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Chapters: 25
Estimated final word count: 140,000ish
Rating: Explicit
Relationships: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus/Hob Gadling, Dream & his siblings, Hob & the Endless, Dream & Orpheus, Dream & Daniel
Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Hob Gadling, Daniel Hall, Destiny of the Endless, Death of the Endless, Matthew the Raven, Odin (The Sandman), Delirium of the Endless, Lucienne, Despair of the Endless, Desire of the Endless, Orpheus (The Sandman), Destruction of the Endless, Lyta Hall
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Sandman: Brief Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Everyone Lives, Age Regression/De-Aging, Slow Burn, Like the Slowest Burn, Like One of Them Is a Pre-Sexual Child for the First 100,000 Words of the Fic, What If The Red String Of Fate Was Also A Toddler Leash, Touch-Starved Dream of the Endless, Protective Hob Gadling, Cuddling & Snuggling, Caretaking, Bathing, Bed Sharing, Crying, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Injuries, Illness, Depression, Suicidal Ideation, Explicit Sexual Content, Masturbation, Not Exactly Loss of Virginity But Not Not That?, Happy Ending
Chapters 1-4 on Dreamwidth
Chapters 5-8 on Dreamwidth
This fic is also posting (though more slowly) on AO3!
Check out all the gorgeous art by fishfingersandscarves on Tumblr!
Dream woke up in Hob's bed in the long slanting light of morning. Hob was still in the bed, or possibly back in it; he was peering at his phone, occasionally tapping at it, and the red ribbon was once again tied around his wrist.
The other end was tied around Dream's. He stroked his fingers over the crumpled places where previous knots had been tied, noting how Hob had never pulled it too tight; it was always exactly firm around his wrist without being uncomfortable. He considered pointing out to Hob that he had slept several times now, and was quite sure he wouldn't get lost in the Dreaming—indeed, he wasn't sure he'd visited there at all in the night just past.
But if he told Hob that, Hob would stop tying them together every time Dream slept, and... Dream liked that. He liked waking up to the evidence that Hob still wanted him here—that Hob wanted him to come back, and wanted Dream to be instantly able to find Hob when he did.
Worse, Hob might ask him whether he meant that he didn't want Hob to use the ribbon anymore. Even if he didn't answer, Hob might see the truth on his face.
Dream was... not very good at controlling himself, in this form.
Indeed, he found his face flushing hot just at the thought of Hob's imaginary concern and even more imaginary understanding, and he twisted sharply over to bury his face in the pillow. Naturally, this caught Hob's attention, and he felt Hob's hand come to rest on his back. "Not ready to be awake just yet, love?"
"I'm awake," Dream said into the pillow.
Hob didn't laugh out loud, but Dream could hear the smile in his voice, "Yes, clearly you are."
Dream had to peek then, just to see if his expression was as warm as it sounded. He accidentally met Hob's eyes, which were crinkled at the corners with a look of such fond amusement that Dream had to hide his face again immediately.
"Uh-oh," Hob said, and Dream felt a blanket settle over him. "Where's Dream gone? Has he gone off all by himself again?"
There was a part of Dream that wanted to be irritated with Hob playing such an infantile game with him, but it was drowned out by the part that was already giggling into the pillow and wriggling down the bed as though he might really be hidden from Hob by a blanket Hob had covered him with.
"Let's see, I know he told me how to find him," Hob continued, and the mattress shook a bit under Dream as Hob moved around on the bed. "He's got to be here somewhere, doesn't he? He wouldn't just leave me all alone."
Dream had done that many times, without a second thought, leaving Hob for a hundred years at a time, but there was no hint of real resentment in Hob's voice. There was none of the poison under the sweetness that such a remark from one of his siblings would have carried.
Hob's hand patted gently around all the parts of the pillow where Dream's head wasn't, and Dream squirmed down a little farther.
"Hmmm, not there," Hob said. "I know there's a way, though..."
Dream yanked on the ribbon still tied to his own wrist.
"Oh, yes!" Hob said. "Stupid me, there it is!"
Dream watched from under the blanket as the ribbon began to slither away, as Hob evidently began reeling it in. Again the thought intruded that this was very silly, and childish, and he ought not to put up with it, but the small body he wore was vibrating slightly in anticipation of what would happen when Hob pulled the ribbon all the way in.
Dream knew that he should wait, that he would spoil it if he didn't let Hob finish whatever he was doing. As soon as he thought of that, the fear of spoiling it collided with the eager anticipation, and then he couldn't hold still at all. Dream burst up out of the blanket, landing on his feet on the bed, throwing his arms up and not making a sound.
Hob was sitting on his side of the bed, a great length of red ribbon wrapped in tidy loops from his hand to his elbow, but he immediately looked up and laughed as Dream popped up. He didn't seem to notice that Dream didn't know quite what to say to continue the game.
"There you are!" Hob cried, his whole face lit with his smile as he spread his arms, only a little hampered by the ribbon wrapped around the left one. "Dream! I missed you! How have you been?"
"I missed you!" Dream echoed back before he even considered what would be a coherent answer. He flung himself into Hob's lap, which earned another laugh and a tight hug, and Hob smacking kisses against Dream's hair.
"Well, now here we are together again, so that's all right," Hob said. "What would you like for breakfast, my friend?"
Dream shrugged, snuggling into Hob. He was confident that Hob would make him something he liked, and it would probably involve melted cheese on top of bread.
"Hmm," Hob said. "I was thinking of getting out the blender, making a big smoothie with lots of spinach and kale..."
Dream leaned back and squinted at Hob. He did not particularly look as if he really meant that. Dream was not at all sure he owned a blender and was confident that there had been no spinach or kale in the kitchen the day before.
"Or we could make some more cheese on toast," Hob offered. "Maybe with apple slices?"
"Yes, please," Dream agreed, snuggling back into Hob's shoulder, and he felt Hob's silent laugh shaking him just a little.
"Right you are," Hob agreed, and so they began a new day.
Hob was a little scared to try it, but the day had gotten off to a solid start, so once they had all the breakfast things sorted, Hob set out Dream's new sketchbooks and pastels on the coffee table and said, "Why don't you give these a try while I take a shower?"
Dream looked up at him solemnly. "Ten minutes?"
"It might be fifteen," Hob allowed. "You want me to set a timer?"
Dream shook his head, glancing sideways at the paper and pastels. "I can wait. I won't make a fuss again."
"Well, if you feel a fuss coming on, just," Hob gestured, "come right over to the bathroom door and knock on it, right?"
Dream nodded, gaze still fixed on the paper.
Hob decided to believe, at least for the next fifteen minutes, that Dream really wanted him to go away so he could try out his pastels without an audience. "Okay, then. Back in a tick. Or fifteen minutes."
Dream didn't respond at all this time, though he was still just standing there looking at the pastels without moving to touch them. Hob made himself turn away and not look back, letting Dream have a moment to sort himself out.
Hob forced himself to redirect his own thoughts as decisively: he could use a few minutes to do his own sorting out. Most of his time before Dream woke up this morning had gotten taken up with the extremely visceral realization that while Dream could have a 50% cheese-based diet, Hob's own guts were not particularly pleased with that plan. He had skipped the cheese and stuck to whole wheat toast and apple slices this morning, and felt a bit better for it.
As he savored his time alone in the shower, Hob poked around his thoughts to see if there was anything he needed to spend a bit of time on. All of yesterday's dramas seemed to have settled into place overnight, so he was more or less able to accept that there had been some gods about the place and now they were gone and Dream was still here. Hob had had no dreams of undersea exploration to help with that, as far as he recalled, but he had slept well and deeply with Dream sprawled, as well as someone so small could sprawl, over the other side of the bed.
He had been snoring when Hob woke up this morning. The sight and sound of it had been so human and so adorable that Hob had lain there staring. He had been every bit as transfixed as he'd been that time a leviathan had risen out of the sea in sight of his ship.
Hob found himself smiling at his shampoo bottle and shook off that thought, trying once again to check whether he was building up to another bout of needing to go scream into a pillow. He didn't always notice before it was urgent, even in less bewildering circumstances than the last couple of days.
It had taken him a few centuries to learn to introspect at all, and he was still apt to forget all about it if he was distracted. Given anyone other than himself to focus on, he was much happier to be absorbed in them than in himself. His bed had been empty for years before Dream took up his new place in the other half; Hob hadn't wanted to get involved with someone when he knew the time to end this life and begin another was coming.
He ought to get on with that soon—he needed to give notice at the school any day now, and start making all the preparations for moving.
Hob rinsed his hair, mentally reviewing the checklist, and he realized that his body was going full speed ahead toward the next part of the shower routine. He was half-hard from the sheer habit of a wank under the warm water.
It had been a couple of days since he'd had time for this, with Dream around, but Hob had never been one to neglect the call of pleasure for long, even if it was just a quick and solitary orgasm.
Hob got a grip on himself—and snickered a bit at the pun, even in his own head—and got to it. This was one of the loveliest things about the last seventy years or so: all the opportunities to be warm and wet and good-smelling and take some time over himself. He let his thoughts drift as he worked himself up, random images flitting by his mind's eye. That woman by the cheese counter yesterday had had a laugh Hob would like to hear in bed, and there had been that fellow inspecting peaches like he knew exactly what he looked like and wanted someone else to know it too.
Then, just as things were getting properly good, his train of thought slewed over into his most familiar, most safely impossible fantasy: his stranger. That intense gaze going hot on him, those beautiful graceful hands handling him with the same confident tenderness that bloke at Sainsbury's had used on the peaches. And if Hob managed to say just the right thing, please him just the right way, maybe his stranger would even—
Hob came over his own fingers at the thought of his stranger laughing at him in bed. It was only as he turned under the water to rinse away the mess that he realized he hadn't been assigning the laugh of that woman by the cheese counter to his stranger. He'd done that countless times over the years, filled in what he didn't know about his stranger with details from an ordinary stranger—but he hadn't had to do that today.
His stranger was named Dream, and Hob knew what it sounded like when he laughed. At least he knew what the toddler-sized version of him sounded like, and he could more or less guess how it would sound from the full-size version. That was what he'd imagined, just before he came: the version of Dream he'd met all those other times, laughing that rusty hinge laugh in the deep soft register he'd always spoken to Hob before.
Was that weird? That might have been a little bit weird.
Well, he could just pack away the weirdness into the same locked box in his brain where he normally kept his fantasies about his stranger when he wasn't actually wanking to them. All of it was just as impossible now as it had ever been, if not more so.
But this was no time to try to calculate what Dream being with him here like this, as his small self, meant for the odds of him otherwise having the least bit of interest in Hob in the way Hob had always harbored an interest in his stranger. Now was the time to finish washing up and make sure that the Dream currently in his flat wasn't quietly losing his mind just outside the bathroom door.
Dream could not quite look directly at the pastels and sketchbooks Hob had laid out, especially while Hob was standing over him with that air of hopeful good cheer. Even when Hob walked away—even when Dream heard the bathroom door close—he still stood just peeking sidelong at the things on the coffee table. He dug his toes into the rug and found his fingers at his lips, his other hand reaching into the pocket of his overalls to check again that he had his book and Matthew's feather.
He clasped both hands together and held on tightly. He did not need to check with anyone. He did not need to soothe himself or have an excuse not to speak. No one was expecting him to do anything in particular; even Hob would not be offended if Dream did not use the pastels.
Hob would be very pleased if he did, though. He had carried Dream's little scribble from the art store so carefully. Dream went to check the sketchbook it had been tucked into when they left the store; there was no sign of it there.
Dream looked around the room, and discovered the drawing propped up on a bookshelf, obscuring a few of the spines. It was at Hob's eye level, as though he wanted to be sure he could look at it often.
Viewed from this distance, with the child's eyes he had given himself, it looked... nearly worthy of being looked at.
He forced himself to look away from it before he could begin to scrutinize. It was a child's coloring. Dream had taken the form of a child, so that was to be expected. Hob clearly thought well enough of it; he still scarcely grasped what Dream was capable of in his true form.
Dream had never created anything for Hob, before that picture. Even the picture had not really been created for Hob, nor had Dream actually bestowed it as a gift. And yet Hob treated it as something worthy of being cherished.
Hob deserved better than that. He deserved to have something beautiful made just for him, something that could express even a little of the way Dream felt being here with him, so safe and cared for, so bathed in happiness.
Dream went to stand before the two trays of pastels, considering colors. He always gravitated to red, but there were five different red or red-adjacent colors between the two sets.
He would just have to experiment.
Hob was listening intently as he dried off. He wasn't at the fifteen-minute mark, but he was starting to suspect that Dream had no idea how long fifteen minutes was or how to tell. He waited until he was mostly dry and had a towel around him before he opened the bathroom door and stuck his head out. "Dream? All right out there?"
It felt very much like tempting fate, but he was feeling thoroughly relaxed after having a proper unhurried shower, so when there was no answer at all he didn't panic right away. He just crept out to where he could see into the living room.
Dream was kneeling at the coffee table, working intently on something. "Dream, love?"
Dream made a small, vague noise, obviously too absorbed in what he was doing to pay any attention to Hob.
Hob grinned triumphantly and headed into his bedroom to get dressed at a decidedly leisurely pace. He ducked into the study and picked up a book he'd been halfway through reading before Dream turned up on his doorstep. He doubted he was going to get any further through it today, but he was fairly certain that Dream would prefer Hob to at least appear to be busy doing something else while he worked on his art.
Hob's heart sank a little when he finally stepped out into the lounge and got close enough to see exactly what Dream was doing. He wasn't making a picture or anything that looked like just having fun: he was coloring small precise squares of each of his colors, in what appeared to be a strict color spectrum order. He had just gotten started on the different greens.
He noticed Hob and looked up, and a horribly uncertain expression crossed his face, like he knew this wasn't the way Hob had meant him to color with his pastels. Dream looked like he thought he might be in trouble.
Hob immediately crouched down and slung an arm around him, smiling for all he was worth. "Look at you! Very organized, aren't you? Got to try everything out to see how it looks before you get on with your masterpiece, right? Me, I'd probably just start right in on scribbling, but I guess that would be very..."
Hob paused, giving Dream a sideways look. The anxious expression had evaporated, but he wasn't laughing quite yet.
"Abstract expressionism," Hob finished, and then Dream did give a little giggle in his distressed frog way. Hob grinned and gave him a bit of a side hug. "Anyway, don't let me interrupt, I've been meaning to finish this book for ages now. Let me know if you find you need more colors or different paper, right?"
Dream nodded, now kneeling up straight, chin up, and he reached confidently for the next color green. Hob kissed the top of his head and went to lie on the sofa where he could easily peek around the book at Dream. He also got his phone out to check on the status of his order from the art store; it hadn't shipped yet, so it probably wouldn't be too late to call up and add on to it.
Dream didn't make any requests, though, just occasionally wiped his hand impossibly clean on his overalls and kept on making his neat little squares. Hob actually did read a little of his book, though mostly he just basked in not being alone, in knowing that he could just start talking all about his day or anything else that crossed his mind. He could tell Dream about things that had happened hundreds of years ago, or about his plans for his next yet-to-be-chosen new life, and Dream would understand and keep his secrets safe.
He could probably even ask Dream questions, now that all the big secrets were out in the open. Hopefully all. Hadn't there been something yesterday that Dream had carefully talked around? Apart from how well he knew Lucifer.
Well, set that to one side. Hob could ask Dream about himself, his realm, his raven pal. About any other gods he had better relationships with than he had with Loki—though, considering that Dream had said Hob was his dearest friend on any plane of existence, maybe he'd better not. Might be a sore subject.
Still, they could talk. They could be real friends, and Dream could feel comfortable and safe here, and Hob could go to sleep every night knowing that he was off to visit his friend's kingdom.
Hob was watching Dream deliberate over two shades of purple when there was a knock on the door.
Dream immediately slapped the cover of the sketchbook shut, but he looked to Hob before moving any further, and the big version of him was only the faintest shadow. Hob was pretty sure he only saw it because he was looking for it, having seen him flickering between forms before.
Hob shook his head. "Probably just the groceries, love. Nothing to worry about."
Dream didn't argue with him, but the faint shadow of his other self got a fraction more visible, and the look on his face stayed dubious. He trailed after Hob as he went to the outside door and opened it.
Hob grinned at Trevor, one of the usual rotation of delivery guys, and one of those who would generally humor Hob to the extent of chatting a little. Trevor asked no questions about the cheese-heavy order. Hob was prone to getting very excited about one food or another sometimes, though, so Trevor probably hadn't noticed anything unusual. Hob collected all the carrier bags and wished Trevor a good day; when he shut the door behind him, he looked down to see Dream already dragging a bag over toward the fridge.
Hob smiled fondly and let Dream do what he could while he started putting away the rest.
When everything was sorted, Dream scampered back to his sketchbook and got on with finishing his spectrum of colors. He had laid it out just right, so that his succession of squares exactly took up the whole sheet. Dream stared at it for a while and then began blending the squares into each other, making a perfectly blended gradient that wound down the entire page.
Hob wondered if he should compliment it, but Dream didn't look up or make any move to show Hob what he'd done. After a moment he pushed the sketchbook aside and grabbed the book of black paper and a red pastel.
Hob returned his gaze to his book, settling in for Dream to cycle through this all day, so he missed what happened next. He only heard Dream make a noise much closer to a literal growl than that small body ought to be able to produce. Hob looked over at the sketchbook, and saw that the red square had gone a bit wonky, looking like something Hob would draw instead of Dream's perfectly neat coloring.
It was no wonder; Hob could see Dream's little hand all but spasming around the pastel he still held. A child as small as that couldn't possibly keep having perfect fine motor control for hours on end, no matter who was driving.
Dream was scowling down at that crooked red shape like he was about to set the whole sketchbook on fire, or flip the table, or banish all his art supplies to Literal, Actual Hell. Looking at him now, it was suddenly easy to believe that that was a place Dream had visited more than once, and briefly ruled, if only on a technicality.
Hob made a noise of his own, more of a groan than a growl, since he was merely human himself. He rubbed his eyes, then set his book aside and stretched ostentatiously, letting out a big sigh as he did.
When he concluded the performance by looking over, Dream was watching him with only a hint of wariness in his expression. He did, at least, seem distracted from his own violent frustration.
"I think I've been sitting still too long," Hob announced. "Need to stretch my legs a bit. What do you say to a ramble?"
Dream decisively closed his sketchbook and said, about as stiffly as physically possible for an approximately humanoid child, "Very well."
Dream was well aware that Hob was managing him, but he also could not deny that Hob's methods were effective. Given the choice, Dream would rather not repeat the previous day's prolonged loss of control, though he had scarcely any idea of how to go about avoiding it. This form he wore was intensely vulnerable to the vicissitudes of feeling.
As his greater self, when such emotions threatened his control, Dream simply... did not permit himself to feel them. The thwarted emotion expressed itself through the Dreaming or else dissipated, allowing Dream to carry on with his duties.
He had thought they dissipated, anyway. The hurts marked on this small body suggested that at least some of them had lurked within him, biding their time.
And so he permitted Hob to make things easier for him. He allowed himself to be distracted from the frustration he felt with his body's limitations—and the absurdity it laid bare, for what was he thinking, wasting time this way? If he wished to produce something that would be pleasing to Hob, if he wished to be of any use to anyone, he knew how. He had only to be himself. All of himself.
But his greater self could not—would not—spend hours on a ramble through Hob's London neighborhood walking hand in hand with Hob, or borne on his shoulders whenever Hob thought Dream might be tired of walking. His whole self would not be smiled at by passersby—and would be forced to know all their dreams as soon as he looked at them.
Not forced. That was a ridiculous way to think of it. He simply would know, because that was his nature, and so he would be aware of each person he passed as a dreamer—as one of his own responsibilities.
He and Hob passed many people, as they went from one shop to another, and then to a small green, and then to a café which served toasted cheese nearly as good as Hob's along with chocolate milk.
Hob, for inscrutable reasons of his own, had a green salad. He offered Dream a taste, so Dream tried one attractively deep-green leaf from it, and felt his entire small body reject the bitterness of it. Hob laughed, but also supplied him with a napkin to spit it into and a sip of water to clear his mouth before he returned to his own lunch.
There was chocolate cake with strawberries after that, which seemed a very handsome way to apologize for the disgusting leaf business. Dream was happy to forgive Hob entirely after that.
All the time, Dream was surrounded by other people at the nearby tables—to say nothing of the waitress coming and going and flirting far too much with Hob—and knew nothing about any of them. None of them weighed upon him as they normally did; he caught no echoes of the dreams of those who had prepared the food or washed the dishes they ate from. Nothing distracted him from Hob except his lunch, and both were equally wonderful.
Dream had always intentionally blocked out his awareness of most of Hob's dreams, so it was not strange to be cut off from them now. At first he had not wanted to know too early what the outcome of his wager with his sister would be—and then he had not wanted to spoil the surprise of what Hob would tell him every hundred years.
And then Hob was out of his reach.
And then Hob was his friend, and Dream had had the idea that privacy was something friends should grant to one another.
Now here they were, and Hob was talking so easily and brightly that Dream could hardly wish for more insight into him. Anything Dream might want to know, Hob would doubtless tell him sooner or later.
They strolled to another park after lunch, and Dream had barely taken in any of what Hob had talked about in the past few hours, but he felt vastly better than he had before.
Hob had done that for him. Hob had set himself to make Dream feel better, and knew what would help even when Dream himself did not, and now Dream felt better.
Dream searched himself for a way to express it—to name the happiness he felt in this moment, and the gratitude he felt that was not a debt or a subtraction from his gladness, but a vital component of it.
He looked up at Hob, who met his eyes and fell silent, smiling with a gently expectant expression. It was clear that he was looking forward to hearing whatever Dream might say.
Dream might not command all of himself at this moment, but what there was of him was the Prince of Stories, the lord of innumerable realms of fantasy and imagination. Somewhere within him were all the words applicable to all possible emotions and circumstances, and yet he could summon nothing sufficient to speak to Hob right now.
Still, he could find a way to communicate. Dream raised a hand slowly, and just when he saw Hob begin to bend toward him, raising his own hands to meet Dream's, Dream slapped his raised hand against Hob's hip and shouted, "Tag! You're it!"
He ran away at full speed across the green, and in Hob's laughter he heard all the warmth and all the joy he had wanted to express. He looked back and his own laughter broke free as Hob sprinted after him, and trailed in his wake as he ran on and on.
Dream wanted to run forever through the green-dappled sunshine, with Hob always just behind him, but then it was almost equally wonderful to have Hob's hands catch him and swing him up into the air. Dream's laughter crystallized to a shriek of delight, and when Hob pulled him in close to press kisses to his cheeks Dream went limp in his arms in perfect contentment.
That was when he noticed the raven waiting for him on the pathway just ahead.
Chapter 10
Dream went rigid in Hob's arms, and Hob's head jerked up in instinctive response. He shifted his grip on Dream to a more secure one as he looked around, and then he saw what Dream was staring at. There was a raven on the path ahead of them—Matthew, Hob thought. He was almost positive it was Matthew and not just a raven.
Dream wouldn't have reacted like that to just any raven, and Hob was actually certain that it wasn't one of Odin's.
After a long time that was probably really only seconds, Dream's rigid freeze dissolved into a wriggle toward freedom. Hob set him down and stayed close beside him as he walked forward.
