When Two Become One

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)

Summary:

On the seventh of June, 1389, Destiny's book requires that Dream of the Endless marry. His sister Death knows just where to find him a spouse. Hob Gadling is just happy to be here. Dream may have to marry, but he knows how to make sure his marriage lasts at least a hundred years before going down in flames.

A marriage, century by century.

Notes:

Many thanks to 27dragons and Moorishflower for beta, and everyone who's encouraged this!

Title is of course from that timeless ballad of love (and fucking): "2 Become 1" by the Spice Girls.

Chapter 1: June 7, 1389 - Part 1

Summary:

The Wedding in Destiny's Garden

Dream ground his teeth for a moment, considering and discarding the most useless things he could say. He had not run out of useless things when one of them escaped his mouth.

"What if I refuse?"

Destiny nodded ponderously, and turned another page of his book. "Then you will be doing just as my book showed you would do. And yet, the book also states with certainty that you must, and will, marry before this day ends."

Destiny made a flourishing gesture to a mechanical clock that had never appeared in his garden before, and it chimed the hours.

"It is now noon," Destiny announced, when the twelve chimes had rung out. "The next twelve hours will see a spouse found for you, and see you wed."

"And the marriage consummated, we can hope," Desire put in. "That might turn our Dream sweet indeed."

"Oh," Delirium said, though she hardly seemed to have taken in anything that had gone before. "If Dream's having a wedding, will there be cake? Sweet cake, not sour. Or savory. Or zjierb. Or too hard, or..." Delirium looked up, directly at Dream. "It's sweet cake at weddings, isn't it?"

Dream ground his teeth harder, though with Death's hand on his arm he kept still.

"The book indicates that Dream's marriage will be complete and valid in all the usual respects," Destiny pronounced. "And sweet cake can be made available for the celebration."

"Wonderful," Desire declared, clapping their hands together; Delirium did the same much more energetically, floating into the air as she did. "Who wants to go find our brother a bride?"

Delirium waved her hand, but whatever she meant to say came out as a burble of brightly colored bubbles, like orbs of stained glass.

"No," Dream said, determined not to be distracted by his youngest sister's enthusiasm. "Not a bride. I will not marry a human woman—nor angel or demon or fairy or god of any kind."

All his siblings' heads turned to Destiny—even Delirium's, though she was now juggling her colorful baubles—waiting for this objection to be overruled as all others had.

Destiny nodded solemnly. "You have a right to state your requirements for a spouse, of course, Dream."

Of course. Dream scowled more deeply, trying to think of every possibility he could foreclose without simply saying, No, I refuse, this is madness, this will doom me, this will doom whatever poor sacrificial victim you find to marry me off to. That, apparently, was not within his rights.

"There will be no tricks," Dream said to Desire. "You shall not lie to them, nor trick them, nor make cruel bargains. You shall not create lust or desire or any other feeling where there is none, in them or in me. If you are to bring me someone to marry they must agree freely to do so. They must," Dream added triumphantly, for surely this was the one truly impossible condition to meet, "be someone who could be happy, being wed to one such as me."

Desire arched an eyebrow, undeterred as ever. "Well, naturally you wouldn't make it easy on anyone."

"They cannot be mortal," Dream added desperately, though all his siblings were surely aware of that prohibition. "And—and I must like the way they smell."

That last one seemed to take Desire aback for a moment—not so much, Dream thought from the look on his sibling's face, because that would be the most difficult qualification to meet, but because Desire could not believe Dream had made a demand related in any way to his own liking.

Dream could only believe it himself in the resigned sense in which he believed that all of this was happening, simply because Destiny's book could make them all dance to its—his—whims.

It was true, though. He would not like being married to anyone whose smell he did not like. And most humans nowadays smelled terrible, for the short, wretched spans of their stupid, squalid lives.

"All right," Death said, and squeezed Dream's arm before letting go. "Do you want to do your own searching, or will you stay here?"

"You, sister?" Dream looked up at her and felt perhaps more betrayal than he should. Death was always trying to get him to spend more time among humans. She had wanted him to meet her in London today, in fact, only to be preempted by their eldest brother's summons to this family conclave. "You cannot think this will end well."

Death smiled softly. "Most things don't, little brother. That doesn't mean we can avoid our fates, any of us. If you are to marry, I am going to do my utmost to find you the best possible spouse."

"Can you not just look in our brother's book, and spare the searching? If he knows that I must marry, surely he knows who."

"It is all a part of the path we are on," Destiny intoned, tucking his book a little more closely against his chest. "You are welcome to remain here while the search is conducted, and whomever is searching will be able to return here with the selected person once they are found."

"Just one, then?" Desire said. "I thought we might offer him a selection to choose from."

"No," Death said, studying Dream. "I think we can get it in one."

Dream refused to look back at her; he could hear the cheerful confidence in her voice and it made him want to hide. Did she not realize what he was? Did she not realize how badly this would go wrong?

Did she simply not care?

She sounded so cheerful, so careless, as she added, "Are you coming, Del? Anyone else?"

"I don't want Dream to be mad at me," his youngest sister said. "He can't be mad at me if I'm not here, right? And when I come back he'll be getting married, and Dream likes being married, so then he'll be happy." She let the baubles crash to the ground, breaking into glittering sand as Delirium hurried over to take her oldest sister's hand. Desire already stood on Death's other side, arm in arm with her.

Dream went to kneel by the scattering of bright dust, picking it up to admire the jewel-bright colors. The disaster he and his yet-unknown spouse would experience would surely leave uglier wreckage, nor would it all smash to its ending so quickly and decisively.

"There is beauty in the wreckage," Despair said, sitting down beside him, stirring her own fingers through the dust. "It will no doubt make a very compelling story, when it is all over."

"Ah, well, you never know," Destruction said, sitting down on the other side of Dream. "They won't bring you a mortal, after all, so you could have quite a lot of time before things go to pieces. There could be some good parts before it goes wrong. Even while it goes wrong! Sometimes those are the best parts, really."

Destruction was the only one of his siblings who had ever mentioned to Dream having love affairs that in any way resembled Dream's own passions, so this opinion was not wholly unfounded, even if it was unlikely to apply. Dream was the only one of his siblings ever to have married—and now would have married twice. None of them understood what he had shared with Calliope; none of them could understand the grief he anticipated now.

Seized with something very near to panic—he felt his physical form nearly dissipate, reaching for an escape to his own realm before he recognized that the answer he needed was here—Dream lurched away from the other two and went to Destiny.

"I said no women, did I not," Dream demanded. "I cannot—Destiny, I will marry if I must but I cannot—I do not care if I break the universe—"

Destiny shook his head slowly, and made a little gesture as if, were they both entirely different beings, he might have put a consoling hand on Dream's shoulder. "You shall marry, and not to a woman of any sort," Destiny said. "Your marriage will be long, but not fruitful."

Destiny tilted his head slightly, shifting his grip on his book as though he could sense its contents that way, and he added, "Not in that sense, at least. You will engender no children with your new spouse."

Dream nodded, knowing that this was how he had been—had always been destined to be—trapped into assenting to this farce, and assenting anyway.

At least there was that much mercy for him. At least there would not be another Orpheus.

Dream went back to sit with his sympathetic brother and sister in silence, awaiting his fate.

---

Hob Gadling looked up from his ale and his friends at the feeling of a presence close beside him, and found himself looking up into a dark, beautiful, smiling face. The woman was soberly but finely dressed, a wimple of pale grey covering her hair, but there was an air about her of more than just wealth or nobility. For all her sweet smile—for all she was here in the White Horse among such rabble as Hob and his mates—she was something truly extraordinary.

Hob beamed up at her, delighted already by whatever was about to happen, and then she said, "Did I hear you say you have no intention of ever dying?"

Hob grinned wider; clearly this magnificent woman had been listening to him from across the room, and he had caught her attention, which promised a much more interesting night ahead than he had been expecting.

"Yeah," he said, and he had a feeling he would never want to say no to her. "Yeah, that's right."

She nodded, still smiling, but Hob felt like... she wasn't just playing along with his joke. She was listening to him, had been listening longer than he knew, and whatever she said next was going to matter.

"I think you just might manage it," she said, to a wave of derision from the others at the table. Hob barely managed to tear his gaze away to tell them all to fuck off, and when he returned his attention to her, she was offering him her lovely smooth hand, as though he could possibly be worthy to touch it.

"Come with me," she said. "There's something I want to discuss with you, about how you'll be spending your life if you never die."

Hob nodded sharply in agreement and maneuvered himself out of his seat without knocking into the dark lady, but he did not take her hand. Something made him think that would be a momentous thing, actually taking her hand. He did not want to do it lightly, casually, merely because that hand was offered.

The lady began to walk away and Hob followed her, seeing as he did that she was heading toward a pair of people lingering nearer the tavern's door—two people who had something of the air she had, of power beyond the obvious.

One was fair-haired and golden-eyed, a person Hob could not readily identify as either lord or lady, though they were so beautiful his heart ached a little with it. Their beauty was much like the beauty of the sun or the sea, though, too vast and dangerous for Hob to want to approach too closely, or look upon too long.

The other was a woman of very small stature, dressed just as soberly as the dark lady who had approached Hob, wimple and all—except that there were a handful of birds perching on her head or circling near it. Doves, he thought, but their colors were bright and strange.

No one else seemed to notice anything odd about the small woman; no one seemed even to notice her presence. The dark lady went right to her, of course, and the small woman took her hand and went with her, out the front door of the tavern, the golden-eyed beauty following them with an arch look back at Hob.

Hob followed. What else could he do?

He stopped short outside the tavern at the sight of an impossibly grand carriage, with gilt bits all over. There were four fine white horses harnessed to it, but no driver in sight. The door of the carriage stood open, and he could just see the dark lady, the golden-eyed person, and the small one all peering out at him as though they were waiting for him to climb aboard.

The carriage was perfectly clean, as though it had not traveled an inch through London's mud and muck—the horses, too, were perfectly white to the tips of their tails and the tops of their hooves, and they stood quietly and calmly though there was no hand on the reins.

Hob knew already that these were no natural human folk; he knew that he did not want to take the dark lady's hand. He knew that the sensible thing to do would be to back away slowly, with a bow and perhaps an apology for offending.

He also knew that he would rather die at this very moment than never find out what would happen if he boarded their carriage. Hob grinned brightly at all of them and strode forward, pulling himself up into the carriage and swinging into the rear-facing seat, which had been left entirely vacant.

The door closed before he could reach to pull it shut, and the carriage set into motion very smoothly but without any apparent signal to do so, to the driver who wasn't there. Hob felt a wonderful thrill of terror and smiled wider at the three across from him. "Do I get to know where we're going? Or who you are?"

The golden-eyed one looked to the small one and said, "Is he one of yours, sister?"

The small one giggled, and the doves fluttered up from her head and then landed again. "No! Not a bit! He's doing it on purpose for fun!"

The golden-eyed one looked at him again for a long moment, and Hob beamed at them. He was indeed having fun, and he had done all of this on purpose.

The golden-eyed one sat back with a huff and elbowed the dark lady slightly. "Ugh, you're probably right. He does meet all the requirements."

The dark lady snorted, gently amused, and said, "We probably still ought to ask."

Hob folded his hands in silent entreaty and watched them eagerly, waiting to be asked a question that would be another step into whatever fairy story he was now living.

"I should begin by saying that I am Death," the dark lady informed him, with such a wide, warm smile that it took the span of a breath for Hob to understand what she had said.

There was no possibility of misunderstanding, once she had said it. Hob had known she was something other than human, something powerful.

He had known he did not wish to take her hand.

"I... apologize, Lady Death," he said cautiously, though her smile was undimmed, and she had come to his side and said what she said after he'd spoken his piece. "I did not mean that you are... anything I said."

"Stupid?" Death supplied, still smiling. But then what need had Death to make a point of pride? All fell to her in the end, and she obviously knew it. "No, I understood. You meant only that it's stupid of your fellow humans to accept my gift, if they have the option not to."

Hob considered her exact words, then said, "Have I the option, ma'am?"

"Oh, call me Death," she said cheerfully. "Or... well, we'll get to that. But you do have the option, yes. I have decided to withhold my gift from you until and unless you ask me to take you—and here are my siblings as witnesses, if that will help to set your mind at ease."

Hob dragged his gaze away from Death to look at her two siblings, trying to guess who and what they might be.

"Desire," said the golden-eyed one, offering a hand for Hob to kiss in very courtly style. "Of the Endless, to give my full name, as my elder sister did not."

Hob gave a little sitting bow and kept his hands and kisses to himself. Desire could swallow him up as easily as Death; he knew that about himself well enough. Truly it had been his desire for more of everything—more life, more time, more adventure—that he had been speaking of tonight, as much as he had been speaking of death.

He had plenty of desire all on his own; what he wanted was not more desire but more satisfaction, and he knew somehow that satisfaction was the one thing Desire could not give him.

"I am honored to make your acquaintance, Desire of the Endless," Hob said, carefully pronouncing it as a title, not with the familiarity of a name. Desire, he thought, was not so generous in their self-assurance as their elder sister was.

"Hmm," Desire said, studying him. "Not bad, I suppose."

"And I'm the youngest one," burst out the small lady—who had lost her wimple and dark sober gown at some point while Hob wasn't looking. She was dressed now in tattered motley, and her hair was a rainbow to match it. "I used to be different but now I've gone strange. No one ever wants me but I take them anyway when they come to be mine."

Hob smiled encouragingly at her. "Is it a riddle, then? Shall I guess your name?"

She scratched her nose thoughtfully, and reached up to one of the doves, which changed at her touch into something like soft carded wool, also in a rainbow of colors. She held it out to Hob, and he took a puff of it between his fingers, realizing it smelled sweet as he sat back with his prize. The youngest of the Endless crammed half of what was left into her mouth, coloring her tongue and lips in bright unnatural shades.

"If you guess wrong," she said in a wavering voice, "I might make you mine forever and ever and then Death might be mad at me because you're not for me really, you're for—"

She stopped short, looking wide-eyed at her sibling and sister and cramming the rest of the candy wool into her mouth.

"Delirium," Desire said, half-scoldingly, in a way that Hob thought was intended to ruin the game in the guise of rescuing their youngest sister from a dilemma. Was there a Dilemma of the Endless, somewhere?

Possibly that was Hob.

"We came here tonight," Death put in, "seeking someone who might be willing to marry our brother, Dream."

Hob sat back, thrown off balance at the very thought of a male version of these three wondrous beings. His thoughts went rapidly to being married to—which was to say, bedded by—such a one, and he immediately tried to turn his thoughts aside to anything other than the wave of oh yes please that he felt at that idea.

Desire smirked at him like they had felt that anyway, as they surely would.

Hob went to fold his arms and remembered that he had candy wool on the fingers of one hand. He licked it cautiously and then looked down at it, startled by the sweetness of it—purer and sweeter than honey.

"There's sweet cake!" Delirium put in. "For getting married!"

Hob blinked at her and nodded slowly. "That is... surely a point in favor of marriage for me."

He returned his attention to Death. "But I should think one of the Endless would want... something different than myself, if he were to marry."

Someone who was not a landless, penniless peasant soldier, for one thing. Someone who was a woman, for another. But perhaps he was simply failing to think differently enough—the Endless, from what he could see, were stranger and more powerful beings than fair folk or old gods, demons or angels. Death herself, the very person of Desire, the diminutive patroness of all Delirium, and their brother who ruled over all Dreams—these were nothing like human royalty or nobility.

Hob's own liaisons with men had been brief and secretive, but he had known men who inclined to each other as most men did to women, even a few who kept house together. It was not the sort of thing one stood on the church steps to declare before God and everyone, usually, but Hob supposed the rules must be different for such beings as the Endless. What priest could marry a human to Dream?

"Dream's requirements," Death said, "were many and specific, but none of them had anything to do with a title or property or any such considerations. He is the King of the Dreaming, but the Endless have no need of getting heirs or sealing alliances. He cannot marry a mortal, of course, but you are no longer one." Death smiled brightly at that: a problem she had been able to solve, Hob understood.

And yet she had not made his agreement a condition on the boon she had granted him. She had set no conditions at all, except that he himself could choose when to die.

"Dream wished in particular for someone who could be happy being married to him. And I believe that you, Hob Gadling, could be happy in nearly any circumstances at all."

Hob could not help but feel his heart open at the thought of a being as great as one of the Endless whose main requirement in a spouse was not a spouse who could please him, but one who could be happy with him.

Then, too, it was true what Death said. Hob had always found happiness in his life though it was full of death and misery; he only wanted more life, in which to find more happiness. And if he was to be immortal now, that would afford him a very great deal of time indeed to find his happiness.

Still, he had not intended to wed anytime soon, and he supposed it would make sense to ask a few questions. "If I were to wed him, would I have to go live in his... house?"

He didn't know where or what that might be, the home of the Lord of Dreams, but surely it would be outside the England Hob knew and loved.

The siblings exchanged glances, and Death said carefully, "His first wife did not always stay in his realm. She maintained her own life. Her own work. And Dream... accepted that."

"How, ah..." Hob considered, various old tales curling through his thoughts now. "How many wives has he had?"

Desire snorted. "Not nearly enough."

"Just one," Death put in sternly. "He has had a few other lovers, but... for most of his life he's been lonely."

Hob's heart widened a little further for this strange being he'd never yet set eyes on.

"What..." Hob didn't suppose he could ask what is wrong with him outright. In Hob's experience, folk who wanted to pair off mostly did so in fairly short order when free to do so; Hob himself bounced in and out of attachments that he could never make permanent, having no means to make a proper home with anyone when his only steady work was at war. He was lonely some nights, but he never stayed lonely for long.

Dream was, perhaps, a natural singleton—Hob had known a few of those, looking lonely from the outside but content with their own company more than not. Perhaps he was compelled to choose a spouse for some reason and was trying to make the best of it. Such a person probably wouldn't be deliberately cruel, not in ways that would be obvious to their siblings. But Dream's siblings were what Hob had as a source of information, so he might as well ask more questions.

"What is he like?" Hob tried.

"Boring," Desire said immediately. "Obsessed with his work and with following the rules, absolutely sure that he knows better than anyone else."

Hob automatically looked to Death for some countering opinion, but she smiled wryly and said, "Some of us find that endearing."

Delirium, when Hob turned to her, was looking off to Hob's left and about a hundred leagues beyond. He wondered if she had even heard his question, but then she said, in a slow fluttering voice, "I always think he's not happy to see me but I think really he's just... not happy. And I'm there so he sees me and he's not happy. But he tries, usually. He does try. Sometimes I think he really ought to be mine, only he can't be because he's my big brother and it doesn't work that way. But I think he might be happier if he were a little bit mine anyway."

"Well," Hob said, when it seemed she would say no more. "Maybe I could cheer him up a bit."

Delirium turned a brilliant smile on him and then burst into a thousand butterflies. Hob made an alarmed noise, but Death and Desire said in unison, "That means she's happy."

Hob sat very still, careful not to crush any of the delicate butterflies when dozens of them lighted on and around him, until gradually they gathered again on the other seat, and Delirium reappeared in her more familiar form.

Hob had no chance to ask any further questions before the carriage came to a halt.

He felt a pang of fear and a thrill of excitement at the thought that his future spouse might be waiting just outside, but Desire said, "We're stopping at my place first. Dream's other requirement was that he has to like the way you smell—and we're not allowed to cheat, but..."

Desire looked him over dubiously. "A bath couldn't hurt. And you're hardly dressed for an occasion like your wedding, are you?"

Hob looked down at himself. "Can't say I am, no." He smiled brightly, curious to see what bathing facilities would be worthy of the Endless, and followed eagerly when they led the way out of the carriage and into the realm of Desire.

---

The end of Dream's vigil was heralded by a door opening into Destiny's garden and Delirium skipping through, flinging foil-wrapped candies of a kind that would not exist in the Waking world for hundreds of years as if they were flower petals. "Dream! Dream, we found you the wonderfulest human, and I promise he's not any of mine or Desire's or Death's at all! He's all for you!"

Dream stood, clothing himself in suitable, if perhaps funereal, finery as Despair and Destruction took their places beside him. There was no use pretending this was not going to happen as Destiny had said it would. Still, Dream observed, "I believe I said I would not marry a human."

"Human woman, you said," Destiny intoned, standing now at Dream's right hand. "And your bridegroom is neither woman nor mortal, but very human."

His elder sister's doing? "I also specified no cruel bargains."

"So you did," was all Destiny said before Desire strutted in, brilliant in red and gold, with Dream's bridegroom following on Death's arm.

Dream stared in fascination—and too many other things to name—at the human who stepped into Destiny's realm, brought here for him. The man had a full beard, perhaps more neatly trimmed than the average human's, and dark brown hair that fell shining to his shoulders, where it met the sable trim of his cloak. His raiment was otherwise pale ivory and gold, a tunic that ended above the knee and matching hose.

He was looking back at Dream and smiling beatifically, as though at some vision of Paradise.

Dream shot a narrow look at Desire, who stepped aside to stand by Delirium. "None of my doing," they said, raising graceful hands in a gesture of innocence. "He's just like that, I swear. We found him that way."

Dream looked back to his impossibly cheerful bridegroom, who said, impossibly cheerfully, "It's true! I was simply too curious to resist such a fantastical opportunity."

Dream let himself look into the man's—Robert Gadling's—dreams, and saw first a wildly optimistic profusion of daydreams regarding himself and their imminent marriage. Farther back...

Farther back, there was no end of wildly optimistic daydreams. Robert Gadling had dreamt his family would survive the plague; dreamt he would be taken in by others in his village when he was orphaned; dreamt he would find brotherhood and glory when he took up arms and marched off to war; dreamt he would find peace and solace when he returned to England. He had dreamt that he could ward off the death he felt at his heels by declaring that he would not ever die.

There was no sharp change in his dreams, no moment when an obvious influence had interfered. He had simply seen a chance to finally have a dream—any dream—come true, and grabbed hold of it with both hands.

Dream glanced over at Despair, who was watching Robert Gadling with something like greed; she knew, of all of them, just how such a brightly hopeful creature could be destroyed. She understood the shape of the doom that awaited him, and by her nature, she could not help hungering for it.

Still, Dream was not eager to be meat to feed any of his siblings.

"There was one other requirement," Dream said, stepping forward and reaching out a hand.

Robert Gadling gladly stepped away from Death and approached Dream with both hands outstretched. He had his palms turned up, offering himself willingly though he could not possibly know to what fate he was led, like a lamb to slaughter.

But the slaughter was not yet; Dream wrapped his hands gently around Robert Gadling's wrists, knowing that for this night at least they would not come away bloody. He tugged, and Robert stepped up close to him with an eager look on his face. Robert's hands came to rest easily against Dream's chest, making no effort to brace or push away.

Dream tilted his head and pressed his nose to the human's throat. There was a faint hint of rosewater—naturally Desire would have done all they thought they could get away with in the way of rendering the prospective bridegroom sweet-smelling—but it did not hide the natural human smell of his skin.

His future husband smelled... warm and alive, salty under the sweet. Robert's thumbs were sweeping gently over where Dream's heart would be if he had one, and Dream let his lips brush the warm skin of Robert's throat as he breathed him in, surrendering to the inevitable.

Dream dropped Robert's wrists and whirled away from him to face Destiny, who had taken the officiant's place. "Very well," Dream said. "I will marry him."

"Come, then," Destiny said, gesturing for Dream and his bridegroom to take their places; the rest of their siblings ranged themselves on either side as attendants.

Dream stood for one last frozen moment, resisting, and then Robert stepped up beside him, curling an arm around his waist and drawing him into place.

The man was still smiling when he took both of Dream's hands in his, and Dream let him.

---

Boring, his siblings had said, describing Hob's intended.

None of them had mentioned that Dream was beautiful enough to put angels and princes to shame, and so veiled in melancholy that Hob felt at once that he would gladly spend the rest of his newly-granted eternal life working to earn a smile from those berry-pink lips.

Certainly Hob had been given no warning of how the merest hint of a kiss from those lips against his throat would set his senses aflame, or how the grip of those pale elegant hands around his wrists would make him want to fold to his knees and worship his new husband in all the best ways he knew. But then, that was probably not a thing a sibling—even Desire—would either know or say about their brother.

And now it was time to wed him, and Dream let Hob put an arm around him, guiding him into place before a robed figure who could only be the eldest of the siblings, Destiny, who stood with his book as a priest would. Death and Desire and Delirium stood to one side and the other siblings they'd described to Hob, Destruction and Despair, stood to the other. Hob took both of Dream's hands in his, turning to face him.

Hob couldn't keep from smiling brightly at his soon-to-be husband, who looked back at him very solemnly. He did not smile, but nor did he scowl or sneer.

"The family conclave is assembled, the Endless stand witness," Destiny announced. "Make your marriage vows, and so your marriage."

Hob tightened his grip on Dream's hands involuntarily as he tried to guess what he was meant to vow. Proper church weddings were done in Latin, and the poor bastards getting married hardly had to say anything but what the priest told them to. Ordinary common marriages were mostly accomplished by exchanging wedding gifts and then telling everyone you'd taken someone to wife—or husband. The gifts were rings, usually, but for all the finery he'd been dressed in, Hob had no ring nor other gift to offer to Dream, and no idea what vows to make, to shape what their marriage would be.

Hob had no idea what marriage to an Endless was supposed to look like.

Luckily, Dream spoke first.

"I, Dream of the Endless, take thee, Robert Gadling, to be my husband, until such time as you repudiate our marriage."

"Oh, call me Hob," Hob said. "Everyone does."

Dream's lip curled a little at that, and Hob hastened to return to the point. Luckily he'd always been quick to catch on, and he could recite back easily enough. "I, Hob Gadling, take thee, Dream of the Endless, to be my husband, until such time as you repudiate our marriage."

He only properly heard that last bit as he was saying it, and he squeezed Dream's hands and added, "Hope you're not planning on it any time soon, though."

Dream did frown, then, but before he could say another word Destiny said, "It is done. You are wed. There is cake."

This last sounded so portentous that Hob looked hastily around for some dire development, and then discovered that a table had appeared in the garden, laden down with a variety of foods including a strange snowy white towering thing he could make no sense of at a glance.

"Cake?" Hob repeated uncertainly. Dream's hands flexed in his grip, making Hob aware that he was still holding on.

"Delirium insisted," Dream said, and let go of one of Hob's hands but drew the other through his arm, bringing Hob close to his side before leading them over. "This is a cake not yet dreamed of, but all times are one time in Destiny's garden."

"A cake not yet dreamed of," Hob repeated wonderingly, still not at all certain how such a thing as that pristine white tower could be food, let alone a cake. "Is it—will I live to see it, now?"

Dream glanced over at him, a spark of nastiness in his eyes, a sly little smirk curling his lips, and said, "I am the wrong member of this family to ask about things that will be. Brother?"

It was obvious he considered this a set-down, or was inviting Destiny to deliver one, but Hob had no more turned to look toward his new brother-in-law than Destiny said simply, "Yes, you shall. Some centuries hence."

Dream's smirk dissolved into an irritated scoff at his eldest brother. "You will simply tell him that?"

"So the book indicated, and so I did," Destiny replied imperturbably. "Perhaps some certainty of his new immortality was the gift I was meant to give to your husband on the occasion of your wedding."

Hob tightened his grip on his new husband's arm, beginning to see already the ways in which his new family, for all their power and all their strangeness, were like any set of siblings. Hob had seen it plenty of times: the second-born son and the eldest constantly at odds, the eldest perfectly assured of his place, the second-born sure of his own merits but still bridling against his elder brother's superiority.

"I thank you for the assurance, good-brother," Hob said, and added, lower, "And I promise you, husband, no matter how long I live, I shan't ever eat such a cake as this until you and I may share it again, as we do today."

Dream gave him a quizzical look. "We have already made our vows, husband. You need promise me nothing else."

"Well, it is our wedding day!" Hob said cheerfully. "Surely that is a day for promising things just because I wish to be a good husband for you? Would you not do as much for me, dearest husband?"

A second too late, Hob remembered the glimmer of almost-cruelty in his husband's eyes, the smirk that said he was entirely ready to make Hob the butt of a joke. Dream did not know Hob yet; Hob had been pushed upon him as a spouse, and Dream might well be the kind to take out his feelings on his newly-wedded husband.

Dream might have been right, after all, to think his siblings must choose carefully to find a spouse who could be happy being wedded to him.

Then Dream's lips turned up in the tiniest possible smile, and he said, "I vow to you, husband, that no food or drink shall pass my lips in the Waking world, unless I share it with you."

There was a certain tone in Dream's voice that led Hob to suspect that Dream wasn't in the habit of eating or drinking in the Waking world anyway, but that didn't matter so much as the fact that Dream had met him vow for vow. "I shall have to find the very best I can get my hands on to share with you, then, husband. You're surely used to the finest."

Delirium popped up from the other side of the table just as they reached it, brandishing a thing like a very small, thin sword with a rounded end, of some metal that was so shiny as to flash rainbows all down the length of the blade. It had a very elaborate jeweled hilt. "You must cut the cake together," she announced, "and then feed it to each other!"

Hob was nearly ready for it this time when she burst into a flock of brightly particolored doves, leaving her blade behind. Dream was still quicker, and caught the blade before it could fall. He took Hob's hand, wrapping it around the hilt along with his own, and sliced through the top part of the towering white object, releasing a smell of pure sweetness and something else Hob couldn't place.

An assortment of doves settled on his and Dream's shoulders and on top of their heads as they drew the miniature sword out of the cake and made another cut and then a third, creating two wedge-shaped slices. Dream laid the sword aside, and each of them reached for a slice at once.

Hob noticed, just as his fingers were sinking into the white outer coating of the cake, which was soft as summer butter, that the rest of the Endless were now arrayed on the far side of the table. Even Delirium had taken shape again, though there were still a multitude of those bright doves scattered across the heads and shoulders of her siblings. She was crouching right up against the table, her arms folded on the edge and her chin propped on her wrists as she looked up at them, beaming.

Hob winked to her as he took his slice of cake and held it to Dream's lips. He couldn't see anything but Dream's mouth once he looked there; he watched his husband's lips part, watched his teeth and tongue appear like shy creatures peeking from a covert.

