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Robert Gadlen, as he is this decade, fumbles with the keys to his flat. He wonders briefly, through his heavily tipsy haze, how he got home from the White Horse. The keys scrape the lock a few times before they slide in, and he turns them the wrong way at first.
He doesn't bother with the lights. He's lived here for six years now, and can navigate by feel. Toeing off his loafers, he leaves them where they fall. His shoulder-padded blazer is shrugged off to the floor. He whips off his belt and listens to it clatter on the floorboards.
He looks down at the crystal decanter, containing a whiskey he'd chosen especially for his intention to invite his stranger here. For the hope he'd held that his stranger would actually accept his invitation. Both hands braced on the drink cart, Hob squeezes his eyes closed and tries to slow his breathing.
He hadn't come.
The culmination of a hundred years of niggling, fearful apprehension is crumbling onto his shoulders. Hob had, as was his way, been hopeful. Surely 100 years was enough time to recognise an olive branch from a slight. Surely his stranger wasn't so prideful as to forget Hob entirely.
Evidently not.
Hobs hands shake as he uncorks the decanter with a clang of crystal, sloshing more than a few fingers of expensive whiskey into his glass. He holds it up to the dim moonlight and squints.
'Fuck it.' he mumbles, throws the entire drink back, and pours himself another.
He stumbles a little, on the way to the couch but makes it, and spills his drink onto his t-shirt when he falls heavily into the cushions.
Hob sat in the dark and watched the moon pass by the small window in his lounge. The whiskey burned nicely. The smokiness he absently compared to ash in his mouth. He had been the one to assume. He had pushed his buttoned up stranger away with a poorly worded offer of solidarity. He had no one to blame but himself. One or two tears slipped silently down his face, he did not deign to notice them.
—--------------
Dream of the Endless reclined against the rounded base of his glass prison. He had not been aware, prior to this imprisonment, that his corporeal form could become uncomfortable.
His body had no need for warmth, but the icy chill of the glass had started to grate on him some time in the last decade. He did not require air, but the absolute still inside his sphere made his skin prickle uncomfortably. He did not require oxygen, but his corporeal lungs ached from disuse. He had allowed his body to slowly waste, letting his captors stare in horror at the imagining of his diminishing flesh. He had heard them discussing it intermittently.
As Dream floated in a sea of discomfort and dissociation, he replayed some of the dreams he remembered. Dreams of children full of wonder and life, of artists full of shape and form, of inventors full of hope. He mindlessly noted the date.
Dream was ripped violently into a state of full awareness. Today is the day he was to be at the white horse. Hob. Only his age and his disposition as an Endless kept his face impassive. His fists clenched where they rested on his concave stomach. He felt the telltale tightness in the skin of his face that warned of impending tears, but kept his eyes closed against them.
The memory played unbidden behind his eyelids.
I'll tell you what, I'll be here in a hundred years. If you're here too, it'll be because we're friends! Right?
How Dream had ached at the hitch in his voice.
Right?
Fuck.
The expletive had not been for him to hear, Dream knew. His pride had not allowed him to turn around, and not for the first time, Dream cursed his choice. He should have turned. He should have accepted Hob's offer of friendship.
He played the memory back, altering it. He turned. He strode back to Hob through the pouring rain.
—---------------------
Something large and angry pursues Hob through the dark. He is walking through waist deep water, it is a riptide pulling him back. He knows what is following him. He had never known what is following him. A gap in the trees on the bank. The mud is harder to traverse than the water. The thing draws closer. It snaps at his heels. He is floating in the water, with the current. He does not have the strength to swim.
The sky brightens.
The thing that was chasing him now sits, close and a multitude away. He knew what was waiting for him. He had never known what was waiting for him. The water is a creek, waist deep but gentle. He pushes against the flow.
—-----------------
Dream has his eyes closed against the dark. His dreamscape is empty. A void. He does not dream. He pictures Hob's face, the permanent crows feet that line his eyes when he smiles. His chestnut locks in their styles over the years. He tries to place Hob into a dreamscape. There is a pinprick of light in the distance. Dream narrows his focus to it.