Matthew kept still, just waiting, and Hob took a moment to look around. No one was paying any particular attention to them, but Hob still moved to block Dream and Matthew from the most obvious lines of sight from the street.
Dream, meanwhile, knelt down facing Matthew. As small as he was, that put the diminutive Lord of the Dreaming and his raven nearly eye-to-eye. "Matthew," Dream said quietly. "What is it? All is well here, but you can see that already."
"All's well in the Dreaming, too," Matthew said. "Uh, pretty much. Just... Lucienne said I should ask you what to do, because your, uh, your sister showed up at the gates. Your youngest sister. She says she wants to see you. And Lucienne thought you probably would have wanted to see her, if she wanted to see you. But you're... away right now."
Dream rocked back slightly where he knelt, but he did not stand. Hob searched for it, but he didn't think he could see that flickering shadow of bigness around him. He didn't know if that was a good sign or a bad one right now.
"Matthew," Hob said. "Could you... give us a minute?"
Matthew hesitated, shaking out his wings in a very recognizable human-like fidget. "Boss?"
"Yes," Dream said slowly. "Please, Matthew. I will confer with Hob."
"You got it," Matthew said, and sprang into the air. Hob watched him as he flew away, taking up a perch in a tree perhaps five yards away.
Hob looked back to Dream, and found he was still kneeling there, watching Matthew just as Hob had done. Hob crouched down and rested a hand lightly on his back. "What are you thinking, my friend? What do you want to do?"
"I... do not know," Dream said slowly, frowning in thought. "I think... I think that I am doing something important right now. But... I do not like to ignore my siblings. They call upon me as rarely as I call upon them."
"Do you think she's in trouble of some kind?" Hob asked. "Do you think she needs your help?"
Dream shrugged, his gaze sliding from Matthew to the pavement in front of him as his frown deepened. "Matthew would have told me if Lucienne perceived that there was any danger. If Delirium is present in the Dreaming, nothing can harm her there, and she is very congruent to my realm, so she will cause no lasting harm by her presence there. But I... I am her elder brother. I would like to be a good one."
Hob let out a breath and sat down all the way on the pavement, cross-legged.
Dream, still frowning and not looking even in Hob's direction, crawled into the lap Hob had made for him, and Hob's arms curled around him just as automatically.
"What do you think would happen if she saw you like this?" Hob tried.
Dream jolted at that, looking up at him with his face gone entirely childlike in surprise, no trace of that frown remaining.
"It's not just a choice between ignoring her or going back to your realm," Hob pointed out gently. "You could tell Matthew to bring her here, couldn't you? If it's just that she wanted to see you, she could come and see you."
Dream's brows drew together again as he thought it through, gnawing briefly at his lower lip. "I... am her elder brother," he repeated. "She is the youngest."
"Yeah," Hob agreed. "I don't know about Endless—" though he was actually pretty certain as he said it that what he was about to say absolutely applied, "but for humans, sometimes being an older or younger sibling, and especially being the oldest or the youngest, that can be something you get stuck in. Something that limits you. I don't know your sister, but maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing for her to see her elder brother being... littler than her, for once. It might give her a chance to be something other than she usually is."
"She is... very changeable, herself," Dream said into Hob's chest, curling up like he wanted to hide himself in Hob's arms. "Perhaps she would not..."
Dream didn't seem to have an end to that sentence, and Hob didn't feel ready to guess at it. "Do you think you could trust her to see you like this?"
"She might... laugh, or say silly things," Dream said slowly. "But I do not think she would hurt me. Or intend to hurt me."
Hob squeezed him a bit. "Would you like me to tell her, if I think she's hurting you and doesn't realize she's done it?"
Dream looked up at him again; he had caught that shift from the question of whether to see her to planning how it should go.
He didn't object.
"You need not," Dream said quietly. "She... I know how she is. And I know that you... you will be with me."
"Course I will," Hob promised easily. "You're my best friend."
Dream tried to imagine what was going to happen if Delirium came to see him as he was now, in the Waking world. Much depended on why she had gone looking for him in the Dreaming, and he knew better than to think that he could predict that.
She was one of his favorites among his siblings; she had been the easiest of all of them to love, in her first self, and Dream found her scarcely more difficult in her current form. She was frequently more confusing, however. He always felt on the wrong foot with her, always as if he ought to be doing better at the task of being her elder brother.
He had lost the knack of whimsy around the same time she lost Delight.
Perhaps he could be better at it, as his present self. He had certainly laughed and played more in the last few days than he could remember doing for many eons before that. Perhaps Delirium was a test, or a lesson, in the quest for wisdom that Odin had named this journey of his.
In any case, Hob had put his finger on the only way out of the impossible dilemma. Dream could not bear to ignore Delirium, or have her turned away without even seeing him, and neither did he feel ready to return to being his whole self, or to be in the Dreaming as this small self. That left one option.
"Matthew," Dream called, not raising his voice much but putting that intention in it which would call Matthew to him.
The raven flew down to him in a single smooth glide, and only bobbled the landing a little. Dream chose to ignore that minor infelicity.
"Return to the Dreaming, and ask my sister if she will follow you to me. You may bring her here. Hob and I will await you."
Hob gave him another little squeeze—encouragement or approval—and said nothing.
Matthew shuffled a bit but said, "You got it, boss," and flew off again, vanishing from the Waking world as soon as he was on the wing.
Dream took a deep breath and heaved it out on a sigh, and Hob's grip on him tightened again an instant before Hob stood. "You want to stay out here?" Hob asked. "Not see her at the flat? We're not that far, if we go in a straight line."
Dream shook his head. "This is better. Delirium can have... unpredictable effects on people. It is best that she not be too near to too many of them."
It was scarcely a day since Dream had last brought something dangerous to the New Inn. He would not actively invite another.
The green was relatively empty, and a safe distance from the busier streets and pavements that surrounded it. Hob carried Dream away from the path they had been on, finding a shady spot between two trees, which felt even more sheltered. He sat down again, settling Dream in his lap, and Dream leaned back against Hob's arm and looked into the sky, watching for Matthew's return and Delirium's arrival.
Nothing happened.
It was possible that she would not listen to Matthew, or not want to follow Matthew into the Waking. Perhaps she had come to him in the Dreaming for a specific reason. Perhaps she needed something that was only possible there.
Dream squirmed around to lean against Hob's other arm, and watched a different part of the sky, which was equally empty of ravens and sisters.
He sighed. Anything could be happening right now, in the passage from the Dreaming to the Waking world. That was Delirium's nature. Perhaps he should go back, just to see? He could take Hob with him, and...
On the other hand, perhaps she was not coming at all. He had not told Matthew to come back to him if Delirium said no, had he? Would he think of that? Lucienne would, surely, but then Lucienne must be very busy looking after the Dreaming for him. He really ought to go and see, but that would defeat the purpose of sending Matthew to bring Delirium here.
He thought about asking Hob how long it had been—surely it had been hours—but when he looked up Hob smiled down at him with no sign of concern at all.
A cascade of soap bubbles poured forth from nowhere, popping to reveal a wildly fluttering Matthew and a blur of iridescence that resolved into Delirium. She seemed very tall and impossibly small, both at once or oscillating rapidly between the two, before she abruptly settled into her usual shape, clad in a black leather jacket over a rainbow striped sundress. She had a sandal on her left foot that laced up to her knee, and a purple light-up sneaker on her right. She dropped down to sit facing Hob with her legs crossed just as his were.
Dream thought she was about the size she usually was, which would be quite a lot shorter than Hob but still considerably taller than Dream's current shape. She had one blue eye and one green, and there were swirls shaved into her hair where it was buzzed short as velvet on one side, while the other side was a wild puff of multi-colored curls.
Her dress and jacket were battered, her striped tights torn at the knees—but her knees, under them, were whole and unhurt.
Dream wasn't sure if he would have thought to notice that, before. He wanted to show her his own knees, where they had been bruised and now were healing, but he also wanted to hide behind Hob. He settled for plugging his thumb into his mouth and watching her.
She was watching him, her eyes wide and intent, her head tilting as she took him in from every angle. She was smiling, her teeth crooked and the piercing in her lip flashing in the sun, and she kept smiling wider and wider until looking at it made Dream's own face ache in sympathy. Dream felt Hob jolt a little when some line was crossed, and he saw Delirium's gaze dart away from Dream and settle on his friend behind him.
"Oh," Delirium said, "Hello! You're my brother's friend, aren't you?"
"I am," Hob said at once. "We've met a time or two, haven't we?"
Delirium's smile got smaller and a little sly. "Once or twice or geranium. Or Saturday?"
Dream looked up at Hob who was shaking his head ruefully, still looking at her. "Yeah, sounds about right."
He didn't look down at Dream until Dream tugged on his sleeve, and even then his gaze lingered for a long second on Delirium before he met Dream's eyes. "I've done a lot of interesting drugs," Hob half-explained. "And had a few impressive fevers in my time, too. And things got a bit... rough, in 1673."
"Ohhh, 1673," Delirium agreed, and Hob's gaze went right to her again. "You were mine for just a little while, then, weren't you? My next sister thought she would get you that year, but you were mine, mine, mine."
"Just for a little while," Hob agreed, squeezing Dream again, but his attention was still fixed on Delirium. "But now here we are, and you've come to visit your brother!"
"Yes, my eensy-weensy teeny-weeny big brother!"
Dream jumped when she reached out and tickled him. He had still been watching Hob, but now he glared at Delirium, who took her hands back. "Oops. Not all the way eensy. You're still you."
"I am always myself," Dream said stiffly, though he thought he should ask her to try tickling him again, or if she wanted to play tag, or anything that would not be sitting here and speaking to her just as he would if he were perched on his throne.
The words still came out chilly despite what he wanted, or at least wanted to want. "Why have you come to see me, my sister?"
"Well," Delirium said, dragging the word out into seven or eight wavering syllables, "I asked Desire first, because I was in Desire's house when I thought of it, but they said no. And then I asked Despair and she said no, so then I went to ask you but you weren't there even though I could feel you there, but Lucienne said I could have tea but I had to wait and then all the tea turned into bubbles and those little dinosaurs made of sugar and then they kept melting when they tried to fight each other?"
Dream could feel Hob vibrating slightly all around him, and Hob's mouth pressed against the top of Dream's head—not one of the kisses Hob gave him so freely, but just a way to hide his laughter.
"What," Dream said grimly, "did you ask Desire and Despair? Did you mean to ask something of me?"
"Ohhhhhh," Delirium said, raising her hands in a gesture that clarified nothing. "Um. I think you... probably you're going to say no, too. But maybe if your friend...?"
"Did you come here," Dream interrupted icily, "to speak to Hob Gadling? Or to me?"
"Oh!" Delirium said, her hands fluttering up like butterflies but still mostly hand-shaped and approximately attached at her wrists. "I came to see you! Because your raven—" Delirium looked around and Dream followed her gaze to Matthew, who froze in the act of shaking some piece of litter he'd picked up.
Delirium shook her finger in his direction. "Oh no no no, Mr. Matthew, you shouldn't try to eat that."
Before Dream could stop her, it had turned into a brilliantly-colored frog. Matthew let out a squawk and dropped it but then pounced on it again, and Hob said, "Is that poisonous? Aren't the bright ones usually poisonous?"
"It shall not harm him," Dream said, summoning all he could reach of his power to make it so.
"But it might make for a fun day!" Delirium added, as Matthew spat out the frog and then pounced on it again.
Dream turned his attention squarely back to his sister, confident that no permanent harm would befall Matthew.
"What," he said as firmly as he could, though his heart was racing a little from the exertion of bending reality as sharply as he just had while in this shape, "did you wish to ask me?"
Delirium focused on him again, and her face went through a few strange contortions and then settled on a plaintive seriousness. "I want to go look for our brother who went away," she said. "I miss him. Do you miss him?"
Dream slumped in Hob's hold, and felt a fresh sharp pain over his heart, and knew that there would be a bit more of that bruise, the next time he looked.
How could she ask that question, so simply, as though it had a simple answer?
How could she ask that question, as though the answer could be anything but what it was?
"I..." Dream said slowly, and he found that it was hard to speak at all. He felt something shivery in his limbs, prickling in his eyes, and he clutched at Hob with both hands.
"I've got you," Hob murmured, his arms tightening gently around Dream. "I'm here, love. I've got you. You can say whatever you need to say."
"I can't," Dream blurted, and the word came out as a sob. "I can't, I can't, I can't I can't I—"
Dimly he heard Hob saying something not to him, because now Dream was crying and couldn't even speak and still Hob was paying attention to Delirium. The bruise over his heart hurt worse, at that, and he wailed aloud. But then he felt Hob's grip on him change and tighten further, and Hob stood up, still holding him. Hob started walking, swaying more than his steps required, and Dream hid his face in Hob's chest and let himself weep without restraint.
He didn't know exactly what he was crying for. He didn't know if I can't should be I can't help you search for Destruction or I can't say how I miss him or I can't let myself miss him or I can't bear to speak to you about this or I can't stop myself.
The last was the only one that mattered right now. He couldn't stop crying, couldn't help shrieking his hurts into Hob, but Hob just kept walking, rocking him, holding him tight, and Dream clung on with all his strength. There was not much strength left over from hauling in enough breath to keep crying, to keep his heart beating despite the sharpness of the pain in it, to keep existing in any material form at all when he hurt and was so, so tired of hurting.
When the people who he loved were the ones hurting him.
When even Hob—
Dream turned his head and let loose a scream right at Hob's face, though he could not pry his aching, water-streaming eyes open to see what effect it had. Hob stopped walking but still held him, all the time Dream was shrieking and after he ran out of breath. Then Hob just stood still and swayed, bending his head close to Dream's and singing softly.
It was a lullabye, the words old and time-softened in Hob's mouth so that they meant almost nothing in themselves. Dream felt all the layers of love and loss in the song, far more relevant than the lyrics. Whoever had sung this to Hob, and everyone else he had ever sung it to, they were all gone now. All lost to him. Only the song remained.
The song, and the love, and Hob.
Dream let out a soft keen and squirmed up so that he could wrap his arms around Hob's neck, pressing a few messy kisses of his own against Hob's throat. Hob hadn't meant to hurt him. Hob made it better when Dream was hurting. Tears kept streaming from his eyes, and Hob kept singing, until Dream was too exhausted to do more than hold on and, with some effort, breathe.
Hob looked around as Dream got quieter. Delirium was lying on her back near where she had first sat down, bubbles drifting up from her hands as she waved them toward the sky.
So that was... probably all right then.
Matthew was closer, though still far enough away that he and Hob could both pretend he hadn't heard any of that. Hob loosened one hand to wave at him. When Matthew flapped a wing back, Hob crooked a finger.
Dream didn't stir as Hob crouched down, and Hob wasn't sure if he'd cried himself to actual sleep again, or had just gotten worn out enough not to pay any attention to what was happening. Either way, Hob figured he might just get away with not having left the house with any of the sort of emergency supplies that people who were responsible for real small children always had on hand.
"Matthew," Hob said, very quietly but not whispering, because whispering attracted attention. "Could you go to my flat, and get the box of Kleenex off the coffee table, and bring it here?"
It was possible that this was a stupid thing to ask a magical immortal dream raven—who might or might not have eaten a poisonous/hallucinogenic frog while Hob was distracted—to do, but Dream didn't actually pick his head up to say so, and Matthew just looked at him for a long moment. Delirium didn't seem to notice, and the sky didn't crack open and rain down cosmic judgment upon him, so Hob figured he was doing all right.
Then Matthew gave a bobbing raven-ish nod, jumped into the air, and vanished before his wings beat a second time. He was back, dangling the Kleenex box from his talons, just as he reached Hob's head-height. It took a bit of fumbling for Hob to actually retrieve some tissues from the box while Matthew tried to fly at that height while holding them, but they managed it by turning in circles, and on the third rotation, just as Hob managed to bring a handful of tissues to his cheek, Dream picked his head up and blinked swollen, bloodshot eyes with tears still lingering on the long black lashes.
"Here, darling," Hob said. "Do you want to wipe your face a bit?"
Dream unwound one arm from around Hob's neck to give it a try, and even managed to blow his own nose mostly into the tissue without prompting. The rest landed on Hob's shoulder, and Dream frowned and mopped it up but didn't vomit or scream or start crying again, so Hob figured they were coming out ahead.
Hob balled up the tissues and shoved them into a pocket. "Thanks, Matthew. Could you put those back?"
Dream blinked in the raven's direction and gave a little nod, and Matthew vanished again.
Dream let out a gusty sigh and slumped back down against Hob's less-damp shoulder, and Hob rubbed his back and swayed a bit.
"I do miss him," Dream said, very quietly.
An impossible number of—hummingbirds? no, they were multicolored flying goldfish—swarmed all around them and then coalesced into Delirium, standing at Hob's elbow, which she barely came up past. She had a solemn expression on her freckled face, and a few tear-tracks leading down from her different-colored eyes, and bits of grass and a leaf caught in her multi-colored curls.
"I miss him too," Delirium said. "But I think maybe it's not time to look for him after all. Maybe it was really time to look for you?"
Dream took a sharp, shuddery breath at that, but didn't burst into fresh tears. He reached out one small hand, and Delirium pressed a kiss to it that left behind, not a lipstick print, but a crookedly-applied temporary tattoo of a bright orange glittering goldfish with one green eye and one blue. It was already peeling at the edges, and took up almost the entire back of Dream's small hand.
"Thank you," Dream whispered, his voice shaking. "I love it. I love you, my sister."
"Wanna hear a story?" Delirium asked.
Dream nodded against Hob's shoulder, but obviously that was enough.
"So," Delirium said, and began winding one finger into her curling hair. "A while ago I went for a walk..."
Hob sat down when it became obvious that this was going to be a very long and meandering story in what he gathered was Delirium's usual style. After a while Dream squirmed around to sit facing her in Hob's lap, sucking his thumb and otherwise at rest.
Hob let himself laugh out loud at the story as it wound along, because he thought that Delirium was at least reasonably likely to be trying to make Dream laugh. She didn't seem deterred by it, at least, so Hob went on laughing at the funny bits, squeezing or jostling Dream a little each time.
Dream let out a tentative little giggle—which started out sounding like a mostly normal giggle and then somehow turned into a baritone screech right at the end—at the third time the llama showed up. Hob met Delirium's eyes and felt a shared burst of probably entirely misplaced triumph. Dream laughed twice more before she wound to a bewildering and unsatisfying end.
He didn't laugh at Delirium's dramatic conclusion—"And then it was definitely Tuesday!"—but Hob did laugh, and couldn't stop laughing, and eventually that got Dream both laughing and trying enthusiastically to shush him.
The laughter was mostly relief; Hob felt like they'd come through something significant, surviving Delirium's visit and getting Dream to laugh and enjoy his sister on her own terms, beyond that solemn and exhausted little declaration of love.
If Hob was still left with a thousand more questions about this missing brother of theirs who apparently they did talk about sometimes, well, obviously it was Delirium's nature to leave a lot of unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions in her wake.
Delirium popped up to her feet and curtseyed, and seemed to get distracted halfway through the motion.
Hob turned his attention to Dream and said quietly, "Hey, love, it's just about teatime—why don't we ask your sister if she'd like to come back to the flat with us for a cuppa? I bet she'd like cocoa almost as much as—"
Dream had gone still when Hob started talking, but he tore himself away and Hob stopped short, his stomach dropping sharply as Dream's expression turned on a dime from silliness to something cold and furious.
"Ask her yourself if you like her so well," Dream hissed. "I shall find my own way."
"Dream!" Hob yelped, reaching for him and trying to stand at once, stumbling on numb legs—how long had they been sitting there?
By the time he found his feet and looked around, Dream was gone. Not just out of reach, or out of sight, Hob somehow knew, with a surge of something that wanted to be panic, which he ruthlessly suppressed. Dream was gone, and that meant Hob didn't have time to feel anything about that fact.
Hob looked around again and found that Matthew was lying on his back, wings stretched wide, talons flexing in slow motion. He was very obviously in the midst of whatever kind of trip a raven could have after eating a poisonous frog, or whatever else Delirium might have slipped him while Hob wasn't looking.
Hob went over and scooped him up as he called out, "Delirium?"
She was there at his elbow when he looked down, no dramatic swarm of goldfish this time.
"Dream's gone," Hob said briskly. "Can you tell where he went? Matthew, can you?"
"Hmmmmm," Matthew said, his wings fluttering a little in Hob's grasp. "Got a. Leaf? Petal. Fingerprint?"
"Feather," Hob said firmly, though he knew that wouldn't help anyone sober up faster. "He's got one of your feathers. Delirium?"
"Ummmmm," Delirium said, revolving slowly on the spot where she stood. "Where did he say he was going?"
Hob opened his mouth and then closed it sharply. "He... he just said he would find his own way. I mentioned going back to the flat, and he got angry at me all at once. He thought—he said—"
"He doesn't want you to like me better," Delirium said seriously; for a moment her eyes swam with the same mix of blue and green, nearly matching each other. Lines appeared around her eyes and on her forehead, showing the strain of the effort she was making. "He needs someone to love him best. He thinks that means, love him only, because he can't believe anyone would choose him if they had another choice."
Hob winced and opened his mouth to say something, but hadn't figured out what to say before Delirium added, "They don't, usually, so that makes sense."
Hob winced harder. He had asked about bringing Delirium to the flat, when Dream had set that as a boundary—and he had implied he would offer Delirium cocoa, when he had gotten it for Dream.
"Right," Hob said. "But do you know where he's gone? How to find him? I don't think it was just that he ran off, he—"
Delirium tilted her head unnervingly far over, and then said, "No. He's... somewhere else. But when I look for him all I can feel is the him that's still in the Dreaming. It's a lot bigger than the him that isn't. And I don't know Matthew well enough to find his feather. Do you have anything that's just this piece of Dream's? Anything he made, or..."
Hob thought of the sketchbooks—that perfectly blended snaking gradient, that one wonky square. He didn't think it would be right to show either of them to Delirium—and he wouldn't let her touch that drawing Dream had made at the art store, either—but he had a feeling that this was important, and urgent. They needed to find where Dream had gone now. If he hadn't just zapped himself back to his realm and the rest of himself—and Hob didn't think he would do that in a fit of temper, when he had hesitated so deliberately about doing it for his sister—then he could be anywhere, and he was small and upset and had to be mostly exhausted, after the day they'd had.
"Yeah," Hob said. "Yeah, there's stuff at the flat. Can you get us there faster than walking?"
Delirium grabbed his hand, and the world turned immediately sideways, the sky flaring pink as a herd of unicorns galloped around them. Everywhere their hooves touched the earth a frog was cut loose from the earth and flung into the roiling, bubbling candy floss sky, and they screamed the tones of Hob's first digital alarm clock as they went.
He closed his eyes. None of it went away, but he could focus on holding tight to Matthew, who he cradled in one arm, and clinging to Delirium with his other hand.
"Oh!" She said, which made Hob open his eyes on a swirl of colors and spiders and crystalline notes, which abruptly resolved into the landing of the staircase at the outside door to his flat. "I thought," Delirium said, shaking herself a little and then looking up at Hob. Her eyes were two different colors again and her curls were defying even more gravity than before. "Maybe I shouldn't come inside. Dream didn't want me to come inside."
"Right," Hob said. They had something to do, and he needed to not try to make sense of anything he'd just seen. There wasn't time. "Stay here, I'll be right back."
