Work Text:
When Hob enters the coffee shop looking for Dream, he finds that one of the baristas has, apparently, given Dream both a towel and a hot drink. Bless them. He imagines having a patron show up bruised in the face and sopping wet with no wallet or phone would do that. Dream had called him from the cafe phone.
He hopes, not for the first time, that this is the time Dream manages to leave Thessaly. Pushing does not work. He's simply tried to be there for Dream, like he is now, instead.
Dream looks like hell, which is saying something. He is still shivering, bruises dotting his collarbone visible when his shirt shifts, and Hob feels a stab of pain at his friend hurt like this. His expression is vacant and wide-eyed, staring at the paper cup, and he only looks up when Hob approached. Hob tries to telegraph his movements. It apparently isn't necessary, because Dream stands up and buries himself into Hob's chest. Dream's own chest heaves in jerky motions.
"Shh, sweetheart, I got you," Hob murmurs, taking out the jumper from his bag and offering it to Dream. He really, really wants to find Thessaly and give her a piece of his mind, but right now, he has Dream to take care of.
"I'm sorry for bothering you but I just… I couldn't anymore," Dream whispers, Hob's jumper loose and drowning his slender frame. He winces with every motion and Hob suppresses his own.
"No. You could never bother me with this," Hob says, and takes Dream home.
Once at Hob's flat, Dream curls on the couch only to whimper at some unseen injury.
"Dove, you're hurt," he says, crouching down. "Let me help?"
Dream stares at him, blue eyes wide and on the verge of spilling over into tears, and then nods. He sits perfectly docile as Hob asks where it hurts, applies antiseptic to where some of the bruises had split open, and fetches ice packs for the worse ones. His wrist is clearly sprained, and Hob adds an ice pack to that after applying sprain tape, as gently as possible.
There's paracetamol and then hot tea and blankets and taking off the ice packs periodically while Studio Ghibli plays in the background. Dream's head lists progressively sideways in fatigue until Hob carries him like he's made of glass into the bedroom to rest. When Hob tries to leave, worried about startling Dream in his sleep, thin fingers grab onto his shirt and tug him back.
"Stay," Dream whispers, unnerved at the idea of being alone. Thessaly kicks him out of the bed some nights. Other nights she just leaves, herself. If he's alone in this head and bed and in the dark he'll give in – to something – he will lie here rigid until the morning until someone pries him out of the bed, scrapes his brains into the sunlight. Tells him to get his useless body and mind up. He doesn't want to be alone.
Hob, mercifully, returns, settling into the bed beside Dream again.
"Just tell me if you need space. Tell me if you need anything," Hob says, and Dream shakes his head in the dark. Hob was all he needed. He knows if he leaves the bed how far it is to the kitchen and the den and that Hob keeps clothes for him here, that Hob knows how Dream likes his tea and which Studio Ghibli film works best.
His bones feel a little less cold. He's wrapped in sheets that feel lived in, smell like old sweat and Hob's deodorant and not just crisp, nose-burning detergent, and covered with a blanket that normally lives on the couch. It's patterned with black cats, and they both think of it as Dream's.
"I do not think I want to go back," Dream whispers at some hours past midnight after he's woken in tears, over instant ramen with chicken in it. The confession feels like a betrayal and a weakness and a failure.
"Yeah?" Hob says, gently and encouragingly.
"I do not know where to go, though," Dream says to his ramen.
"You could stay here," Hob suggests.
Dream jerks his face up, eyes wide and startled, to meet Hob's brown eyes. "You have already done so much."
"And I can do this," Hob says.
He looks up at his oldest friend, inhales the steam off the ramen. Hob's been right here the whole time. Dream picks up the fork with his sprain-taped hand and winces. "But I can't give you anything," he says.
"Oh, dove. You're my friend, and this is what friends do. It's been too quiet around here, anyway, with just me."
Dream tries to imagine waking up here, in this warm flat, in a place where he knows where everything is already without looking, a place that already has more of him in it than the flat he shared with Thessaly. He reaches for this nebulous new path like it's a soap bubble about to pop, but it's still there a few seconds later.
Tremulously, he says yes.