The cake looked like dense black bread, despite its strange and wonderful rich smell. Hob meant only to nudge it closer to Dream's sweetly parted lips, to encourage his husband to take a healthy bite, for Hob wouldn't have put it past him to lick a single crumb and call it plenty.

Hob had not reckoned on how very soft the cake actually was, or the way it would slip in his hand with the white coating squelching around his fingers. It felt like it was slipping from his grasp, and he tightened his grip, which had the rather impressive result of smashing dark cake and white coating into his husband's finely shaped nose as well as his barely-open mouth.

"Oh, bollocks," Hob said, or tried to—he barely had time to see the look of vast offense in Dream's eyes before there was a piece of cake smashed likewise against his own nose and mouth. Having opened his mouth to speak, he did actually get some of the cake and coating into his mouth, where the incomparable sweetness and mysterious wonderful flavor of the cake burst across his tongue.

There followed an undignified few minutes in which Hob was simultaneously trying to eat as much of the cake as he could get off Dream's hand while instinctively smashing his own handful just as hard against Dream's face as Dream's hand was pushing against his.

Right about the point when Hob was down to working his tongue between Dream's fingers in search of more sweetness, Dream finally jerked his hand away, and Hob did the same a second after.

Dream was giving him an absolutely poisonous look through his mask of smashed cake and white coating; Hob didn't know whether to help him wipe it away or turn and run.

Then the laughter and applause started, yanking Hob back to awareness of his six new siblings-in-law, who were all watching and all seemed thoroughly pleased by the show Hob and Dream had put on.

Hob looked back a little apprehensively at his husband, only to find that he had somehow magicked his face clean of cake and was looking the tiniest bit amused.

Hob immediately grinned. "Did you actually get to eat any, love? Shall I serve you another slice?"

Dream arched a brow and stepped close enough to touch again, letting his hand hover beside Hob's cake-smeared cheek without quite making contact. "From the abundance you have in your possession?"

Hob might have pointed out that if Dream didn't like Hob's face covered in cake he shouldn't have done it, but Dream apparently had the same thought. In the next moment he did touch Hob's cheek, and Hob realized his face and beard were clean.

"Course not," Hob said, "wouldn't serve you secondhand anything, would I? But there's plenty—"

Hob looked over at some motion in his peripheral vision, just in time to see Destruction strike the cake with his own, much larger, sword. The cake burst as if it had been a barrel struck with a warhammer, bits of it flying everywhere.

Notes:

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Chapter 2: June 7, 1389 - Part 2

Summary:

The Wedding Night, and the Morning After

With the extremely decisive end of the cake phase of the proceedings, Dream was prepared to take his newly espoused husband away to complete the last of the necessary rites.

Unfortunately, it was only a moment after the demise of the cake that Desire clapped their hands and called for dancing. Dream might have been willing to spite his sibling, but Hob looked so nakedly excited to take part in the dancing that Dream simply rendered them both clean of cake particles and said, "I do not dance, husband. But you may feel free to take a turn with any of my siblings in celebration."

Robert—oh, call me Hob, everyone does—gave him a thoughtful look and then said, "I swear I shall persuade you to dance with me before we're done."

Dream did not know whether to admonish his husband against making such impossible vows or to return an equally empty vow for that one. Before he could decide, Destruction—looking considerably bedraggled but no longer brandishing his sword—offered his hand to Hob, and Hob took it and whirled away as music began to play from nowhere.

Perhaps that, also, was as it had been written in Destiny's book.

His sibling came to his side, a flare of red and gold in Dream's peripheral vision. Dream did not look over. He was watching Hob dance with Destruction, who nimbly steered them past Death and Delirium twirling each other about while Destiny and Despair looked on.

"Shall I preface each true thing I say to you with an oath?" Desire asked. "Or is it enough to declare that I truly wish you and your bridegroom all possible happiness together?"

"All possible happiness," Dream noted neutrally.

"You're the one who seems to think that that's a direly limited quantity," Desire pointed out, as though they had nothing at all to do with Dream's reasons for believing that based on past evidence. "Were Hob marrying almost anyone else I would not feel the need to hedge myself around with qualifications."

They had been married for a matter of minutes, had barely exchanged a hundred words, and Dream still found that the idea of Hob marrying anyone else left him feeling furious and desolate in equal measures.

"I did specify someone who could be happy while married to me," Dream said.

"Yes, we rather outdid ourselves there—not only is he happy generally but he seems to have conceived an instant infatuation with you that blinded him to all else. He did not give me a second glance, even within the Threshold."

Dream had indeed noticed how eager his husband seemed to be to find him charming and attractive. Dream did not find it at all reassuring. Every lover he had ever lost had wanted him to begin with. But now they were wed, and surely hurtling toward the moment when Hob would regret all of this.

"You swear," Dream said, knowing he ought not ask for a reassurance he could not believe, and asking for it anyway, "that you did nothing to influence him—and will do nothing to change his mind or heart?"

"Nor even the stirrings of his loins," Desire said dryly. "I do swear by the Threshold and the First Circle, I have not meddled with Hob Gadling, and shall not. I told him you were boring, and see how he looks at you? I should be afraid of creating a monster, if I really bestirred myself to have an effect on him."

"You delight in creating monsters," Dream muttered.

"Not for you, dear brother," Desire murmured, and pressed a kiss to his cheek. "Just this once—not for you."

They swept away from him and out to where the others were dancing, neatly stealing Hob from Destruction's grasp. Destruction only laughed and turned to Delirium, spinning her around and up into the air in his great arms. She laughed like stained glass shattering, and butterflies and fish trailed around them.

Through all the tumult, Dream saw his elder sister watching him. Her smile was gentle and a little sad, and Dream wondered what she was thinking and realized that he didn't want to know—especially not if it had to do with just what sort of bargain his sister had made to render his husband immortal just in time for Dream to marry him. Cruelty was in the eye of the beholder, after all, and his sister and Hob were both so kind-hearted that they might truly believe the deal they struck had been fair.

Dream walked over to the edge of the vaguely-defined dancing space, keeping himself on the opposite side from both Death and Destiny.

Hob spotted him almost at once, and it hit Dream with almost physical force that his new husband might have been nearly as aware of him as Dream had been of him, even while he had seemed wholly occupied with dancing.

"Have you changed your mind already?" Hob called out to him, as Desire whirled him off on a tangent line that brought him no nearer to Dream. "I was expecting a little more time to work on you, but if you wish to dance with me now, my dear, you know that I am yours."

"I was thinking of something more ancient than dancing," Dream said. "And more private."

Hob disengaged from Desire with alacrity, nearly stumbling in his haste to change direction; he did not glance back at all, and so did not see the graceful gesture of valediction from Desire. The rest of his siblings likewise waved silent farewells, but Dream paid no attention to them, only holding his hand out for Hob. He tossed sand over the both of them as soon as their hands were clasped, and by the time Hob's body was pressed against his, they were in the Dreaming.

---

Hob automatically shut his eyes and ducked his head at the sight of Dream throwing some sort of sand or dust, but it never seemed to strike him; when he opened his eyes they were somewhere else entirely, and Dream was looking at him with amusement.

"My sand will never harm you, husband," Dream said. "I use it to travel from one realm to another—from my brother's to my own, in this case."

From anyone else, the form of words might have been meant as a mere statement of fact, but Hob knew Dream well enough to hear that his husband had made him another promise. It was not an obvious match to Hob's vow to persuade him to dance sometime before their marriage ended, but still it made things even again.

Hob beamed at his husband. "I'll remember that."

Then he actually looked around to see his husband's realm.

This was the third of the Endless realms he'd stepped foot in today. What he had seen of Desire's Threshold had been beautifully appointed, sumptuous. Everything in sight was clearly made to be wanted.

Destiny's garden, by contrast, had been rather simple. A garden, bounded by hedges.

Hob's first glimpse of the Dreaming was the sight of his husband's palace towering above them while strange and wondrous creatures flew overhead. As soon as Hob caught sight of them, they—or perhaps the whole world, for the sound seemed to come from everywhere—burst into song, and rainbows stretched across the sky in a dizzying array.

There was too much, all of it too wonderful to take in. Hob dragged his gaze back down to his husband, to see Dream with the tiniest possible smile on his face as he watched Hob.

"It's amazing," Hob said. "Of course you know that, I can't tell you anything you don't know, but—I love it already, husband. I hope I—"

Dream kissed him before Hob could babble out any of his thoughts about belonging, even part of the time and by right of marriage, in such a fascinating place. Hob's lips parted on a moan and Dream pressed closer, getting a hand under Hob's cloak to pull him in while his tongue only teased at the opening of Hob's mouth.

Hob dared to dart his own tongue forward, thinking as he did of that little glimpse of Dream's tongue he'd had when he held the cake to his mouth. The next second he was laughing too hard to kiss at all, thinking of them kissing with all the elegance they'd used to feed each other cake. He leaned against his husband, clinging to him as he chortled, and Dream said, "Are you finding my attentions so laughable?"

He sounded cold and stiff, in a way that might well be hiding hurt, and Hob jerked back to reassure him as best he could—only to have the laughter die in his throat. They had traveled again while Hob was distracted.

They were in a bedroom now. Or rather, they were in a great hall with a bed in it, but given the impossible size of the palace Hob had seen he supposed this would be counted as a room.

Dream still had an arm around him, but was watching Hob with a look Hob couldn't read.

"I was just thinking of the cake," Hob explained. "And hoping we can cooperate a little better in giving each other pleasure than we did in giving each other food."

"Mm," Dream said, his expression thawing to faint amusement. "Perhaps it would be best if one of us were to take the lead in that."

Hob swept a look over his husband—king in his own realm, where they now stood—and had a pretty clear idea of where this was headed. Well, there were worse ways to get the measure of this creature he'd pledged himself to. "Would you care to do the honors, my lord husband?"

Dream, lordly as anything, just nodded his gracious acceptance of this privilege.

Hob managed not to laugh.

Dream drew the cloak from Hob's shoulders and put it aside in such a way that it simply disappeared. With his hands on Hob's chest through just the layer of his tunic, Dream asked with every appearance of perfect seriousness, "Have you ever lain with a man before?"

Hob bit his lip very hard and still managed not to laugh.

Dream's expression turned stern, and Hob assumed the expression of guileless good cheer that had seen him successfully through all his time in the army. "I'm sure I've never been with anyone like you, husband."

Dream's eyes darkened, though with nothing like anger. He did seem to have become a few inches taller somehow, as he leaned in and whispered, "You speak more truth than you know. Husband."

Hob shivered at the velvety dark promise of his new husband's voice, but he couldn't help grinning as he held Dream's gaze. "Perhaps you'll instruct me, then."

"It is a husband's duty," Dream murmured, and when he drew his hands apart, from the center of Hob's chest to his shoulders, somehow the tunic split and parted with them. The tunic fell away, leaving Hob clad only in hose and boots when Dream kissed him again. Dream's hands settled on Hob's arse, lifting him up right off his feet, and Hob wrapped his legs around Dream's waist, his arms around Dream's neck, clinging as he opened his mouth to Dream, letting Dream's tongue explore his mouth, letting himself be taken where Dream would have him.

Hob gasped when he was laid on a bed—because he could, as much as because he was surprised to realize he'd been brought to that vast bed, all draped in black. Dream had left off kissing him to loom above him, standing at the edge of the bed with Hob's legs still wrapped around his hips.

"Is there anything you would ask of me, my husband?" Dream asked, his expression still dark and hungry though his words were sweetly solicitous.

Hob had the feeling he was being offered something like a last request. Hob considered things he could ask for—which would be redundant, which would be too much to hope Dream would allow—and after a moment said, "I would ask to see you, if you would permit me."

Dream gave Hob a little push onto the bed, and Hob noticed that this rendered him entirely naked, even his boots simply disappearing. Dream's own clothes remained firmly in place as he looked down at Hob from what seemed like an impossible distance. The moment stretched until it seemed as if Dream were just going to refuse, but at last he said, "Would you wish to see me if it meant being forbidden to touch? Or would you be willing to see nothing, if it meant you were permitted to touch me as you please?"

Hob sat up at that, reaching out though Dream still seemed somehow far beyond him, "Oh, let me touch you, my dear, and I'll care nothing for what I can see or not."

Hob was struck blind as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

His groping hands found his husband's bare flesh in the same instant, one hand landing on the firmness of an upper arm, the other on the scant curve of his chest. Both found skin as smooth as silk, hairless and a little cool to the touch, but instantly familiar. This was his husband, who had held his hands as they made their vows.

He felt the nearness of Dream bending over him, and Dream's breath against his ear as he said, "Would you like to reconsider your choice, husband?"

Hob's grip on Dream's arm tightened, and he slid his other hand up to Dream's shoulder where he could hold on. Now that he had his hands on Dream's skin he knew he would never trade permission to touch his husband for anything, but... "If... if I am to be blind forevermore I hope there is a place in your house for me, husband, for I will not have much work as a soldier."

Dream made a noise that Hob understood, after a second, as a laugh, though it was low as a whisper and deep as a bullfrog's croaking. "Anything I ever take from you, husband, I shall always return to you. Your sight shall return before this night ends—if you are sure you will not ask for it now?"

"I shall know you better by touch than I ever could by sight," Hob insisted, and as if to confirm the truth of it, he felt Dream freeze at that, just for an instant.

Dream didn't want Hob to know him; he had been guarding himself by forbidding Hob to see. Clearly he suspected that touch would give even more away, but he did not change the bargain now that it was fairly struck. The hesitation was only an instant, and then his whole body was pressing against Hob's, bearing him down to the bed.

"Then know me you shall," Dream murmured, so deep Hob felt it in his bones, "and on your head be it."

Hob squirmed under the delicious weight of his husband's body, pressing his cock up and feeling the weight of Dream's hardness against him. He wanted to make a joke about head but couldn't find the words, too taken up with the feeling of Dream on him. He got one arm around Dream's neck, feeling his way toward another kiss, and Dream kissed him hungrily, licking into his mouth without hesitation.

Hob hummed against Dream's lips and settled into kissing, but a second later Dream was pulling away again.

Dream's hands settled on Hob's chest, pinning him down while Dream kissed under Hob's ear and down his throat, seeking out the sensitive bare skin beyond the edges of his beard. Hob turned his head, offering more skin, and got one hand to the nape of Dream's neck while he rested the other on Dream's back. He couldn't help stroking his fingertips over the impossible fineness of his husband's skin; he would know Dream forever now, at a single touch.

Dream's fingers flexed against his chest and then began to wander, playing with Hob's chest hair—it was obvious why that might be a point of interest for Dream, who was made so differently, all smooth and sleek. Dream's mouth, meanwhile, trailed down to the hollow of his throat. Dream nuzzled at that spot, right below his Adam's apple, seeming to just breathe him in while his fingers teased over every bit of Hob's chest but the parts Hob most wanted him to touch.

Hob set his hand over one of Dream's, tugging a little, and Dream only turned his hand to grip Hob's and pinned it down beside his shoulder. Hob immediately held on right back, interlacing their fingers.

Another hand joined the one still on his chest, still just toying with the hair there while Dream kissed along Hob's collarbone.

"Is that..." Hob managed. He knew it could only be his husband's hand on him, he knew no one else was in the bed, and yet...

"I assure you, my husband, no one else shall intrude on our wedding night," Dream murmured against his skin, sounding a little amused. "I myself have as many hands as it is convenient for me to have."

"Oh," Hob said, "that's—"

He got no further. There was a hand running through his hair, fingers rubbing lightly at his scalp before closing into a fist and pulling just hard enough. There were hands on his thighs like the hands on his chest, playing through the hair there while also pressing his legs apart, slowly but surely spreading him wide.

"Fuck," Hob breathed, and then there was a hand on his cheek, too. The thumb at the corner of his mouth encouraged his lips apart.

Hob whined and tilted toward it as best he could while the hand in his hair still held him fast, and Dream took mercy on him and let him catch that thumb in his mouth. Hob moaned as he worked his tongue around it, feeling his husband's cool skin warm as he licked and sucked, as countless other hands stroked and teased him and held him fast.

Dream hummed against his throat and then licked, and Hob made a choked noise of pleasure.

Then Dream licked again, but—

He was licking Hob's throat, but also licking him in a dozen other places, none of them obvious and half of them impossible. The back of his neck and the groove of his spine halfway down, and the center of his belly and the crease of his hip, and Hob couldn't tell where else because now Dream was following it with a slow open-mouthed kiss that once again landed in a dozen places—some of them the same, some different.

Hob tried to writhe, tried to push into every touch at once, but he could hardly move under all those hands, could hardly do more than moan around the thumb in his mouth.

Dream moaned against Hob's skin, and this time one of those moans was exhaled right at the base of his cock, and those hands on his thighs were opening him wider still. Hob could hardly think, hardly knew what to feel when there was so much.

Then Dream licked again, lapping softly over a nipple, and the touch was only in that spot—and then was repeated, like the ripple of notes from the strings of a lute, each distinct but all following on each other without pause. Dream licked his throat, his hip, his ankle, the inside of his thigh, and—

Hob nearly did break free of all the hands holding him in place when he felt that tongue lap against his hole. "Dream!"

"Should I not know every part of you, husband?" Dream asked, and Hob could hear the smirk in his voice, pleased with himself and with the way he'd shocked Hob. The thumb that had been in his mouth traced Hob's lower lip as Dream went on. "Should I not find a way to wring pleasure from every inch of you?"

"If... if you like," Hob allowed. If Dream wanted to—if Dream could do anything, could have a dozen hands and a dozen mouths—Hob could hardly argue about where he wanted to put any of them.

And it had felt shockingly good.

"I must ready you, after all," Dream said, and for a moment Dream's body was over his like an ordinary lover's. He could feel Dream's cock hard against his belly, hot and very large, though somehow Dream still wasn't touching Hob's cock at all, "to know every inch of your husband."

There had been no question in Hob's mind that the consummation of their marriage would go that way—it wouldn't be the grubby peasant getting his leg over, and someone had to fuck someone to make it all official. But a bit of spit rubbed in at one end and a good drink at the other were all the readying Hob had ever gotten before.

But then, he'd never lain with anyone like Dream.

"Whatever you think needful, then," Hob managed to say. "My husband."

"Mmm," Dream said, brushing a singular kiss over his mouth. "You shall want for nothing."

"I can believe that," Hob managed to say, and then Dream was doing it again—not licking this time, just all those many hands touching him, little strokes of fingers, one after another. Most of them shouldn't have felt so good, but Hob could feel the way sensation trilled through his body, the way every touch vibrated through the next. He was being tuned like a lute, like a harp, becoming an instrument of pleasure for Dream to play upon.

The touches of hands turned to touches of mouths again. This time when Dream licked him down below, Hob only moaned and tried to reach for him. Hands found his hands, and a mouth found his mouth, and Dream went on licking and stroking him absolutely everywhere. Hob truly couldn't want for anything, then, could hardly even grasp what was happening to him; it went on and on and on, and he felt so much that surely it was more than could be fit into a single night, or a single lifetime.

But then he had all the time in the world now, and he was in his husband's kingdom, where a night surely lasted just as long as Dream wished it to last.

At some point he was aware that the stroking and licking had taken on more purpose than just driving him out of his mind. As thoroughly as Dream was pleasuring Hob, he was also being prepared: licking that pressed more and more firmly into him, and left more and more wetness behind. Those stroking fingers could glide inside him easily then, reaching deeper and stretching him open more than fingers should.

Hob couldn't see, couldn't move under all those lovely hands, couldn't gather the wits to speak. All he could do was feel everything Dream was doing and know what Dream was going to do next—whenever he was good and ready to get to it, because the preparation also seemed to go on until Hob could hardly remember a time when he hadn't had—how many?—fingers curling in his arse while an impossibly clever tongue worked around his entrance.

And then—suddenly, somehow, even though it had been obvious where this was going since they started, since before Hob ever even met Dream—the fingers and tongue slid away. Dream's body over him became truly singular again, one mouth brushing his mouth and a hand holding each of Hob's hands. Hob's prick, teased and pleasured but never brought to the point of coming, still stood up hard, and as Dream settled lower over him, Dream's body did press against him there. Hob thought to wrap one leg around Dream's hips, then the other, and Dream's teeth closed on his lower lip.

Hob didn't know if that was a warning to keep still or a warning of what was about to happen; in the next second he felt the thick hot head of Dream's cock against him, and all he could pay any mind to was the way Dream was pushing inside him. Joining them together, truly, into one flesh.

Dream moved in him, over him, deep and hard. He was thick inside of Hob, stretching him open like no other ever had, making space for himself inside Hob where it shouldn't have been possible. It felt more than good. It felt right—it made Hob feel new, feel like this really was something different than what he'd ever done with any other, or would ever do again.

As it was, of course. He was wed to a being he couldn't imagine; no one else would ever make him feel this way. No one would ever fuck him so relentlessly and tenderly, no one else would ever kiss him and make him feel it right down to his toes, even while being fucked. No one else would strike him blind in exchange for the privilege of clinging to them with every inch of his body while they did the rest.

He should have been desperate to come—should have been sore, or getting a cramp in his leg, or found his mouth going nastily dry from all the kissing—but everything stayed impossibly perfect as it went on and on and on.

Just when it was starting to seem like the whole of his marriage to Dream of the Endless would consist of this neverending fuck, it changed. It didn't get less perfect, but Dream's movements turned rougher, faster, aiming toward an ending now. Dream closed a hand on Hob's cock—and he released one of Hob's hands to do it, instead of suddenly having a convenient extra.

Hob couldn't resist reaching up to Dream with that free hand, not to try to do anything in particular but just to be touching him. He cupped a hand to Dream's cheek as Dream went on kissing him, and there was the tiniest hitch in Dream's rhythm, the barest tilt of Dream's head into Hob's touch.

Then Dream was back to it, kissing him as filthy and deep as he was fucking him, his hand on Hob's cock gripping him tight and driving him onward toward completion.

Hob couldn't keep quiet as he felt that peak approaching. He gasped, "Oh, oh fuck, yes, yes," before he lost the ability to form words and simply keened against his husband's lips as the pleasure crested over him.

He knew nothing but the unimaginable perfection of pleasure for a moment or an eternity—and still never quite lost track of Dream's cock inside him, Dream's body over his, anchoring him so that he was never entirely unmoored.

When Hob could feel his own body again, he recognized the careful stillness of Dream's. Hob tightened his legs around his husband's hips, squeezing down as well as he could around his husband's cock. He brushed a thumb over Dream's lips and whispered, "Don't stop now, love. We're not finished until we're both satisfied."

Dream's teeth closed on the tip of Hob's thumb, and Hob just smiled, knowing his husband could see it even if Hob still couldn't see him. "I suppose a humble creature like myself hasn't much hope of satisfying you, m'lord, but—"

That won him a growl, and Dream let go of Hob's thumb to catch his mouth in a fiercer kiss than any yet. When he began to move again, Hob knew it should have hurt, or at least felt like too much after he'd already peaked, but it was only pleasure even now. And there was also the separate pleasure of knowing that this was for Dream, that Dream was getting what he needed or wanted from Hob.

It somehow wasn't surprising that it seemed like very little time passed before Dream gave a last hard thrust into him and went rigid, reaching his peak in perfect silence, not even a louder breath to betray him.

And still, there was a moment after, when Dream's body went soft against his. He trusted his weight to Hob, warm and sweaty instead of cool as marble. Dream bowed his head for just a moment so that his temple pressed against Hob's. Hob let his hand slide up to the nape of Dream's neck, rubbing a little there, because he didn't think his husband would permit Hob to really hold him.

Still, for just a moment, Hob could feel him. There you are. That's you, when you're not trying to please me, not hiding behind all the things you can make me feel. Blind or not, I can see you, my dear.

That was the last thought Hob had before he felt himself sinking into something just a little too abrupt and complete to be sleep.

---

Hob awoke feeling well-rested, his whole body sweetly painless and still suffused with the warm glow of being well-fucked. He was very fresh and clean, nestled into his husband's great black-draped bed, and...

He could see!

Hob sat up sharply at that realization, blinking at the sight of his husband propped on pillows on the other half of the grand bed—which put him far enough away that Hob had to scoot over to him through the silken bed coverings.

Dream—who had the covers up to his waist and was wearing some sort of loose robe above that—smiled indulgently as Hob approached. "I did tell you," Dream said. "You would have back all I took from you."

"I never doubted it," Hob averred, and finally he was close enough to steal a kiss from his husband, leaning into the impossible softness of that robe for a moment.

Hob was still naked, so he could appreciate the fineness of it just as well as Dream could.

Dream curled an arm around Hob, holding him close and kissing him thoroughly—though rather sweetly this time, without being quite so terribly kingly about it.

Then Dream tilted his head back, loosening his grip on Hob so that their eyes could meet easily, and said, "Would you care to break your fast here before you return to the Waking world?"

---

It was not pleasant to watch the cheerful eagerness fade from his husband's face, though Dream felt faintly gratified by the way Hob so clearly and quickly took Dream's meaning. He was not stupid, for all he had made a doomed decision in marrying Dream; no doubt it had been a matter of inescapable fate.

Hob sat back from Dream, spine straight and shoulders square, and plastered on a playful smile to cover the crestfallen look he'd first had. "Can't persuade you to keep me any longer, husband?"

"I beg you will not try," Dream said gently. There was no need to be cruel; doubtless he would sooner or later inflict enough cruelty on Hob to ruin things between them, to make Hob despair of living, to burn all his hope to nothing but ashes at last. To leave them both as fodder for Despair, and earn that edge of sadness in Death's smile.

For now, perhaps this parting could be only bittersweet, and Hob might think wistfully of him from time to time until they saw each other again. "It is dangerous for one from the Waking world to linger too long in the Dreaming; my realm changes its living inhabitants till they cannot survive anywhere else. I would not trap you here, and so I must send you away."

"Oh!" Hob's expression turned more hopeful. "Then I shall return so soon as I may—shall I spend only my nights with you, husband? That is as much as any dreamer does, is it not?"

There was a moment when Dream was tempted to give Hob what he was daring to ask for—what they were both, perhaps, promised to. They were married, after all. Why should he not have such pleasure as he had had of Hob every night?

Why should he not let Hob find out what he was asking for?

Why should they not rush headlong to whatever the end of this was going to be?

But Dream remembered all too clearly what his brother had said. Your marriage will be long, but not fruitful. And he had promised Hob that he would live long enough to see a cake that would not exist in the Waking world for hundreds of years.

Hob's life would be long; their marriage would be long.

Alianora's life was long in her skerry.

He and Calliope had married, but within a matter of a few years they had already been drifting apart. They had managed to be happy enough, for as long as they had, by keeping their separate lives. That had made it special when they did see each other—until Calliope could not bear the sight of him any longer.

If he and Hob were to continue to be married for hundreds of years...

"You are immortal now," Dream said. "You are not just any dreamer. You must begin to think on a different scale. For beings such as we are—as you must learn now to be—meeting once in a hundred years—"

"A hundred years," Hob repeated, sounding nearly as much awed as protesting. He had not had time to really think of what his bargain with Death had bought him; he had no idea what it was like to see a century pass.

"Yes," Dream said firmly, not letting himself contemplate how long a hundred years could feel even for one such as himself. If he did not see Hob for a hundred years, they would be a hundred years closer to what was fated for them.

If he did not see Hob for a hundred years, Hob might be eager to see him at the end of it. Almost certainly, Hob would not hate him or be weary of him. Hob might find another to love—but in a hundred years' time, any mortal he cared for would have died, and Hob might be inclined to appreciate an immortal husband again.

And Dream would see none of it happen; he would simply meet Hob again, as he had met him today, a bolt out of the blue.

"You must go and live," Dream insisted. "You must learn what it is to be immortal, and decide whether you even wish to go on living in the Waking world beyond such a time. In a hundred years we will meet again, and spend another night together, and you may decide whether you wish to stay in the Dreaming with me, or whether you will go on in the world you know."

He saw the beginnings of a protest die on Hob's lips as he took in Dream's words as a challenge, a call to prove himself. "I see," Hob said. "Well, if that's the way immortals do things, I will just have to learn. I do wish I could give you a wedding gift to remember me by, for a hundred years."

Hob reached out but did not quite take Dream's hand, though the gesture spoke richly of the customary gift: a ring.

"Ah, but you can," Dream said, charmed by the idea of it. "You are in the Dreaming, and you are wedded to its ruler; it will serve you as it would not serve an ordinary dreamer. Only imagine what you would give, if you could give me anything, and the Dreaming will give substance to your intention."

Hob looked briefly daunted—briefly crafty—and then simply frowned in concentration. He did close one hand around Dream's, rubbing his thumb over the backs of Dream's fingers as if deciding which to adorn. He settled on the third finger, the customary one, and then he opened his other hand and peered into his palm as if waiting for something to appear.

In another moment—and without Dream having to consciously intervene to assist him—something did indeed take shape. It was a ring of a deep, shining black, simple but perfect.

Dream was a little touched at this evidence of Hob's consideration for him. Many a human would have imagined some gaudy creation of shining yellow gold stuck all over with bright jewels, paying no attention at all to Dream's own obvious preferences.

Hob stared down at the ring, clearly not quite satisfied with its elegant simplicity. Dream almost held his breath, hoping that Hob would not ruin it but rather resigned to the likelihood that he would. He was a human, after all, and only technically immortal thus far.

Hob looked up at him, then reached out to Dream, twitching the robe aside to look upon the ruby that hung around his neck as it always did. "That's... important, isn't it? It's not just a pretty thing, or a show of wealth."

"It is a Dreamstone," Dream agreed. "It holds a part of my own power, and I do much of my work through it."

"Power," Hob murmured. "I have little enough of that—none, compared to you. But what I have is yours, my husband."

Hob raised one finger to his lips—to his teeth—and the Dreaming allowed him to behave as if one of his teeth were needle-sharp. Blood welled up on his fingertip when he drew it away, and Hob touched it carefully to the ring, not once but three times.

"I am yours by this," Hob said quietly. "Yesterday, today, a hundred years hence."

Hob's own blood obeyed his intention; each drop formed a perfect glimmering half-sphere on the ring, as dark and as bright as Hob's earth-brown eyes, his oak-brown hair, his human soul. They did not dry, nor flow away, but took on solidity, still just as bright and perfect as the blood fresh from Hob's veins.