Hob let himself into the flat. He grabbed a towel and laid Matthew down on it in the kitchen sink, just in case the rest of his trip happened to have consequences, and then he ran for the bedroom, and Dream's suitcase.
Chapter 11
The Waking world was only a step from the Dreaming, and only a step from any of his siblings' realms as well.
The trouble was that Dream was small, and angry, and perhaps about to start crying again, and too tired to cry anymore or run anywhere. He was far too tired to hold a single goal in his mind, and in truth the only thing he really wanted was to be back where he had run away from, in Hob's arms.
He just wanted it to be a version of Hob who wouldn't like Delirium better, and wouldn't let her see Dream's awkward attempts at drawing with his pastels, and wouldn't give her all the hot cocoa that had been supposed to be just for Dream, and wouldn't laugh at her stories and dance with her and kiss her hands and—
Some of those things perhaps hadn't happened yet.
Dream wasn't sure, because Dream wasn't anywhere and Time didn't reach here. Dream had taken that step out of the Waking world, away from Hob, but he had not decided for certain where he was going when he did. To the Dreaming? To his elder sister's realm, to seek sympathy he probably would not find? To Destiny's realm, for the peace and quiet of the inevitable?
To Delirium's realm, to run wild and break things before she could ruin everything that ought to be his?
To Despair?
Any of them might have proven a satisfying choice, but he had not chosen, and so he was lost, adrift in nothingness.
Everything was both light and heavy, dark and also too bright. He was everywhere and nowhere, could go anywhere and was inexorably trapped in nothingness.
He thought of the black hole.
He thought of his mother.
He had not expected to be rescued then.
He did not expect to be rescued now.
This was his own fault entirely, for one thing. For another, he could not gather himself enough to expect anything.
There was a goldfish on his hand. He thought it might be able to lead him somewhere, if he could only find the words to ask it to help, but no words came.
Hob rushed back out of the flat with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder and Dream's flame-embellished overalls in hand. Dream had worn them the day before, and had wiped pastel dust from his hands onto them at the art store; even with his simply human eyes Hob could see a faint glittering residue against the black. Dream had almost certainly made the overalls themselves for his small self, which had to connect them to that part of himself, or so Hob hoped, though he would bring out the other contents of the bag if the overalls didn't work.
Delirium was perched on the stair railing halfway down in a way that defied gravity, but Hob didn't have time to wonder about that. He hurried down to her, holding out the overalls and unable to think of a word to say to explain.
"Hmmmm," Delirium said, wandering through about fourteen different notes and more syllables as her fingers spidered over the embroidery of the flames in a way that made Hob's eyes ache and his inner ear protest. Her fingers wandered up to the pocket where Matthew's feather and the little book had been kept, though Dream had carefully deposited both into today's overalls, which had little silver stars instead of flames.
"I think maybe..." Delirium let go of the overalls and they just floated in the air, and Hob realized that he was floating, too, and so was Delirium.
The stairs were gone, and the ground, and the inn, and London. The whole world, in fact, had vanished—or rather they had departed from it. They were in some sort of strange void, silent and empty and featureless, white as a blank page or an impenetrable fog.
And then Hob heard a tiny, snuffling breath, and he flung himself, with everything he had, toward where Dream must be. He touched a soft fluffy shock of hair first, and resisted the urge to grab. He ran his hand down over Dream's cheek—tearless and dry and still, but warm as it should be, at least—and down his throat to his shoulder, and from there he could hook two fingers under an overall strap and haul Dream in against him.
Keeping his grip on Dream with one hand, Hob reached into his messenger bag with the other, and pulled out the whole mass of red ribbon. He didn't even try to find an end, didn't bother about tying little knots to each of their wrists. He just wrapped all the length of it around them both, tangling them messily together in bonds that had held them to each other before and would not break now, when they were needed most.
"I've got you," Hob gasped, when the ribbon was all wound around them and he could use both arms to hold on to Dream. "I've got you, sweetheart. I'm here. I've got you. Let's just go home, you and me. I'll make you a cocoa, and we can watch a movie, what do you think of that?"
Dream twitched a little, and then Hob felt tiny fingernails digging into the skin of his arm. As if the sound was coming from a mile away in a gale he thought he heard Dream say, "With marshmallows?"
"Sure," Hob said, curling his whole body into a ball around Dream, feeling the ribbons pull tight in some places and drift loose around them in others. He had a horrible feeling that there was no air here, and no sun. Any minute his body was going to notice that and realize even he could not survive in a place like this. "Yes, darling, with marshmallows, let's just go home."
There were bound to be marshmallows down in the kitchen, or at the bar, or somewhere. It wouldn't matter if they could just go—
Hob took a sharp breath, and straightened up to find that he had landed on his feet in the kitchen. Dream was in his arms, blinking up at him, and the fifty yards of red ribbon was tangled around both of them. Over by the sink, already dropping one trailing end of the ribbon, stood Delirium, and Dream's other pair of overalls was puddled on the floor at her feet.
She was looking down at Matthew, who didn't seem to have budged since Hob set him down in the sink.
Hob felt tears run from his eyes, sudden and hot, and hugged Dream as tight as he could while slightly hampered by a loop of ribbon cutting painfully into his upper arm. "Thank God, love, thank—thank you, Dream. And you, Delirium."
Dream picked his head up, moving in slow motion, and looked over at his sister. Hob tightened his grip, but Dream just blinked and said, "Thank you, my sister. You have... saved me."
Then he looked up at Hob and just stared at him, and Hob stared back.
Dream's eyes were all black, no hint of blue, no trace of white. There was only darkness there—but not emptiness. Hob could feel how wonderingly Dream was looking at him, the way Hob might gaze up at the stars, just drinking in an awe-inspiring sight. The same way Hob was looking back at Dream right now, alive and in one piece in his arms. "Hob. My friend. You came for me."
"Course I did," Hob whispered, although a whole load of delayed panic was looming over him, and some distant part of his mind was categorizing that void he'd found Dream in as scarier than Odin and Loki and Lucifer and God and all the angels combined. "Here, let me just..."
Hob staggered over to pull out a kitchen chair and more or less collapse into it, and then started trying to figure out how to extricate himself and Dream from the ribbon. He was hampered somewhat by the need he still felt to be holding on tight to Dream with at least one arm at all times, but finally Delirium offered him one of the ends of the ribbon, and Hob started winding.
"No one came before," Dream said, his voice still eerily calm. "I was trapped, and I couldn't make a sound, and no one came."
Hob stopped winding the ribbon, holding what he'd gathered as he wrapped both arms around Dream again and squeezing him tight. "I'm sorry, darling. I didn't know. I wish I had come then too. I always want to find you."
It was no help, but nothing could help whatever had happened however long ago—this might be the answer to why his stranger had missed their usual meeting by thirty-two years, or it might be something that had happened thousands or millions of years ago.
Still. Someone ought to say they were sorry. Someone ought to tell him they bloody cared, and Hob could do that much.
Dream rested in his hold for a moment, and then wiggled a little, and looked over at his sister. She was perched on the kitchen bench now, sticking her finger into a coffee pod and licking the powder off.
"I did know you were stuck," she admitted. "Sort of. I don't always know all the things I know, Dreamy. But I think I did know, because you were gone-gone. And then we had a family dinner and everyone said you were supposed to be where you were and we shouldn't interfere. So I didn't look for you. And Destruction told us not to look for him, too, that was a family dinner. But he's been gone ever so much longer than you were. But not gone-gone really."
Hob tried to keep his expression still through all of that, but he couldn't help looking down at Dream, whose eyes were looking mostly human now, though the blackness at their center still looked deeper and darker than could possibly be right.
Dream looked up at him in the silence that fell after Delirium trailed off, and then whispered loudly, "I like you better than all my siblings put together."
Hob smiled, and felt obliged to point out, "I couldn't have found you on my own today—Delirium did help, this time."
"You made her," Dream said confidently. "If you didn't, she would have forgotten all about me."
"I would never forget you!" Delirium insisted, then tilted her head and added, "But I might have forgotten that there was this little eensy weensy piece of you here. I might have just remembered that most of you is in the Dreaming. You're not usually all in pieces like this."
Hob did not let himself think of the Dream in his arms left alone and forgotten in that void for who-knew-how-long. He squeezed Dream again and said, "Well, that didn't happen. Delirium helped me come and find you, and we brought you back home together. So that's a pretty good day, in the end."
"She still can't have my cocoa," Dream mumbled.
"The cocoa is all yours forever and ever," Hob said firmly. "I won't give any of it to anyone without your express permission. Just don't go running away from me like that again, or I'll have to drink it all myself with a lot of booze poured in, and then where will we be?"
"Nowhere," Dream said, and then giggled to himself like a drowsy chainsaw.
For a long while after he was back in the Waking world, in the bright warm familiar space of Hob's flat, in the secure hold of Hob's arms, Dream still felt as though he were partly back in the place between realms, floating in nothingness.
He was awake, and aware, and marveling at having been rescued so improbably, by Hob and by his youngest sister and by the two of them in combination. But he was also still drifting somewhere else, where he could feel nothing at all and expected nothing at all.
It was as though he had come apart, or been frozen. He was thawing in the warmth of summer in London in an upstairs flat; he was being pressed back together by the fundamental force of Hob's hugs. Things happened around him and he knew they were happening and responded appropriately, but he wasn't entirely present—and not in the usual way, where he was such a vast being that he was never entirely present anywhere.
He was small now. There was not very much of him at all. He could not be entirely present while parts of it were still frozen, still lost.
At some point the movie playing in front of him came into sharp focus—a recently-made sequel to the Mary Poppins movie, showing Mary returning unchanged—although played by a new actress—to the Banks family a generation later, to play essentially the same role all over again.
Dream's hands tightened on the mug of cocoa that Hob was helping him to steady. He took a sip of it, because it smelled very good, and it was possible that he was hungry, but he was also beginning to be annoyed again about how little a Mary Poppins story was actually about the title character. He realized that he was really, fully conscious, and the movie didn't matter at all compared to everything else.
Dream looked up at Hob, and found Hob watching him intently.
"You saved me," Dream said. "I was lost and you saved me. You came for me."
"Yeah, love," Hob said, and Dream was dimly aware that they had perhaps already had this conversation more than once. Hob showed no sign of being impatient with it, though, smiling fondly down at Dream and still holding him close and warm and safe.
Dream looked down at his own hands and saw the slightly-peeling goldfish tattoo on the back of the right one, and looked over at his sister, who was sitting, sort of, in the armchair, with her waving feet uppermost and head dangling, an empty pickle jar on the floor beside her along with two emptied coffee pods. Her gaze was intent on the movie.
"Delirium?"
She looked over at once, and she smiled. "There you are, little big brother!"
"Here I am," Dream agreed. "Thanks to you. You came and found me. You brought Hob to find me. I was lost and you saved me. I needed help and I couldn't ask for it, but you came anyway."
Delirium nodded, and flipped onto her feet and came over to perch on the edge of the couch beside him and Hob. "I know we're mostly bad at helping each other. But I love you. And I was glad I could help. And now you've found all the little bits of yourself, so you're ready to get back to being my big brother, aren't you? Even if you're little."
"I still cannot help you find Destruction," Dream said. "Not at this time."
Delirium looked at him for a while, just looking, as if he were something pleasant to gaze upon. Eventually she smiled again, as iridescent tears slipped from her eyes. "I know," she said. "That's okay. You need to do what you need to do."
Dream nodded. "I think it is important," he said slowly. It seemed self-evident to the point of absurdity, but he still felt as tentative as he sounded when he added, "I think... I think I am changing, in a way that matters."
"Well," she said, grinning brightly, the tears flapping away from her cheeks in the form of tiny dragonflies. "I know all about that! Except I can't tell you how to do it, because I don't really remember. But here's something for the journey, anyway!"
She leaned in and kissed all over his face until Dream was giggling helplessly and at the same time trying to push her away and trying to land his own kisses on her face. He succeeded a few times, at least, and when she drew back, he said, "Your hair is even prettier than Death's."
Delirium grinned brightly at him, and she said, "I'll tell her you said so!" and was abruptly gone.
He felt Hob jerk slightly and then Hob said, "Did—did all of that—"
"Yes," Dream said. "That's just the feeling of reality not having to fight against her influence anymore. It feels like waking up or attaining sobriety, but nothing changed in you just now, only her presence departing. Everything you remember happening in the last several hours did in fact happen."
"Huh," Hob said. "Weird. It's getting late, should we have supper? You must be ready for another round of cheese on toast by now, after all that excitement."
Dream, reminded, sipped more of the hot chocolate and shrugged. "After the movie?"
Hob had paused it at some point while Dream and Delirium were talking, he realized.
"Have you actually followed any of it?" Hob asked doubtfully.
"Not... as such," Dream admitted.
"Cheese on toast, then," Hob declared, and Dream sipped a little more hot chocolate and didn't object to being carried into the kitchen.
Dinner was a quiet affair. Dream seemed worn out by the day, and munched his way through his cheese on toast with his gaze slowly drifting around the kitchen. Sometimes his attention landed on Hob, and then he would just... look. Not like he expected anything, not with that stoned, shocky wonder of the moments just after they'd returned. It was just like he wanted to rest his eyes on Hob.
Hob had been doing that a lot for the last few days, so he could hardly object. The first time or two he said something, but Dream would just sort of nod and keep watching him, and Hob wasn't going to attempt to have an actual conversation with him like this. He could have filled the silence, but it didn't seem necessary tonight.
Dream eventually finished eating his cheese on toast, and ate a bare handful of raspberries, more like he was humoring Hob than like he wanted them. He did help with the washing up like usual, and tried to hide his little smiles when Hob told him he'd done a good job at it, but his cheeks were pink with happiness.
He held his arms up as soon as the last utensil was dried, and Hob gathered him up immediately into a firm hug, and found Dream was squeezing back the best he could, with his arms around Hob's neck and his legs wrapping around Hob too.
"Hob," Dream said. "I think I would like to sleep now. I am tired."
"You know, my friend," Hob said, "so am I." He scooped up the mass of red ribbon from where he'd left it on the table while they were eating, and took the both of them straight to bed.
Hob dreamed of roaming through ominous smeared-pastel landscapes, bruised skies and raw bleeding sunsets, sunrises that lit the clouds like a hectic flush, dark seething seas and long meandering shadows. Everything seemed foreboding, but there was never any actual danger to be seen.
Dream was always in his arms, firmly anchored by the red ribbon that connected their wrists. He was heavy against Hob's chest, leaving his hands and arms and shoulders aching with the strain, but the moment when Hob's grip would fail never quite arrived. He always found he could keep walking and keep holding on, and the colors faded one into another as he went.
He wanted to ask Dream what this place was, but he was never quite sure it was that kind of dream. Dream himself never seemed entirely present; he was only a warm sleeping weight in Hob's arms, infinitely precious but not available for light conversation or tour guiding.
That was all right. Hob didn't need to understand. The strange swirls of color were beautiful even while they were dreadful, and Dream was his dearest friend even while he slept in Hob's arms and weighed down his steps. Hob kept holding on, and kept walking.
Dream woke up in Hob's bed, in Hob's arms. Something felt vaguely wrong about the situation, but he couldn't remember what it was. He sat up, flinging the blanket back, and the cool air felt delicious against his skin.
Then it just felt cold, and like he was going to come apart, or like he would get separated from Hob again and get lost.
He had the ribbon, though. The ribbon was very important: it was red, and red was his color, the only color that really mattered. Dream wrapped it around his arm, above where it was tied. Around, and around, and around, and...
Hob woke up feeling a bit cold but also curled around something—someone—wonderfully warm.
He opened his eyes and blinked a bit, trying to make sense of what he saw. It was Dream he was curled around, Dream already awake before him and sitting up while Hob curled instinctively around him. Hob had put him to bed in his little soft pajama suit, black with a print of white stars all over, and a moon over his heart, and a few stray comets hidden among the rest.
Now he was all in red. Not red clothes—he'd wrapped the whole fifty yards of red ribbon around himself, and it was about as much of a tangled mess as Hob had made of it while floating in that impossible void outside reality.
Swathed in red satin ribbon, Dream was frowning down at his hands, running his fingers back and forth along the short length of ribbon connecting the whole mess around Dream to Hob's wrist. Hob sat up, and Dream turned his head at the movement, but a bit slowly, as if he was moving underwater; his eyes when they finally met Hob's were still blue, but glassy and not quite focused.
His cheeks were still very pink, and Hob made himself smile and tried not to wince too obviously when he set his hand over Dream's forehead to feel the fever roaring there.
Dream didn't ask what he was doing, just went on looking up at him in the same unquestioning way his eyes had settled on Hob while he was eating last night. Hob probably ought to have noticed this then, but Dream had only seemed tired, and Hob had been pretty well knackered himself.
"Dream," Hob said, and Dream immediately scowled and jerked away, falling over in his tangle of ribbon and pulling Hob after him.
"Don't call me that," Dream said, scowling, his words imperious but with a hint of a plaintive whine that made him sound nearly as young as he looked. "That's not what you call me."
"I'm sorry, my friend—"
"No!"
Hob raised his eyebrows and started trying to figure out how to untangle them. It seemed clear that whatever state he was in, Dream wasn't going to be able to tell Hob what was going on, so Hob would just have to manage until he could. "No? What do I say, then?"
"You say, good morning, love," Dream insisted. "And you call me darling and sweetheart."
Hob found the end of the ribbon nearest his wrist and started unwinding it from around Dream. This was strange and concerning—and probably Delirium's doing, given the timing—but he wasn't going to make it better by making Dream more upset, so he kept his voice warm and steady when he spoke. "Good morning, love. You certainly have gotten yourself into a tangle, haven't you?"
Dream narrowed his eyes, and Hob couldn't help smiling despite the strangeness. "Darling," he added, dropping a kiss on Dream's hot cheek, "Sweetheart." Dream presented both of his hands for kissing, and Hob kissed his palms, folding little fingers down to hold the kisses in, for all the good kisses would do against this impossible fever.
One thing at a time. He had to get Dream out of the ribbon so they could both get out of bed. Dream might not have bodily functions, but Hob did, and he could see that getting two minutes for a private piss might be a matter of some negotiation while Dream was like this.
"Sweetheart darling love," Dream mumbled to himself, admiring his freshly-kissed hands while Hob managed to sit up again and resume unwinding. "My Hob," he added, a little louder, squirming over to prop his head on Hob's calf, entirely unconcerned with the way Hob had to shift him this way and that to get at the loops of ribbon.
"Of course yours," Hob murmured back, giving his nose a little tweak as he wrapped his end of the ribbon around his own arm to keep it out of the way. "Who else's would I be, hm?"
Dream frowned up at him for a moment, glazed eyes tracking nothing in particular, and then he shook his head and repeated, "My Hob. Only mine."
"All yours, my sweet darling love," Hob agreed, folding over to drop another kiss on his hot little forehead, and Dream seemed satisfied with that for now.
The unwinding took a good fifteen minutes, and was interrupted occasionally by Dream holding up a little hand, or tugging on whatever part of Hob's shirt he could reach, so that Hob would give him another kiss and another endearment. Dream repeated each one quietly to himself, and by the end of fifteen minutes Hob could feel his heart in little shattered pieces and absolutely was not allowing himself to wonder how rarely Dream had had such things said to him, that it was all he wanted now when he was feeling so poorly.
When he had Dream all freed of the ribbon—or at least, untangled from it, as it was still anchored to his wrist and to Hob's—he asked, "Should I untie this?"
Dream looked up at him with an impossibly forlorn expression—Hob would swear his eyes had gotten bigger, like a cartoon character's, but he couldn't look away from them to really check. "Are you still mine? All mine?"
Hob sighed. "All yours forever, darling, but I do need two minutes in the bathroom. I'll leave it tied, shall I? I won't be long at all."
Dream heaved a sigh and held up both hands to be kissed. He couldn't seem to summon the energy for more upset than that, which was almost more alarming than the rest of it. Hob hurried through the bare minimum of morning bathroom time, wracking his brain for what he could usefully do for Dream.
It had to be something Delirium had done—she'd said something, just before she vanished, about helping him on his way. And even if not for that great obvious clue, Dream wasn't human; he couldn't possibly get sick the way a real child would. The fever was something metaphysical, not something Hob could treat with any of the medicines that he was vaguely aware existed for this sort of thing nowadays. He certainly couldn't take Dream to a doctor; that was bound to be an even worse idea than letting one get too close a look at himself.
The main thing would just be to look after him through it, then. He would keep Dream as comfortable as possible, and continue calling him pet names and snuggling him until he was back to himself. Or at least the version of himself that was one meter tall and wanted to eat cheese on toast three meals a day.
With that settled in his mind, Hob headed back to the bedroom, where Dream had wrapped a few loops of ribbon around his hand and was absently gnawing on it. On the ribbon bit, at least, not his own skin, but still.
"How about some breakfast, love?" Hob tried, scooping him up and unwinding him again.
"Not hot," Dream said, and then abruptly burst into tears. Hob hadn't even managed to get out of the bedroom, so he sat down on the bed, and cuddled Dream until he stopped crying, which only took about a minute and a half this time.
"What was that about then, sweeting?" Hob asked.
"I don't want hot toast," Dream said into his shoulder, sounding so mournful that Hob was torn between laughing and bursting into tears himself. "But then I thought about cold toast. Don't make me eat cold toast with cold cheese!"
Hob hugged him tighter and absolutely did not laugh or cry. "I would never, darling. I'm sure we can find you something lovely and cold to eat for breakfast. Strawberries and cream, how about that?"
Dream's whole body jolted a little, but he didn't sit up as he would have yesterday, or wriggle out of Hob's grip and run to the kitchen. Today he just nodded against Hob's shoulder and said, still mournfully, "That sounds nice."
Hob stood up again, resuming the trip to the kitchen, and Dream whispered against his shoulder, "Darling, sweeting, love," like a miser counting over his coins or a dragon admiring his hoard. Hob held him tight and did not stop for his own weeping fit.
Strawberries and cream, with sugar sprinkled on top, was nice. And it was red, which was good. Dream felt very red himself today.
Hob made his own breakfast of eggs and toast, and ate it, in the time it took Dream to make his thoughtful way through half the bowl of strawberries and cream. He had to stop after each bite to lick grains of sugar from his fingers, or trickles of red juice. And it all tasted very good but he did not seem to be as hungry for anything as he'd been before.
And Hob was so very far away, on the other side of the table.
Dream swiped a cut strawberry through the whipped cream, and held it out to Hob.
Hob smiled that warm, soft smile—not red at all, a very cozy sort of deep dark brown—and then he leaned across the table and wrapped his hand around Dream's. He ate the strawberry and cream right from his fingers before pressing a slightly sticky kiss to Dream's hand. "Thank you for sharing, love."
"Love," Dream echoed to his hand as he took it back and licked it clean again. He could not seem to keep count of how many times Hob said it; he didn't know how many times would be enough. Every bit of the hunger he didn't feel for food, he felt for those little words that Hob gave him so freely, so easily.
Eventually he got near enough to the bottom of the bowl to feel no more interest in eating. Hob took the bowl as soon as Dream pushed it away, ate the last couple of strawberries, and washed it, all before Dream had the thought that he should be drying. Hob hadn't waited for him, hadn't brought him over to the sink or given him a towel. He had done it all without Dream and now Dream couldn't help at all.
