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The New Inn is richly golden, oozing rivulets of light and soft conversation into the dim January evening, when Dream steps through the front door; it feels, as it ever has, as he suspects it always will, like home. A shrine built in his honor, this vaunted mead-hall, this temple of story and song, and it takes some weight from his shoulders whenever he enters, encourages him to lay down his worries, to indulge in mortal delights.
Tonight, the weight remains.
It has been three days since he last heard from Hob Gadling, when the man himself had given his word that he would meet Dream here, and would share yet more stories of his last century of life. Dream had been looking forward to it – had, indeed, intended to stay well beyond his allotted hour, so long as Hob allowed him, had intended to let himself be drunk, for a time, on kindness, and on Hob’s unwavering attention, and on the swirl of stories that permeate this building. Yet he had arrived to find Hob absent, a note left with the bartender: he’s taken ill, the man had said, brows furrowed in sympathy. But I’ll let him know you came.
Dream had come again the next night, to much the same response. Out sick. Sorry, mate, but I can text him? Let him know?
And now it is the third night, and if this were a story it would ring in Dream as an ominous foretelling. It is not a story, and yet he frowns all the same when he finds Hob’s customary seat empty, once again.
“If you’re still looking for Rob,” the bartender says, “he’s going to be out for another week, I think.” The man’s eyes are kind, but wary. He scans Dream from head to toe as though searching for a threat; Dream does not know why he would prompt such a reaction. He is hardly at his most intimidating here, where the feel of The New Inn soaks into the firmament of his being and plies him to sink into it in turn, to lose himself to wine and song, if only for a time.
“He has not spoken to me of any illness,” he says, and the bartender shrugs. Resumes wiping down the counter in slow and measured strokes, until the dark wood shines beneath the diffuse and aureate light.
“He wouldn’t,” the man says slowly. “Stubborn bastard. Thinks he has to go through every hardship by himself. You’re his friend, right?”
Dream does not need to think on this long to know the answer. “Yes,” he says, simply, swiftly. Hob Gadling has named him friend, and now he is permitted at last to claim that title, though he knows he does not deserve it. He reaches for it, greedy, grasping, holds it to his breast, marvels at the contours of what friendship looks like when given the chance to grow for six-hundred years.
“If you’ve got a key to his flat, I’d go and check on him.” The bartender holds the rag, clenching and unclenching his fingers. “He texts to let us know he’s still alive, but I’ve got no idea how he’s doing. Bit worried, to be honest.”
The thought of intruding into Hob’s home had not occurred to him. Their friendship, for all that it has had six centuries to plant its roots, is still a fragile, new thing. Hob has given him every indication of pleasure at Dream’s presence, has freely offered his time, his stories, his casual physical affection – a hand upon Dream’s shoulder, their fingers brushing beside a shared bottle of wine, Hob reaching to pluck a feather from Dream’s hair, courtesy of Matthew – and yet Dream still hesitates to prevail upon him for more. Fears that he will be denied.
Ever have his own affections been too much.
Still, the thought of Hob ill, in distress, fists its hand around something deep within his chest and squeezes there, and Dream finds himself nodding, and turning on his heel towards the stairs, before he can convince himself otherwise.
Hob Gadling is a grown man, and capable of taking care of himself. Hob Gadling has also, historically, shown himself prone to making poor decisions. It is only right that Dream, as his friend, go to check on him. Friends do this, he reassures himself. Friends offer each other aid when they are ill.
He does not think friends usually disperse themselves into sand in order to bypass the lock of another friend’s apartment, but he does not feel it productive to quibble over minutia at this time.
The inside of Hob’s flat is still and dark; the living room, when Dream steps within, shows all signs of having been occupied, but not recently. A book lies face-down on the sofa, spine bent, holding its place. There is a cup upon the table, a thin film gauzily stretched across the liquid inside, which Dream suspects was once tea, and is no longer potable. The light in the kitchen is on, and yet when he pokes in his head, there is no one.
“Hob?” he tries, and turns his head towards the sound that answers him, a rustle of sheets and a soft, bitten-off groan.
“Shit,” says Hob’s voice, muffled, emphatic, strange. Runny around the edges, as though he slurs his words. “Dream? Is that you?”
“Yes.” The sounds come from what he is certain is the bedroom – he slips down the hall, head tilted, listening. Hob makes another noise, and this cannot be mistaken for anything other than a pained moan. Dream lays his hand upon the wall beside the bedroom door, which is shut. The way barred to him. “The man downstairs said that you are ill.”
“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him,” Hob says, with such startling vehemence to it that Dream frowns.
“You will not,” he says, with utmost confidence, and there is a deep sigh from behind the door.
