Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hob has always been the kind of person to try anything once. Unfortunately, that applies to the literal anything and that is exactly the reason he finds himself in this situation.

The walls have some weird shimmery blue pattern on them that moves like waves, and he’s maybe not in the most reasonable mindset, but he is pretty certain that they were just solid white before. He is very certain that the girl who is tracing them with her fingers and giggling quietly was not there before either, because he had had some sense in him and locked all the doors and windows before he’d taken a hit.

“Uh, hi?” The words come out funny, a little slurred but not like drunk-slurred, like his mouth has managed to separate itself from his brain and the words are having to jump a gap to come out at all.

The girl continues giggling quietly to herself, swaying slightly as she watches the walls move.

Hob tries again, managing to get himself into a more sitting position than the half-laying-down he had been before. “Hey? Kid?”

She turns around very fast, fast enough that were he sober he’d have jumped up and put his arms out to catch her if she fell. As it is, he just manages to lean forward slightly and hit himself in the face. She giggles at that as well.

“So clum-sy.”

“I guess.” He agrees. “I’m Hob.”

“Clum-s-ee.” There’re notable gaps between the syllables, not like she’s taking pauses but like her brain takes a few moments to remember how the rest of the word goes.

“How’d you get in here?”

She flops down on the floor in front of him with a quiet ‘oof’, and pokes at the pills still in the packet with her pinky finger. “You took it. Many many many maaa-nee.”

Hob blinks down at the drugs and tries to connect them and the girl in his mind. There seems to be a piece missing.

“Pre-tty.” She mumbles, reaching up towards a pink and purple butterfly. “So Pre-tty.”

“You can see them.” Hob says, more to himself than anything, which is probably good because the girl doesn’t appear to have heard him. “Huh.”

Her entire body seems to follow the butterfly, like she and it are connected by a string. Hob is pretty sure that the human body shouldn’t be able to move like that, but then her hair also seems to be slowly pulsing where it’s coloured and that’s not normal either.

She follows it gamely around the apartment, perching on his kitchen countertop to watch when she apparently gets bored of that.

“I’m Hob.” He repeats, a little firmer, and it gets her attention, or at least she swings her gaze around to look at him. “Who are you?”

She considers this. “Not sure.”

He resists the urge to rub at the bridge of his nose. Nobody had ever said that getting high would be this stressful. “You’re not sure who you are?”

“I used to be someone else.” She tells him, as if that answers literally any of the questions he has.

“Who did you used to be?”

She hums the first few bars of a song that seems to be just out of the reach of his memory. “Happ-ee.”

Hob eyes her. “I just wanted to get high. To relax or something.”

“Not having fun?” She looks sad suddenly, as if she’s failed the one thing she is supposed to be doing.

"I – no, not really.”

“Sorry.” Her eyes fill with shiny tears and Hob has a sudden déjà vu, the memory of his stranger looking furious with the same shiny gloss to his eyes.

“Hey, hey, it’s not your fault.”

“’tis.” She objects rubbing her nose on the sleeves of an oversized sweater that she had not being wearing a few seconds prior. It’s made of the most garish wool colours Hob has ever seen and looks a little like a charity shop vomited all over her.

He does rub at his forehead then. The drugs were probably starting to wear off – he hadn’t taken that many and a lifetime of six hundred years had given him a pretty high metabolism. “D’you want a cup of tea?”

“T.” She repeated and stretched her arms out sideways until she resembled the letter.

“To drink.” He clarified.

She considered this for a solid minute and then nodded, very abruptly. “Tea.”

He briefly considered taking some more of the pills before he moved, but it seemed like a bad idea before dealing with hot water. A moment later he was holding the kettle.

“Um?”

The girl was perched cross-legged on his kitchen table. “I like… your ceiling.”

Hob blinked up at his ceiling. It had not changed from last time he had seen it. “Weren’t we in the living room a minute ago?”

“Every room has life.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

She blinked at him. “Questions?”

“Did you teleport us?”