He burst into tears again, and at once Hob was there, gathering him up and holding him, rocking him and whispering soft words to him—new ones, among the ones Dream had named to him. "Dear heart," he murmured, and "my joy," even though Dream was crying and not joyful at all, and yet he could feel the amber-brown truth of the word, curling warm around him. He was a joy to Hob—Hob's own joy—even if he was not to anyone else including himself. He was dear to Hob's heart. He was Hob's, as Hob was his.
When he was still again, Hob murmured, "What did I do this time, my dereworthy darling?"
"I dry the dishes," Dream said. "You didn't wait for me, you did all of them!"
"Oh, love, I'm sorry," Hob said, rocking him again. "I didn't think you'd want to today, I thought you were feeling a bit poorly and would rather just rest. But here, there are a few left, do you want to dry those?"
"Poorly?" Dream echoed, remembering that there was something that had felt wrong to him when he woke up today. Maybe red was not quite the word for how he was feeling, or not the only word. "What's poorly?"
"Hmm, do you feel a bit tired even though you've just woken up?" Hob said. "Or like everything is more difficult than usual, or takes longer? Or like you're just perishing hot and it makes you not feel like doing anything at all? Or like your body hurts here or there or maybe all over, even when there's no reason for it?"
Dream did feel all those things, and something more, something bigger than any of them. Something very wrong that he could not name, and not being able to name it was part of it.
But Hob was here. Hob had come and found him when he was lost, and untangled him when he was all tangled up, and made him strawberries and cream when he couldn't eat toast. Whatever was wrong, Hob could fix it.
"I feel poorly," Dream declared, and found he was crying a bit again. "Hob, I feel poorly."
"I know, love," Hob said, rocking him and kissing his hair. "Happens to the best of us sometimes. That's all right, I've got you. Do you want to dry the last bowl for me, or shall we leave the dishes and go watch a movie?"
"Not Mary Poppins," Dream said firmly. "A different one."
"I believe I know just the thing," Hob said, and carried him to the sofa.
Chapter 12
Hob laid himself down on the sofa, settling Dream on his chest where he could fall asleep or cry at will, since those seemed likely to be his two main activities today. Dream nestled in and turned his face expectantly toward the television; this time Hob didn't faff about, and quickly pulled up The Princess Bride.
He did pick his head up and give Hob a considering look over the establishing shots of the kid lying in bed, too ill to play, though it wasn't the withering glare it might have been any other day.
"Wait for it, wait for it," Hob whispered, smiling. "It's going somewhere."
Hob tilted his head to watch Dream's face when the grandfather arrived with a book, so he saw his eyes go round and his lips part in wonder.
"It's a story about a story?" Dream whispered.
Hob wrapped his arms tight around him and hugged him. "I knew you'd like it."
Another time Dream might have grumped that he didn't like it yet, but today he wound his fingers into Hob's t-shirt and went on watching with those wide, wondering eyes. It wasn't the same rapt attention he had given Mary Poppins—he faded out from time to time—but he was clearly enjoying it, right up until Westley was strapped down to a table and tortured, and then he let out a scream along with Westley and hid his face in Hob's chest.
Hob winced and paused the movie. "Sorry, love. He's going to be all right, and—"
"It felt like that," Dream sobbed into his chest. "It didn't look like that but it felt like that! But I couldn't say anything! I couldn't let them know!"
Hob sat up sharply, hugging Dream all the while, as a cold horror ran down his spine. Dream had said it yesterday—No one came before. I was trapped, and I couldn't make a sound, and no one came.
Hob hadn't let himself think too hard about what that meant, especially the part where Delirium had said she knew, that all Dream's siblings knew, and that they had decided whatever was happening to Dream was as it should be, and none of them would help him. While he was being tortured. While he couldn't make a sound.
"I'm sorry, darling," Hob whispered. "I'm so sorry. We can stop—"
"Does he get out? Will he get out?" Dream demanded. "Will he find her?"
"Yes, I promise," Hob pressed kisses to Dream's hair between the words. "Yes, this is a story about true love, so even when it seems like he won't get out, he will, and he will find her, and they will live happily ever after. I promise you. I wouldn't show you a movie where it all went wrong."
"It's not her fault," Dream sniffled. "She doesn't know. She would do something if she knew, but she doesn't know."
"She would fight all of them herself if she knew what they were doing," Hob promised. "She would never stop looking for him. She loves him just as much as he loves her, and she would never forget that."
"I want to see that part," Dream decided, squirming in Hob's grip so that he could see the television again. "Let's watch it some more."
Dream let out little teakettle keening sounds through the rest of the scene with Westley on the table, but Hob didn't try to shush him, just kept on holding him close. He could make all the sounds he wanted, here and now.
Hob, as always, was caught by surprise by I want my father back, you son of a bitch, and shed a few tears of his own for that. He was almost immediately distracted by Dream crawling up, planting his knees in Hob's gut, and setting his hands—even those felt hot—on Hob's cheeks. "Are you all right, my Hob? Are you poorly?"
Hob couldn't help smiling, blinking away those tears. He reached up to ruffle Dream's hair. "No, love. Just always makes me think of all the people I'd like to have back if I could."
Dream nodded solemnly and then folded down a bit clumsily to mash kisses against Hob's wet cheeks. "It's all right," Dream said seriously. "I'm here. You have me."
In an entirely different mood, Hob might have pointed out that there were a lot of other people Hob missed, but then in another mood Dream wouldn't have been awkwardly but very earnestly trying to console him. "That's right, dear heart, I've got you back. And you've got me back. So we're doing all right today, aren't we?"
"All right," Dream agreed, flopped back down on Hob's chest, and was asleep before Hob had managed to draw a full breath.
Hob lay still and watched the rest of the movie play, not even a little bit tempted to move.
Dream woke up and saw that the television had returned to the screen where Hob had selected The Princess Bride. He had missed the end of the movie.
Hob was lying still under him, resting one hand on Dream's back.
Dream tried to swallow, and couldn't quite. "Hob," he said, and his voice croaked. "My mouth feels poorly."
There was a little pause, and then Hob firmed his grip around Dream and got up off the couch, saying as he did, "Well, let's see what we can do about that."
Hob fixed him a cup of something to drink that tasted a bit orange and a bit bubbly-sharp but mostly just sweet, and Dream gulped it down eagerly. Hob kissed his head and refilled the cup, but this time Dream only needed another sip of the sweetness; his mouth and throat felt well enough again, though the rest of him was still poorly.
He nestled into Hob's shoulder again and said, "I missed the ending."
"We can go back and watch it from where you left off," Hob said easily, heading back toward the sofa with the cup in his hand. "Or just start over."
"Start over," Dream decided. He liked this movie. He didn't want to rush to be through with it.
They ended up watching The Princess Bride six times before the day was done. Hob didn't mind particularly; it made a comforting backdrop to the little trials and travails. Sometime during the second run, Dream began to shiver, and Hob pulled down the blanket from the back of the sofa to wrap him in. The third run was interrupted for a lunch of ice cream and, when that didn't help Dream's overheating enough to stop him lying on the floor whimpering, a tepid bath that Dream fell asleep in.
When they cycled around to another bath after three more viewings, the sun was nearly down, and Dream was willing to put on pajamas once Hob toweled him off and anointed his bruises. The ones on his shoulders were showing signs of improvement, the ones on his knees nearly gone, but the dark mess of bruising over his heart looked like it was only getting worse. Hob's own heart ached as he murmured comfort and applied arnica as if that could do any good.
But he had to believe that the act, if not the ingredients, would help. How else could Dream come to know he was loved but by Hob doing all the loving things he could?
Once he was in his pajamas—this suit was all black silk with white piping, and white buttons up the front—and the ribbon was tied around his wrist again, Hob laid him down on his usual side of the bed. Dream starfished on the mattress, and Hob didn't even try to cover him with a blanket before he headed back to the bathroom to see to his own needs. He had never changed out of last night's pajamas, but once he brushed his teeth and splashed some water on his face, he realized how clammy and uncomfortable they felt. He changed into fresh clothes of his own, untying and then retying the ribbon as necessary, before he lay down across from Dream.
It was only when he settled his head on the pillow that Hob realized Dream wasn't already asleep; his forehead was scrunched into a tiny frown, his eyes barely open, just reflecting the smallest gleam of light.
"What feels worst, love?" Hob murmured, reaching across to touch his cheek and then his forehead. He felt no hotter than he had coming out of the bath, at least.
"You went away," Dream murmured.
The red ribbon had been tied between them all day, but clearly that wasn't enough reassurance now; even when he was hot enough that he needed to be submerged in water, Dream hadn't liked to let Hob out of his sight, and he had only slept while Hob was holding him.
"Come here, then," Hob said, scooting a bit closer so he could reel Dream in by his little reaching hands. Hob curled over on his side and tucked Dream in close. Dream nuzzled in against his chest, took one deep breath, and went limp.
Hob lay there for a while trying to remember the last time he'd been ill himself. He hadn't caught anything going around in a few hundred years; even the dodgiest street food or most suspect leftovers never caused him a twinge these days.
Back in his soldiering days he'd had a few rounds of assorted camp dysenteries, but even then he'd been impervious to most of the common coughs and colds and such. The last time he remembered being really ill was the plague the first time around, but... he didn't ever think about that, and he didn't want to start now.
Before that, though, he was sure he had been a time or two, when he was small. He supposed if he had been ill enough for it to be notable, it had also been bad enough that he wouldn't ever have remembered much about it. He rarely attempted to remember any part of his own childhood; Robyn's early years had stirred up what memories he still had two hundred and some years on, whether Hob willed or nilled it.
Nowadays all he could muster up was the memory of remembering back then.
Hob could really only call one thing to mind that didn't feel like just a story he'd passed down from himself to himself over the centuries. He had just one scrap of sense-memory from his childhood, one ordinary moment out of thousands.
His mother had been sitting near the fire, and Hob had curled up on the floor beside her feet, out of the way of her spinning and on the other side of her from the hearth so she wouldn't tug him away and scold him. He didn't, in the memory, feel particularly small or young, but then he would have been as big and as old as he'd ever been at the time. He did remember how neatly he fit in that spot, how his cheek rested against her thigh, and he could smell her, the kind of familiar body-smell that most people had spent the past hundred years frantically scrubbing off and covering up.
It was the one part of the memory that felt truly real, when he could remember it clear enough that the scent of her came back to him, warm and rich and human and alive.
She hadn't had time to be cuddling him or carrying him about as he did Dream, but she would drop her left hand to his head now and then, when she could pause in her spinning for a moment. And she had told him stories, he was almost certain. Not anything particularly improving or educational—no Bible stories or fables with morals. She had told him stories about being brave and adventurous. She had taught him to be curious, to wake up every day wondering who and what he might discover.
He couldn't remember any particular story she had told him, only the fact that she had; he couldn't remember if the moment he remembered was a specific moment or the accumulation of many, whether she had spoken to him as she spun or kept silent.
But he could remember how she smelled, and how it felt to tuck himself safely in against her body, and he could remember her hand sometimes resting for a moment on the top of his head.
Hob wasn't aware of the slip from memory into dreaming, but at some point he looked across his mother's lap and saw Dream, small enough to fit on her other side. But that meant that he was much too close to the fire, practically in the flames. Even before Dream made a sound of pain Hob was lunging toward him, out of that dream and into the waking world, where Dream was writhing across the bed, whimpering with his eyes shut tight.
"Oh, love," Hob sighed, trying to scoop him up, which only turned the whimpers into outright cries. Dream struggled against him, and Hob could not bear the thought of raising a fresh bruise on that petal-soft skin. He gave up and let Dream writhe away, and then ran to the bathroom, wetting down a few flannels to bring back to the bed.
Dream quieted a little as Hob swabbed him off, and he realized that he was saying, almost chanting, "I'm here, darling, I'm here, I won't leave you."
By the time the flannels were all nearly as warm as Dream himself, Dream had quieted enough that he only whimpered as Hob gathered him up and took them into the bathroom again. Dream startled awake—or nearer to it—when Hob turned the light on, and curled into Hob with a whimper.
"I'm here, lovie, I've got you, I won't let go," Hob murmured, filling the tub again. He rearranged them so that Dream's feet caught a bit of the pouring water on its way down, for whatever cooling effect that would have. "You'll feel better soon, sweeting, you'll—"
He couldn't say what it was: the memory of his own mother so near the surface, or just some trick of Dream's weight on his lap, or the accumulation of a day of helplessness over a feverish child, but for a moment everything around him blurred.
Hob kept talking, because for a moment it was 1586, and he was holding Robyn, waiting out the same ague that Eleanor was taken with. Hob had only been able to try to keep him cool—even the physician had agreed that such a small child could not be bled to fight the fever. Someone had asked him about sending for a priest to shrive the boy, and Hob had refused.
There had only been one help he wanted to call upon: he had wanted to find some way to reach his friend, three years early, and beg his help to save Robyn's life. A priest, after all, would say Robyn had gone on to a better world if he should die that night in Hob's arms—he had been christened already, and too young for sin. But Hob would take no comfort from that. Hob had wanted only this life for Robyn, to keep him in the world. It would have been monstrous to lose him so young.
Hob was dimly aware that that night had passed. Robyn's fever had broken, and Robyn had made a full and rambunctious recovery while Eleanor lingered abed, not in danger but needing her rest, for more than a week afterward. Hob had spent much of every day chasing after his son, coming to love him more and more with every hour and letting himself forget what a fragile creature he dared to love.
Here he was again, holding someone small and feverish and fragile in his arms, and he did not know if he had done everything he could to help. He had been certain, in the light of day, that nothing could really harm Dream, that this was a gift in the guise of a curse, and would pass in time.
Now, deep in the night, he could only wonder: what if he was wrong? What if Dream didn't need consolation—what if he needed help?
Hob lowered him into the half-full bath, keeping an arm curled around him so that Dream could relax into the water without his head going under or water getting into his ears, which he didn't like even when he was otherwise perfectly well. Hob let his own head hang down, watching the water level continue to slowly rise, and tried to think of what he possibly could do if Dream needed help.
Hob had stayed well away from all things magical for a long time now. He was aware of a few other fellow immortals, but didn't know how to contact them, and had no idea if they had powers or connections that he'd dare to call upon for Dream's sake, when Dream was so much more vulnerable than he had been even a couple of days ago when facing Odin.
Dream had the feather that let Matthew find him, but so far as Hob knew even Dream couldn't use the feather to call Matthew. He had sent Matthew on his mission to Odin from inside the Dreaming, while he slept that first night in Hob's bed. Dream clearly wasn't able to sleep well enough to reach the Dreaming, and even within his realm he might feel the effects of whatever Delirium had done to him. Dream as he had been today seemed unlikely to know how to fix this, even if he were in a place where he could.
There was one other thing Dream had, which he kept always close to him like the feather. There was the book of Dream's family, which was clearly more than just a book. Those pages for Night and Time had ensnared Hob somehow, and each of the pages for his siblings probably also held more than just those images. He'd noticed at the time how hurriedly Dream had turned pages and then set the book aside after Hob tried to touch one of the pictures.
He didn't want to think of what would have happened if he touched the picture of Night, or of Time.
But if he touched the picture of Delirium, would he be able to ask her what was happening to Dream and when it would be over?
On the other hand, if he touched the picture of Delirium, would Hob himself be affected? Were all the pages traps for unwary humans?
Hob knelt there by the tub, tipping handfuls of water over the crown of Dream's head without letting any run into his eyes, watching his little grimaces of discomfort slowly relax into something like sleep.
He needed to do something.
There was only one way he could even possibly attempt to do anything.
When Dream dozed off again, Hob shut off the water and shoved a few towels in around Dream to keep him propped up, and then ran back to the bedroom.
He had helped Dream change into his pajamas the night before the fever became obvious, and at that point Dream had taken feather and book from his overall pocket and tucked them into a pocket inside his suitcase. They had stayed there all day today, with Dream still in his pajamas and apparently unconcerned with them.
Now Hob opened the suitcase and reached cautiously into that pocket. He let out a shaky breath in relief when his fingers brushed feather and board book, and he carefully withdrew the book and then hurried back to the bathroom.
Dream was lying still in the bath, so still that Hob dropped the book and laid one hand on his chest, the other on his cheek. He told himself he was being ridiculous—Dream was still visibly flushed pink and also wasn't human—but he breathed under Hob's hand. His cheek was warm, and after a couple of breaths he pressed into Hob's palm.
"All right," Hob said, a little too loud in the night-quiet. "All right. I..."
He looked around and saw the book on the floor, fallen open to the first pages Dream had shown him: his elder siblings, Destiny and Death.
Hob's gaze went to Death first—she had brought him to Hob, and he was almost certain that she must be the reason for his own immortality.
But sister or not, benefactor or not, he could not call Death closer to a sick child. He could not.
Destiny... Destiny knew everything, Dream had said. Destiny, surely, would know why this was happening, and what should be done. He had to know what was going to happen; that was the whole point of him.
Hob didn't let himself wonder whether this would be useless. If it was, he would know soon enough. He took his hand off of Dream's chest, wiped it dry on his shirt, and pressed his fingers to the gleaming book in the picture of Destiny.
"Destiny? I suppose you know who I am and what I'm doing, and that I'm here with your little brother and he's—poorly—" Hob's voice cracked on the word, remembering Dream saying it and bursting into tears as if he'd never felt anything like it before.
There was a rustle behind him, an unmistakable presence, and Hob jerked his hand away from the book and twisted to look up, keeping his hand still on Dream's cheek.
A figure shrouded in gray filled the bathroom doorway, a book held in his arm and connected to his wrist with a chain. His face was invisible even with Hob looking up from his knees.
"Is this how he's supposed to be?" Hob asked, when the silence had stretched unbearably. "Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?"
"This is all as it appears in my book," Destiny said, which seemed like a yes. "You are correct to surmise that Delirium intended to encourage Dream further along his chosen path. She was... being helpful, as best she could."
"Is he going to get better?" Hob demanded, dimly aware that he probably shouldn't be addressing the actual personification of actual Destiny in quite this way, but also miles and centuries past caring.
"He will," Destiny intoned.
Hob nodded, and couldn't figure out what to say other than Thanks, you can go now, which he was very sure was not the right thing to say at all.
He looked down at Dream again, and found Dream looking back at him.
"Hob?" Dream croaked.
"Hey, love," Hob said. "How are you feeling?"
Dream wrinkled his nose. "Wet. And poorly."
"Yeah," Hob said. "It's been that kind of day, hasn't it? Can you sit up, do you think?"
Dream held up his arms, and Hob wasn't going to get out of this without being drenched no matter what he did, so he gathered Dream up to perch him on the edge of the tub. He twisted, and—
There was a towel. One of his own towels, from his hall closet, being held out to him by Destiny, who had evidently known Hob would need that.
"Ta," Hob muttered, and turned back to dry Dream off—but Dream had spotted his brother, and was staring up at him with those glassy eyes.
He was frowning.
Hob wrapped the towel around him, but that didn't distract him a whit.
"You," Dream said, in his tiny croaky wavering sick kid voice, "are not a very good brother."
Destiny gave a stiff, shallow bow. "I was not one, when I came into existence. I must fit all acts of brotherhood into the interstices of my function, when and as I may. It is apparent to me that my efforts are rarely satisfactory, but I am only and exactly what I am."
Dream blinked up at him for a long moment while Hob rubbed him dry, wondering whether there was any point to getting him into another clean set of clothes. Destiny hadn't said when Dream would get better, and that pink flush on his cheeks was already starting to intensify, though that might have been to do with the way he was glaring at his brother.
His expression brightened very suddenly. "You did save me, though. I tried to talk to Mother and she—but you brought me out. There was no way out, but you summoned me to you."
"I did what I had to do," Destiny said, with the cadence of a proverb, or a prayer. "And you will recall that—"
"But you helped me," Dream insisted, starting to frown again. "Even if it was because you had to because of your book, that's you. You helped me. No one else could, but you did."
There was a long, long pause, and then Destiny sat down in the doorway, legs crossed and book in his lap. "So I did. And I was glad of it, my brother."
Dream leaned into Hob for a moment, and then, quick as a cat, he launched himself out of Hob's arms and into Destiny's lap, wet pajamas and trailing wet ribbon and all. He giggled in rusty-edged triumph and flung his arms around Destiny's shrouded neck.
Destiny folded in the arm not holding the book and patted Dream's back, saying, "I sat down so that you could do that. This, too, was written."
"But you still did it!" Dream said, sing-song with happiness. He released Destiny's neck and sank down into his lap, looking up at him with those wide, wide eyes. "Will you stay for a little while?"
"For so long as I may," Destiny said, and raised a hand to rest it on Dream's forehead.
Destiny's hand on his forehead felt cool, and his lap was nice and comfortable. It was cooler than sitting in Hob's lap, which probably wouldn't be nice most of the time, but Dream was feeling poorly and perishing hot. Destiny felt just right, as if it were written that he should be.
Dream had never sat like this with Destiny before, he was certain. Destiny would probably say that was because it was never in the book before, but it was never in the book before because Dream had never been just like this before, and Destiny... Destiny was letting him be how he was now, even though it was different to how he was before.
And Destiny had saved him once, just like Hob and Delirium had saved him. Just like Alianora had saved him, once, when Desire sent her to him. Just like Desire...
He didn't want to think about Desire.
His thoughts wouldn't hold still, and even Destiny's hand on his head didn't feel so nice and cool anymore. Dream kicked his feet sharply against the bathroom rug, squirming a little.
Destiny said, "Your fever is rising again, little brother. You will feel better in the water."
Dream twisted away enough to look up at him, where he could see as much of Destiny's face as he ever could. "Are you leaving? Like Mary Poppins?"
Destiny didn't seem to know exactly what Dream meant, and Dream couldn't think of the words to explain.
From behind Dream, Hob said, as his hand settled on Dream's back, holding him up, "He means, will you be all alone when you go? Will you be lonely there?"
Destiny's mouth curled up just the tiniest bit, but Dream was close enough to see his brother smile. "I am never alone in my garden, little brother. And I will not be lonely when I go. But you may always visit me there, if you are concerned."
"Always?" Dream said, with vague thoughts of showing up just to bother his brother, who was always perfectly in order. He had a sense of why he wouldn't, didn't, hadn't, but it slipped away from him in the pleasure of seeing Destiny's smile curl up by another tiny fraction.
"Always," Destiny agreed. "Though Lord of What Is Not that you are, you have never much liked spending time in the Garden of What Is and Shall and Must Be."
"Hmmm," Dream said, because he knew his brother was right—his brother was always right—but he could not quite hold everything Destiny said and meant in his mind. "But I'm allowed."
"You are invited and welcome," Destiny promised, and Destiny always meant what he said. "But for now you are poorly, and you should have another bath."
Dream sighed, because Destiny was right again, and thinking hard about his brother not being Mary Poppins was far too much effort. He was tired and hot and didn't want to do anything; he leaned himself back against Hob's supporting hand, and Hob laughed a little and scooped him up and into the bath.
By the time Dream looked back toward the door to say goodbye, Destiny was already gone.
Hob, though, Hob was right there kneeling by the tub and looking down at him with a little worried line on his forehead.
"It's okay, Hob," Dream told him. "I'm still here with you."
"Well, thank you very much for that, my joy," Hob said, smiling and making different lines on his face that Dream liked much better. Dream looked and looked at them until he couldn't keep his eyes open anymore, and then he didn't.