“No,” Hob says, “I won’t. Christ. Now’s not. Not a good time, Dream.”
“You are ill.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m, ah. Going through something. Right now. I just need to rest.”
“You have been resting for three days. Your employee says you will be ill for another week.”
There is a long pause, and then Hob says, still muffled through the door, yet now further hushed, as though he has placed something over his face, "I'm not going to kill him, but I am going to make his life miserable. For a bit."
Dream rests his cheek against the wall beside the door. There is a scent that drifts through the cracks, something fever-high and sweet, thick as the haze over a sun-ripened meadow. A pulse that ripples in metronomic time behind the sheltering confines of the barrier.
"You are not usually this irritable," Dream notes, and hears Hob sigh deeply. All of his senses trained towards the man behind the door; if he tries, he may hear the tripping heartbeat, the rush of blood, the sluggish passing of daydreams. He does not try. He has already intruded in Hob's most sacred of spaces, has accosted home and hearth with only the dubious permission of their friendship, and he dares not press his luck further, regardless of what he wants.
"No. I. I'm not. You're not going to leave this alone, are you?" Hob does not sound angry. He sounds, if anything, desperately fond. It makes something in Dream's core flutter and stretch, waking from ancient sleep. It has been so long since someone has been fond of him. Since someone has enjoyed his company, meager as it is.
"I will not," he agrees, because it is true. Because Hob is ill, and in need of care, and is, according to those who have kept in touch with him, not caring for himself. It is the least that Dream can do, as his friend, to offer his aid. This is something friends do, he reassures himself. This is not an overstep. He is not being too much. He is concerned.
He rubs his cheek against the doorframe, taking in, for a moment, the stories worked into the wood, the devotion of this building, the reverence carved into its bones. For him. For him. The shivering thing inside him winds through and through his ribs, this mortal instrument designed and worked into being for the sole purpose of visiting Hob, and sitting with him, and soaking in his kindness.
"All right," Hob says, and Dream takes his cheek from the wall, and feels the echo of the drumbeat of Hob's patience left behind. "Fine. Just. No judging, all right?"
"I would not judge you," Dream says, and Hob laughs, a sound that becomes a weak moan the longer it goes, and Dream turns the door handle, and finds it unlocked, and pushes inside.
The scent is stronger within, by an unfathomable order of magnitude. Rich, spicy, so dense it rests upon the skin, and Dream must stop in the doorway and part his lips that he might gather the full meaning of it, that he might experience it upon his tongue. The air tastes of musk, sweet and oozy as the ambrosia of Olympos, like the sweat of gods, coating the palate and throat with a lining of plush fur. When Dream swallows, the slick of his saliva carries the scent to his belly, warm and glowing, satisfying like hot mead. It is desire he tastes, at once savory and sweet, the pleasure of honey, the satisfaction of bread. His sibling's hand is smeared across every wall and bedpost, and yet they themselves are nowhere to be felt.
"Can you close the door?" Hob asks, drawing Dream's eye to the bed at last. "I'm trying to keep the smell in. Last thing I want, for every poor sod down the block to have to deal with my pheromones."
"Pheromones," Dream repeats, and steps into the room, and lets the door fall shut behind him.
Hob has ensconced himself in his bed, and though there is a mountain of blankets shuffled around him, he is currently lying uncovered, both hands covering his face, his dear face, flat upon his back and with his legs spread. Sweat soaks what Dream can see of his forehead, has dripped in winding trails down his neck, has made the pelt of his chest hair damp and curled. His lungs heave with each breath; the muscles of his stomach tremble, and even in the midst of sickness his skin glows with golden inner light, and his hair, sweaty and amess, is still finer than silk, more rich than mahogany. When he parts his fingers, and peeks at Dream through the formed space between them, his eye is a drop of amber, a housing for the sun's pure rays.
"Don't look at me," Hob says, "I'm a fucking mess."
"You are ill," Dream says, and does not add, you are the crux of all beauty, you are that which Hera herself aspires to, you are the hearth and the home of this place and to your gentle warmth do I return again and again. He has not had a friend in many years -- perhaps never, not in the way that he has Hob, abiding and gentle -- but even he knows that these thoughts are best kept to himself. Tamped down and unexamined, where they may eventually be reabsorbed into the essence of him, and will trouble neither he nor Hob any longer.
"Nah." Hob stretches, and when he does his skin ripples in the low light, the sweat that dapples him like dewdrops catching the streetlamps through the window, refracting gilded spots across Dream's vision. Hob moans again, and between the notes of sickly discomfort there is a winding thread of lust, of helpless desire, and this Dream wishes to chase with his teeth, to hunt down the hints of his sibling and cover them with shadow, until whatever it is that has placed Hob in their clutches is buried under the weight of his own possession. "Unless we're counting things like. Ah. Like, menstruation, as illnesses now."
