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It’s been three months, four days, and a few hours since Hob last saw his stranger – though less a stranger now than he had been before.
Dream. And a whole list of fancy epithets, besides, most of which he had promptly filed away under ‘unlikely to be relevant to me, and also highly concerning to think too hard about’ (though the part of him that is and always will be a medieval peasant had almost taken the knee upon hearing King of Nightmares). Yet Dream had reassured him that here, in the comfortable lightness and safety of The New Inn, he was…perhaps not on vacation, but at least not actively working.
Hob is still not entirely sure what ‘work’ consists of for a being who calls himself the Lord of Dreams, but he looks forward to finding out. He looks forward to the next century, and the next, and the next, because when Dream had stood to leave, those months ago, when Hob had said, “A hundred years, then?” with his heart in his throat, he’d gotten a soft smile in return. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his friend smile quite like that. He wasn’t sure he ever had.
“I’m given to understand that friends see each other more often than once a century,” he’d said. And Hob had said, “Right. Yes. Any time. Really, any time,” and had meant it with a breathless sort of sincerity, like taking an oath before an altar.
And now it has been three months, and four days, and he won’t admit to counting the precise hours, despite how he knows in his heart that, if he were given a clock, he would be able to tell down to the minute. His best quality, he thinks wryly. The patience of a saint. He’s come to terms with it over the course of a few hundred years, but there are times it galls him – the waiting. The held breath.
Not today. It’s been three months and four days, and the memory of that smile still buoys him as sure as any lifejacket, keeping him above the water of the past hundred and thirty-three years of uncertainty. Dream had said the words more than once a century like they were made of stone, like he meant them, and Hob, as he always has done (as, he suspects, he always will), takes them to his heart and etches them there.
And here is another thing he has come to terms with, over the course of his long life but, specifically, over the course of the past two centuries: he loves. He loves life, he loves his job, almost every job he’s ever had (with a few extremely notable exceptions), he loves the people he’s met, the experiences he’s had, and with every year that passes he feels that love lift him higher and ground him deeper. He walks through life in a cloud of the stuff, constantly enamored with how things change, with how they stay the same, how the technology gets smaller and the problems get bigger, and yet. And yet he loves it, all of it. He loves…
He loves all of it. Including Dream. Aye, there’s the rub, if he’s feeling particularly self-deprecating. He loves Dream. Has loved this beautiful, distant stranger, as untouchable as a white-hot star, since he’d seen him walk through the door of the White Horse in 1489 and had realized that he had the whole road of eternity spooling out before him, and he did not have to walk it alone.
He thinks it even now, rolls it across the palate of his mind like champagne or pop-rocks, something sweet and effervescent and charged with electricity. It’s good to be in love. Even when it hurts, even when nothing will ever come of it – because he’s no fool, he’d never expected anything to come of it even before he’d learned the man is a literal god-king – because love by its nature soothes as much as it stings, and Hob has had many years to learn how to ignore small hurts.
He waits. He sits at his table in The New Inn, this safe place he’s built where dreams and stories are always welcome, and he grades his papers, and his patience builds in his bones until they are unyielding and strong as steel, rooting him to this spot, this building, this one unchanging facet of his long and varied life. Him, living in full joy, and every so often glancing up, eyes drifting to the front door, hopefully expectant.
The door swings open, and Hob looks up, as automatic as a blink or a breath. He’s not expecting anything. It’s been three months and four days, six hours and thirty-nine minutes, and all he had been told was more than once a century.
Dream is standing in the doorway.
He looks like hell.
Hob’s on his feet and moving before he’s even consciously aware of the fact, because Dream is standing in the doorway in the sort of outfit he’d expect to see at a fetish club, razor-thin lines of mail so delicately wrought it shimmers like fish scales, miles of black leather, a long skirt that falls to the floor in cascades of some dense and shiny fabric, like silk. His hair is all at once spiked and wild and lank, it’s plastered to the side of his head with something dark and half-dried that Hob doesn’t want to think too hard about, and there’s a smear across his fine-boned temple, the thickened black-brown of crude oil.
He’s also carrying the most god-awful looking helmet Hob has ever seen, tucked underneath one arm. He looks tired. The entire Inn has gone silent. Hob’s heart thuds against his ribs – he recognizes armor when he sees it, strange and beautiful though it may be.
“My friend!” he calls out, loud, obvious, and Dream’s eyes snap to him, focusing as obviously as a camera lens, but slow. Fuck, but he doesn’t just look tired, he looks exhausted. He looks like he hasn’t had a moment’s rest in months. Hob remembers Burgundy, remembers Agincourt, countless other campaigns and skirmishes that had left him lying beside a watchfire or crawling atop a straw bed and feeling like all his blood was slowly thickening in his veins, rendering his muscles still and painful and hard as stone.
He grabs Dream’s shoulder, the adrenaline of the moment making him bold, and he doesn’t miss the wince that accompanies the touch. He tries to gentle his hand, even at the same time as he’s determinedly steering Dream towards the second floor stairway. “How was LARPing? Your outfit looks fantastic, is that real leather or the fake stuff?”
“Larping,” Dream repeats vaguely, mouth shaping around the word like it’s a piece of metal or glass he can feel with his tongue. An enthusiastically drunk man wearing a Tottenham shirt lifts his beer as they pass.