Estimated final word count: 140,000ish
Rating: Explicit
Relationships: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus/Hob Gadling, Dream & his siblings, Hob & the Endless, Dream & Orpheus, Dream & Daniel
Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Hob Gadling, Daniel Hall, Destiny of the Endless, Death of the Endless, Matthew the Raven, Odin (The Sandman), Delirium of the Endless, Lucienne, Despair of the Endless, Desire of the Endless, Orpheus (The Sandman), Destruction of the Endless, Lyta Hall
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Sandman: Brief Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Everyone Lives, Age Regression/De-Aging, Slow Burn, Like the Slowest Burn, Like One of Them Is a Pre-Sexual Child for the First 100,000 Words of the Fic, What If The Red String Of Fate Was Also A Toddler Leash, Touch-Starved Dream of the Endless, Protective Hob Gadling, Cuddling & Snuggling, Caretaking, Bathing, Bed Sharing, Crying, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Injuries, Illness, Depression, Suicidal Ideation, Explicit Sexual Content, Masturbation, Not Exactly Loss of Virginity But Not Not That?, Happy Ending
Chapters 1-4 on Dreamwidth
Chapters 5-8 on Dreamwidth
This fic is also posting (though more slowly) on AO3!
Check out all the gorgeous art by fishfingersandscarves on Tumblr!
Chapter 9
Dream woke up in Hob's bed in the long slanting light of morning. Hob was still in the bed, or possibly back in it; he was peering at his phone, occasionally tapping at it, and the red ribbon was once again tied around his wrist.
The other end was tied around Dream's. He stroked his fingers over the crumpled places where previous knots had been tied, noting how Hob had never pulled it too tight; it was always exactly firm around his wrist without being uncomfortable. He considered pointing out to Hob that he had slept several times now, and was quite sure he wouldn't get lost in the Dreaming—indeed, he wasn't sure he'd visited there at all in the night just past.
But if he told Hob that, Hob would stop tying them together every time Dream slept, and... Dream liked that. He liked waking up to the evidence that Hob still wanted him here—that Hob wanted him to come back, and wanted Dream to be instantly able to find Hob when he did.
Worse, Hob might ask him whether he meant that he didn't want Hob to use the ribbon anymore. Even if he didn't answer, Hob might see the truth on his face.
Dream was... not very good at controlling himself, in this form.
Indeed, he found his face flushing hot just at the thought of Hob's imaginary concern and even more imaginary understanding, and he twisted sharply over to bury his face in the pillow. Naturally, this caught Hob's attention, and he felt Hob's hand come to rest on his back. "Not ready to be awake just yet, love?"
"I'm awake," Dream said into the pillow.
Hob didn't laugh out loud, but Dream could hear the smile in his voice, "Yes, clearly you are."
Dream had to peek then, just to see if his expression was as warm as it sounded. He accidentally met Hob's eyes, which were crinkled at the corners with a look of such fond amusement that Dream had to hide his face again immediately.
"Uh-oh," Hob said, and Dream felt a blanket settle over him. "Where's Dream gone? Has he gone off all by himself again?"
There was a part of Dream that wanted to be irritated with Hob playing such an infantile game with him, but it was drowned out by the part that was already giggling into the pillow and wriggling down the bed as though he might really be hidden from Hob by a blanket Hob had covered him with.
"Let's see, I know he told me how to find him," Hob continued, and the mattress shook a bit under Dream as Hob moved around on the bed. "He's got to be here somewhere, doesn't he? He wouldn't just leave me all alone."
Dream had done that many times, without a second thought, leaving Hob for a hundred years at a time, but there was no hint of real resentment in Hob's voice. There was none of the poison under the sweetness that such a remark from one of his siblings would have carried.
Hob's hand patted gently around all the parts of the pillow where Dream's head wasn't, and Dream squirmed down a little farther.
"Hmmm, not there," Hob said. "I know there's a way, though..."
Dream yanked on the ribbon still tied to his own wrist.
"Oh, yes!" Hob said. "Stupid me, there it is!"
Dream watched from under the blanket as the ribbon began to slither away, as Hob evidently began reeling it in. Again the thought intruded that this was very silly, and childish, and he ought not to put up with it, but the small body he wore was vibrating slightly in anticipation of what would happen when Hob pulled the ribbon all the way in.
Dream knew that he should wait, that he would spoil it if he didn't let Hob finish whatever he was doing. As soon as he thought of that, the fear of spoiling it collided with the eager anticipation, and then he couldn't hold still at all. Dream burst up out of the blanket, landing on his feet on the bed, throwing his arms up and not making a sound.
Hob was sitting on his side of the bed, a great length of red ribbon wrapped in tidy loops from his hand to his elbow, but he immediately looked up and laughed as Dream popped up. He didn't seem to notice that Dream didn't know quite what to say to continue the game.
"There you are!" Hob cried, his whole face lit with his smile as he spread his arms, only a little hampered by the ribbon wrapped around the left one. "Dream! I missed you! How have you been?"
"I missed you!" Dream echoed back before he even considered what would be a coherent answer. He flung himself into Hob's lap, which earned another laugh and a tight hug, and Hob smacking kisses against Dream's hair.
"Well, now here we are together again, so that's all right," Hob said. "What would you like for breakfast, my friend?"
Dream shrugged, snuggling into Hob. He was confident that Hob would make him something he liked, and it would probably involve melted cheese on top of bread.
"Hmm," Hob said. "I was thinking of getting out the blender, making a big smoothie with lots of spinach and kale..."
Dream leaned back and squinted at Hob. He did not particularly look as if he really meant that. Dream was not at all sure he owned a blender and was confident that there had been no spinach or kale in the kitchen the day before.
"Or we could make some more cheese on toast," Hob offered. "Maybe with apple slices?"
"Yes, please," Dream agreed, snuggling back into Hob's shoulder, and he felt Hob's silent laugh shaking him just a little.
"Right you are," Hob agreed, and so they began a new day.
Hob was a little scared to try it, but the day had gotten off to a solid start, so once they had all the breakfast things sorted, Hob set out Dream's new sketchbooks and pastels on the coffee table and said, "Why don't you give these a try while I take a shower?"
Dream looked up at him solemnly. "Ten minutes?"
"It might be fifteen," Hob allowed. "You want me to set a timer?"
Dream shook his head, glancing sideways at the paper and pastels. "I can wait. I won't make a fuss again."
"Well, if you feel a fuss coming on, just," Hob gestured, "come right over to the bathroom door and knock on it, right?"
Dream nodded, gaze still fixed on the paper.
Hob decided to believe, at least for the next fifteen minutes, that Dream really wanted him to go away so he could try out his pastels without an audience. "Okay, then. Back in a tick. Or fifteen minutes."
Dream didn't respond at all this time, though he was still just standing there looking at the pastels without moving to touch them. Hob made himself turn away and not look back, letting Dream have a moment to sort himself out.
Hob forced himself to redirect his own thoughts as decisively: he could use a few minutes to do his own sorting out. Most of his time before Dream woke up this morning had gotten taken up with the extremely visceral realization that while Dream could have a 50% cheese-based diet, Hob's own guts were not particularly pleased with that plan. He had skipped the cheese and stuck to whole wheat toast and apple slices this morning, and felt a bit better for it.
As he savored his time alone in the shower, Hob poked around his thoughts to see if there was anything he needed to spend a bit of time on. All of yesterday's dramas seemed to have settled into place overnight, so he was more or less able to accept that there had been some gods about the place and now they were gone and Dream was still here. Hob had had no dreams of undersea exploration to help with that, as far as he recalled, but he had slept well and deeply with Dream sprawled, as well as someone so small could sprawl, over the other side of the bed.
He had been snoring when Hob woke up this morning. The sight and sound of it had been so human and so adorable that Hob had lain there staring. He had been every bit as transfixed as he'd been that time a leviathan had risen out of the sea in sight of his ship.
Hob found himself smiling at his shampoo bottle and shook off that thought, trying once again to check whether he was building up to another bout of needing to go scream into a pillow. He didn't always notice before it was urgent, even in less bewildering circumstances than the last couple of days.
It had taken him a few centuries to learn to introspect at all, and he was still apt to forget all about it if he was distracted. Given anyone other than himself to focus on, he was much happier to be absorbed in them than in himself. His bed had been empty for years before Dream took up his new place in the other half; Hob hadn't wanted to get involved with someone when he knew the time to end this life and begin another was coming.
He ought to get on with that soon—he needed to give notice at the school any day now, and start making all the preparations for moving.
Hob rinsed his hair, mentally reviewing the checklist, and he realized that his body was going full speed ahead toward the next part of the shower routine. He was half-hard from the sheer habit of a wank under the warm water.
It had been a couple of days since he'd had time for this, with Dream around, but Hob had never been one to neglect the call of pleasure for long, even if it was just a quick and solitary orgasm.
Hob got a grip on himself—and snickered a bit at the pun, even in his own head—and got to it. This was one of the loveliest things about the last seventy years or so: all the opportunities to be warm and wet and good-smelling and take some time over himself. He let his thoughts drift as he worked himself up, random images flitting by his mind's eye. That woman by the cheese counter yesterday had had a laugh Hob would like to hear in bed, and there had been that fellow inspecting peaches like he knew exactly what he looked like and wanted someone else to know it too.
Then, just as things were getting properly good, his train of thought slewed over into his most familiar, most safely impossible fantasy: his stranger. That intense gaze going hot on him, those beautiful graceful hands handling him with the same confident tenderness that bloke at Sainsbury's had used on the peaches. And if Hob managed to say just the right thing, please him just the right way, maybe his stranger would even—
Hob came over his own fingers at the thought of his stranger laughing at him in bed. It was only as he turned under the water to rinse away the mess that he realized he hadn't been assigning the laugh of that woman by the cheese counter to his stranger. He'd done that countless times over the years, filled in what he didn't know about his stranger with details from an ordinary stranger—but he hadn't had to do that today.
His stranger was named Dream, and Hob knew what it sounded like when he laughed. At least he knew what the toddler-sized version of him sounded like, and he could more or less guess how it would sound from the full-size version. That was what he'd imagined, just before he came: the version of Dream he'd met all those other times, laughing that rusty hinge laugh in the deep soft register he'd always spoken to Hob before.
Was that weird? That might have been a little bit weird.
Well, he could just pack away the weirdness into the same locked box in his brain where he normally kept his fantasies about his stranger when he wasn't actually wanking to them. All of it was just as impossible now as it had ever been, if not more so.
But this was no time to try to calculate what Dream being with him here like this, as his small self, meant for the odds of him otherwise having the least bit of interest in Hob in the way Hob had always harbored an interest in his stranger. Now was the time to finish washing up and make sure that the Dream currently in his flat wasn't quietly losing his mind just outside the bathroom door.
Dream could not quite look directly at the pastels and sketchbooks Hob had laid out, especially while Hob was standing over him with that air of hopeful good cheer. Even when Hob walked away—even when Dream heard the bathroom door close—he still stood just peeking sidelong at the things on the coffee table. He dug his toes into the rug and found his fingers at his lips, his other hand reaching into the pocket of his overalls to check again that he had his book and Matthew's feather.
He clasped both hands together and held on tightly. He did not need to check with anyone. He did not need to soothe himself or have an excuse not to speak. No one was expecting him to do anything in particular; even Hob would not be offended if Dream did not use the pastels.
Hob would be very pleased if he did, though. He had carried Dream's little scribble from the art store so carefully. Dream went to check the sketchbook it had been tucked into when they left the store; there was no sign of it there.
Dream looked around the room, and discovered the drawing propped up on a bookshelf, obscuring a few of the spines. It was at Hob's eye level, as though he wanted to be sure he could look at it often.
Viewed from this distance, with the child's eyes he had given himself, it looked... nearly worthy of being looked at.
He forced himself to look away from it before he could begin to scrutinize. It was a child's coloring. Dream had taken the form of a child, so that was to be expected. Hob clearly thought well enough of it; he still scarcely grasped what Dream was capable of in his true form.
Dream had never created anything for Hob, before that picture. Even the picture had not really been created for Hob, nor had Dream actually bestowed it as a gift. And yet Hob treated it as something worthy of being cherished.
Hob deserved better than that. He deserved to have something beautiful made just for him, something that could express even a little of the way Dream felt being here with him, so safe and cared for, so bathed in happiness.
Dream went to stand before the two trays of pastels, considering colors. He always gravitated to red, but there were five different red or red-adjacent colors between the two sets.
He would just have to experiment.
Hob was listening intently as he dried off. He wasn't at the fifteen-minute mark, but he was starting to suspect that Dream had no idea how long fifteen minutes was or how to tell. He waited until he was mostly dry and had a towel around him before he opened the bathroom door and stuck his head out. "Dream? All right out there?"
It felt very much like tempting fate, but he was feeling thoroughly relaxed after having a proper unhurried shower, so when there was no answer at all he didn't panic right away. He just crept out to where he could see into the living room.
Dream was kneeling at the coffee table, working intently on something. "Dream, love?"
Dream made a small, vague noise, obviously too absorbed in what he was doing to pay any attention to Hob.
Hob grinned triumphantly and headed into his bedroom to get dressed at a decidedly leisurely pace. He ducked into the study and picked up a book he'd been halfway through reading before Dream turned up on his doorstep. He doubted he was going to get any further through it today, but he was fairly certain that Dream would prefer Hob to at least appear to be busy doing something else while he worked on his art.
Hob's heart sank a little when he finally stepped out into the lounge and got close enough to see exactly what Dream was doing. He wasn't making a picture or anything that looked like just having fun: he was coloring small precise squares of each of his colors, in what appeared to be a strict color spectrum order. He had just gotten started on the different greens.
He noticed Hob and looked up, and a horribly uncertain expression crossed his face, like he knew this wasn't the way Hob had meant him to color with his pastels. Dream looked like he thought he might be in trouble.
Hob immediately crouched down and slung an arm around him, smiling for all he was worth. "Look at you! Very organized, aren't you? Got to try everything out to see how it looks before you get on with your masterpiece, right? Me, I'd probably just start right in on scribbling, but I guess that would be very..."
Hob paused, giving Dream a sideways look. The anxious expression had evaporated, but he wasn't laughing quite yet.
"Abstract expressionism," Hob finished, and then Dream did give a little giggle in his distressed frog way. Hob grinned and gave him a bit of a side hug. "Anyway, don't let me interrupt, I've been meaning to finish this book for ages now. Let me know if you find you need more colors or different paper, right?"
Dream nodded, now kneeling up straight, chin up, and he reached confidently for the next color green. Hob kissed the top of his head and went to lie on the sofa where he could easily peek around the book at Dream. He also got his phone out to check on the status of his order from the art store; it hadn't shipped yet, so it probably wouldn't be too late to call up and add on to it.
Dream didn't make any requests, though, just occasionally wiped his hand impossibly clean on his overalls and kept on making his neat little squares. Hob actually did read a little of his book, though mostly he just basked in not being alone, in knowing that he could just start talking all about his day or anything else that crossed his mind. He could tell Dream about things that had happened hundreds of years ago, or about his plans for his next yet-to-be-chosen new life, and Dream would understand and keep his secrets safe.
He could probably even ask Dream questions, now that all the big secrets were out in the open. Hopefully all. Hadn't there been something yesterday that Dream had carefully talked around? Apart from how well he knew Lucifer.
Well, set that to one side. Hob could ask Dream about himself, his realm, his raven pal. About any other gods he had better relationships with than he had with Loki—though, considering that Dream had said Hob was his dearest friend on any plane of existence, maybe he'd better not. Might be a sore subject.
Still, they could talk. They could be real friends, and Dream could feel comfortable and safe here, and Hob could go to sleep every night knowing that he was off to visit his friend's kingdom.
Hob was watching Dream deliberate over two shades of purple when there was a knock on the door.
Dream immediately slapped the cover of the sketchbook shut, but he looked to Hob before moving any further, and the big version of him was only the faintest shadow. Hob was pretty sure he only saw it because he was looking for it, having seen him flickering between forms before.
Hob shook his head. "Probably just the groceries, love. Nothing to worry about."
Dream didn't argue with him, but the faint shadow of his other self got a fraction more visible, and the look on his face stayed dubious. He trailed after Hob as he went to the outside door and opened it.
Hob grinned at Trevor, one of the usual rotation of delivery guys, and one of those who would generally humor Hob to the extent of chatting a little. Trevor asked no questions about the cheese-heavy order. Hob was prone to getting very excited about one food or another sometimes, though, so Trevor probably hadn't noticed anything unusual. Hob collected all the carrier bags and wished Trevor a good day; when he shut the door behind him, he looked down to see Dream already dragging a bag over toward the fridge.
Hob smiled fondly and let Dream do what he could while he started putting away the rest.
When everything was sorted, Dream scampered back to his sketchbook and got on with finishing his spectrum of colors. He had laid it out just right, so that his succession of squares exactly took up the whole sheet. Dream stared at it for a while and then began blending the squares into each other, making a perfectly blended gradient that wound down the entire page.
Hob wondered if he should compliment it, but Dream didn't look up or make any move to show Hob what he'd done. After a moment he pushed the sketchbook aside and grabbed the book of black paper and a red pastel.
Hob returned his gaze to his book, settling in for Dream to cycle through this all day, so he missed what happened next. He only heard Dream make a noise much closer to a literal growl than that small body ought to be able to produce. Hob looked over at the sketchbook, and saw that the red square had gone a bit wonky, looking like something Hob would draw instead of Dream's perfectly neat coloring.
It was no wonder; Hob could see Dream's little hand all but spasming around the pastel he still held. A child as small as that couldn't possibly keep having perfect fine motor control for hours on end, no matter who was driving.
Dream was scowling down at that crooked red shape like he was about to set the whole sketchbook on fire, or flip the table, or banish all his art supplies to Literal, Actual Hell. Looking at him now, it was suddenly easy to believe that that was a place Dream had visited more than once, and briefly ruled, if only on a technicality.
Hob made a noise of his own, more of a groan than a growl, since he was merely human himself. He rubbed his eyes, then set his book aside and stretched ostentatiously, letting out a big sigh as he did.
When he concluded the performance by looking over, Dream was watching him with only a hint of wariness in his expression. He did, at least, seem distracted from his own violent frustration.
"I think I've been sitting still too long," Hob announced. "Need to stretch my legs a bit. What do you say to a ramble?"
Dream decisively closed his sketchbook and said, about as stiffly as physically possible for an approximately humanoid child, "Very well."
Dream was well aware that Hob was managing him, but he also could not deny that Hob's methods were effective. Given the choice, Dream would rather not repeat the previous day's prolonged loss of control, though he had scarcely any idea of how to go about avoiding it. This form he wore was intensely vulnerable to the vicissitudes of feeling.
As his greater self, when such emotions threatened his control, Dream simply... did not permit himself to feel them. The thwarted emotion expressed itself through the Dreaming or else dissipated, allowing Dream to carry on with his duties.
He had thought they dissipated, anyway. The hurts marked on this small body suggested that at least some of them had lurked within him, biding their time.
And so he permitted Hob to make things easier for him. He allowed himself to be distracted from the frustration he felt with his body's limitations—and the absurdity it laid bare, for what was he thinking, wasting time this way? If he wished to produce something that would be pleasing to Hob, if he wished to be of any use to anyone, he knew how. He had only to be himself. All of himself.
But his greater self could not—would not—spend hours on a ramble through Hob's London neighborhood walking hand in hand with Hob, or borne on his shoulders whenever Hob thought Dream might be tired of walking. His whole self would not be smiled at by passersby—and would be forced to know all their dreams as soon as he looked at them.
Not forced. That was a ridiculous way to think of it. He simply would know, because that was his nature, and so he would be aware of each person he passed as a dreamer—as one of his own responsibilities.
He and Hob passed many people, as they went from one shop to another, and then to a small green, and then to a café which served toasted cheese nearly as good as Hob's along with chocolate milk.
Hob, for inscrutable reasons of his own, had a green salad. He offered Dream a taste, so Dream tried one attractively deep-green leaf from it, and felt his entire small body reject the bitterness of it. Hob laughed, but also supplied him with a napkin to spit it into and a sip of water to clear his mouth before he returned to his own lunch.
There was chocolate cake with strawberries after that, which seemed a very handsome way to apologize for the disgusting leaf business. Dream was happy to forgive Hob entirely after that.
All the time, Dream was surrounded by other people at the nearby tables—to say nothing of the waitress coming and going and flirting far too much with Hob—and knew nothing about any of them. None of them weighed upon him as they normally did; he caught no echoes of the dreams of those who had prepared the food or washed the dishes they ate from. Nothing distracted him from Hob except his lunch, and both were equally wonderful.
Dream had always intentionally blocked out his awareness of most of Hob's dreams, so it was not strange to be cut off from them now. At first he had not wanted to know too early what the outcome of his wager with his sister would be—and then he had not wanted to spoil the surprise of what Hob would tell him every hundred years.
And then Hob was out of his reach.
And then Hob was his friend, and Dream had had the idea that privacy was something friends should grant to one another.
Now here they were, and Hob was talking so easily and brightly that Dream could hardly wish for more insight into him. Anything Dream might want to know, Hob would doubtless tell him sooner or later.
They strolled to another park after lunch, and Dream had barely taken in any of what Hob had talked about in the past few hours, but he felt vastly better than he had before.
Hob had done that for him. Hob had set himself to make Dream feel better, and knew what would help even when Dream himself did not, and now Dream felt better.
Dream searched himself for a way to express it—to name the happiness he felt in this moment, and the gratitude he felt that was not a debt or a subtraction from his gladness, but a vital component of it.
He looked up at Hob, who met his eyes and fell silent, smiling with a gently expectant expression. It was clear that he was looking forward to hearing whatever Dream might say.
Dream might not command all of himself at this moment, but what there was of him was the Prince of Stories, the lord of innumerable realms of fantasy and imagination. Somewhere within him were all the words applicable to all possible emotions and circumstances, and yet he could summon nothing sufficient to speak to Hob right now.
Still, he could find a way to communicate. Dream raised a hand slowly, and just when he saw Hob begin to bend toward him, raising his own hands to meet Dream's, Dream slapped his raised hand against Hob's hip and shouted, "Tag! You're it!"
He ran away at full speed across the green, and in Hob's laughter he heard all the warmth and all the joy he had wanted to express. He looked back and his own laughter broke free as Hob sprinted after him, and trailed in his wake as he ran on and on.
Dream wanted to run forever through the green-dappled sunshine, with Hob always just behind him, but then it was almost equally wonderful to have Hob's hands catch him and swing him up into the air. Dream's laughter crystallized to a shriek of delight, and when Hob pulled him in close to press kisses to his cheeks Dream went limp in his arms in perfect contentment.
That was when he noticed the raven waiting for him on the pathway just ahead.
Chapter 10
Dream went rigid in Hob's arms, and Hob's head jerked up in instinctive response. He shifted his grip on Dream to a more secure one as he looked around, and then he saw what Dream was staring at. There was a raven on the path ahead of them—Matthew, Hob thought. He was almost positive it was Matthew and not just a raven.
Dream wouldn't have reacted like that to just any raven, and Hob was actually certain that it wasn't one of Odin's.
After a long time that was probably really only seconds, Dream's rigid freeze dissolved into a wriggle toward freedom. Hob set him down and stayed close beside him as he walked forward.