"You are not menstruating," Dream says, and Hob at last takes his hands from his face, and fixes Dream with a kind but judgemental look. He dares to creep a little bit forward, dares to stand beside the foot of the bed, where the turn of Hob's foot exposes his ankle, the gentle dip there between his tendons, the strong cord that doomed Achilles made lax and soft in repose. Dark hair dusts the knuckles of his toes, across the pale top of his foot, the bump of his calcaneus as mathematically pleasing as a parabolic curve.
"You're joking," Hob says, and Dream shakes his head. "Do...you don't know? You knew Lou's whole history just by looking at her. We've known each other six centuries."
"I knew her dreams," he corrects. He does not know where to put his hands. They seem, at the moment, entirely extraneous, their entire purpose meant for the touching of Hob's ankle, to bury his fingers in the coarse fur of his chest, to map the swell of his biceps with the pad of his thumb. Instead, he holds them clenched at his sides, and hopes that their intention is not plain. "I have endeavored to respect your privacy. Your life. Your choices. Are your own."
"That's sweet of you," Hob says, and, sighing, widens his legs, his thighs parting with all the gravity of the Red Sea. Between his legs his pyjama bottoms are dark-patched, and the sheets below him soaked through. He smells like the ocean, briny, living, deep; he smells like hot wine shared between friends; he smells like home. "Can't believe we've gone six hundred years and you never knew I was an omega."
The phrasing is not familiar, which means that it is recent. That he must go searching for its meaning, through the vaulted corridors of himself. He finds he does not want to. This is a story that Hob is telling, and Dream wants only to hear it from his lips.
"You can sit down," Hob says, and then winces. "Ignore the wet spot, please."
He sits, perching upon the edge of the bed. Hob's leg stretches out, his foot gently nudging against Dream's hip in friendly greeting. Even that movement seems to cause him discomfort. There is a flush high on his cheeks, and it deepens when their eyes meet.
"Explain?" Dream asks, and Hob huffs.
"You really are disconnected, aren't you?"
"The word is. Unfamiliar."
"Ah. Sorry. Sorry, I'm. I'm not myself, when I'm in heat. Let's see. They used to call us, ah, sheaths. In the Bible it's 'the sex apart.' Nowadays it's. Hm. Jacob-Strong Syndrome. Omega...Omega-47-XXY. And alpha, of course. Alpha-48-XXY. You really don't know any of this?"
"I am familiar with the tertiary sexes." He has merely never needed to consider them. How humans procreate, and what means by which they do so, has never been of interest. Now, sitting beside Hob, who has sweated through his sheets, whose thighs are soaked with the rampaging want of his body, who lies here and talks to Dream through his own discomfort, now he finds that he wants to know everything. Wishes to reach out and touch Hob's dreams, to learn more of this new facet of him, how it has shaped his life. How Dream might help alleviate his pain.
"Suppose it isn't a problem for you," Hob says, and Dream shakes his head.
"When I am here, I take whichever form is most common for the time. For whom I speak to."
Hob hums, and says, "Used to think you were another omega. And that was why you weren't trying to tup me over the nearest barrel." He laughs. "Ah, my friend. Sorry. Again. I'm going through the. The twin monsters of heat and withdrawal, and my brain's absolute soup. Forgive me for anything I say right now."
"I would forgive you no matter your condition," Dream says, and means it truthfully. The smile that Hob gifts him with is like a beam of sunlight lancing across a dark room, a perfect ray in which to bask.
"Do you wish to sleep?" Sleep, perhaps, might give Hob some relief, and is within the purview of friends to provide. Or, at least, within their particular friendship. He thinks. He is not sure.
It does not matter -- Hob shakes his head.
"The wet dreams are horrendous," he says. "Most god-awful confusing thing about going off Promiraxole. One minute it's a normal nightmare about, dunno, giving a presentation, and I've forgot my notes, and the next there's...well." Hob flushes darker, and reflexively presses his thighs together. It draws from him a gasp, and he turns his head away. "Fuck. Sorry. Can't control it."
"You are lacking medication," Dream prompts, and Hob swallows hard, and nods. He looks studiously towards the window, not meeting Dream's gaze.
"My heat suppressant is on backorder," he says softly. "A lot of things are, apparently. Heart meds, antibiotics. It's a mess. I'm lucky, honestly."
"You are in discomfort."
