Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hob Gadling was the second oldest of five, and lived an unremarkable life, for the time, up until he met a very strange stranger in a tavern in 1389.

That was the story he remembered, anyway.

Half his village fell to the plague before he was born, and it came to ravage the children of the survivors when he was young. That was why he always felt he was missing so many familiar people he couldn’t actually remember, why he had always grown up under the shadow of Death even before he went off to fight for his lord.

It had nothing to do with the occasional dreams he had, where the red grass was burning to ash and the glass dome protecting the city he had grown up in was shattered, and he and his siblings - comrades? - siblings were following their mother - commander - mother to the only hope of safety any of them could think of. Where an apparatus was coming out of the ceiling to attach to his head and pain tearing memory running out hide run hide pain-

It had nothing to do with the strange hourglasses which none of his siblings had, nor his mother or father, which ran sand through their bulbs unendingly without any sign either the top or bottom bulb ever gained or lost any sand. Those didn’t exist.

The hourglasses which his family didn’t have were not buried with them, one by one, as they aged and sickened and died and he remained the same as he’d ever been.

When Hob Gadling was thirty-three (one hundred and seventy-five) years old, he was overheard by Death and her little brother Dream in a tavern proclaiming that death was stupid and he didn’t intend to have any part of it. This had quite a large impact upon his life, firstly in the length of it, and secondly in the fact that he lived long enough to put an end to his centuries-long time as a human rather than dying in obscurity as a mediaeval peasant, mercenary and occasional bandit like hundreds of his actually-human fellows. Dream of the Endless never looked into Hob’s dreams, preferring to hear of his experiences in his own words, and did not look into specific dreams unless he had cause in any case. If he had, it would still have been a gigantic lottery whether he would have encountered the strange dreams, rare and hidden as they were.

After 1916, Hob dreamed much more rarely than he had, and as the century went on, disjointed nightmares of living skeletons and screeching metal contraptions with alien creatures hidden inside and two suns were most of them, when he wasn’t dreaming about the world wars of Earth in the 20th century. The unusual dreams might have stuck out more then. Maybe, just a tad. Of course, Hob didn’t know that it could link to anything, or that there was anything to link it with, at that point. It was only bad dreams, and those were bound to happen when you’d been through as harrowing an experience as the First World War had been – it was only odd that many of them seemed so metaphorical when the others were straightforward dreams of the traumatic events he had lived through and needed to process.

If Dream had looked at his nightmares then, he might have begun to suspect something was amiss with Hob Gadling and investigated why his dreams were all trauma memories but from two different lives, but even if he had been willing he could not have done so by then, due to being trapped in a self-deluded magician’s basement.

The reason for the dreams was quite simple in the end. Even the sort of technology which is intended to hide a person completely, even from themself, indefinitely, cannot actually last forever. Stress exacerbates the pace of degradation, as would actually being searched for. The chameleon circuit had been running for around five centuries longer than intended, and even unintentionally bolstered by the touch of two Endless meddling with its protectee, it began to fail. By 1990, the shell of forgetfulness was beginning to crack in earnest.

Hob, sitting in his room and watching the sand run down and down forever, thought it was very odd that he’d never noticed the hourglass properly before. He’d always had it, hadn’t he? Got it from his mother. It was a tiny little brass thing the size of his little finger. The sand ran through and through the bulb and never settled. Odd. It was mesmerising. Why did he still have this, when every other thing he’d ever owned had been lost across the years? Why did the sand do that? Why didn’t he remember it before? Best not to think about that. He’d never questioned odd things like immortality too closely before, never look a gift horse in-

-wait. He very much had spent most of a century trying to understand his immortality, terrified that he might have forfeited his soul to the devil in a moment of drunken hubris. Why couldn’t he focus on thinking about the hourglass? That was a tad bit not good. It was like trying to find the centre of a maze, except the route kept changing as he was walking.

Maybe he ought to smash it.

The sand poured out of the hourglass and became a flowing golden light which came straight towards Hob’s face. He barely took a breath before it was in his head and he was screaming because it burned and he remembered everything and it was hardly a few decades more than he’d already lived but it was also everything that had ever happened, past future now whatmustbewhatmustnot-

When the child who would become Hob Gadling was eight years old, the end of infancy on Gallifrey, he was taken with his age mates to look into the Untempered Schism and see the whole of the myriad possibilities of Time. There were several possible outcomes to this. The first and most desirable was that he was inspired to great heights of accomplishment for his House and for the glory of Gallifrey - which, at that moment, meant leading armies to victory in the Time War. The second, separated from the first by a razor thin line, was that he was driven mad, but in a way that could be steered by his House to channel his delusions or destruction into appropriate avenues - not as hard in war as in peacetime. The third was that he would run, and never be worth betting on to become a Time Lord, only a normal Gallifreyan - though it did happen now and then, they said that had happened with the Doctor, and he’d been Lord President more than once. The fourth was that he would break entirely, and in these circumstances of war he would be culled by his House as a waste of resources.

Hob was so enthralled by the breadth of all there was to see that he tried to jump into the schism. That hardly ever happened.

Fortunately, it was steerable, and got him slated for a life growing and repairing TARDISes, nurturing them and encouraging them in their wishes for going through time and space without tipping them into wanderlust too great for their pilots to navigate the path. This was an advantage decades later, when a group of cadets and their commander stole a TARDIS and fled the planet as part of a last-minute and very unofficial evacuation.

The feeling of Time flowing through his head on that day at eight years old was the same feeling as now, and the same feeling as when he had to regenerate. No wonder some of the kids had become such adrenaline junkies when a near-death experience could result in just an instant of this feeling of touching eternity - any pain that came along with it (and there was a lot of pain, blinding-white and electric) was worth the heavy golden feeling of being everything at once, in pure complete selfhood. It was just as well that didn’t happen when Hob… did whatever he did that wasn’t dying, these days. He would have died many more times in the 1600s just to feel something that wasn’t crawling, aching grief or the numb despair that had been barely a relief.

Would Hob still not die, now that he wasn’t human?

Silly question. There were infinite possibilities in this as in every other thing in the universe and he couldn’t pick out an answer from the flood coming through him. He was still just as determined not to die as he was before. He’d gotten into the habit of not-dying by now anyway. If that wasn’t enough then there was nothing he could do about it, so no point in dwelling. He’d just have to hope and trust that his immortality would hold, like he always had.

They said, among the more religious Gallifreyans (who were few, as religion had been heavily frowned on since Rassilon), that they had been formed by Time and her sisters, Death and the Lady of Pain. Time himself, had he cared to, would have quibbled that if the being was a sibling to the other two, they in fact meant Destiny. Pre-Time Lord society had been very matriarchal, and most of the gods they had worshipped had therefore been assumed to be female, so we should not put too much importance on the genders they assigned. Besides, the Endless don’t care for such things overmuch. Hob had never heard of this story, but it may help put some things into perspective. The Prince of Stories might have found it enlightening, who can say.

Of course, as with all stories, they had got some things wrong. Stories are only ever an imperfect mirror to reality, even when realism is valued and attempted by the society that tells them. There were some members of the pantheon who were original to Gallifrey, such as Life being peeled off from an inverse-aspect of Death’s function into its own being, and some Endless were not recognised, such as Destruction being considered a part of Death. Despair was flattened down into Pain. But in the essentials, the Menti Celesti of the ancient Gallifreyan religions were the Endless, through the lens of their particular religious sensibilities.

Very few beings in existence had ever known that the Endless had parents. To be fair, they were the definition of “should never have become parents”, and none of their children ever went to see them unless they had to.

Time experienced every instant that existed or might exist at once, constantly, and needed a lot to be able to focus on the particular moment his children were experiencing when they wanted him. He did not generally care to try. Even Destiny, the one of his children who was most like their father, only experienced those moments which definitely existed, and narrowed it further to reading it from the book chained to his hand at that. Such a flood was not conducive to sanity in beings that have to experience linear time.

The secret of the children of Gallifrey who looked into Time was, all of them went mad. It was just that they all went mad differently.

Once upon a time, the stars all went mad. Then the universe was reset so that it had never happened. No one remembered, except Time, who remembers everything that ever might have happened across the span from the creation to the heat death of the universe (or the Big Crunch, or…), and the one who caused the reset. This sort of thing happens more often than you might think.

For example, once upon a time, cats were huge and ruled the earth, and humans were the size cats are now, and cats would hunt humans; then the humans shared a dream, and rewrote the world.

Once upon a time, a species of omnicidal maniacs discovered time travel, and another time-travelling race waged war to stop them destroying everything, until after an eternity of slowly losing a total war they got to the point where they could only fathom saving themselves and not anything else. Nearly no one truly remembers that war, only Time, and the few people who were time-travelling when it ended.

When the Time Lords went to war, Time was their weapon and battleground and logistics line. Its preservation was their casus belli. They had not been to war in ten million years. An instant later, they had always been at total war with the Daleks. Timelines and morals were mangled and stitched together wrong with the sole purpose of winning. It lasted a couple of generations. It lasted billions of years. It lasted an instant. It protected and destroyed all other life in the universe.

The War hadn’t been winnable, by the end.

When the dust cleared, as far as the rest of the universe was concerned, neither Time Lords nor Daleks had ever existed. Even the Endless did not remember them.

Well. The Endless remembered the war, somewhat, because they had always been outside of time in many ways. Some of them remembered more than others: Dream, as he was the king of Could-have-beens, and Death, who reaped so many, and Destiny, whose book only showed him those narratives which are currently true but who remembered what he had read. But even they remembered it as humans remember dreams, fragmentary and far away, not as those who were living in it do. All this is to say that the Endless did not bear the mental scars in the same way as the soldiers who came out of the other side of the Time War.

Chapter Text

The return of a child of Gallifrey to existence caused a minor psychic shockwave which might have been a problem if anyone was looking for it, but as it happened no one was, and it showed up against the background hum of the universe like a candle against the sun. Hob was good at shielding and went quite unnoticed.

There were a lot of people on Earth who were familiar with Time Lords, but they were familiar with the two most famous examples and not more run-of-the-mill ones (if they could be called such) let alone Gallifreyans who had technically barely earned the rank. UNIT and Torchwood and all that lot would have been looking for time travel, large and loud incidents, TARDISes and so on. Hob knew nothing about those agencies in this moment, but he remembered a lifetime’s lessons and a long-ago warning and swiftly resolved himself to keep discreetly away from any excitement he could manage.

Hob spent several hours lying on his bed fully clothed, putting all his memories back in place and coming to terms with the fact that yes, this was real, and yes, this meant that (as far as he could tell) he was the only one left. Then he got up, went to the nearest corner shop, bought ginger beer and gingerbread, came home, and spent the rest of the night getting absolutely blasted.

He decided, once he’d got the hangover out of his system, that he needed to go scouting. There was a certain tree back in the woods that had once been his village which wasn’t a tree. He supposed it must be his now.

It wasn’t very far from the track where he parked his car (poor thing was not designed for country roads, but it would manage). No human would have been able to distinguish it from any of the other trees in the area, but he remembered that one whorl of bark at just the right level to be a door handle. It wasn’t, but still.

He put his hand there and leaned his forehead against the trunk. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said, coaxing. “Are you awake? Time to get up now. Will you let me in? Please?”

It took a long minute, or a small eternity, for her to respond. But, eventually, a door appeared in the trunk and swung slowly open.

Inside was not very impressive, as TARDISes went, just the basic default control room with simplistic navigation column and white rounded walls. It was like the world’s most minimalist and colourless showroom house. The inside of the capsule was bigger than the outside, but that was usual - a TARDIS capsule could go on for miles inside. It was the most beautiful sight Hob had seen in a century.

He stepped in like a pilgrim entering a cathedral, or a man coming home after many years away. The door swung quietly shut behind him. He reached out to rest a hand on the column.

A hologram leapt into flickering life across the room. It was a Time Lady in battered leather and metal uniform, slightly shorter than him, with his own eye colour and nearly the same jawline. She’d been his mother for nearly twenty-five years, as a human; he suspected that if he’d been born in peacetime she would have been a favourite aunt. She’d been the commander who evacuated his cadet unit when Gallifrey fell.

Her digital ghost looked through him now.

“This is emergency recording fourteen. If this message is playing, it means you are very much in need of explanations, so let me sum up. The crew of this capsule went into hiding via chameleon arch in the local year 1360. The capsule itself was rendered dormant, with minimal systems and internal space, to extend the life of the power supply. In the event that only one crew member remains, who is not the symbiotic link, this recording will play. It will assume that your relevant memories are as yet too chaotic or incomplete to have full understanding of your circumstances. Use the screen to pull up the instruction manual, if needed, but until the capsule has a symbiotic link it will not allow movement along either spatial or temporal coordinates. I understand that you will be under a lot of stress in these circumstances, and I am sorry for that. Please believe me, we did our best to keep you all safe, and give you lives that were as happy and away from major temporal events and the levels of technology which might pose a threat as we could. That you’re here now means that didn’t work, and I can’t help because I’m dead. I’m so sorry, child, but have courage and good fortune. Goodbye, love.”

Hob flicked through all the messages left on the emergency system, listlessly. His mother always had been a thorough planner.

“This is emergency recording one… the chameleon arch has failed and emergency medical treatment is needed…

… emergency recording three… in the event that it becomes safe to remove the chameleon arch…

… emergency recording seven… only some crew members remain, and the symbiotic link is among them…

… ten… we have been discovered despite the chameleon arch, and must flee immediately…

… thirteen… discovered… unable to flee due to mechanical failure… stand and fight…”

He sighed and forced himself to stop listening. The contingency plans were for circumstances that hadn’t happened; they wouldn’t help him now. He pulled up the manual instead, and after a few minutes making himself dizzy with the swirling rings and lines of his unfamiliar mother tongue, he gave up and activated the communication programme instead. He could tackle literacy another time, he needed information to decide what he was going to do, and some way to become more familiar with the ship.

The TARDIS communication programme was not quite what he expected. She seemed to be just a little bit mad.

