Archive of Our Own

It starts like this:

Dream of the Endless, called Morpheus, the Shaper of Forms, Lord of Dreams and King of Nightmares, sits upon his throne of office within the Dreaming; he holds in his palm a gemlike star, which he twists and turns like a jeweler studying the cut of a diamond, searching for flaws. He is fashioning a dream of natural beauty, of the Milky Way in bright and untempered splendor splashed across the velvet darkness of a sky free of light pollution and smog, of a swift-running creek unfouled by tailings or gasoline which runs sparkling and clear-bodied through a valley as green as fresh-cut grass.

Professor Hob Gadling, an immortal, sits in his lap, and offers occasional input.

“There was a smell the nighttime got, back before petrol was a thing,” he muses, and Dream releases the star from his palm, allows it to soar upwards into the twinkling antapex of the castle ceiling. There it will remain in stasis until it is called again. “Woodsmoke, if you were close to town. But if you went far out enough into the woods it was just. Green things. Good dirt beneath your feet, and, ah. How running water smells. Wish I had the words.”

“Your words are sufficient as they are,” Dream says, and Hob tips back his head and laughs.

He loves the way Hob laughs. He loves the bristly tilt of his throat when he has not yet shaved, and he loves the smoothness of his cheek when he has; he loves Hob’s brows, dark and thick and rounded and, these days, kept as neatly groomed as his beard and the hair at his groin. He loves that Hob has hair, the thick pelt of his chest and the coarse hair of his legs, a pleasing contrast to Dream’s own flesh, which tends towards marble smoothness unless he wills it otherwise.

He loves Hob’s eyes, dark as the rich earth he rhapsodizes about. He loves that Hob has taken his coat, after their lovemaking, and now has it draped about him like a blanket, the shimmering galaxy of its lining birthing suns and novas for the sole purpose of keeping him warm. He loves that Hob has come to find him here, to watch him work. Loves that Hob finds it fascinating.

He loves. He loves. He loves so deeply and so ardently that there must be no end to it, and yet Hob meets him eagerly each time, and never cries that it is too much, too painful, too endless. Hob seems delighted by Dream’s ardor. Shows continuous amazement that Dream wishes to please him at all.

Dream finds the thread of Hob’s laughter, follows the feel of it, the breathless joy, the swooping curl of love, and winds it through his fingers in shining amber thread. He will stitch this into the ebb and flow of the creek, he thinks, this gleeful bubbling chuckle, and all who dream sweetly of the Earth at its most beautiful will dream also of its most beautiful son.

Hob hums as his laughter dies down, and tucks his head beneath Dream’s chin. He is a solid weight, a furnace of warmth that seeps into Dream’s own unyielding flesh and makes a home there.

“I’ve got a thing coming up next week,” Hob says, and the glittering fulsomeness of the throne room makes him yet more beautiful, dapples his skin with beads of dawning light, illuminates the faint beginnings of sunspots that splash across the highest points of his cheeks. His skin glows like a solar flare, and this, too, Dream takes inspiration from. He bends his head down to kiss the photosphere of Hob’s body, draws the light into his mouth and tastes it there, sweet and hot as melting honey.

“A thing,” Dream murmurs.

“Yeah, for the History and Lit departments. Enrollment is down, and they want to talk about it in the most daft way possible, everyone in costume and sweating their brains out. Rocky Horror themed, if you’ll believe it. Have no idea how they got that past Doctor Smythe, but here we are. Are you interested in coming with?”

The sound of Hob’s voice is equally as pleasing as the sound of his laughter, a gentle cadence that Dream allows to lull him, brings to mind the call of nightbirds, soft and tuneful. It takes him long seconds to realize that Hob has asked him a question. A thing, Hob calls it, by which he means a meeting, which Dream has seen the aftermath of before: Hob returning home with a headache so sharp it rattles his eyes, Hob crawling into bed and asking to be held because of budget cuts and bureaucracy and fucking Tories, Hob gritting his teeth and bearing the weight of his burdens like Tantalus, reaching always for something teasingly held beyond his grasp.

“If I go to your meeting,” he says, ”I will not be held responsible for my actions if they treat you poorly.”

Hob laughs again. A different laugh. The laugh that he has for when Dream has said something sweet: lilting and musical and bell-like. Hob has many laughs, and Dream takes pride in how many he has noted only sound for him.

“All right, point taken,” Hob says. “Maybe you can come with me to the holiday party. Gives me just enough time to convince everyone to be on their best behavior for my protective boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend,” Dream rumbles, with great satisfaction. He is not a boy, but that Hob still names him friend as well as lover is a constant wonder to him. In all his previous entanglements, friendship had ended the moment he had allowed himself to feel too strongly, a candle being consumed in a wildfire.

Yet Hob meets him. Again, again, with the high walls of his hearth and the pales of his pasture and the dam upon which Dream breaks himself, and still Hob remains unmoved. Accepts him each time. Takes all Dream has to offer, and often asks for more. Remarkable creature. Beloved, to stir his blood and heat his heart like no other.

Some inkling of his passion must show upon his face, because Hob’s expression becomes sly, and thoughtful.

“I could use someone to help me get into costume,” he says, “even if you won’t come to the party.”

Costume. Yes. It is October, in the Waking, and next week marks its end. Halloween approaches. Horror, Hob had said. Humans are fond of the horrific and bloody, this time of year. He tries to picture what Hob might consider grotesque – a plague victim’s bandages, a beggar’s rags – but can only think of the process of removing it all afterwards. Of cleaning away latex and greasepaint to reveal the familiar skin beneath, and its tenderness beneath his lips, and the taste of Hob’s mouth.

He says, and feels that he is saying it under great duress, “If I assist you in dressing, I believe I will be forced to also disrobe you. Possibly multiple times. And you will not go to your meeting.”

“What a shame that would be,” Hob says, but he chuckles, and kisses the curve of Dream’s throat. A heart beats there for him, a pulse that Dream has manufactured for him and him alone. The ichor in his veins is swirling nebulae and the radiant mindstuff of dreams, but for Hob, it brings itself closer to being known. For Hob, it functions as breath and blood. If Hob cut him, here and now, it would be red like any other man’s. “But, point taken. I’ll get pictures for you. Better, I’ll call for you when I get home. You won’t be too busy?”

Dream must finish this creation. He has no deadlines but those he sets upon himself. He considers this.

“No,” he says. “Not for you.”

And Hob beams at him. His smile is the first drifting gasp of Summer, the sun-warmed stones, the redolent hum of birds and insects in a field of yellow gorse.

“Well, good,” he says. “Could still use someone to help get into costume, though. Bit of a two person job if I want to do it right.”

“You may avail yourself of Matthew if you desire,” he says, and he is being, perhaps, slightly obstinate, in that Hob has met Matthew only once, and was not given his name, and thus does not know that Matthew has no thumbs. He is being selfish, in the hope that Hob, without assistance, will simply call in sick to his meeting. Will call on Dream that much sooner, and they may skip all the tedium that crushes Hob’s hopes and renders him small and aching in the deep hours of the night.

And then Hob kisses him, softly, kindly, and awareness of his own thoughts drifts apart like dandelion seeds. Hob takes his hand, and draws it down beneath the folds of Dream’s own coat, and he feels how hot his lover is, how burning-bright and hard for him.

“My sweet king,” he murmurs, and the smell of him, when Dream bends his head to lick and bite at the junction of his shoulder, when he parts the coat to reveal the soft concavity of Hob’s armpit and kisses the sweat-damp skin there, when Dream pushes his nose into the thicket of hair that covers his chest, the smell of him, rich and earthy and animal musk. Infinitely and desperately human. This, also, he inhales into his lungs and keeps there, the wonder that is the human body, the depths of it, the headiness. This he will use for the soil that Hob so achingly remembers, a nighttime scent of many centuries past.

It is only many hours later, spent and sated and with Hob returned, regrettably, to the Waking, that Dream of the Endless assembles his collected inspirations, and realizes that what he has made is no dream of natural wonder, of stars like milk and a green-growing valley, but a dream of his lover. Hob, reclined in soft grasses, yellow flowers in his hair; Hob, with his strong-muscled thighs and his handsome prick, with his pelt of chest hair gleaming umber-gold in the sinking sunlight; Hob standing nude in the rush of the creek, the water up to his calves and peppering his skin with goosebumps, his head tipped back, laughing.

Dream sighs. Sends this creation to join the others he has made, half-formed things that will eventually be repurposed, but for now are molded facets of Hob’s mouth, the shell of his ear, the curve of his buttocks; Hob gasping in the midst of pleasure; Hob’s face soft with sleep; Hob’s eyes bright with fever and thanking Dream for bringing him a glass of water, the least he could do when his lover was ill last month. Hob, a thousand different ways, and each more loved than the last.

He will go to the holiday party, he determines. It will please Hob to introduce him as his lover. As his boyfriend. Dream rather desperately wants to please Hob, these days. Would bring down for him stars to adorn his fingers, ribbons of moonglow to fashion his clothing, would present to him the dreams of gas giants and far-flung comets as tribute, and yet all Hob has asked of him is his time, and his presence, and the chance that they might walk in the Waking world together, for a time.

He has never had such an uncomplicated lover. One so focused on Dream’s pleasure, above his own. He finds he likes it, very much. He finds he would like to return the favor.

He turns his attention back to the shaping of dreams. This time, there will be no distractions. And when Hob calls for him, there will be nothing to stop him from answering.

(And the middle is a little bit like this:

“He didn’t say you were a bird.”

“Yeah, well, you aren’t perfect either, buddy. What the hell do you want from me, I haven’t got thumbs.”

“I don’t know! Don’t you have, ah. Friends? You can call? Look, it’s only that I’ve got a bit riding on this –”

“Like a bet? What the fuck kind of bet involves –”

“Twenty quid, all right, and bragging rights, and proof that Lorentzi doesn’t know his arse from a hole in the ground –”

“Jesus, fine, fine, there’s a guy I can call –”

“Telling me that men can’t wear corsets –”

“I said I could call…what? Guys can’t wear corsets? Since when? I thought, uh, Drag Race was still a thing.”