"Yeah, but not any worse than, oh, the 1600s. Most miserable century of my life, and suppressants hadn't been invented yet. That's a special kind of hell, friend. Trying to mourn your. Your son. And going into heat a week later."
Dream cannot imagine. His mind already shies away from Hob's worst years of tribulation -- he could have offered comfort there, he thinks, and his hands clench at his sides. He could have offered some small kindness, and he had not. That Hob continues to call him 'friend' is nearly unthinkable.
He will not besmirch that honor again.
"Is there anything I might do?" he asks, and Hob makes a choking sound, which bleeds into a fitful moan. "To ease your pain?"
"That. That is the pick-up line of the century, my friend." Dream opens his mouth to protest, but Hob flaps a hand at him, touches the bony jut of his patella, rests his palm there. "I'm joking. I know you don't. I know you're trying to be helpful. I appreciate it, I do. But it's just biology. I just have to work through it."
"You should not have to," Dream says. There is a warm glow in him, spreading from where Hob's fingers touch, marching along his veins and suffusing this mortal shell. The room smells deeply of spice, and honey. Hob's eyes have grown heavy-lidded where he still stares towards the window.
"Listen," he says, and his voice is strangled, reaching, straining. "You aren't human, Dream. I wouldn't make you. I wouldn't subject you to all...this." With his other hand he gestures, encompassing the messy room, the damp bedsheets, the closed door.
"You subject me to nothing. My choices, also, are my own."
"Dream," Hob says, and shudders, and sighs, and his thighs rub together, as though he cannot stop them. "Please, stop. If you don't know what this sounds like, to me, you need to stop."
"Sounds like?"
Hob blows out a breath, and at last turns his fever-bright eyes to Dream, holds him there in the magnifying lens of his gaze. Even behind four inches of glass, Dream has never felt so pinned as he does now, with Hob’s hand so tight on Dream's knee that his knuckles have begun to turn white.
"Like you're offering to fuck me, Dream. Because that's honestly the only thing that'll help."
Dream blinks. Studies the line of Hob's bare side, where it dips to meet the cradle of his pelvis, and his softly-furred belly, padded now with academic living, the muscles beneath frozen in time. He examines, with minute precision, the drop of sweat that inches down Hob's clavicle, and disappears into his chest hair, cow-licked and damp. Thinks on how Hob's eyes are the rustle of wheatfields in Summer, the sunlight pouring through flaxen grain, how his parted lips are shells rose-pink, the enveloping sea, how his skin rivals that of golden Helios, tanned and muscular and sweat-sticky from his tireless work.
Do friends think of each other this way? He suspects they don't. He knows very little of friendship in this modern era, but his own feelings he knows intimately. Wishes he knew them less.
Yet is not Hob a most singular friend? Who has waited tirelessly for him, for six centuries, and never asked for more? Does he not deserve any respite Dream might offer him?
"It is within my power to offer," he says, and Hob flinches. "And so I would offer it."
"Okay. I. I realize that you're being extremely helpful. It's good. It's...It's very fucking good. But I don't let flings knot me, and we're, we're friends, we're finally talking, and I get to watch you try shit pub food, and it's good, Dream. It's good. I don't want to ruin this. I'm too..." Hob licks his lips, and Dream follows the movement, the sleek petal of his tongue, with interest. "I'm too much," he says eventually. "I always end up falling for the people who fuck me. And it's so much worse when I already..." He trails off, and for long moments there is only the sound of Hob's labored breathing in the room, some dense cloud of unspoken-of wants hanging between them, mingling with the scent of honey and spice.
"I have been told," Dream says slowly, "that I am also. Too much. In my passion." He hesitates, and adds, "In my affections."
Hob snorts. "So. What? We can be extra together? And you wouldn't...get bored? You wouldn't resent..." Hob flicks his fingers down the length of his body. "The vagaries of the flesh, and all that?"
"I find your flesh pleasing," Dream says. "Vagaries. And all."
"Oh, flatterer." Hob lets go of his knee, at last, and Dream can feel the phantom imprints of his fingers, where the whorls of his identity have scored themselves into the knowing of him. Hob holds his hand out, instead, palm up, his fingers curled, and Dream, slowly, hesitantly, lays his hand over it. His clenched fist relaxes by minute inches, and Hob laces their fingers together. It is an intimacy curiously stronger than that of seeing Hob like this, wrecked with biological lust, his thighs sopping wet with his own fluids. Friends hold hands, Dream thinks, but they do not hold hands like this, with the streetlamps throwing faint illumination through the window and highlighting their joined fingers, held close as twined and ecstatic bodies.