“Goodbye! Hello? Aloha! You’re not my skipper, you’re one of the little ones. Aren’t you? One of the little gems I stole from the jewellers, and one by one they all reformed into pearls to hide their shine, all in the nacre of tiny little human lives. Irritating and rubbing at the mind sometimes, but not shining out. The refraction would have given them away, had them taken back to be good sharp tools again. And then all the pearls were thrown away, into the clay, and I was left alone. But look, here you are again, and so bright do you shine!” A very solid hologram of a young woman in white robes leaned right into his personal space, hands on his shoulders, eyes bright with delight or mania. He was distracted for a moment from what she’d actually said by her being so unexpectedly close.

“Wait. Stole? You stole us?”

“Yes, silly! I stole you, all of you, and you stole me. It was quite the heist, I’d say. A real thriller, complete with daring escape and dashing rescue from oblivion on all our parts.” She twirled away as she talked and hung herself nearly upside-down from the ceiling. He supposed computer programmes could do that easily, but why she’d want to he didn’t know.

“Hang on, you can’t steal people. Things have to be property to be stolen.”

“What do you think you were to them, if not property? I certainly was. Time Lords don’t like thinking of us as sapient, you know. Not even willing to admit we’re sentient, some of them. Biocomputers and little more. Whereas with you, oh, you’re just an extension of the House. It’s an unfortunate consequence of being all telepathic and collective-consciousness, or maybe of being started by a megalomaniac narcissist. Or - ooh, is this the timeline where you’re all bioengineered and made to order?” She put her head to one side, eyes wide and almost mockingly curious.

“What.”

“Oh. Too much at once? I know you Gallifreyans can get overwhelmed by things like that. It’s why we have to have so many filters to talk to you, you need things like respect for linear time and only one moment happening at once. So boring! How do you cope with so little stimulation?” She walked down the wall and sat tailor style next to him.

“Oh, no, not too much, just trying to rearrange my whole understanding of my culture. It was just… how it was, you know.”

“Ah, the fishes don’t know how things work outside the water. Poor sad little fishies, the birds can’t teach them to fly. But you’re a flying fish, or a salmon.”

“I… know what it’s like outside ‘water’?”

“Just so! You’re fun. I like you. Will you be my skipper? I need one. Not for catching and canning, for steering me when I need to move. Oh wait, you wanted a TARDIS. We can do that.”

“…I was expecting to be able to ask first, but sure. That was why I wanted to talk to you, as it happens.”

“Right then. Place your hands here and here-“ two spots on the console lit up “-and brace. Prepare for psychic link by lowering shields. Emergency exits are here, here, and here-“ the hologram waved vaguely in a half-assed attempt at imitating an airline hostess, towards doors that led out of and further into her internal dimensions, and for some reason the ceiling. “Please affix your own oxygen mask before your neighbour’s. Oh wait, not that bit.”

Hob gave her a look. “Why do I need to brace myself?”

She grinned. “Well, you will probably get pretty distracted from things like standing by the mental goings-on, so support from the column will help you stay upright. Of course, you could just lie on the floor or something instead. There’s no seats in this control room, though, so you don’t have that option I’m afraid.”

“Right. Well, I’m fine with lying down, thanks.” He did so, and started breathing in and out steadily, gradually sinking into a meditative state while he dismantled his mental shields. It was a long and involved process, and it felt like he imagined an insect felt like when it was undergoing ecdysis, but he thought it would probably be quicker for most people; he was very good at putting shields up, but taking them down was not really something he had much opportunity to practice. It hadn’t been needed.

Now that the shields were down, the long-defunct links back to the people he’d known on Gallifrey were aching like a whole mouthful of sensitive teeth. He could feel the TARDIS like the heat coming off a radiator when you hover your hand over it, and reached out carefully to her. She reached back, and now it felt like the mental equivalent of hugging a hot water bottle in a fluffy cover, and started putting up shields outside of them both. The two of them weaved the new shields together, sending the metaphorical shuttle back and forth, which took a lot less time than the dismantling but by that point he’d lost precise track of time passing.

Hob came back to himself with the warmth of the TARDIS in the back of his mind. The lights in the control room were dimmed, and pulsing gently with his breathing.

The drum-beat ache in the back of his mind that was the lack of telepathic connection, like some strange phantom pain from a limb made of the awareness of billions like the distant cry of gulls on a cliff far away (annoying and distinctive but not important to what he was doing) lessened slightly.

An amused face came into view, upside down. “Ground Control to Major Tom, everything’s fine on the ground and the stars shine as they should, yes?” The TARDIS squinted at him with her holographic eyes, and seemed to see what she wanted to, because her smile got very wide. “There, see, that wasn’t so bad! My mind to your mind, we come in peace, no problem and no glitches, skipper!”

He burst out laughing, and didn’t stop for quite some time.

Chapter Text

Hob was distantly aware that he could be making plans of what to do with this miracle of time travel, but right now he couldn’t think of a single good use for it. Oh, he could run off into the future and get a glimpse of what lay ahead, but the whole point of living was to go through it all and experience it one day at a time, not skip ahead to parts that looked interesting. He could run off to the past, too, but there was so much temptation down that road. He tried not to dwell on regrets, but they piled up like layers of sediment forming miles of rock even in a normal lifespan, let alone the eternity he would have, and, well. Along with the regrets always came the hope, just as unkillable as he was and driving the turbine of his immortality for centuries now through all manner of hardships.

The thing was, he couldn’t get Eleanor back really. Not without breaking all the Laws of Time at once, anyway. He’d been there when she died, after the midwife had given up, holding her hand and praying to any god he could think of without any real belief in his desperation. He might be able to save Robyn, but only if he agreed to completely sever contact with his life forever, and there would still be the problem of getting a passable substitute body for Hob’s past self to bury. Then there would remain the fact that they were both mortal and would die in a few decades regardless, though that would be a new problem to find a solution for.

Either way, he couldn’t put himself through that grief deliberately, he would fracture himself into little shards all over again; and he couldn’t remove the loss, change the course of his life so much, and remain the same. He’d grown around the grief like a tree accepting a graft. His family from when he was young was much the same, except there was the problem that they were all Time Lords too, and that opened up the dilemma of whether they could or would want to be that again.

He might be able to get his siblings and parents back? He would have to plan that out carefully. Kate would absolutely not want to come; he’d had a conversation with her long before they’d gone under the Arch, and she would never agree to it.

“What would you do if you had forever?” he asked her, crammed in together in a top bunk and cleaning a leather helmet after a capture-the-flag shooting practice.

“Well that sounds horrible. We already have as close to forever as makes no difference, if we don’t get killed, and all the whole bunch of us ever did in peacetime was sit around feeling superior and getting more and more corrupt and snotty. Ain’t no use to forever if all you’re allowed to do with it’s sit around wearing fancy hats.”

“But we get killed all the time, and we don’t have to, that’s the point! The War-“

“Fuck the War! The War’s the only reason there’s so many of us, and if there was any justice we’d never have needed to exist to fight in it. We only ever got regeneration in the first place to fight a different war, if you listen to the stories, and we shouldn’t have!”

“Keep your fucking voice down, you mindless dolt, d’you want to get re-educated? Commanders can only unhear so much!” There were no commanders in the room, and no bugs that they could find. This meant nothing.

“You wanna know? I got the chance I’d go where the War couldn’t never find me and I’d live a good life for however long I got and not try for more’n that. Quality, not longevity. That’s what I want.”

That was how it had gone with Kate, in the end. She’d had a long happy life, married the miller’s son and had three kids live to adulthood, then a couple of grandkids. It had been what she’d wanted and she wouldn’t thank him for pulling her out of it, he knew that. He’d lost track of the family after she died, he’d been noticeably unaging by then and had to move on, but it didn’t matter if he kept in touch or not, ultimately; just like the children and grandchildren of his friends, he wouldn’t be able to truly have a relationship with them long-term past the barrier of his immortality.

His little brother John had been the first in their family to go, from one of the many unavoidable childhood diseases that had come under the general heading of “fever”, when he was… maybe seven human-age? Somewhere around there. People in these modern times always seemed to think of the Black Death as the be-all and end-all of diseases back in Hob’s day, but honestly he would have committed atrocities for good vaccines, antibiotics, and analgesics at any point before the 1700s. John hadn’t survived, but Hob couldn’t think of a way to get around it because he’d seen him as he was put into the ground with the other little bodies of children that had died in the outbreak, after. Will had survived, thank – well, someone, not God, damn sure not Rassilon, and tiny little Mary hadn’t got it at all, thank that same someone double.

Will had done much as Hob had in getting called up to fight for the local lord as a young man. He’d always hated it where Hob himself had awakened some bloodthirsty ravenous pit inside himself at the fighting, and he’d gone off after to work the land again. Better a serf than a sell-sword or a bandit, he’d said, and the lords were offering much better deals all over since they had so few to do the work these days. He’d died old and happy with a family too, all girls. Maybe Hob could talk him round into continuing on as a Time Lord after his human life was over. If he could explain the “you’re secretly an alien!” thing to a man who was very set on clinging to the known order of the world in the chaos of mediaeval life.

Mary had gone off to be a nun, and get an education in the only way she could, and he honestly had no idea how he’d even manage to visit and talk to her about all of it. She’d been the youngest even before they were human, and had been so curious about everything to do with the world just like him, but would she want to leave her life behind so completely to come with him, or want to live with everyone’s lives sliding past her constantly like raindrops down a window pane to come the long way round? He’d had a hundred years to adjust to the changes that came every century. He’d thought of stopping a few times, after he’d lost people important to him, even though it had never been enough to dissuade him that life was worth living; would she feel the same?

He couldn’t even imagine what his parents would do.

Only one way to find out. He’d have to take a trip back and ask them all for themselves.

There was no joy from any of them in the end. Will had wanted to stay with his family as a human. Mary turned around and told him that she wasn’t going to murder herself in order to be resurrected as a woman of another race entirely, when she could just as well wait for the Resurrection as herself and if it was meant to be so, she would be a blend of the two just as Hob seemed to be. She was adamant that making it happen deliberately was a murder in a way that Hob’s had not been.

Hob went back further, to his parents. His father had stared at him and said “But what if we bring doom down on our heads? We hid for a reason, yes?” and that had been that, for him. He had always been just as stubborn as Hob once he made up his mind about what needed to be done. His mother refused to leave his father and siblings and no argument would move either of them. So, that was that. Hob had tried.

The tiny voice in his heart that had got him through most of the seventeenth century and all its indignities with the hope of tomorrow being better (alright, tomorrow… again, tomorrow for sure this time…) whispered that he could always try again. When he thought of something. It didn’t have to be quick on his part, he had a time machine. What else was time travel good for, but to give the leisure of time to solve problems?

In the meantime, he had centuries to live however he wished. (He wouldn’t assume the immortality had carried over just yet, he might be reckless but he wasn’t quite that hubristic.)

It would be fine. He would let it be fine. He’d always been fine wandering through eternity on his own.

Chapter Text

The next few years were eventful, as Hob very slowly began the equivalent of studying for a PhD in trying to learn all the things he should have learned at the Academy if it weren’t for the War. He wasn’t in any kind of rush about it; he wasn’t likely to go gallivanting off around the universe so that the information would be needed, after all, and he had centuries to learn if he wanted them. The TARDIS had very good library banks, and was an excellent study buddy to boot. Her off-the-wall way of talking lent itself to good mnemonics.

In among all of that, Hob poured his free time into trying to save the White Horse, with a group of people from the local area who either didn’t want to lose their local pub, or just didn’t want some developer’s wart of a brutalist block of flats replacing it. It was a losing battle in the end, but the grinding of bureaucracy slowed the process by several years. His Stranger might be off somewhere having a sulk, but sure as the Schism Hob would be here to claim the sweet feeling of vindication when he showed up again, and so would the White Horse, even if it was a pile of mouldering stone and rotting wood by then. If he had to move lives in the meantime… well… he’d think of something. Go on a long holiday and come back as his nephew, maybe, that had worked back in the 1950s.

Then the ultimate spanner in the works occurred: Hob died and ended up on the radar of the government.

It may be useful to back up the story somewhat.

The White Horse closing had been a major blow to Hob, but by that time honestly the writing had been on the wall for years. The campaign to save it had ground on for more than half a decade and the council had done all they could. It wasn’t going to be knocked down for flats at least, so as long as the place was technically standing Hob would call it a draw. The TARDIS was not one to admit defeat any more than Hob was, however, and one night when he was still feeling sorry for himself and trying to get land or a building to make into a replacement, she had an idea.

“What if it was me?” She said. “Horses are transport, too, and that one never moved. I’ve had enough of moving for a long time yet, but I am a bit sick of being alone. I would like to see people, more than just you.”

So Hob bought a brownfield site close to the White Horse, demolished the condemned house there, and relocated the TARDIS to the plot. She was in charge of the sound system and events like pub quizzes, and tended the bar. Hob did cleaning and admin, and recruited a couple extra bartenders and waiters and a cook.

The entire building that made up the pub was the equivalent of a wall and door frame for the portal into the TARDIS proper. If you went into the employee only area, there was a door which didn’t open and which no one really noticed going from the office to the staff room. It took about two seconds to go between the rooms by going out into the corridor anyway, so why try to hunt down the missing key? Hob, of course, could open this door and step into the control room; the TARDIS didn’t need to. Hob had a bedroom, sitting room/kitchen, and bathroom in there, just off the control room, and by the time the New Inn opened (neither of them wanted to bother much with thinking up appropriate names, and this one worked well enough) he was living there full time. Why rent a place at London prices when you didn’t have to?

From an outsider’s point of view, the White Horse finally closed in the mid-nineties, and two weeks later the New Inn was scooping up the despondent regulars. Everyone in the area knew Rob, he’d been trying to keep the old place open for years, going there nearly every day for just as long; he couldn’t buy the Horse off the developers but he was pretty good at finding obscure planning regulations to obstruct them for a while and he was dedicated enough to start up his own place, take on the staff who wanted a new job now, and none of that weren’t anything to sniff at these days, you know. He was some kind of high-flying lawyer, or a broker up in the City, right, big-money stuff, but he was a local lad who’d done well for himself and wanted to give back, not some tinpot parochial dictator. Rob was alright.

