had reminded him of the reason he loved this unique gift his stranger had given him. Watching humanity grow is something he has continued to cherish, even through all of the terrible things he’s witnessed. There would always be cruel people. Sometimes Hob would even be among them. Despite that, humans still have the capacity for wonders both great and small. For every cruelty he saw, there were kindnesses to balance them.
Unending life also means unending time to explore. He still has to work for his food and shelter, of course, this gift is by no means an easy pass. Still, instead of working into an early grave or spending his retirement too aged and exhausted for adventure, Hob has the opportunity to venture out into the world. He will never see everything, not with how quickly the world changes, but he has seen a great deal more than most.
He has never seen anything like this.
A bridge stretches before him, street lamps still lit in the dawn light. Above him, an enormous moon hangs in the sky over a forested mountain shaped like a sleeping woman. Her head is pillowed on her hands. She smiles serenely in her sleep.
The sunrise colors the sky in vivid hues, but somehow stars still peek through the wispy clouds. This surreal landscape is reflected in the calm waters of the bay beneath the bridge. Down the shoreline, in the harbor of the sprawling town of clay-roofed houses, a crew is preparing a ship to sail. A real, true ship from the golden age of sailing. Her masts stand proudly as she waits for the crew to finish.
Most striking of all is the castle of glass that awaits him across the long bridge. Its magnificent architecture would put any fairytale castle to shame. The multicolored windows blaze in the morning light, stealing the breath from Hob's lungs. For a long moment, all he can do is stare.
Then he wakes.
It shouldn't be remarkable. He's had dreams for as long as he can remember, just like almost every human he’s ever met. Though he feels like one often, he is no fool - he’s met many beings by now that he’s certain weren’t human. Morpheus was the first he was aware of, but there have been plenty more since then.
Still, even Hettie still dreams. She’s young in comparison to Hob. Practically a child, really, yet her soul feels older than his own at times. He avoids her most of the time. Hettie’s always been a paranoid sort and being associated with her isn’t good for keeping a low profile. Now he seeks her out. This dream shouldn't be remarkable, but it is and he doesn't know why.
She’s waiting for him on a street corner, a bit closer to his home than he expected. Of course she is. However she gained her immortality, it seems to have brought her insights beyond what Hob is capable of.
“Good morning, Mister Gadling,” she greets him with a knowing smile and a twinkle in her eye.
“Good morning, Madame Device,” he returns with a polite nod, as he has no hat to tip. “You’re a bit far from your usual haunt. Waiting for someone?”
She tuts, but there’s no heat in her glare. If anything, it seems playful. They’ve had their disagreements in the past, of course. Still, few remember the city as it was before the wars, even if she is too young to remember it before the fire.
“You’ve seen him, haven’t you?” she asks pointedly. Hob blinks in surprise.
“Seen who?” he replies, though he has a sneaking suspicion that he knows what she means.
“The Sandman. He’s back. You’ve seen him,” she says and it almost sounds like an accusation.
“I’ve seen an old friend recently, if that’s what you mean,” he clarifies, skirting neatly around the question. “That’s not what I wanted to ask you about, though.”
She raises a brow, waiting for him to continue. He pauses, considering her odd words. The Sandman, der Sandmann, like the one he ran across during his research on Morpheus.
“Actually, maybe it is,” he admits with a sigh. “God, I don’t even know where to start.”
“The very beginning, probably,” she replies drily.
“I’ve heard that’s a very good place to start,” he chuckles. “Unfortunately, you’ll have to try harder to get my story out of me.”
“It was worth a try,” she says with a smirk. “Perhaps try whatever made you seek me out today? You never do, so it must be something special.”
“Well… it was a dream,” he admits, cringing at how childish it sounds. “I saw the most wondrous place, but I’ve never seen it before.”
“What did it look like?”
Trying to remember is like grabbing onto a cloud. Even as he reaches for it, details begin to slip away. The good dreams always slip away so much faster than the nightmares. He’s grown used to that quality of dreams, especially since his time in the first of the World Wars, but now he finds himself scrambling desperately for anything he can reach.
“A glass castle in a bay. There was a mountain behind it, I think. And a town. Red rooftops, I think. But the castle, it was beautiful - I’ve never seen its like before,” he explains and finds himself smiling at the last traces of the memory. “I can’t remember the details, just that it looked like every fairytale I’ve ever heard.”