"Okay," Hob says. Blows out a breath, his eyes trained on their held hands. "Let's negotiate this. For a second. Before the urge to jump you gets overwhelming. You aren't put off by the idea of having sex with humans?"
"Having sex with you," Dream corrects, and then adds, "No." Hob lets loose a hiccoughing laugh.
"Right. Having sex with me. Okay. And the part where I have this. This horrible habit of falling in love with the people I let fuck me? That doesn't put you off, either?"
Dream considers this. Considers his ill-advised trysts of the past, Nada with her blinding smile, shining and dutiful Alianora, Killala who had blazed so brightly with green fire, and yet she had not held a candle to the inferno of his own wanting. He could try. Again. And burn. Again. That which is Endless is not meant to be loved.
"I am not good at...moderation," Dream admits, and Hob grins at their clasped hands. It seems less a smile, and more a baring of teeth.
"Yeah, well. Neither am I." He hesitates, for only a moment, and then says, "This will either be. Fantastically good, for both of us, or it's going to end in flames. But I'm game to try, if you are?"
He had come here seeking kindness. Had come to offer succor, if he were able. Dream is not sure at which point the story had shifted -- where it was he lost the thread of the narrative, disappeared down the throat of desire's hungry maw. He only knows that he is blind, here, suspended only by the tethers of Hob's friendship. Groping, now, towards this more-than-friendship that he offers, with all the negotiative cheerfulness of a seasoned merchant. Dream had thought he'd known his own feelings -- he is confronted, now, with the notion that Hob knows himself far better.
"I do not wish to stop being friends," he says, and Hob's expression, foxlike and keen, grows softer.
"We don't have to," he says, and a tension he had barely been aware of loosens in his breast. "Look. Even if it turns out that we'll eat each other alive, if we're together, you're still the one constant in my life. I mark my years by it, you know that? My centuries begin and end with you."
Dream wishes he had words for this. Prince of Stories, he is meant to be, and yet the only thing he can think to do is to lift their cupped hands, and to brush his lips across Hob's knuckles. It seems a paltry offering, yet Hob's eyes flutter closed, and his lips part in a sigh.
"Fuck," he murmurs, "I've always been soppy for chivalry, haven't I?"
"You would know better," Dream says, letting his lips rest in the divot between Hob's knuckles, absorbing the pitched warmth there, tasting the scent of him, high and strange. "Being a knight."
"Ha. Won't let me live that down, eh?"
"No. It is part of you. I would no more deny it than I would deny any of your accomplishments."
"It won't bother you, then? Me being an omega?"
Baffling, he thinks, the things that mortals fixate upon. More baffling still, why it should matter. "Why would it bother me?"
"Right. Silly question. You not being human. People've got expectations of omegas, is all."
"I am not 'people.'"
"No," Hob says, and unfurls his fingers, his thumb brushing Dream's lower lip. "You aren't, are you? Come here." His fingers become a hook, just barely touching the underside of Dream's jaw, and yet they draw him in as surely as steel. He goes, crawling over Hob's supine body, and with a thought his coat dissolves into glimmering dust, golden sand cascading over the edges of the bed, twinkling where it touches the floor and then disappears. Hob's noise of delight is one he thinks he will cherish, for at least as many days as it takes for him to prompt it again, and again, and again.
There is a story on Hob's lips, yearning for freedom, and so Dream bends his head, presses his nose to the curve of Hob's throat, where sweat and fever have turned him into a frenzied jungle of scent, of taste. "Tell me," he says, into the tanned swell of Hob's Adam's apple, "the reasons I ought be bothered by your sex. That I might venerate you for them instead."
“Fuck,” Hob says, emphatically, and Dream feels his strong and shapely calves fold over the small of his back, locking there and grinding upwards, seeking. “God’s fucking wounds. Dream.”
Dream is not given much time to consider the feel of Hob’s legs around him, nor the wet hardness that pushes insistently against his belly. It feels as though one moment he is beginning to get a handle on the situation – still blind, still searching, but doing so now with the rudder of Hob’s body to guide him – and then in the next he is being flipped roughly over, in both the literal and figurative sense. Hob Gadling, even in the midst of fever, has the strength of a soldier and the temerity of a bandit, and rolls them both smoothly, the corded muscles of his thighs growing solid as stone, and Dream lands upon his back, with Hob kneeling now over him, firmly planted upon his groin.
“I am not,” Hob says, “some mewling little wandought made for warming beds. I’m not going to beg for your cock.”