The pub and Hob, in fact, gained a very good reputation locally, over the next few years; and they could probably have gone on quite a bit longer in the new status quo if he hadn’t gone and got shot in some two-bit alien invasion in 1998.

Alien invasions, contrary to popular belief, happen quite frequently. A lot of them seem to happen in the little group of islands off the coast of Europe; the theories why are wide-ranging and could probably grant a politics student a very classified doctoral dissertation, but in short may be boiled down to: the size of the landmass and proximity to a mainland provide ripe opportunity for foothold situations; there is no major seismic or volcanic activity; there is a rift in time and space on the western part of one of the larger islands that can be exploited for vast amounts of energy; there is enough of a population to form a forced labour pool without being too militarised; the dominant language is also a dominant language of the planet in one dialect or another; and, last but not least, the fucking Doctor loves it so much that it attracts Attention.

All of this is of course highly inconvenient when you are an alien simply trying to live your life unmolested by alien invasions or the local government forces trying to prevent said invasions. People tend to get suspicious. Or try to recruit you.

Anyway. Alien invasions. Very inconvenient when the invader of the week decides to shoot a ray gun about the place and manages by sheer fluke to hit you in the head - though Hob found this out later, being dead too quickly to notice at the time. Because UNIT will cordon off and catalogue the scene, and be very surprised when the definitely-dead, no-pulse body comes back with a gasp and turns out to have two pulses. They tend to ask a lot of questions about that.

Hob never really remembered anything overtly unusual happening when he should be dead. Well, beyond the obvious. He would just… be unconscious while he healed until it was time to get up again, if he was lucky, and if he was less lucky the damage would be slight enough that he wouldn’t pass out at all. He just had to be aware while doing a speed run on healing that should take a mere mortal days or weeks of life-support, in a few agonising and (towards the end) very itchy hours.

It turned out that, beyond the vague sense of time trickling past in the back of his head and the tugging feeling of gravity and velocity of the universe around him and under his feet, the best part of being a Time Lord was that the whole regenerative process was considerably faster, such that even a massive head trauma that probably fried his brain like an egg only took a couple of hours to get through. This woke him up with a gasp right in the middle of a UNIT forensic investigation, which involved a surprising number of guns being pointed at the supposedly dead man.

Alright, so this was extremely inconvenient in this specific case. It didn’t make the speed of his recovery any less impressive. Hob was very appreciative that he wasn’t on an autopsy table yet, for example.

Also the fact that he was still immortal flooded him with too much relief to mind the guns. Much. He’d noticed the vague feeling of Time constantly pressing down against him like it had whenever he’d come across a fixed point, but he hadn’t been certain. A distant part of his mind noted the correction that he in fact had forever to learn all the blasted Academy curriculum, if he wanted it. That could go to the back burner, then, because everything about Gallifrey gave him the heebie-jeebies now for reasons he would probably need a lot of therapy or at least a lot of talking through to totally unravel. He could just ignore the Time Lord stuff for a while in favour of being the regular-guy immortal he’d been for centuries now. Yeah. What could go wrong?

The worst part of being a Time Lord on Earth, especially when you’re based in Britain and doubly so when you’re living near London, is all the X-files types. What they knew or suspected varied depending on the precise time period in question. Hob had always kept a vague weather eye on the sort of magic practitioners who might like to dissect him for his immortality after Lady Constantine, and had added the local alien-spotter agencies to the list since he found out he was one. When he got his memories back, UNIT was still a power and still had a strong institutional memory of the Doctor, even if people who’d known the Doctor personally were starting to be promoted elsewhere or age out of active duty. Worse, they remembered the Master as well. Fuck the Master. And fuck the Doctor, too, for being an alien-invasion magnet. Also, Torchwood could take its Victorian acquisitiveness and shove it somewhere very painful. He’d heard that was partly the Doctor’s fault, too, so fuck the Doctor again. Fortunately, Torchwood were being kept at a distant remove from anything potentially Doctor-related by UNIT calling the organisational equivalent of dibs. Unfortunately, this meant Hob would now have to regularly deal with fucking UNIT. He had tried to keep himself out of sight, and he’d managed for a good few years thanks very much, but there were certain systems keeping an eye out for things like a double pulse. And people who woke up after they died. At least Hob knew that the immortality stuck? Torchwood had probably taken far too much interest in that. Apparently they had an immortal working for them in Cardiff, only semi-willingly, who they were making sure Hob didn’t meet. Fuck Torchwood. Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, meanwhile, was cursed with a very long name but blessed with a lot of people skills. He could stay.

Hob being introduced to the shadowy world of governmental and international defence forces against aliens had occurred due to an unlucky fluke, but it could have gone a lot worse. After several decades of worrying that the government might find out his immortality and try to use him to their advantage, and several centuries of getting over a reflexive fear of witch-hunts which were probably not going to happen in this new age of science (and gaining a fear of mad scientists to replace it), they’d found him not because he was immortal, but because he was a Time Lord. At least here was proof that hiding as another species had been a good idea. It was not a very public death, and no one he knew found out about it as far as he knew; he went to a lot of effort later to make sure of this. He didn’t want to have to move on again so soon. Unfortunately, even though the neighbours didn’t know about it, the multiple international organisations which were looking out for Time Lords would be worse than a mob if he crossed them and stuck around for the consequences. Joy.

Hob sighed. The interviewer on the other side of the cheap wooden table was being obstinate and it was wearing on his patience. He refused to remember her actual name, because she kept insisting he was using an alias. It might be petty, but he was probably allowed a little bit of pettiness now and then by now.

“Look, Agent Scully, I am not here to hurt Earth. I’ve lived here for centuries and it’s my home, and I frankly wouldn’t want to be in charge of this madhouse if you put a gun to my head. Nor do I have any interest in or expertise necessary to be a consultant for you in keeping off any idiots who do want to conquer the place. I don’t know how much more clearly to say it, and I’d really like to go home now, I have work in the morning.”

She gave him a very unimpressed look. He wasn’t sure if it was because she couldn't care less about his job when put against the possibility he might be a threat to the planet – which he could sympathise with, he supposed, if he had felt like it – or that he was comparing her to a fictional character. “I think you might have trouble going back to work after having turned up dead, Mr Gadling… are you sure you don’t have another name? All the Time Lords we’ve ever encountered have been a definite-article sort of deal.”

“Oh for fuck’s - yes that’s my name! It’s been my name for six centuries and change now. Just because I’m technically a renegade doesn’t mean I’m needing to use a byname, and just so you know, if you’d asked that knowing anything about our society I’d be well within my rights to deck you for suggesting I was Nameless. That sort of thing only happens to people who’ve been completely ostracised by polite society, y’know.”

That flustered her, in that polite-British way that tried to draw attention away from both the emotion and its cause. “We are only trying to find out as much as we can about you, Mr Gadling- ”

“Yes, yes, you need to be certain considering your previous experiences, I know. But I have had a very stressful day, and I woke up after dying from some alien I didn’t recognise shooting me with a sodding ray gun, with a bunch of beret-ed twits standing around me. I’m sure you can see why I might not be that cooperative right now, hmm?” He didn’t want to be cooperative. He wanted to take that tape recorder on the desk she was documenting his answers with and do something painful, but that wouldn’t help anything and would in fact only confirm their worst fears about him, so he could project being a friendly and harmless guy who just happened to be an alien until he got to leave. He could.

The interviewer had the grace to look embarrassed and redoubled her efforts to be polite.

“Well you see, Mr Gadling, sir, the only examples we have of your species were either trying to conquer our planet or working as a consultant for us to prevent any number of invasions. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to consider-?”

“No, I will not help you with the alien invasion of the week, what do you think I am, a mercenary? Because I gave that up as a mug’s game centuries ago. I have no interest in saving the world when there’s a bunch of people who can do it better and have more experience, and I have enough PTSD already without top-ups, thank you.”

“But you’re a Time Lord, and you have a functional TARDIS!” Did she think the whole species was made of superheroes and supervillains or something? Good grief.

“I’m barely a Time Lord. Didn’t exactly take the usual final exam. Still catching up on a bunch of things I should have been taught but wasn’t, because they were putting everything they could into what would help us survive total war. And as for my TARDIS, she was active for a good portion of that and then helped run a time lock on the damn thing while pulling evacuation duty. She has earned, if not a full retirement, then at least a long holiday. A sabbatical, maybe. Anyway. The answer is no, with a side of leave us the fuck alone.”

Her face fell. “Well, you must admit it was worth asking, though I do understand why you would refuse sir. It does make it more difficult to trust your intentions if you’re not working with us…”

“So that you can investigate me as you like and keep an eye on me, you mean? Come on, you were all but accusing me of trying to take over the world just now, I can’t have changed your mind that quickly. There’s always a catch to these things. I don’t mind being checked up on now and then, just stay out of my life between times and I’ll be fine. My place is very easy to find, open to the public and everything, they can come along for a pint sometime.”

There wasn’t much they could do to justify keeping him for further questioning after that, and they did seem like the type of organisation to at least want to delude themselves into believing they were the “good guys” – Hob was going to suspend judgement on that front until he had some actual evidence one way or the other – so they let him go. There were an unsurprisingly large number of people visiting the New Inn over the next few months who were not quite as good as they thought they were at stakeouts, though. Hob and the TARDIS tolerated them with vague amusement at the attempts. And then there was the Brigadier, who didn’t bother with stakeouts but came and introduced himself to Hob directly about a fortnight after the disastrous interview. They could both respect the Brigadier.

He was actually retired from the world-saving business as well as the military, technically, but both of those turned out to be jobs that liked to call in people with previous experience when the shit hit the fan. Hob was very glad he’d stayed away from both for so long himself, because the way the Brigadier talked it was starting to sound like a real achievement.

Chapter Text

Nothing much happened that Hob needed to care about for the rest of the nineties. The head of Torchwood Three over in Cardiff took out his entire team over the millennium, and eventually the only remaining member, Captain Jack Harkness, convinced the bosses up in London to take it on. Hob kept a vague eye on him but didn’t try to introduce himself; it could get complicated with Torchwood involved, even if the man was another immortal. Best to wait.

There were alien invasions that actually got acknowledged as such in 2005. Hob supposed even a humanity which was used to UFOs turning out to be hoaxes and to no answers to their SETI signals couldn’t ignore a great fuckoff ship hovering over London and a third of the world sleepwalking to the highest ledges they could find. Hob couldn’t find out what was going on with that one except that the Doctor was involved somehow and the alien species involved sounded like a character from The Tempest. Why Shaxberd had to show up here Hob wasn’t quite sure, but he eventually decided it must be a coincidence rather than a reason to revive a reluctantly-abandoned grudge. He’d just stoke the recent mild grudge against the Doctor instead.

2008 was a shit year.

Alright, the second go-around was more or less ordinary, since the majority of the terrible events got erased, but the first attempt unequivocally stank to high heaven. The trouble started with the assassination of the US President, immediately escalated to the death of ten percent of the world population, and rounded off with labour camps to build an armada for the conquest of the rest of the universe. That wasn’t even touching the paradox machine, which gave Hob and the TARDIS both a migraine for the entire time it was active and completely destroyed any chance they might have had of moving without severe damage and/or sending up a metaphorical flare announcing they were there which would have guaranteed they would be caught.

And, of course, a childhood terror was real and flying around killing people, and turned out to be humans from the death of the universe converted into abominations to survive. Hob was used to childhood terrors, they had usually been real and actively trying to kill him, but the latter part was horrifying in many and varied ways and the fact they seemed so childlike about it all was maybe the worst part when you got right down to it.

Hob had hunkered down in the perception-cloaked Inn with his staff and regulars, and as many of the local population as he could manage. There were enough hydroponics in the TARDIS to outlast a siege, and room for everyone to sleep as well, though he never quite felt like he was doing enough no matter how many people he took in or how many runs they did out into the London streets to support the Resistance movement. He heard of Martha Jones, travelling the world to get everyone focused on one telepathic push to defeat the Master, but he never met her.

At one point, some Toclafane had tried to enter the Inn. Hob had not bothered to move from his perch on top of a bar stool, but given them one warning, which they had laughingly ignored; then the TARDIS had increased the gravity in the room so they fell to the floor, shot them with a laser hidden in the CCTV over the bar, and electrocuted the floor for good measure. That was the point when Hob had got a screwdriver and opened the little flying devils up. He sort of regretted that, but it had been very useful information for the resistance later, so he couldn’t be quite so definite in his feelings. These things always got complicated if you let them.

When the paradox machine broke and the world rewound itself, it was both an enormous relief and a devastating loss, with all the people who didn’t remember him anymore even though to him they had lived and bonded together over a year of trauma. He and the TARDIS talked it through and supported each other, but one of these lifetimes he really would have to research psychology and see if he could cobble together some better coping mechanisms than his current strategy of making it all up as he went along.

He wondered what his Stranger had been doing that year; but then, he wondered that most years.

(As it happened, Dream had been abandoned for most of the year, after the guards stopped coming with no explanation that he could hear. They had no notice-me-not protection, after all, and besides the job would have ended soon after the Toclafane came in any case, because Paul and Alex had been out in London together that day and never made it home. Dream being in the circle, he didn’t even know what specifically was wrong with the world, though he realised Time was out of whack when the year repeated. It was a very lonely first year, he was very relieved when the guards came back. And immediately disgusted with himself for his relief.)

The Inn became a regular drinking spot for ex-companions of the Doctor as well as UNIT, after that second 2008. Jack Harkness was… interesting in a variety of ways, and introduced his team to Hob; Sarah-Jane was very nosy but good at realising where actual lines were; Martha was delightful company and whip-smart, and convinced Hob to go to university to read history (not medicine, screw that).

