#h&b

[Narrator] Welcome welcome ! Make yourself cozy and let me introduce you to this place ..

You looked very familiar. Its like i saw you in a dream. I wanted to draw you. How are you nowadays, Sol? Anything interesting?

[Dawn] . . . . .-

he's always seemed very sentimental to me. i like to think his uniform is the same set he's been wearing for hundreds of years, meticulously repaired to keep it in order. it's not the first set he's worn, and he went through quite a few when he was younger and newer to mending things. it's a skill that isn't taught much in the goblin court, clothing repair, a process too delicate and time-consuming in a court that prided its own impatience, but for something to last in a court that lacks magic, it must be cared for by hand. hob got better at it given time, though it took some trial and error, given that he was mostly teaching himself.

of course, to mend invisibly was the necessary goal of his practice, both for the sake of hiding his eccentricity from his peers, and for the sake of appearing similar to the magic, high-stationed fey of other courts when meeting them as part of delegations. to have a stitch out of place, for the color of his darning to be a shade off, was an embarrassment that he was intimately familiar with. he often wondered if that particular feeling were something only he, with his strange coveting of permanence and his long nights spent trying to summon it to being around him, had ever experienced.

when hob met the lady binx - and it was binx, namely, rather than her glamor, that he cared for - he immediately admired her. she had a deftness of hand in her craftwork that he could not imagine possessing, formed clever and beautiful things from nothing as if by some incredible magic of thread. but of course, it was more or less the product of their bare hands, not the magic that coursed through her veins below her skin. he was as intimidated by her skill as he was elated to find a kindred spirit in her.

it was only after the bloom that he fully realized how similar they were. he and rue had been staying together for some time at the outskirts of the court of wonder, taking up residence in an old, forgotten building while they figured out where they would end up next. one chilly night, hob ventured to binx's quarters to trouble her for some extra blankets, and they opened a closet, reached into a pile of quilts, and pressed them into his hands.

he quickly returned and spread them over their bed, and when he lifted a corner to slip beneath them and back to rue's side, he noticed a subtle difference in texture in the fabric below his thumb. he paused, frowning lightly, and turned the corner toward the moonlight filtering through the window to inspect it. bright blue thread had been darned into a hole in the material some time ago, standing out brightly against the mint green fabric that surrounded it. he turned his gaze slowly down the length of the blanket. patches and stitches of all colors and shapes greeted him from the uneven surface of a thing proudly and exuberantly mended - a thing imperfect, persuaded to last by hands that loved it.