“Perhaps it is one. Maybe you stumbled into Fairyland,” she suggests.
Hob blinks. He hadn’t considered that. Stories of the fair folk were common when he was a boy, but they’ve grown so rare in the last couple of centuries that he’d nearly put them out of his mind. Then again, he’s an immortal human who is friends with a god. Why shouldn’t the fair folk be real?
“I suppose I should be glad I was able to leave,” he half-jokes.
“You’re right about that,” Hettie scoffs. “If you find yourself there again, don’t eat anything. And mind your manners!”
“Of course. Thank you, Hester,” he says with another polite nod of his head. She doesn’t curtsy back, but he doesn’t mind that. For some reason, her knees aren’t what they used to be.
“You’re welcome, Robert. Come visit properly sometime, won’t you?” she says instead, then turns without waiting for a reply and begins to hobble away. He’s learned by now that she won’t take any offer of a ride. It may take her all day to get wherever she’s going, but she has plenty of time.
It’s not until a few hours later, as he’s grading papers between classes, that Hob realizes he never asked Hettie about the connection between the Sandman and this Fairyland he visited.
The next time he dreams of that breathtaking kingdom, he finds himself wandering the city streets. Though the air is only pleasantly warm, the sun shines brightly down through the wispy white clouds. Between the sound of the waves, the bright sun, and the clay-tiled roofs, Hob finds himself reminiscing about a trip to Greece that must have taken place at least a century or two ago by now.
Greece didn't have a castle of colored glass towering in the distance, of course. Nor did it have the beings he walks among now. He passes a satyr with dark horns sprouting from their forehead and a pan flute hanging on their belt. Not long after, a pair of extremely small people, perhaps only a fourth as tall as a human, fly from over his shoulder. The wings that carry them are so quick they're hardly visible, but he catches a glimpse of the iridescent feathers before they dart around a corner.
Not everyone is so blatantly fantastical, of course. Especially at first glance, many of the people wandering through the streets look nearly human. Many are only identifiable due to the elvish point of their ears. A young girl with pale skin and even paler hair dashes across the cobblestone street, ears poking clearly out from under her long hair. Hot on her heels is another young person with light brown skin and curly brown hair that only barely reveals the tips of his ears. They giggle and escape further into the market, leaving a smile on Hob's face.
Eventually, his wanderings take him away from the city’s center market. The buildings fade around him. Really, he can’t tell you when he left the city, only that eventually he realized that there were no more houses around him, nor any stones under his feet. Instead, he stands on a grassy hill, overlooking what barely amounts to a village. He hasn’t seen it for over 600 years, not like this. Yet in some ways, he sees it every day.
There’s no real name for this place. It’s more a waypoint, somewhere to stop on the road between London’s walls and some village that ceased to exist long before proper records were kept. Really, the only things of note are the river that passes nearby and the inn that someone has wisely set up by the crossroad. The White Horse, they call it, and will continue to call it until it is finally closed down in the early 1990s. Somewhere in the thirty years that follow that, it will become a soulless shell. Even those who remember its name will forget what it truly was, and even they don’t truly know.
No, Hob may be the only human left alive who remembers this.
He also knows, with a cold certainty that sinks deep into his chest, that this will not be a pleasant dream.
His feet are already too heavy to lift. They are not simply encased in stone, but made entirely of it. While he stood there enjoying a sight he had nearly forgotten in his old age, it had begun. Hob knows how this dream goes by now. He’s known for decades now not to fight it. That just makes it worse, in the end.
So Hob Gadling, the last human alive who remembers when livestock roamed within the walls of the White Horse, stands as still as a statue and watches the place that had become so dear to him age before his eyes.
Tears streak Hob’s cheeks as time rushes forward. The building is expanded and, gradually, others spring up around it. Nearly all of them are wooden, or worse. He always hates to know what is coming. It always comes all the same. Fire consumes what has become a city surrounding him, the grass beneath his feet burning away along with it. He was lucky not to be involved too directly in that disaster, but it was horrifying enough to see the aftermath.
They rebuild. As always, they rebuild. This time it is bricks - can’t catch fire, bricks - and there are bricks beneath his feet as well. His legs are stone by this time. It creeps up to his waist as he watches helplessly. Hob can spot himself entering and leaving the building occasionally. Even more occasionally, he spots the dark figure of his Stranger. More a suggestion of him, really. Hardly a blur.