“It is, and do you know how many men I knew in the 1800s who wore corsets? The whole bloody lot of them! Lorentzi is just a homophobic prick, and if he thinks he can shame me at a Rocky Horror-themed costume party, that bastard has another thing coming. I didn’t spend my teen years thinking the devil lived in me for some jumped-up little toad in the twenty-first century to tell me the same fucking thing.”

“Oh, shit, this is hitting a, a nerve.”

“Bloody yes it is. If I’m going to take Dream to the holiday party, the very last thing I want is for Damian fucking Lorentzi to end up plagued with eternal nightmares because he can’t handle me having a male lover. Male-presenting. You know.”

“I mean, it sounds like the guy deserves it.”

“God’s bones, he does, but he’s insufferable now, and I don’t want to imagine him sleep-deprived.”

“That. That makes sense.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

“So you…you said you could call someone?”

“Yeah. Yeah, let me just, uh. I’ll be right back.”)

And somewhere, also, is:

Matthew plunging downwards through the metaphysical smoke that rings the edges of the Dreaming, feeling so beside himself with smugness that he thinks it might be a little excessive, even for a raven (which are, as everyone knows, creatures designed for smugness). He has, as Lucienne would say, done a good thing today. He’s helped his boss’s boyfriend, he’s given a friend – an acquaintance – a colleague the chance to stretch his legs, and by the end of the night some asshole’s pocket is going to be twenty bucks lighter.

So he’s feeling pretty accomplished, pretty good about himself, when he emerges in the heart of the Dreaming, the massive, impossible castle rising over the crest of the horizon like a titan. He swoops in through one of the tower windows, and here he isn’t bound by speed or distance or how strong his wings are, he just goes. It’s like breaking the sound barrier, except he does it with his mind. He’s not a smart man. Raven. Whatever. He knows this. But in the Dreaming, he can go anywhere, do anything, and all he has to do is think it. It’s probably the best job he’s ever had, and it’s well worth having to play match-up with Dream’s human boyfriend.

The throne room is dim and quiet, and he wings his way through the murky fog of night that spreads its fingers across the ceiling, coming to a scrabbling landing on the high back of the throne itself. It still takes some getting used to, the landing part. Coordinating his wings and his legs at the same time takes a level of muscle finesse that humans don’t usually have to deal with, and he likes to think that yeah, he’s a raven now, but there’s still some little part of him that remembers what it was like to be human, to kick back on a hot day with a PBR in one hand and a cigar in the other and just exist.

He spreads out his wings, preening through the flight feathers to get them nice and straight, and the figure on the throne finally looks up at him.

Dream of the Endless is pale and thin and angular in ways that humans aren’t, and his eyes are like the fathomless field of space, and when he looks at you it’s like staring into a black hole.

“Heya boss,” Matthew says. Black holes and liminal angles mean very little to ravens. The parts of him that aren’t yearning for a nice, cold beer are currently preoccupied with making sure his feathers are tidy, and thus too busy to feel intimidated by space, or stars, or endlessness.

“You have returned,” says Dream, the master of stating the obvious. “I had thought you would be with Hob for some time yet.” He twists in the throne, the better to give his full regard to his raven, and Matthew preens under the attention. “Has he chosen to abstain from his meeting this evening?”

There’s a barely-restrained eagerness in the way that Dream holds himself, in the bright attentiveness of his voice when he speaks of Hob, when it is normally so somnolent and deep. Matthew’s human memories translate this, instinctively and correctly, as holy shit, he’s gonna fuck that poor man six ways from Sunday.

Far be it for him to be the bearer of bad news, but he’s still riding the high of having done a good, and so Matthew thinks nothing of saying, “Nah, sorry boss. It’s still not for like two hours, though, if you want to go and visit?” He’s not entirely sure how long ‘getting railed by the Dreamlord’ might take, but probably not longer than an hour, right? He turns his thoughts away from that path before they can wander too far. Bad enough that he’s privy to some parts of his boss’s sex life, he doesn’t need to start actively considering it.

Dream is still staring at him, but now his brows are knit together, his mouth pursed.

“And were you of good assistance, Matthew?”

“Oh, I mean, you know,” says Matthew, the part of him that is a raven incorrectly assuming the banked sweetness in Dream’s voice is praise for him, and the part of him that remembers what it’s like to be human sitting up and taking notice like a hare that hears a barking dog, “it’s hard to help someone into an outfit like that without thumbs, and I mean Christ, what an outfit, I’ve never seen so many laces before. Did you know that in the 1300s they thought the devil made you gay? Isn’t that wild? Anyways Hob’s a cool dude, really got his bi flag flying for this shindig, so I had to phone a friend, y’know –”

Shut up, what remains of Matthew’s human brain wails, shut up, shut up shutup–!

“A friend,” Dream rumbles, and something, some long-forgotten instinct of self preservation, finally drops a pin through the cavernous echo of Matthew-as-raven’s brain, and he clicks his beak together so fast that it echoes like a whipcrack in the empty throne room.

“Uh,” he says, and finds himself suddenly face to face with the Dreamlord, as his boss stands and stretches and looms in ways that shouldn’t be possible. The light bends around him, refusing to touch the shadowed surface of his skin, skating over him like oil on water.

Matthew, quite against his will, opens his mouth again and starts to pant.

“What friend,” Dream says, so softly that it could be a whisper if it didn’t have the full force of the Dreaming laced behind it in subtle curls and whorls, “and do not say –”

“--The Corinthian,” Matthew says, miserably. “Look, he’s been, he’s been really good lately, he’s hardly stabbed anyone without asking first, and he really wanted to meet your boyfriend, and now that I think about it that was maybe a red flag, but Hob’s immortal, right? That’s his whole deal, he won’t die unless…”

Dream cuts him off with a wave of his hand, and Matthew, pathetically grateful for the excuse to stop running his mouth, snips his beak shut again and tries to focus on his breathing. “We will discuss this, “ Dream says, “later. I am.” And here Dream seems to draw himself inwards, and the shadows that writhe around his feet retract into the seething mass of dreamstuff that is the King of Nightmares, and then Dream raises a hand, and he closes his eyes, and he pinches the bridge of his nose. Like he has a headache, or is trying to stave one off. Matthew knows for a fact that anthropomorphic personifications of concepts don’t get headaches, because they don’t have brains, not the way that he understands them, but. But he’s seen Hob do this exact same motion a dozen different times. He’s seen Hob perform this little ritual of self-soothing when Dream has said something particularly ass-hatty.

He thinks he’s going to ask Hob to put in a good word for him. Assuming the Corinthian hasn’t eaten his eyeballs. Hopefully.

“I am not angry,” Dream says. It’s clearly a lie, but Matthew appreciates it all the same. “I am disappointed. Inform Lucienne that I will be indisposed in the Waking for the next few hours.” He pauses, and then, sounding like the word is being dragged out of him over hot coals, adds, “Please.”

And there’s a lot that Matthew could say about what he knows of Dream now versus what Lucienne has told him of Dream then, but there’s equally much that he can say about the little changes he’s noticed just since Hob reentered the guy’s life. How he smiles more, when he’s working, and how the work doesn’t consume him for weeks at a time like it apparently used to, and how he’s started inserting all these little things, these human gestures and aspects, into the firmament of his being, and how when Hob is here he just. He just fuckin’ lights up. The whole Dreaming feels it, the uplift of joy, like a sudden warm summer downpour while the sun is still shining, the sort that begs you to go outside and dance in it.

He thinks, though, this is the biggest thing. That Dream bends, now, before he breaks.

The thought scatters through him, through one ear and out the other, and Matthew bobs his head down and says, “Yeah, boss, of course. I’ll, uh. I’m just. Gonna go. To the Library, now.”

And he spreads out his wings, and hops, and Dream watches him struggle to catch the first beat of air (which is, he’ll admit, a little embarrassing), but then he gets a good wind beneath him and Matthew rides it through the thermals of the infinitely high ceiling, spiraling upward until he can find a high window, and at last make good his escape.

And Dream of the Endless, who does not have a corporeal form in the way that most beings understand it, and yet nonetheless feels, again, the urge to press his fingers to his temple, takes from his waist his pouch of sand, and lets a fistful of golden light carry him to the Waking.

Which brings us to:

Dream of the Endless, Lord Shaper, ruler of the Nightmare Realms, the Oneiromancer, and lover of Immortal Hob Gadling, steps through the thin membrane between the Dreaming and the Waking and into the living room of the flat above The New Inn.

“Put your sodding back into it,” he hears, the voice of his lover drifting from the open door to the bedroom. “You’re supposed to be a nightmare, if you can’t lace me in properly…”

“Sorry, babe, what was that? ‘Go ahead and break a rib’? And risk getting unmade again? No, thanks, I know how to tighten a corset and bruising your fuckin’ kidney isn’t part of it.”

“If you can reduce my waist to thirty-three inches you, you can have. Limited stabbing privileges.”

Dream judges this, perhaps, a prudent point to intervene, and begins to stride towards the bedroom.

“Listen, I’m flattered, I am, but you’re taken, and I’m married to my work –”

“I’ll tell you about the time Elton John snorted coke off my chest?”

There’s the sound of pulling fabric, of laces being suddenly tightened, and Hob’s voice, a startled grunt that turns at once into a drawn out, “Fuck me, I forgot how that feels.”

It is at this point that Dream arrives in the doorway. He notes the dishevelment of the room: the clothes that lie scattered on the bed, the open closet pouring its contents onto the floor, as though Hob had gone through it in a rush, and the bathroom door standing open also, revealing a slice of the sort of wide mirror that Hob has favored since the 18th century, and a smaller mirror ringed with lights, the purpose of which he does not know, and a veritable cornucopia of makeup on the counter, of rouges and kohls and lipsticks in shades from peach pink to red as running blood.