“That mask is cool as fuck,” he says, and Dream’s eyes go soft-focused as he swings his head slowly around, like a near-blind animal tracking through an empty room. One of his hands has found Hob’s hip, over his jeans, and lingers there, fingers resting light as spring, light as dandelion fluff; Hob feels it like a brand all the way through the denim. This close he smells uncomfortably like ozone, like the suck of air before a fire, like something dark and meaty and the consistency of fresh tar.
“Made it himself,” Hob says, and steers Dream up the stairs, slowly, one step at a time. Dream lifts each foot as though it’s made of lead, and the hand on his hip completes the stabilizing triangle of Hob, Dream, the banister. They troop upstairs, the pitch and timbre of the Inn below them slowly ramping back up, the clinking of glass, the mild cacophony of chiming phones and enthusiastic chatter. It’s not yet four in the evening, still too early for the bar to be in full swing, and Hob is grateful for it. It means that the sounds that filter up through the floorboards of his flat are muted, velvety in quality, when he finally gets the door open and guides Dream inside.
“Fuck,” he mutters, and together they sway over to Hob’s beaten and battered sofa, where he lowers Dream down to the cushions with the sort of care he’d usually reserve for someone with a broken bone. The exhaustion, the sweat, the fact that he’s wearing armor, for there’s no doubt in his mind that’s what it is, all of these things are a yammer of new sensory input that’s crying out for gentleness.
He’s a born sucker, his heart tender as a dog leaning its side against a steady leg. He cannot stop his hand from reaching out and sweeping sweat-damp hair from Dream’s forehead. “What happened, my friend?”
My friend. It feels near as good in his mouth as the brain-feel of love, and better still, Dream does not discount it. He’s sitting ramrod-straight, his hands planted into the cushions alongside him and fingers flexing against the worn fabric, the helm deposited next to him, a glass-eyed monstrosity that reminds Hob of pictures of macro photos of moths and weevils. There’s a protrusion from the bottom of it that looks like it’s made of a spine.
He kneels in front of the sofa, in front of Dream, daring to touch again – he rests a hand on Dream’s knee, and again the eyes flicker. They’re far stranger than usual, the pupils dilating in asynchronous tandem, eclipsing the seastorm blue until the entire eye is swirled in inks and indigos and a single bright, white light at the center, glowing like a mote of sunlight.
“Where,” Dream says, and then stops, searching for words that don’t seem to be forthcoming. Hob makes a guess.
“You’re in my flat,” he says. “Above The New Inn? Do you remember walking through the door?”
“I remember everything.” He’s picking at the green tartan of the cushion. “Larping?”
Laughter bubbles up – he snorts, and Dream looks vaguely offended. Vaguely, because everything about him seems vague, right now, from the inconstancy of his eyes to the soft downward turn of his mouth.
“Live action role-playing,” he says, and Dream tilts his head. “Bunch of people dressing like elves and wizards and smacking each other with pool noodles.”
“I was not larping.”
“Yeah, I figured, but you show up dressed like this in a public place, people are going to ask questions.”
For the first time, Dream looks down at himself, brows furrowed, following the cut of his armor and then skirting aside to the helmet that sits next to him. His mouth forms a tiny ‘o,’ so barely open that if Hob weren’t trained towards him he would never know.
“Ah,” he says, and then falls silent. Hob takes a chance; his hand is already on Dream’s knee, and now he moves it in slow circles, thumb rubbing through the rustle of leather and some other fall of cloth, something thick, but slippery and cool. He can feel the rise of ligaments beneath the skin, the knobby bump of his patella, and some latent Victorian instinct in him shudders with delight. “Do you want to talk? About what happened?”
“No,” Dream says, and then, a second later, “Yes.” Hob waits. He rubs circles against Dream’s knee. The leather is soft as butter, soft as a retriever’s mouth; he imagines he can feel the heat of Dream’s skin beneath it, blazingly chill, cold to the point of being warm again.
“There are those.” Dream stops. Seems to think. He’s never been like this, not that Hob has seen. Always, Dream’s words have seemed to come easily to him. Slowly and carefully, yes, but it had always felt like when he’d reached for something, the idea had leapt to him as eager as a loosed falcon. Now there is a distant muzziness to the feel of his words, a lulling vibration that underscores them. Bone-deep weariness. “Those who would attempt to unseat me. From my throne. Old gods. New. Parasites upon the Dreaming. My duty is not only to oversee, but to defend.” Each word is dragged from him kicking and screaming, discordant pauses filled only by the sound of Hob breathing and the rustle of leather and mail.
Finally, Dream says, “I have been away for too long. I underestimated how bad the…infestation. Would be. But it is done.”
Hob thinks back to his limited experience with kings and courts, his significantly more nuanced memories of war. Tries to reconcile that knowledge with the being sitting on his sofa, luminously pale in the dusty golden late-afternoon light streaming through the living room windows. ”Do you have a doctor? A…a physician, someone who can look you over?”
Dream blinks. The sort of blink that turns into a resting of the eyes, dark smudged lashes lingering on the shelf of his marble-smooth cheek. His eyes, when they open again, are no longer the vortex-swirl of bruisy blue and pupil, but a deep wellspring of black, stretched from edge to edge, no sign of sclera nor iris remaining. There’s only the beautiful, glittering light in the center, a pale laser reflected through a prism.
