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Hob drifts back into awareness, slowly, bonelessly content, utterly relaxed and warm. He sighs. There’s a solid weight on his chest, loose limbs wrapped around him, and he sighs again. Dream’s still here. He blinks his eyes open but instead of meeting blue he encounters fathomless black, barely a star in sight. All of Dream’s beautiful, painfully familiar form is a bit fuzzy around the edges.
“What are you doing?” Hob whispers.
Dream solidifies, eyes turning silvery blue. “Nothing.”
“Please,” Hob murmurs, carefully touching two fingers to Dream’s now slightly furrowed brow. The frown’s barely perceptible but Hob knows it’s there. He reaches further up, into impossibly messy raven strands, in further disarray after what they did earlier – in the Waking for a change which is still, always a wondrous thing, Hob’s hands in Dream’s hair, bodies intertwined, fervently touching and coming together. “Don’t stop on my account.”
Dream wears that expression that very clearly says, ‘Humans, chimneys, playing cards, self-driving cars, chat bots, still hoping for world peace and a cure for all ills’. Not convinced then.
“You know I don’t mind, right? Whatever form you choose.”
Dream’s eyes turn black again. “What if I don’t choose?” And he shifts.
Hob cannot describe what he sees. Words fail him, his thoughts tumbling in wild disarray. Dream’s so beyond human comprehension tonight. Hob has watched him change into a lot of different things by now, dreams and nightmares alike, monstrous and beautiful, strange and alien, but this is, it’s – more somehow. It’s not a solid form. It could be a concept of sorts, a fleeting moment of something, anything, everything. It’s ever-changing or maybe simply never-ending.
The best Hob can come up with are some ideas and associations, absurd and chaotic. They appear to him in one second, gone, null and void in the next. There’s an ancient tree, its roots far and wide in damp earth, fog rising from warm soil after a thunderstorm. It’s a laugh, careless and free, elicited by a moment of pure, easy joy, celebrating life and its wonders. It’s a star blinking into existence in the vastness of the universe, gone again in a moment of time, in a white-hot fiery explosion, billions of years conflating to seconds.
There’s a feeling of freedom, tainted and strengthened by confinement. He glimpses a nebula, winding through space, a mountain lion, poised on a ridge, ready to strike, an otter, gliding through a lake, droplets of water sparkling in its fur like diamonds, a grain of sand in a desert. It’s the desert itself, hot and hostile, gorgeously cold, covered by a blanket of stars. The images keep changing faster than Hob can perceive them. There’s hope and compassion and pain. It’s too much and never enough.
Whatever it is, it’s Dream, and it coils around Hob, caressing and stroking and petting. And he did not expect it to be this gentle, this tender. He imagined it to be a blizzard or a hurricane, a tsunami perhaps, something he could barely endure. Instead it’s all soft and sweet. It’s so ancient and powerful and yet it decides to worship him. He wants to reach back, but it’s impossible, there’s nothing to touch, not for him, nothing humanly palpable, so he lays there, drowning in happiness, hoping that Dream can hear his thoughts, feel what he feels.
"Hobsie,” it echoes in his mind, and it should be amusing – he hasn’t heard this in centuries, certainly not from Dream, occasionally from himself, in a moment of self-mockery, rarely in fond memory. It should be funny. It’s not. It makes him choke up and need and want.
“Dream. I love you so fucking much,” he manages, voice raspy and raw, laid bare.
There’s a solid weight on his chest, loose limbs wrapped around him.
“Hobsie,” Dream says again, eyes blue but with a hint of starlight, before he leans down for a proper kiss.