Chapter Text
War came to Fawney Rig on a summer’s evening and lit a cigarette on the lawn with the tip of her thumb, which was on fire. A long car drive with a horseman of the Apocalypse was the sort of thing that might have worried Hob Gadling once upon a time but these days he had different priorities. The highest priority was locked in the cellar of this horrible fucking house.
“He’s not going to be grateful,” War said. “He’s probably going to be a real prick.”
“He’s been locked up for a hundred years,” Hob said savagely. “He’s allowed to be a prick.”
War shrugged. She was not sentimental. She was neither god nor Endless – this place did not frighten her. She was contemptuous of it. She stared down the house as she took a drag on the cigarette and flames licked up her wrists like they were longing to be unleashed on Fawney Rig. Hob had seen her many times over his centuries as an on and off soldier, she who wore scarlet, but this was the first time he’d gone looking for her. He’d found her in the stands of a football stadium where the crowd was baying, a brawl in the air, and she’d turned to him with her terrible Mona Lisa smile. “Out for blood, Hob Gadling?”
“Your blessing,” he’d said, because he loved life with all he had but self preservation had never been his strong point or he’d never have challenged Death to that game of cards and won immortality by cheating shamelessly.
Anyway. War had laughed, got in the car, and smoked like a chimney the whole way. Reminisced about Hastings and Agincourt with the satisfaction of a job well done, pausing occasionally to give directions. Fawney Rig was not easy to find these days. “Fucking nightmares,” War had explained. “They’ll misdirect you. They don’t like your boy much.”
“Not mine,” Hob had said.
He’d met Dream a handful of times over the centuries, usually in the company of his far more sociable sister Death. Death was invariably friendly, showing every evidence of enjoying their conversations; if Dream acknowledged Hob’s existence, it was a good day. Six hundred years was a very long time to want something. Forever was an even longer time to know you couldn’t have it.
Hob would have liked to think that time had made a better man of him, slowly and painfully, but when he heard of Dream’s imprisonment the wrath that had overcome him was pure medieval in its brutality. It belonged to the longbow, to the axe. It was 1989 and under the sleek hair and expensive clothes, Hob Gadling was still at heart a soldier of fortune.
“Death’s little brother is not an easy lover,” War had said, red hair billowing out the window like a banner on a battlefield. “In fact, he’s destroyed every relationship I’ve ever known him to have, it’s an art form. Why do you think no one has come all this time, even his siblings? He’s too proud to ask for their help, and they don’t help each other without asking. You can do better.”
“Thanks?” Hob had said faintly. Getting advice on his love life from a horseman of the Apocalypse was maybe a bit much for today. He took a left, got tutted at by War, screeched around and went right. There was the house – there was Fawney Rig, a prison for an Endless. It was a big house but it didn’t look big enough. Hob remembered a cathedral from his childhood and how it had seemed to belong to another world from the mud and woodsmoke of his village. Even that cathedral would not have felt worthy to hold Dream. Rage welled up in Hob again like blood from a wound.
This was why War had come along with him. He might not always be a soldier, but he was hers all the same. He was always going to fight.
“Have a sword,” she said, swinging an ugly length of sharp steel through the air. Hob caught the hilt squarely and the weight felt right. He knew what to do with this. “Have my blessing,” War said, and then there was no one there, only a burning cigarette on the drive and the smell of smoke.
Hob Gadling walked into Fawney Rig.
There was blood and water on the floor of the cellar. Dream of the Endless was naked as a fantasy, kneeling in a prison of glass with his eyes fixed on Hob. He was an impossible sight, moonshine and shadow, and Hob’s want for him clawed its way out of containment. It seemed this was the night for freeing terrible things. Even as he walked forward, his bloody sword swinging at his side, what he wanted to do was stand there and stare a while, to look his fill at something he would never get to see again. Dream rose slowly to his feet. Even like this, he was graceful.
“If you release me,” he said, as if he did not think that would happen, as if that was not the whole fucking point of Hob being here, “I will reward you.”
Hob came to the edge of the circle of runes and held the tip of his blade to the painted symbols on the floor. Dream’s own family – even Hob’s friend Death, whom he had liked so long, and trusted, and thought of as the best person he knew – had left him to rot in the dark but Hob had come as soon as he heard. He had thought he would at least be seen as a rescuer, not a mercenary. War had given him better benefit of the doubt than that. Hob knew he was not a good man, but seeing himself as Dream must was a bitter thing. It made him pause, considering.