“I would not expect you to,” Dream says, and his voice, all against his wishes, comes out breathless. Hob sits him, thighs bracketed astride Dream’s hips like the Colossus, a towering and terrible beauty. What little light filters into the room paints one half of him in stark and unflattering shadow, creates of him a pleasing nightmare for the senses. He seems an incubus from ancient texts, his hair wild about his face and sweat dripping from the point of his nose, his visible eye alight from within by godly fire. Dream must remember to exhale – he must remember to feel, to let this fleshly body respond as Hob wishes.
He is not surprised to find that it has already done so. That when Hob grinds down upon him again, there is a new and answering hardness between his legs, and when Dream opens his mouth to gasp the rich scent of Hob’s sweat and skin floods him as the sea once flooded proud Attica. He is drowned in it, subsumed, in the heady mess of pheromones, in Hob’s hands pushing palms-down beside his head, this magnificent creature that has effortlessly snared him, and Dream does not know where.
“I’m not some pale, pretty thing to hang on your arm,” Hob says, vicious satisfaction in his voice. In the spin of words and the exchange of humid breath between them Dream watches the story unfold, sharp as a knife’s edge, the dream-shape of Hob’s sex, winsome and delicate, batting doe-eyes at their strong and capable lovers. Hob, whose eyes are rich and soft as sable, yet could never be mistaken for dainty, whose thighs are thick as tree trunks and whose chest is broad and comely and dense with hair, whose hips, when Dream reaches for them, are sharp and angular, made for riding, made for war. “I won’t be fucked like a dog unless I want to be.”
Dream strokes his hands up the sweat-beaded length of Hob’s sides, finds the damp curl of the hair at his armpits, tucks his thumbs there, prompting a laugh, and Hob’s bared teeth. “That is your right,” he says, and Hob bends down with a snarl, and he kisses, also, like he goes to war, like Dream’s mouth is an enemy force to be subdued. It is messy and slick, bordering on violent, Hob’s tongue thick and strong and insistent on counting each of Dream’s teeth in turn. Hob kisses as though he intends to wipe out all other thoughts from Dream’s mind, and it is surprisingly easy to acquiesce, to submit to this conquering warrior, to let him force Dream down into the soft bed, to be taken.
“I’m not waiting around to be bred,” Hob says, the words swallowed in the flood of saliva in Dream’s mouth, in the way that Hob turns his head and bites at the curve of Dream’s jaw. The rasp of his stubble is too much, and not enough, and Dream whines. Humans feel this, he reminds himself. And humans like Hob feel it keenest, their senses tuned to the most minute of scents, their bodies primed to receive pleasure. And the thought of Hob taking his pleasure from Dream’s body, of wringing him dry, of making him spend, over and over, until Hob is satisfied, that is a heady thought indeed.
He begins to see what Hob meant, when he said that they might eat each other alive. Yet he can think, in this moment, of no sweeter ecstasy.
Clever fingers, strong, capable, tug at the waist of Dream’s jeans; he needs no further prompting, and the denim dissolves from him, sunlit dust trickling over the edge of the bed. Hob hums, pleased, and slips apart from Dream only far enough that he might look at the prize he has captured. When his fist closes around Dream’s prick, his hips stutter upwards in bestial instinct, though Hob keeps his hand loose, unsatisfactory.
“I’m not a very good sheath,” Hob says, and there is something there, some undercurrent of old hurts, a poisoned tree grown strange and bitter fruit where it has been left to fester in the dark spaces of Hob’s subconscious. “Are you going to venerate me for that? Failing at my own biology?”
“You have failed at nothing,” Dream says, and gasps when Hob grips him tighter, provides him a snug channel into which he may thrust. He holds himself still, instead – he is no more a slave to his biology than Hob is, no matter how much he wants. “Mortal memory is short, but mine is long. I watched the ancestors of man crawl forth from the sea, and then, as now, were you not the most resourceful? Most clever and guileful, to be able to sow your seed twice? Did you not steal the mates from lesser creatures, all unknowing? When man first tamed fire, was it not you who was left to tend it? You, who both sired life and nurtured it?”
“Dream,” Hob says, the viciousness in him gentling, his fingers a slow stroke along the length of Dream’s cock. Dream reaches for him, for the frame of his face, the stubbled cheeks and the dark brows, which he brushes his thumbs over in gasping wonder; the memories unspool from him, and he wills them to Hob, the vision of the dancing fire, the rain pelting the savannah into mud, a man stood with spear in one hand, and the other resting gently on the swell of his belly.
“Before the dawn of Rome, was yours not considered the wisest of council? You, who know the giving and taking of life?” Hob’s grip loosens, and Dream does not even have the chance to wonder if he has misspoken, so quickly does Hob move, scrambling to tear down his pajama bottoms, discarding them over the bedside like so much trash; his thighs are so damp with fluid that the hair there is sleeked flat and dark, and his prick hangs heavy, thick and flushed deep and beautiful red. He settles himself over Dream again, ruts their sexes together, hands roaming as if to cease his touching might doom him.