And Hob, stood facing the wall near the bed, braced with his palms flat upon it while the Corinthian winds leather laces between his fingers and pulls them tight. The laces are threaded through, and it takes Dream several seconds to reconcile this garment with what he remembers of them from previous centuries, a corset. A corset that Hob is wearing, largely blocked by the Corinthian’s body, but Dream can see the edge of it, how it cinches Hob’s waist into a neat hourglass, can see where the steel bones cage his flesh and tame it into a desirable shape, bracketing the jut of his hips just visible over his terrycloth sweatpants.

Can feel, if he reaches outwards with a trembling sense of self, the edges of Hob’s daydreams, a vague sense of being powerful and beautiful and predatory. There is a hot clench in the guts that he manifests here, for the pleasure of his lover, for the use of the sensorial aspects of the Waking, a shivering response to Hob’s low-grade simmering desire.

“Boss!” the Corinthian exclaims, having spotted Dream in the doorway, and he lets go of the laces, causing Hob to fall more firmly against the wall with a soft grunt. “See, champ, I told you. Anyone who chooses work over seeing you all dolled up is insane.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Hob says, and turns around at last, and looks at Dream with his soft, dark eyes, an ember kindled in their center, and his mouth a gentle curve, and his lips a dark crimson, and his eyelids painted in black kohl, his vague daydreams coalescing into lasered focus on Dream. Dream, coming to him, kissing him, the lipstick a red smear between their mouths, Dream’s hands settling on Hob’s waist made trim and tight by the corset, Dream sinking into the comfortable leather chair in Hob’s living room, and Hob standing over him, so much taller, wearing heels –

“Check out these tits, my lord,” the Corinthian says; Dream did not refashion him to have any sense of propriety or good timing, and he regrets this now, immeasurably. “Woof. Bark bark, am I right?”

“Please stop barking at my chest,” Hob says, and the Corinthian shrugs.

“Well, big man here probably won’t let me squeeze ‘em, so needs must. Anyways, my job here’s done. You lovebirds have fun, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, et cetera. You owe me one hell of a juicy story, Gadling.” The Corinthian steps away, the lights flickering into fuzzing darkness for the brief moment of shadow all Nightmares require to travel through dreams, and the room goes searing cold for one microsecond that Dream actually feels, so mired now in Hob’s daydreams of him, in the wallowing of human sensation. It prickles across his skin, a frigid burn that is blessedly brief, and which he chooses to ignore in favor of Hob, as the lights return.

“Shit, that’s cold,” Hob says. Goosebumps travel the length of his bare arms, the swell of his shoulder and the dark hair that girds his forearms; there is a noticeable tan line that encircles his triceps, a delineation between the intimate and the public that Dream notes with fascinated interest. He can still see behind his eyes, in blurry overexposed photography, the image of Hob approaching him from a position of height, of Hob pushing him down into worn leather, putting a knee between Dream’s legs in delicious threat.

Then the image wicks away, replaced by Hob’s gentle worry. It washes over him in lapping waves, a soothing warmth that drains the tension from manifested limbs, that drapes over him like a lover’s arms – and yet, like a lover’s arms, does nothing to bank the smoldering warmth in him, that hot coal in his gut that he has come to associate with wanting in the Waking realm. He has grown accustomed to manifesting a physical form that pleases Hob, and he finds himself at its mercy now, as blood rushes simultaneously to his cheeks and to his groin.

“Don’t you dare discorporate him, or whatever you want to call it,” Hob says, and it takes Dream long seconds to remember the thread of the conversation, because Hob has turned to face him fully, and Dream wants. He wants with a severity that is nearly frightening. He wants in the way he loves: ravenous, passionate, consuming.

“I was not planning to,” he says; he is, for once, not looking at Hob’s eyes, but at the corset. It is Hob’s, in a way that is obvious from how it settles on his frame, a thing designed for him and for his body and not merely picked out for its beauty. He can pluck its history from the air between them: Hob commissioned this corset himself, ordered it in the 90s, not long after their meeting-that-wasn’t, fueled by hurt and copious amounts of drugs. He had buried himself in a culture of mutual joy to try and drown his sorrows, surrounded by friends still reeling from a plague that slashed their numbers in halves each passing day; he had marched in a parade. Put on a play.

Rocky Horror, Dream thinks, and comprehends. Not for the season at all, then, but something different entire. Some other, more meaningful thing.

“Well, good. He was just helping.” Hob rolls his shoulders; the corset moves with him, charcoal black coutil embroidered with twining flowers, elaborate roses and twisting vines that inch down towards Hob’s covered belly. The lower half of the corset is flaring orange, an illusionary blaze that glints with studs of rhinestones and sequins, glittering in the low light of the flat. The outline of flowers and vines implies the shape of flames licking up towards Hob’s chest, and Dream is reminded of his own coat, which Hob so often takes after they have made love, which he drapes around his shoulders, which he touches with reverent curiosity. Hob has clothed himself in flames and starlight, and Dream wants.

I could have helped, he wants to say, and, wisely, does not say it. Hob offered him the chance, and he refused it, though he was not possessed of all the information possible, because that is how humans are. Reading the feelings between words, scrabbling more than surface-deep. How it must feel, to always seek some further meaning. To not know, within the bones of your existence, what is.

Hob sighs. “Come here, love,” he says, and Dream goes to him, drawn as undeniably as a meteor towards the surface of the Earth.

Hob, gentle, kind, considerate. Hob who looks through him and sees some deeper quality that still pleases him, after everything. Hob who sees past his pride and his stubbornness and his foul moods, and still draws him close, and touches his hair, and coddles this soft animal body that Dream has made for him. Dream goes to him, and fits themselves together, himself and Hob’s self, puts his hands upon the waist made smaller by dint of mechanical ingenuity and the weight of history. The coutil is faintly textured beneath his fingers, worn but cared-for.

“Something’s got you in a mood,” Hob says. His hands are lovely and strong-fingered where they card through Dream’s hair. Dream wants. He does not know what he wants: for Hob to continue his daydream of earlier, of delightful and simple pleasures of the flesh, or to address the rising question in him.

He has been trying, as of late. He has been trying.

“This means something to you,” he says, and Hob huffs laughter, and plants a smacking kiss to Dream’s cheek. “I would have attended you more vigorously if I had known.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hob says. He turns in Dream’s arms. “Finish lacing me up, dove? Tight as you can.”

The laces, when he takes them up, are smooth and slippery from many years of repeated tugging, and he must wind them through his fingers to maintain his grip. He does as he’s bid, cinching Hob firmly into the corset, until the hemmed edges nearly bite into his flesh, and then no further. Hob makes another quiet sound, nearly the same as before, and it heats Dream’s blood, as it had before. He bites his lip. He ties the laces into a broad and comely bow.

“When I was a boy,” Hob says, “the idea of loving another man was. Unfathomable. The first time I ever thought of kissing my best mate, I thought I was possessed. And then I got rather pissed at ah, both King and Church, and decided I didn’t want to care about it for a while. But it kept coming back. The Buggery Act, you know. And then King James and his lover. And the Wilde trials. It kept being a thing. That fully half of me was sinful. In the…in the 1980s, when everyone I knew was dying. Things like this were a way to make people look at us. See how much we still wanted to live, despite it all.”

Hob’s hands find Dream’s where they rest upon the broad wings of his hips, made sharper still by the corset’s stiff grasp. “How could something that celebrated living be sinful, you know?” he says softly. “So, yeah, this means a bit to me. It’s the chance to show some snide little dalcop that he’s not allowed to be casually homophobic without consequences, and it’s. It’s me, you know? They’ve got a word for it and everything, now. A bunch of words.”

The words are ripe berries that Dream could pick from the brambles of Hob’s history – he tastes the shape of them in his mouth, pride and bisexual and not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.

“Your words,” Dream says, and Hob’s hand squeezes. “They suit you.”

“Aw. Sweet of you. They’re words for everybody, though. Even you, if you wanted.”

“Does it not seem. Disingenuous? When I am neither human, nor gendered.”

Hob laughs. It is a laugh that Dream hears rarely, now, that he recognizes more from the very beginnings of their relationship. When everything had been new, and strange, and wonderful, and Hob had reintroduced him to loving a human as though leading a child into the shallow end of a pool.

“You like when I call you my boyfriend,” Hob says. He wriggles at last from Dream’s grasp, and goes to the ruin of the closet. Dream shortly sees why it is ruined, as Hob digs through the contents like a dog searching for a buried bone. “You can be queer if you want. That’s a nice catch-all term these days, and that’s all that really matters, is if you want it.”

Dream considers this. He still wants, yes, wants Hob’s kisses, and his mouth upon Dream’s neck where he likes to rest his lips, and he wants Hob’s strong body against his, and he wants Hob’s familiar weight in his lap while he creates. What Hob describes is a want that he is unfamiliar with. Humans seek to define themselves, to explain and understand their nature within the universe. Dream has never needed to. He is. He was. He always will be, until his sister turns out the final light and folds up her wings for good.

Hob emerges from the morass of his closet with a triumphant ah-ha! He is holding a pair of black satin panties. Dream’s contemplation of his own Endless nature is, smoothly and completely, obliterated.

“I haven’t tucked in so long,” Hob says. He slants his gaze towards Dream, and his expression becomes slyly fond. “You’re going to make it harder if you stand there watching me.”

Dream clenches his fists. “Apologies,” he says, and turns to face a different direction. This has the benefit of making Hob chuckle again, this time deep and rolling, and also gives him the chance to try and tame the slow-growing fire in his belly.

“Christ, I love you,” he hears, and is suffused with warmth. “Shame that I won’t have you on my arm for this. Would love to see Lorentzi’s weaselly little face when he sees I’ve pulled the most gorgeous creature in all God’s green earth.”

Dream licks his lips. He has the urge, nonsensical, human, to reach up and tug his ear.

“I could be. Convinced to go,” he offers.

“Oh?” There’s a rustle of falling cloth, and Dream can picture in the firmament of himself how Hob looks: the corset sleeking his torso, the dense thicket of his chest hair visible over the smooth hem, the way the material cups his chest like a lover’s hands, makes more obvious the musculature there, brings attention to his nipples, copper-pink amongst the burnt umber of his hair. How the sweatpants have puddled around his feet, and how he steps lightly out of them on his way to the bathroom. He is not wearing briefs, as he usually does; his sex is pleasingly-shaped and quiet against his thigh, the dark hair trimmed short, now, and tidy. Dream blinks, and the image smears away. There is a great deal of shuffling and swearing that is coming from the bathroom, and the sound of tearing tape.