“Telle-port.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“People are always moving, they put legs or wheels or sometimes hands.”

Hob filled the kettle. Evidently he wasn’t getting any answers out of her. “Sugar in your tea?”

“T?” She repeated the motion from earlier.

He sighed. “I’ll give you sugar and milk.”

“Sugar and milk and all things… nilk.”

The kettle boiled, saving Hob from having to come up with a response to that, and he quietly went through the motions of making tea, feeling her eyes on the back of his neck as he did. Some latent parental instinct had him adding cold water to hers, to stop her from burning her mouth.

She took a huge gulp as soon as he set the mug down in front of her. “Hob?”

“Yes?”

“What is that word for when something is spicy but it is not spicy but it leaves a spicy sad feel in your mouth?”

“Uh,” he took a sip of his own tea and… “do you mean bitter?”

“Bitt-er.” She repeated.

He silently moved around and added some more sugar to her mug. “Try now.”

“Anti-bitter.”

“Sweet?”

She hummed and drank the rest of it in two huge gulps. A not-insignificant amount spilled out of the mug and down her front, changing the threads of the jumper to a milky brown where it stained. “Tea.”

Hob grinned into his own mug, “It sure is.”

“Hob?”

“Yes, Sweets?” She wasn’t really that annoying, not annoying at all really just a little girl who seemed generally confused about how the world worked.

“What is that, um, word, for when something is going away but very slowly but it is still in front of you until it goes?”

“Uhh, fading?”

“Hob?”

“Yes?”

She frowned slightly, unhappy, and Hob found himself reaching across the table to squeeze her hand.

“You are fading.”

Automatic, he glanced down at himself. He was still pretty solid. Her hand, however, beneath his, was starting to become paler to the point that he could almost see through it. “I think you are fading.”

“Like a haircut.” She said, sort of wistfully, just before she completely faded out of existence, and the unexpectedness of the phrase had him laughing out loud to the now-empty apartment.

Chapter Text

The next time he sees her, Hob has drunk probably far too much, but that is one of the drawbacks of living above a pub you own. He’s agreed to lock up and shooed everyone out, laughing and in good spirits.

Christmas is coming.

He wants his staff to spend as much time with their families as they can, urges them to and promises the pub will be closed from the 23^rd through to the 28^th. Plenty of time to visit any relatives that might be further afield as well.

His thoughts turn slightly more maudlin as he knocks the lights off and retreats behind the bar, staring out at the empty seats.

“Sad.” A voice says behind him, and it’s probably a good thing he wasn’t holding a glass or he would have thrown it at her in surprise.

As it is, he just slips where he had been leaning against the bar and hits the floor pretty hard.

“Ouch.” She says, helpfully, and offers a hand to pull him back up.

Hob gives her his hand, imagining that he will have to pull himself up and just let her pretend, and almost overshoots her when she pulls him up with little to no effort. She steadies him with a hand on his shoulder and blinks up.

“Better?”

He snorts a laugh. “Sure, kid.”

She tilts her head thoughtfully. “Still sad?”

“A little.” He admits. “It’s kind of the thing about being immortal, all your family dies out.”

“Family.” She repeats, and maybe Hob is just projecting, but it sounds like there’s a wistful note to her voice.

“Yeah.”

They stand silent for a few moments.

“So, who are you?” Hob asks her. “You didn’t tell me last time.”

She clambers up onto the bar next to where he’s leaning – the charity store vomit jumper from last time is gone, instead she has black fishnets on her legs and arms, plus green and pink almost psychedelic patterned t-shirt and shorts on.

“Sometimes I forget.” She explains. “Lots of things, they float.” She waves her hands above her head.

“Who are you today?” Hob asks, feeling like he may have just hit on the last piece of a puzzle he was trying to put together.

“Delirium.”

“Delirium?” It’s obvious that she’s not human – the super strength and ability to appear in locked places has kind of shown Hob that already – but it seems cruel to call a child that.

“Mmmmmmmm hmmmm.”

“That’s a cool name.”

