A Man of Good Fortune (ONE-SHOT)
Pairing: Dream of the Endless / Morpheus x Hob Gadling Fandom: The Sandman Genre: Post-canon AU, canon-divergent, hurt/comfort, soft dark fantasy, mortal Dream, friends to lovers Rating: Teen and up
Word count: ~5k Warnings: canon character death aftermath, grief, mourning, resurrection/rebirth, mortality, human vulnerability, cold/exposure, hunger, nightmares, panic, mentions of a funeral/the Wake, emotional hurt/comfort, kissing. Disclaimer: This is a non-commercial work of fan fiction. The Sandman and all related characters belong to their respective creators and rights holders. This story is written for transformative fan entertainment only.
Summary: After his death, Dream wakes in the waking world as a man. Cold, hungry, mortal, and without a kingdom that recognizes him, he goes to the only person who might understand what it means to live beyond all logic: Hob Gadling.
The first thing was the cold.
Not cold as an idea, not that word he had seen cross the faces of a thousand sleepers as they dreamed of winters and trenches and houses without firewood. Real cold. A thing that entered through the skin and stayed there, that made teeth chatter when he did not remember ever having teeth, that turned breath into a pale cloud every time the chest emptied.
The chest. That was the second thing.
Something inside him was striking against his ribs, fast, stubborn, and he understood with an ancient and entirely new terror that if it stopped, so would he. That he depended on a muscle. That the air did not belong to him: he had to take it, and take it again, and again, in an endless chain of small urgencies. He inhaled. The act hurt, and tasted of wet earth and distant smoke. He did it again because there was no other choice.
He was lying on the damp grass of a park, at the edge of a city, beneath a sky the color of dead ash. The light had that indecision of dawn, that gray that has not yet decided to become day. The clothes he wore — black, his usual clothes, the ones that for ages had been an extension of his will and not a garment — were soaked with dew and weighed on him the way foreign things do. They no longer answered to his desire. They were only fabric. He understood it all at once, with his entire body: nothing answered to his desire anymore.
He sat up. The world spun, and he had to brace his hands against the ground so he would not fall. Hands. He looked at them. Long fingers, pale, dirty with mud, trembling. His skin had risen into tiny roughness from the cold. It was grotesque and fascinating, and for one instant he hated how much it fascinated him.
He remembered everything.
He remembered the Dreaming. He remembered the throne and the gallery of sigils, the infinite library, the corridors that folded themselves according to whoever walked them. He remembered his siblings: Desire’s laughter, Destiny’s stillness, his sister’s kind eyes when she came to collect those who had run out of time. He remembered being a principle of the universe, one of the things that exist because without them there would be nothing. And he remembered the end. The Kindly Ones in his realm. The decision that had not been entirely a decision and that, nevertheless, he had made with his eyes open. The terrible relief of letting go. His sister’s hand.
He had died. He knew it with the same certainty with which he knew how to breathe now. And yet here he was: a man in the grass, cold, hungry — because there was hunger too, a sharp blade beneath the sternum — with a heart that beat and lungs that demanded and a weight that bound him to the ground. Newly born. Ancient. Both things at once, and the contradiction did not kill him; it merely left him breathless.
He stood. It was difficult. He had to learn it, that gesture children take an entire year to master and that he had seen a billion times without ever understanding what it cost.
There was a question inside him, larger than the cold and the hunger. Why. Why a dead lord walked as a man. Why, out of all the ways in which the universe might have unmade him, it had chosen this: the smallest, the most fragile, the only one he had never allowed himself.
And he knew, too, that in all the wide waking world there was only one person who might help him understand it. A man who had spent six hundred years doing exactly what he now had to do: live against all logic, without rules, without a manual, without permission.
If anyone knew how to sustain a life that should not exist, it was Hob. The city received him the way it receives anyone: without looking at him.
He walked toward it through streets he knew without ever having set foot on them. He knew every one. Through his realm had passed all the dreams of all the men who had slept on those pavements, and he had seen the city a thousand times, through a thousand eyes, on a thousand nights. He knew the names of the bridges. He knew what had stood before on the plot of that glass building. He knew the history of every corner.
Knowing a world and inhabiting it are two different things, and he discovered this now with every step. The noise assaulted him — engines, voices, metallic music spilling from a place that was still closed — and he could not silence it, could not fold it back, could not make things hush with a gesture. The stench of wet asphalt, the sickly sweetness of something frying somewhere, the smoke of a cigarette that crossed his face and stayed in his throat. Everything entered without asking permission. This was what it meant to have a body: a house with every door open and no key.