“Don’t look,” Hob says. “I’m an absolute travesty in here.”

“You are deserving always of the most effusive praise,” Dream responds. He is gifted with another laugh.

“Flatterer. Aren’t I supposed to be convincing you?”

“I will not need much convincing,” he admits. “Now that I know it is. Important.”

“Well. Thank you, love. But if it’s not something you want to do…”

“I want to,” Dream says. Insists. “For you. I would pull down stars, for you. Reshape oceans. I can be…polite. For an evening. For you.”

When Hob emerges from the bathroom he is smoothing his palm down the front of his groin, made curiously flat; the panties are plain black satin, and Dream, allowing himself to glimpse, wants nothing more than to sink his teeth into their hem, and pull them down with the sheer force of his desire. To undo all the careful preparation Hob has done, and tease him, and tempt him to stay, to linger here with Dream, in the comfort of Hob’s home. To lure him into bed as the sirens of old, encourage his lover to dash upon the cliff of his body until they are spent, and afterwards he would bury his fingers in Hob’s hair, and whisper to him of the dreams he has created, how Hob’s face has appeared in the outline of the trees and the flight pattern of birds, how in the glimmering fire of lava flows he has woven the shine of Hob’s hair, how the shape of his hip is a mountain range and the music of his laughter the beat of the wild ocean.

“If you’re sure,” Hob says.

And Dream loves him so deeply, and so desperately, that it feels nothing like an inconvenience to say, “I am sure.” It feels even less so, when Hob’s arms wind around him from behind, and he presses a soft kiss to the nape of Dream’s neck, his lips tacky with color.

“All right,” he says. “But you can leave at any point, all right? No suffering through it for my sake. And no. Ah. No cursing anyone with nightmares. No matter how much they deserve it.”

“I will not stand idly by while your honor is impugned.” Hob’s hand fumbles across his chest, warningly squeezes Dream’s right pectoral, and he amends, “I will. Attempt to address the matter in a way befitting humans.”

“That’s my love.” Hob pats his chest twice, and then his hands, his wonderful, strong, beloved hands, retreat. “Now, come help me get these heels on. Honestly, I could’ve gotten the corset done myself, but these things are murder to lace on your own.”

And we come, at last, to:

The party, which is, as many human parties are, ostensibly about one thing and yet in truth merely a thin skin draped over the desire to drink copious amounts of sub-par wine from plastic cups, and to be given the opportunity to devour bland, yet free, hors d'oeuvres. Dream is familiar with such parties; as the regent of his own realm, he is expected to attend functions much like this one, though often with significantly grander stakes.

Yet this means something to Hob. “I cannot wait to show you off,” he’d said, and had made a noise of pure delight when Dream had draped his coat around his shoulders, fabric falling in shivering pleasure over the beloved arms. His clothes are himself, and thus are as fond of Hob as he is, and the coat needs no convincing nor tailoring to fit his lover like a glove. If he concentrates, he can feel Hob’s skin through the space-born fabric, can taste the heat and sweat and musk of him.

He concentrates, instead, on the here and the now, on the music that plays softly through unseen speakers, hooked to someone’s iPhone that lies on the refreshments table, unattended. There’s a light, a woman croons, over at the Frankenstein place.

“This song mentions you,” Hob says, and nudges Dream with his elbow as they step within the loose press of bodies that fill the room. It is not such a large event, Dream thinks. Merely two departments, several dozen faculty members and their TAs, all of them mingling and speaking in varying tones, from raucous to circumspect. There is a clear delineation between History and Literature, but not so set in stone that members do not cross party lines to visit. Hob brings him to the refreshment table and hands him a red plastic cup; Dream takes it automatically.

“I will bet you anything it’s Franzia,” he says. He speaks down to him now, the boots that Dream had helped lace him into adding an extra five inches to his height. The effect is admittedly stunning: Hob in stiletto heels, a crimson ribbon in cross-patterns enclosing his calves and lower thigh in gauzy black lace, picked out in designs of roses and spiraling leaves. His hair is a fall of bronze about his face, his eyes framed in thick wings of kohl, his lips, already the object of Dream’s wanting, made more pleasing by the reapplication of matte red lipstick.

Flow morphia slow, the speakers lilt, let the sun and light come streaming into my life. Dream takes a sip of the offered wine. It is, as expected, of dubious quality, but he is not here to sample wine. He is here for Hob. Hob, who has spotted someone he knows, and waves eagerly at them. This causes him to list against Dream’s side, balancing on the precarious knife edge of his heels. Dream takes the unbalance of his weight with ease; Hob’s thigh touches Dream’s hip, strong and supple and softly-furred, his skin made golden under the buzzing electric lights. Dream transfers his wine to his other hand, that he might curl his fingers over Hob’s hip, rest his forearm within the shelf made of his tucked waist.

The man and woman who approach are dressed similarly, though with not near as much attention to detail. The woman is wearing a top hat and leggings, likely in deference to the chill outside. The man has opted to wear a collar adorned with a bow tie, dark slacks, and nothing else.

“Robbie,” the man says, and Hob leaves his side, and exchanges gestures of friendship with the both of them, pats on the back and kisses hovering just above the cheek. “Phwoar, look at you. Where’s your nads, mate? You lose them outside somewhere?”

“My boyfriend is holding them for me,” Hob says, sweetly batting his eyelashes. A shiver goes down Dream’s spine, liquid pleasure. My boyfriend. Hob was correct when he said that Dream enjoys the sound of the word, but it is less for the word itself, and more for what it means. Hob’s. Hob’s lover, Hob’s partner, his friend, who he has chosen, who he freely acknowledges with the power of his speech. It is heady, to be acknowledged. To be accepted. Hob reaches back, touching Dream upon the arm. “Morpheus, love, this is Professor Isaac Harris, Modern British and European History, and this is, ah, Professor Devji, right?”

“Sushma, please,” the woman says, looking at Dream’s hand on Hob’s hip. She thoughtfully does not extend her own to shake. “Old English Literature. It’s good to see you again, Rob. You look stunning. And, Morpheus, you said? I take it your parents were fans of the classics.”

“One might say that,” Dream murmurs. Hob has not let go of his arm. Has, in fact, pulled him closer, so that they are once again thigh to hip. He feels, for the first time, almost small, in comparison to his lover. This, also, is curiously pleasing.

“What made you decide to come?” Sushma asks. “Only, you’re the talk of the department. Everyone was so keen to meet you, and when Rob said you wouldn’t be coming the betting pools collapsed like a house of cards.”

“Betting pools,” Hob says, sounding bewildered. Dream purses his lips.

“I decided to attend in support of Robert,” he says at last, and the man, Professor Harris, reaches over and roughly pats Dream on the back. The force of it rocks him forwards, nearly sloshing the wine.

“Good on ya. Gonna rub Lorentzi’s nose in it, and I for one cannot wait to watch. Reckon he thought you were bluffing when you said you had a corset of your own.”

“What’s your waist?” Sushma asks, and Hob beams. Dream knows this information, also. Hob had insisted on measuring before they had left.

“Thirty-two inches,” he says, and then, after a beat, “and a half.”

Professor Harris whistles lowly. “You’re going to destroy that man’s worldview, you know that, yeah?”

“Better to do it now than later. And at least I won’t be a massive prig about it.”

“I do not understand,” Dream murmurs, “what grievance this man has with you. When you are the kindest of souls.”

Sushma makes a gentle cooing noise. A blush has risen on Hob’s cheeks, made more obvious by the unforgiving overhead lights.

“Some people,” Professor Harris says, “have a. What would you call it, Robbie?”

“A stunted worldview,” Hob mutters.

“Yeah, s’good as anything. They get an idea in their head, and the second you challenge them on it, they get defensive.”

“Lorentzi’s been laboring under the assumption that I’m straight,” Hob clarifies. “Probably because I can kick his arse in rugby and I know how to swing a sword. And when I told him that I wasn’t, he said he didn’t believe me, because I don’t look that way.”

Both of Hob’s companions wince.

“Still think you should report him for that,” Sushma says, and Hob shrugs.

“To what end, really? The department loses a professor they need, and he treats his students well. I checked. No, I’ll keep this between us for now, and if he makes a fuss, I’ll talk to Doctor Smythe.”

Dream thinks, but does not say, that if this man causes further trouble for Hob, interdepartmental conflict will be the least of his concerns. But he has promised to be polite tonight. He has promised to respond as a human might.

“Anyways.” Hob squeezes Dream’s side, where his hand casually rests. “He spent the next fifteen minutes trying to pick apart everything I said. Itching for a fight, sort of thing. Hence, the corset. When I said I’d actually done Rocky Horror, and cinched this tight besides, he told me to prove it.” Hob smiles, then, and it is not a kind smile. Not the gentleness he reserves for Dream. It is something keenly sharp, a blade hidden at the small of the back.

“Loads of microaggressions,” Sushma says, with obvious sympathy. “Well, it’s your choice, Rob. I will say, the loss of one classics professor isn’t going to make the whole department crumble into dust.”

“You say that as if they’d actually fire him. It’s all sensitivity courses, now,” Professor Harris adds. This causes a small chain reaction, and Hob’s friends are quickly absorbed in each other, discussing the relative merits of harassment training, a thing that Dream has little understanding of and even less interest in, and so he turns his head to Hob, who is sipping from his own plastic cup of wine and making a very dear face when he tastes it.

“This bothers you,” Dream says, and Hob shrugs.

“I mean. A bit. Yeah. Lorentzi can say whatever he wants. But it bothered me more that people might look at me and just. Assume, you know? That I’m something I’m not. I thought I’d made it rather obvious. There’s a flag on my desk and everything.”

“A flag,” Dream says, and Hob sways downwards, nestles his lips amongst Dream’s hair and breathes.

“Pride flag. I’ll get you one. You can set it on the arm of your throne.”