“It didn’t used to be.” She replies sadly. “But I forget lots.”

He reaches out and squeezes her knee. “It’s ok, I forget as well. Today I realised I can’t remember my sister’s face.”

“I have sisters.” She replied. “Death and… and Despair.”

Apparently the naming convention stretches to the whole family – although something approaching an alarm bell is triggered in the depths of Hob’s mind at that. He’s too drunk to give it any attention.

“Wow, is it just the three of you?”

“No. There are… there… Hob?”

“Yeah?”

“What is the number that comes between the six and the eight? The one that ate nine?”

“Seven?”

“Yeah. Seven there are of us. Sort of.”

Hob thinks that this might be pushing into territory that he doesn’t want to touch. “Sort of?”

“I used to have twoooo whole brothers.” She told him.

“Used to?”

“Mm hmm. One of them went away and the other is somewhere secret.”

Hob does not ask if they are dead, but the urge is there. “I’m sorry.”

She hums in response, and then, “Dark.”

Hob follows her gaze to the window. “It is.”

“Sleepy.”

He can’t stop the smile spreading across his face at that, “You’re sleepy?”

She frowns at him, like he’s being deliberately obtuse. “No. You.”

The realisation that he’s being told to go to bed by a child hits him like a slap in the face and he laughs, loud, quick and shocked. “Ok, ok. Bedtime for Hob.”

He leads her up the back stairs to his apartment, tripping several times and making her laugh. It isn’t mean, her laughter, nor malicious, just a child taking joy from something silly.

“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbles, “laugh it up.” But his heart isn’t really in it and he thinks that she laughs an awful lot like Robyn did.

The Christmas tree lights are on when he opens the door and Hob sighs. “Forgot I left those on.” He’s not even really sure why he put it up, it’s not like he had plans to invite anyone round for Christmas or at all, and all they really do for him is remind him that he’s missing things.

“Oh!” Delirium says when she sees them, and then she vanishes from just behind him and reappears kneeling in front of the Christmas tree. Her hair briefly flickers through the colours of the lights and then settles into red and green, pulsing faintly.

“Guess I put them up for you, then.”

She isn’t listening, but that doesn’t really matter.

Chapter Text

Delirium looks like she stepped out of the worst part of the eighties on a good day, all the crazy styles Hob can remember being in fashion and trying out, all compressed into one being. He tells her as much when he notices her sitting on the end of his bed. She doesn’t laugh, just tilts her head thoughtfully at him.

“Sick.”

Hob coughs, feeling it grate on the pain at the back of his throat. Everything is a little blurred, a little bigger or smaller than it should be and he’s cold. “Yeah, I’m sick.”

She looks particularly unhappy about this, or Hob thinks she does, he might just be projecting. He shivers again and tries to give her a reassuring smile.

“Been kicking for six hundred years, Sweets, I don’t think a fever is gonna take me out.”

“You’re cold.”

Hob doesn’t bother trying to disagree with her, especially not when his teeth are almost chattering together.

A moment later, a hoard of psychedelic blankets drops from the ceiling and land on top of him with an affectionate ‘oof’. Apparently, the blankets are… alive? They curl themselves around him, pausing to hold up on one side, the reason why becoming quite apparent when Delirium crawls in and wraps her arms around him.

“Hi, kid.”

“Hello.”

He pushes a hand under her to wrap her up in a hug as well.

“Better?”

His responding cough shakes the bed hard enough to make him dizzy. “Yeah.”

She pokes him in the ribs. “Lying.”

“I feel better, even if the fever is still here.”

“OK.” She shifts closer, pressing her nose to his neck. It’s freezing and Hob only just restrains the shriek that he wants to make in return.

“Your nose is cold.”

“Sorry.” She shifts her head back again, but not quite far enough that he can’t feel the frown that takes over her face.

It’s obvious she wants to help. “Hey,” he pauses to cough again, “can you make me something nice to look at?”

She nods ferociously. “Like butterflies?”

“Butterflies are nice.”