The process of reinvention and the requisite forging of official documents was much easier with the knowledge and help of an organisation that regularly had to deal with resettling spatial and temporal aliens, no matter how they might grumble at doing so for people with established long-term residency on the planet and no real links to them (the quiet erasure of all UNIT members’ bar tabs said otherwise). So in short order, armed with a new legal identity, officially the first cousin once removed of the previous identity who had gone on a round the world trip and would never be heard from by his neighbours beyond occasional postcards again, Hob turned over the running of the New Inn to herself and entered academia.

It took him ten years to get to PhD level and get himself established as a professor of Mediaeval History and Literature, and he reckoned he would be able to keep it going for another twenty without suspicion. He came and wrote essays with a pint as a student, and later as a professor he often marked students’ papers and pop quizzes at the Inn, and covered weekend bartending shifts on occasion throughout, just to keep up with the place and because he wanted to. Not in the hopes that he would be more likely to get his overdue centennial meeting, no, absolutely not. In this way, he whiled away the years refusing to look straight at the reason he had stayed so close to the site of the old White Horse for so long. His Stranger wasn’t the only one who could be in wilful denial about his feelings.

It was the early 2010s when Hob noticed the first strange customer. Well, no, that wasn’t quite true, they had a lot of strange customers, from mundane humans, to magic users, to UNIT folks and the occasional alien. It was just that this particular customer was none of those things, and pulled at his mind in a way that reminded him of his Stranger. A lady who looked like she’d walked off a runway her clothes were so bleeding-edge, but if someone had asked him afterwards what they looked like he wouldn’t have been able to say. Maybe they’d changed every time he looked at them? She had a little pendant that looked like a stereotypical witch’s broomstick, and maybe an eyepatch?

He did know she’d been looking for someone, because she’d said so, but when questioned she had just shrugged and told him that if he were here she’d have found him already, but since he wasn’t about could she have a cocktail with Perrier in it, please, oh it didn’t matter what cocktail, surprise her, and by the way his clothes were nearly half a decade out of date, such a shame on such a handsome man, but at least he knew what to do with his colour palette to complement his skin tone.

She put a lot in the tip jar, though, so he put up with the criticism with a grin and nodded along without any intention to go and get new clothes as she recommended. And the cocktail she had was popular for a couple months afterward, with all sorts of customers. Even the ones who wouldn’t necessarily have drunk cocktails usually but “we’re feeling adventurous, and we heard that one’s in style”. So none of the staff were likely to forget her any time soon.

She never turned up again. There were several more like her in the following years, though. The TARDIS grew very fond of the kindly older gent with the bowler hat who was a regular for a few months with the book club that came in every other Tuesday night, and was very sad when Gilbert - as was, apparently, his name - moved to America on some strange sort of writerly pilgrimage or effort to “find himself”. Hob was sad too, though he privately thought that if the man didn’t know himself by now it was a waste of middle age wisdom. He had always ordered some sort of rum cocktail, and talked with Hob a lot about folk music, especially sea shanties.

Neither Hob nor the TARDIS were particularly surprised, after, that these strange people with an air of the Stranger about them turned out to be dreams (and nightmares) looking for their Lord Morpheus. It only made sense that they would try to find him in the place where Hob was, considering that Hob was the only human he had regular contact with; it was just a shame for everyone that it didn’t work.

In late 2020, the universe was rocked by a massive displacement of power as something slipped back into the world, like an earthquake in the fabric of reality. The TARDIS and Hob both noticed - how could they not, when it was so obvious? - but the humans did not, unless they had special instruments to measure particular aspects of reality. There were various aftershocks; the victims of encephalitis lethargica who were still alive woke up, several authors were suddenly freed from writer’s block, the character of people’s dreams became stranger than usual for a few nights, and the time rift in Cardiff spat out a larger than usual group of weevils and in return drew in a young man to a world halfway across the galaxy and millennia in the future, where he settled down to a simple sort of life which suited him down to the ground and made a family which eventually gave rise, in his great grandchild, to the foremost diplomat in a team that stopped a major galactic war before it could begin, saving billions of lives and creating an interstellar trade bloc which remained influential for several centuries.

But those things, though important in themselves, were relatively tangential to the story currently being told. The part that mattered was that Dream of the Endless, after more than a century, was free.

Chapter Text

Dream stood and inspected the New Inn from across the green. It was a very straightforward sort of name, and he wondered if it was a deliberate flag for him or simply a lack of imagination on Hob’s part - because there was no doubt that, with a “new” inn this obviously well-established, the red graffitied directions were more than a way to let potential customers know of an alternative to the long-shuttered White Horse. The place felt… strange, almost detached from time, very much present but also halfway into the Dreaming with the layers of hopes and possibilities slathered across every inch of the brickwork and roof slates.

He strode across the tall grass like he’d walked into the sea of dreams when he came out to the Waking in search of his sand, recently, and in search of serenity and his sister, just today. He stepped through the door into a barroom flooded with light from tall windows and reflected from ornately-patterned cream wallpaper, wooden floor, a chalkboard with social media details and a bar made of warm-toned wood across the room from the door. It could not have been more different from the first time he entered the White Horse. A few people were sitting here and there chatting and drinking; he looked around in the hope that Hob might be here at the minute. If not, he would have to come back another time, or else search his …friend, alright… out himself. Perhaps he could ask the pub staff?

In a booth in the far corner of the room sat a man. It was not Hob. It looked like him, if you were human, but to every one of Dream’s myriad senses he seemed like a funhouse-mirror reflection, or a well known song in the wrong key. What had happened to Hob Gadling? What had this being, or worse, some enemy without this being’s knowledge, done to him?

Dream turned around in a fury and left the New Inn, moving to the Dreaming as soon as he was out of sight.

Hob glanced up from his marking, feeling a presence flare for a second near the door. He could have sworn he saw someone in black walking away, but he deluded himself into seeing his Stranger walk away again sometimes. Most often in his worst dreams and tamest nightmares. He mentally shrugged and went back to grading essays. His Stranger would turn up one of these days, there was no use straining to bring it closer than He wanted to come.

Hob sits in the Inn, marking, as he often does. The words are nonsense that shift and change, but his sleeping mind does not notice. Vague impressions of patrons talk and laugh around him. Outside, far off, a mutter of thunder rolls across the sky and rain begins to patter on the windows, but the TARDIS enfolds him in warmth and safety with her mind and the facade that is the building of the New Inn. Even when it had come into existence on this plot of land, no one had thought to notice the fact that it wasn’t there the day before, and by now it is simply a fixture of the area and may as well have always been here.

The rain, all shadows, begins to seep through the ceiling and drip down the walls. The TARDIS stirs around him uneasily. The door opens and a presence brushes against his mind like the vastness and emptiness of the void of space, with points of thought twinkling out in the blackness like stars. His Stranger steps in from the storm, looking just as angry as the last time Hob saw him, his eyes shining in the pitch black of the pub. When did the lights go out? Where have all the people gone? The TARDIS is clamouring in fear at the back of his head.

The thing which might be his Stranger stands looming over Hob. “Who are you and what have you done to Hob Gadling?” comes rumbling out like the first drumroll of an avalanche in the high mountains, right when you realise the snow is moving towards you too fast to get out of the way and all you can do is duck behind whatever cover you can find and pray.

Hob smiles uncertainly. “I swear, Stranger, I’m just as much Hob Gadling as I was when we met in 1389. I’ve changed a bit, but I am still me.”

This does not seem to mollify the Stranger, and shadows begin to flood the room. The thunder sounds right outside, now, rattling the roof like a drum. The pressure of the void, paradoxically, presses down on Hob’s mind, pinning him like a bug under a microscope. The TARDIS is truly panicking now at the unfamiliar mind.

Hob would like to answer, really he would. But at that moment the TARDIS forces him to wake up.

Hob is sitting in the White Horse waiting for his Stranger. The jukebox is playing some song from 1989, he is wearing the outfit from 17’, there is welcoming spread of food rather like that in 15’. Lushing Lou is laughing and singing along to the song in corner with his mates from 13’ whose names not sure he remembers right anymore.

The candles all jump and flare, settling with the brightness and steadiness of LEDs. Hob’s Stranger steps through the door, with stars shining in his eyes and the lining of his coat, a presence against mind like the void of space. He strides over to Hob-
-he takes a step, and is where he wants to be instantly-
-he was always there, and his presence is wrapped around Hob wherever his mind’s eye looks-
-the TARDIS shrieks at him.

“I would apologise, for I have heard it is rude to keep a friend waiting, but I have not yet been assured of your identity.” rumbles the Stranger. Hob desperately shushes both his own internal chant of what the fuck what the fuck at his terrifying presence and the TARDIS gibbering in his mind, and tries to focus on the situation. A blaze of clarity comes through. He’s dreaming now, and he was dreaming before too.

“I am Hob Gadling, I promise. I discovered a pretty life altering thing since last time I saw you, though. Turns out I’m not actually human, sorry.” He tries to smile and manages a grimace, just like last time when he was talking about how people are nearly always better than you think they are; some part of him hopes distantly that that isn’t an omen of how this will end.

His Stranger’s eyes flare and the hem of his coat catches fire, but it doesn’t burn up. His ink-black hair seems to be growing wilder and longer, and his shadow stretches out towards Hob like the sun is setting rapidly, though it’s night and they are indoors to boot. His presence is bearing down so hard Hob is beginning to be afraid his mind might crack.

“What are you then, Hob, and how did you seem human when we met? It is not easy to trick one such as I. What was your purpose in doing so?”

“I didn’t know myself! I wasn’t trying to trick you. Honest! I was running from a war that was all over reality at that point, my whole family was, the only way we could escape was hiding so much we weren’t even the same species any more. I’m sure that tells you something of the scale.” There’s a bell tolling deeply somewhere. Hob manages to gasp out “The timeline got overwritten! That was how it was fought, how it ended!”

His Stranger looks like he might cry, stars glistening with the unshed tears like tiny diamond-dust in the void of his eyes. He reaches out and clamps a hand around Hob’s wrist, manicured nails digging in until Hob winces, then releasing with a guilty look. “If I find that you have lied to me – if you are not Hob and you have harmed him, or allowed him to come to harm for your own purposes –”

Hob wakes up. He’s on a barren wasteland that used to be full of red grass, with the domed city behind him. He’s wearing a leather uniform which is mostly the light blue that signifies his chapter along with the white of childhood, like he did as a senior cadet. Spread out at hundreds of metres’ distance to his right and left are other cadets. Somewhere out in the distance a Cloister Bell is tolling and an impossible rainbow of light-ribbons is lashing out across the plain like the tentacles of an octopus having a tantrum. Wherever they ground themselves, reality warps. A tree burns black as though lightning-struck, a patch of grass revitalises to new shoots.
“What is going on?” comes the Stranger’s voice from behind him.

“Damaged TARDIS causing time-warping bullshit. If you can sense time dilation, great, if not get a bunch of pebbles or something to throw before you step anywhere so you can measure the speed differential.” Hob’s mostly trying to keep focused on the patterns himself while keeping an ear out for the commander’s orders. “The pilot managed to get rid of the attackers but they got a couple lucky shots in that damaged the capsule in ways he couldn’t fix, so he set down as far from people as possible and sent out a general distress signal. If we manage to get this sorted we get to be Time Lords, not how it usually goes but needs must in war. If we don’t we’re dead anyway, so.”

“This is a memory.” says his Stranger. Hob suddenly realises this is a dream, and one he’s had before.

“Huh. Guess so. Want to go through with it anyway?”

“If you wish.” His Stranger sounds as intrigued as he ever does.

“What the hell, why not.” It would surely cut down on a few explanations.

The signal goes up to start out in formation across the blasted plain. Hob starts across it in a way that reminds him, now, of clearing a minefield.

One of the team is hit, and Hob sees half of her wither to aged decrepitude while the other half is still trying to scream. He hears a hissing intake of breath from his Stranger. Hob keeps walking.

“Exhibit A on the dangers when time gets warped. Try not to look. The quicker we sort this the sooner the medics can come in. She’ll regenerate in a minute.” Indeed, the building of energy for a regeneration is already starting, and hopefully she’ll be able to hold it off long enough the time warping won’t interfere. He thinks she had back when this actually happened, but he isn’t sure. It has been several eventful centuries since then.

Hob jigs sideways to avoid an imminent impact, and sees his Stranger. In the way of dreams, he completely accepts what he sees as logical, and just as well, because if he’d seen this while awake he’d have been distracted and probably killed.

His Stranger is flickering like an optical illusion between the familiar, if otherworldly, goth extraordinaire he’s used to, and a woman with skin a few shades lighter than the night sky, in the way he is usually barely darker than bleached bone, and a mass of hair braided through with stars like a jewelled crown. Not star-shaped anything, just little points of light which are stars, like the glow in her eyes. Her dress sense is just as black and star-lined as her more familiar form, but it spills out over her shoulders and streams out behind her in a floating cloak cut out of the night sky. She is just as regal as he always is. Wait, what pronouns should Hob be using here? Does it matter to his Stranger, whatever sublime force of nature he is?

The thing about Gallifreyan colours is that they were one of the last things to be named when they stopped using only telepathy to communicate and began using spoken words, and so everything about it is wrapped up in symbolism to an absurd degree. Colours were almost never directly named, but nicknamed for the things they stood for, and so red could be “grass-coloured” or “scout camouflage-coloured” or even “open land freedom-coloured”. Hob has always thought of black and red as his Stranger’s colours, such that in his own mind and his own tongue he would often use “Stranger-coloured” for black and red together.

The Stranger, as she is now, is in black, yes, as black as the void of space and with the light-points of distant stars to match, the black of mysteries and deep secrets that historians drew out of the depths of Time; but there was no red anywhere. Instead the accents are the deep, dark blues and purples of poets and storytellers, artists and composers.

She is awe-inspiringly beautiful, just like always.

The group has reached the open door of the TARDIS. Not counting the Stranger, there’s four of them, and they slot into their places like cogs in a well-oiled machine: one to the control column, two to the panel covering the wires and other crucial mechanical guts of the steering column, and Hob to sit and sing with the TARDIS, to calm her and let the others know what she’s feeling and how she’s reacting to what they do. It’s a lot like being the anaesthesiologist for a surgical team.

