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This silence between them had fallen heavy like black holes were heavy - Wrapped around the whole inn to better devour them.
It’s a Tuesday, and the moon it’s on its first quarter. It’s a quiet night outside, and if there’s a few stars to see in London, East Greenwich’s lights try their best, and fail, to make up for it.
On their table: Empty glasses and a pitcher of far better beer than the one Morpheus had deigned taste the day they’d met.
Around them: Very few patrons to cloak from by then, and oh, he’s so grateful for it.
“... One century from now? Are you sure?”, Hob asks, and his voice is reedy in a way that throws Morpheus all the way back to 1689 - An open wound with a chance of scar tissue, if you let it.
He doesn’t tell him about the flashback, or that it was the year things started to change for him too. When Hob Gadling stopped being a bet, an experiment on despair, and he’d been struck with the backhand of actual respect.
This was a man who in his own sense of a timeline had known love steadfast enough to think it long-term, the awe of fathering a child – And had lost all of it as predicted. Meanwhile he was already...
He doesn’t want to tell him ‘I may not come next century’ to rip off the band-aid quickly.
“... 2089”, he amends.
He’s never going to tell him ‘you could be the reason I do.’ Perhaps–
– Perhaps Daniel Hall could get to grow up as little boys did or almost, with one foot in the Dreaming and another in the Waking. He’d reach adulthood and immortality in the same breath, giving Morpheus time to take all of this back and set his plans in motion if he still wished so.
Maybe a heir as a vessel could work, instead of a new facet. Even for beings like him, life was strange.
“... Could I see you in my dreams, then?”, Hob asks. And all about this is about uncertain promises, isn’t it? It’s not like he hasn’t done it before.
Just not like this. He hadn’t known it had been him.
(Sharing a glass of wine, holding him close, acting out desires he could hardly admit to himself, even though in the Dreaming hailed for days later.)
“Maybe”, Morpheus replies then, and against all prognosis Hob laughs.
“See, it’s good to know you’re still you”, he says, and through the pain he’s smiling, and his voice has now a thread of certainty it had lacked. “But I’m still me. Stay the night: This pub is an inn. Wherever I go you’ll always have it.”
He stares at this human, the audacity of this spitfire of a man who stands in front of him with his two feet firmly planted on the ground - To keep moving, keep moving always.
“You have a deal, Hob Gadling”, he replies.
It’s Morpheus the one who kisses him, the one who steps into Hob’s flat like he owns it instead of asking for another one. They make out, and he takes him to his own bedroom.
Hob takes sacrament, and offers him his own. Morpheus takes it, keeps his clothes on, and watches him sleep.
He stays the night, and fades with the first rays of sunlight. Inside of him, there’s a needle insisting he’d seen a glimmer of brown watching him leave.
There’s nothing naive about hope.
It isn’t about faith either, though it skirts close. It’s about watching disaster unfold in front of you and the conscious effort of looking for the helpers. Watching humans trash a whole goddamn planet and stay aware it had been such a small minority, compared to everyone who wanted to save it - And those who would if they weren’t so worn, life itself fucking with their ability to think it could happen.
Hob hadn’t considered himself particularly selfish before, until his spectacular fall into moral bankruptcy around the 1700’s. He hadn’t considered himself particularly good either, and even less so after said fall, no matter if he’d done his best to pay penance.
He still doesn’t. But if on the 80’s his stint at stockbroking had been more about playing at a grownup’s casino than anything, he's… Fucking glad, truly, that he’d done it. Thrown so much of it into saving accounts and let the interests pile up. He can put it to decent use now.
Getting through a doctorate in History had been just the punch to the face he’d needed, and not only because the horrors of higher education had felt like too much, even for the Catholic peasant in his head he hadn’t quite killed. Over six hundred years and scientific proof of pantheism hadn't done in either of them.
This isn't about the New Inn, his small temple to the only one he’d ever worship, running on an independent grid of solar power.
He's been throwing money at organizations aiming to clean the oceans and rivers of plastic, stopping desertification in Africa, and climate change activists galore. At food pantries and healthcare relief in all of the British Islands, because Mary’s Holy Womb, all those centuries later and the government had remained a shitshow.
Would’ve thrown money at the goddamn Antifa if he could, except Antifa isn’t an organization.
(For those, he just masks himself and puts his very unkillable body to use on the front lines, shielding the kiddos from the cops' wanton target practice.)
Things are bad. Painful, and exhausting. History is a spiral, moments echoing through time without being the exact same.
… It's also an electrocardiogram, action and reaction.
(And of course ‘in all hitherto societies, of Class Struggle’. Fuck, but he should’ve been doing better things at the beginning of the Twentieth Century instead of drowning the loss of his Stranger.)
He wants to do right by this planet. Wants to have a planet so Morpheus had one to return to.
And if sometimes he caught glimpses of him in dreams– Half-remembered, of love and pleasure and laughter, of being shushed when he tried to tell him what he’d been doing- It only makes him fight harder.
(“Quiet, Hob Gadling, until the time comes. I want you to surprise me, as you do.”)
Things would get worse before they got better. But they fucking would. So many were working on it, it had been gaining such urgency, it could never be in vain.
This was what hope was about.
Hob would’ve loved to show Morpheus a Promised Land of an Earth by the time he came back. Truth was, they still aren’t there.
Glimmering cities work on solar energy - Thin panels, transparent like glass, power them from every window. Every vehicle. People work less, from everyone according to what they could, to everyone according to what they needed.
Public transportation actually works!
… Cleanup crews are hard at work in large, desertified zones, and still polluted rivers. Water remains the biggest problem. Someone had discovered and then re-engineered some fungus that eats plastic, would you believe? It had, however, brought along the constant task of managing it so it doesn’t grow too cheerfully, and microplastics make desalination a total undertaking.
Meanwhile, a new Golden Age of Sailing has set in. The same sun powering humanity’s home has– Well, it is a long explanation, but it’s done embracing its winds, and using sails to propel spaceships. They are bringing water from Ceres! Other ships take it from the Moon bases and make it rain into their planet, over the food crops! Of course he was going to be there. Maybe not as a captain like he’d once been but, being a sailor for these? Hadn’t known awe like it since his first storm.
Since he’d first knelt before Morpheus.
“Are you vying for flattery, Hob?”
Morpheus is grinning. He’d relearned how to in the last century, slowly. Recovery is, too, both the pulse of a heartbeat and a struggle.
“I’d never”, Hob replies, but he's daring to cradle his lover's face on a hand still calloused by the use of a thousand instruments. However spartan, he has a cabin of his own, and space is darker than he'd thought but oh. It's beautiful all the same. Comforting, a duvet over their shoulders.
“I remember being promised a temple wherever you went”, Morpheus teases in return. Keeping the date had been worth it. This human keeps surprising him, over and over, the needle in his heart turning into a thread, the thread into a ball of yarn, the yarn into something he’d taken in his hands to put a stop to his own suicide in slow motion.
Hope is all about uncertain promises, yes... And gritting bloodied teeth if you had to. So you could keep walking, know when to rest, and hold tight onto your wishes. It's spite for a good cause, love, the awe of things to learn and see.
“Here I am”, Hob replies simply, healthier than ever. Cocky like the day they’d met, and how could Morpheus not kiss him?
There they were. Toasting for a new century, and the next one, and the next one.
So much to live for.