Matthew kept still, just waiting, and Hob took a moment to look around. No one was paying any particular attention to them, but Hob still moved to block Dream and Matthew from the most obvious lines of sight from the street.
Dream, meanwhile, knelt down facing Matthew. As small as he was, that put the diminutive Lord of the Dreaming and his raven nearly eye-to-eye. "Matthew," Dream said quietly. "What is it? All is well here, but you can see that already."
"All's well in the Dreaming, too," Matthew said. "Uh, pretty much. Just... Lucienne said I should ask you what to do, because your, uh, your sister showed up at the gates. Your youngest sister. She says she wants to see you. And Lucienne thought you probably would have wanted to see her, if she wanted to see you. But you're... away right now."
Dream rocked back slightly where he knelt, but he did not stand. Hob searched for it, but he didn't think he could see that flickering shadow of bigness around him. He didn't know if that was a good sign or a bad one right now.
"Matthew," Hob said. "Could you... give us a minute?"
Matthew hesitated, shaking out his wings in a very recognizable human-like fidget. "Boss?"
"Yes," Dream said slowly. "Please, Matthew. I will confer with Hob."
"You got it," Matthew said, and sprang into the air. Hob watched him as he flew away, taking up a perch in a tree perhaps five yards away.
Hob looked back to Dream, and found he was still kneeling there, watching Matthew just as Hob had done. Hob crouched down and rested a hand lightly on his back. "What are you thinking, my friend? What do you want to do?"
"I... do not know," Dream said slowly, frowning in thought. "I think... I think that I am doing something important right now. But... I do not like to ignore my siblings. They call upon me as rarely as I call upon them."
"Do you think she's in trouble of some kind?" Hob asked. "Do you think she needs your help?"
Dream shrugged, his gaze sliding from Matthew to the pavement in front of him as his frown deepened. "Matthew would have told me if Lucienne perceived that there was any danger. If Delirium is present in the Dreaming, nothing can harm her there, and she is very congruent to my realm, so she will cause no lasting harm by her presence there. But I... I am her elder brother. I would like to be a good one."
Hob let out a breath and sat down all the way on the pavement, cross-legged.
Dream, still frowning and not looking even in Hob's direction, crawled into the lap Hob had made for him, and Hob's arms curled around him just as automatically.
"What do you think would happen if she saw you like this?" Hob tried.
Dream jolted at that, looking up at him with his face gone entirely childlike in surprise, no trace of that frown remaining.
"It's not just a choice between ignoring her or going back to your realm," Hob pointed out gently. "You could tell Matthew to bring her here, couldn't you? If it's just that she wanted to see you, she could come and see you."
Dream's brows drew together again as he thought it through, gnawing briefly at his lower lip. "I... am her elder brother," he repeated. "She is the youngest."
"Yeah," Hob agreed. "I don't know about Endless—" though he was actually pretty certain as he said it that what he was about to say absolutely applied, "but for humans, sometimes being an older or younger sibling, and especially being the oldest or the youngest, that can be something you get stuck in. Something that limits you. I don't know your sister, but maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing for her to see her elder brother being... littler than her, for once. It might give her a chance to be something other than she usually is."
"She is... very changeable, herself," Dream said into Hob's chest, curling up like he wanted to hide himself in Hob's arms. "Perhaps she would not..."
Dream didn't seem to have an end to that sentence, and Hob didn't feel ready to guess at it. "Do you think you could trust her to see you like this?"
"She might... laugh, or say silly things," Dream said slowly. "But I do not think she would hurt me. Or intend to hurt me."
Hob squeezed him a bit. "Would you like me to tell her, if I think she's hurting you and doesn't realize she's done it?"
Dream looked up at him again; he had caught that shift from the question of whether to see her to planning how it should go.
He didn't object.
"You need not," Dream said quietly. "She... I know how she is. And I know that you... you will be with me."
"Course I will," Hob promised easily. "You're my best friend."
Dream tried to imagine what was going to happen if Delirium came to see him as he was now, in the Waking world. Much depended on why she had gone looking for him in the Dreaming, and he knew better than to think that he could predict that.
She was one of his favorites among his siblings; she had been the easiest of all of them to love, in her first self, and Dream found her scarcely more difficult in her current form. She was frequently more confusing, however. He always felt on the wrong foot with her, always as if he ought to be doing better at the task of being her elder brother.
He had lost the knack of whimsy around the same time she lost Delight.
Perhaps he could be better at it, as his present self. He had certainly laughed and played more in the last few days than he could remember doing for many eons before that. Perhaps Delirium was a test, or a lesson, in the quest for wisdom that Odin had named this journey of his.
In any case, Hob had put his finger on the only way out of the impossible dilemma. Dream could not bear to ignore Delirium, or have her turned away without even seeing him, and neither did he feel ready to return to being his whole self, or to be in the Dreaming as this small self. That left one option.
"Matthew," Dream called, not raising his voice much but putting that intention in it which would call Matthew to him.
The raven flew down to him in a single smooth glide, and only bobbled the landing a little. Dream chose to ignore that minor infelicity.
"Return to the Dreaming, and ask my sister if she will follow you to me. You may bring her here. Hob and I will await you."
Hob gave him another little squeeze—encouragement or approval—and said nothing.
Matthew shuffled a bit but said, "You got it, boss," and flew off again, vanishing from the Waking world as soon as he was on the wing.
Dream took a deep breath and heaved it out on a sigh, and Hob's grip on him tightened again an instant before Hob stood. "You want to stay out here?" Hob asked. "Not see her at the flat? We're not that far, if we go in a straight line."
Dream shook his head. "This is better. Delirium can have... unpredictable effects on people. It is best that she not be too near to too many of them."
It was scarcely a day since Dream had last brought something dangerous to the New Inn. He would not actively invite another.
The green was relatively empty, and a safe distance from the busier streets and pavements that surrounded it. Hob carried Dream away from the path they had been on, finding a shady spot between two trees, which felt even more sheltered. He sat down again, settling Dream in his lap, and Dream leaned back against Hob's arm and looked into the sky, watching for Matthew's return and Delirium's arrival.
Nothing happened.
It was possible that she would not listen to Matthew, or not want to follow Matthew into the Waking. Perhaps she had come to him in the Dreaming for a specific reason. Perhaps she needed something that was only possible there.
Dream squirmed around to lean against Hob's other arm, and watched a different part of the sky, which was equally empty of ravens and sisters.
He sighed. Anything could be happening right now, in the passage from the Dreaming to the Waking world. That was Delirium's nature. Perhaps he should go back, just to see? He could take Hob with him, and...
On the other hand, perhaps she was not coming at all. He had not told Matthew to come back to him if Delirium said no, had he? Would he think of that? Lucienne would, surely, but then Lucienne must be very busy looking after the Dreaming for him. He really ought to go and see, but that would defeat the purpose of sending Matthew to bring Delirium here.
He thought about asking Hob how long it had been—surely it had been hours—but when he looked up Hob smiled down at him with no sign of concern at all.
A cascade of soap bubbles poured forth from nowhere, popping to reveal a wildly fluttering Matthew and a blur of iridescence that resolved into Delirium. She seemed very tall and impossibly small, both at once or oscillating rapidly between the two, before she abruptly settled into her usual shape, clad in a black leather jacket over a rainbow striped sundress. She had a sandal on her left foot that laced up to her knee, and a purple light-up sneaker on her right. She dropped down to sit facing Hob with her legs crossed just as his were.
Dream thought she was about the size she usually was, which would be quite a lot shorter than Hob but still considerably taller than Dream's current shape. She had one blue eye and one green, and there were swirls shaved into her hair where it was buzzed short as velvet on one side, while the other side was a wild puff of multi-colored curls.
Her dress and jacket were battered, her striped tights torn at the knees—but her knees, under them, were whole and unhurt.
Dream wasn't sure if he would have thought to notice that, before. He wanted to show her his own knees, where they had been bruised and now were healing, but he also wanted to hide behind Hob. He settled for plugging his thumb into his mouth and watching her.
She was watching him, her eyes wide and intent, her head tilting as she took him in from every angle. She was smiling, her teeth crooked and the piercing in her lip flashing in the sun, and she kept smiling wider and wider until looking at it made Dream's own face ache in sympathy. Dream felt Hob jolt a little when some line was crossed, and he saw Delirium's gaze dart away from Dream and settle on his friend behind him.
"Oh," Delirium said, "Hello! You're my brother's friend, aren't you?"
"I am," Hob said at once. "We've met a time or two, haven't we?"
Delirium's smile got smaller and a little sly. "Once or twice or geranium. Or Saturday?"
Dream looked up at Hob who was shaking his head ruefully, still looking at her. "Yeah, sounds about right."
He didn't look down at Dream until Dream tugged on his sleeve, and even then his gaze lingered for a long second on Delirium before he met Dream's eyes. "I've done a lot of interesting drugs," Hob half-explained. "And had a few impressive fevers in my time, too. And things got a bit... rough, in 1673."
"Ohhh, 1673," Delirium agreed, and Hob's gaze went right to her again. "You were mine for just a little while, then, weren't you? My next sister thought she would get you that year, but you were mine, mine, mine."
"Just for a little while," Hob agreed, squeezing Dream again, but his attention was still fixed on Delirium. "But now here we are, and you've come to visit your brother!"
"Yes, my eensy-weensy teeny-weeny big brother!"
Dream jumped when she reached out and tickled him. He had still been watching Hob, but now he glared at Delirium, who took her hands back. "Oops. Not all the way eensy. You're still you."
"I am always myself," Dream said stiffly, though he thought he should ask her to try tickling him again, or if she wanted to play tag, or anything that would not be sitting here and speaking to her just as he would if he were perched on his throne.
The words still came out chilly despite what he wanted, or at least wanted to want. "Why have you come to see me, my sister?"
"Well," Delirium said, dragging the word out into seven or eight wavering syllables, "I asked Desire first, because I was in Desire's house when I thought of it, but they said no. And then I asked Despair and she said no, so then I went to ask you but you weren't there even though I could feel you there, but Lucienne said I could have tea but I had to wait and then all the tea turned into bubbles and those little dinosaurs made of sugar and then they kept melting when they tried to fight each other?"
Dream could feel Hob vibrating slightly all around him, and Hob's mouth pressed against the top of Dream's head—not one of the kisses Hob gave him so freely, but just a way to hide his laughter.
"What," Dream said grimly, "did you ask Desire and Despair? Did you mean to ask something of me?"
"Ohhhhhh," Delirium said, raising her hands in a gesture that clarified nothing. "Um. I think you... probably you're going to say no, too. But maybe if your friend...?"
"Did you come here," Dream interrupted icily, "to speak to Hob Gadling? Or to me?"
"Oh!" Delirium said, her hands fluttering up like butterflies but still mostly hand-shaped and approximately attached at her wrists. "I came to see you! Because your raven—" Delirium looked around and Dream followed her gaze to Matthew, who froze in the act of shaking some piece of litter he'd picked up.
Delirium shook her finger in his direction. "Oh no no no, Mr. Matthew, you shouldn't try to eat that."
Before Dream could stop her, it had turned into a brilliantly-colored frog. Matthew let out a squawk and dropped it but then pounced on it again, and Hob said, "Is that poisonous? Aren't the bright ones usually poisonous?"
"It shall not harm him," Dream said, summoning all he could reach of his power to make it so.
"But it might make for a fun day!" Delirium added, as Matthew spat out the frog and then pounced on it again.
Dream turned his attention squarely back to his sister, confident that no permanent harm would befall Matthew.
"What," he said as firmly as he could, though his heart was racing a little from the exertion of bending reality as sharply as he just had while in this shape, "did you wish to ask me?"
Delirium focused on him again, and her face went through a few strange contortions and then settled on a plaintive seriousness. "I want to go look for our brother who went away," she said. "I miss him. Do you miss him?"
Dream slumped in Hob's hold, and felt a fresh sharp pain over his heart, and knew that there would be a bit more of that bruise, the next time he looked.
How could she ask that question, so simply, as though it had a simple answer?
How could she ask that question, as though the answer could be anything but what it was?
"I..." Dream said slowly, and he found that it was hard to speak at all. He felt something shivery in his limbs, prickling in his eyes, and he clutched at Hob with both hands.
"I've got you," Hob murmured, his arms tightening gently around Dream. "I'm here, love. I've got you. You can say whatever you need to say."
"I can't," Dream blurted, and the word came out as a sob. "I can't, I can't, I can't I can't I—"
Dimly he heard Hob saying something not to him, because now Dream was crying and couldn't even speak and still Hob was paying attention to Delirium. The bruise over his heart hurt worse, at that, and he wailed aloud. But then he felt Hob's grip on him change and tighten further, and Hob stood up, still holding him. Hob started walking, swaying more than his steps required, and Dream hid his face in Hob's chest and let himself weep without restraint.
He didn't know exactly what he was crying for. He didn't know if I can't should be I can't help you search for Destruction or I can't say how I miss him or I can't let myself miss him or I can't bear to speak to you about this or I can't stop myself.
The last was the only one that mattered right now. He couldn't stop crying, couldn't help shrieking his hurts into Hob, but Hob just kept walking, rocking him, holding him tight, and Dream clung on with all his strength. There was not much strength left over from hauling in enough breath to keep crying, to keep his heart beating despite the sharpness of the pain in it, to keep existing in any material form at all when he hurt and was so, so tired of hurting.
When the people who he loved were the ones hurting him.
When even Hob—
Dream turned his head and let loose a scream right at Hob's face, though he could not pry his aching, water-streaming eyes open to see what effect it had. Hob stopped walking but still held him, all the time Dream was shrieking and after he ran out of breath. Then Hob just stood still and swayed, bending his head close to Dream's and singing softly.
It was a lullabye, the words old and time-softened in Hob's mouth so that they meant almost nothing in themselves. Dream felt all the layers of love and loss in the song, far more relevant than the lyrics. Whoever had sung this to Hob, and everyone else he had ever sung it to, they were all gone now. All lost to him. Only the song remained.
The song, and the love, and Hob.
Dream let out a soft keen and squirmed up so that he could wrap his arms around Hob's neck, pressing a few messy kisses of his own against Hob's throat. Hob hadn't meant to hurt him. Hob made it better when Dream was hurting. Tears kept streaming from his eyes, and Hob kept singing, until Dream was too exhausted to do more than hold on and, with some effort, breathe.
Hob looked around as Dream got quieter. Delirium was lying on her back near where she had first sat down, bubbles drifting up from her hands as she waved them toward the sky.
So that was... probably all right then.
Matthew was closer, though still far enough away that he and Hob could both pretend he hadn't heard any of that. Hob loosened one hand to wave at him. When Matthew flapped a wing back, Hob crooked a finger.
Dream didn't stir as Hob crouched down, and Hob wasn't sure if he'd cried himself to actual sleep again, or had just gotten worn out enough not to pay any attention to what was happening. Either way, Hob figured he might just get away with not having left the house with any of the sort of emergency supplies that people who were responsible for real small children always had on hand.
"Matthew," Hob said, very quietly but not whispering, because whispering attracted attention. "Could you go to my flat, and get the box of Kleenex off the coffee table, and bring it here?"
It was possible that this was a stupid thing to ask a magical immortal dream raven—who might or might not have eaten a poisonous/hallucinogenic frog while Hob was distracted—to do, but Dream didn't actually pick his head up to say so, and Matthew just looked at him for a long moment. Delirium didn't seem to notice, and the sky didn't crack open and rain down cosmic judgment upon him, so Hob figured he was doing all right.
Then Matthew gave a bobbing raven-ish nod, jumped into the air, and vanished before his wings beat a second time. He was back, dangling the Kleenex box from his talons, just as he reached Hob's head-height. It took a bit of fumbling for Hob to actually retrieve some tissues from the box while Matthew tried to fly at that height while holding them, but they managed it by turning in circles, and on the third rotation, just as Hob managed to bring a handful of tissues to his cheek, Dream picked his head up and blinked swollen, bloodshot eyes with tears still lingering on the long black lashes.
"Here, darling," Hob said. "Do you want to wipe your face a bit?"
Dream unwound one arm from around Hob's neck to give it a try, and even managed to blow his own nose mostly into the tissue without prompting. The rest landed on Hob's shoulder, and Dream frowned and mopped it up but didn't vomit or scream or start crying again, so Hob figured they were coming out ahead.
Hob balled up the tissues and shoved them into a pocket. "Thanks, Matthew. Could you put those back?"
Dream blinked in the raven's direction and gave a little nod, and Matthew vanished again.
Dream let out a gusty sigh and slumped back down against Hob's less-damp shoulder, and Hob rubbed his back and swayed a bit.
"I do miss him," Dream said, very quietly.
An impossible number of—hummingbirds? no, they were multicolored flying goldfish—swarmed all around them and then coalesced into Delirium, standing at Hob's elbow, which she barely came up past. She had a solemn expression on her freckled face, and a few tear-tracks leading down from her different-colored eyes, and bits of grass and a leaf caught in her multi-colored curls.
"I miss him too," Delirium said. "But I think maybe it's not time to look for him after all. Maybe it was really time to look for you?"
Dream took a sharp, shuddery breath at that, but didn't burst into fresh tears. He reached out one small hand, and Delirium pressed a kiss to it that left behind, not a lipstick print, but a crookedly-applied temporary tattoo of a bright orange glittering goldfish with one green eye and one blue. It was already peeling at the edges, and took up almost the entire back of Dream's small hand.
"Thank you," Dream whispered, his voice shaking. "I love it. I love you, my sister."
"Wanna hear a story?" Delirium asked.
Dream nodded against Hob's shoulder, but obviously that was enough.
"So," Delirium said, and began winding one finger into her curling hair. "A while ago I went for a walk..."
Hob sat down when it became obvious that this was going to be a very long and meandering story in what he gathered was Delirium's usual style. After a while Dream squirmed around to sit facing her in Hob's lap, sucking his thumb and otherwise at rest.
Hob let himself laugh out loud at the story as it wound along, because he thought that Delirium was at least reasonably likely to be trying to make Dream laugh. She didn't seem deterred by it, at least, so Hob went on laughing at the funny bits, squeezing or jostling Dream a little each time.
Dream let out a tentative little giggle—which started out sounding like a mostly normal giggle and then somehow turned into a baritone screech right at the end—at the third time the llama showed up. Hob met Delirium's eyes and felt a shared burst of probably entirely misplaced triumph. Dream laughed twice more before she wound to a bewildering and unsatisfying end.
He didn't laugh at Delirium's dramatic conclusion—"And then it was definitely Tuesday!"—but Hob did laugh, and couldn't stop laughing, and eventually that got Dream both laughing and trying enthusiastically to shush him.
The laughter was mostly relief; Hob felt like they'd come through something significant, surviving Delirium's visit and getting Dream to laugh and enjoy his sister on her own terms, beyond that solemn and exhausted little declaration of love.
If Hob was still left with a thousand more questions about this missing brother of theirs who apparently they did talk about sometimes, well, obviously it was Delirium's nature to leave a lot of unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions in her wake.
Delirium popped up to her feet and curtseyed, and seemed to get distracted halfway through the motion.
Hob turned his attention to Dream and said quietly, "Hey, love, it's just about teatime—why don't we ask your sister if she'd like to come back to the flat with us for a cuppa? I bet she'd like cocoa almost as much as—"
Dream had gone still when Hob started talking, but he tore himself away and Hob stopped short, his stomach dropping sharply as Dream's expression turned on a dime from silliness to something cold and furious.
"Ask her yourself if you like her so well," Dream hissed. "I shall find my own way."
"Dream!" Hob yelped, reaching for him and trying to stand at once, stumbling on numb legs—how long had they been sitting there?
By the time he found his feet and looked around, Dream was gone. Not just out of reach, or out of sight, Hob somehow knew, with a surge of something that wanted to be panic, which he ruthlessly suppressed. Dream was gone, and that meant Hob didn't have time to feel anything about that fact.
Hob looked around again and found that Matthew was lying on his back, wings stretched wide, talons flexing in slow motion. He was very obviously in the midst of whatever kind of trip a raven could have after eating a poisonous frog, or whatever else Delirium might have slipped him while Hob wasn't looking.
Hob went over and scooped him up as he called out, "Delirium?"
She was there at his elbow when he looked down, no dramatic swarm of goldfish this time.
"Dream's gone," Hob said briskly. "Can you tell where he went? Matthew, can you?"
"Hmmmmm," Matthew said, his wings fluttering a little in Hob's grasp. "Got a. Leaf? Petal. Fingerprint?"
"Feather," Hob said firmly, though he knew that wouldn't help anyone sober up faster. "He's got one of your feathers. Delirium?"
"Ummmmm," Delirium said, revolving slowly on the spot where she stood. "Where did he say he was going?"
Hob opened his mouth and then closed it sharply. "He... he just said he would find his own way. I mentioned going back to the flat, and he got angry at me all at once. He thought—he said—"
"He doesn't want you to like me better," Delirium said seriously; for a moment her eyes swam with the same mix of blue and green, nearly matching each other. Lines appeared around her eyes and on her forehead, showing the strain of the effort she was making. "He needs someone to love him best. He thinks that means, love him only, because he can't believe anyone would choose him if they had another choice."
Hob winced and opened his mouth to say something, but hadn't figured out what to say before Delirium added, "They don't, usually, so that makes sense."
Hob winced harder. He had asked about bringing Delirium to the flat, when Dream had set that as a boundary—and he had implied he would offer Delirium cocoa, when he had gotten it for Dream.
"Right," Hob said. "But do you know where he's gone? How to find him? I don't think it was just that he ran off, he—"
Delirium tilted her head unnervingly far over, and then said, "No. He's... somewhere else. But when I look for him all I can feel is the him that's still in the Dreaming. It's a lot bigger than the him that isn't. And I don't know Matthew well enough to find his feather. Do you have anything that's just this piece of Dream's? Anything he made, or..."
Hob thought of the sketchbooks—that perfectly blended snaking gradient, that one wonky square. He didn't think it would be right to show either of them to Delirium—and he wouldn't let her touch that drawing Dream had made at the art store, either—but he had a feeling that this was important, and urgent. They needed to find where Dream had gone now. If he hadn't just zapped himself back to his realm and the rest of himself—and Hob didn't think he would do that in a fit of temper, when he had hesitated so deliberately about doing it for his sister—then he could be anywhere, and he was small and upset and had to be mostly exhausted, after the day they'd had.
"Yeah," Hob said. "Yeah, there's stuff at the flat. Can you get us there faster than walking?"
Delirium grabbed his hand, and the world turned immediately sideways, the sky flaring pink as a herd of unicorns galloped around them. Everywhere their hooves touched the earth a frog was cut loose from the earth and flung into the roiling, bubbling candy floss sky, and they screamed the tones of Hob's first digital alarm clock as they went.
He closed his eyes. None of it went away, but he could focus on holding tight to Matthew, who he cradled in one arm, and clinging to Delirium with his other hand.
"Oh!" She said, which made Hob open his eyes on a swirl of colors and spiders and crystalline notes, which abruptly resolved into the landing of the staircase at the outside door to his flat. "I thought," Delirium said, shaking herself a little and then looking up at Hob. Her eyes were two different colors again and her curls were defying even more gravity than before. "Maybe I shouldn't come inside. Dream didn't want me to come inside."
"Right," Hob said. They had something to do, and he needed to not try to make sense of anything he'd just seen. There wasn't time. "Stay here, I'll be right back."
