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“Five minutes, I was gone,” Hob complains.
Dream hums, smoothing a hand over Cat’s fur. She nudges her nose further under her paw, for all the world as if she’s been asleep on Dream’s lap for a good several hours.
“Spoiled,” Hob mutters, shaking his head as he crouches before the fire and carefully adds one, then two logs to the blaze.
Dream watches his form—a dark silhouette against the only light source in the house, bulky with furs and wools against the cold—the way Hob grasps for the iron poker without looking, sure of its place after a lifetime tending to the same hearth day in and day out. The way he pokes at random to gently topple and shift the wood about, making little humming noises as he assesses his work, until he is eventually satisfied though there is no measurable difference in amplitude of flame. The way the poker is secured on the rack once more, sight unseen, and the thumb that runs over its strange runes with casual surety of their obedience.
Dream remembers well the bite of cold iron against his hand, and the blisters that had swelled on his palm, yellow and pink and white. The subsequent weeks of exquisite pain. It has left the skin disfigured, and sensations not quite as they were before.
He dreams, sometimes, of an iron blade run through his belly. Pinned to the floor. Boiling and burning and dying from the inside out.
And yet here he sits, in a house with a mortal man, surrounded on all sides by deadly weapons and entirely unarmed.
Entirely unafraid.
Hob returns to him, grumbling, but does not evict the cat and instead carefully moves their current book out of the way, and slots himself up against Dream’s side.
He is… shivering.
Already, many of the layers that Hob wears have been crafted by Dream’s own hands. He will clearly have to bring more. There are none to give today, for he is clad in only a simple robe, and so he must utilize other methods to warm Hob's tiresomely mortal body.
Cat yowls in displeasure as she is dislodged.
“Dream,” Hob sighs.
Dream presses himself more firmly against the line of Hob’s back, and snakes his arms around his chest. “Do you enjoy being cold?”
“Well, no. But—”
“Then do not complain. I will bring yet warmer garments on my next visit, if you insist on continuing in this fashion.”
“Continuing… with what? Winter? I didn’t choose the weather, you ridiculous creature.”
Dream sniffs. “I could easily relocate you. There are many lands in this realm that experience no winters at all. No snow. No ice. You would never be cold again.”
Hob secures Dream’s hands, where they’ve been rubbing briskly up and down his arms through the many layers of wool and fur. “I like my home, thanks.”
“The house could come, too.”
“A home,” Hob says, squeezing his hands, “is not just a house.”
Sometimes. Sometimes Hob just says these things.
“It’s been runed right down to the ground and back, for one,” he continues, logical and oblivious, “and I bet even you couldn’t preserve five generations of Gadling magic across the sea. It wouldn’t be the same. And I’d lose my garden—cor, how do you even garden without winter? When does the earth rest? Downright unhealthy. And there’d be no snowball fights, no icicles to suck on while you walk, no roasted chestnuts, no—”
“Yes, all right,” Dream huffs.
“Not to mention, all my friends I’d leave behind,” Hob adds.
“Alliances can be forged even in lands that do not feature regularly scheduled climate shifts outside of your survival range,” Dream says.
“Friends,” Hob stresses patiently, “are not alliances.”
Dream exhales.
Hob continues to parrot this idiocy, no matter how many times Dream has explained it to be false.
“You’ll just have to stick around and keep me warm, right where I am,” Hob says cheerfully, and releases Dream’s hands to squeeze his thighs instead.
“You are,” Dream complains, “most incredibly vexing.”
“Yep.”
“Mentally defective.”
“So you’ve said.”
“You could, at the very least, take the initiative of growing your hair properly for the season.”
“I—” Hob goes still against him. He tries to turn his head, but Dream is on him like a stick bug on a wool-swaddled hedgehog, and so what this mostly accomplishes is the futile shifting of fabric. “Do what?”
“Grow. Your hair. Properly,” Dream enunciates.
“I have done,” Hob says, sounding baffled.
“Only your beard, and the hair atop your head,” Dream says, and does not hide his annoyance at having to clarify the obvious. “You have, for reasons unknown, chosen to leave the rest of your body unprepared and vulnerable to what is obviously an unsuitable climate. You have grown neither hair nor fat in response to the winter weather, when both would be of clear benefit. I do not understand.”
“You want me to… Dream, are you saying that you think I should grow… more… body hair?” Hob again tries to turn his head. “Because it’s cold?”
“Surely mortals are not so under-evolved as to rank below the survival skills of the common bear.”
“You’re saying this—” Hob says, oddly strangled. “You’re saying this because I haven’t grown a winter coat.”
“You would be warmer,” Dream replies, obviously.
Is Hob not aware? Can his suffering truly have stemmed from something as simple as ignorance? Mortals are of a lesser intelligence, yes, but surely not to this degree, surely not. Surely not Hob.
Dream finds himself abruptly disentangled.
“Dream,” Hob says, carefully re-settling himself so that they are face to face.
Dream, bereft and annoyed, folds his arms over his chest and scowls.
“Do you think,” Hob says carefully, and then he pauses. Tilts his head. “You are aware. That humans do not grow our hair… voluntarily.”
“You grow it for warmth,” Dream states. “This is the purpose of hair.”
“Yes,” Hob agrees.
“So when it is cold, you should grow more.”