“I do not need a doctor,” Dream says. Hob doesn’t bother to contest this. He knows a losing argument when he sees one. “Only a moment to…rest.”
“And you came here.” The words leave him before he can think them through, birds flying from an opened cage and scattering into uncatchable hundreds. Dream’s eyes focus again, the white starlight fixed on him. Studying Hob with the intensity of combustion, the dense weight of gravity.
“Yes,” Dream says eventually. “I came here.”
God’s wounds, Hob thinks. Oh, Christ help me. His heart clamors like an ancient clock, the pendulum swing of his emotion. It chimes loud enough to rattle his ribs, to bruise that tender organ. He wants to weep. He wants, absurdly, to take Dream’s hand and kiss it.
“Right,” he says, and gives Dream’s knee a squeeze. “Let’s get you settled, then.”
He leaves Dream on the sofa, absently flexing and extending his fingers against the fabric and seeming perfectly content to experience his moment of rest with a spring sticking near-directly into his spine from where Hob’s collapsed onto the old beast one too many times. He tries to think of the things he would have dreamt of, weary and heartsore, on the long march from Agincourt back to England. A good meal, a pint of beer, a soft bed. Years later, when the money had first trickled, and then flooded in, the guilty pleasure of a hot bath. That had been a revelation, the heat sinking into his bones, scouring away the dirt and the sweat and the exhaustion, until he’d felt near lightheaded with it.
He thinks of Dream’s hair, the worst it’s ever looked, normally as flyaway and soft-looking as eiderdown, now stuck down to his skull in haphazard patches. The smear of ichor on his brow. How he’d winced and trudged his way up the stairs.
Right. Bath first. Then food and drink. Then sleep, if sleep is even something Dream can do. With a plan of action in place, Hob feels himself kick into motion again, the constant need to keep pushing forward drumming up his blood. He sets to tasks with single minded focus, and he’s now absurdly glad that, when he’d designed the flat, he had done so with creature comforts in mind. A sitting room large enough to house his most important keepsakes, a bedroom big enough for a king mattress, all the most modern kitchen appliances available at the time, and, yes, a shower and tub fit to hold multiple people, if it pleased him.
He swallows against that thought. Tries to think of Dream the way he would a fellow soldier, not a body to desire but an object to be mended. He’s not sure how successful he is, but it gets him through the filling of the tub. He tosses a few capfuls of scented oil into the mix – the thought of Dream sitting in a bubblebath fills him with a bizarre giddiness, but he suspects that’d be strongly pushing the envelope – and soon the bathroom is filled with cascading billows of steam and the smell of lavender and cedarwood, the oil sitting atop the water in a rich golden sheen.
Dream is still sitting on the sofa when Hob pokes his head out, but has graduated to examining the books laid on Hob’s coffee table. Some of them are the sorts of benign photography folios that make for conversation starters when nothing else is forthcoming, but mixed in amongst them are the real treasures: first and second and third editions of Dahl, Dickens, Brontë, and yes, a bit of that old twat Shaxberd, too. Yet the book that Dream has laying open on his lap is a reproduction of something even older – something he’s clearly fished around for, if the other books scattered haphazard across the table are any indication.
Le morte Darthur, the title reads. Hob knows the contents as well as he knows his own hands: the frontispiece in bold strokes of ink, Lancelot knelt before King Arthur with his head tilted back in supplication, his hair to his shoulders in loose waves, and Arthur dark-eyed and more than human, a hand extended – to kiss or to bless, Hob has never been able to decide between. He’d looked for ages for someone talented enough to render that fabled king to his specifications, and even now, more than five-hundred years later, he’s still rather proud of it.
“You found my first book,” he says, swiping his damp hand along the thigh of his jeans. Dream does not look up from where his fingers trace Arthur’s high cheeks and dark brows. “Or the reprint of it. The original is in archival storage. Too frail to handle now, alas.”
“All books that have ever been dreamt of. Can be found in my library.” There’s some strength creeping back into Dream’s voice, words coming more easily to his mouth. He still looks exhausted, but, perhaps, no longer quite as lost. He traces a pale finger over the frontispiece, and then across the spine to the title.
“Wynkyn de Worde,” he says, and Hob laughs.
“A wink and a word. Thought I was clever at the time. Now people just think I’m German.” He tucks his thumbs into his belt loops, drifting closer. Caught in the orbit of Dream rubbing the pads of his fingers over Lancelot’s face, over and over.
“This is you.” His finger moves over the shape of Lancelot’s shoulders, the faint stubble on his jaw, an artistic rendering of a scar upon his cheek that Hob now reaches up to scratch.
“Well,” he says.
“And me.” The finger has moved to King Arthur. The dark hair, weighed down by his crown but still so deeply blacked it’s like the night sky, and the proud brow, the perfectly carved chin and the pale mouth and the dark eyes. Perhaps most damning, the gem that hangs around his neck on a thin chain.
“One could…interpret it that way,” he hedges. Dream finally looks up, his ink-spilled gaze locking onto Hob with singular and devastating intensity.