Hob held out the ring; Dream offered his hand.

Hob smiled a little—sadly, but still smiling—and fitted the ring into place.

"I would give you a gift as fine," Dream said, and tugged at the ring, drawing from his finger not the ring Hob had given him—that would never leave him, not until Hob demanded it—but a twin to it. He made a bead of blood well up from his own finger and mingled it with Hob's on this ring, drawing the drops together into a single cabochon where two deep dark shades of red mingled with each other—impossible to tease apart, but neither lost in the other. "Yours, for so long as you will keep it."

Dream slid the ring onto Hob's finger, and felt a dangerous little thrill at having laid so visible a claim.

Hob seemed to feel similarly, for he turned his hand this way and that, admiring the ring and clearly pleased by it, but the smile he offered Dream when he looked up from it was a trifle nervous. "I don't know if I know anyone who wouldn't have a go at knifing me for this. Might have to get some new friends when I go back."

Dream waved a hand, layering a little more enchantment onto the ring. "It will be impossible to remove from your hand unless you remove it yourself—and invisible to the eyes of ordinary mortals. Any who can see it have the power to see what should be hidden—so you will know to take their measure accordingly."

And any who were capable of seeing it would be capable of seeing what it truly was: the claim of an Endless upon this human.

"Well," Hob said, looking down at the ring again and once more turning his hand this way and that, admiring the deep red shine of the stone, "that's a very fine gift indeed, then. And we are well and truly wedded now, with our gifts exchanged, so I suppose I ought to be on my way."

Again Dream felt that treacherous impulse to keep Hob near him, but he knew that he was right; this was safest for Hob. Dream genuinely did not know how quickly a human would begin to be affected by being physically present in the Dreaming. And if he let himself delay and drag this out, it would only be more difficult for both of them to part.

"Not quite yet," Dream said. He gestured to a chest under the nearest window—a chest made of shining dark wood, the same rich brown as Hob's hair, not quite matching the stark black and white of the décor of Dream's rooms. "You will wish to dress before you go, I am sure."

Hob looked down at himself, and then looked around. "I suppose those fine things I wore yesterday would serve me no better than a ring everyone could see—"

"Your wedding clothes were a gift to you from my sibling," Dream interposed. "You will find them in the chest, but also more practical garments, and whatever else you might require that you may have left behind when my sibling dressed you."

Hob's hand went automatically to his hip. He had worn no blade in Destiny's garden, and no human of his sort would go without a bit of steel if he could help it.

Dream motioned toward the chest, and Hob knelt up and put his left hand to Dream's cheek—pressing in just a little with his ring finger, Dream thought, so that the ring pressed into Dream's jaw—and stole one more quick kiss. Then he clambered off the bed and went to crouch before the chest, lifting the lid of it and peering in.

He looked back at Dream, frowning. "There's nothing."

"There's darkness," Dream corrected. "Reach in, and draw out what you seek."

Hob's face tensed, as if bracing for pain or cold or another unpleasant sensation, but he reached into the chest and drew out a bundle wrapped in plain linen, bound with a cord.

He looked up at Dream rather than unwrapping it.

"Your wedding clothes," Dream said. "Packed for you to carry with you, since you may not wish to wear them."

Hob still did not unwrap them to investigate, but set the bundle aside and reached in again, this time with no sign of apprehension. He drew out a plain tunic and immediately pulled it on, then reached in again and brought out braies, hose, socks, boots, a hooded cape, a belt and a sheathed knife.

He reached in one more time and drew out a weighty purse; he looked at it for a moment, then looked up hesitantly at Dream. "This... this is more than I had before."

Dream waved a hand. "Gold is cheap in the Dreaming—so many dream of having it, it is easy to find in dreams. Dower yourself freely; I would not be stingy with you."

Hob tucked the pouch he already held into the bundle of his wedding clothes, then reached in and drew out another, which he set with his clothes. When he had dressed himself, he tucked the second pouch away within the cape. He picked up the bundle, tucking it under his arm, and then...

Then there was no more reason to delay.

Dream got out of bed and went to his husband. Just as Hob had done, Dream put his left hand to Hob's cheek, pressing his ring against Hob's jaw, and stole a last kiss as he tossed his sand. The kiss ended as Hob disappeared back into the Waking world.

Then Dream stood alone in his empty rooms. Nothing was changed, except the ring on his finger and the chest under the window.

Dream made the ring invisible and banished the chest into the darkness. He would have no use for either of them for a hundred years.

---

Hob arrived in the very familiar space between the back of the White Horse and its backhouse, dressed in cleaner and finer versions of everything he'd had the night before, and with a small fortune in clothing and coin tucked under his arm. With a better gift than any of these, laid on him by his kind sister-in-law. He would live forever now.

He shifted his bundle to be able to see the ring on his left hand. It was there, the same as it had been in the Dreaming—a black band adorned with a single red gem swirled with two slightly different shades of glimmering blood red.

"A hundred years," he muttered under his breath, shaking his head in wonder. "I'll see you then, dear husband."

Notes:

If you want to boost this fic on Tumblr, the post is here!

Chapter 3: Interlude - July 1389

Dream's cock was lovely, slim as the rest of him and beautifully proportioned, rosy at the tip when it was hard, which it had been for a good while now. It was wet, too, glistening in the morning light from leaking fluid and a generous coating of Hob's spit.

Hob was on his knees between Dream's thighs, but Dream was sprawled on a wide white-sheeted bed, so Hob was looking down at his lovely slender body, dotted here and there with the colorful blooms of love bites. His face was flushed nearly as pink as his cock, his wide eyes looking impossibly brilliantly blue.

"More," Dream said. "You cannot stop now."

"Can I not?" Hob asked, sitting back on his heels and stroking his own cock, enjoying the way his husband sounded so imperious while looking so beautifully wrecked. "Will you forbid me, husband? Will you strike me blind? Will you banish me from your kingdom?"

Dream scowled and pushed to sit up. They were in the Waking world, that was why Hob dared to be so impertinent, and so Dream was stuck with two arms and two legs and the power of his looks.

Which were very powerful, in truth, so before he'd even sat up all the way Hob was leaning in to kiss him and push him back down. He curled his hand around Dream's cock and gave him a teasing stroke that made his kisses turn sweet and his spine soften.

"Or you could simply ask," Hob suggested. "Just ask your husband for what you want, because you know I'd give you anything, my love."

Dream stayed stubbornly quiet, so Hob left a few more bites to decorate his chest and belly before returning his mouth to Dream's cock, and this time, at long last, when Hob's mouth slackened Dream closed a hand in his hair and gritted out, "Don't. Stop."

Hob hummed, pleased, and sucked harder, bringing up a hand to play with Dream's balls just before they emptied themselves, Dream's cock spurting bitter-sharp in his mouth. Hob swallowed, though he let enough escape to run wetly into his beard, purely for the exasperated look Dream gave him when he picked his head up.

Dream raised a languid hand to Hob's cheek and made the mess disappear, and then he was cupping Hob's cheek, pressing in with his ring for Hob to feel it. That was all Hob needed. He took his own cock in hand and finished with a few quick tugs, spilling his own seed over Dream's belly to join all the other marks he'd left on his husband.

That was the end, and it brought the instant of clarity Hob always found: he knew he was dreaming. He knew that this creature he had been making love to had not been his husband, not really.

But he knew also that dreaming meant he was touching his husband's realm, even if he could never find his way to any part of it where he might see his husband face to face. Not yet.

"Remember that one, love," Hob said, as the figure under him dissolved into sand, "There's my message to you for tonight. I've plenty more ideas where that came from, and if any of them please you, you know where to find me, today or in ninety-nine years and eleven months."

Hob blinked and his eyes were really open; he was lying in his bed, the sable-trimmed cloak spread over him as a coverlet, his braies wet and sticky with the evidence of another night's dreaming.

He really ought to pawn the cloak before it was stolen from his rented room, but... he'd already missed the campaigning season this year, and it would be warm to sleep under through the winter. Next year he'd pawn it, before he went off to fight again.

There were plenty of nights left before next year. Plenty of chances to call out to his husband and maybe, just maybe, be heard. Maybe he would have better things to do than march off to war next year; maybe he would have a better king to swear a more enjoyable allegiance to.

Hob rolled over and pulled the dark fur up to his cheek, thinking of his husband's hair soft against his cheek when Dream lay over him, and closed his eyes again.

---

Dream gritted his teeth at the sight of the sex dream approaching his throne. It was Sweetly, for the eleventh straight time. He had minded Fiercely and Harshly and even Quickly marginally less; there was no way his husband could truly know what he was doing, but... Sweetly, eleven times in a row, began to seem rather pointed.

"Sire," Sweetly said, with pink cheeks that were more than just his demure nature. Dream had not been particularly successful in hiding his irritation with this trend since the third time.

"I do not care," Dream snapped. "As I believe I have clearly stated several times by now."

Sweetly bit his perfectly plump lower lip and twisted his hands together, looking around the throne room as if he might find some support, but there was none to find. Not even Lucienne was in evidence, just at this moment. No dream would dare, after the way these audiences had gone every other time. Dream really did not know why they kept coming to him.

"It's just that he wants so badly for you to know," Sweetly burst out. "He says so, every time, he says he wants you to know about his ideas, and that you can find him if you like them, and—"

Dream leaned forward, his mouth open on I do not care, and Sweetly just spoke faster and louder. "And he's your husband, sire! He's the Prince Consort of the Dreaming! What he tells us, we cannot just ignore!"

Sweetly gave Dream a pleading look, and Dream realized that he had left his dreamfolk in an uncomfortably ambiguous position. That was his own error to amend, having not made this matter more clear.

"Let it be known, henceforth," Dream stated, in that voice which would reach to every corner of the Dreaming and lay down an implacable law, "that Robert Gadling's dreams are his own affair, and not to be reported to your king. Nor," Dream went on, feeling a sudden premonition of Hob's next likely tactic if he realized this one was thwarted, "should anyone else's dreams concerning my husband be reported to me. I am well able to perceive my husband when I choose to do so, and his will shall not override mine."

Sweetly looked relieved though also, in accordance with his nature, shyly pleading. He did not argue, though. None would dare to actually argue.

Dream sat back in his throne, satisfied. He would hear no more of Hob, now, for another ninety-nine years and eleven months.

That, surely, would be better.

Chapter 4: June 7, 1489

Notes:

Many thanks to Readertee, 27 dragons, Pellaaearien, and Moorishflower for beta and screaming!

This is still not the chapter where these two figure anything out.

It occurred to Hob, long before the hundred years were up, that Dream had not told him where they would meet again in a hundred years. For lack of a better plan, he resolved to go back to the White Horse tavern, where Death and Desire and Delirium had found him on that fateful evening that had become his wedding day. He would wait until he could keep his eyes open no longer, then get a place to sleep and see if Dream had meant him to return to the Dreaming that way.

He had not seemed to have any luck reaching his husband through his dreams during his hundred years of waiting, and not for lack of trying. He had often had the sense of knowing he was in his husband's kingdom, but it had never lasted more than a moment. He had never been able to even try to search for that fantastical palace where he had passed his wedding night.

For a time he did as his husband had bidden, and simply tried to enjoy immortal life and get used to the idea that he would have hundreds more years of it. Everywhere he went, he tried the finest cakes anyone could offer, and never tasted another like their wedding cake; he was glad, he found, for it meant there was still more time for him, and more to look forward to.

Also, the cakes he did try were all very good in their own ways, so Hob did not regret his experiments.

When the calendar turned over to 1480, Hob returned to London and set to preparing himself for the second night of his marriage to the King of Dreams. He had nothing left of his wedding gifts except the ring, which, as Dream had promised him, was invisible to nearly everyone. He had sold his wedding clothes except for the cloak, which he had kept for years, until the fur and velvet both had become rather pathetically worn from his habit of petting their softness when he was trying to remember everything that had passed on the night of his wedding.

He had kept it for years after that, too, until a beautiful woman had approached him in a tavern. She had tilted her head as she studied his ring and asked him how old he was, and how long he had been married. He had left the cloak behind when he fled, and for all he missed that last lovely thing from his wedding day, it had taught him a sharp lesson in taking better care not to stay in one place too long.

He was feeling rather good at it by the time he returned to London, more or less penniless but certain he could make his way once again. He had learned how to make himself look as young as possible—a close shave and wide eyes and combing his hair down over his temples to cover the faint threads of gray did a lot, and playing up his own genuine delight in everything about London that was new to him did much of the rest. He found an apprenticeship with a man who'd invented a whole new trade—printing—which was messy, hard work all for the sake of doing what scribes did a bit faster.

Hob didn't know who was going to read all these books—how many Bibles could be wanted, when every church already had one? But Master Caxton was willing to take him on and didn't treat him too badly. Hob could scrape together enough coin, month by month and year by year, to buy new clothes he wouldn't be ashamed to meet his husband in, and a fine chest of dark wood to keep them in.

When the day finally came, Hob was so distracted with thoughts of his husband and the night to come that he kept dropping things, making a mess of himself and the workshop until Caxton gave up on telling him to get it right and chased him off for the night. Hob hurried to the bathhouse to get himself as thoroughly clean as he could—thinking wistfully, as he did, of the baths of the Threshold—and then to his lodgings, where he changed into his finery.

Then it was time to hurry to the White Horse, stopping only to retrieve the bottle he'd asked the publican to set aside for him. He turned then, scanning to spot a good table, and discovered that Dream was already awaiting him.

Hob couldn't help it: he broke into an enormous grin and only barely held himself back from running to his husband's side.

---

Dream ignored the ring on his finger and all it meant until ninety-nine years, eleven months, and three weeks had elapsed since he was wed. It was not difficult; he always had a great deal of work to do in the Dreaming and with the political entanglements between the Dreaming and other realms.

The thought of Hob Gadling flitted through his awareness now and again—when he extricated himself from a negotiation with Lucifer Morningstar without it devolving into another moderately violent sexual encounter, for instance. It wasn't because of Hob; Lucifer was a habit he had been meaning to break. As was Titania.

And if now and again he found himself thinking of the quiet peace of the moments when his husband had slept in his bed, at his side, sated and content, and Dream had let time stretch and turn on itself to prolong the night... It was only a thought. He had many thoughts, many matters requiring his attention, and very few moments of such serene stillness. It was very little to do with his husband at all; Hob had been asleep at the time, even if his warmth and the quiet sound of his breathing had seemed to fill up the room around Dream.

Still, for the most part, Dream did not think of him at all for nearly the full span of their hundred years apart. A week beforehand he realized that the date of their meeting was approaching, and he had not actually given Hob any clear instructions on the manner of their meeting. Recalling the way Hob had attempted to use dreams to contact him before he had put a stop to it, Dream went to the library to consult the books of Hob's life and of his dreams.

Soon he found all the daydreams that centered on their next meeting—it was a thick volume which Lucienne had filed in the locked cabinet only she and Dream himself could access. There he found that Hob's daydreams had coalesced around his plan to await Dream at a particular location—the place where Death had found him, a hundred years earlier, which showed a sense of narrative rightness that Dream appreciated.

He noted, also, that Hob was... preoccupied with what would come after their meeting.

Extensively, perhaps even obsessively preoccupied.

Dream spent quite a bit of time reading. He only ceased when he realized that Lucienne was standing at a respectful distance from him, and had just cleared her throat for the fifth time in a row.

"Ah, Lucienne," Dream said, tucking the volume of Hob's daydreams under his arm. "Is something the matter?"

"The Skerry of Children's Hamelin has sent a missive," Lucienne said, and Dream forced his thoughts back to his work, caring for the Dreaming and its residents.

He tucked Hob's book into his coat, to study further when he had more time.

By the time the day of their meeting arrived, Dream had studied Hob's daydreams extensively; it was a trivial matter to appear just before Hob did, planting himself at a table as if he had always been there.

It was only another moment before Hob appeared, wearing a robe with a trimming of fine dark fur that called to mind the sable Hob had worn at their wedding. True sable wouldn't be proper for Hob to wear in the Waking world, where none knew him for a royal consort, but he had found the nearest equivalent to it and glowed with pride in his own finery, simple though the garments were.

He had made an effort to present himself as well as he could to his husband, lacking Desire's resources, and Dream found that he could not despise such efforts, even if their specific material results were nothing very impressive.

It was not the only effort Hob had made for his sake, as Hob's daydreams had revealed to him, but there would be time to discuss that later.

"Well met, my lord," Hob said cheerfully—not shouting Dream's true name for all and sundry to hear, which Dream appreciated. "I don't know how well you'll like this, but I believe it might be worth the tasting—a very good mead, fit for a wedding feast."

Hob poured for each of them, and Dream did him the courtesy of tasting the mead. It was not the worst thing he had ever tasted in the Waking world—quite drinkable, he might say. Hob did not actually ask his opinion, merely beamed at the sight of him taking his careful sip and then took a healthy quaff from his own cup.

"Tell me," Dream said. "How have you been keeping? Are you enjoying your long life in the Waking world?"

"Oh, yeah," Hob said at once, and the self-conscious propriety he had worn for the first moment of their meeting instantly sloughed away to reveal the very same impossibly and irreverently cheerful human Dream had married a hundred years ago. "It's..." Hob took another sip of his mead, obviously searching for words, then said, "It's fucking brilliant."

Dream had nothing to say to this summation of a hundred years in the Waking world, but Hob took his raised eyebrows for encouragement to elaborate, and burbled on happily about all the things that had changed in a hundred years—humans had learned not to sit in the smoke of their fires, or wipe their bodily fluids on their sleeves, and this was evidently what his husband found impressive.

And then Dream asked Hob what he himself had been doing, this hundred years, and after airily summarizing what must have been decades of his life as "soldiering, mainly" and "a little banditry here and there" he began to speak about his new line of work.

"It's called printing," Hob said, as if the mass reproduction of text were not the most exciting development this part of the world had seen in hundreds of years, as if it was not the clear route to a great opening of minds as stories of all kinds became more easily and widely circulated.

"Don't need to be a guild member, not yet," Hob went on, as if the sheer attainability of the work mattered more than the wondrousness of the development he was playing a role in.

"Never be a real demand for it," Hob went on, full of the confidence of a man who was utterly wrong, "and it's hard work, but—"

Dream entirely lost the end of whatever absurdly idiotic thing Hob was saying, caught up in the horrible realization that, on the one hand, his husband was as foolish as he was cheerful, and very literally on the other hand, the black flecks visible here and there on Hob's well-scrubbed skin were ink. They were the marks of stories that had gotten quite literally under Hob's skin, because he was engaged in the most important, beautiful work anyone on this continent was doing in this century. Dream wanted to kiss him so badly it hurt—and what was more, if he did then Hob would stop talking.

Hob had trailed off into silence and was watching him with wide eyes, a flush starting to rise on his clean-shaven cheeks.

"Come away with me," Dream said, extending his hand across the table, and Hob grabbed hold as if he were a drowning man offered rescue.

Dream could feel the calluses that were signs of Hob's work pressing against his own skin, could almost hear the ghosts of the stories that had passed under Hob's hands.

He did not shiver.

He used his other hand to summon a pinch of sand, and transported them both into the Dreaming, only barely remembering to make sure that none in the White Horse would notice their disappearance or recall their brief presence.

They arrived directly in Dream's private quarters this time, giving Hob no chance to be distracted by the rest of the Dreaming. Hob, of course, immediately turned away from Dream to look around the space.

"You have been here before," Dream pointed out.

"Yes," Hob said, looking here and there, everywhere but at Dream himself, "yes... it's the same, isn't it? It's exactly the same. Nothing in my world can keep so still, but you..."

"I am Endless," Dream said. "I do not change. It is not in my nature to change."

Hob's brow wrinkled into a rather endearing confusion. "That can't be right," he said. "You're the King of Dreams, aren't you? Dreams are always changing."

Dream forced himself to swallow frustration at his husband's misapprehension. He was human, and not conversant in any matters beyond his own humble pursuits. He would not know or understand these things if Dream did not explain them to him.

"The particularities of dreams change," Dream said. "Just as they vary from place to place—a farmer who dreams of disaster or bounty for his crop of corn is not much different than one who dreams of his rice, or cassava, or maize."

Dream saw eager curiosity kindle in his husband's eyes, and waved a hand. "You will learn where such crops grow soon enough. The point is that dreamers vary, and individual dreams change, and I create particular dreams as they are needed for specific situations, but I, their creator and king, remain myself."

The fascination in Hob's eyes had turned to something different, and he stepped in and touched one hand lightly to Dream's chest. "Do you create dreams for lovers? For husbands who dream of their spouses when they are apart?"

"Many such," Dream said. "And had many reports of you from them, until I told them that I knew where to find you when I wished to see you, and that I had already told you when to expect me."

Hob's smile turned mildly sheepish, and he leaned in closer. "I'm sorry if I made a pest of myself, m'lord, but you can't blame a man for hungering for more of what we had on our wedding night."

"It seemed you were hungering for a wide variety of things that you did not have on our wedding night," Dream pointed out dryly. "And I can certainly blame a man for hungering when he has chosen to fast for years on end."

Hob's cheeks colored a bit, but he smiled, seeming not at all aware of being scolded. "Is it fasting, to have no appetite for anything but the feast to come? I consoled myself with others when I knew it would be decades yet until I would be permitted to so much as look upon my husband, let alone touching him, but the last few years, mere swiving has lost its savor. Not when I knew that I would be in your bed again before long."

Dream shook his head, fighting a smile; whether his husband flattered or stated a simple fact, it came to the same thing. "I would not have you deprive yourself so. I returned you to your Waking life that you might enjoy it."

"And enjoy it I have, I assure you," Hob said. "And I mean to enjoy the next hundred years, too, but there's a pleasure in looking forward to something, isn't there? Haven't you spared even a thought for me in a hundred years, Dream?"

Hob said it so easily: I mean to enjoy the next hundred years. He would not beg or bargain for more this time, and if there was some tiny part of Dream that wished he would... it was better this way. They could both simply enjoy their rare liaisons. They could both be happy with each other, once every hundred years.

"I have known no other while we were apart," Dream said, permitting himself at last to brush his fingers over Hob's heated cheek. "But my nature is not so... gregarious as yours, and a hundred years is not so long a time for me."

"That's not what I asked," Hob said, stepping close enough that their bodies brushed against each other, and it was obvious that Hob was struggling to focus on Dream's eyes so close. Dream could feel the breath of Hob's words against his lips. "I asked, my lord husband, my lovely Dream, if you ever thought of me the way you know I thought of you."

"Aside from those times when I was forced to think of you, because you thought so loudly of me?" Dream said, smirking a little, but he would not lie to his husband—not over such a small thing, when there was still nothing but warm fondness in his husband's eyes, and Dream truly had no cause to resent him either. "Perhaps, a time or two, you crossed my mind and I whiled away a little time in thoughts of this night or our last one."

And if it had been more than a time or two—if there had been a dismal year or two or five when he thought of nothing but that his husband existed, and liked him, and would like him still at the end of their century's parting, and if those thoughts had given him the strength he needed to carry on...

There was no need to trouble Hob with that information. He was beaming, pleased already with what little Dream had admitted.

"Did you think of different things than what we did on our wedding night?" Hob prodded. "Would you like something else this time? If I have been impertinent, should I get on my knees for you? Would you permit me to worship you, my Endless lord?"

Dream took a step back that brought him to the edge of the bed where they had shared their wedding night, and he drew Hob with him. Dream perched on the edge of the bed, parting his knees as he sat and drawing Hob to stand between his thighs. "What sort of worship would you offer?"

"Well," Hob said, raising his hands between them in a gesture of prayer. "I am no great singer or speaker, my lord. No artist or poet. But I do honest work with my hands, and I do have a way with my mouth, so I've been told."

This aligned with the main thrust—so to speak—of many of Hob's dreams and daydreams on this topic, and Dream was not averse to seeing just how his husband would react to the collision of those long-cherished fantasies with the reality of Dream himself.

Dream allowed his clothing to melt away from him; Hob's eyes went wide and for a moment he stood perfectly still, taking in the naked form Dream presented to him. Then, before he reached out to touch, he flung off his own cloak and reached for the fastening of his belt.

"Does this worship you spoke of with hands and mouth also require you to make such urgent use of your other parts?" Dream enquired, amused but grimly unsurprised at such human selfishness betrayed so immediately.

"Not at all," Hob said, abandoning his task and dropping to his knees between Dream's feet. "But it is hardly right that I should be clothed when you are naked, my lord husband."

There was a look of awareness, nearly of concern, in Hob's eyes; he had known well why Dream had rendered him sightless during their only other night together. He saw Dream far too clearly, when Dream knew that his only hope of their marriage's continuation, even intermittent as it was, was to keep Hob from knowing him well enough to despise him.

And yet he could not bring himself to repeat that stratagem, and in truth had no wish to. He wanted to be admired—to be worshiped as Hob had promised. He did not even deplore the care Hob's words and actions conveyed, little though he needed any human to be concerned for him.

He waved a hand, freeing Hob of the remainder of his clothes without any tedious need to remove them. "Will this permit you to continue, husband?"

Naked now, still on his knees, Hob grinned up at Dream as though he had already been given all he could want. "I thank you, yes," Hob said, and set his hands on Dream's thighs.

"Of course," Hob went on, leaning in to brush his lips reverently against the inside of Dream's knee, his eyes closing in apparent bliss, "now I must find what form of worship pleases you most. Will you guide me?"

"I would rather see what you think might be pleasing," Dream said. "Rest assured if you displease me I will not hesitate to say so."

"That I could never doubt," Hob agreed with a wink, and then he turned his head and began pressing kisses to the inside of Dream's thigh.

Dream's knees spread wider without his quite meaning them to, and though he had meant to hold himself aloof he could feel a stirring in the core of himself. It was not the kisses, so much, pleasant as those soft and damp little touches were. It was the way Hob's eyes stayed closed, the way his hands rested only lightly on Dream's calves, making no attempt to move him or keep him still.

It was the way that Hob really was not applying himself immediately to the most intimate of touches, or the most obviously pleasurable. It felt as if Hob really did want, first and foremost, to show his devotion—and his willing submission to whatever Dream wanted of him, despite the forwardness of his fantasies over the past century.

Dream rested a hand on Hob's head, and Hob had no difficulty understanding the touch as a benediction; he went still and waited, radiating gladness to be allowed to kneel before Dream regardless of what Dream wanted from him while he was there. Dream sank his hand into Hob's hair, then tugged; Hob's joy faltered, feeling that little jolt of pain as a sign he had done something wrong.

Hob knew that Dream would make his displeasure known, after all. He should not make the message too complicated for his human husband.

Dream hummed softly and brought his other hand to Hob's cheek, stroking as he gentled his grip on Hob's hair, reassuring him without words, and Hob relaxed again into the kinder touches. He went readily when Dream guided him—gently—toward his cock, and his mouth opened eagerly when the tip brushed his lips.

Hob's eyes opened then, and he was smiling with his mouth open and not quite on Dream, pleased with himself but too sweet to be properly smug. "Oh, so you do have a preference, then, my dear?"

Dream promptly let go and leaned back on his hands.

Hob smiled, but did not press his point or persevere in his impudence. He closed his eyes again, and with the same obvious pleasure at being permitted to please, he took Dream's cock into his mouth. Dream was not particularly hard just yet, but Hob evidenced no impatience with that state of affairs and seemed actually to relish it, his mouth working upon Dream not with any focused intent but as if Hob were learning and savoring the shape of him, his taste, his weight on Hob's tongue.

Hob let the tip of Dream's cock rest there for a long moment and it seemed as if he would be content to stay that way all night.

Dream was tempted to let him, but even more tempted to let himself respond to the heat of Hob's mouth and the even more intoxicating bliss of his regard. Before he was aware of deciding he felt himself swelling, hardening, pushing just a little deeper into Hob's mouth even without moving.

Hob looked up at him, obviously pleased to have won that reaction, and immediately set to work trying to please Dream more. He was skillful and attentive, responding quickly to any twitch or sigh or involuntary reaction that betrayed what pleased Dream most—and all the time he radiated that confident eagerness to please, the certainty that he could and would do just the right thing to bring Dream all the pleasure that could be encompassed in sex.

And he did, if only because Dream could not help responding to Hob's eager attention. Hob was a strong dreamer and a sure one, and he believed Dream was a creature who would very much like to have his cock sucked just like this; without entirely willing it Dream became one, at least for so long as Hob's mouth was on him.

It was a very fine thing to be Hob Gadling's husband who enjoyed having his cock sucked. It involved astonishingly little thought, and an ecstatic rush of sensation and emotion.

It felt very much like being loved and desired and given what he wanted while being accepted as he was. It felt like being intensely present in a physical form he had rarely worn over the last two and a half millennia, like the hot muscular flex of a wet tongue over thin-stretched sensitive skin. It felt like he had a heart and it was beating a frantic rhythm perfectly in time with Hob's.

Dream felt himself coming apart, his very self unraveling under the onslaught of pleasure as it peaked. There was a blissful moment in which he was everywhere and nowhere, was scattered through the Dreaming, was wholly contained in a body and mind which could not contain so much ecstasy and blacked out in the attempt.

He returned to the sensation of soft touches. He recognized kisses first: Hob's mouth pressing gently to the front of his thigh again and again in a random pattern. It took him another moment to make sense of the sweep of Hob's thumbs, petting the skin of his hips where Hob's hands rested.

Eventually it occurred to Dream to open his eyes, and he found that he was lying back on the bed, his legs still dangling off the edge. Hob still knelt there, quiet, only touching him in these gentle ways—nothing sexual, nothing demanding, nothing for Hob's own pleasure. The touches only served to remind Dream that his existence was rooted in this spot, and someone awaited him here.

Dream blinked away tears, and made them evaporate tracelessly from his cheeks before he sat up and met Hob's gaze.

Hob smiled, looking satisfied but sweet with it, despite the sky outside being a profusion of rainbows, despite the improbably blooming flowers that had taken over most of the spacious chamber. "That was all right, then?"

"I would repay you sevenfold," Dream said, reaching down to pull Hob up onto the bed, twisting to lay him flat upon it, so that Dream could lean over him.

Hob was still smiling, still pleased, and said, "Does that mean you'll—"

He stopped short, then, perhaps remembering that the last request he made in Dream's bed had not been granted without condition.

Dream raised his eyebrows, waiting.