He thinks, again, that he has never needed to define himself the way that Hob does. Has never thought of himself as anything more or less than Dream, his function and form one and the same. Yet it brings Hob such joy, to roll in the scent of his own identity. To be seen.

Hob sees him, Dream thinks. Sees past the membrane of his being and into the spiraling cosmos beneath. Hob sees him and is not afraid, and is not overwhelmed. Hob sees him, and calls him his boyfriend.

“Come on,” Hob says, and deposits his mostly-empty cup of wine upon a nearby table, where it joins a scattering of other empty red cups. “I want to introduce you. Show you off a bit.”

They make a circle of the room, moving easily between groups of chatting compatriots, and at each turn Hob introduces him, my boyfriend, Morpheus – my partner – my sweetheart. This, also, is an identity. He thinks vaguely of Calliope, and how, in their later years, she had refused to acknowledge him as her husband. How only tradition and propriety had driven them to the same functions, and how, even then, she had left him at the first opportunity presented. How her sisters had told her that they had known, all along, what sort of being he was. How, after she had left, returned to Olympus with her sisters, he had realized how much he missed it. Being named. Being seen.

Perhaps, he thinks, that is all that identity truly boils down to. Being named by the one who loves you. Accepting that name as your own.

“Christ,” Hob says, which is, admittedly, not a name that Dream is used to answering to. “Don’t look now.”

This is a rhetorical device, and thus, tradition dictates that Dream must look. But he is polite, this evening, and so he looks circumspectly, taking a sip of his substandard wine and glancing in the direction that Hob has angled his chin.

Damien Lorentzi, the object of Hob’s darkening mood, is a man in his late twenties, of the sort who desperately imagines himself older, and for whom the agony of youth is felt sharply in every missed opportunity and passed-over promotion. His dark hair has been artfully tousled, and he is wearing a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses and a tan jacket, and beside him, Hob snorts quietly. There is a tow-headed young woman on his arm, wobbling in heels much shorter than those that Hob wears, and Dream feels secure in the knowledge that his lover has more grace, and certainly more practice, between the two of them.

“Wonder if he even watched the movie,” Hob says. “The, the character he’s dressed as. Ah. Ends up questioning his sexuality at the end.”

Hob’s brows have furrowed. He has not bothered to wear foundation tonight, nor cover any of his natural features beyond what little makeup he wears, and so he is wonderfully expressive, even without the benefit of Dream dipping his fingers into daydreams. There is a pinched quality to his mouth that Dream has come to associate with deep thought, and Hob’s body language, previously angled away from an encroaching enemy, has loosened. He leans into Dream, visibly, obviously, and Dream puts his hand at the tuck of Hob’s vespine waist. Lets his fingers curl there, again. It is a lovely place to hold.

He has promised to be polite. Yet Damian Lorentzi is one of his dreamers, and Dream has touched that sleeping consciousness, however briefly, however disinterestedly. He thumbs through the many pages of himself, observing idly, and says, “You remind him of his brother.”

Hob slants his gaze sideways, and now his considering look is for Dream. “Are you doing that thing? That thing you did with Lou?”

“All dreams are within my purview,” Dream says, “I can no more deny this than you can deny your heart to beat.”

“Well, if you put it that way.”

Dream shrugs one shoulder, as he has seen Hob do in the past. He has put it that way, and will continue to do so. “His brother was. Older. His father did not approve of him. Who he spent time with. Who he loved. His nightmares are complicated. If he’d seen it sooner. If he’d stopped it quicker.”

“Oh,” Hob says softly, as if he understands, even when Dream, in deference to politeness, has given the barest information that he can. “That. That makes more sense, doesn’t it.”

Hob swallows, and Dream tracks the movement of his throat, and the shape of his imaginings, made soft with a cupful of wine and sudden empathy. Hob pictures a dozen young men that he has known, most of them long-dead, with a sense of time passing too quickly, a sense of irretrievable loss, of if I’d known them sooner, if I’d been there for them earlier. He leans down and kisses the crown of Dream’s head, a casual intimacy that fills him with light.

“Come on,” he whispers. “Let’s go introduce you, then.”

The crowd does not part for them, no Red Sea nor thunderous split stone, but Hob is a force of nature when he walks, and is made more so by the addition of five inches of height. He keeps Dream close to his side, hugging the shape of them together, and he imagines their skeletons entwined, as humans did in ancient barrows, their bodies curved towards each other beyond the span of mortal existence. Humans die. Gods die. Hob Gadling, so long as he wishes it, never shall. Hob Gadling has promised him forever. As long as you want me, he has said, again, again. Until you get tired of me. Hob Gadling would lay claim to him until the sun dies. Would call Dream his.

There is no sanctity in vows, in matrimony sworn before gods and Fates, but in Hob’s smile as he turns to look at him, made glowing and holy by lightning and flickering mercury vapor, he sees the shape of eternity.

“Professor Lorentzi,” Hob says, and Dream follows that path of forever-faithful-true where it winds around Hob like a neon halo, even here, even in waking. He is the most glorious thing Dream has seen in many centuries, all lines of him perfectly displayed, the strength of his legs and the pleasing shape of his chest, the contour of his mouth, the soft kindness of his eyes. Kindness, where he could choose to cultivate the simmering annoyance of before. Hob chooses kindness.

Hob is allowed to choose. His name, his identity, his feelings. He is allowed.

Dream feels his brows furrow. A microexpression that, six months ago, he would not have needed. He would have simply felt. He has allowed himself to experience this, the small tells, the pieces of his lover that he has absorbed into himself.

Small allowances, he thinks. Small steps. A flash of self beyond the concept.

“Rob,” Damian Lorentzi says, a young man made younger still by memories of a brother he was never permitted to know, who looks up at Hob now with bafflement and wonder and a curling twist of anger. How dare he, swirl his imaginings, how dare he show me up, how dare he come in here looking like that, how dare he remind me, how dare. “I have to admit, I didn’t think you’d actually do it.”

“Why not?” Hob asks. So soft. The girl on Damian’s arm leans up, and kisses her companion’s unmoving cheek. She whispers in his ear, and totters towards the refreshments table. “I told you, I already had the corset. I’m hardly ashamed to wear it.”

“You,” says the man, says the boy, thirteen and watching his brother leave home for good, “you, I mean, you look…”

“He is beautiful,” Dream says, and both men look to him. He holds the red plastic cup before him like a shield against the knowing. The wine is still terrible, when he takes another sip.

“And who are you?” Damian asks. Hob opens his mouth, the shape of the words in wisps of intent before him: this is Morpheus, he’s –

“Robert’s boyfriend,” Dream says, and Hob’s teeth click neatly shut. “Morpheus. It is a pleasure to meet you. Robert has spoken highly of your work.”

Dream turns his body towards Hob. He tilts up his head, as he has done before, when he has joined Hob in his flat, in the New Inn, when the engirding circle shuffles close and tight and it is only them, when he is allowed the privilege of secreting himself into Hob’s lap, as Hob so often does to him. When he is allowed the luxury of being seen, and being known, and the begging of a kiss becomes not a weakness, but an imperative.

Hob does not deny him. Has never denied him. He tilts down, on his five-inch heels, and kisses the corner of Dream’s mouth. He tastes like lipstick, and oversweet wine, wild gorse and rich nighttime loam. He smells how devotion feels.

“Boyfriend,” Damnian says.

And Hob, who looks somewhat dazed when he sways upwards, who has a faint smear of lipstick at the corner of his mouth, who still looks down at Dream as though he is confounded and blessed in equal measure, says, “Ah. Yeah. Look. Damian, we should…talk. At some point. I think there’s some things we both should get off our chest. But. I am so sorry, but I have to take my boyfriend over there.” Hob is not gesturing to anywhere in particular when he says ‘there,’ only in a vague, directional sense that is ‘away from you.’ “We’ll talk later. I promise. There’s a lot I’d like to share with you, if you’ll let me.”

And then Dream finds himself being shepherded along again, through the slowly-parting crowds, Hob confident and resplendent, who knows who and what he is. Who has, in his infinite kindness, gifted some osmosis of his knowing to Dream.

Hob leads him out into the hallway, the corridors of the building dim, absorbing the glow of radiance that had limned Hob’s umber hair in the room behind them, making him softer, ever more human. More human, too, in the way that he crowds Dream against the wall, bracketing Dream’s shoulders with his forearms, bracing against him the way he would against a load-bearing beam.

“You beautiful,” Hob says, and punctuates his words with kisses, hot lipsticky pecks to Dream’s cheek, his jawline, once again the corner of his mouth, “gorgeous, perfect creature. I love you. I love you. Have I told you, lately, how much I love you?”

“Thrice just now,” Dream says, and Hob pushes their foreheads together, though it must pain his neck to bend down as he is doing, and he laughs, and his breath smells of Franzia wine, and is the sweetest thing Dream has ever known.

“God, you. Impossible man. Man-shaped being.”

“I do not mind being a man, for you,” he says, and Hob kisses him again, properly, this time, the plasticky wax taste of lipstick smearing between them, and beneath it the suddenly wonderful fascination of being known.

“You can be whatever you want,” Hob murmurs into his mouth. “However you want to be it. Just promise me you’ll be mine, yeah? Whatever you choose?”

“Yours,” Dream says, and tests it, and tastes it on his tongue, and in the fibers of his being. It is a good feeling. A good taste. He works it into the firmament of himself, where he has carefully stored the shine of Hob’s hair, and the catalog of Hob’s laughter, where live the small and personal movements that Hob claims, the tug of an ear or a bitten lip, all things he has hoarded, and made his own. Worked into the fundamental weave of the Dreaming itself.

‘Hob Gadling’s boyfriend,’ he thinks, is also an identity, as he accepts Hob’s kisses, accepts his soft breaths and his groans and his laughter, folds them into his heart, lets them live there.

It is an identity that pleases him, very much, to claim for himself.

And it ends (though never truly ends) like this:

“...and that’s, that’s when I told him, I said ‘Evan, if you put your cock in that, I am never blowing you again.’ He looked so sad, love, like, like I’d kicked his dog.”