“One could,” he says. His fingers follow the same path, from Lancelot to Arthur, over and over. Hob knows with a sudden and terrible finality that he will never be able to set this book on his coffee table again – it’s become a special thing, a loved thing, even moreso than its original printing languishing in perfectly preserved storage in Salfords. He doesn’t even know what he can do with it.
Put it on the bedside table, he thinks, something to fall asleep to. Now isn’t that an idea. He shakes himself, shakes out the longing and the wanting and the love that sits in the base of his throat like an expectant breath, and moves around the sofa to offer Dream his hand.
“Come on, your majesty,” he says. Dream looks up at him, his brows knit together; the book is set with gentle care on the cushion beside the helmet. The two sit side by side, the mundane and the fantastical, a bizarre comportment, and yet. “I’ve run a bath. Let’s get that armor off before it starts sticking to you.”
“I have no need of bathing. If I wish to be clean. I will be so.”
Hob says, “Right,” and does not take back his hand. “But I already filled the tub. Would be a shame for it to go to waste.”
Dream looks between the offered hand and Hob’s face for long seconds; he’s beautiful, and otherworldly, and now that he has sat for a moment, now that he’s had a chance to breathe, Hob can almost see the slow encroachment of reality creeping back in: how he stinks of lightning and something that’s almost blood but isn’t, how his hair is flat on one side and wildly spiked on the other, how the smear of blackish fluid on his brow has begun to go tacky at the edges.
“Very well,” he says, and takes Hob’s hand. He lets himself be pulled to his feet – he’s light as bird bones, a gleaming, shining sheet of aluminum, sharp-edged and easily crumpled – but staggers when Hob moves to let go. He’s quick to reel him back up, and Dream settles against his side like a puzzle piece, like he just fits there.
He tries not to think too hard on that. Tries not to linger on Dream’s soft, heavy voice saying This is you. And me., as if you and me were two halves of a whole. Wishful thinking, is what it is.
They stagger together to the bathroom, plumes of steam wisping into the hallway and dissipating into fragrant nothingness. There’s enough room for them to move about each other, but not by much, and Hob props Dream up against the wall like a mannequin and studies the armor with a frown. Once, he’d been used to mail and cuirasses and gambesons, but it’s been a hot minute since he’s needed to take them off another person. As a soldier, and a mercenary later on, he’d mostly been concerned with his own skin.
Still, no time like the present to learn. There’s a catch somewhere, and when Hob starts patting down the sides of Dream’s armor the look he gets makes the awkwardness fantastically worth it: confused, a little bit pissy, and then a slow, creeping fondness that comes on despite itself, visible there in the twitch of Dream’s mouth and the way that he slowly spins himself to the left, exposing a series of buckles and snaps cleverly hidden in a fold of leather along his side.
“This is beautiful,” Hob says. There’s just the sound of the bathwater rippling, the almost inaudible hum of the lights, the rustle of leather and their breathing, mutely echoed along the tile. He slips the leather tongue from its buckle, makes his way down the line until the armor sits loose along one side. Then he puts a hand on Dream’s hip, turns him to the right, and repeats the process: unbuckle, unsnap, the part of the leather. He can see a flash of white skin beneath – does Dream wear his armor directly against his skin? How has he not chafed himself bloody?
“I wore this armor. When I retrieved my helmet from Hell.”
Hob pauses. Attempts to fit this new information into his worldview, which he is becoming aware is intensely limited.
“Like, literal Hell?” he asks casually. Tries to be casual about it, but doesn’t succeed, based on the crinkle at the corner of Dream’s eyes, the soft exhale of laughter.
“Yes, Hob. Like literal Hell.”
“Ah. So it’s. Served you well, then?”
“It has served. Adequately. It is an extension of myself.”
“Mm. Good, uh. Good.” That explains the lack of chafing, then. Still, the thought that he is slowly stripping a layer of Dream’s self from him does something funny to Hob’s gut, a swooping feeling that he attempts to tamp down firmly and with extreme prejudice by focusing all the harder on getting the armor off. It’s perhaps not the most well-thought-through plan, but it works for the moment, the movement of fingers and buckles and leather enough to distract him until suddenly, there are no more buckles, and Dream turns himself towards Hob, blinking his slow blinks, his eyes like colliding stars, his mouth a gentleness, an amusement. He holds out his arms, the mail along his shoulders rustling musically, bouncing faint echoes off the walls.
“Will you disrobe me? Lancelot?”
Hob swallows. That is…uncomfortably close, he thinks, to something that he’s not keen to poke at unless he’s sure, and the trouble is, with Dream, he’s never sure. In 1789 he could have sworn that Dream found him, dare he say it, interesting; had intended, if Dream was amenable to his suggestion of another pub, to offer a drink in his room instead. Perhaps more. If he was amenable. And then a hundred years later he had dared to press his luck properly, and look where that had gotten him.
Safer, he thinks, to stay silent. To wait. To uncover the moonwashed body inch by inch as he draws the leather up and over Dream’s head to drape it on the counter, leaving him in just the armored skirt, and what look like thin metal bracers beneath his sleeves. These have clever catches hidden inside a bit of fiddly, ornate filigree, but once his thumbs find them they come free as easily as oiled springs, and he sets them with the armor, thumb touching the pulse at Dream’s wrist, the soft skin. He bites his tongue.