Hob huffed a sigh and gave Dream a fond narrow look, as if Dream had beat him at some game they played and he knew the penalty would not outweigh the pleasure of playing. "If you want to repay me sevenfold," Hob said, "does that mean you'll let me stay awake a bit longer this time? If I regret anything about our wedding night, it's that I wasted so much of it asleep when I should have treasured every hour I had with you."

"You did not know then, how rare such hours would be," Dream pointed out.

Hob just studied him for a moment, and Dream waited for Hob to negotiate to make such hours less rare, to ask to stay in the Dreaming, to ask to see him again sooner, but what Hob finally said was, "I know now, don't I? So tonight... tonight I'd like to waste less time, my dear husband."

Dream had no reason to be disappointed in that answer, and did not allow himself to be. He let his smile stretch just a little too wide, let himself grow bigger just so that he could loom a bit more over his husband, and bent down for a toothy kiss as he murmured, "We shall waste no time at all, my sweet husband."

---

Hob hadn't forgotten that little nasty edge his husband had; it had featured in a considerable number of his fantasies over the past century. Sometimes he had thought of it while trying to imagine what his husband who had however many hands he wanted to at any given time looked like on their wedding night.

He didn't know if Dream meant to be scaring him, but at least he didn't seem to mind when Hob was nothing but eager to spread his legs for his wolfishly smiling and inhumanly large husband.

When Dream kissed him, the kiss was all teeth, and Hob felt engulfed by it even as it felt like an ordinary kiss that only actually took up his mouth. Dream's teeth grazed his lips and tongue as Hob eagerly opened to the kiss, welcoming him in, and Hob felt somehow devoured at the same time that Dream didn't so much as nip him. There was something in him, something in Dream, that played this out in a much more vicious way while Hob was unharmed, moaning into his husband's mouth and doing all he could to pull Dream closer.

Dream never seemed to have more than the usual number of hands or mouths or anything else, but he never stopped kissing (plundering, consuming) Hob. Somehow Hob was ready for him anyway, when Dream's hands found his thighs and held them open, making way for his cock to press against Hob and then, easily, inside.

And then, less easily. Dream was big, and the stretch of taking him hurt a little, but then that made the pleasure of it sharper, the satisfaction of rising to a challenge. On his next breath Hob could hardly think of what he felt, because he was too busy feeling it—the pleasure and the pain and the way Dream held him like he never wanted to let go. Like he never would let go.

He started to move like the sea, like the tide, crashing rhythmic and powerful into Hob like he had never begun and would never end, and Hob could only give himself up to it. It felt so immense, so unearthly, that it was a surprise to realize that it also felt like swiving, and Hob only caught up with that part when he realized he was about to come.

"Oh," Hob gasped, breaking away from kissing Dream. "Oh, wait, wait—"

"No waiting tonight," Dream breathed, and thrust into him again just right.

Hob cried out as pleasure broke over him in a drowning rush, and for a moment he was aware of nothing but bliss. When he opened his eyes again, it was a relief to find that he could, that he could see his husband's face, even if Dream looked a bit toothier and as if his edges were sharper in general than they had been before.

Dream was still inside him, and he felt... bigger. Hob couldn't tell if that was because Hob was feeling him more now, or if Dream had altered himself while Hob was distracted. He began to move again, slowly, an exquisite mingling of pleasure and pain, and Hob managed to say, "You said you would repay... sevenfold?"

Dream's toothy grin got wider before brushing Hob's mouth in a perilous kiss. "At least, my husband. We shall see what we can make of an entire night, when we waste no time."

Hob kissed him back eagerly, and then found himself laughing into the kiss as Dream kept fucking him, and the pain of it dissolved into more pleasure. They were in the Dreaming, in his husband's kingdom, and here even Hob was as his husband willed him to be; if his husband wanted this to last all night it would last all night.

And Hob would enjoy it, all night.

---

Dream managed to hold himself together in the face of Hob's kisses and Hob's undaunted affection and undimmed joy until Hob had come thrice. By then Hob was drunk on pleasure, wildly overstimulated and still game for more.

When Dream disengaged from him, Hob whined and reached for him, unable even in the Dreaming to form words for his complaint but decidedly unhappy until Dream's hands were on him again. Dream rearranged his husband face down on the bed, and Hob melted into the soft mattress, sighing contentedly and still spreading his legs, tipping his hips up. He was leaking Dream's seed and covered in his own and still begging for more.

Dream had promised him all night, and Hob would have it; Dream did not even permit himself to interfere too much with the flow of time or Hob's awareness of it. The only mercy he permitted himself was to turn Hob away, so that Dream would not have to keep his countenance in the face of Hob's kisses and Hob's adoring looks, the sweet soft touches of Hob's hands.

Instead he had Hob wriggling under him, and the sight of Hob's ink-flecked hands gripping the sheet under him, and the half-muffled sounds Hob made when his mouth was not occupied with kissing. It was not altogether an improvement, but at least now Hob could not see the soft looks on Dream's face, and was far less likely to notice Dream nuzzling behind his ear or dropping quiet kisses on his hair.

He had promised Hob that the sex would last all night, which meant there would be no time for another quiet interlude like the one Dream had remembered so fondly for the past hundred years. That was all right; he could still remember the first time perfectly well. For this night he let himself enjoy the sex as thoroughly as his husband did, let himself truly feel it so long as Hob was equally taken up.

Pleasure took Dream by surprise when he let himself really feel it. He came once, then again, because he couldn't resist chasing that feeling—and Hob came again as well, for Dream did not neglect his husband's enjoyment even when immersed in his own. These formed brief lacunae in the pursuit of pleasure, little hollow moments of stillness when completion was achieved, when Dream could run his fingers gently through Hob's hair, wipe sweat from his brow and tears from his cheeks. Dream could whisper softly to him in languages no human mind could comprehend: how sweet and beautiful he looked and felt and was.

Hob moaned and whined and whimpered and sometimes tried to speak, but if he could form words then Dream was not keeping his promise. He increased his efforts and kept Hob on the exquisite edge of total incoherence without surrendering him from the Dreaming into the realm of Delirium.

When the sun was coming up back in Hob's London, Dream finally let their night be at an end, let Hob catch his breath and gather his thoughts.

Almost at once Hob wriggled out from under him, looked upon him with reddened eyes—he had wept, and he was exhausted, and still he looked on his husband as something wondrous, something good.
"Well," Hob said, his voice wavering. "No time wasted indeed, husband."

"Not a moment," Dream agreed. "But now the night is ended, and a new day begins. And you have another hundred years of life to enjoy, do you not?"

There was a flicker of temptation in Hob's eyes; Dream had just spent the night demonstrating to him that greater pleasure could be had here than Hob would ever know in the Waking world.

Dream held his breath, waiting for even a word, even the smallest sign that Hob wished to stay, to be his forever. He would not wish for it, he would not try to coax, for it would inevitably end in disaster, but still—still he could not help watching, waiting...

"Another hundred years, then," Hob said, sitting up and stretching. "Ohh, I hope I don't get fired, I don't think I'll be fit to work today."

"You shall be," Dream promised him, and with a twitch of his hand he returned all Hob's accoutrement, more less as it had been, and sent him back to London, back to the Waking world. Back where he belonged, and where he wanted to be.

Dream removed himself from the bed, and folded away the bedchamber and everything in it, for he would not need it again anytime soon. Perhaps not ever; a hundred years was a long time.

He would not think of Hob Gadling now. He had work to do.

---

Hob was, very abruptly, back in his lodgings, dressed again in the finery he'd spent years assembling for his meeting with Dream. He might have thought that he'd somehow imagined their meeting and the whole night that followed, except that the bottle of mead from the White Horse was in his hand, and the two cups—one nearly empty, one mostly full—were perched on the sill of Hob's one little window.

He gathered up the cups, taking a quick sip from the emptier one as he opened the shutter to peer out. The sun was just rising, which on a June morning meant he ought to be getting to work soon, but he wasn't late yet.

With slow, careful hands, Hob peeled out of the mantle he'd worn over his fine clothes—Dream hadn't even seen the fine linen underthings Hob had worn, had just vanished them away before Hob got that far. But he had been pleased, hadn't he? He had accepted the mead, and there had been something approving in his expression when he first saw Hob. He had liked that Hob had made an effort for him.

Hob knelt by the trunk to lay his mantle back inside—he'd have little enough use for it, and he didn't know if he could look at it just yet, as a keepsake of the night.

Then Hob frowned, and drew the mantle back out, hastening over to the window with it to get all the little daylight there was upon it. He had had it made with the darkest, finest fur he dared—squirrel—and he'd spent a ridiculous amount of the time, in the year since it was completed, petting that fur, learning its texture, learning where every hidden seam was to be found.

This mantle his husband had clothed him in was something different. The same weight, the same fit, the same at a glance, but Hob would swear it was real sable, so cleverly pieced together that his fingers could find no seams at all where the furs were joined together to create a continuous luxurious border.

Hob set it on the bed and unlaced his doublet from his hose next, only to pause again as he realized that the laces had little gold tips now. He shook his head, smiling helplessly at his husband's care for him, and peeled out of doublet and hose both, setting the laces aside. That left him in his shirt and drawers, and the shirt was surely a much finer linen than he had put on the evening before, and subtly embroidered in white-on-white than Hob could only feel. He would have to find time to look at it in better light.

He set that aside as well, and then laughed aloud at the sight of his drawers. They were embroidered as well, but he had light enough to make this out—it wasn't just fine little decorative stitches. His drawers had been embellished with pearls.

He slipped out of them so that he could look more closely, and saw that they were embroidered in seven spots, seven designs each like a spray of... Hob felt his face heat, and remembered again his husband vowing to repay him sevenfold after Hob brought him off once.

He'd surely reached his own completion at least seven times in the course of that long—Endless—night. Exactly seven, it must have been; that was the way it would have happened in a story. Seven times, and for each time here was a little bounty of pearls to commemorate it.

Hob sat down on his bed and ran his fingers over this wealth his husband had sent him home with—his own design, this time, and not Hob's choosing. Last time all the fine things Hob had worn had been what Desire gave him, to make him look fit for his bridegroom; this time Dream had adorned Hob to his own liking.

Hob could take a hint, couldn't he? Dream had only told him to go and enjoy his hundred years, as he had before, but Hob could do something with his time. He could meet Dream in a hundred years, dressed finely enough that Dream would find nothing to improve upon.

He could show Dream how much change was possible—and if he did, then maybe Dream would realize that other changes were possible. They could change the arrangement between them, for instance, and not see each other only every hundred years. Hob could make something of himself—enough to earn a chance at keeping his husband for more than a single night.

Hob pressed his lips to a little spray of pearls, stifling another laugh, and then he heard the church bells ringing out and realized that he did need to hurry now.

Notes:

Up next: you'll never guess which one of Dream's siblings wants to host an anniversary party!

Chapter 5: Interlude - June 7, 1539

Summary:

Desire issues party invitations for a certain sesquicentennial; as usual, Dream departs early.

Notes:

Life has been getting in the way of writing lately, but! A stray chapter appears!

Robert Gadlen was a man of business, and so it was hardly a surprise to have a messenger bring a letter to his door on any given evening. He was a little peeved when it happened late in the lingering summer evening of the seventh of June in 1539. He liked to take every tenth year's anniversary to sit and take stock of his progress toward becoming someone who his husband would find truly worthy.

But whatever the letter was could likely wait until tomorrow; Hob took it in hand intending to give it only the briefest glance before setting it aside.

His eye was immediately caught by the wax seal holding the folds of the paper together. It was brilliantly red, with a strangely translucent gleam that made Hob's gaze drop to the ring on his finger that most people could not see, with its rounded red gem that was no stone found in the earth. The wax seal had a glimmer of gold to it, though, and it was shaped into an impossibly perfect heart.

Hob turned the letter over to look at how it had been addressed, and saw that there was nothing written upon it but the oldest form of his name: Hob Gadling.

Hob heard it echo in his ear in his husband's velvety rumble of a voice, but he turned the letter over to study that wax seal again.

A letter like this was not how his husband would reach out to him. The red and gold heart spoke of his husband's most contentious sibling: Desire.

Hob had last seen Desire one hundred and fifty years ago precisely; they had come into the Waking world to find a husband for their older brother, and along with Death and Delirium they had selected Hob. They had taken Hob to their own realm, the Threshold, to prepare him for his wedding. Hob had danced with them, after the vows were done, but only for a few turns before his husband came and whisked him away to their wedding night.

He did not think his husband would be particularly pleased to find that his sibling and his spouse were corresponding, but Hob had no way to reach Dream to ask permission or advice. And surely it couldn't hurt just to read the letter?

At that thought, Hob glanced around the house—none of his servants were immediately in sight, but several lived in and one might come to ask if he needed anything at any moment—and then retreated to his bedchamber and firmly latched the door. Only when he was quite certain that he was alone did he finally break the seal on the letter.

He had a moment to realize that the light was not very good in the bedchamber—he caught the word summoned!—and before he could do more than wince, he was gone from his own bedchamber and his own world. He was standing at the entrance hall to the Threshold, which was all hung with dazzling red and gold tapestries between a floor and ceiling of some kind of polished red stone veined with gold.

Desire stood before him, beaming. "Welcome! You're the first to arrive—so prompt, dearest little brother."

They managed to make this sound exceedingly suggestive.

Hob sighed and crossed his arms, glancing down as he did to see that he was, thus far, wearing the same clothes he had had on back in his own world. Nothing special, and he began to think it ought to be. "What have I arrived to, may I ask? I did not have a chance to actually read your summons before it did its work."

"Summons? I'm sure it wasn't a summons," Desire said, though the insinuating tone of their voice said that if it wasn't, it could only have been something even less appropriate. "An invitation! I'm hosting a little family party, to honor your one hundred fiftieth wedding anniversary—a joyous occasion, to be sure!"

Hob looked pointedly around the silent hall they stood in. "A very little party, apparently? Has my husband been invited?"

Desire's eyes went very wide. "You mean you don't know? Are you spending your evenings apart these days?"

Hob raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. He did not quite have a headache, here in the Threshold, but he strongly suspected that if he were having this conversation back in the Waking world, he would. He could feel where it ought to be. "Desire, my dear good-sibling," Hob said, "have you—"

"Hob! There is going to be cake again!" Hob turned to see his smallest good-sister approaching. Delirium was dressed in a tattered gown in a dizzying array of colors, and that was as much as Hob could take in before she flung her arms around his waist and hugged him with a strength that belied her size.

Hob patted her back and said, "I suppose it would hardly be a party without cake, would it?"

"Wellll," Delirium said, leaning back to look up at him with her head tilted. "It could be a party, because there are so many kinds of parties..." She trailed off into half-mumbling half-singing about parties to crime and parties of politics and as she drifted from his side Hob was distracted from her by the sight of her next-elder sister.

Despair had arrived and was standing at Desire's flank. She was dressed drably, her hair hanging in her face, but Hob could see enough of her expression to detect some disfavor.

For a moment he wondered what cause he had given her to dislike him, and then he realized that more than likely it was simply that they had such opposite natures. Of all the many and various sins Hob had committed in his many years of life, despair was the only one he had never been tempted by. Desire and Delirium had both had their roles in his life, as well as—

Destruction appeared and boomed a cheerful greeting; Delirium lost track of her thoughts about parties and ran to him, and he scooped her up in a hug, spinning in place to twirl her around until she laughed a stream of multicolored butterflies. Hob was still watching them fondly when he felt a hand slip in to take his arm, and he turned to find his eldest good-sister smiling softly at him.

He closed his own hand quietly into a fist; he still had no interest in taking Death's hand. But he smiled back at her with all the happy fondness he felt. "Good-sister! A pleasure to see you again."

"So long as it's at a party, well outside of your world," Death said, completing a thought he hadn't dared to put into words. "Understandable, my life-loving good-brother. You're looking well! Marriage suits you?"

"Well," Hob said, studying Death and wondering how much she knew about the nature of her brother's marriage. "Being alive suits me exceedingly well—my most cherished of wedding gifts." He dared to pat her hand with his opposite one as he said it, just to complete the illusion they were both carrying on, of this being a perfectly cordial conversation.

"Oh, he gave you a ring!" Death sounded, perhaps, genuinely surprised at that, and since Hob had never been able to allow anyone to actually admire it before, he did not draw back from her inspection of his left hand.

He kept his fingers curled in. He did not take her hovering hand in his as she studied his ring: the deep black metal of the band, the red gem swirled with two faintly distinguishable colors, the literal combination of his essence and Dream's.

"It's lovely," Death said, looking up to meet his eyes again with a smile.

"It is largely Hob's design," came his husband's voice, as his husband's hand found his and took a firm hold of it, left over left, so that Dream's ring was on display instead. Dream's grip was very tight, though not quite painful, and despite the circumstances Hob felt a shiver of glee at touching his husband again a whole fifty years early. "He gave me mine first. I merely imitated it for his."

"What a beautiful start to your relationship," Death said, looking past Hob to her brother; he was abruptly uncomfortably aware of being merely human and stuck between two Endless beings. "And now it's been a hundred and fifty years. You must have given each other so many gifts in all that time! You must know each other so well!"

Hob had begun to suspect, somewhere along the line, that his husband's insistence that their centennial arrangement was just the way immortals did marriages was, in a word, bullshit. It would have been gratifying to have that confirmed, perhaps, if he were not able to feel the way Dream was vibrating with some sort of unhappiness—every sort, possibly—behind him. Dream's grip on him tightened to something that still did not exactly hurt, but probably should have.

Hob hadn't even had a chance to look him in the eyes, but he could feel that Dream was about to walk away. He could see the little flicker of weary disappointment in Death's eyes that meant she knew it too.

She had known it when she spoke; she had known that Hob and Dream had scarcely seen each other in the past hundred and fifty years, just as surely as Desire had known it. They must all know it, and they all meant to, what? Gather around a table and mock them for it? Or simply drive Dream off at the first moment?

Dream stepped back from him, letting go so abruptly that Hob felt thrown off balance. He was already turning away, and Hob whirled after him as he strode toward one wall where seven tapestries hung.

In his peripheral vision, Hob just glimpsed Destiny appearing in his gray robes and saying, "I could have told you—" but somewhere behind them Desire was saying, "Shh, shh, it's—"

Hob lunged forward and grabbed two fistfuls of Dream's coat just as Dream pressed his hand to the intricately embroidered tapestry image of a black mask.

They were in the Dreaming, somewhere Hob hadn't been before. He hastily let go of Dream and took a step back, looking around. The space was not so strangely vast as Dream's bedchamber, though it shared the same white walls. There were frames on the wall they faced, each holding a beautifully rich painting—not portraits of Dream's siblings, but symbols of them.

The third frame, where Dream's painting ought to have been, was empty, and Hob thought, Of course, so that we could come through it.

Then Dream turned to face him and Hob couldn't see anything but his husband.

Hob still couldn't quite read anything but not happy from Dream's expression—perhaps it was grief or rage or pain or all of that and several more kinds Hob couldn't imagine. Dream's eyes weren't blue, now, as Hob had seen them before. They were black, and full of stars which all seemed very far away on a very cold night.

"Did you plan this?" Dream asked, his voice quiet but so deep that Hob could feel it in the center of his chest, like a great drum being beaten. "Did you conspire with my sibling to force—"

Hob threw his hands in the air. "Dream! I have no idea how to contact even my own husband, let alone his siblings. How do you imagine I could have done any such thing?"

Dream turned half away, scowling toward a painting of a heart all in scarlet and gilt. "Naturally it would have been Desire's idea first."

"It was Desire's idea only," Hob insisted. "I received a letter tonight, and before I could even read it, as soon as I so much as looked at it, I was there."

Dream's expression hardened, and his voice took on the aspect of a growl. "Then they interfered with you, despite giving their solemn word—"

"I am unharmed!" Hob protested. "Unaltered, except that I am in one place instead of another. And truly, Dream, if it had been an invitation I would have accepted, just as I did the first time. I could not have resisted a chance to see you, my husband." He dared a step forward, reaching out a hand but not quite daring to touch. "No doubt they knew how badly I wanted that; it is their business to know such things."

Dream looked down at Hob's hand; he held it steady for the space of a breath or two, then, when Dream was still just staring, cautiously drew it back.

"I did," Hob repeated, quietly but with all the confidence of the man of substance he'd made himself back in the Waking world in the last fifty years. "I did want to see you again, Dream. They all thought we should see each other more, didn't they? That's what you didn't want them to see, that this is only the second time we've met since our wedding. Because that's not usual for the Endless any more than it is for one of my kind, is it?"

Dream's gaze, which had been fixed on the spot where Hob's outstretched hand had been, snapped up to meet Hob's gaze, the stars blazing brighter now. "Is that all you care for? What is usual? I have told you to live as you like, have I not? Marry one of your kind, if you care so much for what others expect."

Hob opened his mouth to protest, to argue, to beg for just a little more of Dream's time—but his husband's sand caught him full in the face and returned him to his bedchamber again.

Dream had promised his sand would never hurt Hob, and though he was just as unharmed—as unchanged—as he had been by Desire's summons, he could not help thinking that this was cutting it rather fine. The sting of being sent away so abruptly did not ease for a long, long time.

And he did not forget his husband's parting words.

---

Dream stood for a time still looking at where his husband had stood—at the lingering dream of his husband's offered touch, and all the possibilities that spiraled out from it. He had been unable to begin to understand them before Hob had withdrawn that offer of contact, of touch.

It had all happened too quickly; Dream had had no time to consider, to plan, to prepare himself for seeing his husband again, and then he had found Hob surrounded by his siblings. He had found Death speaking to him, interfering, upsetting the arrangement Dream had made to keep things simple, to keep Hob happy.

Hob had followed him back into the Dreaming. Hob had wanted to see him. He had said so, more than once. He had reached out his hand.

He had taken it back.

He was gone again, for fifty more years.

Dream had had no time to think. He ought to have done it better. To have spent more time with Hob—a night, perhaps?—so that Hob would go away pleased with him, as he had twice before.

Instead Dream had thrown sand in his face and told him to marry a mortal if he chose.

Well. He had done what he had done; he would not chase after Hob to reverse himself.

And Hob should marry a mortal if he cared to; perhaps he already had. He might have fit several mortal marriages into the years of their partings, and it would have made no difference to Dream. If he went and married another now, they would surely be in his sister's lands fifty years hence, and Hob would perhaps once again be happy to see his husband.

Dream would have time, before then. Time to examine Hob's dreams and the book of his life. Time to know how best to approach him, and their night together. Time to forget this knot at the center of him that suggested that the doom he had awaited was now begun, and that what had gone wrong so quickly between him and Hob would only ever get worse from here.

And it was, of course, his sibling's doing.

Dream turned to eye Desire's sigil on the wall, and realized that he was not alone as he should be; a nightmare was lounging in the doorway, his smile—all his smiles—a louche curve of amiable temptation. Dream had made him well, for what he was.

A creature of hunger—of, yes, desire. A creature who killed and mutilated what he lusted after and never felt regret, who found joy in the damage he inevitably wrought, who would never hold back for fear of causing harm. A creature with no eyes for anyone to gaze into, only extra mouths, to devour what would look upon him and think him fair and lovely. A creature who would take and take and never be sated and never wish to be.

"That was a pretty one, my lord," the Corinthian said. "Shall I—"

The Corinthian had dared to look upon Dream's husband, and dared to want him—which was to say, dared to threaten him. Dream knew that the Corinthian could not really have done otherwise—he was made of Dream, and Dream could not have resisted the lure of Hob's presence in the Dreaming, and could never cease to want him. Or to be a danger to him.

Still. Dream would not stand for it.

Without a word, without letting the Corinthian finish that sentence, he reached out a hand and snatched away the essence of the nightmare, letting him fall into sand and be reabsorbed into Dream's self, until only the triply-toothy skull remained.

He ought to have felt different, when he took it all back. He had made the Corinthian to purge himself of that insatiable hunger, that inevitable violence.

He felt no different at all. Whatever was in him that he had tried to siphon off into the Corinthian, either there was so much of it that one nightmare's worth made no difference, or it had grown back since, like a weed simply cut off at the ground instead of being pulled out by the roots.

Dream picked up the Corinthian's shrunken skull, and considered what it would take to pull up his lust and love by the roots, to truly rid himself of it, and so also rid himself of all the cruelty that inevitably followed. If he made himself capable of letting Hob go, never seeing him again at all, never interfering with his life or his happiness...

He could do it, Dream knew. He ought to do it, to make Hob and all the other Dreamers safe from him. He should crush out his urge to love, his selfish wanting, his foolishly cherished wish to be loved in return, which only ever served to inspire him to rage when it was not granted. He should be different; he should be better.

He should be no one's husband or lover.

He should be nothing and no one but Dream of the Endless, colorless and cold and perfect.

He looked back at the spot where Hob had stood. He thought again of that outstretched hand. The things Hob had said... he had sounded gentle. Almost as if he understood, or wished to.

Dream could not permit Hob to be gentle with him, nor to understand him. But nor could he deny himself the possibility of another night, and another night.

He crushed the Corinthian's skull to powder and let it sift away from his hand into free dreamstuff.

Fifty more years. He would wait fifty more years, and then when he was ready, he would see his husband again.

Chapter 6: June 7, 1589

Summary:

Hob attempts to host his centennial night with his husband at his impressive manor home, and it goes about as well as you would expect.

Notes:

Many thanks to Moorishflower for beta!

I'm posting this chapter in celebration of my 15th Ao3-versary! I registered here on Ao3 on November 29, 2008, and now I can hardly imagine fic life without it.

Hob looked down at his son's sleeping face and was horribly aware that he might have made a terrible mistake, and that it was far, far too late to do anything about it.

He bent and kissed Robyn's cheek, then straightened up to look Eleanor squarely in the eyes. She had kept Robyn from his nurse tonight, let him fall asleep in their bed, because she knew what Hob would be doing tonight. Hob had, at least, managed not to make the horrible mistake of not telling her what this night was, and what might happen next.

There was a very real chance that, one way or another, he would not return to her and Robyn tonight, or ever again. He had made all the plans he could for that eventuality, writing up all his bequests and wishes and designating the male cousin Eleanor liked and trusted most to have the guardianship of Robyn and the estates until he reached his majority. Eleanor's widow's portion would be generous as well, and would enable her to live independently or marry again as she chose. She and her cousin John between them would raise Robyn well—probably raise him to be far more steady and sensible than any son of Hob's would be naturally.

He had done all he could, and in a short time he would see his husband again for the first time in half a century—would spend a night with him for the first time in a hundred years. Still, Hob hesitated to leave the closeness and warmth of this bed he shared with Eleanor, where their son lay sleeping.

"I'm sorry," Hob said to Eleanor once more.

"You are not," Eleanor said, but they'd been fighting this out for more than a year now. Tonight she said it fondly, with a little smile. She tugged him down for another kiss—perhaps their last—and then pushed him away. "Go. Go and see what your husband thinks of all this."

Hob offered her a courtly bow, much as he had when they were first introduced, and then turned sharply on his heel and walked out without letting himself look back.

At the first doorway into the Queen's Rooms, the doors were wide open, and Hob could see the butler arranging decanters and one of the kitchen servants looking over the array of food Hob had ordered for tonight, laid out on tables drawn close to the fireplace.

"It looks splendid," he assured her, and gave the butler a firm nod as well. "Now, off you both go, and remember, no one is to come near these doors until I or your mistress give the word in the morning."

They murmured their understanding, made their courtesies, and left, looking slightly unsettled but obedient to Sir Robert Gadlen's eccentric whims. Sometimes being rich and titled was very useful indeed.

Hob stepped within and closed the doors firmly behind him, wondering again if he ought to have given up on caring how it looked and had a bar installed to be absolutely certain that, no matter what anyone heard from this room or how tempted they were to come and get in the way, he and he alone would bear the brunt of Dream's reaction.

It probably wouldn't be bad, Hob told himself, as he looked over the spread he had requested for this evening. Venison pasties, still hot, and the dish of lamb as well, and the wines he had chosen.

Dream had given Hob his permission—an instruction, really—to go and marry a human. Hob knew well that Dream had spoken the words in anger and scorn and had not meant that he really wished Hob to do so, but his husband was the sort of being who set great store by promises and such. He would not punish Eleanor or Robyn or anyone else in Hob's household for what Hob had done, and he wouldn't do anything truly cruel to Hob himself, not when Hob had only been doing as Dream told him to.

He wouldn't, Hob was almost certain, go and tell his sister to take back her wedding-gift of immortality.

Hob was really almost completely certain of that.

It was possible Dream would renounce their marriage, or insist that Hob had done so in choosing to marry another. That would certainly be disappointing, but Hob was starting to feel that he had really gotten the knack of living forever, now, and if he must go forward doing so without the certainty of meeting his husband again every hundred years, so be it. Hob would miss him, but Dream would still be out there somewhere, and who knew when they might meet again? Perhaps by then Hob would have learned the trick of making him laugh and smile; perhaps then Dream would want him around.

It was also possible that Dream would give him a choice in the matter. He might demand that Hob forsake his wife and child and manor and name if he would continue to be married to Dream. Perhaps he would whisk Hob off into the Dreaming to stay at last, or simply require him to leave Gadlen Manor and never look back if he wished Dream to return to him in another hundred years.

Hob would do so, of course, if Dream made him either of those offers.

He was really almost completely certain that he would.

He had made all the preparations, even written certain letters for Eleanor to find which would lend credence to the notion that an old enemy from his early life in the north had caught up with him. He had a will, had designated a guardian for Robyn, had settled a widow's portion on Eleanor that she agreed was sufficient without being suspiciously excessive.

Given the choice he'd made two hundred years ago, he would make it again. He would choose the mystery, the impossible; he would choose another chance to make his husband smile.

He had ordered a cake, to mark the possible renewal of that choice. He had still yet to find anything that resembled their wedding cake, but the cook had produced a dark, soft honey cake and surrounded it in smooth marchpane which had only the slightest ivory tint. At a glance, it was very like that towering white cake Hob had tasted in Destiny's garden.

It was not a perfect replica any more than these grandest rooms in Hob's manor house were a match for Dream's bedchamber in his palace, but he couldn't hope to offer anything that truly met his husband's standards. He could only hope to come close enough to show Dream what he had accomplished in the past hundred years.