The evening had started with Dream leaning heavily against Hob, both physically and metaphorically – relying on his social savvy to navigate the treacherous waters of tipsy coworkers, relying on the breadth and strength of his body as a shelter from the sounds, the lights, the too-sweet wine and the probing questions of those same fellows. It makes sense, he thinks, from a narrative perspective that their roles are now reversed. Hob has not drunk enough to impair him overly, but he is flush-faced and pleasantly talkative on the walk home, Dream’s coat a swirl of flame and shadow around his ankles, his hands gesturing in vivid motion. He has been telling Dream stories of previous lovers, many of them taken during the period that Dream was imprisoned.

A small part of him, selfish, envious, is displeased that Hob has ever taken another lover. He knows this is not rational. Even if he had pursued his suit in 1389, he would still not have been the first to touch Hob, the first to kiss him, the first to bring him pleasure.

It is only a small part. The majority of him (and he counts this as, as his sister would say, growth) is merely happy to have Hob now. Warm and solid, leaning against him, tottering vaguely in his heels, smelling sweetly of Franzia, deodorant, and sweat. Is happy that Hob, in the years when Dream was denied him, found kinship in those who so obviously needed him, his light, his hope, his relentless zest for life.

“You did not kick his dog,” Dream says, and Hob laughs, full-throated and glorious.

“No. I just told him ‘don’t put marmite on your prick’ and suddenly I was the bad guy.”

Dream has no context for whether or not this would make someone morally in the wrong, and so chooses not to request further information. The New Inn approaches, besides, rising up over the corner as they make their way down the street, a swaying, two-headed creature, Hob’s arm slung gamely around Dream’s shoulder, Dream’s arm around his waist. He is so warm, perhaps the warmest thing Dream has ever felt, a furnace that sears him through, brands every manufactured cell with the indelible prints of his fingers.

“Home,” Hob says, with great and lusty satisfaction. “Thank you for taking the walk with me. It’s a lovely night for it. Sometimes that’s the best part of parties, I think, is the leaving afterwards. When the…the air’s cool like this, and you know you’re heading towards someplace that’s warm, and yours.”

“Home,” Dream repeats, and Hob turns his head, looking at him from the corner of his eye. His lipstick has been smudged beyond salvation, the result of a dozen fervent kisses stolen between conversations with post-docs and TAs, and now that they are free of the miasma of the party, Dream is more able to think on those kisses with the amount of attention they deserve.

“Your home, too,” Hob says softly. “If you want it to be. I know I’ll have to pack up and change things out in a few years, but…I reckon I’ll keep coming back, as long as I can. It would be nice if I came back to you.”

“You will always come back to me,” Dream says, with utmost confidence. “Or I to you.”

“You know what I mean, though.”

He thinks he does. He thinks this is another aspect of identity, as Hob understands it – and one that Dream, in some ways, also knows. The Dreaming is as much his home as it is him. For Hob, who has built the Inn from the ground-up, who has poured sweat and funds and years of his life into its construction, who has maintained it as a safe bastion, not only for Dream, but for all those dreamers in need of a reason to keep going…

Yes, he thinks that in this, he and Hob are of the same mind.

“I would like that,” he says, and Hob’s expression turns soft and wondrous, and he leans down and kisses the corner of Dream’s mouth, another scarlet imprint to add to the many that decorate his neck.

“You are the most astounding creature,” he murmurs, and the cold, perhaps, has done its duty in softening the effects of the wine that Hob has drunk, because Dream finds that their roles once again shift, and now it is Hob who is taking him by the arm, Hob who is leading him towards the other side of the building, and the stairs there that lead to his flat. “Do you know that? Do you know how much I love you?”

“You have seen fit to tell me frequently. It would be difficult for me not to know.”

“Oh, cheeky. Could tell you what I’ve done with my brats in the past, dove. You’re never too old or too powerful to be put in your place.”

Perhaps he, also, has overindulged in wine, for it takes Dream several seconds to parse what Hob means, and then several seconds more to recover from it, as images smear behind the folds of his retinas, of Hob Gadling, in his five-inch heels and his black satin panties, resplendently confident, putting Dream in his place. He is reminded of Hob’s half-formed daydreams of earlier in the evening, the worn and comfortable leather chair in his living room, vague shape-sensations of Dream pushed down into its squashy embrace and Hob towering over him, daintily resting his heel upon Dream’s thigh –

He realizes that he has stopped moving entirely only when Hob makes a noise of concern. They have come to a halt outside the door to Hob’s flat; it is partially open, bleeding light and warmth into the uncaring night, and Hob stands silhouetted in the doorway, Dream’s coat an embrace of his shoulders, his sides, his arms.

“You all right, my friend?”

My friend. It ought not be as romantic as it sounds, yet to his ears, it is the most devoted and ardent of poetry. Dream has had trysts, has experienced love, has married, and yet he cannot think of a single of his dalliances that has ever counted him as both friend and beloved. This title that Hob bestows upon him so casually, the easy acceptance, my dove, my friend, my boyfriend, he wants to bury himself in it, wishes to wallow in the pleasure of it, yes, wishes for Hob to drag him kicking from the pedestal of his office, to bring him down here, into the mire and the physical realness of humanity, where being Hob Gadling’s boyfriend is no cause for alarm nor concern.

Hob bends his head down, takes his form from the gold-lit glow behind him, and must see something that Dream is only himself realizing now, because he smiles, and it is a slow and lazy smile, and even with his face all in shadow Dream can see the way his lover’s pupils dilate.

“Do you want me to put you in your place?” he asks. His voice has lowered to a rumbling purr, rough-edged and wanting, and Dream would make himself a mortal shell for Hob, yes, would make himself small and needful and soft – or perhaps he is also these things, and has not made himself. Perhaps this is one of the powers of being named, and being known, that the ones you love may reduce you so casually to the basest parts of yourself, the animal things that still fear thunder, and quaver when it rains, and take pleasure in the idea of something larger than yourself taking care of you.

Dream nods. Faint, for he himself can hardly believe it, but Hob has grounded him in mud and flesh and he wants. He is Hob’s boyfriend. He is allowed to want.

Hob darts in swiftly, kisses him again, again, soft little pecks to his mouth, his cheek, and Dream feels himself being ushered inside, where it is warm and safe and the glow of Hob’s many lamps suffuses everything with sunlight and memories of yellow gorse.

“Come here,” Hob says, and Dream goes with him, led inexorably onward by the tether Hob has looped around his heart, the rope and stake that have lashed him to this earthly coil. He is guided to the armchair that has so haunted his thoughts, but Hob seats himself first, and then pulls Dream down atop him, into his lap. His thighs are broad and warm, and the stirrings of want that have crept through him like thieves blaze into vibrant alarm. His body responds as a man’s does, prick hardening, breath quickening, a flush rising to his cheeks.

You bring me low, he wants to say, but is that not the point?

“Okay,” Hob says, and adjusts himself, sighing at the ease of weight off his feet. The heels are not comfortable, Dream knows. “Let’s talk about this. Just briefly, mind. We can have the whole conversation later, if you decide you like this.”

“Conversation,” Dream repeats dumbly. Positioned as he is, he cannot find friction, nor relief, without turning himself over, and draping himself across Hob’s lap. Another thought that splashes across his mind’s eye in vivid and screaming color. Hob reaches up and touches his cheek.

“You’re blushing,” he says, delighted. “I didn’t think you could.”

“For you, I can,” Dream says, and means it simply. But Hob rubs his thumb across the stain of red at his cheeks, and hums in thought.

“Yeah. But this isn’t going to be for me, right? This is going to be for you. Because it’s something you want.”

And Dream says, “Yes,” because that sounds logical. Hob has a way of reducing concepts to their most basic forms; once, he thinks he would have found it disagreeable. More than a century of contemplation has rendered him more able to appreciate simplicity.

“Look at me, dove.” Hob’s strong hand takes hold of his jaw, turning his head, a gentle pressure. He could resist if he wanted to. He thinks that if he did, Hob would allow him to break free. Hob would as easily keep him as he would let him go. “I would like you to look me in the eye, and tell me that you understand what you’re asking for. All right?”

Dream does so. He looks Hob in the eye, at his encouraging smile, and he purses his mouth, and he says, “Hob Gadling, I am aware of dominance and submission. As a subculture. As a desire. It is not new, to humans.”

And Hob says, “Oh, you bastard,” and Dream finds himself being abruptly picked up, such that he is forced to cling to Hob like a child with both arms and legs, and then just as swiftly deposited into the leather chair once again with a soft grunt. Hob has smoothly taken up the position of his daydreams, a towering beauty, his makeup smeared and ruined, the corset making all the lines of him curved and lovely. He stands over Dream, scrunched down into the worn leather, and Dream feels abruptly very small, and hot all over, as though Hob has left the furnace of his skin upon him.

“We’re going to take it slowly tonight,” Hob says, and he smoothly slides his knee between Dream’s thighs, forcing them to part. The knob of his patella butts into Dream’s groin, presses there against his cock, heavy and needful and trapped against his thigh. He swallows the groan that threatens to escape him; it comes out as a whine instead. “We’re going to keep it simple. If you want to be put in your place, I can do that for you, pet, but we’re going to do it my way. Do you have a safeword?”

Dream feels another mewling cry try to scrabble from him, and tamps it down into his throat; he is not sure why. He wants. He wants Hob to touch him, to press his knee forward, to push him down into the soft leather and cover him with his body; he wants to put his hands on Hob’s sides and marvel at the hourglass shape of him, and he wants Hob to do the same, to kiss his belly and his throat and the inside of his thigh, so softly and sweetly, as he has done before.

It feels shameful, to want this much. When Hob has already given him everything, and has continued to offer him more. It is too large a thing to hold in the fragile mortal skin he has cultivated, and so Dream tries to smother it down, and only a trembling, fluting sigh escapes him when Hob’s hand finds his jaw again, and forces him to tilt up his head.

“All right,” Hob says kindly, “we’ll go for simple, then. If I ask you for a color, at any point, you’ll need to give me one. Green for yes, keep going. Yellow for pause, you need a moment. Red for stop everything, right now, no questions. Do you understand?”