He was hungry. The hunger did not leave; it grew. He was cold, and the cold did not leave either. And he had nothing. Not a coin, not a name that meant anything in that place, not the power to make appear what he needed. He, who had granted the impossible wishes of sleepers, who had built and toppled entire kingdoms in the time it takes to draw one breath, could not obtain a piece of bread.
An older woman, hunched beneath an umbrella she no longer needed because it was not raining anymore, stopped to look at him. He must have presented a pitiful image: soaked, pale, trembling, eyes too wide. The woman rummaged through her bag and handed him, without a word, a gray wool scarf, worn thin, smelling of mothballs and another home. Then she went on her way as if nothing had happened.
He remained there with the scarf in his hands, looking at it. For ages he had observed human compassion from afar, like one observes the weather. Now he had received it. A stranger had given him warmth for no reason and without expecting anything, and he had not even known how to thank her. He wrapped the scarf around his neck with clumsy fingers. It was warm. It was a small and exact miracle, and for a moment the burning behind his eyes was not from the cold.
He continued. Toward the only fixed point he had.
It was no longer the same one from 1389, of course. The White Horse had burned, been rebuilt, renamed, changed hands and centuries as many times as he had changed moods. But the place was still there, stubborn, on the same corner, because some places refuse to disappear the same way some men refuse to die. In recent years Hob had run it himself. He had turned it into his anchor. And wherever the anchor was, Hob would be.
He arrived at dusk, when the streetlamps had already come on and the light from inside spilled, yellow and warm, over the wet pavement. Through the misted glass he could make out the last customers, the chairs someone had begun to put up on the tables, the gleam of bottles behind the bar. And a figure. Broad-shouldered, drying his hands on a cloth, saying something that made someone else laugh.
The heart — that new and tyrannical muscle — lurched in a way he did not know how to name.
He waited for the last customer to leave. He waited for the lock to sound, for the lights in the room to go out until only the one over the bar remained. Then, because his legs were trembling and because there was no longer any way to delay it, he lifted his hand and knocked on the glass of the door.
Footsteps on the other side. The voice, muffled, almost cheerful:
“It’s closed, mate. Come back tomorrow.”
And then the sound of the bolt, because Hob Gadling had never, in six hundred years, quite learned not to open the door, not to peer out and see who was knocking in the night. The door opened. A strip of warm light fell across the face of the man waiting in the dark.
A single word. The first one he spoke with that new throat. It came out hoarse, broken, foreign, and at the same time it was the most his own thing he had done since waking in the grass.
He saw him look. Saw him recognize the shape of the face, the pallor, the black and disordered hair, the line of the cheekbones he had carried in his memory since a tavern in the fourteenth century. He saw him begin to smile by pure reflex, that smile he had always offered him. And he saw him stop halfway, freeze, because something did not fit.
He understood, in that instant, what Hob was searching for and not finding. His eyes were no longer what they had been. There were no nights inside them anymore, no stars, none of that bottomless darkness into which a man could fall. They were only eyes. Dark, yes, but human. Two tired eyes in a tired face. And by the absence of those stars, Hob knew, before anything else, that something had changed irreparably.
“No.” Hob took half a step back, and the cloth stayed hanging from his hand. “This can’t be real. You’re dead. I went to your funeral.”
“You are right,” he said. His voice was still trembling. “But even so... here I am.”
The silence that followed was so dense he could hear the hum of the refrigerator behind the bar.
“I dreamed you.” Hob spoke low, almost to himself, as if going over a wound to prove it was still there. “A while ago. I don’t know how long. I fell asleep one ordinary night and suddenly I was in your realm, in that enormous hall, and there was a procession. Everyone dressed in mourning. Things that have no shape, things that are dreams, weeping for you. And there was a new one. Young. Pale like you but not you, with a cloak and eyes that...” Something broke in his throat. “He offered me a place at the banquet. And I understood what it meant. I understood that the one before, mine, was gone. That there would be no more meetings. That after six hundred years, you had finally left me truly alone.” He swallowed. “I woke up crying like a child. I cried for you, damn you. For a shadow I met every hundred years in a pub.”
“I know.” And he did know, because he had felt it, wherever such things are felt. “You were at my wake, Hob. I saw you. You refused to forget me. You refused to accept another in my place.”
“Of course I refused.” He said it with anger, with that anger that is the last thing to rise when everything else has already fallen. “And now you show up at my door as if nothing happened? After I buried you?”
“I have not come to undo your grief.” His knees nearly gave way; he braced himself against the frame. “I have come because I do not know what I am. I have come because I woke in the grass this morning with a beating heart and a body that feels cold, and because out of all living men you are the only one who might understand what it is to exist when you should not. I have come...” The word cost him. It always had, and now more than ever. “I have come to ask for your help.”
