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Dream would assert that he did not care about Hob Gadling. He was not interested in Hob Gadling, beyond a passing curiosity in his approach to humanity, sated every hundred years. He was certainly not thinking about Hob Gadling, or his wife and small child and knighthood and other life goals he’d managed to accrue in this century.
And yet, as he felt a particularly vicious nightmare go for Hob in his sleep, not long after their last meeting, he took note.
He wasn’t sure why he took note. Perhaps because Hob had been on such a disgusting high last they’d met, it seemed strange for this to happen now. Perhaps because he knew this nightmare particularly well, had crafted it from deep in his own soul, as he so rarely did.
He followed the thread of the nightmare.
Hob was running. Both from and after something at once. A darkness chased him. And another darkness retreated from him.
“Wait!” he yelled, reaching for it. Smoke slipped through his hands. Hob heaved for breath, stumbling to a stop as he ran out of air. He leaned on his knees, panting and coughing. “Wait,” he sobbed, but the darkness did not wait.
The other wave of darkness caught him, knocking him off his feet so he sprawled on the ground, hands scraping on the dirt. It didn’t attack him, just hovered over him like a blanket of fog, blocking the meager light.
“You weren’t supposed to go,” Hob said into the darkness. It didn’t reply.
It was not an unreasonable nightmare for a father to have, Dream knew well enough. But the sharpness of those dark shadows – this nightmare was not pure fiction. It was drawing more from memory than he’d thought.
“Enough of this drama,” he commanded the nightmare. “Show me the truth of things.”
The scene of darkness faded to reveal an ordinary, if well-appointed bedroom. An air of sickness hovered, and death also – Dream could feel the echo of his sister near.
A sickly woman, heavily pregnant, lay in the bed, and it was she that Dream knew was calling Death forth. She, and the tiny baby cradled in her womb, not quite ready to be born, and now would never be.
And Hob – not dying, he couldn’t, but he looked about as close to it as a man could come. Ashen, shaky, trembling.
“I love you,” he was saying, kissing Eleanor’s hand. “You know?”
This was still a dream, and this had all already occurred, Dream knew. There was nothing he could do here, not that he would. He turned to go, feeling stiff and cold in a way he decidedly did not like, when Hob looked up, and saw him.
Dream had not meant to be seen.
“My friend,” said Hob, surprise temporarily wiping the grief from his features. “You’re here.”
“I… am,” Dream conceded, and, drawn in despite himself, sat in a chair beside Hob.
“I’m grateful for it,” said Hob. Dream didn’t know what he could possibly be providing that Hob was grateful for. Then, “There’s no hope, is there? I mean. I don’t know why I’d think you would know.”
Dream looked at the mother and baby before him. Hob had called him friend. A friend, he thought, would tell Hob that there was always hope. But that was not what Dream believed.
“I do not think so,” he said. “I am… sorry.”
Hob sighed. He was still holding Eleanor’s hand. “I have to tell you, I– whatever I might’ve said to you at our last meeting, I’m struggling to feel any of it right now.”
“That is understandable.” More understandable, Dream thought, than his declaration of Life is rich! that Dream had found so hard to swallow.
“I’ve known others who’ve lost wives, children,” Hob said, and Dream looked down. Hob would have no way of knowing who those others might have included. “But I guess I always thought, not me, never me, never my Eleanor. Not until she was old and gray, anyway. But I guess everyone thinks that, don’t they?”
“Perhaps.” Dream thought he himself had always known the cost would come due. Destiny might have said that was one of the reasons it did come due. You make your own end. But that would not help Hob.
“It’s got to get better,” Hob asserted. “It’s got to. It’s got to stop some day, doesn’t it? All these children, and mothers dying.”
The instinct to sneer at his optimism jumped up Dream’s throat, but he managed to bite it off. He did not want to be… cruel, he realized, to someone who was suffering. Especially within a dream; dreamers’ minds were not for him to subject to his own feelings.
“In Guangzhou,” he started slowly, the dreams coming to him like a light rainfall, “there is a doctor who has just crafted a new medicine to ease pain during childbirth. She has been dreaming of it for years. In Oyo, a healer is learning to tell earlier and earlier when a pregnancy is troubled, that they might intervene in time. A few months more, and they will have it. And down the street, here in London, a midwife is just planting the seeds for the hospital she will open to help unwed mothers with nowhere to turn.”