There is a familiarity. A warmth that Dream craves.
—-----------------
There. On the opposite bank. The moon is full and bright. The stars are those of his childhood, unimpeded by artificial light. He does not look up, but he knows it for a certainty. The black smudge across the water grows clearer. He knows what awaits him. He has never known what awaits him.
This is a dream.
His new awareness gives him power. The water grows still and recedes like a tide. There remains a barrier, a force trying to keep him away. The pale thing reaches for him. The hand is welcome. He cannot reach.
—------------
Dream draws the pinprick of golden light towards himself, it is resistant, and he has precious little power. He reaches out. The pinprick widens, several minuscule points expanding outwards. The light blooms, radiant through the darkness. Blinding. He does not dare close his eyes.
—------------
Stranger. He thinks, or perhaps says. Either way the creature before him materializes further. He recognizes the face. He cannot recognize him. He closes the final distance, he takes hold of the hand, cool fingers delicate and bird boned, strong as any warrior.
—-------------
Dream reaches further. The light is iridescent and he will not close his eyes. There is a figure, a silver shadow. The warmth is all encompassing. It burns his sorrow like so much paper.
He pushes his power to its fullest extent. He knows it will leave him with nothing. There is nothing else he can do. The darkness retreats.
—--------------
In less than a blink, Hob's knees are jarred by their sudden impact with a cold, hard, curved surface. He slips toward the center of the curve, his thighs colliding with something fleshy.
Hob blinks once, twice. He lies in the bottom of a glass sphere, his limbs entangled with someone else.
He blinks again.
A shock of dark hair shifts by his shoulder. A face turns to him. His stranger's face. Hob immediately recognizes the eyes. Startlingly black, sclera and all. The universes multitudes contained within, rimmed with long, dark lashes which make a contrast worthy of poetry. The familiar crease between eyebrows. Small, shockingly grey lips that should be pink, pursed, but plush looking regardless. His hair a birds nest of black locks.
That is where the recognition ends.
The stranger carefully extricates himself, though he looks pained to do it, coming to rise on his knees. Hob rights himself also, if only to grasp his stranger by the elbows, steadying him as he sways.
Each rib shows cleanly through skin like wet silk stretched too far. The collarbones create pools of shadow that could house monsters. His hips jut from his stomach like blades. Hob averts his eyes, shaken by his nakedness, and cups sharp cheekbones in his palms.
He had never seen so much as his stranger's wrists. The juxtaposition wrenches him from shock.
He tries to speak, but there is no air on which to buoy words. Otherworldly eyes snap to his own, where they had been focused elsewhere. The stranger frowns, eyes glassy, tears threatening to fall.
Hob does the only thing he can think to do. He leans forward, wrapping his arms around a frame with nothing to spare, and pulls his stranger into an embrace that says
I'm here
There is a moment of panic in Hob's mind when his stranger goes rigid. The seconds tick by, each a millennium, before the body in his arms softens, and hands like claws clutch his t-shirt, a nose finds the space under his jaw, forehead resting against his cheek.
Hob cannot feel it properly, but the place he has found is cold.
—-------------------
Dream softens in Hob's embrace because there is nothing else he can will himself to do. Solid, warm, human arms wrap around his ribs and squeeze a semblance of life back into his corporeal form. His face is buried neatly into Hob's neck. He breathes in the minuscule amount of carbon dioxide left just to note that Hob smells of whiskey and aftershave, he smells of life and London, he smells of the White Horse.
They stay like that for a time. Dream is vaguely aware of activity outside his prison. He finds he has a modicum of control over the dream space right here, and drowns out the noise. He focuses on the imagined beating of Hob's dream-heart. They do not speak. Dream has no words for this. Hob had gone to the White Horse, and he was not there. He conveys his apology with a vice grip around Hob's waist.
Hob shifts. Dream compulsively tightens his grip on the back of his t-shirt, but Hob presses a hand carefully to the back of his head, before readjusting his legs. Carefully, without separating their torsos any more than necessary, Hob maneuvers Dream until he is settled, sitting in Hob's lap, legs wrapped around his waist.