Hob let himself into the flat. He grabbed a towel and laid Matthew down on it in the kitchen sink, just in case the rest of his trip happened to have consequences, and then he ran for the bedroom, and Dream's suitcase.
Chapter 11
The Waking world was only a step from the Dreaming, and only a step from any of his siblings' realms as well.
The trouble was that Dream was small, and angry, and perhaps about to start crying again, and too tired to cry anymore or run anywhere. He was far too tired to hold a single goal in his mind, and in truth the only thing he really wanted was to be back where he had run away from, in Hob's arms.
He just wanted it to be a version of Hob who wouldn't like Delirium better, and wouldn't let her see Dream's awkward attempts at drawing with his pastels, and wouldn't give her all the hot cocoa that had been supposed to be just for Dream, and wouldn't laugh at her stories and dance with her and kiss her hands and—
Some of those things perhaps hadn't happened yet.
Dream wasn't sure, because Dream wasn't anywhere and Time didn't reach here. Dream had taken that step out of the Waking world, away from Hob, but he had not decided for certain where he was going when he did. To the Dreaming? To his elder sister's realm, to seek sympathy he probably would not find? To Destiny's realm, for the peace and quiet of the inevitable?
To Delirium's realm, to run wild and break things before she could ruin everything that ought to be his?
To Despair?
Any of them might have proven a satisfying choice, but he had not chosen, and so he was lost, adrift in nothingness.
Everything was both light and heavy, dark and also too bright. He was everywhere and nowhere, could go anywhere and was inexorably trapped in nothingness.
He thought of the black hole.
He thought of his mother.
He had not expected to be rescued then.
He did not expect to be rescued now.
This was his own fault entirely, for one thing. For another, he could not gather himself enough to expect anything.
There was a goldfish on his hand. He thought it might be able to lead him somewhere, if he could only find the words to ask it to help, but no words came.
Hob rushed back out of the flat with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder and Dream's flame-embellished overalls in hand. Dream had worn them the day before, and had wiped pastel dust from his hands onto them at the art store; even with his simply human eyes Hob could see a faint glittering residue against the black. Dream had almost certainly made the overalls themselves for his small self, which had to connect them to that part of himself, or so Hob hoped, though he would bring out the other contents of the bag if the overalls didn't work.
Delirium was perched on the stair railing halfway down in a way that defied gravity, but Hob didn't have time to wonder about that. He hurried down to her, holding out the overalls and unable to think of a word to say to explain.
"Hmmmm," Delirium said, wandering through about fourteen different notes and more syllables as her fingers spidered over the embroidery of the flames in a way that made Hob's eyes ache and his inner ear protest. Her fingers wandered up to the pocket where Matthew's feather and the little book had been kept, though Dream had carefully deposited both into today's overalls, which had little silver stars instead of flames.
"I think maybe..." Delirium let go of the overalls and they just floated in the air, and Hob realized that he was floating, too, and so was Delirium.
The stairs were gone, and the ground, and the inn, and London. The whole world, in fact, had vanished—or rather they had departed from it. They were in some sort of strange void, silent and empty and featureless, white as a blank page or an impenetrable fog.
And then Hob heard a tiny, snuffling breath, and he flung himself, with everything he had, toward where Dream must be. He touched a soft fluffy shock of hair first, and resisted the urge to grab. He ran his hand down over Dream's cheek—tearless and dry and still, but warm as it should be, at least—and down his throat to his shoulder, and from there he could hook two fingers under an overall strap and haul Dream in against him.
Keeping his grip on Dream with one hand, Hob reached into his messenger bag with the other, and pulled out the whole mass of red ribbon. He didn't even try to find an end, didn't bother about tying little knots to each of their wrists. He just wrapped all the length of it around them both, tangling them messily together in bonds that had held them to each other before and would not break now, when they were needed most.
"I've got you," Hob gasped, when the ribbon was all wound around them and he could use both arms to hold on to Dream. "I've got you, sweetheart. I'm here. I've got you. Let's just go home, you and me. I'll make you a cocoa, and we can watch a movie, what do you think of that?"
Dream twitched a little, and then Hob felt tiny fingernails digging into the skin of his arm. As if the sound was coming from a mile away in a gale he thought he heard Dream say, "With marshmallows?"
"Sure," Hob said, curling his whole body into a ball around Dream, feeling the ribbons pull tight in some places and drift loose around them in others. He had a horrible feeling that there was no air here, and no sun. Any minute his body was going to notice that and realize even he could not survive in a place like this. "Yes, darling, with marshmallows, let's just go home."
There were bound to be marshmallows down in the kitchen, or at the bar, or somewhere. It wouldn't matter if they could just go—
Hob took a sharp breath, and straightened up to find that he had landed on his feet in the kitchen. Dream was in his arms, blinking up at him, and the fifty yards of red ribbon was tangled around both of them. Over by the sink, already dropping one trailing end of the ribbon, stood Delirium, and Dream's other pair of overalls was puddled on the floor at her feet.
She was looking down at Matthew, who didn't seem to have budged since Hob set him down in the sink.
Hob felt tears run from his eyes, sudden and hot, and hugged Dream as tight as he could while slightly hampered by a loop of ribbon cutting painfully into his upper arm. "Thank God, love, thank—thank you, Dream. And you, Delirium."
Dream picked his head up, moving in slow motion, and looked over at his sister. Hob tightened his grip, but Dream just blinked and said, "Thank you, my sister. You have... saved me."
Then he looked up at Hob and just stared at him, and Hob stared back.
Dream's eyes were all black, no hint of blue, no trace of white. There was only darkness there—but not emptiness. Hob could feel how wonderingly Dream was looking at him, the way Hob might gaze up at the stars, just drinking in an awe-inspiring sight. The same way Hob was looking back at Dream right now, alive and in one piece in his arms. "Hob. My friend. You came for me."
"Course I did," Hob whispered, although a whole load of delayed panic was looming over him, and some distant part of his mind was categorizing that void he'd found Dream in as scarier than Odin and Loki and Lucifer and God and all the angels combined. "Here, let me just..."
Hob staggered over to pull out a kitchen chair and more or less collapse into it, and then started trying to figure out how to extricate himself and Dream from the ribbon. He was hampered somewhat by the need he still felt to be holding on tight to Dream with at least one arm at all times, but finally Delirium offered him one of the ends of the ribbon, and Hob started winding.
"No one came before," Dream said, his voice still eerily calm. "I was trapped, and I couldn't make a sound, and no one came."
Hob stopped winding the ribbon, holding what he'd gathered as he wrapped both arms around Dream again and squeezing him tight. "I'm sorry, darling. I didn't know. I wish I had come then too. I always want to find you."
It was no help, but nothing could help whatever had happened however long ago—this might be the answer to why his stranger had missed their usual meeting by thirty-two years, or it might be something that had happened thousands or millions of years ago.
Still. Someone ought to say they were sorry. Someone ought to tell him they bloody cared, and Hob could do that much.
Dream rested in his hold for a moment, and then wiggled a little, and looked over at his sister. She was perched on the kitchen bench now, sticking her finger into a coffee pod and licking the powder off.
"I did know you were stuck," she admitted. "Sort of. I don't always know all the things I know, Dreamy. But I think I did know, because you were gone-gone. And then we had a family dinner and everyone said you were supposed to be where you were and we shouldn't interfere. So I didn't look for you. And Destruction told us not to look for him, too, that was a family dinner. But he's been gone ever so much longer than you were. But not gone-gone really."
Hob tried to keep his expression still through all of that, but he couldn't help looking down at Dream, whose eyes were looking mostly human now, though the blackness at their center still looked deeper and darker than could possibly be right.
Dream looked up at him in the silence that fell after Delirium trailed off, and then whispered loudly, "I like you better than all my siblings put together."
Hob smiled, and felt obliged to point out, "I couldn't have found you on my own today—Delirium did help, this time."
"You made her," Dream said confidently. "If you didn't, she would have forgotten all about me."
"I would never forget you!" Delirium insisted, then tilted her head and added, "But I might have forgotten that there was this little eensy weensy piece of you here. I might have just remembered that most of you is in the Dreaming. You're not usually all in pieces like this."
Hob did not let himself think of the Dream in his arms left alone and forgotten in that void for who-knew-how-long. He squeezed Dream again and said, "Well, that didn't happen. Delirium helped me come and find you, and we brought you back home together. So that's a pretty good day, in the end."
"She still can't have my cocoa," Dream mumbled.
"The cocoa is all yours forever and ever," Hob said firmly. "I won't give any of it to anyone without your express permission. Just don't go running away from me like that again, or I'll have to drink it all myself with a lot of booze poured in, and then where will we be?"
"Nowhere," Dream said, and then giggled to himself like a drowsy chainsaw.
For a long while after he was back in the Waking world, in the bright warm familiar space of Hob's flat, in the secure hold of Hob's arms, Dream still felt as though he were partly back in the place between realms, floating in nothingness.
He was awake, and aware, and marveling at having been rescued so improbably, by Hob and by his youngest sister and by the two of them in combination. But he was also still drifting somewhere else, where he could feel nothing at all and expected nothing at all.
It was as though he had come apart, or been frozen. He was thawing in the warmth of summer in London in an upstairs flat; he was being pressed back together by the fundamental force of Hob's hugs. Things happened around him and he knew they were happening and responded appropriately, but he wasn't entirely present—and not in the usual way, where he was such a vast being that he was never entirely present anywhere.
He was small now. There was not very much of him at all. He could not be entirely present while parts of it were still frozen, still lost.
At some point the movie playing in front of him came into sharp focus—a recently-made sequel to the Mary Poppins movie, showing Mary returning unchanged—although played by a new actress—to the Banks family a generation later, to play essentially the same role all over again.
Dream's hands tightened on the mug of cocoa that Hob was helping him to steady. He took a sip of it, because it smelled very good, and it was possible that he was hungry, but he was also beginning to be annoyed again about how little a Mary Poppins story was actually about the title character. He realized that he was really, fully conscious, and the movie didn't matter at all compared to everything else.
Dream looked up at Hob, and found Hob watching him intently.
"You saved me," Dream said. "I was lost and you saved me. You came for me."
"Yeah, love," Hob said, and Dream was dimly aware that they had perhaps already had this conversation more than once. Hob showed no sign of being impatient with it, though, smiling fondly down at Dream and still holding him close and warm and safe.
Dream looked down at his own hands and saw the slightly-peeling goldfish tattoo on the back of the right one, and looked over at his sister, who was sitting, sort of, in the armchair, with her waving feet uppermost and head dangling, an empty pickle jar on the floor beside her along with two emptied coffee pods. Her gaze was intent on the movie.
"Delirium?"
She looked over at once, and she smiled. "There you are, little big brother!"
"Here I am," Dream agreed. "Thanks to you. You came and found me. You brought Hob to find me. I was lost and you saved me. I needed help and I couldn't ask for it, but you came anyway."
Delirium nodded, and flipped onto her feet and came over to perch on the edge of the couch beside him and Hob. "I know we're mostly bad at helping each other. But I love you. And I was glad I could help. And now you've found all the little bits of yourself, so you're ready to get back to being my big brother, aren't you? Even if you're little."
"I still cannot help you find Destruction," Dream said. "Not at this time."
Delirium looked at him for a while, just looking, as if he were something pleasant to gaze upon. Eventually she smiled again, as iridescent tears slipped from her eyes. "I know," she said. "That's okay. You need to do what you need to do."
Dream nodded. "I think it is important," he said slowly. It seemed self-evident to the point of absurdity, but he still felt as tentative as he sounded when he added, "I think... I think I am changing, in a way that matters."
"Well," she said, grinning brightly, the tears flapping away from her cheeks in the form of tiny dragonflies. "I know all about that! Except I can't tell you how to do it, because I don't really remember. But here's something for the journey, anyway!"
She leaned in and kissed all over his face until Dream was giggling helplessly and at the same time trying to push her away and trying to land his own kisses on her face. He succeeded a few times, at least, and when she drew back, he said, "Your hair is even prettier than Death's."
Delirium grinned brightly at him, and she said, "I'll tell her you said so!" and was abruptly gone.
He felt Hob jerk slightly and then Hob said, "Did—did all of that—"
"Yes," Dream said. "That's just the feeling of reality not having to fight against her influence anymore. It feels like waking up or attaining sobriety, but nothing changed in you just now, only her presence departing. Everything you remember happening in the last several hours did in fact happen."
"Huh," Hob said. "Weird. It's getting late, should we have supper? You must be ready for another round of cheese on toast by now, after all that excitement."
Dream, reminded, sipped more of the hot chocolate and shrugged. "After the movie?"
Hob had paused it at some point while Dream and Delirium were talking, he realized.
"Have you actually followed any of it?" Hob asked doubtfully.
"Not... as such," Dream admitted.
"Cheese on toast, then," Hob declared, and Dream sipped a little more hot chocolate and didn't object to being carried into the kitchen.
Dinner was a quiet affair. Dream seemed worn out by the day, and munched his way through his cheese on toast with his gaze slowly drifting around the kitchen. Sometimes his attention landed on Hob, and then he would just... look. Not like he expected anything, not with that stoned, shocky wonder of the moments just after they'd returned. It was just like he wanted to rest his eyes on Hob.
Hob had been doing that a lot for the last few days, so he could hardly object. The first time or two he said something, but Dream would just sort of nod and keep watching him, and Hob wasn't going to attempt to have an actual conversation with him like this. He could have filled the silence, but it didn't seem necessary tonight.
Dream eventually finished eating his cheese on toast, and ate a bare handful of raspberries, more like he was humoring Hob than like he wanted them. He did help with the washing up like usual, and tried to hide his little smiles when Hob told him he'd done a good job at it, but his cheeks were pink with happiness.
He held his arms up as soon as the last utensil was dried, and Hob gathered him up immediately into a firm hug, and found Dream was squeezing back the best he could, with his arms around Hob's neck and his legs wrapping around Hob too.
"Hob," Dream said. "I think I would like to sleep now. I am tired."
"You know, my friend," Hob said, "so am I." He scooped up the mass of red ribbon from where he'd left it on the table while they were eating, and took the both of them straight to bed.
Hob dreamed of roaming through ominous smeared-pastel landscapes, bruised skies and raw bleeding sunsets, sunrises that lit the clouds like a hectic flush, dark seething seas and long meandering shadows. Everything seemed foreboding, but there was never any actual danger to be seen.
Dream was always in his arms, firmly anchored by the red ribbon that connected their wrists. He was heavy against Hob's chest, leaving his hands and arms and shoulders aching with the strain, but the moment when Hob's grip would fail never quite arrived. He always found he could keep walking and keep holding on, and the colors faded one into another as he went.
He wanted to ask Dream what this place was, but he was never quite sure it was that kind of dream. Dream himself never seemed entirely present; he was only a warm sleeping weight in Hob's arms, infinitely precious but not available for light conversation or tour guiding.
That was all right. Hob didn't need to understand. The strange swirls of color were beautiful even while they were dreadful, and Dream was his dearest friend even while he slept in Hob's arms and weighed down his steps. Hob kept holding on, and kept walking.
Dream woke up in Hob's bed, in Hob's arms. Something felt vaguely wrong about the situation, but he couldn't remember what it was. He sat up, flinging the blanket back, and the cool air felt delicious against his skin.
Then it just felt cold, and like he was going to come apart, or like he would get separated from Hob again and get lost.
He had the ribbon, though. The ribbon was very important: it was red, and red was his color, the only color that really mattered. Dream wrapped it around his arm, above where it was tied. Around, and around, and around, and...
Hob woke up feeling a bit cold but also curled around something—someone—wonderfully warm.
He opened his eyes and blinked a bit, trying to make sense of what he saw. It was Dream he was curled around, Dream already awake before him and sitting up while Hob curled instinctively around him. Hob had put him to bed in his little soft pajama suit, black with a print of white stars all over, and a moon over his heart, and a few stray comets hidden among the rest.
Now he was all in red. Not red clothes—he'd wrapped the whole fifty yards of red ribbon around himself, and it was about as much of a tangled mess as Hob had made of it while floating in that impossible void outside reality.
Swathed in red satin ribbon, Dream was frowning down at his hands, running his fingers back and forth along the short length of ribbon connecting the whole mess around Dream to Hob's wrist. Hob sat up, and Dream turned his head at the movement, but a bit slowly, as if he was moving underwater; his eyes when they finally met Hob's were still blue, but glassy and not quite focused.
His cheeks were still very pink, and Hob made himself smile and tried not to wince too obviously when he set his hand over Dream's forehead to feel the fever roaring there.
Dream didn't ask what he was doing, just went on looking up at him in the same unquestioning way his eyes had settled on Hob while he was eating last night. Hob probably ought to have noticed this then, but Dream had only seemed tired, and Hob had been pretty well knackered himself.
"Dream," Hob said, and Dream immediately scowled and jerked away, falling over in his tangle of ribbon and pulling Hob after him.
"Don't call me that," Dream said, scowling, his words imperious but with a hint of a plaintive whine that made him sound nearly as young as he looked. "That's not what you call me."
"I'm sorry, my friend—"
"No!"
Hob raised his eyebrows and started trying to figure out how to untangle them. It seemed clear that whatever state he was in, Dream wasn't going to be able to tell Hob what was going on, so Hob would just have to manage until he could. "No? What do I say, then?"
"You say, good morning, love," Dream insisted. "And you call me darling and sweetheart."
Hob found the end of the ribbon nearest his wrist and started unwinding it from around Dream. This was strange and concerning—and probably Delirium's doing, given the timing—but he wasn't going to make it better by making Dream more upset, so he kept his voice warm and steady when he spoke. "Good morning, love. You certainly have gotten yourself into a tangle, haven't you?"
Dream narrowed his eyes, and Hob couldn't help smiling despite the strangeness. "Darling," he added, dropping a kiss on Dream's hot cheek, "Sweetheart." Dream presented both of his hands for kissing, and Hob kissed his palms, folding little fingers down to hold the kisses in, for all the good kisses would do against this impossible fever.
One thing at a time. He had to get Dream out of the ribbon so they could both get out of bed. Dream might not have bodily functions, but Hob did, and he could see that getting two minutes for a private piss might be a matter of some negotiation while Dream was like this.
"Sweetheart darling love," Dream mumbled to himself, admiring his freshly-kissed hands while Hob managed to sit up again and resume unwinding. "My Hob," he added, a little louder, squirming over to prop his head on Hob's calf, entirely unconcerned with the way Hob had to shift him this way and that to get at the loops of ribbon.
"Of course yours," Hob murmured back, giving his nose a little tweak as he wrapped his end of the ribbon around his own arm to keep it out of the way. "Who else's would I be, hm?"
Dream frowned up at him for a moment, glazed eyes tracking nothing in particular, and then he shook his head and repeated, "My Hob. Only mine."
"All yours, my sweet darling love," Hob agreed, folding over to drop another kiss on his hot little forehead, and Dream seemed satisfied with that for now.
The unwinding took a good fifteen minutes, and was interrupted occasionally by Dream holding up a little hand, or tugging on whatever part of Hob's shirt he could reach, so that Hob would give him another kiss and another endearment. Dream repeated each one quietly to himself, and by the end of fifteen minutes Hob could feel his heart in little shattered pieces and absolutely was not allowing himself to wonder how rarely Dream had had such things said to him, that it was all he wanted now when he was feeling so poorly.
When he had Dream all freed of the ribbon—or at least, untangled from it, as it was still anchored to his wrist and to Hob's—he asked, "Should I untie this?"
Dream looked up at him with an impossibly forlorn expression—Hob would swear his eyes had gotten bigger, like a cartoon character's, but he couldn't look away from them to really check. "Are you still mine? All mine?"
Hob sighed. "All yours forever, darling, but I do need two minutes in the bathroom. I'll leave it tied, shall I? I won't be long at all."
Dream heaved a sigh and held up both hands to be kissed. He couldn't seem to summon the energy for more upset than that, which was almost more alarming than the rest of it. Hob hurried through the bare minimum of morning bathroom time, wracking his brain for what he could usefully do for Dream.
It had to be something Delirium had done—she'd said something, just before she vanished, about helping him on his way. And even if not for that great obvious clue, Dream wasn't human; he couldn't possibly get sick the way a real child would. The fever was something metaphysical, not something Hob could treat with any of the medicines that he was vaguely aware existed for this sort of thing nowadays. He certainly couldn't take Dream to a doctor; that was bound to be an even worse idea than letting one get too close a look at himself.
The main thing would just be to look after him through it, then. He would keep Dream as comfortable as possible, and continue calling him pet names and snuggling him until he was back to himself. Or at least the version of himself that was one meter tall and wanted to eat cheese on toast three meals a day.
With that settled in his mind, Hob headed back to the bedroom, where Dream had wrapped a few loops of ribbon around his hand and was absently gnawing on it. On the ribbon bit, at least, not his own skin, but still.
"How about some breakfast, love?" Hob tried, scooping him up and unwinding him again.
"Not hot," Dream said, and then abruptly burst into tears. Hob hadn't even managed to get out of the bedroom, so he sat down on the bed, and cuddled Dream until he stopped crying, which only took about a minute and a half this time.
"What was that about then, sweeting?" Hob asked.
"I don't want hot toast," Dream said into his shoulder, sounding so mournful that Hob was torn between laughing and bursting into tears himself. "But then I thought about cold toast. Don't make me eat cold toast with cold cheese!"
Hob hugged him tighter and absolutely did not laugh or cry. "I would never, darling. I'm sure we can find you something lovely and cold to eat for breakfast. Strawberries and cream, how about that?"
Dream's whole body jolted a little, but he didn't sit up as he would have yesterday, or wriggle out of Hob's grip and run to the kitchen. Today he just nodded against Hob's shoulder and said, still mournfully, "That sounds nice."
Hob stood up again, resuming the trip to the kitchen, and Dream whispered against his shoulder, "Darling, sweeting, love," like a miser counting over his coins or a dragon admiring his hoard. Hob held him tight and did not stop for his own weeping fit.
Strawberries and cream, with sugar sprinkled on top, was nice. And it was red, which was good. Dream felt very red himself today.
Hob made his own breakfast of eggs and toast, and ate it, in the time it took Dream to make his thoughtful way through half the bowl of strawberries and cream. He had to stop after each bite to lick grains of sugar from his fingers, or trickles of red juice. And it all tasted very good but he did not seem to be as hungry for anything as he'd been before.
And Hob was so very far away, on the other side of the table.
Dream swiped a cut strawberry through the whipped cream, and held it out to Hob.
Hob smiled that warm, soft smile—not red at all, a very cozy sort of deep dark brown—and then he leaned across the table and wrapped his hand around Dream's. He ate the strawberry and cream right from his fingers before pressing a slightly sticky kiss to Dream's hand. "Thank you for sharing, love."
"Love," Dream echoed to his hand as he took it back and licked it clean again. He could not seem to keep count of how many times Hob said it; he didn't know how many times would be enough. Every bit of the hunger he didn't feel for food, he felt for those little words that Hob gave him so freely, so easily.
Eventually he got near enough to the bottom of the bowl to feel no more interest in eating. Hob took the bowl as soon as Dream pushed it away, ate the last couple of strawberries, and washed it, all before Dream had the thought that he should be drying. Hob hadn't waited for him, hadn't brought him over to the sink or given him a towel. He had done it all without Dream and now Dream couldn't help at all.