He saw it on Hob’s face: disbelief battling against something older and stronger. Six hundred years of habit. The loyalty of a man who had never known how to close the door on him.
Hob looked over his shoulder, out into the night, into the empty street. Then he looked back at him. At the bruised fingers, the borrowed scarf, the trembling he could no longer hide.
“You’re freezing,” Hob said, and his voice changed completely, softened, became the voice of someone gathering a person in from the street. “God. You’re shaking. Come in. Come in now, before pneumonia kills you.” And then, almost to himself, with an astonishment that looked very much like fear and very much like hope: “Pneumonia. You.”
He took him by the arm, firm, warm, alive, and pulled him inside, and closed the door against the night.
The threshold was left behind. Something had inverted itself forever, and neither of them said it yet.
Upstairs, in the rooms above the pub, Hob lit the stove and put a blanket around his shoulders and took the black, soaked clothes from his hands, carefully, to hang them near the heat. He gave him clothes of his own: a wool jumper much too loose, a pair of trousers he had to hold up. They smelled of Hob, of beer and old wood and something clean beneath it. He put them on slowly, learning every gesture, and Hob watched him from the other side of the room without sitting down, arms crossed, as if he feared that if he blinked the visitor would dissolve into smoke.
“You need to eat,” Hob said suddenly. “If you really are... what you say. If you’re a man now, you need to eat or you’ll go down flat.”
He warmed some broth for him. Ordinary broth, from the pub kitchen, in a dented saucepan. And he set it before him with a spoon, and finally sat down across from him to watch him eat.
The first spoonful was a shock.
There were no words for it, not among the billions he had kept. The taste burst in his mouth like a truth. The salt, the heat going down his throat into a stomach that received it the way dry earth receives rain, the whole body answering, thank you, yes, this, more. He closed his eyes. His hand trembled around the spoon. He had spent all of eternity watching men eat and never, not once, suspected that it was this; that something so vulgar, so daily, could flood him in such a way.
When he opened his eyes, Hob was looking at him with an expression he had never seen on him in six centuries. Something disarmed. Something aching with tenderness.
“Christ,” Hob murmured. “It is you. It really is you.” He shook his head slowly. “I’ve seen you reorder the world with a gesture and now you’re nearly crying over a miserable bowl of broth.”
“I had never tasted it,” he said simply. “Anything. I had never tasted anything.”
Hob did not answer. But something in him, in the line of his shoulders, in his jaw, loosened.
That night he made up the bed in the small room, the one he kept for guests who never came. And when it was time to turn off the light, he found himself unable to do it.
“I do not want to sleep,” he said, and hated the fear in his own voice.
Hob, at the threshold, stopped.
“The lord of dreams is afraid to sleep.” He did not say it with mockery. He said it with an almost reverent astonishment.
“Sleep was my realm. I ruled it. I decided.” He clutched the blanket to his chest. “Now I am going to close my eyes and I do not know where I will go. I do not know what awaits me there. For the first time since the universe has been the universe, I do not know what lies on the other side of sleep. I will be...” He searched for the word. “At its mercy.”
Hob looked at him for a long time. Then he left the door ajar, with a strip of light falling in from the corridor.
“I’ll leave it open,” he said. “If you wake up, I’m next door. All right? I’m not going anywhere.” A pause, and something old and rough beneath the words. “I’ve spent six hundred years not going anywhere. I’m rather good at staying.”
He was in the Dreaming. In his realm. The galleries unfolded as always, infinite, living, breathing. But something was wrong, and it took him a while to understand what: the galleries did not recognize him. He walked through his own corridors the way a stranger walks through a house that is no longer his. The doors did not open to his desire. And far away, at the end of an immense hall, he saw a pale figure with a cloak, a young figure who barely turned, unalarmed, with the distant courtesy one offers an unexpected visitor. Eyes full of stars that were not his stars.
He woke with a start, his heart racing and his throat closed and the terrible certainty of having been a guest in his own home.
The strip of light was still in the door. And after a second, footsteps, and Hob appeared in the doorway with messy hair and an old T-shirt, alarmed.
“Hey. Hey, easy.” He came closer and sat at the edge of the bed without thinking. “You’re here. You’re with me. It was only a dream.”
And they laughed, both almost at once, at the enormity of that phrase being spoken precisely to him.
“Only a dream,” he repeated, and the laughter dissolved into something wet. “I went to my realm, Hob. I went as a visitor. The doors did not know me.”
