#so dysfunctional

When the sound of the phone ringing cuts through his sleep, Hob stares at the ceiling for another ring or two before he fully understands it’s a phone, and his, and he has to get out from under the covers to answer it. Groaning, he stands and turns on the light, blinking hard. The kitchen clock says it’s just after five, and he jolts the rest of the way awake, hurrying to pick it up. Something’s wrong at home. Nobody here would call him at this hour, but it’s already eight o’clock back east. “Ma?” he answers.

“Oh. No.”

“Dream,” he breathes out. Relief unknits his shoulders. “Hey. Why are you up so early? Did something happen?”

“I did not sleep. In the first place.”

Hob waits, but he doesn’t say anything else. The sound of Dream’s voice, scraped raw, answers the rest of Hob’s question anyway.

“I’ll bring you notes from class. Is that why you called? You sound rotten.”

“Yes,” says Dream, haltingly. “Thank you.” He starts to say something else but stops and coughs sharply. Then he speaks again, in tight measured bursts, and Hob can nearly feel the titanic effort of Dream stubbornly holding off from coughing. “Did I wake you. You said. You were. An early riser.”

Then he muffles the receiver and resumes hacking. Hob grimaces in sympathy. He glances sidelong at the clock, and bites his lip. 5:05. He’d bet a crisp Benjamin he doesn’t have that Dream was staring at the clock too, waiting for the first acceptable moment to call. The sudden wash of protective fondness threatens to drown him.

“I am. I’m up for the day,” he says, as soon as Dream catches his breath again. It is, technically speaking, the truth. He’s not going to go and let Dream feel even worse for what the man presumably deems the mortal sin of needing a small favour when he can barely string together a sentence.

The quiet susurration of static hisses between them. When he realizes Dream isn’t hanging up, he eyes the front door. “Listen, if you can’t sleep, do you want company? I could come over.” He shifts and stretches, putting clothes on in his mind.

“No,” says Dream, and his imagined self, half the way out the door already, turns back and glares bitterly at the phone.

Hob chews his lip instead of asking, Can I come over anyways? He can’t bring himself to let Dream off the phone just yet. “Well, let me distract you from your misery. If you’re lucky, I’ll be boring enough that you finally catch some sleep.”

There’s a long pause. “Alright,” Dream replies. “Since you insist.”

Hob grins. “Can your phone reach your bed?”

“Why?”

“Well, you’re definitely not going to fall asleep if you’re standing by the phone, are you?”

“Oh. No.”

Hob smiles at his own bed across the room as he listens to the sounds of shuffling. His stomach does something funny, with Dream in this state, still him but not, slow and pliable from exhaustion. Letting himself be bossed around by Hob. Just a little.

He hears a distant cough and then Dream brings the receiver back to his mouth. “Alright.”

“Good?”

“Miserable.”

Hob snorts. He can picture Dream sitting propped up in his bed with his phone beside him, receiver cradled in his hand. Chest aching like hell, probably. Delirious with exhaustion. He slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the floor. Doesn’t even know what he’s going to say until he opens his mouth, still thinking of other nights he’s been up, sleepless. Thinking of withstanding suffering. “Alright. When I played football in high school,” he starts, smiling when he hears a little huff on the other end, “Coach would lead us in this prayer before games. Same one every time, sent up to the patron saint of athletes. Saint Sebastian, give these boys the strength and fortitude to prevail. We must’ve heard it a hundred times. I end up looking him up in the library one day on my free period. I’m killing time and I see this big book of illustrated saints off the shelf. Alright. I wanna know. Who’s this guy that’s supposed to stop us from getting our asses kicked, right? What’d he ever do?”

“I know who he is,” rasps Dream, who even while sick as a dog can’t resist showing off his omniscient knowledge. “He-”

Hob hushes him. “‘Course you do. But I didn’t. Picture me, sixteen or so, finding his entry. In the school library. Saint Sebastian, martyr. Commanded to be shot to death by archers. But the art. He’s in this little loincloth, bound by rope to a tree, muscles straining, pierced with arrows. I stared at it until the bell rang. Then I did something terrible.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “I tore the page out of the book and shoved it right into the pocket of my letterman jacket.”

“No.” A scandalized croak.

“Oh, yes. I took him home with me,” he says, laughing. “Hid him under my mattress between the pages of a Playboy. He became my patron saint.”

“Undignified.”

“No way. Undignified was me imagining how I’d come upon him in the woods, and rescue him. I was one of his loyal converted soldiers, wasn’t I. I’d untie the ropes, suck the venom out of his wounds-”

“Venom?” interrupts Dream.

“Listen, I’d just seen Strange Cargo.”

“That’s a myth. It doesn’t work.”

“Come on, you’ve gotta give me a little creative leeway for my sexual fantasies, man.” Then he realizes what he’s said and feels his ears get hot. “But it doesn’t work in the movie either. The guy doing it knows it won’t do anything. He just wanted the guy who was poisoned to know somebody cared about him, before he bit the dust.”

Dream is quiet. The hush of static over the line feels charged in a way it didn’t before. Hob winces. He’d just wanted Dream to laugh at his expense. He grasps for a change the subject, but Dream speaks up before he can find something, anything, better than sexual fantasies.

“That’s very kind of him.” A beat. “Is that what you’re doing now?” His voice is low. He doesn’t sound like he’s teasing at all.

“God, you’re dramatic. You just have a cold,” Hob says, while trying very hard to not imagine pressing his mouth tenderly to a mortal wound on Dream’s thigh. Failing.

“But you do,” says Dream, very quietly.

“Do what?”

“Care. About me.”

Hob swallows down the first three traitorous words that spring to his lips. Dream must be feeling pretty damn sorry for himself, talking like that. Doesn’t mean Hob has any right to say what he wants to say. “Yeah,” he says. “I do. Of course I do. You’re my best friend. I’d suck the venom out, any day. Even if it did no good.”

Dawn is starting to lighten the room. Hob hums. “You know what, I’m pretty sure that’s why I imagined it. Embarrassing as hell, but that’s what it was for me. I mean, it was hot. But mostly it was the thought of putting my mouth to another guy’s skin and, God, and showing him I care, you know? Acting all swaggering like Steve McQueen or Clark Gable but secretly saying, I cared about you. I really cared. Being somebody’s arms to lie in, as they died. As long as there was mortal peril. Saint Sebastian, barely surviving the arrows, or that poor bastard in the desert, bit by a snake. Because there was no other good reason I could think of to hold another man that close.”

He twines and untwines the cord around his fingers, itching for a cigarette. This is the sort of thing he could never say to somebody’s face. Not even Dream’s.

“Sure, it would be nice to be somebody’s arms without all the tragedy. But that didn’t occur to me back then. To be honest, I’ve only just started to realize it is. Never felt possible before. So I never got around to wishing for it. Until here.” Until you.

He trails off into silence. Dream says nothing.

“Dream?” he asks, softly. His heart is pounding again like he just got woken up.

Nothing but the faint hush of static answers him. Hob squeezes his eyes shut and sighs. “Hey. You still awake?”

There’s no response. Well, for the better. To be spared of hearing Hob empty his guts like that.

He gently hangs up the phone, and groans as he stands up, stiff, and walks back to his bed. He imagines Dream in his own bed, dozing curled beside the phone, receiver lying next to his face, and wishes he could be there. Wishes he could see him, getting some rest at last.