“What would be my reward?” he asked.
Dream pressed his hands to the glass. Long slender hands, soft and fine, the hands of an artist and an aristocrat. “What is it that you wish ?” he asked.
Hob wanted to get his hands around those slim wrists and pin them above Dream’s head to hold him in place while he kissed him witless. He wanted to get him on his hands and knees and fuck him until he couldn’t walk. He wanted to lay him in a bed of silk, feed him like an emperor with figs and honey, swathe him in comfort and pleasure until he had no desire to ever leave Hob’s side. Hob had been around for a while, had friends in all sorts of strange places, and he’d kept track of every scrap of gossip ever dropped about Dream. He had a good idea of what the Prince of Stories wanted from a lover and had imagined now and then over the centuries about how he’d give it to him.
He’d tried, and failed, to not dream about it.
“I’d wish to see you,” Hob said simply. “I’d see you as I sometimes see your sister. How many men could call two Endless his friends?”
Dream looked at him. His pink, perfect top lip curled and Hob thought, shit, War was right, he is a real prick. “ To visit you, Waking or Dreaming? ” he said distractedly, hands pushing on the glass like he was testing it for a weak spot. “ Yes. Very well, Hob Gadling. That will be your reward.”
Hob scraped the edge of his blade through the paint, leaving a thin clear line right through. Dream arched up behind the glass with a gasp, heavy-lidded. His fingernails scratched against the glass. Hob could imagine how they’d feel raking down his back.
“Better duck now,” he said, hefting up the sword and swinging it with all his strength.
He had expected Dream to fuck off to the Dreaming the moment the glass was broken but when the storm cloud of darkness that had surrounded him cleared, Dream was still there, crouched on the floor. He said in a small, shocked voice, “It will not answer me. I do not have the power.”
Hob laid the sword aside. It promptly vanished. Apparently his loan had expired.
“My tools, ” Dream said, raising his head. “ I must find them.”
This was, it seemed, going to be Hob’s problem. Dream’s eyes were expectant. What was Hob, in his mind? His older sister’s side project? A freelancer of the Dreaming? Hob realised how loose his phrasing had been in asking for that reward. No wonder Dream had agreed so quickly. He could show up once in a hundred years and call their terms fulfilled. He would likely consider himself generous for doing it at all. He was Endless, after all, and above all Hob’s human hungers.
He looked very thin, though. And cold.
Hob offered his hand. Dream stared at it as if he had forgotten what a gesture like that might mean, his blank face twisting. Above human hungers, maybe, not human fears. Hob bent, taking Dream’s hand in a cautious hold, telegraphing each motion. Dream’s hand went from a still, cold weight to a clawing, clutching grip, coming to his feet right in Hob’s space. His eyes were burning. Vengeance, and tears.
“Sounds like you need a lift,” Hob said.
Hob was in the antiques business this time around. Nearly everything he bought and sold was younger than he was, and quite a lot of those items had been his in one life or another. He had a good nose for lost things and contacts all over the world who owed him favours for one reason or another. When serious competition cropped up, he found out everything he could about them, which was how he recognised the name of Dream’s thief.
“Ethel fucking Cripps,” Hob said admiringly. “She’s a real one.”
“You know her?” Dream said with more open suspicion than should be allowed from a being wearing Hob’s coat and nothing but the coat, seated in the passenger seat of Hob’s car. His long bare legs glowed pale in the dark car, folded elegantly into the footwell.
“Ethel is a dealer. She’s ruthless, brilliant, a fucking ghost. Almost as bad as me.”
“You cannot find her?”
Hob grinned a little too wide. Oh, he was enjoying this – Dream looking to him for answers. “That’s not what I said.”
He stopped to refuel the car and while they were stopping anyway, he asked Dream if he wanted something to eat or drink. Dream turned his head slowly toward Hob and gave him a cool, disdainful look. A king troubled with petty matters.
“I am Endless ,” he said. “ I need not eat.”
“Need isn’t the same thing as want,” Hob said. He would know.
Dream looked away. “I need my tools. All else is irrelevant.”