He burst into tears again, and at once Hob was there, gathering him up and holding him, rocking him and whispering soft words to him—new ones, among the ones Dream had named to him. "Dear heart," he murmured, and "my joy," even though Dream was crying and not joyful at all, and yet he could feel the amber-brown truth of the word, curling warm around him. He was a joy to Hob—Hob's own joy—even if he was not to anyone else including himself. He was dear to Hob's heart. He was Hob's, as Hob was his.
When he was still again, Hob murmured, "What did I do this time, my dereworthy darling?"
"I dry the dishes," Dream said. "You didn't wait for me, you did all of them!"
"Oh, love, I'm sorry," Hob said, rocking him again. "I didn't think you'd want to today, I thought you were feeling a bit poorly and would rather just rest. But here, there are a few left, do you want to dry those?"
"Poorly?" Dream echoed, remembering that there was something that had felt wrong to him when he woke up today. Maybe red was not quite the word for how he was feeling, or not the only word. "What's poorly?"
"Hmm, do you feel a bit tired even though you've just woken up?" Hob said. "Or like everything is more difficult than usual, or takes longer? Or like you're just perishing hot and it makes you not feel like doing anything at all? Or like your body hurts here or there or maybe all over, even when there's no reason for it?"
Dream did feel all those things, and something more, something bigger than any of them. Something very wrong that he could not name, and not being able to name it was part of it.
But Hob was here. Hob had come and found him when he was lost, and untangled him when he was all tangled up, and made him strawberries and cream when he couldn't eat toast. Whatever was wrong, Hob could fix it.
"I feel poorly," Dream declared, and found he was crying a bit again. "Hob, I feel poorly."
"I know, love," Hob said, rocking him and kissing his hair. "Happens to the best of us sometimes. That's all right, I've got you. Do you want to dry the last bowl for me, or shall we leave the dishes and go watch a movie?"
"Not Mary Poppins," Dream said firmly. "A different one."
"I believe I know just the thing," Hob said, and carried him to the sofa.
Chapter 12
Hob laid himself down on the sofa, settling Dream on his chest where he could fall asleep or cry at will, since those seemed likely to be his two main activities today. Dream nestled in and turned his face expectantly toward the television; this time Hob didn't faff about, and quickly pulled up The Princess Bride.
He did pick his head up and give Hob a considering look over the establishing shots of the kid lying in bed, too ill to play, though it wasn't the withering glare it might have been any other day.
"Wait for it, wait for it," Hob whispered, smiling. "It's going somewhere."
Hob tilted his head to watch Dream's face when the grandfather arrived with a book, so he saw his eyes go round and his lips part in wonder.
"It's a story about a story?" Dream whispered.
Hob wrapped his arms tight around him and hugged him. "I knew you'd like it."
Another time Dream might have grumped that he didn't like it yet, but today he wound his fingers into Hob's t-shirt and went on watching with those wide, wondering eyes. It wasn't the same rapt attention he had given Mary Poppins—he faded out from time to time—but he was clearly enjoying it, right up until Westley was strapped down to a table and tortured, and then he let out a scream along with Westley and hid his face in Hob's chest.
Hob winced and paused the movie. "Sorry, love. He's going to be all right, and—"
"It felt like that," Dream sobbed into his chest. "It didn't look like that but it felt like that! But I couldn't say anything! I couldn't let them know!"
Hob sat up sharply, hugging Dream all the while, as a cold horror ran down his spine. Dream had said it yesterday—No one came before. I was trapped, and I couldn't make a sound, and no one came.
Hob hadn't let himself think too hard about what that meant, especially the part where Delirium had said she knew, that all Dream's siblings knew, and that they had decided whatever was happening to Dream was as it should be, and none of them would help him. While he was being tortured. While he couldn't make a sound.
"I'm sorry, darling," Hob whispered. "I'm so sorry. We can stop—"
"Does he get out? Will he get out?" Dream demanded. "Will he find her?"
"Yes, I promise," Hob pressed kisses to Dream's hair between the words. "Yes, this is a story about true love, so even when it seems like he won't get out, he will, and he will find her, and they will live happily ever after. I promise you. I wouldn't show you a movie where it all went wrong."
"It's not her fault," Dream sniffled. "She doesn't know. She would do something if she knew, but she doesn't know."
"She would fight all of them herself if she knew what they were doing," Hob promised. "She would never stop looking for him. She loves him just as much as he loves her, and she would never forget that."
"I want to see that part," Dream decided, squirming in Hob's grip so that he could see the television again. "Let's watch it some more."
Dream let out little teakettle keening sounds through the rest of the scene with Westley on the table, but Hob didn't try to shush him, just kept on holding him close. He could make all the sounds he wanted, here and now.
Hob, as always, was caught by surprise by I want my father back, you son of a bitch, and shed a few tears of his own for that. He was almost immediately distracted by Dream crawling up, planting his knees in Hob's gut, and setting his hands—even those felt hot—on Hob's cheeks. "Are you all right, my Hob? Are you poorly?"
Hob couldn't help smiling, blinking away those tears. He reached up to ruffle Dream's hair. "No, love. Just always makes me think of all the people I'd like to have back if I could."
Dream nodded solemnly and then folded down a bit clumsily to mash kisses against Hob's wet cheeks. "It's all right," Dream said seriously. "I'm here. You have me."
In an entirely different mood, Hob might have pointed out that there were a lot of other people Hob missed, but then in another mood Dream wouldn't have been awkwardly but very earnestly trying to console him. "That's right, dear heart, I've got you back. And you've got me back. So we're doing all right today, aren't we?"
"All right," Dream agreed, flopped back down on Hob's chest, and was asleep before Hob had managed to draw a full breath.
Hob lay still and watched the rest of the movie play, not even a little bit tempted to move.
Dream woke up and saw that the television had returned to the screen where Hob had selected The Princess Bride. He had missed the end of the movie.
Hob was lying still under him, resting one hand on Dream's back.
Dream tried to swallow, and couldn't quite. "Hob," he said, and his voice croaked. "My mouth feels poorly."
There was a little pause, and then Hob firmed his grip around Dream and got up off the couch, saying as he did, "Well, let's see what we can do about that."
Hob fixed him a cup of something to drink that tasted a bit orange and a bit bubbly-sharp but mostly just sweet, and Dream gulped it down eagerly. Hob kissed his head and refilled the cup, but this time Dream only needed another sip of the sweetness; his mouth and throat felt well enough again, though the rest of him was still poorly.
He nestled into Hob's shoulder again and said, "I missed the ending."
"We can go back and watch it from where you left off," Hob said easily, heading back toward the sofa with the cup in his hand. "Or just start over."
"Start over," Dream decided. He liked this movie. He didn't want to rush to be through with it.
They ended up watching The Princess Bride six times before the day was done. Hob didn't mind particularly; it made a comforting backdrop to the little trials and travails. Sometime during the second run, Dream began to shiver, and Hob pulled down the blanket from the back of the sofa to wrap him in. The third run was interrupted for a lunch of ice cream and, when that didn't help Dream's overheating enough to stop him lying on the floor whimpering, a tepid bath that Dream fell asleep in.
When they cycled around to another bath after three more viewings, the sun was nearly down, and Dream was willing to put on pajamas once Hob toweled him off and anointed his bruises. The ones on his shoulders were showing signs of improvement, the ones on his knees nearly gone, but the dark mess of bruising over his heart looked like it was only getting worse. Hob's own heart ached as he murmured comfort and applied arnica as if that could do any good.
But he had to believe that the act, if not the ingredients, would help. How else could Dream come to know he was loved but by Hob doing all the loving things he could?
Once he was in his pajamas—this suit was all black silk with white piping, and white buttons up the front—and the ribbon was tied around his wrist again, Hob laid him down on his usual side of the bed. Dream starfished on the mattress, and Hob didn't even try to cover him with a blanket before he headed back to the bathroom to see to his own needs. He had never changed out of last night's pajamas, but once he brushed his teeth and splashed some water on his face, he realized how clammy and uncomfortable they felt. He changed into fresh clothes of his own, untying and then retying the ribbon as necessary, before he lay down across from Dream.
It was only when he settled his head on the pillow that Hob realized Dream wasn't already asleep; his forehead was scrunched into a tiny frown, his eyes barely open, just reflecting the smallest gleam of light.
"What feels worst, love?" Hob murmured, reaching across to touch his cheek and then his forehead. He felt no hotter than he had coming out of the bath, at least.
"You went away," Dream murmured.
The red ribbon had been tied between them all day, but clearly that wasn't enough reassurance now; even when he was hot enough that he needed to be submerged in water, Dream hadn't liked to let Hob out of his sight, and he had only slept while Hob was holding him.
"Come here, then," Hob said, scooting a bit closer so he could reel Dream in by his little reaching hands. Hob curled over on his side and tucked Dream in close. Dream nuzzled in against his chest, took one deep breath, and went limp.
Hob lay there for a while trying to remember the last time he'd been ill himself. He hadn't caught anything going around in a few hundred years; even the dodgiest street food or most suspect leftovers never caused him a twinge these days.
Back in his soldiering days he'd had a few rounds of assorted camp dysenteries, but even then he'd been impervious to most of the common coughs and colds and such. The last time he remembered being really ill was the plague the first time around, but... he didn't ever think about that, and he didn't want to start now.
Before that, though, he was sure he had been a time or two, when he was small. He supposed if he had been ill enough for it to be notable, it had also been bad enough that he wouldn't ever have remembered much about it. He rarely attempted to remember any part of his own childhood; Robyn's early years had stirred up what memories he still had two hundred and some years on, whether Hob willed or nilled it.
Nowadays all he could muster up was the memory of remembering back then.
Hob could really only call one thing to mind that didn't feel like just a story he'd passed down from himself to himself over the centuries. He had just one scrap of sense-memory from his childhood, one ordinary moment out of thousands.
His mother had been sitting near the fire, and Hob had curled up on the floor beside her feet, out of the way of her spinning and on the other side of her from the hearth so she wouldn't tug him away and scold him. He didn't, in the memory, feel particularly small or young, but then he would have been as big and as old as he'd ever been at the time. He did remember how neatly he fit in that spot, how his cheek rested against her thigh, and he could smell her, the kind of familiar body-smell that most people had spent the past hundred years frantically scrubbing off and covering up.
It was the one part of the memory that felt truly real, when he could remember it clear enough that the scent of her came back to him, warm and rich and human and alive.
She hadn't had time to be cuddling him or carrying him about as he did Dream, but she would drop her left hand to his head now and then, when she could pause in her spinning for a moment. And she had told him stories, he was almost certain. Not anything particularly improving or educational—no Bible stories or fables with morals. She had told him stories about being brave and adventurous. She had taught him to be curious, to wake up every day wondering who and what he might discover.
He couldn't remember any particular story she had told him, only the fact that she had; he couldn't remember if the moment he remembered was a specific moment or the accumulation of many, whether she had spoken to him as she spun or kept silent.
But he could remember how she smelled, and how it felt to tuck himself safely in against her body, and he could remember her hand sometimes resting for a moment on the top of his head.
Hob wasn't aware of the slip from memory into dreaming, but at some point he looked across his mother's lap and saw Dream, small enough to fit on her other side. But that meant that he was much too close to the fire, practically in the flames. Even before Dream made a sound of pain Hob was lunging toward him, out of that dream and into the waking world, where Dream was writhing across the bed, whimpering with his eyes shut tight.
"Oh, love," Hob sighed, trying to scoop him up, which only turned the whimpers into outright cries. Dream struggled against him, and Hob could not bear the thought of raising a fresh bruise on that petal-soft skin. He gave up and let Dream writhe away, and then ran to the bathroom, wetting down a few flannels to bring back to the bed.
Dream quieted a little as Hob swabbed him off, and he realized that he was saying, almost chanting, "I'm here, darling, I'm here, I won't leave you."
By the time the flannels were all nearly as warm as Dream himself, Dream had quieted enough that he only whimpered as Hob gathered him up and took them into the bathroom again. Dream startled awake—or nearer to it—when Hob turned the light on, and curled into Hob with a whimper.
"I'm here, lovie, I've got you, I won't let go," Hob murmured, filling the tub again. He rearranged them so that Dream's feet caught a bit of the pouring water on its way down, for whatever cooling effect that would have. "You'll feel better soon, sweeting, you'll—"
He couldn't say what it was: the memory of his own mother so near the surface, or just some trick of Dream's weight on his lap, or the accumulation of a day of helplessness over a feverish child, but for a moment everything around him blurred.
Hob kept talking, because for a moment it was 1586, and he was holding Robyn, waiting out the same ague that Eleanor was taken with. Hob had only been able to try to keep him cool—even the physician had agreed that such a small child could not be bled to fight the fever. Someone had asked him about sending for a priest to shrive the boy, and Hob had refused.
There had only been one help he wanted to call upon: he had wanted to find some way to reach his friend, three years early, and beg his help to save Robyn's life. A priest, after all, would say Robyn had gone on to a better world if he should die that night in Hob's arms—he had been christened already, and too young for sin. But Hob would take no comfort from that. Hob had wanted only this life for Robyn, to keep him in the world. It would have been monstrous to lose him so young.
Hob was dimly aware that that night had passed. Robyn's fever had broken, and Robyn had made a full and rambunctious recovery while Eleanor lingered abed, not in danger but needing her rest, for more than a week afterward. Hob had spent much of every day chasing after his son, coming to love him more and more with every hour and letting himself forget what a fragile creature he dared to love.
Here he was again, holding someone small and feverish and fragile in his arms, and he did not know if he had done everything he could to help. He had been certain, in the light of day, that nothing could really harm Dream, that this was a gift in the guise of a curse, and would pass in time.
Now, deep in the night, he could only wonder: what if he was wrong? What if Dream didn't need consolation—what if he needed help?
Hob lowered him into the half-full bath, keeping an arm curled around him so that Dream could relax into the water without his head going under or water getting into his ears, which he didn't like even when he was otherwise perfectly well. Hob let his own head hang down, watching the water level continue to slowly rise, and tried to think of what he possibly could do if Dream needed help.
Hob had stayed well away from all things magical for a long time now. He was aware of a few other fellow immortals, but didn't know how to contact them, and had no idea if they had powers or connections that he'd dare to call upon for Dream's sake, when Dream was so much more vulnerable than he had been even a couple of days ago when facing Odin.
Dream had the feather that let Matthew find him, but so far as Hob knew even Dream couldn't use the feather to call Matthew. He had sent Matthew on his mission to Odin from inside the Dreaming, while he slept that first night in Hob's bed. Dream clearly wasn't able to sleep well enough to reach the Dreaming, and even within his realm he might feel the effects of whatever Delirium had done to him. Dream as he had been today seemed unlikely to know how to fix this, even if he were in a place where he could.
There was one other thing Dream had, which he kept always close to him like the feather. There was the book of Dream's family, which was clearly more than just a book. Those pages for Night and Time had ensnared Hob somehow, and each of the pages for his siblings probably also held more than just those images. He'd noticed at the time how hurriedly Dream had turned pages and then set the book aside after Hob tried to touch one of the pictures.
He didn't want to think of what would have happened if he touched the picture of Night, or of Time.
But if he touched the picture of Delirium, would he be able to ask her what was happening to Dream and when it would be over?
On the other hand, if he touched the picture of Delirium, would Hob himself be affected? Were all the pages traps for unwary humans?
Hob knelt there by the tub, tipping handfuls of water over the crown of Dream's head without letting any run into his eyes, watching his little grimaces of discomfort slowly relax into something like sleep.
He needed to do something.
There was only one way he could even possibly attempt to do anything.
When Dream dozed off again, Hob shut off the water and shoved a few towels in around Dream to keep him propped up, and then ran back to the bedroom.
He had helped Dream change into his pajamas the night before the fever became obvious, and at that point Dream had taken feather and book from his overall pocket and tucked them into a pocket inside his suitcase. They had stayed there all day today, with Dream still in his pajamas and apparently unconcerned with them.
Now Hob opened the suitcase and reached cautiously into that pocket. He let out a shaky breath in relief when his fingers brushed feather and board book, and he carefully withdrew the book and then hurried back to the bathroom.
Dream was lying still in the bath, so still that Hob dropped the book and laid one hand on his chest, the other on his cheek. He told himself he was being ridiculous—Dream was still visibly flushed pink and also wasn't human—but he breathed under Hob's hand. His cheek was warm, and after a couple of breaths he pressed into Hob's palm.
"All right," Hob said, a little too loud in the night-quiet. "All right. I..."
He looked around and saw the book on the floor, fallen open to the first pages Dream had shown him: his elder siblings, Destiny and Death.
Hob's gaze went to Death first—she had brought him to Hob, and he was almost certain that she must be the reason for his own immortality.
But sister or not, benefactor or not, he could not call Death closer to a sick child. He could not.
Destiny... Destiny knew everything, Dream had said. Destiny, surely, would know why this was happening, and what should be done. He had to know what was going to happen; that was the whole point of him.
Hob didn't let himself wonder whether this would be useless. If it was, he would know soon enough. He took his hand off of Dream's chest, wiped it dry on his shirt, and pressed his fingers to the gleaming book in the picture of Destiny.
"Destiny? I suppose you know who I am and what I'm doing, and that I'm here with your little brother and he's—poorly—" Hob's voice cracked on the word, remembering Dream saying it and bursting into tears as if he'd never felt anything like it before.
There was a rustle behind him, an unmistakable presence, and Hob jerked his hand away from the book and twisted to look up, keeping his hand still on Dream's cheek.
A figure shrouded in gray filled the bathroom doorway, a book held in his arm and connected to his wrist with a chain. His face was invisible even with Hob looking up from his knees.
"Is this how he's supposed to be?" Hob asked, when the silence had stretched unbearably. "Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?"
"This is all as it appears in my book," Destiny said, which seemed like a yes. "You are correct to surmise that Delirium intended to encourage Dream further along his chosen path. She was... being helpful, as best she could."
"Is he going to get better?" Hob demanded, dimly aware that he probably shouldn't be addressing the actual personification of actual Destiny in quite this way, but also miles and centuries past caring.
"He will," Destiny intoned.
Hob nodded, and couldn't figure out what to say other than Thanks, you can go now, which he was very sure was not the right thing to say at all.
He looked down at Dream again, and found Dream looking back at him.
"Hob?" Dream croaked.
"Hey, love," Hob said. "How are you feeling?"
Dream wrinkled his nose. "Wet. And poorly."
"Yeah," Hob said. "It's been that kind of day, hasn't it? Can you sit up, do you think?"
Dream held up his arms, and Hob wasn't going to get out of this without being drenched no matter what he did, so he gathered Dream up to perch him on the edge of the tub. He twisted, and—
There was a towel. One of his own towels, from his hall closet, being held out to him by Destiny, who had evidently known Hob would need that.
"Ta," Hob muttered, and turned back to dry Dream off—but Dream had spotted his brother, and was staring up at him with those glassy eyes.
He was frowning.
Hob wrapped the towel around him, but that didn't distract him a whit.
"You," Dream said, in his tiny croaky wavering sick kid voice, "are not a very good brother."
Destiny gave a stiff, shallow bow. "I was not one, when I came into existence. I must fit all acts of brotherhood into the interstices of my function, when and as I may. It is apparent to me that my efforts are rarely satisfactory, but I am only and exactly what I am."
Dream blinked up at him for a long moment while Hob rubbed him dry, wondering whether there was any point to getting him into another clean set of clothes. Destiny hadn't said when Dream would get better, and that pink flush on his cheeks was already starting to intensify, though that might have been to do with the way he was glaring at his brother.
His expression brightened very suddenly. "You did save me, though. I tried to talk to Mother and she—but you brought me out. There was no way out, but you summoned me to you."
"I did what I had to do," Destiny said, with the cadence of a proverb, or a prayer. "And you will recall that—"
"But you helped me," Dream insisted, starting to frown again. "Even if it was because you had to because of your book, that's you. You helped me. No one else could, but you did."
There was a long, long pause, and then Destiny sat down in the doorway, legs crossed and book in his lap. "So I did. And I was glad of it, my brother."
Dream leaned into Hob for a moment, and then, quick as a cat, he launched himself out of Hob's arms and into Destiny's lap, wet pajamas and trailing wet ribbon and all. He giggled in rusty-edged triumph and flung his arms around Destiny's shrouded neck.
Destiny folded in the arm not holding the book and patted Dream's back, saying, "I sat down so that you could do that. This, too, was written."
"But you still did it!" Dream said, sing-song with happiness. He released Destiny's neck and sank down into his lap, looking up at him with those wide, wide eyes. "Will you stay for a little while?"
"For so long as I may," Destiny said, and raised a hand to rest it on Dream's forehead.
Destiny's hand on his forehead felt cool, and his lap was nice and comfortable. It was cooler than sitting in Hob's lap, which probably wouldn't be nice most of the time, but Dream was feeling poorly and perishing hot. Destiny felt just right, as if it were written that he should be.
Dream had never sat like this with Destiny before, he was certain. Destiny would probably say that was because it was never in the book before, but it was never in the book before because Dream had never been just like this before, and Destiny... Destiny was letting him be how he was now, even though it was different to how he was before.
And Destiny had saved him once, just like Hob and Delirium had saved him. Just like Alianora had saved him, once, when Desire sent her to him. Just like Desire...
He didn't want to think about Desire.
His thoughts wouldn't hold still, and even Destiny's hand on his head didn't feel so nice and cool anymore. Dream kicked his feet sharply against the bathroom rug, squirming a little.
Destiny said, "Your fever is rising again, little brother. You will feel better in the water."
Dream twisted away enough to look up at him, where he could see as much of Destiny's face as he ever could. "Are you leaving? Like Mary Poppins?"
Destiny didn't seem to know exactly what Dream meant, and Dream couldn't think of the words to explain.
From behind Dream, Hob said, as his hand settled on Dream's back, holding him up, "He means, will you be all alone when you go? Will you be lonely there?"
Destiny's mouth curled up just the tiniest bit, but Dream was close enough to see his brother smile. "I am never alone in my garden, little brother. And I will not be lonely when I go. But you may always visit me there, if you are concerned."
"Always?" Dream said, with vague thoughts of showing up just to bother his brother, who was always perfectly in order. He had a sense of why he wouldn't, didn't, hadn't, but it slipped away from him in the pleasure of seeing Destiny's smile curl up by another tiny fraction.
"Always," Destiny agreed. "Though Lord of What Is Not that you are, you have never much liked spending time in the Garden of What Is and Shall and Must Be."
"Hmmm," Dream said, because he knew his brother was right—his brother was always right—but he could not quite hold everything Destiny said and meant in his mind. "But I'm allowed."
"You are invited and welcome," Destiny promised, and Destiny always meant what he said. "But for now you are poorly, and you should have another bath."
Dream sighed, because Destiny was right again, and thinking hard about his brother not being Mary Poppins was far too much effort. He was tired and hot and didn't want to do anything; he leaned himself back against Hob's supporting hand, and Hob laughed a little and scooped him up and into the bath.
By the time Dream looked back toward the door to say goodbye, Destiny was already gone.
Hob, though, Hob was right there kneeling by the tub and looking down at him with a little worried line on his forehead.
"It's okay, Hob," Dream told him. "I'm still here with you."
"Well, thank you very much for that, my joy," Hob said, smiling and making different lines on his face that Dream liked much better. Dream looked and looked at them until he couldn't keep his eyes open anymore, and then he didn't.