"In Sumer, I watched them revere you as the blessed of Inanna, she who brought war and children in equal measure," Dream says softly, and Hob makes a quiet, wounded noise, pushes his face against the crook of Dream's shoulder, setting his teeth there, though not biting. Dream wishes he would. Thinks with displeasure about Hob denying full half of himself for the sake of human mores, because it is too much, because it is unseemly. "You have not failed your biology, Hob Gadling. The world has failed you."
"Oh Christ." Hob's words are muffled in Dream's skin. "Right. Right, come on. Fuck me. Dream, my darling, want you in me."
"Take me, then," he says, and Hob makes a low and rumbling sound of pleasure, nearly a growl, and reaches for Dream's hand. Draws it back insistently, and Dream cannot disobey. Hob holds himself open, knelt over Dream like a mara, like a thundering god, and Dream brushes the tips of his fingers over Hob's entrance, slick and warm and clenching. When he slips a finger inside it draws a gasp from the man above him, and there is no resistance, only smooth grasping muscle and a heat to rival the sun.
"Feel that," Hob says, and rocks down upon Dream's finger, tossing his hair, sweat-damp, shining. "S'yours. For you. So fucking wet for you. C'mon, another." Dream hums, wriggles another finger in beside the first, a gentle push and then seated in unrelenting heat. Hob hisses, bouncing back upon Dream's hand with increasing fervor, and Dream rocks into the motion, fucking into Hob with a wet and sloppy noise, obscene compared to the saintly vision that rides his hand. "Yes, like that. Thought about your fingers, before. So long. Pretty. Thought about, hah, sucking on them, making them wet for me, thought about this."
"Fucking you," Dream murmurs, and Hob groans, punched out, gored. "Yes. Take your pleasure from me, Hob. This body is yours."
He pulls his fingers free, slick shining between them in sticky webs when he spreads them, and Hob wastes no time, scrambling between them to grab at Dream's sex, to hold it steady. Hob's eyes are wide, his pupils so dilated all of his iris seems black as he strokes his fingers up Dream's length.
"You're so fucking pretty," he whispers. "Pink and white as roses."
Nothing compared to you, blazing and beautiful as fire, he thinks, and then realizes he need not only think it -- that Hob has given him permission, that they may be too much together. He helps to hold the base of his sex as Hob kneels over him, fits to where their bodies interlock, and begins to sink down with a gasp. Wet heat, tight, perfect, and Dream puts his hands to Hob's hips as all the tireless inferno of the sun engulfs him and says, "You are more comely than Shamash at the height of his power," the words wrenched from him, from some deep and yearning place. "More fierce than Orion and all of his starlight, more brilliant in countenance than Sol --"
"Don't," Hob moans, but he scrabbles for Dream's hand on his hip, prises his fingers free and drags them to his prick, so dark now that in the ambient light it seems a shadow held in Dream's pale grasp. "I'm not, I'm not."
"You are," he insists, and levers himself upwards, fucks into the giving warmth and draws from Hob an animal groan. Hob's thighs flex as he lifts himself, all the muscles of his stomach tense and corded, bouncing himself with the wet sound of their skin between them. "You are deserving of most effusive praise, you whose body holds multitudes, your skin more becoming than all mortal gems and gold."
"Fucking kiss me," Hob says, and Dream surges upwards, helpless to resist, drawn to the shape of Hob's mouth as birds seek true south, with mindless instinct and deep-seated wanting. Hob's mouth over his is as hot as his body, his tongue sliding along Dream's lips as if to sip from him some greater truth, and between them he rubs his thumb over the wet-slick tip of Hob's prick, and feels a fluttering clench around him. Hob gasps into his mouth, and Dream drinks that as well, pulls the pleasure of that internal peak into his being, whispers, "I would crown you with sunlight and seaglow, Hob Gadling. You know that I speak truth."
Hob bites into his lip, drawing a bead of iron tang, his words slurred between them, "I know, I want, I want that, want you," and when next Dream twists his wrist, and fucks up into the blazing heat, he feels Hob's orgasm wash over him like a tide, and lets it carry him out to sea.
For long minutes afterwards Hob rests their foreheads together, breathing deeply, chest heaving. Sweat drips along Dream's cheek, and he does not know if it is his or Hob's -- in truth, it does not matter. The both of them wet and sticky, entwined, such that their cells mingle and their skin smears, a cocktail of pheromones and spiraling DNA. He lets go of Hob's length, prompting a sigh, and brings it to the dim light to admire, the pearl-white strands of seed between his fingers dripping down slowly towards his wrist.