Hob bought himself a coffee. He also bought a waxed paper cup of tea, three kinds of juice, a box of trail mix, a bag of fruit and an assortment of sweet and savoury pastries. He dumped the bag on Dream’s side of the car without a word and pulled out of the car park. Dream ignored the bag pointedly for fifteen minutes before his eyes drifted down to it, a tiny frown pulling his brows together. As they crawled forward through the predictably appalling traffic, Hob heard the rustle of the paper bag being opened and from the corner of his eye he saw Dream taking out an apple.
“My sister likes apples,” he said.
“Yeah,” Hob said, staring at the road ahead. “I know.”
Death liked a lot of things. Hob had made a little game of it, trying to find something she wouldn’t eat and hadn’t won it yet. She had never seemed human to Hob, and it had never seemed to matter, because he thought he knew her. He had thought they were friends.
Hob heard a soft crunch. Dream had taken a bite of the apple. He froze and Hob suddenly wondered if it was possible for an Endless to throw up; it looked for a good minute like he would find out. Then Dream was eating, in small, desperately restrained bites, one after another after another until all the apple was gone and he was reaching into the bag for more.
The friend Hob had thought he had would never have left her brother buried in that cellar, whether he asked for her help or not.
Dream ate everything Hob had bought, washed down with deep shaky draughts of the juice and cooled tea. Not a drop or crumb was left by the time he was done. He did not look at Hob once, and Hob tried not to acknowledge the frantic feasting that was happening beside him at all. It wasn’t only War he’d met over the centuries; he’d seen more of Famine than he could bear in the 17 th century. He’d survived it only because the other option was not surviving. He thought about that prison of glass, in the dark beneath Fawney Rig, and he wanted to be sick himself.
Once back in his flat in London, Hob found some clothes for Dream to wear and made him more tea, which he drank the minute Hob’s back was turned. Hob refilled the cup, patting Dream’s thin shoulder unthinkingly as he passed, and regretted it at once at the tiny hitched, hurt noise Dream made. That was the second time he’d been touched in decades. He probably had wanted it to be someone other than Hob.
Still, need and want were different things, and what Dream needed was his tools.
Hob sat down with the phone and a little notebook that had he’d kept on him for the past century or so, with generations worth of dirt laid by for a rainy day, and he started calling in favours. Dream paced about the flat like a restless cat, Hob’s too-big shirt sliding off his shoulder, his fingers petting absently at his throat where the ruby should be. He watched Hob with an intensity that could be frightening, would be frightening, if Hob didn’t want it so fucking much.
Hob made thoughtful noises into the phone, jotted down a few notes, and by midnight he had three addresses. The sand had been floating around in arcane circles for a while now, disappointing every buyer and soon passing on to new hands. That had been easy to track down. The ruby was more a challenge, but Ethel had a son and the son had a storage unit, and that storage unit must be quite important to have such a complicated arrangement for keeping the fees paid. As for the helm, Hob couldn’t say where that might be. But Ethel could. And he had found her.
Hob wrote the addresses down in his notebook, tore out the page and folded the paper in half. He held it up between two fingers. “Am I getting rewarded for this too?” he asked, with what he thought was obvious humour.
Dream looked at the paper as if he would tear it away. “What would you ask for?”
Hob’s hand clenched, closing around the paper. “How about this as a reward. You come to me when I ask, whenever I ask.” He shrugged. “I’m a fair man. I won’t keep you from your duties. What’s a few hours here and there to the King of the Dreaming?”
“Hours,” Dream said. He stood like a statue, head tilted like a bird.
“I can ask for you to come. I can’t make you stay.”
He didn’t expect Dream to believe him. He didn’t expect Dream to honour his word either. Oh, he would keep to whatever promise he made, but he would find a way to twist the promise to his own purposes – beings both ancient and obnoxious were good at that, as Hob should know. He’d settle for hearing the words. For Dream feeling enough obligation to say it.
“Speak my name. I offer you no service, no gifts, no compact of any kind. Only that I will come when you wish and leave when I choose. ” Dream lifted those shocking blue eyes. “ Are we agreed, Hob Gadling? Will you help me retrieve my tools?”
All you needed to do was ask. But Dream of the Endless would never lower himself to ask, not a lesser creature like Hob. “Agreed,” Hob said easily. He flicked open the paper. “Sand first?”
A little London auction house – the sand. Hob’s money got them through the door.
A storage unit in America – the ruby. The sand got them there. Hob broke them in.