Hob said nothing intelligent. There was nothing intelligent to say. He did the only thing one man can do for another at three in the morning: he put a hand on his shoulder and left it there, heavy, warm, real, until his breathing began to calm. And he, who had been touched by his siblings and by immortal lovers and by things that had no hands, could not remember ever being held by anything with such simplicity. Without asking. Without expecting. Only holding.
He fell asleep again with that hand on his shoulder. And that time he dreamed of nothing.
The following days were a long lesson.
Hob taught him the world of men the way one teaches a child and an old man at the same time, with a patience he had not known in him. He taught him to button a coat, to cross a street while watching the cars, to hold money, to say thank you in a bakery. He taught him that the body has schedules, that it asks for food at its hours and rest at its own, that it gets tired and must be allowed to rest, that it cannot be commanded the way one commands a realm. He taught him the pleasure of a hot cup of tea between the hands on a cold morning, and the small humiliation of a cold, and the way rain feels different when it falls on skin that has never felt it before.
He learned quickly and slowly. Quickly, because his mind was still vast. Slowly, because the body has its own time and cannot be hurried.
And meanwhile, downstairs, the pub went on with its life, and upstairs they talked. They talked late into the night, beside the stove, with the noise of the city muffled by the glass. They talked of six hundred years of meetings. Of 1389 and Death sitting at the table with her kind smile. Of 1689, when Hob had fallen into disgrace and he had come all the same. Of 1889, when Hob, drunk on courage, had told him they met because they were friends, and he, wounded in the pride of an eternal thing, had walked away.
“You took a hundred years to come back,” Hob said one night, looking at the stove. “For a hundred years I thought you wouldn’t. That I’d scared you off by saying too much.”
“You did.” Hob nodded slowly. “You never said it, you know. The friend thing. In six hundred years you never said it once. But you came back. And in the end I understood that was your way of saying it. Showing up. Once every hundred years, punctual as death. That was your word for affection.”
He remained silent. Hob was right, and the truth weighed in his chest in a new, physical way, because now all things weighed in his chest.
And one of those nights, at last, he asked the question that had dragged him from the grass that first morning.
“Why am I here, Hob?” His voice came out low. “That is why I came. So you could tell me. You have spent six hundred years living what you were not meant to live. Surely in all that time you have found out why. Why has life been returned to me as a man? What am I supposed to do? What is the meaning of it?”
Hob looked at him for a long time. And then, instead of answering, he laughed: a low laugh, without joy and without bitterness, the laugh of someone who knows the question very well.
“Oh, my friend.” He passed a hand over his face. “You think I have the answer. You think after six centuries someone sat me down and explained what it was all for.” He shook his head. “There is no why. That’s the truth it took me two hundred years to swallow. Death and you made a wager one night in a pub, set a price, and left, and you left me here alive without any further explanation. I spent the first century waiting for someone to come and tell me what my mission was, my great purpose, what I was meant to do with all that gifted time.” He shrugged. “No one came. No one ever came. There is no meaning waiting for you at the end of the corridor. They give you time, and that’s all. What is worth something and what isn’t, you decide day by day, with what you do with it.”
“Then there is no reason.” Something sank inside him. “I am here for nothing.”
“That is not what I said.” Hob leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I said there is no why that comes from outside. But look at you. Look what you’ve been given.” And his voice softened, and he chose his words with a care that was not his usual way. “Your whole existence, you were one of the things that hold the universe together. You couldn’t truly get tired, or truly want, or waste time over a cup of tea. You were too large to live. And now someone, your sister, the new one, whatever it is, someone decided that the old one, the proud one, the one who never allowed himself anything, deserved at last the only thing he never had.” He swallowed. “A small life. A man’s life. With cold, and broth, and fear, and mornings. The most ordinary thing in the world, and the only one you never tasted. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s a gift, and gifts don’t come with instructions.”
The silence filled with the hum of the stove.
“Or maybe it’s none of that,” Hob added, lower. “Maybe it’s pure chance, like mine. But it doesn’t matter which it is. Because you’re here. You breathe. That’s the only thing paid in cash. The rest is stories we tell ourselves so we can sleep.”
He looked at him. Really looked at him, as he had not allowed himself to look in six hundred years, because then he had been something too high to look directly at a man. And he saw what had always been there and what he had never had the body to recognize.
He saw that Hob had aged in the soul what the body did not let him age. He saw the weariness of someone who had buried wives, children, friends, whole centuries of people, and had kept opening the pub each morning. He saw the impossible generosity of a man who still welcomed strangers in the night even though he knew he would lose all of them. And he saw, beneath it all, a tenderness that had been waiting for more than a century, since that night in 1889 when he had offered his hand and been left with it in the air.