Three of them appear above his head and Hob lets their nonsensical patterns of movement begin to lull him back to sleep. “Thanks.”

“’s ok.”

Chapter Text

He isn’t drunk and he certainly isn’t high, because he’s at the university and has been for the past… days, so it is a little surprising when Delirium starts giggling behind him.

“Hey gorgeous,” he turns to see her beaming at him, “what are you doing here?”

“Hi Hob!” she trills back, “you haven’t been sleepy.”

As if on cue, he yawns, and she laughs at him again.

“Alright, alright. I’ll sleep after this class, ok?” He rubs at his eyes. Now someone’s pointed it out to him, he is incredibly exhausted.

“Hob?”

“Yes, Sweets?”

“What is that phrase, where… where the sleeping will be done but not for a looooooong longlong time?”

“’I’ll sleep when I’m dead’?”

She nods solemnly. “You cannot do that.”

He can’t stop himself from laughing. “That is true, you got me there.”

“Where?”

“Right…” he leans in and presses a finger to the tip of her nose, “here!”

She laughs again, scrunching her nose up. “Tickles.”

At the top of the lecture hall, the first few students trickle in, headphones in and eyes on the floor – looking anywhere else while trying to navigate those stairs is practically a death wish.

“Alright, Trouble, I’ve got to teach a lecture so you gotta go, ok?”

Her face falls. She looks like a kicked puppy when she’s sad. “I want… I want to stay.”

The students have found their seats and are beginning to frown in his direction, confused by the presence of a little girl with hair more brightly coloured than even the most ‘alt’ of students. Hob still doesn’t quite understand what that means, but he’s starting to associate it with a look.

“You can stay…”

She shrieks in glee and Hob reaches over to press a finger to her lips.

“But, you have to be quiet, ok?”

“Quiet.” She whispers back. “Quiet like the wind.”

“Exactly.”

She beams at him and lets him carefully steer her into a seat on the front row where he’ll be able to see her at all times.

“I like it around you,” she tells him, somehow managing to curl herself into the least comfortable looking position he has ever seen, “you make it…” she wiggles her hands in front of her and then stops them, pressing them together, “stable.”

And that is something Hob should probably address, but the lecture hall is slowly filling up with students expecting a lecture and he doesn’t really have the time to force an explanation out of Delirium, who struggles with focus at the best of times.

“Well, you can come around me anytime you like,” he tells her, “but you gotta be quiet when I’m teaching, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” He returns to the front, adjusting the recording devices so it will be caught for those who weren’t able to make it. “Alright, good afternoon, everyone, how are we?”

Someone a few rows back raises a hand.

“Yes?”

“What is that supposed to say?” They point at the whiteboard.

Hob turns around. What he had been writing when Delirium showed up, which had meant to be ‘Early Modern England’ says… not that. It doesn’t actually contain any recognisable words in it, and there are a few letters that haven’t been used in several hundred years.

He nods slowly. “I have no idea.”

Among the laughter that garners, he can hear Delirium’s, high and carefree.

Chapter Text

Hob gasps, thrown out of the most vivid dream he had experienced in over a hundred years. The feeling stayed with him, even as he put on the light – everything being too much and not enough and the first time he had ever felt that way. The odd panic that set in was confusingly close to coming down from a drug high.

“Delirium?” He scrambled out of bed, ignoring the way the duvet pooled on the floor. “Delirium? Is that you?”

A faint memory came back to him as he rushed through the apartment, the necklace she always wore, no matter what else changed. Swirls of colour.

He found a loose sheet of paper and several coloured pens before he paused and actually asked himself what he was doing. It probably wouldn’t even work. He put all the pens on the paper together and attempted to draw a swirl.

“Delirium?”

“That isn’t going to work.”

He looked up to see her sitting opposite him, except, there was something different; her normally coloured hair was a pale blonde, her mismatched eyes were both blue this time and her funky, psychedelic clothing had been replaced by a pink dress.

“Why not?”