He reached out for three dishes the kitchen maid had tucked out of the way: a portion of rice, one of maize, and one of cassava. His cook had had no notion what to make of them, but Hob had tracked down the far-flung crops his husband had once mentioned, to show that he was listening. Hob moved them to the front of the display, so that Dream would see that, too.

He looked up and found Dream standing just inside the firmly-closed doors. Despite every worry weighing on him, Hob smiled as widely as he knew how at the sight of his husband, here under Hob's roof.

"My dear! Welcome." Hob spread his arms wide, indicating the table of food and drink at his right hand, and the bed decorated with gilt and laid with velvet and silk off to his left, just beyond the open inner doors.

"Hello, Hob," Dream said, taking a few steps forward to join Hob beside the loaded table. His expression was calm, neutral, his eyes the ordinary blue they always showed in the Waking world. No sign of that starry blackness, that cold disdain with which he had sent Hob away fifty years ago.

"Hob," Hob echoed back helplessly. It was his name, of course, his oldest and truest name—the name that belonged to the black ring that never left his finger—but like that ring it was hidden from nearly everyone. He didn't think he'd told even Eleanor that he used to be called that. He had not heard it from anyone in a hundred years; Dream had not addressed him so familiarly at their last meeting.

Dream looked enquiringly at him, and Hob realized he had simply repeated his own name. He forced a smile, a bit of a laugh. "Faith, that takes me back some few years. It's Sir Robert Gadlen, now, my dear."

Dream swept a glance about the room, the laden table, the grand bed, the windows covered by curtains and the hangings that warmed the walls. He seemed unimpressed by all of it, but said, "You've had good fortune, I take it."

Hob kept smiling, saying things he had occasionally imagined he might say, when he dared to imagine that Dream would let him speak at all on this occasion. "The gods have smiled on me as they smile on all England, where no man is slave or bondsman."

Dream was still just out of his reach; Hob put his hand down on the table and grabbed the first item he touched, raising it to offer. "Venison pasty?"

Dream looked ever so faintly amused, but made no move to take it or to step closer. Of course not; Hob had never seen him eat meat at all. He ought to have offered the wine.

He could not bear to offer the cake, while Dream just stood there, looking at Hob as if he had never seen him before.

Hob crammed a bit of the venison pasty into his mouth and thought that it really was almost exactly the way Dream had looked when Hob first met him, moments before they married. He had looked stiff like this, almost pained. He had reached for Hob then, though. He had been eager to touch, to breathe him in. Now he kept his rigidly polite distance.

Dream knew, Hob was suddenly absolutely certain. Dream knew that Hob had married Eleanor, and he was waiting for Hob to say it. To include her in the telling of his good fortune.

He had meant to tell Dream about the house, the estate—about his new life, all that he had made of himself. He took another bite of the venison pasty, flicking his wrist as he did, wanting Dream to see—to recognize—the pearls that embellished his cuffs. He had had to sell most of them, but these were the last he had kept, just one set out of the original seven.

He had not forgotten that all he had, all he had built, had begun from the turn his life had taken when he married Dream, and received his immortality as a gift that made him an eligible match. Dream's own simpler gift of a little easily transferable wealth had helped him along the way, helped him weather a small misfortune or two on his way from Billy Caxton's print shop to life as Sir Robert Gadlen. But he had not sold it all. He had held on to enough to remember his husband by, even as he tainted the best thing in his life with spite.

Both of the best things in his life: his marriage to Dream, and his marriage to Eleanor.

"Here, let me show you," Hob said, for there was no point leading into it, and nothing else that could compare. He plucked up the miniature from where he had left it, not immediately in sight but ready to hand. "Look. I did decide to marry a human woman, once I had my knighthood to go with my estates. I can't keep coming back as my own son, but—this is my fair Eleanor, and our little Robyn. My first son born in two hundred years on this earth—"

Dream's face might have been a portrait as well, so still and remote it was. He might have been on the other side of a mirror, or still in his own kingdom while Hob was here in the mortal world, entirely out of reach. Hob could not help but try to bridge the distance in the stupidest possible way: with a joke.

"That I know of, anyway," he said, making a rueful face, but Dream just looked away, scarcely even glancing at the miniature.

There would be no coaxing him down the hall to meet Eleanor in person. There would be no introducing them to each other, no chance of luring both his beloveds into sharing one bed, but Hob had always known that that was too much to hope for, even when he let himself imagine it.

Dream would not look upon Robyn as a child of his as well as Hob's, and Hob had not known until Dream's eyes skimmed past without looking upon his son at all how badly, how desperately he had wanted that. He loved fatherhood more than anything else he had experienced in this world, and almost from the first moment he had wanted to share it with Dream. He wanted to have his husband beside him feeling this same wonderful, terrible joy, the horrifying inevitability of loss that came with loving someone so tiny, so much, all the while loving him more and more anyway.

Of course Hob already shared Robyn with Eleanor, which was wonderful, but Eleanor was also someone Hob would have to lose. That always stood between them. There need be no such division between himself and Dream, except that Dream would not even look at him now. Would not fight for him, would not make demands of him. Would not carry him away from all this, and spare him having to choose when he would leave them, for sooner or later he must leave them; Robyn could not inherit his father's estates if Sir Robert Gadlen never mysteriously vanished and was declared dead.

Hob felt all that grief coming for him, but it was not here yet.

For now, he was here with Dream, and this was their one night together for this century, and he would salvage what he could from it.

Before Hob had formed any clever ideas for how to do that, Dream gestured to the magnificent bed and said, "You did not outfit this room just for our meeting tonight."

"Ah," Hob said. "Well, not to begin with, I suppose. The Queen graced us with a visit last summer, and I thought... good enough for her had to be nearly acceptable to you. I got new sheets, though," Hob added, crossing over to flip back the cloth-of-gold coverlet and show the black silk beneath. "For you. For us."

It had been difficult and costly to get the bedsheets made and dyed, and Hob still wasn't sure what rumors he had started about himself, but he remembered so vividly the black covers on Dream's own bed in his palace. He had wanted to show that he remembered, that he knew how Dream liked things. He had thought he might have succeeded.

Dream was abruptly at his back, whispering in his ear but still not touching him at all. "This was your grand plan, then, Sir Robert Gadlen? Have your husband in this chamber and your wife down the hall? Will you go straight from my bed to hers, still reeking of me? Of us?"

Hob closed his eyes. There was venom in Dream's voice, cold as ice, and Hob was frozen by it. There was no right answer. There was no way to mend this. And still, he whispered, "Please, husband."

"Please yourself," Dream snapped, and took a sharp step back. "I have come to you on the appointed night. Our bargain is complete for this century. Or do you require more intimate attentions to be satisfied?"

Hob considered what intimate attentions from his husband were likely to consist of tonight, and shook his head slowly. "I wish nothing from you that you do not wish to give, husband," Hob said. "I will see you—"

He felt some change in the air, in the quality of Dream's silence, and turned to find that he was gone.

"In a hundred years," Hob whispered to no one but himself.

He crumpled to the floor beside the bed, and put his head in his hands, and did not weep.

---

Dream took himself to the White Horse tavern, and lingered for a time outside, breathing the filthy air of a human city and trying to forget the misery that had already been overtaking Hob even before he left.

He should not have come. He should have sent a letter, or visited Hob in his dreams. He had known what he would find, and he had found it: Hob living a human fantasy of happiness, wealth and family and all.

Hob had nightmares about what was coming for him; it was not that he did not know all the grief and loss in store. But he carried on anyway, as though the warnings meant nothing to him. They could not, Dream knew.

Hob could have no notion of what it meant to lose a son. As he himself had said, he had never had one before—that he knew of.

Dream was not angry, but he could not sit there with Hob and pretend that that grief was not coming for them. There was no way to spare Hob now, no way to soften the inevitable blow. He could only entangle himself in it, and make it something Hob would eventually blame him for not preventing, and he would not do that. And if Hob should suffer so with that grief that he finally came to ask Death to rescind her gift when he lost them... Dream did not care to be present for that, either.

He had other matters to attend to tonight, so it would not be a wasted venture into the Waking. He stepped into the White Horse, and almost immediately caught the eye of Will Shaxberd.

---

Hob's arse went numb, and he still had not cried, nor found any other way to give vent to the feeling that he had broken something precious to him, something which might never be mended. He had gambled, and he had lost, and now...

Hob eyed the curtains covering the windows. He could, he well knew, open the farthest one, make a jump to the tree that grew outside, and climb down. He could walk away into the night with the clothes on his back and the pearls at his cuffs his only wealth. He did not need anything that was not in this room. He could even take his miniature of Eleanor and Robyn with him.

He had started many of his lives with less.

He had to leave them sometime, and if he went now, Eleanor would never know that it had not been Dream's doing. Eleanor would believe he had had no choice, or at least could believe that, if it comforted her. She had spent all her anger with him already; she would be able to simply grieve, and might speak kindly of him to Robyn.

Hob would be far away, and never see them age, never see them die. He could join one of those voyages of exploration, go and wander about the New World for a decade or two, get himself lost amongst the natives there.

He should do it, he knew. It would be the kindest thing. He would never be better prepared for it than he was tonight. There was no good reason to stay, nothing but the selfishness of wanting to keep what he had for a little longer.

Nothing but the fact that he didn't want to be alone tonight.

It wouldn't kill him. It wouldn't even make him weep, not this first night.

But he loved Eleanor, and he loved his son, and he couldn't lose them on the same night he had lost... whatever it was he had lost with Dream, which he had barely had in the first place.

Dream had never loved him, or even liked him very well. But he had taken some joy, some pleasure, of their nights together. Even fifty years ago, when he had been so angry, he had not been so cold as he was tonight. He had let his body brush against Hob's, that night, and let Hob catch his cloak and be drawn with him into his kingdom.

Hob touched the ring that even Eleanor could not see, even when he described it to her and guided her fingers to touch it. It was still there, the same as ever, no crack down the middle of the stone to mark what had happened tonight.

In a hundred years...

Hob could not imagine what that meeting would be like, a hundred years from now, but he knew what he could and could not do tonight.

He stood up and brushed himself off. He left the miniature lying where it was, and left every bit of the food behind, sparing only the barest glance for the beautiful marchpane cake. He left the door standing open for whomever might dare to venture in and help themselves, and headed back down the hall to the lord and lady's bedchamber.

There was a candle still burning. Eleanor was lying awake in their bed, watching Robyn sleep. Scarcely an hour had passed, and it had taken far less time than that for everything to go wrong.

Eleanor looked up and watched him come to the bed with his empty hands and unruffled clothing, watched him take off his boots and his doublet. When he hesitated to undress further, Eleanor slipped out of the bed and came to him. She put her hands up under his shirt and shoved down his hose, stroking her hands up over his arse and back when they were off.

It was the most she had touched him since he told her about Dream; they had shared their bed as chastely as if there were a sword down the middle of it. Now she tipped her face up for a kiss and pulled his body into hers, and Hob gave it all gladly, his breath shuddering out of him in relief.

He wouldn't be alone tonight. He still had a marriage he had not destroyed, a spouse who would have him in her bed. The rest he would worry about later.

Chapter 7: Interlude - 1593 & 1606

Summary:

A night when Dream was persuaded to visit Hob before their hundred years were up, and a night when he did not.

Notes:

In case the years did not give it away, this is me pointing emphatically to the "Canonical Character Death" tag. This is Hob losing Eleanor and the baby, and then losing Robyn. The next chapter will be comfort-y but this one is pretty much all hurt, so please do not read if it's not a good time for you to go there.

I wrote a chunk of this chapter a couple of days before a good friend of mine died, and it's been dangling almost-finished since. I don't know how much more of it I could have borne to write in any circumstances, but if it seems a bit sparse... that's why.

1593

Hob had known something was wrong for hours already, as Eleanor's labor dragged on and on, but he did not truly fear the worst until he looked up and saw his sister-in-law standing beside the chamber door.

"No," Hob whispered, rushing to Death, catching her hands before she could enter where Eleanor was. "No, no, please—"

"I do not choose, Hob," she said softly, her dark eyes sorrowful as any saint's but implacable. "I only take them when they have to go."

"Them," Hob whispered, and she grimaced and drew her hands out of his grip.

Then she turned, and walked through the door without opening it. Hob had to open it for himself, running after her.

He had no attention to spare for the midwife, or Eleanor's two ladies in waiting who were weeping and praying at the foot of the bed. He rushed past all of them to see Eleanor's face, to catch her hand in both of his.

Her hand was still warm, but it was utterly still; her face was already going pale, making tiny red spots stand out starkly around her eyes, which were staring fixedly up at the canopy.

She was already gone. Hob looked around wildly, and saw his sister-in-law standing at the opposite side of the bed—and just barely visible beside her, as if hidden by some shadow, there was Eleanor. She was in her nightgown, her belly as round with the promise of the future as it had been when she woke in this bed this morning and complained of her back aching.

Hob had kissed her, and suggested a few ways to make her forget her pain, and she had laughed and kissed him back and told him not today.

Not ever, now.

Her hand was in his, not even cold yet, and the taste and smell of her was already fading from his memory. She watched him from within that veil of shadow with no laughter in her eyes, but she made an emphatic gesture. He looked to the midwife just in time to see her pull the babe free from Eleanor's limp body.

Hob held his breath, hoping against hope, all his being concentrated in a single wordless prayer of pleading.

But the babe, though a good healthy size, though perfectly formed—a daughter, he could see, he had a daughter as sweet and wonderful as his son—was blue, and still, and did not cry. Did not breathe, no matter how the midwife rubbed and coaxed, no matter how the women prayed.

Tears ran from Hob's eyes, blurring his vision, but when he looked again across the bed, Death still stood there, patiently waiting. Eleanor, somehow farther away but also right beside her, waited much less patiently. She threw her hands up in obvious frustration—Hob knew well the signs that he was not doing what she wished, whether it was across Her Majesty's ballroom or across the very veil between life and death.

She gestured, slowly and emphatically, toward the baby, and then made a cradle of her empty arms.

The baby had to go with her. It was only right that the baby should go with her.

The baby was dead, but the baby was not with her.

"She must be baptized," Hob said, realizing it as he spoke. "Mistress—" he could not, to save his own soul or his daughter's, remember the midwife's name, but she looked up and met his eyes with a grim but not unkind look. "Can you..."

He did not know what to ask—the babe had never drawn breath, and there was no priest here—but the midwife nodded. She wrapped a bit of linen around the baby and held her out, and Hob took his daughter into his arms for the first and last time.

She was warm, too, and heavy the way he remembered Robyn being, all the being of a person concentrated into a tiny space. He stared down at her little face, gray-blue and still but so beautiful he could not look away.

Then the midwife was at his side; she traced one thumb in a cross on the baby's forehead, leaving an oily trace behind, and then with the other hand she sprinkled water, murmuring something almost under her breath. The only part Hob caught was Elizabeth Eleanor, which would evidently serve the baby for a name; Hob certainly could have suggested none better.

He looked across to Eleanor, to see what she thought, and saw himself mirrored. He held their daughter's body in his arms, but now the baby appeared in Eleanor's arms as well—and that baby, unlike this one, waved one tiny arm and smacked her pink lips. She was dead in this world, but she would live in the next, and would never be parted from her mother.

Hob looked up to meet Eleanor's eyes one last time, but the shadow took her entirely before he could. The visage of his sister-in-law lingered another second—he saw her gentle kindly sadness—and then Hob fell to his knees, clutching his daughter's body to his heart, and wept as he had not since he was a child in his own mother's arms.

---

"Dream? My brother, I stand in my gallery and hold your sigil. May I come through?"

Death rarely visited; Dream did not stop to think before he stepped across the Dreaming and into his gallery to receive her. "Of course, my sister, you are welcome."

He almost wanted to take it back when she stepped through and just looked at him for a moment, sadness written all over her face.

His sister rarely visited, and he should have remembered that she always had some purpose when she did. There was only one thing she could have to tell him, and he did not wish to hear it, but he had let her in already.

"What happened?" Dream asked, keeping himself firmly on his feet though he had to bend the very fabric of the Dreaming around him to make it so.

It was only a few years since he had seen Hob so happy, and now...

"Hob's wife, Eleanor, died tonight in childbirth. The baby, too," Death said softly.

Dream nodded, his gaze fixed on the pillar just to one side of her face as he waited for the rest. Had Hob's beloved son, Robyn, died already of some childhood malady or accident?

"Dream," his sister said sharply, and he forced himself to focus on her. She looked less gently sad now, and more exasperated.

She had no more news to tell him; she had not come to tell him that Hob was gone. Surely she had not. She would not be frustrated with him yet, when she had not told him the worst.

"My... husband?" Dream asked, cautiously, just to be sure.

"Is stricken with grief, worse than I have ever seen him," Death said, gentling again. "He has lost many he loved in his life, but this has taken him hard, losing both wife and child. And I assume he thinks you're angry with him, because you can't have taken the wife and children news well."

Dream permitted himself to look away. "I was civil. We remain married, despite his other adventures. He knows when to expect me to visit him again."

"Which is when, exactly?" Death prodded. She likely knew, one way or another; his sister always seemed to know anything he wished she did not.

"1689," Dream said coolly. Civilly. "We meet every hundred years on the centennial of our marriage."

"So in ninety-six years, you can maybe say something kind to him? Dream, I know you care for him. I know you like him. And I know that he needs not to be alone tonight. Go to him! You don't have to stay forever, you don't have to stop being angry, but just for tonight..."

Death stepped closer, reaching up to cup Dream's face in her hands. "You were worried when I got here, weren't you? You thought he might have chosen to die."

Dream couldn't meet her gaze, but he nodded just enough for her to feel it.

"He needs to know he's got a good reason not to," Death said softly. "He needs to know you care. Just... just go to him, and hold his hand, and let him know he's not alone."

Dream pictured it. He was rarely of use to anyone in distress, but Hob always seemed so glad just to see him. And if he was experiencing any uncertainty, after the abrupt ends of their last two encounters, perhaps it would be indeed be a relief to him to see Dream now.

If Dream could ensure that Hob would live on until 1689, that they could have a better night than the last, just by going to him...

"You don't have to know what to say to him," Death said tightening her grip and shaking him a little. "You just need to be there."

"If you are certain," Dream said, pushing back against his own sudden eagerness to go, to do what he could, to be good for Hob, someone Hob would want to return to him.

"Just go," his sister said, dropping her hands to his shoulders and giving Dream a little push. Dream drew suitable raiment around him and went in a swirl of sand.

---

They had cleaned Eleanor up, and the bed, and laid her out properly in a good gown, all while Hob huddled on the floor by the side of the bed, clutching the baby. Finally the midwife had come and knelt beside him, and said some soothing words that Hob didn't really take in, though he understood what it meant. The baby had to go with her mother—to the next world, and into the ground.

Hob kissed her little cold head, her tiny still cheeks, and then forced himself to let go. The midwife took her and cleaned and dressed her in the fine white gown Eleanor had made, and laid her in Eleanor's arms, and that was that. She was gone, and dead, and Hob would never hold her again.

He knelt at the side of the bed, and folded his hands to remind himself not to reach for either of them, who were now out of his reach forever. He would have to go and tell Robyn soon, but the night was still deep and dark, and Robyn would sleep a while yet. Let him sleep. Let him be safe in his dreams, eager to meet his new little sister in the morning.

Hob bowed his head over his hands, and did not look up when he heard someone else enter the room, not until a cool hand settled over his own, and a body knelt down beside him.

For just an instant, despite everything, he smiled when he looked over and saw Dream looking back, and realized that his husband was here with him, holding his hand, his body close enough for Hob to lean on.

Then Hob's gaze jerked back to Eleanor and the baby, laid out on the bed, and the smile vanished as if it had never been. He remembered Dream's cold, cruel voice, asking him if he would lie with one spouse and then the other, if he would go back to Eleanor reeking of Dream. He scrambled away from Dream altogether, jumping to his feet, and demanded, "What are you doing here?"

Dream gestured to Eleanor as he got gracefully to his feet. "My sister told me of your loss. She thought that you should not be alone."

"She thought," Hob said, remembering the way she had admired his wedding ring, prodding at Dream about how often they saw each other. She had looked so kind, when she took Eleanor and the baby away, and she had immediately turned to meddling. "Not you, of course."

Dream was standing very still, his expression masklike, and he offered no condolences, no sorrow, no words of love, did not even reach again for Hob's hand. He only said, "I thought she might be right. I wished to offer what consolation—"

"Consolation," Hob snarled. "My wife is not yet in her grave, and here you come to console me? I'm sorry, my lord husband, but there's no room in the bed tonight!" Hob flung out an arm toward Eleanor, and still Dream would not even look at her and the baby—just as he had refused to look at the miniature. "Would you have me against the wall, Dream, and feel you'd done your duty?"

"If I am unwelcome," Dream said, very quietly, "I will take my leave. I did not wish to cause greater distress."

"Go," Hob snapped. "I'll bloody see you in 1689, and not a minute sooner. Go!"

Dream was already gone when Hob finished speaking, and he could not settle himself to kneel again. He kept flexing his hands, recalling that cool, gentle touch.

He did not want it. He should not; he could not live with himself, if he were the sort of man who would accept it. Not tonight. Not at Eleanor's deathbed.

But he could not settle himself to kneel again until the sun began to come up, and he could think of Robyn's grief instead of his own.

---

---

1606

He had no such warning when Robyn died. He had been peacefully sleeping, and then a servant was shaking him awake, looking ghastly. Even then, Hob thought it must be something else—a plague outbreak in town, or perhaps the Queen had died.

Even when he saw Robyn's body, laid on a cloak on the floor of the Hall, he didn't understand, not until he was kneeling beside his boy, calling his name, looking for a wound to staunch. Then he looked up, looking wildly for help—why had they brought him to Hob, why had they not taken him to a doctor?—and saw the sad, kind face of his sister-in-law, as unchanged as Hob's own in the years since he saw her last.

"No," he whispered, looking about her, but there was not even a shadow of Robyn. Hob caught his son's hand, but it was already cold. He had not died here. They had only brought his body home. The rest of him was gone already. "Please," Hob gasped, reaching for her, "Please, tell him—"

She was already gone, and Hob knew better than to imagine that she would carry messages for him. He sagged down onto the flagstones beside Robyn and wept, his son's cold hand clutched in his for as long as they let him hold on.

---

"Dream, my brother, I—"

Dream would not be fooled again. He was in his gallery in an instant, pressing his hand to Death's sigil, blocking her entrance. "Tell me. Just tell me."

There was a silence. He could not remember when he had ever barred Death from his realm. Even when he might have had cause, he had not blamed her, nor turned her away. But this night...

"Hob lives," Death said quietly. "His son died tonight, Dream. He—"

Dream took his hand from his sister's sigil and blocked even her voice from reaching him. He had taken her counsel in such a matter once, and Hob had told him what to do then.

He was to return in 1689, on their accustomed day for meeting, and not a minute sooner.

Dream folded down to his knees, there on the floor of his gallery, and did not weep for Hob's son or any other. There was no point in weeping.

Eventually, the night passed, and he returned to his work. Another eighty-three years would pass just the same.

---

Hob sat vigil beside Robyn's body once the women of the household had cleaned and dressed him. Sometime in the dark hours before dawn he knelt at the side of the bed, folding his hands and staring at them, waiting for the sight of another hand covering his.

It did not come.

There was only the merciless light of day, and Robyn, cold and dead and still.

And Hob, alone.

Chapter 8: June 7, 1689

Summary:

Hob and Dream both arrive at their centennial marriage night ready to reconcile, and their plans go off very nearly without a hitch.

Notes:

Many thanks to msdonnanoble for beta service, and to everyone who has encouraged this (and been so patient about it) for the past ten months. 2024 has been quite a year for me, but I never forgot these two!

When the sun rose on the seventh of June, in the Lord's year sixteen hundred and eighty-nine, it found Hob Gadling lying on a luxurious bed with a fine view of all London stretching out below him.

So he hoped he could persuade his husband to view it, anyway—though truly a bed of heaped-up spring grass was a finer place to sleep than any Hob had had in many years. And it was a very good view, from up here on the heath above the city.

He had followed the River Fleet yesterday, from its newly trammeled canal banks down by the Thames, up and out of the city to this grassy height. In the city he could be nothing but a beggar—unless he was a madman, or a thief, or beneath noticing as anyone at all. Out here under the fine blue sky, he could at least be a man on his own terms.

More or less. He could be clean, to start with, and on that hopeful thought he got up from his fine soft bed and stripped out of his ragged clothes. He was tempted to fling them into the river and let them wash away, but... he was not perfectly certain that his husband would be happy to outfit him with new things, this time around.

Hob had spoken harshly to him, the last time Dream visited, though in hindsight Hob was nearly certain Dream had not really deserved it. Even if he had intended to offer the kind of consolation Hob imagined... Dream was not a human man, and there must be things he simply didn't understand as a man would. Dream had still been there, trying.

Until Hob told him to go away, and not to come back until today.

As he thought it, Hob looked around, but there was no sign that Dream had been so eager that he had come at the break of dawn—or, well, a few hours after dawn, from the look of the sky. Hob had been tired, and he had felt safer sleeping out here on the heath than he had in years down in London.

No, most likely Dream would come in the lingering light of the June evening, as he had every other time. Hob had a whole day to get himself as clean as he could, and prepare himself to try to pass off a bed of grass and a roof of sky as the finest things he could offer his husband.

Hob looked down at himself and then waded quickly into the cool running water, not stopping long enough to shiver at it. He didn't have any time to waste.

---

Sometime around three in the afternoon on the seventh of June, 1689, Dream began to wonder if he should have looked in on his husband before now.

The possibility had crossed his mind now and again, a hundred times or a thousand, but he had known that no good could come of it. Whether the news of Hob was good or ill, he had to wait to return to his husband at the appointed time. He would surely have been aware had Hob died or repudiated him; everything else was simply detail.

So he had told himself, anyway, until the afternoon of the day he was to go to Hob at last. Then, deliberating over his choice of costume for the rendezvous, he began to think that it would have been preferable to have some idea of what to expect.

Englishmen were traveling all over the world now; Hob might be anywhere. He might have fled his grief to the Great Qing Empire or the Andes Mountains, and Dream would hardly be suitably dressed for either if he garbed himself as an English lord the way he had on his prior visits into the Waking to visit his husband. Of course Hob's perceptions would always interpret Dream as an Englishman, and others would see him in the guise that befitted their own expectations, but Dream did like to do the thing properly.

If he consulted the books of Hob's dreams, or of his life, he would know for certain—but he would know much else, besides.

He would know how ill Hob had thought of him, the night that Dream came to him at his wife's deathbed. He would know what Hob had thought when his son died, and Dream did not come at all. And Dream would know of Hob's grief, for a wife and two children all gone under the earth—and what it had cost Hob to go on living despite it.

Dream tried for a moment to believe that it might have been easy for Hob—that he might be just as shallow and foolish and forgetful as any other human, and that after a decade or two he had all but forgotten his little Robyn, his Eleanor, and the babe who had perhaps never been named, whose face Dream had not allowed himself to look upon. But Dream still remembered Hob's face on that night, and he knew how very real that grief had been.

He knew, too, that far from being as fickle as he would have expected any human to be, Hob had always kept faith with his husband, though they only saw each other once every hundred years. They had had two nights together, no more; how much longer would Hob faithfully remember the wife with whom he had shared years of nights and days, sunsets and sunrises, midnights and noons?

Nor would Hob have forgotten the loss of his son, not after mere decades.

No, if Dream looked into the books that could tell him of Hob now, he would learn a great deal of sorrow. He would go to Hob this evening with all that sorrow fresh before his eyes, when he would wish to be calm and composed, ready to share as enjoyable a night as was possible with his husband.

Dream let his thoughts reach back to 1589, to the way Hob had welcomed him. He had awaited Dream in a sumptuous bedchamber, standing by a table laden with a wide variety of food and drink. It had all been mortal matter, the stuff of the Waking world which held little natural appeal for Dream, but in retrospect Dream could see clearly enough that it had been the finest Hob could muster for the occasion.

He had wished to share with Dream what pleasures and luxuries his human life afforded. It had been all wrapped up in that which Dream could not accept or share, but that much of his husband's intention had been good. Dream resolved that whatever Hob offered to share with him tonight, he would accept as well as he was able, or draw from the Dreaming to share something he could stomach.

He would be patient, he decided. He would listen carefully. He would be kind and understanding. He would give Hob no cause to send him away again, or to regret their regular meeting. Their harsh words to each other in the past century and a half could be forgotten; they could spend a pleasant night together, and part with nothing but good will between them and the promise of another night before them, a century hence.

With all that settled, he clothed himself in the standard finery of an Englishman in London and stepped out into the late afternoon of June 7, 1689, near to where he could sense his husband's presence.

The first thing Dream noticed was the smell of the place where he had arrived, which was rather more pleasant than he had expected. This was swiftly explained by the fact that he was in the middle of some sort of more or less wild green space: a meadow bounded by a small river. Turning, he discovered the distant sight of London, some way to the south and downhill of where he stood.

Turning another quarter-circle, he also discovered his husband.

Hob was naked, curled on his side, asleep in a sort of nest of grass, most of it simply heaped up on top of the grass growing in that spot, though directly under Hob's body Dream could see that he had begun to make a sort of mat of loosely woven rushes. Hob's hands, in fact, were loosely curled around a half-made plait of grasses, the red stone of his wedding ring looking almost black in the green shadows.

Dream let his own clothing melt away to match Hob's nudity, letting even his ruby melt away and leaving only his wedding ring in place. He absently made a circle of protection around this space, to deflect any dreamers who came near. Hob had left himself vulnerable; it was his husband's place to shield that vulnerability.

With that in mind, Dream reached out to touch the dreams of every living thing inside the circle—the river was full of life, and the meadow held many tiny creatures. Most of those large enough to trouble Hob in any way were keeping their distance from him, but a pair of small snakes had found his nest and were curled up close to the warmth of Hob's sleeping form.

Dream clicked his tongue and drew the basking snakes from their somnolence, coaxing them over to himself, where they curled onto his feet. Dream reached down and picked them up, finding himself immersed for just a moment in their simple snake dreams for the young who would be born in a few more months. He carried them over to a large stone at the edge of the river, which had accumulated a generous share of the sun's heat. They were content with their new location, and Dream was able to return to Hob's side, confident that nothing would now trouble them.