An apartment in Venice – Ethel Cripps, and the name of the demon to whom she had traded the helm for an amulet of protection. Hob eyed that toy with considerable interest while Dream extracted his answers from Ethel, who for all her steely composure had a festering core of guilt where Dream was concerned.
Then Dream took the name to a Constantine, because of course it was one of the fucking Constantines, to summon that demon and compel the helm from them. There was screaming and burning and Dream the size of a mountain, a vast horrifying thing of shadow, triumphantly reclaiming the last of his tools. By the time Hob staggered to his feet, choking on smoke and staring at the remnants of what had been quite a nice cathedral, Dream was long gone.
About what Hob had been expecting.
He went home, had a few drinks, thumped his head on the window a few times like the cool glass could knock some sense into him. It had been his day to call in favours, but this one was the newest and the biggest, the one he should store away over the centuries for when a rainy day became a flood. Instead he closed his eyes and said to the night, “Dream.”
“You ask for your reward so soon, Hob Gadling?”
Dream was angry. That was fine. Hob was angry too.
“Might as well,” he said, knocking back the rest of his whiskey and slamming the glass down. It rolled off the table and he saw Dream flinch a little, though there was no shattering, only a dull thump on thick carpet. How could Hob want so badly to give Dream a shake and enfold him in his arms all at the same time? He wanted to pull Dream over his knee and spank him until he wept, and wrap him in every soft thing he could get his hands on until nothing could hurt him again. It had been easier when he just wanted to fuck Dream blind.
“Very well, ” Dream said curtly. “ I am here. Say what you will, and quickly, for I have more work at hand than you can possibly imagine.”
“You’re very important. I know,” Hob said, not entirely sarcastic. He looked at Dream, how taut and tense he stood as if to avoid touching anything. The ruby glowed in its place around his throat. He was the most powerful creature, apart from Death herself, that Hob had ever met and was ever likely to meet, and he’d only just come out of a century of imprisonment – straight to work, apparently, without giving himself a breath in between. “Too important to listen to the likes of me, I know. You offer me no service.” Hob walked closer, the mad fearlessness of the battlefield taking over. “No gifts. Nothing but your presence now and then, when I ask for it. Well, I ask for it. I ask for it. I ask and I ask and I ask.”
Dream’s eyes widened. Hob was close enough to touch now, and he did touch, running his fingers along the edge of Dream’s black coat sleeve. “I’m a fair man,” he said softly. “I won’t make you ask.” And he lifted his hand to Dream’s jaw, pressing the palm to the cut-glass perfection of it while he stole a kiss from that soft, shocked mouth.
Dream stood very still, and let him.
Hob kissed him thoroughly, catching a handful of feral black hair and using it to gently guide Dream’s head a little to the side, so that Hob could mouth at his throat too, while he was taking things he had no right to anyway. He felt Dream swallow, the movement under his lips the only sign of life. Dream wasn’t breathing. He was probably above that too. Hob bit down on the taut muscle between his neck and shoulder, a quick wicked nip, then reclaimed Dream’s mouth with filthy, demanding intent.
And Dream let him. He didn’t kiss back. He didn’t touch Hob. But he stood like a beautiful sculpture in Hob’s apartment, a universe dressed up like a man, and let Hob’s hands slide down his narrow back to wrap around his even narrower waist. Dream was proud, and dignified, and there was neither pride nor dignity in asking to tipped over the nearest horizontal surface, but Dream allowed it to happen – walked backwards to the wide leather sofa and laid down on it by Hob’s eager hands. The only reaction Hob received was the tiniest of snarls when he flicked up the hem of Dream’s shirt. All right. The shirt stayed on.
Hob laid his mouth against the thin, soft fabric and licked across the little hard spot where Dream’s left nipple was concealed. He swept his tongue over it a couple more times to settle exactly where his target was then bit down suddenly, and to his ferocious delight, Dream bucked silently in response. Hob pinned him firmly to the sofa with his weight, so that Dream would be required to use force to remove him, and turned his attention to the right nipple. It was already hard, sensitive, waiting for his teeth. Dream twisted at the sensation. He wanted it. He wasn’t going to ask, but Hob had been fucking for over six centuries and he knew , if Dream had a cunt he’d be soaking through his panties right now. Hob had that idle thought in mind as he slipped a hand down the front of Dream’s jeans to find a welcoming wetness under his fingers. Huh. King of Daydreams too, Hob supposed. He risked a look at Dream’s face and found it turned away, blue eyes directed at the ceiling. One long pale hand was pressed hard into the cushions of the sofa, nails digging in hard enough to damage the leather, not that Hob gave a fuck. He peeled Dream’s jeans open and down just far enough to get access between his legs, where sure enough, the lovely cunt he’d imagined was waiting for him.