The skirt is a less complicated affair than the leathers, a thick fall of fabric that seems designed to obscure movement as much as hinder an incoming blade. Hob doesn’t know how a battle would work for Dream in his realm, if it’d be fought with swords and bows, or by other, more esoteric means, but beneath the fall of the skirt is more familiar territory: cuisses, poleyns, greaves, all in some beautiful wrought black metal peeking from between the folds of shimmering midnight fabric. He looks up again, to find Dream studying him intently, his brows knit together, his lips slightly parted. The sound of the water reflects off the tiles; Hob’s heart slams against his ribs so hard he worries it might be audible from space.
Dream leans himself back against the wall, a slow, pale ripple of ribs and skin, canting his hips out and sliding one foot forward in obvious offer. It curves his spine, pushes out his belly in a way that begs for Hob to touch his teeth there, to kiss the bird-sharp angle of his pelvis and hips, to follow with his nose the dark trail of hair that starts just above the leather waist of the skirt and thence disappears. His prick throbs a useless threat of wanting, blood rushing. Six-hundred years and he hasn’t yet discovered the secret to stop his cock from taking an interest at an inopportune moment, and he curses that oversight now.
He swallows. He kneels, his knee clicking faintly as he goes. He rucks up the skirt just enough for his fingers to find the buckles for the cuisse, a marching path along the inner thigh, and here at least Dream has some sort of padding, dark silk that floats from his skin like water. Hob makes his way down the line, his hands shaky as he finds the straps at the back of Dream’s knee, peels the poleyn free of him only for his fingertips to touch the hollow there, the softest thing he has ever felt in his life. Dream is still looking down at him, his chest an ordered rise and fall, his breathing the same rhythm as the lapping of the water.
The greave is last, more buckles, more cleverly-hidden straps that Hob’s shaking fingers undo; the metal is light as tin but hard as cold iron when he sets it aside on the floor, creating a neat pile of armaments – he’ll take them aside later, see if they need cleaning or oiling. It’s difficult to look at them for too long, something about the deep blackness drawing the eye and sucking him in. Hard to see if it even wants for cleaning, but he’ll have plenty of time after he’s got Dream bathed and put to bed.
He sucks in a shuddering breath. His bed. His sheets, soft brushed cotton in midnight blues and creams, his pillows with the smell of his hair worked into the threads, his mattress that’s cradled his body in slumber for the past eight years, the duvet he’d bought because it’d reminded him of the one he’d commissioned for Eleanor so many years ago. His bed, his sheets, his pillows, and Dream spilled out on them in a vision, the oil slick of his hair and his haunting eyes and his pale aquiline body, the bone structure of him so severe and alien that Hob worries he might cut himself if he dares to touch. Dream in his bed, lazy with rest, his eyes hooded, his hair milkweed fluff, the gentle arc of his spine and the ladder of his ribs. Armor in a neat pile beside the door. His clothes, these extensions of his selfhood, hung on cheap Wilko hangers in Hob’s closet.
Dream’s leg is pale and well-shaped beneath the armor, his calf strong and sinewy-lean, muscles in bright relief beneath the bathroom overheads, every inch of him spare and stark. He’s not entirely smooth, Hob’s pleased to note – scarce, dark hairs start at the curve of his thigh and smatter downward, thicker as they go. When Hob unworks the laces of Dream’s boot, slides it free and sets it aside, the foot beneath is fair and angular, the graceful arc of his instep and the tendons along the top beautifully obvious. He has long toes, not a callus on him, yet more fine, dark hair across the knuckles.
Holy mother help me, he thinks. His palm cupping the curve of Dream’s calf, holding it steady as the boot comes off, but the boot is set aside and there’s no reason for him to hold anymore. He sets Dream’s leg down, feels his fingertips slide down to touch the strong tension of his Achilles’ tendon. He lets go.
Dream rolls his body, languid, he’s like a snake or a cat, something that doesn’t need bones to move, only the ripple of muscle. His pale leg disappears beneath the fall of the skirt, and Dream puts forward the opposite leg, still garbed.
Hob starts over again. The buckles, the straps, the snaps, the hidden catches, Dream’s thigh held in the palm of his hand while he peels the armor off of him, peels him out of this exoskeleton like some vast and beautiful insect, revealing tenderness and thrumming blood beneath. Does it hurt? Is it a relief, to feel the armor fall away? Does he feel the warm-humid air of the bathroom on his skin and find it soothing, or is it like air on a raw nerve, a jangling of the senses? If Hob touches the armor, the leather, the dark metal, does Dream feel it like a pressure? Like a caress? Or is it only armor, in the end?
Thinking too hard on it will drive him mad. He’s already half-hard, his jeans growing uncomfortably tight, from the image of Dream in his bed, lazy and sated and comfortable. He could give Dream that. That comfort, that rest.
He exhales. It’s tempting, to try and hold his breath, to try and cram this wanting as deeply down into his body as he can, but the bathroom is so warm, damply pleasant, the smell of cedar and lavender in misty effusion, saturating the lungs. If he holds his breath it’s only going to get worse. “Okay,” he says, and sets down Dream’s leg. “Skirt, then tub. You’ll feel better after. Think I would’ve done horrible things for the sake of a bath after Agincourt.”