She wrinkled her nose up. “I’m not close enough to being Delirium right now.”

Hob nodded slowly, taking in the changes to her person. “So who are you?”

“Delight.” She sighed. “Like I used to be. Why did you call me?”

“I had a dream.” Hob replied, and then paused, realising how menial that sounded in comparison to whatever had happened to Delir- Del.

But she frowned, tilting her head in an invitation for him to go on.

“I haven’t dreamed for years, not properly anyway, they were just faded, like watered down memories mostly if I even dreamed at all, and then today – tonight – I just had a dream and it was like I was experiencing everything all at the same time. I don’t know, like I got all the dreams I should have had in the past hundred years all in one go.”

“Dream is back.” She said, a little surprised, a little wistful. “I wasn’t 100 percent certain, but he must be.”

“Dream?”

“My brother. He’s been missing or something for… well probably as long as you have been missing dreams."

"What happened to him?”

She sighed again, her expression down turning. “I don’t know. I think the others are trying to keep it from me.”

“Why?”

“Because they don’t think I can handle anything anymore. Not after changing to Delirium.” She paused, her eyes filling with tears slightly. “They’re scared of me, of what I could become and what they could become so they think the best solution is to keep me in the dark and tell me nothing.”

“I’m sorry.” Hob said, because that was all he could say.

She smiled at him. “It’s ok.” And then, “your dreams should settle down again once he gets a handle on everything.”

Hob nodded. “Thank you.”

“I have to go.” She told him. “I can’t stay like this for much longer.”

“Wait,”

She raised her eyes to meet his.

“Delight?”

“Yes?”

“What is that word for when being around someone makes you warm and happy?”

She smiled at the floor, obviously seeing straight through what he was doing. “Love?”

“Ah, yes. Delight?”

“Yes?”

He reached out a hand to squeeze her own. “I love you.”

She was at his side in an instant, wrapping her arms around him and burying her head in his shoulder. From that vantage point, he could see the colours seeping back into her hair, starting at the roots. “I love you too.”

And then she was gone, leaving the faint smell of bubble-gum and a sorrow Hob hadn’t known he could feel.

Chapter Text

Delirium – or maybe Delight, Hob isn’t exactly sure what to call her – was right, the dreams remain a little odd for the next few days, but settle back into what he remembered dreams to be, interspersed with a few nights of standing in a barren wasteland, looking up to a crumbling castle.

He doesn’t see her for a while after that, tries some cocaine he picked up off a dealer, but it has little to no effect on him. Oddly, he sleeps better than he has in years as well, although that might have been separate to the shitty drugs.

Two weeks after the vivid dream and meeting Delight, Hob is sitting in the New Inn, grading some papers when his Stranger walks in.

“You’re late.” He says, a smile spreading across his face, utterly unbidden.

His Stranger smiles back, the tiny thing that Hob has coveted for centuries. “I have heard it is impolite to keep one’s friends waiting.”

“Two weeks.” Hob whispers to himself, staring at the door his Stranger had just walked back out of.

“I believe it is customary for friends to see each other more regularly.”

“My name is Dream, of the Endless.”

“Dream.” He whispers again, feeling the sound of it on his tongue. He’d said it in almost every sentence he could over their conversation, but it still didn’t feel like enough. It would probably never be enough.

Someone knocks lightly on the table and he jumps, looking up to see one of his staff looking down, one amused eyebrow raised. “We’re closing up, boss.”

“Right, sure.” He waves his hands at the table for a few seconds before giving up and sweeping all the papers into his bag in a clumsy pile; no doubt some of them would get creased, but the students could deal with it.

“He’s cute,”

“Huh?”

She jerks her chin in the direction of the door and Hob looked, almost instinctively. Dream hadn’t come back, obviously, and the only thing to see was the bartender herding out the regulars who hadn’t left yet.

“He’s an old friend.”

She snorts, “Oh, I’ll bet.”