Hob’s lips fold inward, a gesture that Dream has learned will happen when Hob is trying particularly hard not to smile. “That’s, uh. That’s not how humans work, love.”
“It is,” Dream insists.
Hob looks, infuriatingly, even more delighted. “I think I would know.”
“The hair on your head is nearly twice the length it was over the summer,” Dream argues. “You have grown it. I have watched you grow it.”
“It grew itself,” Hob clarifies. “I didn’t have a choice about it one way or the other, sweetheart, except for the choice not to cut it off, because winter was coming and I wanted to keep the back of my neck warm in the cold.”
This… does not make sense.
“It. Grew itself,” Dream repeats.
“Yeah,” Hob says, gently. There is no lie in his eyes. “That’s how it works for us, all over. Just sprouts up where it wants to, when it wants to, and some people get more, some people get less. Some people get blonde, and some people get red. Nothing we can do except cut it off—but even so, it’ll just grow back, whether you want it to or not.”
Dream’s brow knits together. “You did not. Choose. To grow this precise pattern of hair.”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
Hob laughs. “I think if I’d had a choice in the matter, love, I’d have chosen a bit less than this.”
Dream tilts his head.
“Got it from my da, I’m afraid,” Hob adds, rueful. “Full head of hair ‘til the day he died, but gods above if the rest of ‘im didn’t match. Afraid you’re in for much the same with me.”
He looks embarrassed about this. Almost, perhaps… ashamed.
“I like,” Dream declares crossly, “your particular distribution of hair.”
“You like me,” Hob corrects. “And I come with hair, so you’ve learnt to like that, too. That’s okay. It’s how these things work.”
“Do not presume to know my mind,” Dream bites out.
“Dream,” Hob says.
“I like it,” Dream insists.
“I’m going to go out on a limb here, given the conversation so far,” Hob says slowly, “and guess that you can choose where and how you grow your hair?”
Dream blinks. “No.”
“...Oh,” says Hob.
“We are born with our hair as it is meant to be, the same as the color of our skin or the shape of our ears, as is only sensible,” Dream says. “It is your human babes which are born hairless and then later choose to grow it in mysterious quantities about their bodies.”
“We don’t choose,” Hob reminds him.
Dream waves an impatient hand. “It remains illogical. And furthermore, if it is hair which keeps your species warm, then it should stand to reason that an excess of it would be considered an attractive trait to others. Does is not appeal to your base instincts, that which is beneficial for survival? Toward producing robust and hearty young?”
“Uh.” Hob’s eyebrows have gone sky high. “Well. It has yet to produce that effect in the majority of the dating population here in Eskham.”
“Dullards,” Dream pronounces.
Hob rolls his eyes.
Dream huffs, and re-crosses his arms.
Hob swallows, and his gaze briefly skitters away to some middle-distance, before he takes in a deep breath and says, “Dream, do you… Do you really. I mean. I mean, look at you, and look at—” He stops. Swallows, again.
Dream stares.
“I mean, it’s not exactly like you’re looking at me to produce, y’know, robust and hearty young,” Hob tries.
Dream had not paid mind, before, to the litany of ex-lovers Hob had once provided him with. He regrets this, now. He wishes to go and find the one responsible for this insecurity and provide. Correction.
“I like,” Dream repeats, once more and with the most emphasis yet, “your body, Hob Gadling. And your hair. Very much.”
“But you’re so—” Hob waves a hand over his chest. “You haven’t got any—”
“Hob,” Dream snaps, thoroughly fed up with this. “How my species happens to grow hair is not a reflection of that which I find appealing in others, else I would require little more for my own contentment than the sight of my own reflection in a mirror. I like your body, despite and because of all the ways it is different than mine—in the same way that I am not one for words but would hear yours at every turn, and in the same way that I would have you gentle when I am sharp, and in the same way that I would sooner listen to your laugh for the rest of my days than ever attempt any mimicry of my own.”
Hob’s mouth is hanging open slightly. His cheeks look pinker than usual, beneath his beard.
“So,” Dream concludes, glaring, “you may cease drawing your erroneous conclusions and casting baseless suppositions regarding my preferences in a mate, in the same way that I do not question your preference for my body and its—”
“...Quirks?” Hob suggests.
“Superior features,” Dream corrects.
“Of course.”
“Yes,” Dream agrees. “Now turn back around, so I can warm you properly. Who’s the ridiculous creature, now?”
“Oh, definitely me,” Hob says, with amusement.
“Correct.”
Dream wrestles Hob back into place and wriggles until he’s exactly where he wants to be, with his chin just over Hob’s shoulder and his arms tight around Hob’s waist.
He gives it a disgruntled squeeze. “I suppose, then, your useless species also cannot grow fat? It is also entirely out of your control, and the thin are left to shiver in the cold as much as the hairless?”
“What?” Hob laughs. “What do you—I mean. Sort of? Some people are better at gaining weight than others, I guess, but any man could grow fat as a king if he was fed well enough. Same as a festival goose.”
“Fat, but not hair,” Dream mutters. He buries his nose into Hob’s neck. “Ridiculous.”
“Yep.”
Dream hums, and snakes a hand up Hob’s many layers to give his side a probing pinch. “I will bring warmer garments, on my next visit,” he decides. “And also, more food.”