“Mm.” Dream makes no movement, still leaning back against the tiled wall with his hips forward in a rude push and his eyes soft as velveteen. They seem almost liquid; when he blinks the blackness wisps across his waterline, like an overfull cup, held there only by surface tension.
Hob puts his hands on Dream’s hips. They’re sharp, jutting into his palms, but the skin is soft and snowy and luminous in the steam and the light. He’s practically glowing. Hob wishes he could get him out into sunlight like this, see how golden Sol would dapple him between the shade of leaves and branches. Useless longing, and yet seeing Dream like this, in the gentling steam, makes him hope. He has never seen Dream like this. Always he’s seemed perfectly composed, perfectly possessed, save for that one night in 1889 that even now Hob keeps locked behind the gate of his eyes, taking it out only when he’s drunk and maudlin. Things he could’ve done differently.
The skirt has laces, thick leather thongs on the side woven together like a corset, and Hob picks them apart slowly. It feels dangerous, this slow revealing, like he’s stripping the thorns from a rose, rendering some wild and beautiful thing down into tameness. But Dream doesn’t stop him – he pushes himself from the wall when the laces come undone, and sets a hand on Hob’s shoulder to steady himself. He’s still swaying a little, wobbling in place as Hob shucks the skirt down his legs, and he is a grown man, he’s six-hundred years old and he has seen countless other men in all manner of undress, both carnal and not, and yet when Dream steps daintily out of the puddle of his armored skirt Hob feels as though he’s twelve and seeing a bare breast for the first time, remembers the shape of the moment when he was seventeen and watching his best friend pull his tunic over his head in a field of rye and barley, sweat beading at the small of his back, the first time he’d thought what would it taste like? A man’s skin? A man’s mouth?
Beneath the soft white daylight bulbs of the bathroom, Dream is faintly luminous. He’s a creature carved out of marble and dark ice, the edges of his body faded into obscurity, bleeding out into the whiteness of the bathroom, while his eyes, his hair, are smears of soft India ink. He could be cut stone, so severe is his musculature, no softly rendered David but a chiaroscuro abstract of lines and angles. A Rothko in cream and black. His thighs are corded, every tendon in bare relief, and the planes of his chest are so smooth and flat as to be nearly concave. There’s no classic beauty here, no ripple of muscle nor sun-golden tan nor symmetry of face or eye. Dream is beautiful in the way that a knife is beautiful, sharp-edged and balanced, or in the way that some insects are beautiful, with his tucked shoulders and vespine waist.
The dark hair at his belly is thicker below the waistline, looks downy as unspun silk in a thatch of sable around the base of his sex. Here, then, is proof that Dream is a man, or at least is sometimes a man, or the dream of a man: his prick is as captivating as the rest of him, faintly pinkened, long and slender and curved like a swan’s wing, the looseness of his foreskin pulled slightly back beneath the rosy head. His testicles look soft as worn muslin, more scatterings of dark hair, everything muted and lovely.
Dream’s hand flexes on Hob’s shoulder, and the stretch of his body rubs his prick against the white line of his thigh, shifting skin and muscle. Hob’s mouth waters; he wants. He wants Dream’s hand to cup the back of his head and draw him inexorably forward, he wants to kiss the knuckles of each finger, wants to take them into his mouth and feel how they press against his tongue, wants to let Dream’s prick rest in his mouth, to hold it there and feel the texture of it, commit it to memory.
He wants to lay Dream out on his bed. Wants to comb his fingers through the soft hair made riotous by bathwater. Wants to cover the harsh chitinous body with his own and press it down into the bedsheets until it goes soft and malleable as warm clay. He wants to take Dream outside and see him in the sunlight of the park. Rest his head in the thin lap. Kiss the stern mouth until it smiles.
Hob stands, instead. Offers his arm so that Dream can balance himself as he steps away from the pooled black silkenness of the skirt, towards the waiting tub.
“Not a scratch on you,” Hob says, and dips his fingers into the water – it’s cooled just enough, the perfect soaking temperature – then braces his shoulder so that Dream can use it to heft himself up. Shed of the thickness of his armor, Dream is a pale spider, limbs just too long, his spine just too harsh, but then he slips beneath the water, and the refractions bend the lines of him until he’s waver-edged and indistinct. He crouches at the bottom of the tub, exposed from clavicles upwards, and turns to face Hob. His expression is one of deep amusement.
“Is that…what you were looking for? Wounds?”
Heat races to his cheeks, and Hob coughs, and ducks his head to make it less obvious.
“You said you didn’t need a doctor,” he protests. “Just wanted to make sure.”
“Hm.” Slowly, Dream relaxes, melting into the heat and the water. His legs unfold from him like the roots of a seeking thornbush, he presses the keen-winged spike of his scapulae back against the tub’s edge, and he lets his eyes fall shut. There’s just the sound of the water lapping, the delicate mute echo against the tile, the yammering of Hob’s heartbeat.
He doesn’t know why he’s still stood here by the tubside, clenching and unclenching his fists, eyes trained obediently to the opposite wall to avoid the temptation, the lick of Dream’s collarbone, the salt crystal whiteness of his skin. He just knows that he can’t move, that if he moves, if he leaves this vision behind, he’s going to regret it for the rest of his life. The chance to see something as huge and uncontainable as Dream slowly melting down into the warmth of an oil-slicked bathtub.