True to his word, Dream comes back two weeks later – two weeks that Hob spends panicking over how clean his flat is, just in case, writing lists of the things that had happened in the 130 years they had spent apart and just generally wondering what he would do if Dream didn’t return as promised. They are all unfounded fears.

With a slightly haunted look in his eyes, Dream requests that they sit outside and Hob leads him to the wooden benches outside the pub. It is just getting cold enough that people don’t want to sit outside when there’s space inside and so they have the area to themselves.

“It is hard to know how to greet you, after all this time, only meeting every one hundred years.” Dream tells him, eyes turned down to where his hands are folded together.

“You could kiss him.”

They both turn around – very fast – to see Delirium. She is hanging upside down from the flag pole that had somehow ended up on the side of the New Inn despite the fact that Hob was almost certain it had not been in any of his plans.

“What.” Dream asks very pointedly. “Are you doing here.”

“I live here.”

Hob steps in, “Uh, no. No, she – she does not live here.”

“I want to.”

Hob resists the urge to run his fingers through his hair and fails. It is only when they get caught on a knot that his brain actually kicks in and reminds him of the last conversation he had had with Delirium – Delight. It was with Delight. “Dream is back.” She had said. He had been missing, she had told him.

Hob chokes on the realisation, eyes darting between the two of them. They don’t look like siblings.

“There would not be enough space for your realm.” Dream points out, still on the conversation that had actually been happening, and honestly it sounded like an insane sentence to Hob, but Delirium nodded sadly, like this made sense.

His mouth forms the word ‘siblings???’ with the added question marks, but Delirium speaks before he can, helpfully informing the both of them that they are avoiding the subject.

“What subject?”

“The subject where you should… um… oh! Kiss.”

Hob stares very fixedly at the door to the New Inn and wonders, quietly, how his life had ended up here.

“My sister?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you not have duties to attend to?”

“You could just tell me to go away.” She replies, swinging gently.

Her hair wasn’t hanging down, Hob realised, it was sitting the way it would if she was standing, not obeying the laws of gravity.

“Very well. Delirium?”

“Yes!”

“Go away.”

She scowls at him. “I’ve been his friend more than you.”

Dream’s expression suggested he was considering slamming his head into the brick wall.

The words ‘don’t be mean to your brother’ are on the tip of Hob’s tongue, ready to be spoken before he remembers that he isn’t actually the only adult figure Delirium has in her life (apparently), Dream probably has more room to scold her than he does, and also, he isn’t entirely sure what Dream’s reaction to him accidentally shoving his way into his family would be.

Regardless, she vanishes, and leaves the two of them sitting there.

“So,” Hob says a little weakly, “your sister?”

Dream fixes him with a darkly thoughtful look. “You have met her.”

“Uh, yes?”

He turns away again, facing the brick wall. Hob shifts around slightly, leaning to get a look at his face. It’s thunderous.

“I must speak to her about this.”

“Wha—”

“Two weeks, Hob Gadling.”

In the same fashion as his sister, Dream seems to pop out of existence, reality bending around him as if he had never been there at all.

Hob drops his head against the wooden table and sighs.

Chapter Text

Delirium pops back up a few days later, orange hair with one side shaved off but grown out enough to be fuzzy. It’s a Monday, so the New Inn is closed for the day and Hob is just doing some (admittedly unnecessary) handy work.

“Hi.”

“Hello. You’re back.”

Delirium nods and then, in a slightly more secretive tone, “Dream doesn’t know.”

Hob laughs, pulling himself out from under the sink and dusting off the dirt that he’s gotten himself covered in. “Yeah, he seemed a little upset last time.”

“Protective.” She supplies.

Hob frowns, confused.

“We’re not supposed to hold onto you for too long,” she explains, swinging her legs back and forth, “otherwise Dream gets mad.”

Hob leans on the bar as he processes this. “The reason I have such a high metabolism when it comes to drugs and alcohol is because… you’re scared of your brother?”

“Not scared.”

“But you… don’t want to make him mad.”

Delirium shrugs. “Death says he won’t admit—” she cuts herself off. “Nothing.”