Dream swallows, a convulsive movement, and nods. Hob’s fingers tighten on his jaw, his thumb curving towards the seam of Dream’s lips. It presses at the corner of his mouth until he opens, and Hob says, “Use your words, pet. You’re the Prince of Stories, so act like it.”

“Yes,” Dream says. He tries to turn his head, to catch Hob’s thumb between his lips and suck, but the grip on his jaw is stronger than steel, and he is not the Dreamlord, here, no king nor lord shaper. He is allowed, here, to be Hob’s. “I understand. Please.”

“Ah.” Hob presses his thumb to Dream’s lower lip, a gentle drag that pulls it down and then releases, and then his whole hand is gone. Hob leans backwards, getting his leg back beneath him, raising his arms above his head and stretching languidly, and Dream sways towards him, only to be stopped cold by Hob’s disapproving look.

“Did I say you could move?” he asks mildly, and it takes Dream long seconds to respond, his mouth thick with saliva and longing.

“No,” he says softly. “But neither did you tell me to stay.”

“Oh, you would be a brat, wouldn’t you? But you get a pass for today, because you did so well at the party. I’m going to untuck and clean myself up, because I am going to be using your mouth tonight, make no mistake. I want you to sit quietly and prettily for me while I’m gone, okay, my love? No touching yourself. No trying to find a loophole. Be patient, and I’ll be right back.”

Dream very badly wants to tell Hob that he does not need this. He does not need to be put in his place, for he knows his place, and always has -- he cannot forget what he is, the whole of the dreaming subconscious folded gently into his being, shepherded for so many years that he has forgotten what it was like to tend to only simple things, things that dreamt of light and shadow and little else.

He also, very badly, wants to sit prettily. And to please Hob, such that when he comes back he will again tuck his thumb into Dream's mouth, and perhaps will kiss him again, and will perhaps take pity on him, and will take Dream in hand and bring him to completion with Hob's reddened smirk looming in Dream's vision.

Hob cannot read minds nor intentions; he cannot sense the wavering edge of imaginations as Dream can, and yet there is an understanding in his gaze when he looks down at Dream, sat miserably in the leather armchair, knowing what he wants and yet unable to find the path to voicing it aloud. Hob has said that this is something for Dream. It is something that he is allowed to want. That Hob will give him this, easily, readily, if he can but ask.

"You're such a good boy," Hob says softly, and Dream feels something loose and shivery flutter through his breastbone, coursing its way through his blood and down to his increasingly uncomfortable groin. He starts to rub his thighs together for the sheer pleasure of sensation, but stops himself at the last moment, remembering Hob's instructions -- and he is gifted with a radiant smile, Hob grinning from ear to ear. "That's my good pet. I'll be right back. I won't leave you, I promise."

When Hob leaves, he takes with him the uncanny weight and heat of his presence, and Dream feels all the more bereft for it. Skin that had thrilled at the touch of mortal warmth now grows cool and marble-countenanced once more, and he must reassure himself with the knowledge that he is here, that Hob has asked him to be patient, and present, and, as much as he can be, human.

He clenches and unclenches his hands upon his thighs, shifting, restless, but he sits. He waits. The bodied physicality of this form is an agony to contend with. He is painfully aware of every nerve, of the rasp of denim across his bare cock, and how when he flexes his fingers he feels the bunch of fabric against his thighs, and if he moves his torso the silken caress of his shirt reminds him of Hob's hands smoothing down his forearms, Hob's clever fingers plucking his nipples until they turn red, Hob's lips in a ticklish whisper over his belly. The bedroom is not so far that he cannot hear the movement within it, the rustle of clothing, the peeling of tape and Hob's soft but definitively audible groan just afterwards. He wishes, almost, that he could mold his form, give himself wet folds and eager cunt, that he could rub his thighs together in secrecy and find some pleasure there. But Hob has told him to wait, and he is Hob's boyfriend, and so Dream digs his fingers into his thighs until he feels the well of bruises, marks he has never allowed to touch his skin but for here, in the Waking, with Hob.

It is long minutes before Hob returns, and when he does Dream is riveted to him, staked and claimed, unable to look away. His cock pulses weakly against his thigh, and a noise he has never heard himself make before escapes him, a needy whine that ought to shame him, perhaps, and yet he cannot find it within himself to care. If Hob sees him base and animal, there cannot be shame in it.

"Oh, you pretty thing," Hob says. He is still wearing his heels, his corset, but whatever trick he had used to make his groin smooth and flat has been reversed. The satin panties barely contain the heft of his prick, the length of it poking above the elastic band, flushing slowly, the foreskin rucking back to reveal the fat and glistening head. Dream's mouth fills immediately with saliva, and he swallows, once and then twice, and Hob's eyes track the movement. He prowls forward, made sleek and hunting by the curves of the corset, how it emphasizes the triangular perfection of his torso. He only comes to a stop when he is standing directly over Dream, their knees bumping, and even that small contact makes him sigh, and lean forward. When he catches himself, when he freezes in place, Hob hums in pleasure.

"Good boy," he says again, and Dream looks up at him, as beautiful and confounding as the Tower of Babel, the language he speaks a pleasant buzz that vibrates along Dream's nerves, racing along white matter tracts and piercing heretofore sleeping portions of his brain. "Christ, you're gorgeous. You can speak, sweet thing. I'm not going to deny you that, not this time."

Dream swallows again, licks his lips, says, softly, "Hob." His lover makes a noise as though he has been punched, and lifts one stately arm, and hooks his finger beneath Dream's chin.

"What color, sweetheart?" he asks, and it takes Dream multiple seconds to understand the question, but it comes to him, at last, in fits and starts, Hob looking steadily at him, expression growing, for just a bare moment, uncertain.

"Green," he says, and the shadow of worry in Hob's eyes vanishes in a flashbang of need. "Green. Please. Hob. I want..."

"I know what you implied you wanted," Hob says. He turns Dream's head this way and that, his fingers so close, and Dream opens his mouth, begging silently for something to rest upon his tongue. He watches Hob's pupils dilate into sudden darkness, and feels a surge of pleasure. He did that. "But I would like to hear you say it. I wasn't kidding when I said to use your words, Dream."

The sound of his name, spoken normally in reverence, now reduced to nothing but a name, makes Dream moan again. He is trembling, he realizes distantly, but does not feel cold. This close, Hob is once again a sun in which Dream basks; he would take it into his mouth, if he could, that light, that warmth, and he hesitantly lays out his tongue in invitation.

"Fuck," Hob says; his cock, caged in satin, has plumped against his belly, no longer quiet but tight, straining. There is a bead of fluid welling at the tip that Dream wants to taste, but he is given, instead, Hob's thumb, the flat of it petting the length of his tongue like a soft creature. Spit pools beneath it, spills over the corner of his mouth in a winding trail, and this time it is Hob who groans. "Can you say it for me, Dream?"

"Yes," Dream says, and his voice comes from someplace distant, but truthful, muffled around the thumb that strokes along his tongue, and then wetly over his bottom lip, allowing him to swallow again. "Yes. I. I want." There are words there that he reaches for, and yet with every swiping grasp of thought they seem to flutter further away. It should not be this difficult to ask for what he wants. It should not feel as though something is being dragged from him, kicking and screaming into the light. "I want you," he says, miserably, wretchedly, and Hob blinks slowly at him, and then leans down, holding himself bare inches from Dream's waiting mouth. To lean forward, to take Hob's lips in a kiss, would be to deny the purpose of the game, and so he holds himself still, shuddering and rocking his hips into empty air. He cannot speak plainly, as Hob does. He is the Prince of Stories; his power lies in metaphor, in simile, in prose both beautiful and mild. He ought to be able to find the words.

"Oh, my love," Hob says, and strokes his thumb along the corner of Dream's mouth. "It's all right. Take your time. I can be here for you all night, if you need."

Time, yes. There is endless time, for them, for Hob has promised him eternity, if he desires it. He desires it keenly. His desire is a monstrous thing inside him.

"I would," he says, and this, somehow, feels safer than I want, feels as though the shapes of the words will actually leave him, and have some meaning when they do. "I would. Be brought low for you. Make of me a base creature. The. The raw clay of my flesh, for you to mold. As you see fit."

And Hob closes the distance, at last, at last, barely waits for Dream to cease speaking before he is slotting their mouths together. It is a kiss as demanding as it is sweet; Hob gives him no quarter nor room to breathe, sweeps into his mouth with tongue and teeth and lays his claim there. Hob must lean back periodically to sip the warm and humid air between them, and Dream finds himself mirroring his breaths, his lungs bellowing with stolen air. "God's fucking wounds," Hob murmurs, and kisses him again, takes Dream's bottom lip between his teeth and worries it until it is red, and deliciously sore. "Good boy. Good, good boy. My beautiful Dream. You're doing so well for me, pet. Do you want more?"

"Yes," Dream says, and then, because some dim instinct in him judges it prudent, he adds, "Green. Please."

He is gifted with one of Hob's many laughs, sparkling, mirthful. "Good initiative. I'm so proud of you, Dream. It's hard, isn't it, for you to admit you want something. We'll work on actually saying the words, all right? For now, you've been very good. A little bit cheeky, but good."

Hob cups a hand to the nape of Dream's neck, lets it rest there for a moment, solid and reassuring. His words flood Dream with ecstatic heat -- he is good, he has done good for Hob, his lover, his boyfriend, his gravity and stars. Hob is pleased with him, and he is filled with a dumb and animal joy at the thought, and his cock pulses weakly, still trapped, still yearning. He cannot touch himself without Hob's say-so, and Hob has not yet said it, and so he must wait.

"I do like a bit of cheek, though," Hob murmurs, and lets go of Dream's neck, and he sways upwards in neat and liquid lines.

"I want to touch you," Dream says, because this, at least, is easy to admit. He wants to touch Hob always. Every moment, in this instant, spent separated is an agony. Hob smiles gently at him, and tilts his head.