“D’you…want me to do your hair?” It’s the only excuse he can think of, the only thing that he can offer that Dream might potentially accept, though Dream has been…exceedingly cavalier about everything so far. He doesn’t want to think about what might be, though. He wants to grasp what’s in front of him with both hands, wants to hold what he can and hide it, wants to use it to blanket the hope like wings in his chest, simple satisfaction. He can’t have everything, but he can have this.
Dream tilts his head back, eyes closed and nose tilted like he’s scenting through the clouds of steam. Like this, relaxed and redolent in the sheen of oil, he looks almost human.
“You may.” The corner of his mouth tilts up. “Is this another thing you would do? For your king?”
“You’re being a prat.” He’s laughing as he says it, though, because what else can he do? It’s either laugh or go mad, so he rolls his sleeves up past his elbows and fetches a cup from above the sink, mirth bright and golden on him like a sunbeam. “I let you into my home, you scuffle around in my things like a, like a magpie…”
“If the book is about me. Then it is my right to read it.” Dream turns his head to the side. His eyes slit open, and they’re the deep dark of a black hole, the pale star in the center a warning, like how some insects blaze eyespots across their backs. Hob feels like he’s falling. He could fall forever, and never feel regret over it.
“Or do you deny? That you rendered us in ink and poetry. Surviving centuries. Your dedication to me.”
Dedication, yes. Like a saint, like a dog, a loyal knight. He wears those mantles and so many more. Hob turns on the tap and fills the cup with wrist-warm water.
“I don’t know what you want me to say. Here. Tilt your head back.” Dream does, baring the pure marble column of his throat, eyes narrow and all the void of deep space roiling at the sockets, straining to expand. Hob holds his hand over them to block the sluice of water that he pours, working through Dream’s hair with patient fingers. He picks through little snarls, until all the flyaway down is gone sleek and glossy. Swirls of brownish ichor filter out into the bath, dissipate amongst the oil. “You have to know by now, the things I’d do for you. I waited a hundred and thirty-three years. I’ve, I’ve kept waiting. And I just. I don’t know what else I’m allowed to give you without it being too much. I don’t…” Don’t want to drive you off again.
He sets the cup aside, finds instead a bottle of shampoo – he’s got so many, always enamored of the new smells and all the new oils and vitamins and minerals they shove into soaps, remembers to this day a time when ash and tallow and quicklime were the best he could hope for. This one is labeled Winter Forest. Fitting, he thinks, for a creature who looks like he’s crawled from a fairytale about ice, and princes, and the deep dark of the woods.
His heart has graduated from chest to throat; he can feel it humming there. Any minute he’ll lose his hold on it and it will come spilling out, raw and obvious, for Dream to study like a bug beneath a magnifying lens.
But until that happens. He pours shampoo into his palm, says, “Eyes closed, please,” and buries his sudsing fingers into Dream’s hair.
For long moments it’s just the water, the echoes, the resonant tile, the rising smell of lavender and cedar and pine and ice, his hands in Dream’s hair, rubbing soap through strands as thin and dainty as spidersilk. He feels like he’s touching nothing at all, just the sloping curve of bone beneath his digging thumbs, anatomy trickling back in slow waves of memory: sphenoid, ethmoid, occipital. Does Dream have all the same bones as him? Does he imagine them into being, whenever he has to lower himself to the earth like a falling angel?
Or is it like he said? His armor an extension of himself? That Hob has peeled him out of his exoskeleton, deposited him naked and raw and trembling, into the warmth of the bath?
The suds run brownish, and then grey, and then to white clouds the longer he scrubs, and eventually Hob has no further excuses for his hands to linger, and he pours another cup of water. “Eyes,” he warns again, and Dream tilts his head back, into the cup of Hob’s palms. The water at last runs clear.
“You are,” Dream says, “frustrating.” He opens his eyes, and pins Hob with them. He thinks of insects on a mounting board; he thinks of Lancelot, who would have taken any wound for his king, whose secret love undid him. It’s not an exact metaphor, but it had been a comfort on lonely nights. He laughs, and perhaps it’s less a laugh than it is a sob that’s trying to disguise itself.
“Frustrating. I don’t. I don’t even know how to respond to that? What the fuck does that mean, Dream? Just…tell me. Talk to me. God’s nails, I feel like every conversation we have is a bloody riddle.”
Dream’s hand whips out of the water, slick with oil and suds and still quick as lightning, fingers around Hob’s wrist and drenching him in a short fall of warm bathwater. The whole bottom half of his shirt is soaked, probably ruined because of the oil, but Dream is staring at him with such naked intensity that Hob can’t.
He can’t think. His breath comes in a whistletone in his ears as Dream drags his captured hand down into the water.
“How much more forward would you have me be?” The halting stupor of exhaustion has fled, and Dream is fixed on him like a spotlight. He’s like a vibration, set to some frequency that matches the marrow of Hob’s bones, the exact viscosity of his blood. “I came to you for succor. I spoke favorably of your offering to me. I allowed you to disrobe me. What else?”