Hob waits to see if she’s going to change her mind, and she focuses on the slightly dent in the wood of the bar. “OK. Maybe don’t imply that he wants to kiss me though? I think it made him uncomfortable.”

“Why?”

“Because he left quite soon after.” He swallows down on the part of himself that’s been in love with his stranger for longer than he could ever count, prevents the painful rejection from overtaking him and ignores any fantasies of them living a happy life together.

Delirium hums.

“And, I mean…” he pauses, gathering up the tools, “no offence, but it came from you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, I mean, the idea that he might love me back is one of my delusions, right?”

She doesn’t say anything for a very long time, almost to the point that Hob is expecting her to be gone when he turns around again – she’s not, still sitting on the bar and her eyes are slightly clearer than normal, like she’s trying very hard to focus.

“Death told him once that ‘You can have your pride, or you can have the joy of close, loving relationships.’ Because he’s bad at that.” The way she mimics a voice he doesn’t know does make him want to laugh, but the random topic change is confusing him too much.

“I am sensing a ‘but’ here.” Hob tells her.

She shrugs. “You too. You hide too much of yourself from everyone.”

“To protect myself.”

“He already knows everything.”

“I know that.” The misery at having everything he wants dangled in front of him bites out at her as anger and he immediately feels guilty about it. “Sorry, I just…”

“We’re not just our names.” She tells him, instead of responding to that.

He rubs his forehead and tries to follow the threads of a conversation that keeps jumping around, “Oh?”

“We’re also the opposite, so Despair is also hope and Death is also life and Dream is also reality, you know?”

When he looks up, she’s watching him closely, waiting for him to understand something. He isn’t quite sure what, but the next question seems obvious.

“What’s your opposite?”

“It used to be sadness, very simple, and it kind of still is but now it’s actually truth.”

Hob rubs very hard at the bridge of his nose. “So you are also Truth?”

She shrugs. “Or lucidity.”

He looks back up at her, the focused look in her eyes is starting to slip away again, but he thinks he understands what she means.

“You can’t see what people want?”

“Dream can. And Desire.”

He shelves that thought hurriedly before it distracts him. “But you can see… truth? And delusions?”

“Mmhm.”

“Just my truth?”

“Truth does not change.” A voice says from behind him.

Hob turns around so fast that he nearly hits his head on the same sink he had been failing to fix. “Dream.”

Dream nods at him in acknowledgement, but his attention is focused on Delirium. “Sister, you seem tired.”

The lucidity has completely gone from her eyes now, and her irises look a little like kaleidoscopes, which Hob decides is probably not a good thing to focus on.

“Tired.” She repeats.

Dream takes a cautious step towards her. “Is there a truth you need to share?”

“The Book can change.” She replies, vacant and floating a few inches above the bar top. “He can change it.”

And then she’s gone, leaving Hob and Dream alone in the bar with many things to think about – Dream probably more than Hob, considering that he has no idea what the Book is – but instead of voicing any of his questions, Hob looks up into the face of his oldest friend.

“You could kiss me, if you wanted.”

Dream’s expression goes slack with surprise for a few moments, and he kneels down to be at the same level. “If I wanted?”

“Well, I want,” Hob tells him, “and I’m willing to share.”

The tiny smile that he has coveted for centuries makes a reappearance, but Dream does not lean in to kiss him like he hoped.

“You are filthy.”

He looks down at himself and laughs. “Yeah. Kiss me when I’m clea—”

Dream cuts him off with his mouth, leaning forward with so much force that Hob does hit the back of head on the sink, but he doesn’t let Dream pull away, even as he can feel the shape of an apology on his lips.

“This is good too,” he mumbles, sliding a hand round into Dream’s hair – it’s as soft as he always imagined, “you could join me while I clean up?”

This time Dream does pull away. His pupils have expanded to show galaxies within them and Hob is fascinated.

“I would like that. Very much.”

“OK.” He can’t stop smiling. “Never done it in a shower before, but I’m willing to try anything once.”