Well. He knew what to do with that.
Hob lowered himself into position, elbows braced on either side of Dream’s hips, and dipped his head between Dream’s legs. He rolled his tongue around the heated lips of Dream’s cunt, a tease and a test to see how Dream would react. A minute shiver of the flawless pale thighs – Hob was going to have to work for this. Good. He’d spent centuries getting in the practice, now he was going to put it all to good, thorough use.
He gave Dream’s clit his full, unrelenting attention until he was dripping, thighs slick and shaky from orgasm even as he refused to give Hob the satisfaction of a single noise. He wasn’t actually breathing, Hob was pretty sure. His legs had spread, though, his hips hitching helplessly towards Hob’s mouth. When Hob was good and ready he gave Dream two fingers at once and could have managed three without effort, Dream was so wet. Hob made an approving noise, humming where Dream must – if he felt anything like a human did – be almost unbearably sensitive. Hob thought longingly of what he could do to Dream’s composure with a few hours and a good vibrator.
Dream responded to the fantasy as if a toy had been pressed directly to his clit. His lips parted and a small harsh breath finally escaped him, like an admission of defeat. Hob worked a gasp out of him as he came again on Hob’s fingers, and it wasn’t as if he was pretending to have self control tonight, so he lunged up to kiss that open, panting, unresisting mouth. While he was kissing deep, he positioned himself and thrust inside. He tasted Dream’s tiny cry and set himself the task of getting it again. He fucked Dream steadily, working his thumb against that sweet spot until Dream was clamping his thighs around Hob’s waist and throwing his head back. A pink flush was spreading over his face; a facsimile of a blush as delightfully involuntary as the real thing.
Hob was panting, too greedy to stop. He pulled out and revelled in Dream’s tiny startled frown. A push and a little guidance got Dream over onto his hands and knees and then Hob was fucking straight back in, driving another cry from Dream. That wasn’t quite enough. Hob always pushed his luck right to the limit. He hooked his fingers through the chain around Dream’s neck, tangled them to get a nice tight grip, and tugged. Dream’s neck was jerked backwards like a leash being pulled. If he’d needed to breathe, he’d have needed it more; as it was, his head was pulled right back against Hob’s shoulder. Lips bitten red, lashes wet and black, skin pale as Snow White’s. Hob fucked him at a ferocious pace, bracing one arm against the arm of the sofa and wrapping the other tight around Dream’s waist, driving his hips in and in at a brutal pace. He didn’t want to come, he didn’t want it to end, he wanted to keep Dream like this – just like this – cored open, wet and wanting and wrecked on his cock.
But Hob was human, not Endless. He needed to breathe and he needed to come. He pushed his face into the smooth, soft skin at Dream’s neck and dipped his hand back between Dream’s trembling legs, bringing him to shuddering relief one last time before he lost himself in pleasure too.
He had never been so rough with a lover before. Dream could take it but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be gentle with him afterwards. Hob was as careful as he knew how, pulling regretfully from the clutch of Dream’s tight body, gentling his tensing spine with a firm rubbing hand. On instinct, he drew Dream in against his chest, gathering him in with the full expectation he’d break loose in an instant. But he didn’t. He was very quiet, loose – sore, surely, if he could get sore – allowing himself to be tucked in against the hot sweaty skin of Hob’s chest. Hob felt the slight weight of him in his arms and felt a flutter of something in his throat. Happiness, maybe. Or grief. What was it they said about getting everything you’d always wanted?
Hob’s eyes drifted shut against his will. Dream was gone between one blink and the next.
Hob woke alone to the fading smell of sex and a fierce ache in his hips and thighs. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. That had been the fuck of a lifetime – even a lifetime as long as his was likely to be. He was in a daze all day, unable to think about anything else. He should know when to stop. He should know when there would be a hell of a price to pay.
He looked out over the balcony and said, “Dream.” And grinned as a shadow formed between him and the stars.