The water is still warm, but warmer still is the wet-slick thigh that Dream places his hand upon, the sort of heat that comes from an ice cube held too long against a lip.
“Now hold on,” Hob says, whiplash spinning his head in place; his heart has gone from patient waiting to desperate yearning in the span of seconds and he’s struggling to make a connection between the Dream he’d known in 1889, eyes reddened with furious tears and storming into the darkness, and the Dream who now tugs Hob’s hand down between his thighs and bends his fingers around vulnerable flesh.
Dream tilts his head back, exposing his throat. There’s a challenge in his eyes, a dare – the moon that begs a comet to swing into its orbit. Maybe eventually it will fling him back out into the endless void, but for now, for now.
Hob exhales, releasing the held breath. He makes a fist around Dream’s prick, hard in his hand, the give of foreskin and the pulse of the thick vein along the length of it, and bends his head. Finds where Dream’s mandible meets the slope of his neck, and there lays his mouth.
“You are,” he says, “the most absurd, the most frustrating…”
Dream’s other hand comes up, clamps on the back of his neck and hauls him up by the scruff until he goes, until their mouths find each other – the angle is awkward, him coming from the side and Dream rocking his hips upwards at the same time, but Dream’s mouth is cool and sweet as snowmelt, and he makes a low, rumbling noise when Hob takes his bottom lip between his teeth and sucks. His cock is heavy in Hob’s palm, the oil and the water easing the way. He twists his wrist, pulling a moan from Dream’s outstretched throat.
“I’ve wanted you,” he whispers, “for so long, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not want you. I built the Inn so you could find me. I waited. I waited.”
“Yes,” Dream says, hand now up in Hob’s hair, gripping and loosing over and over. “Your patience is not unnoticed. Your loyalty.” Hob thumbs the head of his prick, wringing from him a gasp. “Your sweetness. Hob. Would you have me?”
“Yes. You impossible creature, Christ help me, yes.” The water sloshes gamely over the side of the tub, a thin patina of oil and soapsuds over the tiles around Hob’s knees, ruining his jeans, the bathmat, but he can’t bring himself to care because Dream arches his spine in a way that seems dangerous, seems painful, but he’s so many-jointed and slinking that all it does is push his chest up out of the water, bare his throat for Hob’s mouth to find. He sinks his teeth in there, the join between jaw and neck, and the skin is hard as bone but Dream makes a thundering, broken sound low in his chest, so deep it’s nearly a vibration, that frequency that strips Hob’s blood and leaves him desperate.
“I would have you,” he says, and licks over the spot he’s bitten. Noses upwards to Dream’s mouth and says against it, “If you’d have me, too.”
The hand in his hair tightens, pulls him down so quickly that their teeth click together, but it seems such a small thing in the face of the echo of the water, Dream’s heady panting, the prick in his hand throbbing in time with the beat of alien circulation. He licks into Dream’s mouth, eats the burring moans and the sighs, says, “Come on my darling, my heart’s root, let me be sweet to you. Let me, let me take care…”
He doesn’t get the chance to finish; Dream ruts his hips up in a demanding push, gets out a single near-sung “Hob,” and bites down on Hob’s lip so hard that the taste of copper floods their mouths. His cock is pulsing in Hob’s hand; the room smells so strongly of cedar and ozone that Hob feels dizzy with it.
Slowly, the bend of Dream’s spine relaxes. He collapses down into himself, becoming smaller, a moth folding away its wings; he releases his hold on Hob’s lip, and when his head falls back in lazy satisfaction there is a smear of claret red across his mouth. Hob touches his tongue to the inside of his lip – he can taste the metallic tang, but already the wound is sucking closed. Soon there’ll just be the memory of it.
Dream’s chest heaves, and then slows, and slows, finding once again the even rhythm, the clockwork collapse and expand of universes.
“I would show kindness to you,” he murmurs, and Hob leans forward to hear him. Lets go of his softening prick beneath the line of the water. “Sweetness. And light. It has been many years. I don’t know…if I remember. But I would try.” He turns his head. His eyes are searching. Eyes like looking into the uncaring depths of a sunflare, wild and ravaging and huge. And yet.
In armor, he had seemed a king, distant and untouchable as the dawn, the figure of Arthur with his hand outstretched. The armor lies, now, in a neat heap beside the door, an extension of self peeled away, and Hob does not give it a second thought. He gets an arm beneath Dream’s legs, another beneath his spine, and scoops him from the tub, soaking wet, sheets of oil and water cascading over them both. Tomorrow, he will lament the fact that his heart is soft and romantic; today, and now, he presses his nose to Dream’s nose, rubs them together, two soft, scenting animals, stars caught in each others’ orbits, moths circling a flame.
“Let me take you to bed,” he says, thinking of the blue and cream sheets, the pillow that smells of him and only him, the shape of his body sunk into the mattress. Now dares to imagine a body beside his, a room that smells of ozone and rain, and yes, even, a suit of armor hung in the closet.
Dream blinks. It takes forever. It takes no time at all. He winds his arms around Hob’s neck, pale, long arms, the unfamiliar jut of bone and joint a strangeness, a dearness.
“Yes,” he says, his voice gone buzzing soft, and Hob, breathing freely, at last, at last, carries him over the threshold.