Hob stirred a little as Dream returned to him, and Dream hesitated too long to push him back down into sleep. Hob blinked a few times and Dream knelt down beside him so that Hob need not look so near the position of the sun; Hob's eyes widened and he pushed up on one arm.

Dream's gaze dropped to Hob's chest, where altogether too many of his ribs were visible despite the protective coat of hair that covered his chest. Even that covering did not seem as lush as Dream remembered it; Hob seemed altogether depleted, though he shone as brightly as a dreamer as he ever had.

He was still looking up at Dream, having moved no further, and his expression was very uncertain.

Dream realized that he had said nothing, and that they did not normally begin their meetings naked and alone together—and Hob had a human's weight of meaning for nudity. Clearly from his current condition, he had been at many others' mercy in the past century, and even on his knees Dream was towering over him. Looming, perhaps.

Dream sat, and reached out a cautious hand to Hob, who took it and offered a hesitant smile in return as he pulled himself up to sit.

---

It felt like a dream.

It was not like his husband's kingdom, the Dreaming, which always felt almost more sharply real than Hob's waking life. When he opened his eyes on a sunny late afternoon to find his husband kneeling beside him, fine black clothes vanished to leave him naked as though the heath had become their own personal garden of Eden, everything felt velvet-soft and impossibly lovely. Like a dream.

His husband sat down in the grass beside where Hob was lying and reached out his hand, and Hob took it, smiling, thrilled to touch him again. He pulled himself up to sit facing Dream, wondering when he would really wake.

There were probably things he ought to say, but it didn't matter in a dream. His husband would know, and Hob's drifting mind found nothing very urgent to put into words. He only wanted to sit here, to hold Dream's smooth and lovely hand in his, to look at his husband looking so softly back at him. If they didn't speak, or move, perhaps he wouldn't wake. Perhaps nothing would be ruined, and no one would be angry. Perhaps they could just stay here like this until...

He saw the tremble first in his husband's lovely berry-pink lips, and then tears spilled from his eyes, rolling down his marble-pale cheeks. For a breathless, suspended moment Hob just went on looking, watching his husband in this new and equally beautiful aspect, unable to take in what it might mean.

Then, with a snap like a blow to the head, his mind cleared, and he knew exactly what it meant—what all of this meant.

The last time he saw or spoke to Dream, Hob had been a knight, a landowner, secure in his place and able to plant his feet, square his shoulders, and order his Endless husband out of his sight.

Now he was less than even the peasant he'd been born, a man with nothing and no one, belonging nowhere. He had been thoroughly punished for his overweening ambition, reduced to lying naked in a bloody field. He was teetering on the brink of a gentler madness than he deserved—he had to assume this meant his youngest sister-in-law still felt kindly toward him—and now here was his husband, reduced to tears of pity at his woeful plight.

Hob felt himself go red from his hairline to his breastbone, and his entire body tried to curl into itself as he shrank from Dream's gaze. He turned his face away, feeling the sting of tears in his own eyes—another weakness, another reason for shame, but perhaps Dream would simply go away before he saw them fall.

At the first brush of Dream's fingers against his jaw Hob hunched in further on himself, but it was no use. Dream got a firm grip on his chin, the other hand on Hob's shoulder, and almost before Hob could brace for pain, there was the soft press of lips at his temple, over his tightly-closed eye, on his thick-stubbled cheek, the bridge of his nose.

Hob gave in to the tug of Dream's hand then, letting his head turn fully toward Dream, and Dream rewarded him with a kiss on the lips, soft and chaste—then another and another, as if he couldn't get enough. Dream's hand slid away from Hob's chin to the back of his neck, holding him close as Dream continued to kiss him.

Once again Hob felt it like a sharp blow, but this time it wasn't his mind that woke up. It was his body, suddenly fully aware that his husband was here, naked, kissing him with improbable enthusiasm. Hob made a noise against Dream's mouth, and Dream pulled back to look into his eyes, his lips parted as if to ask a question.

Hob shook his head and remembered how to use his limbs, just enough to wrap them around Dream and haul him closer again; their mouths met somewhere in there, the feeling of Dream's parted lips against his all of a piece with the feeling of Dream's skin against his, his legs wrapping around Dream's hips, his arms around Dream's back. At first it felt only like something he needed, as necessary as air in his lungs, cool water on a hot day, warmth in winter.

How long, since he had been so close to another, had been welcomed and touched with kindness and care? How long since anyone had permitted—invited—Hob to touch in turn, to cling, to lay a claim?

How much longer even than that, since anyone had held on to him equally fiercely, pressed equally close, as though they shared his insatiable hunger for contact, as if he could satisfy some need for them? As if he was needed—wanted—desired—

The instant the thought crossed his mind it was as if his whole self was dry tinder suddenly catching alight. It had been an age—a mortal man's lifetime—since he had felt such a rush of lust, such a welcome wave of good honest wanting for something he was on the verge of having.

He opened his mouth to Dream's kiss, licking hungrily at him, and Dream moaned around Hob's tongue, leaving his whole body feeling like a plucked string, vibrating and eager for more. Hob let himself fall back into the half-made grassy bed, and Dream followed him right down, rocking his hips into Hob's before they were even settled.

Hob's breath was already coming in irregular gasps snatched whenever his mouth parted for an instant from Dream's. The air was thick with the scents of sun-warm grass and sex, and they might have been youths tumbling together beside a swimming hole or in a hay meadow. They might be just this frantic for each other then, and Hob could remember being just so anxious to be sure another liked him after some cross words or cold treatment.

Everything had always felt so important when he was young, after all, and even as he was rutting wildly up against Dream, Hob had a strange shift of perspective.

He was going to live forever, and so was Dream; they could fight and not speak for a hundred years, and a thousand or ten thousand years from now, they would look back at it the way Hob looked back at the spats he'd had with the other boys and girls of his village.

Someday he would look back and know how young he had been, today, feeling anxious and embarrassed, naked on the heath because he had no clothes he could bear for Dream to see. So perhaps it was all right to act just as young as that, to be kissing him so clumsily, clinging so desperately.

It was a good thing that he'd decided this was all right, Hob thought, with his last shreds of coherent thought, because he certainly couldn't stop. As surely as he'd have fallen on any food put before him like the starved animal he was, Hob clung to Dream, working his hard cock against Dream's silk-soft skin, feeling the answering hardness of Dream's cock against his belly.

There was nothing like skill in it, no finesse, no proper attempt to please each other. Their kisses were sloppy, gasping things, and they each chased their own pleasure on the other. Still, they both used their hands only to cling, as if keeping close were more important than any other part of their sporting together.

Hob froze when he felt his pleasure building toward climax, the thrill of it turning abruptly to fear. Not yet, not yet, it can't be over yet.

Dream seemed to sense it instantly, his kisses gentling as his grip on Hob turned caressing. "Come with me, Hob," he murmured, and hearing that beloved voice again made Hob realize they were the first words Dream had spoken to him. "Stay here, stay with me."

Hob made a helpless wanting noise at that; it was all he wanted, for Dream to stay. He relaxed in Dream's arms just enough for pleasure to overcome that spike of fear, his body taking over again as the urgency of it swept over him. He kept making little pleading noises against Dream's mouth, far beyond forming words, and Dream kept moving over him, holding him, making coaxing sounds that faded into a groan.

Dream spent first, and the feeling of it tipped Hob over the edge, moaning and still trying to kiss Dream's open mouth, thrusting up into the increasing mess between them.

When the crisis passed Hob still clung to Dream just as tightly, panting a little, and he found that Dream was still holding on to him as well. It struck him all over again that Dream had come first—that Dream had wanted him, had been driven to his finish just by Hob naked in the grass. He shuddered all over again, another little shock of pleasure, and pressed open-mouthed kisses to Dream's shoulder.

His mouth flooded at the taste of salt on Dream's skin, and he licked a stripe over his shoulder only to freeze, hunger twisting hard through his gut, teeth bared over the meat of Dream's arm. Before he could draw back in horror, his husband murmured, "Of course, you must be famished. Allow me to provide the feast this time."

Hob felt a dizzy rush of terror and lust and pure physical ravening hunger at the thought of it, that he might sate himself upon Dream's body as if it were Christ's. It would be a sacrilege even greater than being married to this godless divinity in the first place, a holy communion offering a greater salvation than Hob's immortality had ever forfeited.

He swallowed his mouthful of spit and breathed in through his nose—and turned his head sharply at the smell of bread, the other half-pictured possibility wiped instantly from his mind. A low table had appeared on the grass of the heath, heavy-laden with food.

Hob thought he ought to be cautious, ought to wait, except that he was already moving as he thought it. He snatched up something golden-brown and rich-smelling that proved to be a venison pasty when he bit into it, perfectly piping hot and luxuriously spiced. It was a dainty thing, and he'd eaten the whole of it before he looked at the table again and saw the towering white cake and, before it, the three little bowls: rice, cassava, and maize.

His throat went tight, even as he felt the warm weight of the pasty sliding down his gullet; he was still hungry, but couldn't have eaten another bite just then. He knelt up and looked carefully at each dish, and recognized every one. There the lamb, and there the fine white bread, and there the wines he had chosen so proudly.

He knew every inch of this table, for he had chosen everything on it, a hundred years ago, seeking to supply a fine feast for his husband. He dragged his gaze to Dream now, and found him looking... worried?

"Dream," he managed to say. "What..."

"Forgive me," Dream said. "Perhaps it is not what you would want now—I simply wished to be sure of supplying a suitable feast. This seemed... very fine."

Hob looked again at the board, trying to test it against his own memory, faded as it was after a hundred years, distracted as he was by the delectable smells. "I didn't think you'd even looked at it," Hob said, feeling small and lost before this lavishness not just of food but of memory and care. "I didn't think you..."

"I was paying attention," Dream said quietly. "I always am, to you. I forget nothing to do with you, even when we are parted. And this... this was an offering. Full of dreams."

Hob's fists clenched, rage rushing through him like a spark catching on dry grass. "An offering you rejected. Not good enough."

Dream moved to him, laying his hands softly over Hob's fists, and the mere touch drained Hob's anger away, reminding him that he had been desperate just to see Dream again, that he had been so alone for so long and now, at last, he was not. His hands fell open, his fingers interlacing quickly with Dream's.

Before Hob could summon words to take back the rude complaint, Dream said, in that ponderous way of his, "I am. Sorry. My husband."

Hob was struck speechless then. For all he'd dared to imagine seeing Dream again, not being alone, receiving some of the casual largesse Dream had bestowed before, he had never imagined Dream apologizing for anything. Kings didn't apologize, nor the Fair Folk, nor gods, and little though Hob understood, he knew Dream was something beyond any of those.

He couldn't think of what to say. It was surely not his place to proffer forgiveness, or even to accept the apology, but Dream kept looking at him solemnly, his weighty words still hanging in the air, making it so thick around them that Hob couldn't move.

"You," Hob managed finally, and Dream leaned in and kissed him, a touch as gentle and deliberate as any priest's benediction.

"I," Dream returned, as if he were agreeing with some coherent thing Hob had said. "I know you have suffered, my husband. I could have spared you, but—"

It was Hob's turn to shake his head, to press his lips to Dream's in a far clumsier kiss to stop his words. "I brought it on myself, I was careless. I didn't go out much, I—"

Dream was frowning, and the words caught in Hob's throat as he realized that Dream didn't know the half of it. He knew that Hob had lost Eleanor and the babe, and perhaps his sister had told him of Robyn as well, but Dream had no idea what had followed.

It was a fine thought, mad though it almost certainly was, to imagine that Dream might have intervened, if he had known. He didn't, though, and that meant Hob had to tell him.

"They tried to drown me," Hob said quietly, and couldn't resist a swift glance toward the water and away. "As a witch. I'd lived there forty years—overconfident. I got out with my skin—and the last of your pearls that you gave me, all those years ago. Lost those soon enough—"

Somehow it was there that his voice broke, and then failed him entirely. Somehow that was the loss he couldn't speak of. He never had spoken of it before; who could he tell, and how could they possibly understand what it meant? He scarcely understood it himself, how it gutted him to have lost the last of his husband's lavish gifts, the last tiny object that could remind him he had once held Dream's regard.

It had been bitter enough to sell two of them, trying to scrape together a way to live decently, a new beginning for a life. The third he had simply lost—it had not even been stolen, for all he could tell. He had simply misplaced it, somewhere in his starveling vagabond days: dropped it on the road, let it slip from the ragged hem he'd sewn it into for safety and never noticed.

He hadn't noticed the most precious thing he had left in this world slipping away from him. When he lost Eleanor, the baby, Robyn, his home, his name—he had at least known of the loss, and grieved each accordingly. But the pearl had slipped so quietly from his grasp, and that had made it seem, somehow, like the cruelest loss of all. He had said prayers for it, for months—not to find it, for he knew better than to hope for that, but for the pearl itself, as if it might have a soul that could be lost and in need of saving.

Dream's arm came around his shoulders, oddly tentative when they had shared so many more intimate caresses, and he drew Hob into something that just might have been a hug.

Tucked close, saved from the threat of watching tears spill from his husband's eyes, Hob managed to confess, "I have hated every moment of the last eighty years. You know that? Every moment."

He was lying, just a little. He had not hated the moments when he looked down at his left hand and realized he did have one thing left, however prone he was to forgetting that the ring was not physically a part of his own hand. That it was in fact a sign that his husband would come for him when the century was done. At least things would be different after that, even if Dream was still angry, even if Hob had spoiled everything forever. Still, they were wed, and the ring had ever reminded him of that, when he remembered to see it.

"And that I could have spared you," Dream said quietly. "I could have come to you when my sister bade me to, when your son—"

Dream's voice broke on that, and his grip on Hob tightened—as if he understood that grief, somehow. He had been married once, Hob recalled; it was one of the very first things he had known of Dream. Had there been a child?

He could not ask. Hob shook his head instead, squeezing firmly on Dream's hand. "I told you not to. It was my own fault for sending you away so harshly as I did."

"Do you truly believe," Dream said, his voice steady again and perhaps slightly amused, "that I would have let heated words stop me, if I knew better? If I truly knew..."

"But you didn't," Hob said firmly, because he didn't want to think about whether Dream might have known or should have known. "And anyway, what could you have done, really? I have to live my own life, you said. If I lived in your dreamworld all the time, it would change me, make me unfit to really live—and I spent enough time drunk in the last eighty years, I know I wouldn't have had the strength to stir myself, if I could live all my days in dreams."

There was a silence long enough that Hob shifted in Dream's grasp. His husband's face was downturned, thoughtful, and a single tear lingered on his lashes.

"If you ask it of me," Dream said. "If you wished to be finished with all the suffering of this world..."

Hob shook his head and brushed the tear away, savoring the barely-there softness of Dream's eyelashes, the way Dream let him touch even there without flinching away. "I might as well die, and go to heaven, my dear. For it surely would be just like heaven, to be forever in your kingdom of dreams. But me—I've got so much to live for."

Dream's eyes raised to his then, not offended as Hob might have feared, but simply wondering.

Hob's stomach twisted, his hunger only roused by the little he had eaten so far, and he added more lightly, "Like this lovely feast—didn't know I would have this when I woke up this morning, and what a thing! Tomorrow might bring anything."

Dream moved with him, as Hob squirmed over enough to reach the fine loaf of bread, and murmured in his ear, "But there is still today, and tonight, before the morrow comes."

Hob bit down on the bread to avoid doing anything more foolish, and tried not to spit any crumbs as he leaned back against Dream and said, "Oh yes. And I do mean to have my fill."

Dream kissed his throat, and Hob went on blissfully chewing, debating whether he should try the lamb next or break into the cake.

---

It was unexpectedly satisfying to watch Hob eat. Dream had certainly seen him do so before, and he supposed that technically it was always necessary for a Waking creature to eat in the Waking world, but Dream had never seen him need it like this.

He had never been the one to provide anything Hob truly needed. He laid a hand over Hob's belly, expanded his awareness of Hob's material form so that he could sense the food making its way to his stomach and undergoing the necessary digestive transformations there.

When Hob was halfway through the loaf of bread, Dream exerted a gentle pressure over his belly and murmured, "Slowly, my dear. You would not wish to make yourself sick."

Hob made a forlorn noise and took one more bite, then tore off a bit and offered it to Dream, holding the soft inner part to Dream's lips.

Dream took it without hesitation, brushing a kiss of thanks over Hob's fingertips and making an approving noise as he chewed. Having come from dreams, the food was far more palatable to him than most Waking fare, and he would refuse nothing his husband offered him this night.

Hob paused to butter the next chunk of bread he tore off, and gave Dream the first bite before he ate the rest himself, obviously trying to slow down and savor the richness. Just as obviously, he was unable to resist finishing it in two bites.

A little sheen remained on his lips from the butter, glossy and enticing, and when Dream kissed it away he was simply doing his part to be sure Hob did not take another bite of food too soon. Hob kissed back—how else but hungrily?—then broke away with a regretful little whine and turned to the food again. Dream curled around him, holding on but not hindering him.

Hob tore off a portion of the lamb and devoured it down to the bone. He made glorious mouth-full noises all the while that had Dream remembering their meeting of two hundred years before with increasingly ardent fondness. He pressed a kiss to Hob's throat, and then another, and then Hob's thumb brushed his cheek, drawing his attention to the last shred of tender meat, offered between Hob's thumb and forefinger.

Dream lapped it up, making his own throaty sound of satisfaction and earning a very promising wriggle from Hob, nearly a writhe.

Hob subsided against him with a sigh, rubbing absently at his belly. "You know, that cake..."

Dream eyed the tower of marzipan-covered honey cakes. "You were imitating our wedding cake."

Hob nodded. "I remembered it was white outside, and dark inside. I knew I couldn't get anything that tasted like that—I've still never tasted anything like it, not ever. But I think I almost smelled it once? A few years ago, walking by a coffee house, there was something almost like it, I think. Something that reminded me of it, anyway, but I looked in the window and there weren't any cakes and I—well, I couldn't look for long, so I still don't know what it was."

He'd been run off, no doubt, for being a poor man daring to look in at his betters.

"I believe I know what you smelled," Dream murmured. "Would you like to taste it?"

Hob twisted in his hold to look at him, eager and hopeful, and then Dream watched as painful caution took hold, Hob's posture going warily stiff under his hands. "Your brother Destiny said once that I would live to see such cake as we had at our wedding again. Is this..."

Dream shook his head. "Such cake is still a far-off dream, my dear, and I shall not show it to you tonight, unless..."

Unless that was all Hob was holding on for, and once he had had it, he would be content to join Dream in his realm... where the final demise of their marriage would surely be a matter of days, if not hours.

Hob, however, simply looked relieved. "No, no, not nearly ready to be finished yet. Imagine all the other things I'll live to see before that cake! I should like to taste the stuff it tasted of, though."

"It is called chocolate, in your people's tongue," Dream informed him, tugging Hob to settle against him once more.

When he did, Dream placed the delicate cup of drinking chocolate in his hands—one variety of the many concocted in England and across the European continent. Dream had taken the liberty of making this one nearly as sweet and creamy as that wedding cake had been, though with a hint of more interesting spices.

Hob's hands trembled a little as they closed around the delicate cup, and Dream cradled his own hands around them, guiding the warm drink nearly to Hob's lips. Hob closed his eyes and breathed in, his face as reverently intent as any man at his most devout worship.

"Oh," he whispered, and wetness appeared along his closed eyelashes. "Yes. That—that is—" He breathed in again. "Just to smell it is—"

"Drink," Dream murmured. "Drink your fill, my love. You need not want for anything tonight."

Hob's lips trembled even more than his hands, but he sipped at the rich chocolate, taking barely enough to coat his tongue at first. He made a startled, joyful noise, and a tear slipped down his cheek. Dream kissed it away, the salt on his lips a pleasant contrast to the sweet scent of the chocolate.

Hob took another, more substantial sip, then drew away from the cup with a half-suppressed gasp just to say, "Here, love, this is—this is fucking brilliant, you should—"

Dream chuckled against Hob's skin, but humored him to the extent of drawing another cup of chocolate into existence—this one more bitter, more strongly spiced, closer to the traditional preparation. He took a hand away from Hob's to hold his own cup and sipped from it.

"It is enjoyable," Dream allowed, making Hob smile before taking another sip of his own chocolate. "Perhaps you should be cautious," Dream added, when Hob had lowered the cup. "Chocolate is reputed to be an aphrodisiac."

Hob arched an eyebrow and drank deeply, keeping his eyes on Dream's.

Dream, not to be outdone, rearranged them to face each other, settling himself astride Hob's thighs. He drank deeply as well, holding Hob's gaze.

After a moment Hob lowered the cup, peering into it with a frown, probably at the fact that it was still full.

"I did tell you to drink your fill," Dream pointed out when Hob looked up at him, obviously expecting an explanation.

Hob very deliberately set his cup aside, his lips curling up into a new smile, with just a glimmer of the confidence he'd had a hundred years ago as he looked up at Dream. "I think I'd like my fill of something else, now."

"You shall want for nothing tonight," Dream promised him, and bent his head for a kiss as Hob's hands closed on his hips. Dream shivered, his breath escaping him, at the roughness of them, the strength of them as something entirely material dragging against the surfaces of himself.

Hob's mouth was hungry on his, laying claim as strongly as Hob's hands held him; Hob's hunger for him now was less desperate but no less deep.

Answering need rushed through Dream; he was still unaccustomed, these centuries on, to the way his husband lusted for him. Each time it seemed as if he must misremember, as if Hob's eagerness for him had been dreamstuff—but here it was again, honest and naked and open, as simple and straightforward as it had ever been. This part of Hob was changeless as only something born of the Waking world could be—and yet different every time, too, because it existed in the moment, in each touch and taste, each movement, each breath.

Dream was inspired, as he felt Hob's cock nudging up against him, to make this time something new, something he had never offered before, nor did Hob seem to have imagined he could ask. It would be another sweet thing he could give, another luxury. Another way to make up, just a little, for eighty years of misery.

He reached down between them, curling his hand around Hob's cock, and Hob whined sweetly into the kiss, his hips jerking up sharply at the first touch. Hob's hands flexed on Dream's hips, grip loosening and tightening as though Hob couldn't decide how to respond to this foray. Had Dream been so stingy with his caresses, when last they lay together?

"Lie back," Dream murmured. "Let me take care of you, my husband."

"Fill me up all you like," Hob gasped, stealing a last few sucking kisses before he subsided back into the grass. He tried to spread his legs, only to find Dream's knees blocking the movement.

"I think," Dream murmured, bending low over him and giving his cock another lingering stroke, "that I would fill myself with you instead, if you do not object."

Hob's eyes went wide, and his cock twitched hard against Dream's palm; he went rigid as if desperately resisting the impulse to thrust up again. Trying not to trespass, or offend and have the offer snatched away again.

Dream smiled and kissed him softly, sweetly. "What a gentle husband I have," Dream murmured. "You will be careful with me, won't you? It's my first time, having a man this way."

Dream had meant it half as a joke, even if it was technically true, but Hob's eyes flashed open filled with wondering tenderness, and his body relaxed at once into the soft grass. "Take your time, love. You need not, if—"

"I have told you what I want," Dream insisted, softening the stern note in his voice with another kiss. "I shall have it."

"Anything you want of me," Hob promised. His hands found Dream's hips again, this time stroking lightly, as though Dream were some nervy creature needing to be soothed.

It felt... nice.

It was unnecessary, of course, but after all, this was meant to be enjoyable for both of them. Dream was still thoroughly in control, whatever mere touches Hob indulged himself in. He should have all he wanted tonight, Dream had already decided that.

Reminded, Dream bent forward again to indulge Hob with more kisses, and a teasingly slow stroke of his cock. Hob kissed back fervently, whining as Dream maintained the not-quite-enough touch on his prick, but he kept very still now. Even his hands remained gentle on Dream's hips and thighs, moving up and down them in echo of Dream's hand on him, stroking gently as if his skin were something that could be bruised.

Dream lingered for a time, indulging himself and Hob both in this uncomplicated sweetness.

Eventually he felt Hob beginning to squirm under him; nothing could last forever for such a human man as Hob, not even his sweet patience. Best not to push it to the breaking point.

Dream prepared himself with the merest thought. He had no doubt that Hob would wait for him to do it the slow way, as one with definite ideas about his body's capacities would require, but he had no such limitations and wished only for this to be easy and pleasurable for Hob.

He shifted his position over Hob, aligning himself, and Hob opened his eyes, that tender worried look coming back into his face which had begun to contort with pleasure. His lips parted on some earnest advice, and Dream smiled as wickedly as he knew how and sank down onto Hob's cock in one smooth, slick movement.

Hob made a choked noise of surprise that eased quickly into a groan of pleasure. For an instant his hands tightened hard on Dream's hips, still not pulling him down but holding on fiercely. Just as quickly his grip relaxed, and Dream closed his own eyes and let himself feel, for a moment, what he had done.

It struck him, as he felt Hob within him, his own form making space for another, that he truly had never done this before for any of his lovers, and that Hob had perhaps not been wrong that it was something to be tender over. It felt... not painful, for he had chosen that it should not, but still it felt very important, very big in a way that was not merely about the relative sizes of the anatomy involved.

Dream took a careful breath, letting him feel all of himself again, the rest of his body that was not directly involved in this act and yet felt just as changed by it. His toes and fingertips tingled, and his skin felt flushed hot everywhere. He was aware of the softness of the grass under his knees, and the heat of Hob's hands, now caressing again. Hob's thumbs made little circles on his hips, distracting him minutely from the implacable hardness of Hob's cock inside him—not intruding but invited, and still more than he had bargained for.

"Come on, love," Hob said softly. "Is it so bad as that?"

Dream shook his head and opened his own eyes, looking down at Hob. His smile would not take that wicked twist now, but Hob smiled back when he saw it, so that was good enough. "It is... very good. And new. Not so many things are new to me, after all my years."

"Well," Hob said, and rocked up under Dream, his cock moving inside him in a way that stole his breath. "It gets better from here, if you keep going."

"Does it," Dream said, not really a question. He leaned forward enough to plant his hands on Hob's shoulders, holding him down. Hob let his hands fall down to the grass, let himself be held in place, and smiled knowingly up at Dream.

Dream began to move—tentatively at first, finding the way to his own pleasure. He had no doubt of Hob's, when his cock was still so thoroughly hard inside him, when he could feel every twitch of Hob's response.

Hob seemed to have no complaint, watching with obvious joy as Dream rode him, slowly at first and then faster, finding the very best rhythm and angle. His own prick was bouncing between them, but when Hob raised a tentative hand toward it Dream swatted it away.

He wanted only this, only the pleasure of their joining, which jolted through him from deep inside, new and strange and wonderful, making space inside him for more pleasure than he had known he could hold. He felt his peak approaching, different than any he had known before, and he heard himself gasping Hob's name.

"I'm here," Hob gasped back, sounding nearly as undone. His hand came up to cover Dream's where it pressed against his shoulder. "You beauty, you wonder—you have me, my darling, all of me you want. Anything. Use me as you will, have your fill of me. I wish I could fill you up properly, I—"

Dream lost track of Hob's words then, heard only the sweet warm caress in his voice, a perfect complement to the hard press of Hob inside him, steady and hot and human, touching him in places he had not known he could be touched, giving him what he had never imagined he could need.

He cried out as he finished, spending between them, clenching tight around Hob still inside him in wracking waves that drew Hob over the edge after him. He kept them joined as long as he could, kept the feeling of Hob within him, kept hold of all Hob spilled. All that Hob gave him was his to keep, after all, as surely as the ring on his finger.

Hob's hand curled more firmly around his and drew it away, and Dream found himself folding down to rest against Hob's chest. He whined a little as their joining slipped apart.

Hob's arms came around him as Hob rolled him over so they lay on their sides, still pressed together all down the length of their bodies.

"I'm still here, love," Hob murmured. "I've still got you."

Dream let himself know nothing else for a time.

---

The sun was sinking into the west, and Hob lay with his husband drowsing in his arms, and he was full of as much wonder as he could hold. He'd come harder than he could remember doing in centuries, but he had more or less expected that; he had not expected to be offered what Dream had evidently not given to any other. How could he have? He had never imagined that his husband might think him worthy of such. He could not credit that he was, really, but Dream had permitted it anyway, had taken pleasure from him, and Hob felt something within him knitting back together that had been broken for a long time.

He was not only a wretch, a beggar, a wasted creature. He was a man, and more than that a husband. He could aspire to—

He remembered abruptly what he had been babbling as Dream rode him. I wish I could fill you up properly, I wish I could get a child with you, I wish I could bear it for you, I could give you such a son—

Hob laughed at himself and his ridiculousness, even as the pang of wanting something truly impossible cut through him.

Dream stirred a little, picking his head up to look Hob in the eye, though Dream's gaze still seemed sleepy and unfocused.

Hob kissed his nose and pushed away all thoughts of impossibilities. Dream was in his arms now, and they were together, thoroughly reconciled after more than a century of bad partings. He would not ruin this night for anything.

"The sun is scarcely setting," Hob murmured. "We have all the night still, my love."

"Hm," Dream nestled into him. "Keep your peace and let me have a little rest, then," he said, nearly into Hob's shoulder. "Unless you are hungry? Or cold?"

Hob was neither, and would not have complained if he were, but Dream waved a hand, and a velvet coverlet draped itself over them, while the plate of venison pasties and a great tankard of beer both settled into place just behind Dream's back, where Hob could more or less reach them. He squirmed around, settling Dream on his chest again and sitting up a bit, and the coverlet wrapped around him to become also a bolster behind his shoulders, so that he could recline at his ease and eat and drink while keeping one arm around Dream. His husband's weight was warmer and sweeter than any blanket he could want, but it would be a shame to let all these fine things go to waste.

---

They made love again in the light of false dawn, the brightest stars still lingering in the bowl of the sky above them. Dream did not take his cock again, but they rubbed against each other languidly, kissing all the while, until Hob had spent twice and Dream once more, still wrapped in the velvet coverlet and propped on the array of pillows that seemed to have hatched from it in the course of the night to make them comfortable in any position.

"The morning is coming," Dream said after a time. "You must dress, and be ready to face it."