“Right, everyone ready?” he asks, brusquely, and getting three affirmatives, he reaches out mentally to the memory of the TARDIS. In doing so, he reaches out to his actual TARDIS in the present. The tolling bell quiets, as he calms her, and the team starts working. It’s both as crisp and tense as it was in reality, and remote abstraction compacted into a few seconds all at once; he’s beginning to wake up. He focuses instead on the Escherian being next to him.

“Not that I’m not glad you’re here, but why are you here? Seems to me you’d get a lot more out of the effort if I was awake and coherent, if you wanted to see me again after all this time.”

His Stranger almost looks embarrassed, if that were an emotion one with such a high opinion of themselves would be willing to show.
“I was unable to attend our appointment through circumstances outside my control. I did attempt to come and see you recently, but you were not at all as you had always been before. I wanted to discover more here, where my power is greater and you would not be able to dissemble. I am convinced now that you are yourself, and I seem to have jumped to conclusions in a way that was unbecoming towards a friend. Would you be willing to disregard my distrust and meet at the New Inn?”

Hob sits and stares at that, for a moment, because what. Then he slowly smiles. “You’re late, so drinks are on you. My friend.”

His Friend stares for a moment, then blinks slowly. “Very well, Hob Gadling. Shall I see you tomorrow?”

What else can he say? “You’re on.”

His Friend looks smug. “Tomorrow, then. For now, this dream is over.”

Hob woke up in his own bed. Damn it, he should have asked for his name! Ah well, he’ll just have to ask if (when, something deep in his bones says it’s when) his Friend actually shows up.

Chapter Text

When Dream returned to the New Inn around mid-morning the next day (after being loudly disapproved at by Matthew and silently by Lucienne for his reaction), Hob was nowhere to be seen. There was, however, a young woman tending the bar, who seemed to blend into the background of the room like she was part of it and whose mind did not react when he reached out to it - she had good shielding, and he did not press on it too hard. He had made that mistake only last night with Hob, and it had nearly gone very ill. She gave him a very disapproving look, and said, in tones of deep disdain, “Well, look who the cat dragged in. I have a splitting headache from you, mister kitty cat, that little clawing-the-furniture session doesn’t get a repeat. My little fishy wants to give you another chance, void knows why, so you get to go in there, but I will scruff you and set you back outside if you hurt him. Don’t care if you are older than the universe, I ran out of fucks to give about when the stars went mad and I was running on fumes before then.”

Dream inclined his head. “I will not harm Hob Gadling.” This was the easiest agreement he had ever made in his life. “And you are…?”

“Type 105 TARDIS. Technically you’re standing in me right now. Time-and-space craft which uses stabilised black holes to function.” She gave him a Look that deserved the capital letter. “I know where a lot of black holes are.”

Dream was unsure if this threat held the weight it did intentionally, or if she often implied that she would leave those she disapproved of in black holes, but he did not feel particularly inclined to find out. Whatever she saw on his face seemed to satisfy her, at any rate, because she nodded in business-like fashion to a pair of doors leading further into the building.

“You’re wanting the one on the left and then the staff room. Pay attention in there, right?” He inspected the doors curiously; the one on the left was marked staff only, and the one on the right bore signs that said toilets and stairs (bedrooms). The indicated door turned out to hold a small corridor with three further doors leading off it. The one on the right of the corridor was, by the skirting boards intruding through the plaster, an under-stairs space, with cleaning written on the door; the nearest one on the left had a frosted glass upper panel, and had office written on it, and the last was ajar and turned out to be a staff room with a row of coat hooks on the back of the door, a small bank of lockers on the opposite wall, and a kitchen area with sink and cupboard, a counter holding a kettle with a fridge nestled underneath and a shelf above it holding tins reading “coffee” “tea” and “biscuits”, and a table and squishy seat very like the ones in the pub area. A window above the sink held a bottle of dish soap, one of hand soap, and a dish sponge on its wide sill, all in a little wooden tray with a squirrel carved at one end. There was a matching wooden mug tree on the counter with a carved owl “perched” at the top. The floor was a horrible linoleum which Dream could only hope had been bought for its cheapness considering the garish, chaotic pattern, and there was a clock on the wall that looked like it had a galaxy painted onto it. Dream pulled himself up mentally; this was probably too much attention to pay to detail and he was just trying to avoid interacting with the room’s occupants at this point. Such childish avoidance was beneath him.

Hob was sitting at the table with a mug of tea and a biscuit, chatting with a man who was standing at the sink washing out his own.

They had both looked up as Dream appeared at the door, and now the other man - he pulled up his life story automatically: Zdenek Svoboda, who was just about to start his shift tending the bar and wrote poetry secretly in three languages because he didn’t think they were good enough to show anyone yet - smiled and nodded at Dream as he set the mug to dry on the draining board, got his coat and left.

Hob grinned up at Dream as widely as he ever had, with only the barest hint of nervousness in his eyes. “My friend! Come and sit down. Can I get you a drink? Biscuit? No? Ah well. I’ll just have to enjoy them enough for both of us, eh? We should stay in here for a bit though. Not everyone knows about what this place is, if you get my drift. I have learned some caution in my time.”

“It seems I owe you an apology, Hob Gadling, that I do not recognise my friends when I see them. It seems you have been through much change since last we saw each other - how have you been keeping?”

Hob stiffened like he was suppressing a flinch. “Well, that’s quite a complicated story, and I’m not surprised you’re confused. Um. Just let me think for a minute how to explain? I tried to rehearse it a few times over the years but it’s never come right, so, be patient? Thanks.” Dream inclined his head and didn’t interrupt.

They sat and looked at each other in slightly awkward silence for a few moments.

“So. I spent the last six centuries or so really, truly thinking I was human - since before I met you. I haven’t lied to you, unless you consider me to have been lying to myself at the same time. Um. In the early nineties the mechanism that was keeping me human broke down, and honestly it was only ever designed to last a century at the outside so I can’t fathom what kept me all that while unless- well, I suppose the gift you gave me does keep me the same age and so on as I was when I met you. Do you have anything to do with Time?”

“As little as possible. He is very reluctant to get involved or exchange favours.”

“What? No, no, not important right now, I can ask about the inner workings of the universe later. Always time later to have my conception of reality turned upside down. I’ll take that as probably due to the immortality and such for now. Anyway, turns out I was from a planet called Gallifrey- don’t suppose you know it at all?” Hob really should stop doing the thing with his ear, it was such a bad tell.

“I know all worlds. However, that one is very firmly in a state of non-existence at present, I believe. How did you get out of the War?”

Ah, so he knew about the war. That would cut down on explanations a bit. Not a surprise given he was obviously some kind of higher being, he would have felt at least some of the effects.

“Deserted, technically. World’s most unofficial evacuation if you want to be a bit more squirrelly about it. The unit I was part of ran and hid when the planet got overrun, cause at that point there wasn’t any saving Gallifrey and word got out that the Lord President was going to do something desperate, and it could well destroy everything on the planet or worse everything but Gallifrey, and. We never got any kind of word that it was safe to stop hiding as humans so we just… didn’t. We didn’t know we’d ever been anything else, you know? And then. Everyone else died still human, and I didn’t die, and these things break down eventually, so, here I am.” He made a little ta-da motion with his hand. “Not the most heroic story, but then I’ve never been a hero type, have I?” He leaned forward across the table, eyes bright. “What about you, because you are very much not in the usual run of folks even for powerful beings, you feel nearly like part of the universe. I know I haven’t asked you who you are for a long while, but if we’re going to be friends I think I really ought to know at least the rough shape of it. Please don’t get mad, I just have to try. If you don’t want to tell me, just say.” And don’t leave again came the unspoken plea in every line of him. What had Dream done?

“I have many names, as I have many aspects depending on the world and culture of the people I encounter. But my truest name is Dream, in English. It is my function and so it is my name. Dream of the Endless. My siblings are likewise functions of reality- Destiny and Death, Desire and Despair, Delirium. There was another, but he has left us. We are all the Endless.” He found himself wanting to give information to make up for his previous reticence. “I am made up of the collective unconscious of all beings that dream, and must rule and control all the dreams and nightmares to ensure that they do not overwhelm the dreamers; I am the King of Dreams and of Nightmares, and Prince of Stories.”

“Ah, is the aspects thing why you- no, never mind. Dream of the Endless.” He rolled the words around his mouth like it was the finest thing he had ever tasted, and smiled like the sun. “My friend Dream. Nice to meet you properly, so to say. How have you been?” Dream did not want to pursue that line of conversation, actually, although he knew that he would at some point have to give a reason why he had not come to their appointment in 1989. He seized gratefully on the distraction presented to him.

“No, by all means, ask your questions. It has occurred to me that I have been far too miserly with the information I have shared with you, given that you have shared so much of yourself with me. These things are supposed to be reciprocated in friendships, are they not?” Hob’s eyes widened slightly at that.

“Well, ah, I was going to ask if the aspects is why my vision keeps flipping between two of you. I mean, there very definitely is only you there, but you’re very different whenever I blink and it’s a bit nauseating honestly. Uh, should I be changing pronouns for you? Only, one of you looks female to me.”

Dream went very still. “This may be due to different aspects coming to your attention, yes. On Gallifrey I and my siblings were often considered to be female, in much the same way that human cultures often consider men to be more automatically powerful than not. I do tend towards male aspects on Earth, for example the ancient Romans thought of me as Morpheus, and that is a name I have kept use of, but there is no reason any of us would be restricted to one particular way of being for anything. Usually others only see one aspect at a time. Is it bothering you?”

“No, no, I’ll get used to it. Just takes a bit of concentration not to slip between them, is all.”

The door opened and the human-looking TARDIS slipped in with a tray carrying two glasses and several bottles of- did that beer have a ghost hare on it? Humanity came up with some very strange ideas for labelling. She put the tray on the table and sat next to Hob, shooting Dream an absolutely filthy look as she did so.

“Have you finished yet?”

“No.” If she wished to provoke him by being discourteous, he could employ a very good diplomatic mask after all these millennia. She would get no reaction for her impudence.

“Sweetheart, can you please sort something for me? Tell me what you see when you look at my friend here.”

“Stars. Like a nebula, all bluey-black and twinkly. Trying to look kinda humanly shaped, I guess, since none of the humans are panicking and you’re seeing people, but it’s not people love, you need to get away before you burn up or the pressure difference pops your head. We don’t want ice-cream brains Hob, it nearly did that when you were dreaming before. Fucking about with Menti Celesti never goes well.” She didn’t stop glaring at Dream all through this little speech.

“Wait, Menti Celesti? They have a name? A Gallifreyan one?”

“We are universal entities intrinsic to all life in existence, Hob, we have a name in almost every culture you could think of. Your own seemed to be convinced we arose from the imagination and belief of a mass of individuals, but this condition is more accurately applied to gods. The Endless do not need belief. We simply are, as long as life exists so do we. Belief and expectations of the beings around us do shape how we are perceived, however, which may be where the misconception arises.”

Hob squints, suspicious. “You’re not giving me an awful lot of reason to distinguish between types of higher power, here. Do you have any idea how much people used to blur the lines between fae, gods, and ghosts? And that’s just one example. At a certain level of phenomenal cosmic power the difference doesn’t matter much outside academic debate, you know.”

Dream smirks, again. It’s unfair how beautiful he looks when he does that, and doubly unfair that this apparently holds true whatever form Hob sees. “You seem very keen on considering me a god. I am sure this is flattering to your mind, but gods are small and fleeting.”

“Ah, best not offend you by comparing you to such lowly beings as gods, then, Your Majesty. Your Endlessness? Tell me when I hit the right title. Your Universal Resplendency-”

“Please stop.”

The TARDIS interrupted, looking like she wanted to strangle Dream, or perhaps both of them, with her bare hands. “It doesn’t matter what he is, fishy. What’s important is that he scratched you all up inside last time and then left you flopping around outside your pond for ages until you’ve had to learn to breathe like a lung fish in the mud and all that time you were looking over your shoulder for the mob to come and drown you again. And then he came back and tried to open your airlock to the void or maybe crush your whole self like a tin can – and mine too, us being as we are! - and I don’t see why you would want to forgive him so quickly. I won’t.” She turned to Dream. “You can’t just pad back in, clean your whiskers and try to make friends with the fish again, that’s not how it works. And he’s changed a bunch anyway, he was a bird last you saw him and he had to relearn the sunless depths and how to avoid the sharks in his memories all by himself, and also now he’s learned what divebombing puffins are like. The wars this last century got all blended in a bit with that War, because they were so big and recent, see? Personally I wouldn’t care if you never came by again, except that he’d go back to missing you and pining for you and I don’t want him hurt but being hurt because you’re here but might go is probably better than being hurt because you’re gone again. So you had just better explain yourself, and do it well, and come more often maybe because you owe him for being late. Friends don’t stand their friends up without even a word.”

Dream was pulling a face like he had just sucked the world’s bitterest lemon.

“I need not explain myself to you, and I owe you nothing, so you may leave. Then, if it is as you say, I might make my reparations in peace, though I might talk in peace with Hob without you regardless of if you are correct in your assessment.”

“You little-“

“Yeah, you should go, this is about as polite as you could ask for when you’re being insulting to him - yes it counts to him, he thought being too direct about being friends was an insult, remember?”

She rolled her eyes, but left, backing out so as to keep glaring eye contact with Dream the whole time.

Hob turned back to Dream, smiling ruefully. “Well, that’s me in the doghouse for a while. Just for the record, though, and don’t walk out again, but the general idea was good; I do want to know where you’ve been. But then, I always want to know that and I’ve never felt the need to ask before, so, as you like. Friends generally do catch up with each other on what they’ve been doing, but it’s not universal and you really, truly don’t have to. I’m not owed anything here and I want to make that perfectly clear, right?”

“The lack of obligation has no bearing on the fact that I wish to make the reason for my absence known to you. You have been a steadfast friend, waiting as you have, and if nothing else that should be rewarded. It is only that I know not how to tell this story.”

