Chapter Text
To love someone who only visits you every century is exhausting. It’s worse when you have them to thank for this eternal life but in turn they are to blame for the torment that lives alongside it. To only have room in your heart for one being means that without them, you feel a pang of emptiness that cannot be satiated with any meal, nor be extinguished without it. Robert Gadling has lived all aspects of that life, and yet he has not asked for death. Why? The reason is simple, really. He cannot deem his life complete. No matter what he does, how many places he visits, how much he learns and experiences to recount to his eternal love, he is missing something. Something that even humans with half the lifespan he used to believe he would have had achieved.
A life partner.
After his first family, then his second, he realised quickly that in the grand scheme of his existence, these people will be specks in the timeline of his life. He will outlive his ancestors and his descendants, he can never stay in one place lest he risk being found by those digging too deep beneath the surface of his character.
Although, every century his will for life refreshes, at the sight of the being that he lives to serve – in a roundabout way. He owes his life to this being so that they may know and live vicariously through his own actions. His choices end up determining the view of humanity for this ethereal presence in human form. It took centuries to know his purpose beyond their conversations, even longer still to be given the privilege of a name.
Dream of the Endless. The Sandman. Lord of the Unconscious Realm. Morpheus.
He had fallen in love with the idea of a person who had been nameless for centuries. If that is not a testament to the human condition, then Robert didn’t know what else could prove that he was still human.
To love without boundaries, before knowing someone's true abilities, to only experience their magnificence in the dreams that they craft.
He dreamt often of Morpheus, since their first meeting in that tavern, all those hundreds of years ago. He wondered if the Lord of Dreams knew this, but he never dared to ask. He had billions of sleeping souls to entertain or torment, their meetings every hundred years already took up too much of his time as a being with power beyond human comprehension. Yet still, he took the time to find him, meet with him, and listen to his stories.
That was enough for him.
Lying to oneself is easier done in the waking world than in the realm of dreams, where the unconscious mind revels in the impossibilities of the life that one cannot live. For Hob, he dreams of a simple life, perhaps in a cottage somewhere, just outside of the city. Close enough for supplies and socialising, but far enough away where house lights fade across the course of an evening, leaving the stars visible each night. It is a recurring dream, one that he remembers and ponders on during the day until it is time to return to it at night. Morpheus lives with him, engaging in fruitless conversation about nothing in particular, laughing and smiling and drinking to the point of tipsiness but no further. Just enough to take the edge off of an eternal life. To forget the hundreds of years lived before and the thousands of years left to live. Until the day the universe closes its eyes for its own eternal slumber, finally being allowed to dream a perfect version of itself to begin the cycle once more.
Hob may have considered himself an observant man, hundreds of years surrounded by humans of all ages and types brings with it a sixth sense he nicknamed ‘The Radar’. This radar would pick up on cues dished out in troves from those around him, only visible to those who knew how to read them. Centuries of human life would build that experience automatically. That didn’t apply in the world of dreams, where he had his focus on only one being, on the one person he could never have. The lord of the realm he dared visit each night, praying for a glimpse into a person he barely knew. He was not an observant man in this regard.
Morpheus visited the worlds of those in the Dreaming for a multitude of reasons, to check on the work of both Dreams and Nightmares, pursue anomalies in either of these fields and reverse the damage they had caused, or simply to gain a further insight into the worlds of these humans that he served.
He avoided Hob’s dreams for many centuries, for the reason that it would tarnish the sanctity of their meetings. Although curiosity got the best of him one night in 1914, and they broke the internal contract he had set with him.
It was quiet, a woodland scene expanding for acres beyond the eye’s scope, a house at the end of a worn gravel pathway being the only feature of the landscape. The light was on, an orange glow of candles radiating from the windows, smoke billowing into the cold air, fluttering into wisps, a slight breeze rustling the trees.
He saw a figure pass by the window, not Hob’s but his own, carrying a platter of some kind in one hand, leading another figure behind him with the other. He assumed the figure to be Hob’s but, the question of why he would feature so predominantly in his dream considering the last time they had seen each other was almost 30 years ago froze him in place. Even more so when they parted on less than friendly terms.
They had seen versions of himself in dreams before, the concept of meeting the Lord of the Dreamworld had been a fantasy to some and a nightmare to others. In some he would be meeker, a colourful artist draped in the light of a thousand worlds, paint splattered across his skin and a smile on his face. In others he would be a hulking monster with tendrils spreading as far as the eye could see, curling and wrapping around the innocent Dreamer, afraid of the images their mind could conjure to torment them with. He had the potential to realise either of those versions of himself, but they could never find a reason to do so. Instead, they lived as they always had, a masculine image of mystery and intimidation. It worked for him for the centuries he had ruled over the Dreaming, so why would they need to change it?