Hob sighed and buried his face against his husband's neck. He did know that. Reconciled or not, this much had not changed; he would not go to his husband's kingdom to live in dreams forever, and that meant that this night's ending was the start of a hundred years without him.

"I don't quite know what happened to my clothes," Hob admitted. He had lost track of them, though he hardly wanted them back now.

Dream made a little noise of amusement. "They will make a very fine nest for some wild creature, and you shall walk back into London dressed as a gentleman."

"At least a gentleman's husband," Hob allowed.

"I am no gentleman, as I'm sure you have observed this night," Dream returned, raising his head so that Hob could see his smirk. "But I am a king, and I will clothe my spouse accordingly. To the extent he allows," Dream added, when Hob jerked back from him, eyes going wide. "If my husband chooses to dress as merely a gentleman, I shall outfit him to his tastes."

"Well," Hob said, and then sighed and sat up instead of snuggling back into Dream. "Well, let's—"

Hob stopped short, looking down at himself, the whole feeling of his body changing. He was suddenly—not fully clothed, but wearing a linen shirt so white it nearly glowed in the starlight, and silk stockings just as bright.

Dream sat up beside him, and ran the backs of his fingers down Hob's cheeks, one and then the other, and then thumbed the point of his chin. Hob raised his own fingers to trace where Dream had touched, and found himself wonderfully clean-shaven. Dream's hands moved meanwhile to his hair, fingers combing through it, and Hob gasped a little to find it as long and silken-smooth as any lord's, perfectly combed out with just that touch.

Hob rose to his knees, and Dream stood and pulled him up the rest of the way. Hob saw him begin to make some dismissive gesture at the coverlet, and couldn't keep from making a small plaintive sound—it would be a waste, surely, for all those fine things to disappear into nothingness only because their night was over.

Dream shot him a slyly amused look and made a different gesture, and Hob watched the coverlet and bolster and dozen pillows all fold themselves up impossibly tightly, becoming a single neat canvas-wrapped bundle that even so tidy a gentleman as he was about to be might carry with him, walking into London of a summer morning. He looked down and noted that he was wearing fine sturdy shoes, and then Dream brushed a hand up his thigh, giving him good respectable breeches and tucking his shirt into them.

Dream's hands brushed his shoulders, and Hob was shrugging into an embroidered coat—no sign of gilt anywhere, but good rich cloth and fine detail work around the cuffs and down the placket, a full skirt that covered his breeches entirely and concealed an unknowable quantity of pockets. Dream arranged a cravat around his neck, and tied a ribbon around it—what color Hob could not make out in the still-dim light, but he knew he would look well in it. His husband would not lead him astray now.

Hob realized that Dream was fully dressed too—all in deepest black, of course, and with his ruby shining on his chest again as it had on their other visits. Hob remembered then to look for their rings; he caught Dream's left hand in both of his and stared for a long moment at the black band, the three little drops of red still adorning it.

"It is still my favorite," Dream murmured, "of all the gifts I have ever received."

Hob looked up to meet his eyes; he didn't think Dream had made any such grandiose claim before. "I am glad," he returned. "If it means that you will always wear it."

He kissed Dream's knuckle, just above the ring, for they were both properly clad now, and he knew that no other kiss would suit this moment. Dream turned his hand in Hob's and pressed an answering kiss just above Hob's ring, and then stepped back, letting go of Hob's hands to look him over, judging the effect of his efforts.

Hob turned, to let him see every angle, and when he was facing Dream again, his husband offered him a walking stick. "I expect you shall need it," Dream said, smiling softly, "when you have such a long walk to make, back to town."

"I thank you," Hob said, for there was nothing else to say, nothing he could offer in return. "I will miss you, my dear, these hundred years."

"They will pass," Dream said simply, but Hob saw his fingers flex before he clasped them behind his back, and contented himself with the thought that Dream had wanted to reach out one more time. Dream would miss him too.

He turned and began his walk back to the city just as the sun began to rise, and he did not look back. Dream would be gone now, with the morning's light. Hob had his bundle and his stick and his fine clothes, more than enough to make a fresh start for himself as whomever he chose to be; no one would connect him with the beggar he'd been the day before.

His heart was heavy and light at once, as he walked, for he was walking away from Dream—and yet he knew that he would face no greater loss, in these hundred years, and he was assured that they would meet again, a hundred years hence, and that meeting was surely one to look forward to.

He smiled as he walked, and the sunlight caressed his face as his husband had done, and a new century spread open at his feet.

---

Dream stood still for longer than he should have, watching Hob walk away. His body scarcely existed—would not exist, in another moment when he returned to the Dreaming—and yet he could still feel it inside him, the space he had made for Hob. He still ached a little, sweetly. He had taken his husband's hunger into himself and now it was his.

For a short while, watching Hob walk away, Dream let himself feel it.

---

All over London, dreamers woke feeling sated and wistful from a night of erotic and indulgent dreams.

Some of them wrote down what they remembered of them. One even made a sketch—for stories were told of the dreams folk dreamed in London, once every hundred years.

Chapter 9: Interlude - 1719

Summary:

Hob's sister-in-law arrives to escort him to an Endless family meeting, and has a word with him about business ventures he is considering.

Notes:

Canon divergence continues diverging: maybe Hob with the wider perspective being an Endless-in-law entails is a better person, or at least. Makes better choices. The Endless, on the other hand, continue to be themselves.

Many thanks to Pellaaearrien for beta!

Hob disliked Ouidah from the moment he disembarked there, but still he might have dismissed it as mere distaste until he saw his sister-in-law standing among the slaves waiting to be loaded aboard a ship.

He realized he had been mistaken a heartbeat later—it was simply a woman with similarly dark skin, standing in an attitude of resigned and weary desolation that reminded him sharply of Death standing at Eleanor's bedside, and beside Robyn's body. Then he thought he saw her again, and again, until he forced himself to turn his back on the slaves entirely—and there stood Death, in a gentlewoman's black gown, watching him with far too much understanding in her eyes.

Hob bowed to her without a word—he could not imagine what to say. She nodded gravely and took his arm as he straightened up, leading him away from the quay.

"I always sail with them," she informed him. "You were not wrong to see me among them. They have great need of me all along the voyage. Half of them will not reach the other side—and yet, with my help, all of them do arrive where they belong in the end."

Hob had been right to look more closely before he invested in the venture. Now that he had seen it, simply not spending his money on it seemed hardly enough. "What do I do? To put a stop to it, how can I..."

He trailed off when he saw her looking puzzled, and as he watched her expression turned amused. He realized with horror that his kind and gentle sister-in-law, Death Herself, might have no interest whatever in ending a practice that gave her so much work to do.

"You are so wonderfully human," she said, tucking her arm more firmly through his, patting his arm with her other hand as one might pat a child or a friendly dog. "But you are not wrong, either. There are others who think as you do—I'm sure you can find them if you look. Just now, however, there is another meeting you should attend."

They turned a corner, and Hob stopped short at the sight of his husband, dressed in his usual rich and sober black, his ruby at his throat, his expression decidedly peeved.

"Sister," he said, stepping forward with the obvious intention of physically pushing Hob and Death apart.

Hob took his arm back and reached out both hands to Dream as he approached, and Dream let himself be diverted, only aiming a dark glare at his sister as he took both of Hob's hands and stepped firmly between them.

Over Dream's shoulder, Hob saw Death roll her eyes, then smile. "Well, now we can all go together."

Hob looked to Dream inquiringly. "A family affair?"

"Destruction has called a family meeting," Dream said sternly, instead of anything as simple as yes. "Destiny, who is our host on these occasions, insists that you are a part of the family, and that we are not all gathered together without you present. My siblings... sought to be helpful, apparently."

"Well, hope the rest of them didn't end up too far astray," Hob said. "And I'm glad your sister found me first, actually—she had some good advice for me."

Dream frowned a bit at that, and only then glanced around and seemed to notice that they weren't anywhere he had seen Hob before. He frowned more at the sight of the people in chains, and tightened his grip on Hob's hands, and then they were in a startlingly familiar garden.

"She told me—well, she didn't tell me not to get involved, I suppose," Hob explained, since Dream was still scowling. "Not directly. But she knows what I'm going to do."

Dream nodded absently, not seeming to want to talk about it. Hob looked around—none of Dream's siblings were in sight, except that there were statues of them towering overhead. He didn't remember those from his last visit, but then he'd only had eyes for his husband. He might never have turned his gaze high enough to see them.

He tried another tack. "This is where we wed, isn't it?"

Dream scowled harder, and then abruptly leaned forward and kissed Hob, still gripping hard on his hands.

Hob smiled into it and then got to work properly kissing his husband back, taking in the ferocity of it and giving back just as good. Their teeth clashed, and Dream's lips were bruisingly hard against his, his hands painfully tight on Hob's, but Hob held on just as fiercely and leaned into him, licking roughly into his mouth.

His whole body lit up with it, longing for more no matter how inopportune the time and place. The kiss was rough and clumsy, bad by any measure of mere kisses, but this was him and Dream in the same place for the first time in thirty years. Neither of them could say it properly—I want you, I miss you, I love you, now that you're here all I want is to make myself a part of you and you a part of me—but their mouths could crash together and get the point across anyhow.

Hob didn't know how long they stood there, only touching at their grimly clasped hands and their rough, wet mouths. He never had to pull away to breathe; his jaw and his hands never got too sore to go on. It seemed to go on for hours, and yet it had surely been only a moment when a shout from somewhere too nearby made them jerk apart.

Dream's brother, Destruction, stood down the hedgerow, fists on his hips, radiating irritation. "This is a family meeting, you two. Kiss on your own time. I have things I need to tell you."

Hob let go of one of Dream's hands and kept tight hold of the other. They could kiss on their own time, couldn't they? Once this meeting was over, they could do whatever they liked.

From the grip Dream kept on his hand, Hob suspected his husband was thinking along the same lines—which meant that Hob knew exactly when Dream stopped thinking it.

Destruction announced to them all, gathered around the table—Hob was seated between Dream and Death—that he was leaving them, leaving behind his realm, and should no longer be considered one of them. They should not follow him or seek him.

Death and Destiny sat very still; Delirium said nothing but swigged her wine as if she meant to hurt someone by it. Desire acted amused; Dream braced both his empty hands on the table before him and thundered at his brother while Despair pleaded with him to change his mind.

Hob sat looking down at his own hands—very decisively released, and unlikely to be caught again—and then leaned across the table. He caught his brother-in-law's eye and asked levelly, "Why?"

For a moment Destruction just looked back at him—long enough for Dream and Despair both to notice what was happening and stop arguing—and then he nodded. "I have not spoken to you of it, good brother, as I have to each of my siblings in turn, over the years. It is simple enough: your kind are becoming too gifted in the arts of destruction, and will throw things altogether out of balance before very much longer. I do not wish to stay in a world where I will become paramount over all my siblings. I cannot work against my nature; I cannot prevent this. I can only choose not to see it."

Hob stared at his brother-in-law for a moment, thinking of those souls down at the docks—half of them doomed, and maybe all of them, in one way or another—and of the people he meant to look for, who meant to stop it. For a moment he wondered if there was any point; what Destruction said was evidently true, for none of his siblings, not even Destiny, actually disputed it.

He wanted to ask Death if he would still live, beyond this great and terrible destruction to come—but he had survived the plague even before he had her boon. He had survived the London Fire. How much more could be destroyed? And if everything and everyone was...

I still haven't had a chocolate cake, he thought, and glanced over at Destiny, who shook his head the tiniest fraction, holding on firmly to his book.

That No had to be an answer to the questions Hob didn't quite dare to ask: Has my destiny changed? Will I not live to see that cake? Will no one else live to make it? Will the cocoa trees not live to bear fruit to be made into cake?

And if none of that had changed—if Hob could survive, and chocolate cake could survive—then not everything was going to be destroyed, and Destruction was giving up on the human race far too soon.

Hob shook his head, sitting back in his chair. It was obvious that Destruction wouldn't be argued with, though Dream and Despair went right back to arguing with him, each in their way. Hob did not know his brother-in-law well, but he wondered how that could come about: a personification of Destruction who did not love and look forward to the ultimate destruction.

He thought of Death's expression, back on the docks, when she had not told him to do anything that would curtail her work. She surely loved her purpose, and...

Hob looked over at Dream, arguing furiously with his brother, haranguing him about duty, about obligation, about his unchanging nature, and he felt a shiver of unease. He did not know whether his husband delighted in his work in dreams, or the rule of his kingdom. Hob had scarcely ever seen him in it. Dream had never let him come there for more than a single night, and had not even tried to entice him there thirty years ago.

And Dream was so, so very angry with Destruction for going away, but he said nothing of the personal desertion. He was angry with Destruction for escaping his work, for changing something that was meant not to change. He did not say that anything would go wrong because of the dereliction, or that Destruction's duties would fall to him or to anyone else. He was simply angry with Destruction for... daring to do it.

Perhaps it was only that Dream liked everything in its place—his husband who he visited once every hundred years, each of his siblings tidily located in their own realms, wakeful creatures in the Waking world and dreamers in the Dreaming. Almost, Hob could believe that, but there were tears standing in Dream's eyes, and Hob thought that if he reached out to touch his husband now he would shatter something.

He glanced over at Death, and found her watching Dream with an expression that made Hob's heart ache. He wasn't the only one who saw it, then.

In the next second her gaze shifted to Hob, and her expression turned exactly as softly, ruefully sympathetic as it had been at Eleanor's deathbed.

I am going to lose him, Hob realized. And she knows it.

He just stared at her for a moment, and then whispered, "I would like to go back home now, lady."

She nodded and laid a hand on his arm, leaning across him as she said softly but with authority, "Dream."

Dream's head whipped around, and his face was stricken for a moment and then perfectly, horribly blank, like a marble carving of Dream rather than a living creature. "Sister."

"Hob has said what he came to say, and heard what he came to hear," Death said, still quietly. Despair was still wailing at Destruction, who was still listening without showing any sign of bending. "I am going to take him back home, unless you would care to escort him yourself."

Dream's lips compressed to a pale line, and Hob wanted to reach for him, and didn't dare. He knew that Dream was thinking of that moment—those hours?—out in the garden, delaying coming in, the glimmering possibility of stealing time to finish what they'd started when this meeting was done. If Dream left now, taking the opening Death was offering him, he could take Hob anywhere, do anything with him.

Hob could have said something to remind Dream that he was thinking of it too, could have reached out to touch him. He could have begged.

What he couldn't do was forget that look in Death's eyes, that resignation and sadness, that complete lack of surprise. She had prodded at her little brother a couple of hundred years ago, when Desire threw that party for them. Hell, she had been the one to find Hob for Dream, the day they wed. She had had hopes for them.

Now, she just offered to take Hob home, and sat quietly at his side while Dream considered it.

And Hob sat quietly and watched his husband and waited for the inevitable.

Dream nodded. "I thank you, sister. That would be as well."

Hob opened his mouth, deciding too late that he had to say something, that he couldn't just acquiesce—and then he was back on that bloody quayside in Ouidah, his sister-in-law's arm looped through his. He could swear the sun had stood still all the time they'd been gone.

"Why," Hob said, drawing away from her enough to look her in the eye. "Why..."

She smiled sadly. "I've known him a very long time. And I have always known what it means, to be what I am and to love my little brother. I do not have any sense that his time is so very soon, as you would reckon it, but I have always known that it will come."

She would not try to stop it, Hob understood then, any more than she would try to stop humans from hurting and killing each other. She would do her work, and that was that. She might claim to love Dream, but it was no kind of love Hob could understand.

"But not soon," Hob repeated. "Not... I'll see him again, won't I? We'll meet in 1789?"

Death's smile turned sadder. "I can make no such guarantees, Hob. I do not know all that will come to pass."

"But if you—if you do know. If it's his time. Can you—please, for your brother's sake?" Hob would have got down on his knees and begged, but he could feel how far she was from him already; another yard would make no difference. "Please, bring me to him. He's my husband, I beg you, if it's the last chance—"

Perhaps she nodded; perhaps it was only the tilt of her chin as she turned away. She was gone, and Hob stood there alone, feeling very small and helpless in the face of all the things he could not prevent.

He looked across at those people standing on the quayside, waiting.

He had some money. He couldn't save his husband—couldn't stop the destruction humans would wreak by and by, driving the very personification of Destruction to turn his back on them—but he could do something, here and now. He could stop someone from being taken away across the sea in chains.

He started toward the fort.

Chapter 10: June 7, 1789

Summary:

For once, Dream and Hob's centennial night is going beautifully, until they are interrupted.

Notes:

This story is still happening! I swear! Many thanks to Chrome for beta on this chapter, and to all of you who are still reading!

Mindful of the way the previous century had gone, Dream made sure to check in on Hob every ten years or so, just to see what he was up to.

He seemed busy, and occasionally in some peril, but all in all content. Dream could not call it restful, to see his husband so energetically engaged in whatever he found to be so passionate about after more than four hundred years of existence. Still, it was a sort of balm, to observe Hob's determined work—to know that it was possible for him to care so much, to work so hard, and feel himself satisfied with that.

Dream of the Endless did find his own work absorbing and satisfying, of course. The Dreaming was an extension and expression of himself, and he existed to serve and guide the Dreaming and all the dreamers. That was the very definition of satisfaction—far superior to Hob's human fumbling after one interesting cause or another, never knowing his true and ideal purpose. Dream knew exactly what he was for, and he immersed himself in doing it, and wished for nothing else.

And still—he checked on Hob, every ten years, and he was always, always aware of the date June 7, 1789 as it approached.

When the appointed day arrived, he made himself wait until evening before he sought Hob out. He found his husband in one of his more usual locations: back in London, in a pub. It was, he realized as he stepped through into the Waking world, the same one where Dream had met him back in 1489. The same, if he was not mistaken, where Death had first found and recruited his husband a hundred years before that. The White Horse.

His eyes locked on Hob as soon as he stepped inside; his husband was loitering near the bar, watching the door. Waiting for him, as surely as Dream had been waiting for this moment. His eyes lit as soon as he recognized Dream, his casual posture straightening up to eager attention. He was dressed finely, his hair perfectly coiffed, but without any ostentation to set him apart from the general run of people in the room. A close look would show him to be well off, but he was not making himself at all conspicuous.

Hob took a step toward Dream and then halted sharply; Dream watched him tamp down his excitement, felt his attention turn outward to the room around them, though he did not obviously look around to see if anyone had noticed his reaction to Dream's entrance.

A few people had; with the merest effort of will Dream ensured that they promptly forgot it again, so that Hob relaxed after that moment of wariness, showing a softer, less obvious smile. He tilted his head toward a staircase and returned to his place by the bar.

Dream flicked the briefest nod in Hob's direction and went where Hob's gesture invited him. He considered, as he did, this evidence that his husband—so often in danger, these past seventy years—had learned some caution. The beginnings, perhaps, of wisdom, for an immortal being living so intimately amongst mortals as Hob persisted in doing.

Dream ignored the feeling that he did not like it, and even more firmly ignored the question of why he might feel such a thing. Hob was his husband; Dream had a vested interest in his wellbeing. Therefore it was a good thing that Hob was learning to be at least a little careful.

At the top of the stairs, he promptly identified the room where Hob's dreams were concentrated, and let himself in, closing the door quietly behind him.

The bed, an ordinary four-poster, was made up with bedding formed of dreamstuff. Dream crossed to it at once, sinking his hands into the velvety cloud of the duvet, and recognized his own work, shaped from dreams but sturdy enough to survive in the Waking. This was the coverlet and those the pillows he had made for Hob a hundred years ago, saved all this time. For him—for them—for this night.

Staring at the carefully made bed, Dream was forcibly reminded that Hob had been far more cautious on that night—had not even ventured into the city among so many of his own kind. Here and now...

The door opened behind him, and Dream whirled to see Hob entering, his face lit with a smile no more cautious than it had been on their wedding day. Hob didn't take his eyes off Dream as he turned a key in the lock, and in the next instant he was in Dream's arms, kissing him and pressing full-length against him, all but bearing him down into that lovingly prepared bed.

"I meant to," Hob said against his lips, only to cut himself off by kissing Dream again.

Dream did not even attempt to discover what his husband had meant to do, thoroughly occupied with kissing him back, holding him close, reveling in the solidity and strength and eagerness of him. He held tight to Hob and let himself fall, let his clothing dissolve into nothingness so that it was bare skin that pressed against the velvet coverlet, the whisper of dreams under him.

Hob groaned, writhing over him, and gasped, "Do mine, then, can you—"

Dream did, whisking Hob's clothing away into the ether (making a tiny mental note to be sure he could retrieve it from thence as quickly; Hob might need to be clothed again at any moment). Hob responded to this with a wonderfully throaty hungry sound and redoubled kissing, his bare cock grinding hard into Dream's belly as he pressed Dream down with all his warm, solid weight.

He was here again, here in this one place, this one time, where he could have his husband and his husband could have him—wanted him, and did not hesitate to reach for what he wanted, to take what he wanted. Nothing and no one else could hold Dream to a single place and time like this, could draw him to such a perfectly singular focus, so that all else seemed to go quiet around them. They might be alone, there might be nothing else in all the universe, so long as Hob was kissing him, so long as Hob's mere material form rested upon him, acting upon him as all the gravity of this world could not.

Dream wrapped his arms around Hob, clutching him close. He wrapped his legs around Hob's hips, drawing him in. Hob's mouth dragged along Dream's jaw, down his throat, and Hob's cock pressed against his, slipping and sliding and returning, with more teasing than steady friction. Even as the shock of novelty wore off there was the wonder of it, their hunger for each other so equally matched, so wondrously mirrored.

Dream tilted his hips, seeking more, seeking something he couldn't name. Hob's teeth scraped over his collarbone and Hob's cock pressed down behind Dream's balls, and Dream made a sound in his throat, deep and needy and raw.

Hob froze, and raised his head enough to meet Dream's eyes.

Dream felt a brief thrill of rage at Hob for stopping, for looking at him. For making him look back. For wondering if he was sure, and making Dream wonder as well—making him acknowledge what he was inviting.

But behind the rage was a sweeping wave of tenderness for his husband who took such unnecessary care with him, who would not press even where Dream gave way, unless he was certain that was Dream's wish.

Dream nodded, and pushed up to kiss Hob's slackened mouth, tightening the grip of his legs around Hob's hips.

Hob moaned into his kiss and bore him down to the bed, his tongue thrusting easily into Dream's mouth while his cock had not quite found its way so readily. Dream did nothing to hurry him along, because this rough push and sweaty friction also had its pleasures; he could yield himself to his husband's efforts, and wait for them to bear fruit.

Dream did question that resolve in the next instant, when Hob's mouth strayed from his, but he let out a sigh of gratification when Hob turned instead to kissing his way down Dream's throat. Shivers of pleasure and anticipation rose through him with each soft touch of lips and tongue and breath against his skin.

Hob found his nipple, and while Dream had no particular expectation of how it might feel to be touched there, he could feel Hob's anticipation of his pleasure. It promptly solidified into actual sensation, a bolt of sweet heat rushing from that spot all through him, sparked by the brush of Hob's lips, the slightest scrape from his teeth.

Dream let himself make a noise, venting some of that wild sparking feeling, and he could not help feeling Hob's reciprocal pleasure. It was not a physical thing, not smug satisfaction, but pure enjoyment arising entirely from pleasing Dream.

As Hob went on exacting such sensations from Dream's body, Dream felt something else emanating from him, something he had never quite felt from Hob: worship.

It was not an unfamiliar feeling, being worshipped—he had many times been taken for a god—but this was not worship for him as the Dream King, as a cosmic entity. This awe, this reverence, was lavished purely, wholly, on the corporeal form he wore, and the fact that he donned it to spend this night with Hob.

Dream was so lost in the particular joy of this particular way of being adored that for a time he thoroughly lost track of where exactly on his body Hob's mouth was.

He noticed only when he found himself making not-quite-voluntary noises, and then realized that his thighs were parted around Hob's face, resting on his shoulders as Hob licked into him. The act itself was not shocking—he had done it himself with Hob on their wedding night—except that Dream had not realized how good it would feel, in itself, not simply as the prelude to more.

Another sound escaped his throat as Hob's tongue swirled against him, and Hob's hands squeezed on his thighs as if in answer. Dream reached down, laying his fingers across Hob's, but let himself otherwise go limp, simply letting his husband have his way—not at all because that seemed the shortest route to the greatest pleasure. He was being very generous, giving Hob free rein.

He had to keep making noises each time he did it particularly well, of course. It was the only way Hob would know what pleased him, being otherwise so blind to Dream's feelings and reactions. The fact that Hob would make noises in response sometimes, encouraging hums or throaty groans which vibrated right through him, was immaterial.

Eventually, Hob did draw back, shaking his head and working his jaw. His lips were wonderfully reddened and wet, kiss-swollen and so hot against Dream's when he kissed him that even Dream could not help noticing that feverishness.

"Been wanting to do that," Hob murmured against Dream's mouth, "for at least a hundred years. More, but—it's a hundred years since I thought you might let me."

"I am glad I did," Dream murmured back, enjoying the tantalizing brush of lips against lips. "I might again, given this trial. But if you would like to move on to—"

Hob groaned, shifting his position between Dream's wide-parted thighs, and Dream felt the press of Hob's cock against him where he was wet and soft and open. Dream hitched one leg higher where it wrapped around Hob's side, and Hob pressed into him, his mouth falling open wide and his eyes fluttering closed, his face gone sweetly reverent all over again as he savored the feeling.

Dream closed his own eyes, shutting out sight so that he could simply feel Hob moving inside him. He could still feel Hob, as well as Hob's cock. That sense of worship only amplified now that he had been allowed within; that almost unbearable adoration poured off every inch of Hob's body as he moved over and into Dream.

The pleasure of the movement was exquisite, but almost better was the way Hob moved, the way Dream could feel in every motion, every touch of his hands, every ragged breath, that Hob was still being careful, still seeking Dream's pleasure above his own. Still worshiping his husband, with this act that most men of his kind would consider the greatest defilement.

He was pressing open-mouthed kisses to Dream's face, his throat, his collarbones, gasping incoherent words of love and devotion that nonetheless spoke volumes to Dream. He would have been very content to bask in this worship indefinitely, but Hob's human body could sustain this for only a limited time here in the Waking.

Dream allowed the sensations running through him to gather direction and momentum, to gather towards a peak of pleasure, and it did not take long at all before that peak was imminent. He clutched at Hob, gripping one shoulder, digging fingernails into the back of his neck, as Hob's sweat bathed his face and Hob's pleasure twined with his own, pushing them both closer and closer to the point where perfection would overcome itself.

Dream cried out, and only barely managed to keep his voice to a reasonable volume, and contained on this plane of existence, so that his ecstasy did not leak into either the ears or the dreams of those nearby.

He need not have bothered, but he did not know that yet.

---

Every time, Hob thought he had prepared himself for what it was like to make love to his husband again, and every time he was wrong. He lay for a while gasping, sprawled on the fine linen sheets that were now somewhat despoiled, unable to rein in the enormous grin on his face as he looked at Dream reclining against the pillows beside him.

Dream, of course, though he was charmingly pink and bore a few visible kiss marks, was not breathing hard at all, nor sweating beyond a certain dewy sparkle along his hairline. Perfect as ever. He did at least look quite relaxed and pleased with himself, so Hob had acquitted himself well enough to think he had very fine odds of a second and third round before the night was out.

When he could speak without gasping too obviously, Hob said, "As I was saying. I had meant to start with refreshments. Very civilized."

Dream tilted his head and raked a gaze over Hob's naked body, sprawled on the bed in a fashion that, no, did not look particularly civilized. Dream waved a finger, and Hob was abruptly cleaned of sweat and all other evidence of their encounter, clad again in stockings and drawers and shirt, his hair neatened back into its ribbon. Dream rearranged himself into a similar state of artistic dishabille, tidy and mostly decent but still pointedly at his ease.

Hob sighed and leaned over to steal one more kiss, just a domestic little peck of lips this time. "I suppose I asked for that."

"You did," Dream agreed, but he was smiling, his expression warmly suggesting that Hob could also ask for other things, as they went along.

Hob gazed at him for a long moment, tempted to kiss that smile, to start all over again, but also content just to be so close, to be looking. "It's been a long time, my dear. I have missed you."

Dream arched a languid brow. "So I gathered."

Hob huffed. "Not just the bedsport. I have missed... you. Just seeing you, being near you."

Dream's expression turned more serious at that, but he did not immediately respond; Hob could not help remembering that long moment when he had looked upon Hob before permitting Death to take him away. Perhaps Dream was thinking of it too, but his gaze did not falter from Hob's, as if that was as close as he could come to admitting that he, too, was glad to be gazing upon his husband.

Hob drew back and got out of the bed. He turned to the table he had carefully arranged, checking that the chocolate was still drinkably hot in its silver pot. "Come, sit with me. I know it will not be as fine as what you made for us the last time we met, but I like to think it is tolerably similar; I have thought of you every time I drank chocolate, these last hundred years."

Hob glanced over his shoulder and managed not to startle when Dream was not still lounging on the bed needing persuasion but standing just behind him. Hob gestured him toward one of the chairs that flanked the little table, and pushed the small platter of sweets toward him. "Perhaps these will be to your liking—still not quite the stuff of the famous cake, but I cannot help thinking we are moving in that direction."

Dream studied the pure white meringues and tiny chocolate bonbons and then picked up a meringue, keeping his eyes on Hob's as he laid it delicately on his very pink tongue.

Hob swallowed hard and reminded himself that they had just gotten out of bed, and forced his own gaze to the chocolate pot and the two small cups. He poured a cupful for each of them, and pushed Dream's across the table, glancing up just in time to see Dream licking his lips before they curled into a rather wicked smile.

He could not help smiling as he lowered his gaze again. "You do not make it easy on me, my dear."

"I do not believe that I ever promised to," Dream said agreeably. "But let us speak of other things. How have you enjoyed your past century?"

Hob grinned. He was quite unable, at this moment, to even fully remember how much of the past seventy years he had spent anxious over whether Dream would still be alive when the day of their meeting arrived. Here they were, and here Dream was, after all, and Dream had let Hob make love to him as never before; all was well, and surely all would go on well, or well enough, from here.