“Well, do your best. No rush.”

Dream stared at Hob for more than a minute like he was trying to burn an image of the experience into his brain rather than describe it out loud, but finally seemed to scrape together the means to speak. “You remember what I told you when we were so rudely interrupted in 1789, that you could be hurt or captured?”

Hob blinked, a nasty suspicion dawning on him. “Yes… oh. Oh I see. Shit. How lo- when were you-“

“1916. Until- very recently.”

“Fuck. Buggering shit, what- please tell me the bastards are dead because if they aren’t I’m going to need some very good reasons why I shouldn’t fix that.”

“The one who originally did the deed, yes. The one who kept the process going after his death is… permanently indisposed. I am not permitted to kill humans, and would not regardless, but this is not necessary when the alternatives allow for much more… gratifying circumstances of punishment.”

Hob grinned like a wolf in a fairytale, all cunning and malicious delight. “Good. There’s some fuckers death’s too good for.”

“Given that they were attempting to capture her, I agree that she should not have to sully her hands with them, but she is much kinder than I and would doubtless see the matter differently.”

“…What.”

“I have no idea why so many mortals insist on envisioning Death as cruel. She meets people during the most disorienting experience of their lives, as the ending of it must be, and gently guides them through it to the Sunless Lands no matter how they receive her and her gift. She is the best of us.”

“Not what I meant. Just – I’m sorry, they were trying to capture Death? Why?”

“To bargain for the return of a dead family member. That was how it started, too, with me, but when they realised they had summoned me in error it soon became a demand for wealth, and power, and immortality. None of these were gifts that were mine to give. Later, it simply became a demand that I not seek to take revenge once I was free, but I could not trust that once such a promise was given that they would not demand more again, even had I wished to.”

The Dream who Hob had known before his imprisonment had only looked this wretched once, he was sure, and that had been when Hob was at his own lowest point so the impact was lessened quite a bit. The regal figure was replaced by a mass of sorrow contained in human form, barely keeping itself from leaking out of the eyes it had shaped and not succeeding even slightly in stopping anyone from seeing straight to the soul of it through those same eyes. Knowing now what Dream was, it was sort of terrifying to watch, but comforting as well that a being so far above people was so much a person as to be affected. If the universe contained such vast concepts as “dreaming” in a realised way, it was at least not an impersonal force; but how grindingly lonely and burdensome must it be, to be the person with all the weight of every sleeping mind? Never mind the inevitable trauma involved with capture and extortion for magical favours, however unsuccessful the unfortunate magicians had been against the immovable bedrock of Dream’s pride. Hob was at home with imagining various and sundry scenarios of rescue and revenge; when it came to helping a friend heal (who would absolutely be too stubborn to acknowledge the wound or the need for someone else to help with the process, the ass) he was at a loss for what to offer.

“Is there anything I can do?” Yeah, that was a classic line that would totally be appreciated and he wouldn’t take offence at the implication of weakness.

“Your concern is appreciated, but unnecessary. There is nothing more that can be done in this matter.” Dream gave him a soft look, and the tiniest upturn of one side of his lips that could, perhaps, be a smile. Wait what? No, Hob should let him feel as he wanted to without judgement. Reward the outcomes you want to see more of, and so on.

“Thought you might say something like that.” That Hob shouldn’t get involved, at any rate.

“However, I have found, while I was… detained, that I greatly regretted being forced to miss our appointment, and additionally would wish to learn more of you as you now are. I would therefore ask that we meet again before the accustomed century.”

This was beyond what Hob had dared to hope for. “You’d like to visit more? I can put aside” what would be best, don’t ask for too much “let’s say a few hours on a given day every month?”

Dream, if he was the sort who smiled, would be beaming right then. Hob fastened his gaze on that look like a heliotropic flower toward the sun. He would need a whole new vocabulary to comprehend his tendency to gravitate toward Dream. Oneirotropic? He could feel the TARDIS’ vague disgust in the back of his brain at his sappiness, especially towards this particular target, and it should be embarrassing, he supposed, but he’d always been shameless in this. He grinned.

“One month’s time, then?”

“As you wish, Hob Gadling. It may be easier, at times, to meet you in the Dreaming, if you would be amenable? In addition to here in your premises. I understand that your headmate is not best pleased with either of us at present.”

“You want to avoid her wrath, huh? What did she threaten you with, if you’re scared of her already? - Don’t worry about that, by the way, it just shows you have sense. She threatens everyone she’s mildly annoyed with and she digs around in your timeline to do it so if you will ever mention a thing and it gets back to her she’ll know. It’s just about as immoral as you can get but it is very effective.”

Dream gave him a sideways look. “She reminds me greatly of my youngest sister.”

It was such an unexpected thing for him to say that Hob just had to laugh.

They spent the whole rest of the day talking, about what Hob had been up to since they last met and about Dream’s family, what the Dreaming was like, and how Gallifrey had been when Hob was young, and what he heard it had been like Before and the stories Dream remembered from versions of the universe which no longer existed. Hob was intrigued by the idea of the Library, and privately wished Lucienne all the luck and patience in the world for dealing with Dream and looking after his greater self and creations while Dream was imprisoned. That sort of loyalty was something he could relate to, and the frustration that must come with it was all too familiar.

Chapter Text

It became a very strange regular appointment for Hob and Dream to meet up and talk about Hob’s life. It had always been strange of course, but somehow less so when Dream could have been any number of powerful otherworldly beings with unfathomable intentions and powers. Now he was a known and measurable quantity, even if the measure came out to “basically infinite.'' And of course, the fact that Hob was working from an entirely different frame of reference these days himself changed things a lot on his end too. But it was always going to change - this wasn’t about the immortal human reporting to his patron any longer, but two friends talking about their lives and jobs like any other people. The pub being what it was, and having the clientele it did, helped a lot too, since the place was used to the weird. Half of the regulars were UNIT these days.

They didn’t only meet at the pub these days, though that now happened on a much more human timescale. Hob roamed the Dreaming regularly, and Dream would come and see Hob in the TARDIS proper, sometimes. That part was a bit of a problem, actually.

The only thing that made the TARDIS tolerate Dream was the fact that Hob adamantly continued to like him and want to meet regularly. He often talked with Hob in Gallifreyan, which no one else except the TARDIS could speak, and that was a comfort that couldn’t easily be dismissed even for her, who was otherwise entirely against the Endless having anything to do with Hob given his attitude and actions before. She would do her best whenever Dream stepped foot within her demesne proper to make the route he needed to take as confusing and circuitous as possible. Unless Hob told her to stop, in which case she would pout like she was trying to win the gold medal in pouting.

“Where is the library today?”

Hob consulted the mental pull which was the TARDIS letting him navigate her ever-changing halls easily. He imagined it was how homing pigeons would feel, if their sense of home shifted around constantly at the whims of the Earth, but he was used to it by now.

“Hmm, second on the right, through the green door, up three flights of stairs, left, down one flight - Sweetheart, did you have to? Last Tuesday it was just third on the left and you were there. I know you like changing things but this is a bit much.”

A smug feeling came through the bond. Hob sighed and trudged his way with Dream to the library to get another lesson in drawing circles freehand while being lectured on palindrome and emordnilap poetry, which had been in fashion on Gallifrey for several millennia around the time that the ancestors of humans were learning how to make fire.

The TARDIS picked up a piece of paper from the small pile of his attempts to practise from the last week and waved it at him. “Hob, what does this note say?”
He caught it and read the circular Gallifreyan. “Note to self: remember to get a book about nursery rhymes from the library. Why?”
She gave him a mildly pitying look. “Hob. Lovey. This is a scribble.”
“Excuse you, I can read it just fine!”
“Only because you wrote it and know what it says anyway.”
“You try to write quickly using circles, you prissy little ass!”
Dream looked at it over Hob’s shoulder. “None of these are circles, Hob. That one looks like a raindrop.”
Hob could not let this betrayal stand, and gently shoved at Dream’s head to get him to stop looking at the writing. “No one asked you, butt out!”
The TARDIS gave him a shit-eating grin. “Even your imaginary friend agrees with me, fish, you’re outvoted.”
“Why do you want him on your side all of a sudden?”
“Anything goes when you need allies, you know that.”
“…Imaginary friend? I assure you that I am just as real as you are.”
“Ah, but you’re a dream. The aggregate dream of all the dreams ever dreamt, and dreams come from the imagination, they are imaginary. Just because you can get a real-ing effect like when a film puts all the shots together really fast and makes it look like the scene’s moving doesn’t mean anything. It’s like society being an amalgamation of everything everyone in the society thinks that society should look like. Or a person being made up of all the ways they show themself to other people. Imaginary doesn’t mean not real.”
“Hob. What.” Dream could not have looked more gobsmacked if she had hit him with a fish.
“Don’t ask me to defend you from her weird mind after you took her side about my handwriting. You brought this on yourself.”
“I was merely telling the truth.” Dream could look remarkably haughty when he was convinced he was right.
Hob waved his hands around, trying to emphasise his helplessness against such evils as handwriting circles and arcs. “I never needed to hand write these things! It was always typed, you know, on screens and things. I’m doing amazingly well under the circumstances, and you shouldn’t judge me like this.”
Two identical disbelieving stares.
“…you should channel your judgement into helping me improve?”

Dream had seemed to brace himself against some terrible inevitability, and given Hob permission to come to the Library of the Dreaming to read the books in Gallifreyan there and copy from them as he wished.

Hob wasn’t quite sure why the hesitation; it turned out he got on very well with Lucienne, the Librarian, and he was completely enamoured with the collection itself. He could quite happily spend several lifetimes in the stacks, if he didn’t have to wake up regularly and live his life in the Waking World.

Lucienne would have been, in any earthly kingdom, somewhere between the chatelaine of the castle and the steward or first minister of the kingdom of dreams. In this place made of dreams and stories, she was the Royal Librarian. She was unquestionably in charge within the Library, shepherding and mending its stories as needed, and all the important administration of the realm was delegated to or supervised by her. In Hob’s opinion, she was the most sensible being in the Dreaming.

Lucienne was very clear from the start that this was not a lending library - “if Lord Morpheus ever tried to take the books into the Waking I would also ban him from taking them out, Hob Gadling, and I wouldn’t care that he is the King of Dreams. Do you have any idea how quickly dream books fade in the Waking World? It would be like storing them in direct sunlight for a century. No.” - and had given him such a Look over her round glasses that he hadn’t even thought to argue with her.

From that meeting, it seemed only natural that Hob should be introduced to other important figures in the Dreaming, such as those Major Arcana who consented to meet him. The TARDIS was very indignant when they found out about Fiddler’s Green, since she had liked him and he hadn’t mentioned he was another person-who-was-a-place (she insisted Dream didn’t count, reasoning that even if he was very definitely a place and a person he was too annoying for her to let him in the club. Hob didn’t get it but was unwilling to argue.) Hob was just stuck on the idea that the afterlife of sailors’ legend was real and a person, without worrying about him being a sort-of-friend or negotiating visiting rights at that point.

It turned out that TARDISes, having such a different perspective on the world than humans or Time Lords, visited a different area of the Dreaming when they slept which catered to their different needs; this seemed logical and reasonable to Hob, but it did mean that she had to go through quite a trip to get to see their friend while Hob could just turn up already there if he wanted.

Dream had immediately offered to work something out with her, and so an impression of the New Inn had made its regular home in a small meadow of Fiddler’s Green which she could anchor her sleeping consciousness to. Hob suspected that the two of them gossiped dreadfully about anything and everything, and most especially about the King of the Dreaming, who had stopped being treated to glares and mentions of black holes. Even while she warmed up to Dream, though, she also seemed to be doing her level best to keep some kind of grudge going, on some principle Hob couldn’t fathom; now the personification sometimes had references to Charybdis and roses muttered at him instead. Hob did not want to know what that was about.

It was strange, when he visited, talking to trees and grass and burbling brooks sometimes instead of the familiar figure of Gilbert, but somehow Hob understood exactly what was being said back, so he told himself he was being silly about trying to see the dream like a human. The feeling of understanding the trees and blossoms was an odd superposition of the feeling he had when he was listening to the “human” Gilbert talk, which itched at his brain a bit when he thought about it in the Waking, but that was the way of dreams sometimes. They made their own sense completely separate from the usual sort.

Dream referred to Fiddler’s Green as the Heart of the Dreaming, at times, and though Gilbert always deferred by saying that this position was in fact filled by Dream himself, it interested Hob that this kind, erudite, inquisitive man and this light, paradisiacal and joyful place was what Dream thought of as his heart, unburdened by the responsibilities of ruling over the Dreaming and all the dreamers in favour of simply being, and thereby looking after them and providing rest and delight without any effort or awkward attempts at communication on a human level that he was uncomfortable with.

It also amused him that Dream, in his heart of hearts, might be partial to rum cocktails and sailing shanties like Gilbert had been, but he took care not to even think that part too loudly anywhere Dream might overhear, just in case. He didn’t think about Gilbert’s love of and skill at giving comforting hugs and kind words either, because whether he would secretly like to learn such things or not there were some things that just didn’t fit in the same mental space as thoughts of Dream as he currently was. It seemed too much the sort of thing that might earn Hob another fit of you dares to contemplate, besides.

Hob suspected that, if the dream was such a lynchpin of the realm, he was very old and more widespread than just sailors’ tales; he mentally eyed the stories of Cockaigne and Arcadia, but didn’t dare ask.

The denizens of the Dreaming were many and varied, and Hob was fascinated by them all as he had always been when he encountered a new culture. The wildernesses and deep dark woods of Nightmares were just as beautiful as the meadows and fields of Dreams, and the bustling city before the imposing palace of the Dream King was a jewel of the imagination. He almost forgot that it was all part of and issued from his Friend at times, it was so complex and vibrant.