“You waited for me,” he said, and it was not a question. “Six hundred years. In taverns. Without knowing if I would come. Without having any power over the bargain. I appeared or I did not appear, and you could do nothing but wait.”
“And now it is me.” Breathing was hard, and this time it was not because of the body. “Now I am the one who has come to your door with nothing. The one who cannot leave whenever he wishes because he has nowhere to go anymore. The one who depends on you to eat and to sleep and not to get lost in a street.” He lowered his voice. “And you will not die, Hob. I will. I am going to age in this body and one day you will bury me, as you buried the others. The one who waited has become the one who stays.”
Hob did not look away. His eyes were bright.
“I thought of that already,” he said, hoarse. “The first night, while I was warming your broth. I thought: here he is. Another one I’m going to lose. And the worst one of all, because I’ve known this one for six centuries.” He drew a trembling breath. “And you know what I decided, don’t you? The same thing I decide every time. That I prefer it. I’d rather love you and lose you than never have had you. That’s what never dying is for, I think. To be the one who stays. So none of you has to be alone at the end. Someone has to hold the door.” A broken smile. “I volunteer. I’ve had six hundred years of practice.”
He did not know who moved toward whom.
Perhaps it was both of them at once, in the small room that smelled of Hob and the stove, with the rain beginning again against the glass. Perhaps the distance between them, the one that had been infinite and sacred for six centuries, had spent weeks narrowing on its own, night after night, without either of them naming it.
Hob’s hand rose, slowly, giving him time to pull away, and brushed his cheek. He did not pull away. On the contrary, he leaned into the warmth, just as he had leaned over that first spoonful of broth, with the same incredulous hunger. Hob’s palm was rough and warm and trembled a little, and he thought, astonished, that it made sense for the first caress of his mortal life to come from the only hands that had spent six hundred years learning not to let him go.
“May I?” Hob asked, very softly.
He, who for ages had granted everyone else’s desires and had never allowed himself to have one, nodded. And he said the simplest word in existence, the one he had never needed because he had always been too large to require anyone’s permission:
The kiss was clumsy and slow, both of them learning, six hundred years finally coming undone into one small and human thing. It tasted of tea, and salt, and something he had no name for and decided, in that instant, to simply call Hob. It was not urgent. It did not have to be. For the first time since the world had been the world, he had a body with which to stay, time to spend slowly, and someone to spend it with. When they parted, foreheads together, both of them breathing, he realized he was crying, and that he did not care, and that this too was a new luxury of men: to be able to cry for something other than grief.
“Took you long enough,” Hob murmured against his mouth, and he was laughing, and his voice shook. “Bloody hell. Took you six hundred years.”
“I am punctual,” he said. “Every hundred years, without fail.”
“Well, no more meetings every hundred years.” Hob embraced him, and he let himself be embraced, let that warm body surround him completely, and rested in him as he had never rested before. “Do you hear me? No more waiting. I’m not waiting another day. You stay. Tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. You stay for as long as you stay.”
“For as long as I stay,” he repeated, and understood everything that phrase concealed. The final day. The illness. The body that one day would not answer. Hob afterward, opening the pub alone, one more morning among the thousands still left to him. He understood it and accepted it, because now he knew something that as an eternal he had never known: that things are not worth less because they end. They are worth more. They are worth exactly because they end.
This time the light entering through the window was not dead ash but a pale, clean gold, and he felt it on his face and recognized it as his. The city was beginning to move below: shutters, first footsteps, ordinary life resuming its course. Hob slept beside him, heavy and warm, mouth half open, snoring a little, perfectly ordinary, perfectly alive.
He stayed there watching him sleep. He, who had been the lord of dreams and was now barely a man keeping watch over another sleeping man. And he found himself, almost with surprise, without the question inside him. The one that had dragged him from the grass that first morning, the one that had pulled him through the frozen city to this door. Why. It was no longer there. No one had answered it; it had simply stopped being necessary, dissolved in the warm light and in the breathing of the man beside him the way mist dissolves when the sun rises.
He did not know why he was there. He would probably never know. And for the first time in all his very long existence, that seemed the least important thing.
Outside, an ordinary day was beginning. He was hungry. His bare feet were cold. Ahead of him were tea, and a street to cross carefully, and a body to learn how to inhabit, and an uncertain number of mornings just like this one.
It was little. It was everything. It was, at last, his.
Hob stirred, opened one eye, found him looking, and smiled half asleep.
“You’re still here,” he said, his voice rough with waking, like someone confirming a small miracle.
“I am still here,” he said.