"It's had its ups and downs," Hob said. "I've been very busy since I saw you last, with one thing and another—liberating slaves, when I could, you know, and then dabbling in other kinds of liberation too. The Americans, and now the French—well." Hob rubbed at his neck, which felt quite exposed now that he thought of it—and in a wink, he was fully clothed again, as Dream was, each of them as immaculately tidy as they'd been downstairs when Dream first walked in. The bed was neatly made again, to boot.

He gave Dream a little half-bow, seated, and took a sip of his chocolate before he went on, "I got a bit mixed up in things over there this spring—I have friends in all sorts of places, with all sorts of ideas, and it's a difficult line to walk. I can't fault hungry people fighting for their bread, but... well. No one's listening to reason, once they've broken into a rich man's house and the militia is in the street outside. Would have lost my head—or everything but my head, I suppose?—if I didn't get out in time, and I don't like to think how that would have turned out for me."

Dream went very still—almost masklike, making Hob once again remember that horrible moment at the family meeting when his husband's death had seemed so clearly and starkly inevitable.

"It was fine, though," Hob said, unable to just sit in silence and watch Dream go away from him again. "Got away clean, laid low in Holland for a bit before I came home again. And for all I've been in and out of some tight spots, I won't starve again—been planning ahead better, this time, and there are so many banks nowadays. I've got a little money here and a little there, so when I need to disappear from one place, I can always live in another."

Dream thawed by minute degrees as Hob went on speaking, and nodded when Hob fell silent. "Still, you should be careful to avoid such a fate. My sister's gift... could become a curse, in that case, and not a curse easily broken."

Hob frowned. "How so? I've... always rather assumed that if I asked to give up her gift, she would take it back. She never seemed to intend it to become a burden."

Dream looked away, staring down at the plate of sweets but clearly seeing nothing in this room. "No, I am quite sure she meant it kindly. But... If you were already in such a state that only her gift sustained you, to withdraw it would be to kill you. To shed your blood. And the Endless are forbidden to shed family blood."

Hob's gaze was drawn down to the ring on his own finger, the red gem formed of his and Dream's heart's blood, swirled together into one. "And... I count as family these days, do I?"

Dream nodded, and crushed a meringue to powder with one elegant finger, not seeming to notice what he was doing.

Hob sipped chocolate, and watched him, and decided a good distracting natter was in order. "I saw a production of King Lear yesterday. Mrs. Siddons as Goneril. The idiots had given it a happy ending."

That, blessedly, did draw Dream back to him, with a sly sideways look and a quirk of his mouth that was not quite a smile. "That will not last. The great stories will always return to their original forms."

Hob smiled, and parted his lips to ask a question about Shakespeare, whose star had begun to rise so abruptly after that awful night in 1589. He had not yet decided whether to dare reminding Dream of that meeting when the door smashed open and two men—one fair, one dark as his sister-in-law—rushed in, a gentlewoman following behind them in measured steps, moving ahead of them while they blocked the door.

Hob flicked a glance over to Dream, who was sitting very still—not revealing himself for what he was, not giving anything away.

"Since you seem so certain on the topic," the lady said, "I have a question about original forms—yours, in particular."

Dream's eyebrows tilted up a fraction. Hob sat back in his chair, eyeing the men, who stood with their knives out but did not immediately attempt to lay hands on him or on Dream.

"Please, please," she went on, "do not trouble yourselves to rise. These are Michael and Tobias, smugglers by trade—although they're only too glad to augment their earnings by slitting throats. If you move, they'll slit yours."

Hob looked them over again more carefully—their blades, their stances. They did indeed have the look of men who ran more than they fought, and would take coin to do a bit of easy violence against the unarmed and defenseless. They were in no way prepared for what they were up against, but Hob saw no need to point that out just yet.

The woman went on quite fearlessly, looking pleased with herself. "They tell a tale in these parts, of the dreams folk dream every hundred years—of the Devil and the Wandering Jew, meeting in London to seal some pact of theirs with a night of wild fornication." She stepped forward, withdrawing a folded page from her skirts. "Two years ago, sewn into the shirt of a dead man, I found this."

She shook the sheet open and laid it down on the table where both he and Dream could see it, and Hob could not help his eyebrows rising and heat coming to his cheek; he dared a glance over and saw Dream looking very blank and cool.

The picture was of them, though hardly flattering in its caricatured style. They lay entwined in a coverlet, reclining on pillows, which were in fact neatly spread on the bed in this very room. The picture didn't show much, really, of what they were doing; apart from their bare shoulders it might have passed, not so very long ago, for two men simply sharing a bed in the way that people still often did in coaching inns and the like.

But there were the bare shoulders. And the lady had no doubt seen his flush, and drawn her own conclusions. Hob flicked another look at Dream, and caught Dream glancing at him, with what might have been the tiniest mote of concern.

Hob was absolutely leaving London tonight, of course, but here and now, the secret was already mostly out.

He let the paper lie, and settled back in his seat. "We are lawfully wed, I'll have you know," Hob said. "So there has not been even a whiff of wild fornication. Just very proper connubial bliss—apart from people spying on us in their dreams, apparently, though this is the first I've heard of it."

"My fault, I fear," Dream said, sounding perfectly composed and more mildly bored than afraid. "Perhaps I thought it would do the people of this island some good to at least dream of satisfying lovemaking, once in a great while. Clearly they have not appreciated it."

The lady glanced between them, seeming very faintly put out by their failure to react more interestingly. "Yet you have not revealed the truth of your forms."

"I am as you see," Dream said. "No Devil."

"And I'm not Jewish," Hob put in. He gestured at the page. "Suppose your peeping tom didn't get a good enough view to spot that."

"Fie," the lady said, though Hob thought she looked a tiny bit amused. "What manner of creatures are you, then?"

All to the good if they could turn this into a bit of bantering, a chat around the table. Hob sat back more emphatically and asked, "Who wants to know?"

"I'm Lady Johanna Constantine," she said, as if that meant something. "You will both follow me, sirs. My coach is without. Even if I am not..." Her gaze fell to the picture again, "precisely to your particular tastes... I know there is much you can tell me. So much I can learn."

For half a second Hob considered it; he doubted he could teach her much, really, but she looked like she might not mind having a good time instead of learning secrets of immortality and all that. Dream, though...

"No," Dream said. "No, I think not."

Well, no. Hob supposed that was no surprise.

Lady Johanna looked mildly exasperated and turned away, apparently imagining that her two thugs were sufficient to manage what she believed were two beings of great and unnatural power.

One of them, Tobias, stepped in toward Hob just as he raised his chocolate cup to his lips. He gestured toward Hob's face with his knife as he said, "Get up."

Dream still didn't move; Dream wouldn't have to move, to do whatever he liked about this situation. But he hadn't told Hob not to, and Hob was rather angry about having his very pleasant evening interrupted, so he did get up—flinging the remains of his hot drink into one man's eyes, smashing the cup into the other's face. Barely time to breathe and he had both men down and was going after Lady Johanna, only to have her spin on her heel and thrust out a dagger nearly into his nose.

Hob did stop short at that, considering his options, but Dream said, "Wait."

Lady Johanna's expression warmed slightly with satisfaction: she thought Dream was ready to bargain.

Hob knew Dream hadn't been speaking to her. He waited, and a bit of sand blew in from over his shoulder and covered the lady's face, and Hob had a sudden memory of Dream promising on their wedding day: My sand will never harm you, husband.

Clearly, it was well able to harm others. Lady Johanna's eyes went white, her knife hand fell to her side and the knife clattered on the floor, and her expression went fearful as she whispered, "No. No, not you. I'm sorry..."

Hob turned back to find Dream had now risen to his feet. "What did you do to her? Killing would have been cleaner, and ended the threat."

"She has old ghosts that I've shown to her," Dream said. "I think that will be a sufficient lesson in the dangers of approaching us. And... she is a rare woman. She may have her uses yet."

Hob raised an eyebrow and said, quite without thinking, "Should I be jealous?"

Dream raised an eyebrow right back, and Hob winced. "No, obviously not. But..."

Hob took a cautious half-step toward him, and Dream was there, arms around Hob, catching his mouth in a heated kiss before he could say anything else even stupider.

"You need not have come to my defense," Dream murmured, while his whole body pressed against Hob's to tell him how very pleased he was that Hob had.

"Clearly," Hob said, nearly a laugh against Dream's lips. "But you can't blame me for wanting to show off a bit, when I get the chance."

"No indeed," Dream said, and then his gaze darted sideways—obviously not interested in taking this any further with Lady Johanna in the room.

"Back to yours for the rest of the night?" Hob offered. "No interruptions there."

"No," Dream said slowly, easing back a little and looking at Hob again, then around the room. "No, but... clearly I have not kept our nights as private as they should be. I must see to that, and encourage the other dreamers to forget what they may have seen."

Hob forced himself to take a step back, tugged on his ear instead of reaching for Dream again. He could hear the no in Dream's words, and he wasn't going to push for more—that had never got him anywhere. "I suppose we must be cautious."

"Always," Dream agreed, and gestured in a way that once again gathered the bedcovers up into a compact bundle Hob could carry away even if he went out a window.

Hob brushed his hands over his clothes, wondering what little alterations he might find when he examined them. Then he looked back to Dream, who was still standing there, still watching him. "A hundred years, then?"

Dream smiled slightly and nodded, and it felt like as much of a promise as their wedding vows: Dream would live on, and would come for him, and Hob couldn't ask for more than that right now. "A hundred years."

Notes:

If you'd like to say hello on Tumblr, yell about this update, or give this story a reblog, the post is here!

Chapter 11: Interlude - 1794-1884

Summary:

Hob receives a visit in 1794 which changes the course of his plans for the rest of the century, and changes many other things as well.

Notes:

This was going to be shorter and then I thought: why on earth would I leave this stuff out?

Many thanks to Pellaaearien for beta, and to everyone who is still with me on this ride! Only three more chapters to go and they should be coming along pretty briskly now!

1794

Hob had always been careful to keep away from witches, magicians, and anyone who stank of power or immortality, ever since he'd seen someone spot his wedding ring back in his first life. Dream and his siblings were plenty of dangerously powerful folk to have in his life, and Hob had never fancied being a hostage or a pawn, and knew well that he had no power of his own to bargain with.

But Lady Johanna Constantine already knew what he was—or that he was something, anyway—and had already had a strong warning from Dream to leave them both alone. Hob had left London after their meeting and stayed away a few years—got busy smuggling a few friends out of France and so on—but when he returned to England, he looked for her.

She wasn't all that hard to find; she had a big manor house outside of London and all. Hob didn't really need to know more than that, not now. Not yet. He simply kept tabs, paid a servant or two to let him know when she was away from home for an extended period, and when she returned.

He was still waiting for word of her return from Paris—wondering whether he ought to go himself and see how she was faring there—when he received a late visitor at his townhouse in London.

Lady Johanna Constantine was far more plainly dressed than when he had seen her last, and though just five years had passed she looked older. Tired, perhaps; her time in Paris could not have been a pleasure trip.

"Come in, sit," Hob said, gesturing to an armchair by the fire; the autumn night was still reasonably mild, but he had the feeling that Lady Johanna felt it more than he did. He poured her a brandy without inquiring about her preference and pressed it into her hand before sitting down opposite.

He barely saw the way she sniffed the glass; the sigil she traced with a finger was more obvious, but she only closed her eyes and threw back a healthy gulp, so she evidently found nothing to alarm her.

Hob found himself fidgeting with his ring, waiting for her to speak, and when she did open her eyes, her gaze went directly to it.

"Lawfully wed, you claimed."

As if that conversation had been five minutes ago, and not five years—but then, Hob remembered it just as vividly as she apparently did.

He nodded, and gave his ring another little twist. "Not, admittedly, according to any law of England, but yes. For quite some time now."

Lady Johanna nodded slowly, thoughtfully, then said, "He was married once before, you know," and flicked her eyes, whip-sharp, to his face.

Hob raised his brows. "Yes, so his sisters told me before I consented to marry him. Divorced, la, what a scandal," Hob added, pressing his left hand to his chest, letting the ring shine in the firelight.

Lady Johanna's lips twitched, but no smile came anywhere near her eyes. "Would that make you a stepfather, to a child of that marriage?"

Hob's hand, resting playfully on his chest, clenched involuntarily at the jolt of pain that ran through him at that thought. He had wondered before—had wished Dream would think of himself as a stepfather to Hob's child, children—had seen that pain in Dream that mirrored his own and hadn't dared to ask.

Movement startled him out of his incoherently whirling thoughts: Lady Johanna had leaned toward him, sitting on the edge of her seat, and her expression was open and wondering. "It would, then," she said softly, studying him in apparent fascination.

"If only my wishes are consulted in the matter, certainly," Hob managed, his voice far too hoarse for the simple words. "My husband might feel quite differently."

Lady Johanna nodded slowly, still looking at him with that sudden bright hopefulness. "Do you speak to him often? Will he know where you go, what you do? To whom you speak?"

"I don't know what he knows, or how," Hob admitted frankly, unable to prevaricate when his heart was thudding with a hope that mirrored hers, though he had no idea what he was hoping for. "But he doesn't seem to look in on me terribly often, and we only meet every hundred years. It was arranged, you know."

Lady Johanna arched an eyebrow. "You seemed to be... rubbing along tolerably well, when I met you both."

"We make it work," Hob agreed, unable to be distracted by the mild innuendo. "But enough about my husband. Tell me."

"Well," Lady Johanna said, sitting back in her chair, cradling her glass as she might a lover's hand. "That is a tale indeed."

---

Climbing the long sea stair with his arm looped through Lady Johanna's, Hob was reminded absurdly of his wedding day, entering Destiny's garden on Desire's arm. He felt far more nervous today than he had on that day, four hundred and more years ago. Lady Johanna was... probably fractionally less dangerous than his sibling-in-law, though it surely would not do to voice that comparison to either one of them.

When there were only ten steps left to the top of the cliff, Lady Johanna stopped, and released Hob's arm. "I'll leave you here. Write to me with any news you can share."

"You're sure?" Hob asked, one last time, as if they had not debated this already for weeks on the journey from London. "You won't come?"

She only shook her head, declining to be drawn into another argument over what it really meant that both Orpheus and Dream had warned her against returning. She called out in a raised voice, in Greek.

Two white-robed men bearing swords appeared at the top of the stair.

"You know me," she called up to them. "I have brought your lord's stepfather to meet his stepson. He too has Death's gift upon him, so violence will avail you nothing."

The two sheathed their swords, and the one on the left said, in heavily accented English, "So our lord has told us. Please, Lord Robert, he awaits you."

Hob looked over at Johanna, unable to speak for the sudden feeling of butterflies filling his chest.

She smiled, her eyes shining just a little too bright, and whispered, "Don't keep him waiting any longer. Go."

Hob touched the pocket where he carried the letter she had already given him, and he nodded and then hurried up the remaining stairs, taking them two at a time with no thought at all for the sheer drop beside him.

His stepson was waiting.

Hob stopped short when he was properly at the top, where a small lawn surrounded a surprisingly large white marble temple. There were also two men in those white robes bearing not swords but rifles. Hob nodded to them as he approached, noting their not-entirely-expert grips on their weapons.

"Might want a few artillery pieces," he offered, "if you want something with proper authority to defend our lad."

The men looked like they had something to say to that, but they were all distracted by a beautiful, musical laugh floating out from within the temple. Hob couldn't help but move toward that sound, nearly running by the time he reached the door of the temple, only to stop short.

Lady Johanna had described the room, and had described Orpheus, and still, nothing had quite prepared him for the sight of the young man's head resting on its plinth in the middle of the beautiful, barren room.

Hob was reminded, viscerally and bizarrely, of his wedding night: the first time he had seen the room Dream made for himself at the heart of the Dreaming, vast and empty and bare around the one thing the room was for. A bed, there. Here, Orpheus was alone in a room much like that one, too big, too bare and empty. Beautiful, but in the way whitened bones were beautiful. Or tombs.

And yet, it wasn't just Dream's boy who was tucked away in such a place. It was Dream himself, still ninety-five years away from their next meeting.

Hob shook off that thought and stepped further forward, dropping automatically to one knee to look his stepson in the eye. "Hello there," Hob said. "Robert Gadling, at your service. I'd have been here sooner, but your father somehow neglected to tell me I'd gained a son when I married him."

"It would have been very strange if he did speak of me," Orpheus said, smiling with a sheen of tears in his eyes. "It was millennia before you were born that I told him he was no father of mine. And yet..."

"He did arrange the priests for you, and this place," Hob said softly. "And he sent Johanna."

Some little spasm of feeling crossed Orpheus' face at her name, and he made a little almost-motion—not exactly a nod, but the idea of one. "He did. So I think, despite everything I said, and everything he said, he is still my father. And that does, I suppose, make you my stepfather."

Hob grinned. "Glad to hear it, though I want you to know I was prepared to put some effort into convincing you. Now I can get straight to work on winning you over."

Orpheus blinked quickly and his expression settled into a sort of distant benevolence. "You need not win me over, Stepfather. Anything I can do—"

"Anything you can do!" Hob echoed back, and shook his head hard. "Not the way that works, dear boy. I'm your stepfather, and you must put me through my paces, see me prove that I'm going to be a good husband to your father, a good parent to you. You must tell me what I can do to help, or failing that, how I might brighten your days. This place seems awfully lonely, and I won't have that."

The distance went out of Orpheus' expression, replaced for a moment by a sheer bafflement that made him look quite a lot like his father. Then he smiled a little and said, "Well, if you are going to insist, I suppose you may read that letter you brought me, then."

"From Johanna," Hob agreed, watching again as that little flicker of some other expression entirely crossed Orpheus' face. He mustn't tease, of course, but... well, it would certainly bear watching, as they went along.

"I suppose I should have known that she would not be easily deterred," Orpheus murmured. "Perhaps you will even be so good as to assist me in writing back?"

"Nothing I'd like better," Hob assured him. "I've got pen and ink and paper too. Everything we need," he glanced around the bare room, "except perhaps something to sit on. And write on. Well, I can rough it."

---

1804

"You haven't got feet," Hob pointed out, "so I don't know why you have such cold ones. You've been looking forward to Vienna for ages, you've written me a dozen letters about it since I saw you last."

"I am looking forward to it," Orpheus said miserably. "I've been corresponding with Pietro—you remember Pietro—"

Hob had spent a month scouring Vienna for a violinist who could also sing unaccompanied, who was willing to be hired to spend a winter in Greece singing all the latest music of the season to a man he would never see. He remembered Pietro.

"And Johanna, of course, though her descriptions of music are..." Orpheus trailed off with a little chuckle.

"And now they might see you," Hob filled in. "And other people might see you. And the music might not live up to all you've imagined from their descriptions."

"No, it—I'm sure—I've even—" Orpheus, Hob had observed before, was somehow able to blush, and it was a wonder to behold every time. "I've seen. I know the music will be wonderful."

Hob brushed his knuckles gently over Orpheus' flaming cheek. "Something else? Some danger?"

Orpheus gave his little almost-headshake. "No, I... not that sort of danger, not anything that need worry you."

"Just the sort of danger that comes of seeing Pietro after all those months of mystery, and seeing Johanna again, after keeping to letters for ten solid years. Scars don't put you off, do they? She's got a few new ones. And a few gray hairs, though she'll stab me for saying so."

Orpheus frowned at that, looking a little taken aback, so much as he could. "She sent me a pencil sketch of the new scars, but..."

His gaze went distant, in the way that Hob had learned to recognize when he was thinking of his lost Eurydice, who had died on their wedding day—far too young to ever grow a gray hair.

"It's been ten years," Hob said gently. "Nothing to you or me, but she's already forty-four, my lad, and she lives a dangerous life. How many more chances have you got to let her see you? How many more glorious disasters does she have time for? How many symphonies are you going to get to sit through together?"

Orpheus' mouth firmed to a little line, and he met Hob's eyes steadily. "At least one," he said. "And then as many as we can get away with."

Hob grinned. "That's my boy. Come on now, your chariot awaits."

The chariot was in fact a Bath chair, with what looked for all the world like a very well-dressed headless man already sitting in it. Two of Orpheus' priests flanked it, now dressed for travel in the livery of very senior attendants—plenty of gilt buttons stamped with an obscure crest, to give the proper idea of Orpheus' standing.

Hob set him in place and adjusted the folds of silk cravat around him. "How's that? Comfortable?"

Orpheus eyed the cliff. "Am I... really riding all the way down in this? You said, in the city..."

Hob laughed. "Right, then, if you're going to be sensible I'll carry you down to the boat. Your gentlemen can carry the chair."

Halfway down the long cliff stair, nearly lost under the sound of the sea, Orpheus said, "Thank you for insisting, Stepfather."

"So formal," Hob returned. "If you won't call me Hob, let's have Papa, at least."

The tiniest smile crooked the corner of Orpheus' mouth. "Very well. Papa."

---

1824

Hob could just about feel the rifleman's sights on him all the way up the cliff stair. He had trained most of the ones on active guard duty, by now, and drilled them all very sternly. They knew who he was. They knew that if Orpheus wished him to be forcefully rebuffed, they were expected to put that bullet between his eyes—and to carry his letters about the matter in the days that followed, since that would only slow him down so much.

Today, however, the rifleman who covered the top of the stair stepped out of concealment when Hob was ten feet away, and gave him a sympathetic look. "Glad to see you," he murmured, offering Hob a hand up over the last few stairs, which Hob was content to take. It was a bloody long stair. "He's... been very quiet."

Hob nodded, taking that to mean that Orpheus hadn't mentioned that he expected Hob. He might not have looked, of course. He didn't, sometimes. He liked to be surprised now and then.

And then, of course, sometimes he didn't look because he was rather too much like his father, and inclined to believe that he already knew what was coming without needing any oracular powers.

Hob headed over to the temple. There were other little buildings around it now—the cottage where Hob usually stayed when he visited, and well away from it, the cottage where both Johanna and Pietro stayed when they visited, separately or together. Johanna had brought children several times in the fifteen years since she'd begun visiting— possibly her own, or her children's children, or other family members, or vague undefined wards. Hob had never attempted to pin down exact relationships. Johanna seemed dedicated to sharing every joy she could with Orpheus, whether here on the island or in the cities they visited, and Orpheus' eyes lit up for the children in a way even the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth had not inspired.

And yet, less than three months after that glorious premiere, the island was silent and still, and Orpheus the only resident.

Apart from the priests. Hob had never inquired into where they lived.

All thoughts of priest-barracks and long walks before morning shifts dropped from Hob's mind when he entered the temple and saw Orpheus there on his plinth, just like the first time. All the art and furnishings had been put away into a few plain chests, and even the writing desk was cleared and empty, pushed around behind him where he would not see it.

Orpheus looked much less glad to see him, this time, and Hob winced. He'd gone wrong somewhere, clearly. Only one way to find out how.

Hob went and knelt before the plinth. Orpheus had his eyes closed, managing to give the impression of hunched shoulders and bowed head with just his expression. "Here, love," Hob murmured. "What's this, then? Hiding from me like I've promised you a whipping? Hiding from everyone who loves you?"

Orpheus let out a little sob. "I know they—I know—it is selfish of me. They only have so much time. Why should I have so much more? Why—only to lose—"

"Shh," Hob murmured, tears rolling down his own cheeks unregarded as he wiped them away from Orpheus', wishing he could do more. Hard to hug the boy properly, when he was like this. "Shh, no, no. You can't think of it that way, you'll run mad. Trust me, I know, I've tried. They come into your life, and you love them the best you can, while you can. But—what's selfish, then?"

"I just—it's so much. I love Vienna, I do, I love spending time there, and in London, and Paris now it's settled down, and I love having them all here, but it's so much. So loud, so busy, so—"

"Right," Hob murmured, trying to imagine spending all the time between 1389 and now alone on this island with one of those over-reverent priests who used to tend Orpheus. And then being flung into spending half of every year—or whole years together—in the most glittering capitals of Europe. It would be altogether too much—especially the way Orpheus experienced it, being a sensitive soul who could never leave a concert or party without troubling someone to take him. It was good, really, that he'd been able to have his men bring him to the island when he needed to come back.

"Yes. Too long a fast, and then too much cake, no wonder if you feel a bit sick, my dear. Anyone would. Jo will understand, and she'll explain to Pietro and the children and whoever else is wondering about you; she'll understand that you need some peace for a while. We only need to know you're safe, that's all."

"Safe," Orpheus hissed, as if it were a filthy word. "As my father intended me to be."

Hob winced. It had been a few years since Orpheus had had a good rage on this topic; he was probably due, and he'd rather have Orpheus raging than cringing. Hob got comfortable on his knees and settled in to listen for as long as Orpheus needed to talk.

---

1844

Johanna had a Bath chair of her own these days, being well into her eighties, but that spark of mischief remained in her eyes—and she was still a dab hand with a pistol, and put Orpheus' guards through their paces nearly every day.

Just now, however, she was napping in the sunshine, her face tipped back toward the sky. Orpheus, lying in her lap, looked up at her, smiling slightly as her fingers twitched against his cheek.

Hob, sitting in the grass by Johanna's chair, ready to jump up for anything either of them needed, murmured, "Penny for 'em?"

Orpheus' gaze shifted down to Hob, and his smile remained in place. "I was just thinking that her hair is nearly all white now, and... I dream sometimes—not so often, anymore, but still, sometimes—I dream of Eurydice that way. With white hair, and our grandchildren playing in our garden."

Hob remained unclear on how any of the children in the garden were related to Johanna, but they all called Orpheus—and Hob himself—uncle, so... close enough, it seemed. Orpheus was smiling, anyway, even at the mention of Eurydice.

"Here you are," Hob offered. "A family man. A dream come true."

Orpheus laughed at that, startled but also pleased. "Yes, indeed, Papa. Here I am. A dream come true."

---

1864

The grass had grown over Johanna's grave on the little island, and Hob was beginning to feel confident that the family Orpheus had adopted and been adopted by, through her, wasn't going to evaporate. In fact, twelve-year-old John Constantine and his four-year-old brother Peter—not destined for the inheriting line of the family, it seemed—had moved to the island more or less full time. The currently active Constantines, a couple of generations down from Johanna, were apparently too busy to look after them and considered Uncle Orry's place the safest option. The priests didn't seem to mind, and often brought their own children to play with the boys, though none were in evidence today.

The boys were quite accustomed to seeing Orpheus unadorned, and were not at all uncomfortable with him, though Peter had a disconcerting tendency to pick Orpheus up and carry him off somewhere while Hob wasn't looking. Vexingly, Orpheus could not be persuaded to simply call out when Peter carried him away; he said he enjoyed their adventures far too much.

Orpheus being perched on his padded-clothing body in the Bath chair inspired Peter to sit in his lap, instead, which was much to be preferred in terms of avoiding accidents or uncomfortable surges of panic on Hob's part, so that was the program today.

Hob was gently prodding John through studying his Latin, and Peter was cuddling one stuffed arm while Orpheus whistled, making fallen petals from the cherry tree dance in different patterns. When Hob looked down to see how the declensions were coming along, he found John frowning in Peter's direction. Before he could remind John that he was older and therefore had these responsibilities to his schooling, John said, "Uncle Orpheus, can you make other things move with music?"

"I suppose so," Orpheus said, letting the petals fall. He looked down at Peter and whistled a different tune, ruffling the boy's fair hair and making him smile, and then looked over at Hob and John and hummed a few lower notes before singing something that made Hob's brain rattle a bit, but also plucked the pen from John's fingers, making him smile as brightly as Peter.

---

1884

"You're sure you don't mind?" Hob asked again, sorting through little trinkets and keepsakes, trying to decide which to pack for London, and which to leave behind. He needed to establish himself properly, get settled—get back to a more ordinary life, after a very leisurely decade spent here on the island or drifting around the Mediterranean with Orpheus. It was a far cry from the way he used to spend his periods between English lives, and he was not sure whether it was himself or Orpheus he was fretting about now.

"Of course I don't, Papa. You must go, naturally."

Hob looked sharply over at Orpheus; there was a certain tone in his voice that Hob had learned to recognize. "Ought I not? Have you seen...?"

Orpheus twiddled several of the bits and bobs on Hob's desk, showing off how he could manipulate them, distracting them both.

"I have seen that you go, as you mean to. It is your time to meet with him, or will be soon enough; that is a promise you have both made, and I would not ask you to break it."

Hob blew out a breath. "I'm going to fuck it up, aren't I?"

"You will do as you will do," Orpheus said, still not meeting his gaze, so, yes, Hob was going to fuck it up.

"Well, if it's as bad as all that, I can still come and stay here, can't I?"

Hob felt frantic, in the instant before Orpheus answered, that he might say no, that this haven might be closed to him after 1889, and he might lose his place in this unruly and inexplicable family.

But Orpheus' gaze came up quickly this time, looking actually startled. "You are always welcome here, Papa. Even if my father is more foolish than I have ever seen, you will always be welcome. This is your home. I think it was your home before I could ever think of it as mine."

Hob opened his mouth, but no words came out. Orpheus was speaking in that way he had sometimes, half-hypnotizing with something beyond mere eloquence or charm, for all that the substance of what he said squeezed Hob's heart near to breaking.

"My father gave me a temple, and a succession of priests," Orpheus insisted. "When you came here, you gave me a family, and you made my exile a new home for me. It will always be as much a home for you as well."

A home for Hob, but not, of course, for Dream. Dream had never come back to see Orpheus—clearly had never noticed, in ninety years, that his husband and his son had become family to each other without him. That was his own fault, no doubt.

Still... Hob had given all he could to his stepson, these last ninety years, and still had never managed to give more than perhaps a sip of drinking chocolate and a little diverting violence to Dream. He'd offered things Dream refused to accept, but he'd never managed to really give him anything, and surely that wasn't right. Surely, if he ever meant to be a real husband—the whole basis of his relationship to Orpheus, after all—he had to offer Dream something that mattered.

"Oh," Orpheus said softly, and Hob picked his head up sharply, to see his stepson's gaze gone very distant indeed.

He waited quietly until Orpheus came back from seeing whatever it was, feeling as if he were waiting for a verdict.

When Orpheus smiled, Hob did too, and Orpheus said, "Whatever you were thinking of, just then... I think you should."

"Well," Hob said, ideas swirling. "All right, then. I suppose I will."