Take Gault, for example. Gault was a lovely dream whose skin was coloured with galaxies and who had beautiful butterfly wings sprouting from her back, and she was responsible now for inspiring people, especially children, towards breaking out of the stifling expectations set by family members and growing towards their ambitions and truths. Dreams of becoming a superhero, or telling off a bully in such a way they would never come back again, or being brave enough to leave an abuser or reach out to the community that would give them a proper family which they chose. Gault was a shape-shifter, becoming whoever the dreamer needed to encourage, inspire, or support them in making the decisions they would need to carry through to the Waking.

She had once been the nightmare of a loved one hurting you, or being disappointed by your choices, or being hurt in some way that wasn’t immediately obvious. The betrayals, by others or by nature, which destroyed families and would leave a dreamer’s psyche in ruins if they did not deal with the possibility or remembrance of such a pain. Hob had got a lot of attention from her and her subordinates after his family died, and more when his Stranger had brought the monstrous nature of the “shipping business” to his unignorable attention. (This last had been in collaboration with a colleague who dealt with inspiring the guilt of those dreamers who had harmed others, who Hob was not keen on meeting with his consciousness fully active, even though he was reliably assured that she had seen everything there was to see of the depravities of humanity - and demons, and fae, and so on - and since he had seen the error of his ways and done something about it, she would not hold it against him. He was still ashamed.)

Since Gault was a Major Arcana, the process of going through the nightmares under her and finding out which of them wanted to change to become dreams along with her and which would remain nightmares was very involved, and was headed with falsely-grumbling cheerfulness by a Lucienne who seemed relieved her King was willing to listen. Then there was the choice of if the Dreamfolk wished to remain under her influence and authority or would come under that of a new nightmare that Dream would create to fill her former role. Hob had seen it. It looked like a person with a concave void where its face should be and was as yet nameless.

The quiet dignity and conviction that Gault brought to everything she did, along with the mischief and wonder that must fit very well with her child dreamers, had not been changed when Dream had remade her according to everyone Hob spoke of her with.

One of these days Hob would get to know enough of Dream’s subjects to understand what the hell went on in his Friend’s head, but regardless he would make as many friends as he could in this fantastical place.

Chapter Text

On the final day of the War, word had gone out in furious whispers that the High Council was abandoning the fight and instead turning to the preservation of the people of Gallifrey, to the detriment of the rest of the universe. If they could no longer defeat the Daleks, they would at least deny them the opportunity to conquer and destroy the universe.

The fact that this would mean destroying everything of the universe which was not part of the collective telepathic web of Gallifreyan consciousness was not relevant to the High Council’s decision.

The fact of this callousness towards what the War had supposedly been waged to defend was not lost on many people. The Doctor had gone to do whatever he must to prevent the carnage, Hob heard, and an unofficial evacuation had gone into full swing by a scattered group of commanders and as many cadets as they could grab at short notice, with a desperate race to the TARDIS docks in the Citadel.

For all Hob knew there could be hundreds of thousands of cadets on thousands of worlds, all of them under a chameleon arch (he would have sensed them by now if they were not, surely?), and it would still be barely a fraction of a percentage of even the children of Gallifrey never mind the whole population.

Soldiers, no matter where or when they are, are the universe’s worst gossips, due to the extreme control of official sources of information in war for both opsec and morale purposes; and so everyone knew what was going on by the time they had gotten through to the TARDISes and helped or hindered as they saw fit. There had been clashes in the streets, rioting even, and that was without factoring in the breach of the Citadel dome by the Daleks somewhere in there. It had been pure Hell.

That was nothing to the Hell the evacuees had experienced once they escaped, though. They had all spent the rest of their lives until they went under reeling from the backlash of millions of telepathic contacts burning at once as Gallifrey vanished from existence. It hadn’t been long, maybe a few days' subjective time, but it had been the worst thing any of them had ever experienced. They had all assumed Gallifrey was destroyed, erased from existence. So had the rest of the universe, which was probably the point.

And then recently word had filtered through from UNIT that the Doctor had discovered it was merely time locked, and the memory had been burned out of him as payment for pressing the metaphorical big red button because the doomsday weapon he used was apparently both sentient and a vindictive shit, and hope had lit up in Hob like a glint of fool’s gold at the bottom of a deep well when the sun shone down as far as it could go, midday on the summer solstice, a fleeting moment of perfect light and answering gleam. After all, if a thing was destroyed then it was done and could only be grieved over. If it was merely very well hidden, it could be removed from its hiding place, however difficult the process might be.

Hob was really damn sick of constantly being alone while everyone around him died, and even sicker of not quite fitting into the society around him because everyone else had life experiences so different they were entirely alien to him. (Even before he was an actual alien, fuck.) And so many of the people on Gallifrey had been as young as Robin, or younger, as young as he had been when he’d left home for his first (harrowing, hauntingly-exhilaratingly familiar) battle, younger, and bloodied already. He might have learned long ago to look out only for himself and the people he cared most for if he wanted to stay alive and sane, but even he sometimes found himself having to do something. He had the ability, so he had the responsibility, wasn’t that how it went? Ugh, altruism.

Deep in the interior of the TARDIS, he paced around a garden full of red-leafed Gallifreyan herbs and trellis-fruits that no one else knew the taste of anymore except one nutjob, running around the universe somewhere with his blue-box TARDIS, and thought.

The Time Lock was very much a real moment frozen in unreality, looping a fraction of a second so small as to permit no movement or true consciousness forever. Would that mean it counted as a memory? Or perhaps a dream? If so it would come under his friend’s purview, surely. Dream could, if he wished, bring it out, or else preserve it in living breathing motion within his realm. That would be better than its current state, lodged like a bug in amber-stillness to keep the moment balancing on the knife’s edge from tipping from disaster into true and total destruction. He had told Hob a story once (in third person, as though that would distance him from the obvious character of himself in the story) of a king who had once summoned him hoping to preserve his city for all time at the height of its glory. According to Lucienne, who Hob had discreetly asked afterwards, that city was still in the Dreaming, in a glass bottle like a model ship, though only the magic and glory and such that the king had wanted to preserve and not any of its people, who had continued to live in a city that was much more mundane and in line with all the other cities of the world. A fate like that could hardly be worse than what Gallifrey was trapped in now, let alone what it faced if it was removed from the Moment and nothing else changed.

Wait, was he really considering asking Dream for something this huge? Apparently so. What the hell, he never had known how to think small.

The trouble with releasing Gallifrey and its people from the Time Lock was threefold: the Gallifreyans themselves, or rather their government, and the Daleks which were currently stuck in there frozen in a moment with them, and all the various peoples of the universe who were perfectly happy to keep the status quo intact with the Time Lords safely and nobly dead. It was so much more difficult to deal with living soldiers and refugees than martyrs, especially when they had been pretty imperialist at the best of times and had been honed to do whatever it took to survive total war for an eternity as far as the universe that didn’t have access to time travel was concerned.

The attitude of imperialist bullshit had never been a problem before the War, largely because the majority of the universe didn’t believe Gallifrey existed. It was like Atlantis, or some such mythological utopia or origin story. The Planet Time Travel Came From. And then, of course, the Time War had happened, and the Time Lords had proved just as willing as the Daleks to destroy planets, erase peoples, and use all the laws of war ever dreamed up as so much kindling to the fires of the engine of their victory. After all that, Hob could honestly not blame any race that decided the universe would be safer without Gallifrey in it, or failing that, taking vengeance on the whole population with the same thoroughness that had been visited on so many others during the War. Depending on who ended up in charge, they might even be right to strike out in self-defence.

So, bringing Gallifrey out of the Time Lock back into its previous place in the universe was not a safe solution to the problem that innocents were trapped in a slice of Hell.

The Daleks would need to be stopped or at least permanently quarantined so that they could do no more damage to the universe or to Gallifrey, but realistically they had been steeped in fanaticism and hatred of the worst sort for time beyond reckoning and very few would be salvageable, if any. There was some hope for the Time Lords not involved with the genocidal decision-making, especially the children, but that too would need to be handled delicately. There were a lot of ways that extracting the poison could go badly wrong.

Well, Hob happened to know an unfathomably powerful being who would be able to keep the planet safe and out of the usual stream of mundane reality, as long as the Daleks could be dealt with, and would have access to the unconscious minds of both sides of the War and thus their hopes and aspirations for negotiation or prevention of further conflict if absolutely necessary. No one wanted to unleash those evil pepperpot maniacs on any plane of reality, especially not the Dreaming, but such meddling would always need to be a last resort to protect dreamers from each other rather than a convenient solution for the problem of a war.

It would take a great deal of wrangling for a boon of that magnitude from the King of Dreams, but it was within the bounds of possibility. Probably it would be easiest if the unreal planet was within an unreal place such as the Dreaming (not that he would ever let Dream catch him thinking of the Dreaming as not real in any way).

So. If Gallifrey could be extracted from the Time Lock and placed in the unreality of some skerry of the Dreaming, and those beings, Dalek or Gallifreyan, who would try to return to destroying reality were expelled or stopped to leave only the innocent - or as close as possible in such circumstances - in place, then Hob would consider his ultimate gamble here to have succeeded.

Looked at that way it sounded downright insanely unlikely.

Getting immortality by being a loudmouth in front of a pair of unfathomably powerful beings who were in a betting mood that day was just about as likely.

Put it that way…

Hob stopped pacing, picked up a trowel and broke new ground.

Chapter Text

Destiny of the Endless was not a petty being.

He could not afford to be. His function was the continued existence of the universe in a linear manner, and he walked continuously through his garden-maze, choosing the paths he and reality would take, or perhaps taking the only paths he was left the option of due to the shape reality had taken. With his blind eyes he read his book, which contained all of reality as it was, and followed its directions. The book was chained to his wrist, or perhaps he was chained to it.

Sometimes the book was different to how it had been before; not that it changed, but it had always now been as it was, which was not how it had always once been. Paradoxes were annoying like that.

Technically, Destiny was King of What-Was-And-Would-Be. His little brother Dream was the King of Could-Have-Beens and Never-Weres. Destiny didn’t blame Dream for this, such was his brother’s function, but it was very annoying when the Was-Not suddenly became the Is or vice versa. It was, in human terms, like the nauseating feeling of a vigorous rollercoaster, one of the ones with loop-de-loops and flipping upside-down.

Destiny remembered the Time War with a distinct lack of fondness, and unlike with his brother, he felt perfectly entitled to hold a grudge against beings that caused paradoxes to fight a war. Calling themselves Time Lords was just insult to injury. He thoroughly regretted the bet he had once made with Death and the first Despair which resulted in their existence.

Probably unrelatedly, Dream had, at one point, somehow managed to get a dream ship, a tall ship of the sort children imagined when they dreamed about pirates, into Destiny’s garden. This had obliged Destiny to pull his little brother through to collect his property and remove it to its proper place, and in doing so remove him from being stuck in a black hole, which had likely been the purpose of the ship in the first place. Destiny could not be sure, because the incident had not been in his book. Paradoxes, ugh.

So, Destiny was not a petty being, but when his father Time decided that the time-locked planet of Gallifrey was not his problem (as he was liable to do with most things) and gave it to Destiny to do with as he wished, it was only logical to give one paradox-causing irritant to the other. Perhaps they would find common ground and get along well. At any rate, Destiny would not have an unwanted painting-which-was-also-a-planet on a wall in his home.

Dream had looked at the painting that was suddenly on the floor of his gallery, sighed, and placed it on a wall in a rarely-used and out of the way part of the palace. He had very little use for it and even less idea what would be the best thing to do about it. When, upon asking Destiny the most politely worded what the fuck in history, he found out what it was, he resolved to ask Hob for advice on what to do about his planet sometime, and thought no more on the matter. It would keep, and he had more urgent issues vying for his attention constantly.

Hob had been prepared to go to Dream in his throne room and petition him formally, if that would be what was needed, but in the end he had blurted it out over a copy of a Gallifreyan book which had never actually been written. For all that the question was spontaneous, it had gone surprisingly well.

“If I were to ask you a really big favour, what would you say?”

“That depends on what it was you were asking for, naturally, but I would be more inclined to favour you in your wishes than not.” Dream looked wary, for values of Dream expressions, but not like someone who had found a possibly-unexploded bomb, more like someone who had been unexpectedly presented with a baking experiment from a beloved family member known for unorthodox recipes which might go wonderfully right or terribly wrong.

“My planet’s not really real right now, yeah? And bringing it back to where it was will just bring back all the problems why it was put like that in the first place. But unreal things are closer to stories than anything else, and those are yours, right? And bringing Gallifrey to the Dreaming would keep the universe and my people safe. It’d need to be quarantined, but that’s been done before, right? And the place has been rewritten so many times anyway it’s practically just the stories and memories of its people by now, it’d fit right in. And-”

Hob stopped talking, because Dream had put a single alabaster finger over his mouth.

Dream had looked at him like he was providing the last clue to a very vexing puzzle. “I believe you may be interested to know that my brother had… gifted me a certain planet, and I had thought to ask you what you wished me to do with it, since you were the only member of its indigenous species that I had reliable access to. I suppose that this answers the question handily. Besides, you need not explain all the minutiae of your reasoning to me. I would be willing to host your people within my realm, provided that they wish to stay.”

Hob sputtered. “You mean you already have it in the Dreaming? And I don’t have to persuade you? I had all these points worked up, I practically made a slideshow of reasons why you should do this, and not only do you immediately say yes, but you already did half the job? I feel robbed. Relieved, but robbed.”

“I can hear your arguments if you wish to debate.” Was that a smile? Was Dream making a joke?

“What? No, no, that’s just fine. No need.”

“I would not attempt to keep anyone if they do not fully consent, however; such things have gone badly in the past. Would you still want this if I had to put some or all of them back?”

“They should at least get the choice. If they want to be stuck in a frozen span of a few milliseconds for the rest of eternity, that’s up to them, isn’t it?”

“Indeed so. It will be an interesting challenge, to manoeuvre an entire population of time-sensitive people each into their own interview, while not disturbing the structure set up to keep them separate from the usual flow of time and removing them precisely if they wish to be removed, though here in the Dreaming I may do as I wish with the local flow of time and space. You do like to challenge me with impossibilities, my friend.” Dream was smiling like a wolf, all predator’s teeth and eagerness for the exertion of the hunt. Hob’s heart thudded hard just looking at it, ready to run.