This version of himself, though, was a complete novelty. A domesticated image of themselves, reduced to living within the confines of a cottage in the middle of nowhere, participating in meaningless, repetitive actions to forget what they were made to do in favour of… love? The man he gifted – or that his sister gifted – an eternal life to had fallen for this version of themself, this antithesis to who he really was? A person crafted to fill the void of what Hob lacked but painted in the style of Morpheus?
He left the dream alone from that point on.
Until, 40 years later, he sat in the basement of Rodrick Burgess, trapped with seemingly no escape. In his absence from the Dreaming he fell back on centuries of knowledge and memories to entertain himself, escape the clutches of insanity. On this day in particular, he dreaded the fact that he had broken his vow twice. This remembrance brought back a more recent memory, of the last time he had seen Hob Gadling; In the silhouette of a cottage window in a distant place to where either of them stand today. They hoped for a miracle, as they had done almost everyday that had passed in this wretched house, ever since his last raven had been killed in an attempt to free him.
He thought back to what he had seen that night, how electric the air felt, buzzing with joy and fulfilment; where in the world of the living would house despair and malnourishment. Maybe he would have asked about it in their next meeting, perhaps Hob would bring the dream up himself, or it could go unspoken – as most things did between them.
Morpheus knew what love was, what it felt like, what it did to people who let it absorb them. He had experienced enough of that when he was naive enough to trust mortals with such a fragile thing as a heart. In curiosity, they would break it, push until it shattered, as humans do. He made that mistake once, and vowed he would never make it again, not to a mortal who knew not of all facets of the world. Who had not lived the highs and lows, had not experienced all but true love.
Although a heart never heals fully after it has been broken, it bears golden scars imprinted within its caverns, never beating quite the same afterwards. For a being capable of creating endless landscapes of effervescent dreams, he had never allowed himself that pleasure, at risk of falling into the palm of Desire, or forgetting his duties, wrapped up in the eternal wants of a restless soul. He had forgotten what it felt like to want, to be selfish for the sake of selfishness, to serve himself rather than his realm. If their meetings with Hob confirmed one thing, it was that being human was not the boon he remembered. It might serve him well to participate in human life, if not to understand it then just to see what had changed since his last ventures into a mortal existence.
After many years of entrapment, he finally broke free from the cage of his captors, with the help of an easily manipulated guard. Humans were complicated creatures, with minds and whims and wants and fears, all of which culminated in a different arrangement so that no two people were wholly the same. Not a single replicated soul across the entire planet. He held a resentment for many people after he had been freed, to the man who captured him, the group around him who helped, the son too afraid to stand up to his father, his siblings who had abandoned him. In the same breath, many Dreamers held a resentment toward him, having been trapped in his realm without his power to let them leave and return to the waking world, as well as Hob Gadling, who he had personally let down in more ways than he knew.
It didn’t cross his mind to find him again for quite a time after his escape. He had a vortex to quell. However, he only needed to ensure his realms integrity for 8 hours. The other 14 were left available to spend as he pleased. They visited him again in his dreams, and again he was met with a gravel pathway, where the grass had grown tall on each side, wildflowers in full bloom under the sun. It was the afternoon this time. The lights were off inside of the house and the door had been left open. Curiosity got the best of Dream and he stepped across the stones and gravel to the door, painted a light green. He heard no sounds of commotion or talking, perhaps Hob was out with the secondary version of themselves. The house was lived in, trinkets from across time lining the walls, old paintings – likely mental copies of those that Hob had in his actual home – and pictures, so many pictures. The ones that stuck out were the ones imagened to have been taken during their meetings. Those were lined up in a row, central to the sprawling wall of images that decorated his living room wall. He must take the time to find him, right his wrongs.
Dream peeked out of the window facing the forest, looking down a similarly worn path as the one at the front of the house, except this one led down to a lake in the centre of a clearing. Hob was sitting with the alternate Morpheus, legs dangling off of a fishing pier, smiling and talking about everything and nothing. The sun beamed on the pair, lighting them with a filter recognisable only as nostalgic. Dream smiled to himself at himself, barely recognisable but utterly familiar. They had made those mistakes as a younger Endless, they should refrain from making them again, lest they damn the centre of their affections to an eternity of suffering in Hell for believing themselves equal to an Endless.
Although, how can one be damned if they cannot die?
Still, he should leave Hob to his fantasies of domestic bliss, and resolve his own problems in the conscious realm.