Hob hums, deep in his chest, shifting in Dream's lap. His prick is still half-hard, and leaks copiously between them, a steady drip of spend that puddles in the cradle of Dream's hips, and there is so much slickness painting their thighs that the air feels cool where it brushes them. "Fuck," Hob says, long, drawn-out. "S'nice. You feel nice." A pause, and then, softer, he adds, "You didn't knot me."
"When next I enter the Waking," Dream says, "I will form my vessel with that intention in mind."
"Ah. This is good, too. Still going to be hard for a while yet." Hob's eyes, glittering with mirth, peer up at him as he lowers himself to Dream's chest, stretching out like a languorous cat, all loose and sated limbs. "Would like to fuck you. In a bit, if you're keen. I can go for a while when I'm in heat."
"This body is the least I would gift you," Dream murmurs. "I would bring comets down to adorn the sweetness of your neck. Would pluck an apple from scheming Eris' garden. I would inscribe 'pon it 'to the kindest' and there would be no question it belonged to you."
"You weren't kidding about the moderation," Hob says, but he does not sound put-off. He sounds, instead, as though he is pleased. "I love it." He places a kiss upon Dream's chest, stubble scratching through the thin material of his shirt. "All those things you said before. Those were true?"
"You know I speak it," Dream says again, and Hob rubs his nose along the hidden curve of Dream's pectoral, scenting. That Hob seems as interested as he does, when Dream has made no effort to produce the pheromones his body cleaves to, is a testament to his ardor. "I remember the first dreams of your sex. Light and shadow. Food. Shelter." Dream feels his lips turn upwards, the barest hint of a smile. "Mating, yes."
Hob snorts. "We've just been a bunch of randy buggers since the first, eh?"
"Your estrus cycle is. A newer development. Before your ancestors left the sea, they changed their sex. According to their needs. Presented male or female to slip into rival nests, and sowed their seed with impunity."
"Oh, randy sluts, then." Yet Hob is laughing against his chest, and Dream is momentarily arrested at the feel of him, warm and comfortable, so vastly different from the towering creature who had ridden him into ecstasy.
"Difficult to map modern perceptions. Onto creatures that had not yet conceived of morals. Let alone propriety. But, your sex was fruitful. They were not alphas, nor omegas, then. They simply were. And they multiplied, and mingled their genes. Until the time came that they left the sea. It takes energy, to change from one sex to another. Even if only in appearance. Your genes faltered, for a time. Subsumed by more successful mutations. It was many eons before the tertiary sexes formed, as they are now. The estrus cycle stabilized them. Forced procreation over food, over water, over all safety. Reintroduced you to the gene pool. Where you settled. Where you have stayed ever since. The most successful mutation in human history. To have endured famine, and illness, and prejudice. Still here. After five-hundred million years."
"Million," Hob repeats, wondering.
And Dream says, "Yes. So when I say you have not failed your biology. I do not lie."
"Well. That's." Hob tilts up his head, presses a wet kiss to the curve of Dream's jawline. The movement shifts them both, makes his softening sex slip free of Hob's body with a gush of seed and a soft moan from the both of them. "That's comforting."
"Would you like to see them?" Dream asks, and Hob blinks up at him, a faint line of tears glittering amongst his lower lashes, which he sniffs, and swipes at, and smiles sweetly.
"See them?"
"Your progenitors. That which came before."
"Moderation," Hob says again, and laughs. "Yeah. Yeah, why not? Show me how it used to be. Dream." He noses along Dream's neck, kisses the white line of it, murmurs, "Lover. Love," and Dream feels that folded and fluttering thing within him stretch further, a soft texture around the cage of his ribs.
"Sleep," he says, and buries his nose in the damp curls of Hob's hair, drying now in wild array, the scent of him musk and honey, thick on the tongue, an overgrown meadow. "Sleep, and dream of me."
"I did that before," says Hob, all the hard edges of him gone now, replaced with restful earnesty, made truthful in post-orgasmic clarity. "Dreamt of you constantly. S'why I warned you about fucking me. I loved you already. Don't know if you knew that. But it's true."
He closes his eyes, breathing softly against Dream's neck, and in gradual increments his respiration eases, becomes the even pendulum of sleep.
This will work, Dream thinks. We will not consume each other. How can we possibly, when we are so evenly matched? The thought is comforting. That he need not worry, for once, about his passion, his excess.
Need only focus on Hob. On matching his fire, each time. How wondrous. How perfect.
Dream tucks his nose into Hob's hair, and follows his lover into dreams.