Then comes a memory that he dreads, but has long since grown familiar with. It’s that embarrassing meeting where he arrives smelling worse than he had in the 14th century and nearly cries. Considers, for a moment, giving up. Hesitates for the first time, the last time. He cannot see it play out from where he is frozen, but that moment remains in his memory with crystal clarity.
So do you still wish to live?
His stranger was as cold, as emotionless as ever. Hob opened his eyes and met the stranger’s dispassionate stare. If he died then maybe he could see his Eleanor and his little Robyn. Then again, he doubted that was the sort of fate that awaited him. Even if it did, they’d been gone for decades now. He missed them and he doubted that he would ever stop entirely, but he could breathe through the pain now.
Death is a mug’s game. I’ve got so much to live for.
Oddly enough, it was the awed little sound his stranger made in response that cemented the truth in Hob’s mind: his Stranger was not human. The stranger wasn’t another immortal like himself who wanted someone to compare notes with or something like that. No, whatever his stranger was, he’d never been anything close to human at all.
He also hadn’t been seeing London the same way that Hob had for the past 23 years.
In the time between the fire and their meeting, a whole city rose from the ashes and smoke to become even more grand than it had ever been. Never before had Hob seen such a magnificent period of humanity’s growth. If this stranger were a human, or perhaps even if he just saw London through Hob’s eyes, he would have known that same desperate desire to live long enough to see how far they could go.
Hob’s breath catches in his chest as the stone constricts his lungs.
By their next meeting, Hob has returned from his journey to America as a rich man with a lack of morals that he remains ashamed of to this day. The conversation is cut short by the Constantine woman, damn her. A few heartbeats more and he would have had a name. Doesn’t he have a name now?
The thought slips away as the stone reaches Hob’s throat. Tears roll continuously down his cheeks, eventually dripping to the ground at his stony feet. He’d sob, but he no longer has lungs to do so, nor a throat to scream for help. It would do nothing to stop this anyway. Nothing ever does.
Hob stares helplessly as more brick springs up around him. This night, this meeting, the last one, will haunt him for the rest of his days. Time seems to slow down now, forcing him to watch every excruciating second from the outside. His stranger enters only for a handful of minutes before he storms out again, hat long forgotten and face set in fury.
Behind him, Hob spots himself shouting some stupid line about how if the stranger is there in a hundred years, it’l lbe because they’re friends. Stupid. He should have known better. Honestly, he did know better, but he’s always struggled to keep his mouth shut when he’s angry. The wine he drank before his stranger arrived didn’t help.
As the stone crawls up his jaw and over his mouth, he mourns for this friendship that could have been. That was, even if his stranger won’t admit it. 1989 will come and go without so much as a sign. The version of himself who is shouting after this inhuman being doesn’t know that, but Hob does. Hob has suffered with that truth for decades.
Now the man storms away from the Hob-that-was, looking past the stone statue of the Hob that is as if he can’t see him at all. The Hob-that-was curses, but does not call out again. He wouldn’t know what to cry out. Five hundred years they’d known each other and he couldn’t get the man to call him a friend. Hell, he couldn’t even get the man to tell him his name.
You know his name now. Call to him, a woman’s voice whispers gently, drifting on the wind with an unfamiliar accent.
There is no air to call with. All the same, his lips form that precious gift desperately.
Morpheus.
Raindrops freeze in mid air. People stop mid step. Lanterns no longer flicker. Even the Hob-that-was pauses as he is turning away. At first he thinks Morpheus has frozen in place along with the rest of this nightmare. Then his friend meets his terrified gaze with those deep, sad, starry eyes.
“Oh, Hob…”
Tears stream directly onto the stone that creeps up his face. Morpheus steps forward to meet Hob where he stands, now made almost entirely of stone. His odd, inhuman stranger gives him the tiniest sad smile, which just brings more tears.
Morpheus reaches out slowly and rests his palm against Hob’s cheek, bringing one of his slender thumbs up to brush away the tears. The tightness of his skin begins to retreat. Stone softens back to flesh.
“This dream is over,” Morpheus murmurs to him gently, as if it is a mercy, gift, and apology all wrapped into one odd, nonsensical sentence.
Hob wakes with tears on one cheek and the phantom sensation of a palm on the other.