Dream relaxes again minutely; for the first time in decades, no part of him is in contact with the unforgiving frigid glass. He crosses his ankles at Hob's tailbone. The hand at the back of his head cards through his hair softly, before coming to rest at his back.
Dream is awash with feeling. His imprisonment had been defined by absence. Of warmth. Of softness. Of dreams. The give of Hob's lap under his thighs is more pleasing than any experience Dream can recall. The arms wrapped around him offer more comfort in their gentle weight than he has ever been offered. The pectoral against his cheek has more cushioning than he has ever appreciated.
Hob breathes an absence of air, the rise and fall of his chest soothing Dream more than he could have hoped. He distantly notes Hob's head moving, turning slowly, looking around.
—----------------
They are situated more comfortably, but Hob would not call it comfortable. His stranger's weight is negligible in his lap. His skin is cool and dry, like pages of a long forgotten book. Hob believes himself to be dreaming, but he also knows that this is, undoubtedly, real. He notes with disgust the prison they are in. Cold glass, iron bands, bolts on the inside. Water surrounding the globe. A basement, moonlight only through the very highest windows.
He cannot hear them, but there are several people around the glass, gesturing and yelling. He looks around as slowly as possible, so as not to jostle his stranger. The inside of the globe smells vaguely of ozone. His stranger's chest does not rise or fall. Had he not climbed into Hob's lap or clutched at him like a lifeline, Hob would think him fallen.
The soldier, the bandit, the thief, the man who has to die and build a new life every few decades takes over.
A basement. Several guards, armed. Night time, same time zone. Pillars in the basement: grimy, but ornate. Gate: iron. The man yelling in his direction: British. Hob's lip reading is not perfect, but he speaks with a turn of his lip as someone raised in South London. There is another man, standing back slightly. Middle aged, meek. A face of misery. Several of the guards are intermittently yelling at him. Hob has seen that face before.
His stranger shifts slightly. Hob momentarily tightens his grip in response, but allows him to pull back. Hob is immediately lost in his eyes again. There is a sorrow there he cannot abide.
Those soft lips part experimentally. No sound comes out, and his stranger furrows his brow once again.
—------------
Dream comes back to himself, and he already mourns the loss he is about to enforce. Another run of minutes while he convinces himself to do what is right, what is best for Hob.
He cannot remain here. Dream does not know how he came to be here, but it is dangerous for him. He allows himself a final measure of Hob's breathing before he relinquishes his grip. The strong arms around him tighten momentarily, and Dream's metaphorical heart theoretically flutters at the thought the Hob might not want to let him go.
He pulls back anyway. It is not safe for Hob to be here.
Dream opens his mouth, and finds he has to consciously remind himself how to speak. He pulls the knowledge to the forefront of his mind. He looks one last time into brown eyes that watch him with worry. He draws a lungful of meager molecules, and with all the strength he can muster, he speaks.
This dream is over, Hob.
His voice betrays him on naming his friend. It cracks horribly, and Dream is subjected to the appalled and already mourning expression on Hob's face, before his backside slams into the glass at the bottom of the bowl, cold and rigid once more.
Dream feels absolutely bereft. He feels more empty than he has these long years. He has already imprinted the scene, the feeling, into his bare dreamscape. He knows it will not bring him comfort.
—------------
Hob jolts awake.
His back aches from his position on the couch. His throat rasps with the aftermath of whiskey. His heart pounds in his chest. His mind races. The final image of his stranger's agonized expression before he had been dismissed is burned into his retinas, though Hob is sure he did not see it with his physical eyes.
The memory of his slight weight held in Hob's lap is intoxicating. Black hair softer than silk sliding through his fingers. Cool fingers digging into his shoulders.
The gray dawn peeks through the window.
Hob takes a moment.
Was it real?
Something undefinable inside tells him it was. It tells him that his stranger is truly held captive. It tells him that there is nothing to do except find him.