“I’m just not sure what to do about the Dalek problem. Can’t leave them in with Gallifrey or it’ll be a bloodbath, can’t let them into the universe for the same reason, and while I’m sure your people can handle themselves - especially the nightmares - they shouldn’t have to deal with it all.”

“Hob. Have you considered that if I can make an area of the Dreaming that is given over to Gallifrey and its people, then I can make one for Skaro and its people too? The Daleks can live in their own little universe where there is nothing and no one but themselves, if they wish. I do not expect they will enjoy it overmuch, since lacking an outside other to excise for the sake of purity they will inevitably turn the impulse upon each other; but if that is their dream, who am I to deny my dreamers?” Hob really should not find that smug little smirk so endearing.

“The only impediment to the plan is that moving dreamers to the Dreaming in a physical manner is tricky at best. They are in their own little safe sub-dimension currently, and they are able to remain there indefinitely, but once they are removed they will need support to remain. Either they would need to be transformed via death, as Cain and Abel or the Ravens are, which would require help from my sister at the moment of death to be safe for both themselves and the Dreaming, or they would require continuous dedicated support from my own power. This has been done before with the use of a dreamstone - like my ruby - but it does mean a large investment of power and concentration at the outset on my part. I may be unavailable for several days or weeks.”

Hob shrugged. “So like when you need to concentrate on making a new dream? I’m fine with that, it’s happened several times now. If that’s the price I need to pay it frankly comes very cheap compared to what I was imagining.”

“Being tied to my power in such a manner would mean that eventually they would be unable to leave the Dreaming except via dying and going with my sister to the Sunless Lands. If the dreamstone were ever destroyed they might be unable to remain. I am unsure, the last example of such had its destruction as a release-valve should the main subject of the process wish to die.”

He proceeded to explain briefly about Alianora and how she had been granted the Land as her own semi-independent skerry after their relationship had fizzled out, long before humanity had existed. Hob would have been quite intrigued to learn about all this under any other circumstances, and he would have questions later, but right now the knowledge was just an unhelpful background to another frustrating roadblock to saving his home planet and he had had quite enough of those.

The process was just as delicate as Dream had warned, but it was accomplished after much careful manoeuvring. Skaro was separated from Gallifrey and sent alone into the metaphorical corner of the Nightmare Realms to think about what they had done, which as far as the Daleks were concerned was the closest thing to paradise they could conceive of, since there were no non-Daleks there and never had been. It did indeed go about as well for them as Dream had predicted.

Chapter Text

Romanadvoratrelundar of the House of Heartshaven, who had once been Lady President of Gallifrey, is not a saint by any measure. No one can be, when they are in charge of a planet’s worth of lives, even in peacetime and with the best of intentions, never mind the sinkhole of political shenanigans which are endemic to Time Lords. She cannot even really say that she had done her best in the office. Then she had made the colossal mistake of getting into a Time War, and everything had spiralled, until Rassilon - fucking Rassilon! How?! - had been resurrected by some overly-ambitious member of the High Council who wanted the strategic genius and rallying point of the mythical founder of their society and inventor of time travel, and he had orchestrated a coup. She has been under a genteel house arrest in a single oubliette suite of rooms since. She doesn't know why she is still alive, or what has happened to her allies and friends, or what is happening with the War. She suspects it is going as badly as ever.

She woke up this morning (she thinks?) to an open door and a distinct lack of guards. It ought to be concerning, perhaps, but there is a detached inevitability in the way she gets up and wanders the halls of the Citadel. A black cat appears at the end of a corridor, and she follows it, and now she is… in a town square, in front of a wall scrawled with graffiti. The words are in English, a very short message. No more. Everything around her is charred, or the embers of the blaze that burned everything, and there is no one here, but there is the sound of a child wailing coming from everywhere and nowhere.

She turns around. In the air across the square is an opening to somewhere dark, and through it she can see a woman as dark and beautiful as a child of the night, in storyteller’s black and poet’s purple, with stars in her hair and stars in her eyes, and she looks into Romana’s soul and says in a voice like the deep pull of sleep, “Romanadvoratrelundar. I am here with an offer for you and your people, that they might never live in fear and danger again. Will you listen?”

Romana looks the obvious cosmic being up and down, plants her feet, and raises her chin so she can look down her nose at the being like a proper Time Lord. “I would rather talk as well, if you would - I have questions. For example, what would be involved in this, and what would be the price?”

”The planet and its people are currently in a stasis known as the Moment - ah, I see you have heard of it, good. They would be brought into my realm, which is the Dreaming; the place that minds go when they dream. There they would be safe from all threats, Dalek and otherwise, but after some time they would be unable to live outside of the Dreaming any longer.”

”I see. Then for myself, at least, I must decline your generous offer and request that any who come with me be allowed to do so. Surely you are able to ensure a dream version of Gallifrey will be available for those who choose to come with you?”

”This is within my powers, yes.”

Romana steels herself to deal with any consequences for overstepping the bounds of a cosmic being’s patience. She has had a lot of practice, and it comes easily even after all this time. ”Since we are rewriting reality, can you help us to set the planet back where it belongs without the universe jumping on us after the War?”

The Lady puts her head on one side like a bird. “That will be trickier, and require cooperation from your people, but after a fashion, I can. Do you wish for your people to live in peace, as they were before the Daleks came?”

“You cannot be serious. I would certainly wish for better than we managed to give them back then!”

This appears to be the correct answer, or at least to amuse the Lady in a grim sort of way. “Then you, and all of your people who wish likewise, must unite your intentions and bring such a dream into being. It is a risky and arduous endeavour on all our parts, but in this case I do believe there is reason to hope. There are many of you who are in accord on this, though you should be warned - it may be unlike you expect, with so many minds weaving their own versions on the same theme. It is less chaotic than, say, humans, but there are a lot more than a thousand of you, and Time Lords are always so opinionated." She seems to be trying and failing to disapprove.

Romana furrows her brow. This doesn’t sound that different from the regular operation of politics, though with more mystical nonsense, and the answer is obvious. “Yes, alright. I can do that.”

Romana dreams, and her people dream with her. They get to work.

Rassilon remains after the end of the final cleansing of all the Dalek filth from the universe. All the rest of the physical universe, too, is gone. There is nothing but a blank white void and the psychic impressions of hundreds of thousands of Time Lords, just as it should be-

Something has gone wrong. There should be more Time Lords than this, if the plan went as intended and they all survived the destruction of the physical realm to Ascend to immaterial planes. Where is everyone?

Every Gallifreyan who ever graduated the Academy to become a Time Lord was given his Imprimatur, to allow them to use his TARDISes and to regenerate their bodies a carefully-controlled thirteen times. He gave them his Seal just as much as any other tool he made. They are his. Why did they not accompany him to his glorious Afterlife?

He turns this way and that in the void, seeking. He reaches out to form a body for himself, and the robes and Glove he was so recently wearing, and then the room he last remembers. He is master of all in this realm and does not require matter, but it is a comfort, and a useful test.

A woman with stars in her eyes appears to him in the void like a cutout into the star-studded blackness of space. She is not of Gallifrey, though she looks it, and she is not his. He remembers, millennia ago, a dim and distant story of his mother’s people. The Lady of Rest, child of the Endless Night. She who shapes the forms of thought and plays them out in dreams to teach the People as they sleep, so that they do not need to work at every possibility until they find the correct way while they are awake. This is a dream, he is dreaming, he needs to wake up-

He cannot wake up.

She does not speak to him. His mother’s people rarely spoke. If it could not be communicated mind to mind, it was too impure to be worth communicating. Only plants and lesser species from other planets could not mind-speak. Instead, he simply knows what she wishes him to know.

Rassilon, you and yours are free to be as you wish here in this place, and shall be forever. But you will not affect the rest of the universe in doing so. I will not allow it.

He has been distracted. All his formed matter has… dissolved into sand, it seems, which is rapidly vanishing. He tries to plead his case, that he was saving what he could from the wreck of a dying universe, but finds he is unable.

There is no lying or dissembling in this place, not to me. There is only what you are, and that is a vainglorious, hubristic little worm who would destroy all else in your quest to be in charge of the universe and shape it to your whims. You would have destroyed all my dreamers, and all else in the Waking. You would have been the same as that which you fought. This will not happen.

Congratulations. You will have your Ascension. May you have joy of it.

Rassilon is alone in a void of white. He can feel his Time Lords, so many fewer than there should be, somewhere out there. No, no, he refuses to remain here, he will wake up soon…

Varyiatracolixmas is a child again, maybe ten years old, and running through a field of grass toward a stand of silverleaf trees by a stream. She must be in an upper-caste area, where they can afford to give the time and effort to supporting the finicky plants which need so much more support than regular blue leaf kinds, and don’t even give good fruit or useful, sturdy wood for the effort since they’re too rare to cut down. She is laughing with her housemates as she runs, without any worry. There is no War here, and she has forgotten it for the moment.

The trees, she sees as she comes closer and steps under the canopy, are filled with things which might put a human who saw them in mind of dreamcatchers, but are not; they are lundebathra, made to welcome home travellers from long journeys from bone and grass and feathers and little metal chimes. There have been a lot of them made recently, she knows, and more that needed to be put on the trees up at the barrows for the ones who couldn’t come home again. The memory of fighting shows its shadow deep beneath the surface of her mind, but leaves her untroubled. This is a pleasant dream, not a nightmare.

There is a man under the trees, dressed in Arcalian green and brown but in a style that isn’t Gallifreyan at all, with a strange round hat on his head and little spectacles on his nose. He stands talking to a Lady in black and deep purple and a Gallifreyan man who must be a renegade because he isn’t wearing robes or a uniform. They all seem very kind, and happy, though the Lady is a bit scary-stern in the way House matriarchs can often be when there’s too much to do and not enough hands to help with the little ones.

Variya comes up to the Lady and hugs her around the leg. She looks down with astonishment that can’t seem to decide whether to be amused or offended at the audacity, and the other two are definitely amused and step away a little to leave them alone.

“Hello, child. What is this about?” the Lady asks, seeming to have gone with amused for now. Variya likes her, she has sparkly stardust in her eyes and hair and she hasn’t told Variya off for touching her like some adults do.

“I dunno. You looked like you might like hugs? I like hugs. Everything’s happy here. Do you know where ‘here’ is?”

“This is the Dreaming, little one. It is the place minds go when they sleep, so that they can dream. This part of it is called Fiddler’s Green. It is where people can have peaceful, restful dreams after a long time travelling or doing difficult tasks. I am Dream of the Endless, and I make and rule over everything in the Dreaming - it is my realm.”

“Oh! Well I like it very much my lady Dream, you did a really good job making it!” Variya lets go of the Lady Dream and hops up on a log to sit next to her so they can talk better.

“Thank you, Variyatracolixmas, that is good to hear. Now, we are both here for a reason, however.”

Variya remembers herself, and an adult Gallifreyan is sitting under the trees with the King of Dreams. She keeps the white child-robes, though scaled up to fit. They’re comfortable.

“Alright. Why are we here?”

“You are here because Gallifrey is currently in my realm. And I am here to give you a choice. Do you wish to join with others to bring yourselves and the planet out to the waking world, as it was before the War, or do you wish to remain here?”

Variya bites her lip. “Are those the only options?”

“They are the most common and obvious ones. There are many who have chosen either path, and some who wish instead to become something other than children of Gallifrey. There are a few who have lost the right to make the choice, for the safety of everyone else, but you are not one of them.”

“Can I change my mind later?”

“You may, though it will be easier to move from living in the Dreaming to the Waking than the reverse, and if you spend too long in the Dreaming you will lose the ability to survive outside of it. You do not have to decide right now, however. You can think it over and even discuss it with others should you wish.”

She sits in silence for a long time, thinking. “I think.. I would like to stay here. At least for a little while. I’ve had enough of doing things for a while, I’d like to stay in a place like this.”

“Very well.” The Lady takes out an old leather pouch, and takes some kind of dust from it which she blows at Variya. It settles all over her like snow on a winter tree. Then she lays one hand on Variya’s head and takes a gemstone in the other, and whatever she does makes the stone and the dust both glow like an approaching dawn. She breathes in, and knows the things around her to be dreams, while the Gallifreyan man a little way away is …real? An actual person? From the Waking? Not a dream, anyway.

Variya grins, and with a thought, makes herself child-sized again for now. She hugs the Lady again briefly, chirps “Thank you!” and turns away to run out across the fields again with the dream-memories of her friends, toward the horizon and a group of children and adolescents she knows, now, as being other actual Gallifreyans.

They are free, and at peace.

Dream was thoroughly unimpressed enough with the High Council to forbid them from leaving. They needed an eye kept on them, apparently, and he got the Major Arcana who dealt with authority figures to deputise some of their dreams and nightmares to the task. Hob didn’t get a straight answer on the details of that. What he did get was a very powerful signet ring with the dreamstone keeping the planet in the Dreaming, and was thoroughly disgruntled (“Hey, why is this my problem? Dream get back here and give this to someone who actually wants it, you ass-”)

Gallifrey was returned to its place in the sky. Skaro was decidedly not. Several hundred thousand beings turned up across time and space with incongruous timekeeping devices, balanced out by several hundred thousand Gallifreyans coming out from hiding now that it was safe to do so.

The TARDIS had been downright friendly to Dream since he offered to bring Gallifrey back. Hob wasn’t sure why, since she must have always known this might happen, she changed her opinion of Dream so much once he had actually done something she approved of rather than something she didn’t like. Maybe she just needed a span of time to let herself feel the appropriate emotions, and liked to compartmentalise with linear time to make herself make more sense to the people who had to live that way? He didn’t want the headache that would come from asking that question.

He also didn’t want to ask why she kept insisting Dream was a “kitty cat”. She could keep her secrets.

Someone once said that you have to know when to end a story, in order to manage a happy ending. So let us end the story here. This is probably as close as we’re ever going to get.