Hob stared at him. He seemed to be holding his breath.
“Dreamers abound,” Dream said, “but it takes time for their work to come to fruition.”
Hob continued to watch him. Something shifted in his eyes, as he looked at Dream. Dream wasn’t certain he liked it.
“You know everything, don’t you?” Hob said.
“Not everything.”
“You know all of that,” Hob mused, “all these things that are happening. And… you still come to ask me if I wish to live?”
Dream bristled, and Hob raised his hands in surrender. “Never mind, never mind, forget I said anything. You’re entitled to your own feelings on the matter. Thank you, for those stories. It helps. Truly. And I’m glad that I’ll get to see it. One day.”
“‘One day,’” Dream echoed. “‘One day’ is a time when no children die and no famine walks the earth, when soldiers break their swords before the fight, and later bread with their enemies. One day is always one step into the future, Hob Gadling. Ever-moving.”
“Aye,” said Hob. “That’s the point.”
Dream frowned. What pleasure could be derived from wanting and wanting, and never having, he could not fathom. He had crafted nightmares thus. What hope to find in hope itself continually being dashed?
“I look forward to seeing you every century, you know that?” Hob added. “No matter what else happens. Bad days, or good ones.”
Dream kept frowning, unsure of the connection.
“It’s important to have those things,” Hob said. He squeezed Eleanor’s still hand. “Even now. Especially now.”
In Dream’s own… aftermath… he could not imagine finding comfort in anything. What help could some nebulous future date possibly be?
“If that is what helps you,” he said.
Hob cast him a look like he just knew that Dream didn’t get it, and it rankled. But there was no true criticism in that look. Hob looked at him with an unfathomable fondness, always.
He turned back to Eleanor, just gazing at her face with an expression Dream found difficult to witness in its softness. Were this the waking world, she would have certainly passed by now. But moments could freeze indefinitely in the Dreaming.
“Do you think I’ll forget her?” Hob asked quietly, still looking at his wife. “The details of her face, I mean? Her voice? What she smelled like? My memory’s far from perfect, and there’s a lot of time for it to fade.”
Dream knew without having to actively make the vow to himself that he would be sending frequent dreams Hob’s way to ensure he did not. He should not do so. He should not interfere.
But.
“There are some things one does not forget,” he said.
Hob swiped at his eyes. He was crying now. “S’pose you’re right.”
If Dream was any sort of friend – and he was not sure that he was, though Hob had declared him so – he would end this dream now and spare Hob any further torment of reliving this memory.
Instead, he sat beside him, far longer than he intended. Sat in silence, listened to Hob’s breaths, his sniffles as he cried, the subtle movements of continued life. He stayed in this sea of human endings and sickness and grief. With Hob. Something unnameable sitting heavier and heavier within him. And more than once he told himself to rise and to end the dream, and he did not.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Hob finally said, when much time had passed and they still sat side-by-side. And it was this that finally reminded Dream that he should not be.
“I should leave you,” he said, standing abruptly. “This dream is–”
“Wait.” Hob took his hand. Dream should– Dream should yank it away in offense. He should take his leave of Hob instantly for the familiarity, the daring.
He did not. He merely stood frozen as Hob pressed his hand between both of his own. His touch was very warm.
“Keep all those things in mind,” Hob said. His eyes still glittered with tears, but his words were steady. “Those infinite things you know about the world. Wherever you’re going.”
“I have much in mind at all times,” Dream told him. Hob had no idea how much.
Hob smiled at him sadly. “I’m sure. Just think about it, okay? Those doctors in those faraway places. Alright?”
Dream studied him, but gleaned no additional information from it. “Very well,” he said at last.
Hob squeezed his hand once more, then let him go.
A friend might comfort him again, in these circumstances. But Dream was not certain it was necessary. He could see in Hob, even now, the spine of a man who would not break, even when he was so far down.
It was… curious.
Hob bid him farewell, eyes just crinkling at the corners. “Until we meet again, dear stranger.”
Dream stepped back into the comforting arms of the Dreaming proper, discomfited by the moment in a way he could not quite pin down, and by his own willingness to stay and engage in it at all. To involve himself in Hob’s life in a way he had not intended.
“Until then, Hob Gadling,” he said, letting the scene dissolve around them, “this dream is over.”