"Mm. I think you've been good, but not that good. I think what we're going to do instead is...I think I'm going to put my boot on you. All right, Dream? And you're going to keep your hands to yourself, but it's all right if you want rub off on me. Does that sound good? Give me a color, love."

The thought of Hob pinning him in place with the sharp wing of his heel, letting Dream rut against the sole of his boot, is such an arresting image that Dream's hips stutter upwards in helpless want, and he makes a high and quavering noise, which causes Hob's nostrils to flare, and his throat to work.

"Green," he says, breathless, "please. Please."

"Gorgeous." Hob is masterful in every craft he pursues, the benefit of an immortal timespan in which to practice, and one-legged gracefulness is apparently one of these pursuits. He lifts his right foot and sets it gently over the straining bulge of Dream's cock, protected in name only by the thin shield of denim, yet Dream imagines he can feel each bump and inconsistency of the sole, the sharpness of the heel where it presses just below his testicles. "Oh, we are going to have a talk later, aren't we, darling? I think you've been wanting something like this for a while. Someone to take over for a bit, do all the thinking for you."

The pressure against him is maddening, nothing like the softness and warmth of a hand, and yet Dream can smell Hob's sweat, and the musky bestial smell of leather, and these things alone are enough to ground the touch and make it human again. Hob had said it would be permissible to take his pleasure so long as Dream can keep his hands tamed, and so he puts his palms flat upon the arms of the chair, and rolls his hips upwards into the unforgiving weight of Hob's boot, and finds, at last, blessed friction.

"Good," Hob croons, and shifts his balance, creating new texture, a new shape for Dream to rut against, and he does so with a quiet moan, his awareness narrowed down to the sole of the boot, the scrape of denim against his cock, the threat of the heel against his thigh. "Oh, sweet thing, myne hertis rote, look at you. So greedy. How has no one given you what you've needed yet? You're practically screaming for it."

Dream does not have an answer. He could tell Hob, perhaps, that he has not known what he needed until he dared to imagine himself human, his naked emotions displayed here in this light-spilled living room. He could tell Hob that he needs nothing, and that, he knows, would be a lie, evidenced by the hardness of his cock and the broken, tremorous sounds that trip from his open mouth.

In the end, what he can say, the words he can come back to with faith and ease, is, "For you. Hob. I need you." Hob's eyes flutter, his own prick smearing wetness across his furred belly, dampening the band of the satin panties.

"Do you want to come like this?" he asks, and Dream mewls, his rhythm interrupted by the hot clench of desire at the thought. "I'd like that, Dream. Would love for you to get these boots dirty. You coming from me stepping on you. Fuck. Okay. Stop for just a second, sweetheart."

Dream does so, the order piercing the veil of his arousal like an arrow, and he finds himself frozen in place, panting now that his rocking movements cannot disguise the heave of his chest. In the stillness, he becomes aware of how hot his cheeks feel, and his chest, and, once again, the silken touch of his shirt across his nipples, nothing like Hob's fingers, but just barely enough.

"Get your jeans open, Dream. There's a good boy." Dream's fingers stumble over the button of his fly, taking seconds to remember the motions of undoing, proof that he is not human, and yet his cock is flushed and wet and aching when he untucks it from where it had been trapped against his thigh, and this, at least, is human enough for Hob, who looks at it with undisguised pleasure, and licks his lips. "You have the prettiest cock, I swear. Keep the zip up a bit. Just so the tip's out. I'm not putting my bare boot on you, I don't think you're ready for that. But I want to see you come all over yourself." Dream nods; there is a fever rampaging through him, and every word that Hob speaks stokes it higher. The unformed clay of his body is made anew in the kiln of Hob's heat, is molded into something made to contain him, and only him, and nothing else. "Good Dream. Pull your shirt up for me. Let me get a good look. Both hands, sweet. No touching your cock, remember?"

"Yes," Dream says, because Hob has asked him a question, and he is desperately, slavishly eager to give him the answer he wants. He takes the edge of his shirt in both hands, draws it up to his nipples, gasps at the bite of open air against flesh made sensitive in consumptive fire. "But. I may. I may...rub myself off. Against your boot. Please?"

And Hob, who is so generous, who is kind and gentle with him, and grounds him in earthly mud, and calls him his boyfriend and steals Dream's coat and whose face exists in a dozen half-formed dreams of love so wide and deep no river of stars could compare, says, "Go ahead, pet. Let me see you come."

It is the only permission Dream needs, and now that it has been given he chases his pleasure with base single-mindedness, rutting up against the sole of Hob's boot, and rocking down again onto the stiff edge of his heel. The texture has changed; he sometimes catches the bite of the zipper against the tender skin of his cock, and the sharpness of it is a welcome reprieve from pleasure that seems so overwhelming it may well drown him. His cock, positioned just so, leaks smears of seed across his belly in shining pearlescent streaks, growing so wet and needy that it drips in trails down to the band of his jeans and soaks there into the denim. He slumps, to try and find a better angle, and it is only Hob's unrelenting support that keeps him upright as he rubs himself in rough animal frenzy against Hob's boot.

"I want," he manages to say, and Hob's expression, foggy with lust, sharpens, narrows upon him, "Oh, I want, I want."

"It's okay," Hob says softly, "it's okay, Dream. I'm here, sweet. Are you going to come for me? Let me see your lovely cock all red and wet?"

"Yes." He nearly chokes on the words, the tight coil of his desire winding in smaller and ever smaller circles, until he feels as compacted and dense as a star. "Yes, oh, yes, Hob."

"Go on then," Hob says, and presses down, just slightly, with his boot. "Pretty thing. My lovely, sweet boyfriend."

There is a white-hot roaring fire in him, at Hob's cadenced tone, at his casual ownership, at the weight of his boot and the way that the air feels against the tip of his cock compared to the hot and humid sheath of his jeans, and Dream throws his head back against the soft leather of the armchair and wails as he strains towards completion, and feels it crash over him, and feels, and feels: the sweat that dapples his brow and his armpits, the lancing wet warmth of the spend across his belly, nearly up to the cage of his ribs, and the thundering breathlessness of his lungs, himself contained in a wholly mortal vessel, and for a moment, as his vision fuzzes at the edges, it is only himself. He feels not the Dreaming at all, only Hob, before him, Hob looking at him with such devastating love that Dream cannot help but let it subsume him. Take it into himself, in sips of air humid with mutual sweat and musk.

When Hob withdraws his boot, it forces another weak spurt of seed from him, and Dream moans, letting go of the edge of his shirt with one hand that he might dip his fingers into the lines of pearly come that stripe his belly. "Shit," Hob says, heartfelt, when Dream pulls the fingers to his mouth, licking the sticky strands from between them, luxuriating, for a time, in the salt-bitter taste of himself at his most basic and needful. His mind, normally pulled taut in strings and webs, has coalesced into a single and trembling mass, amorphous, loose. He is allowed to focus on the sensory pleasure of his come between his fingers, on the tingle in his lips when he extends his tongue, on the cool sensation of the air on his nipples and the weak aftershocks of pleasure that still wring along his spine.

"Are you with me, love?" Dream blinks, vision dozy and soft-edged, and when Hob moves nearer he does so as well, swaying. He wants to lay his cheek against Hob's belly, to kiss and lick the silvery scars beneath the hiding thicket of his hair. He wants to run his fingers through the textural marvel of his chest, dense as houndsfur, he wants to take one bronze nipple into his mouth and feel the shape of it with his lips and tongue. Humans, he thinks, are a marvel of sensations, and they present themselves to him in jostling crowds, each begging attention, each worthy of regard. It is so little to think about, in comparison. "Oh, perfect Dream. I said I'd like to have your mouth tonight. Are you all right with that? Give me your color, Dream."

There is a stray pulse of intention somewhere in the pooling of his thoughts, and he touches it lightly, vaguely, sees a blurred mental image of Hob putting his hand to the back of Dream's head and guiding his mouth forward, half-formed pleading, green, oh please. Dream considers this with the utmost care that he can afford it in the wool-edged softness of his being, and finally nods. Yes. He wants Hob on his tongue, the girth of him stretching his mouth, he wants the salt-musk of his taste and the warmth of his seed, and Hob is still looking at him, lips slightly parted, and Dream remembers he must speak.

"Green," he says, slurred, his lips so sensitive they seem numb without anything to touch them, and Hob lists forward with a groan, his broad palm against the back of Dream's head, as it had been in his imagining, drawing him forward to press Dream's nose against the scent-heavy fabric of his panties. The satin is body-warm, damp with sweat and pre, and Dream lips at the shape of Hob's cock beneath it, pleased that he can be put to use, still, when all of him is so singular and present. Movement of anything more than his mouth seems beyond him at the moment, lost somewhere in the drifting spun-sugar clouds of him, but he needs not do much, only part his lips invitingly, and drag his tongue in wet supplication from the swell of Hob's testicles to the hard line of his cock. When he reaches the head, and lays his tongue there, Hob swears, and pulls him further forward, Dream's nose mashed into his pelvis, the smell of him so strong and pungent that it wipes out any thought of other scents.

"Open your mouth, my love," Hob says, and Dream does so, letting his jaw hang and his tongue loll out, blinking in bemused adoration up at the man who has, with word and deed, reduced him to quiet and simplicitude. "Oh, fuck. Fuck. You're so..." Hob's hand grips in his hair, pulls him back with a tug so light it feels like a massage against his scalp, and Dream follows readily, keeping his mouth open. "You take to this. So beautifully. I'm going to fuck your mouth, sweet thing, all right?" Hob hooks the thumb of his other hand into the band of his panties, dragging them down to his thighs, just enough to free the bob of his prick, heavy and flushed and smelling good, so good, like something that Dream desperately, but vaguely, wants in his mouth, coating his palate, pouring into him. He breathes in deeply, and between the inhale and the exhale Hob brings him forward again, and lays the head of his prick upon Dream's tongue.

The taste of him fizzes and pops as brightly as champagne, the noise that Hob makes is more tuneful than any songbird, and Dream hums, and holds himself still -- the most that he can expect of himself, at this moment, when he is in such deep contemplation of his singularity, and the quiet of his mind -- but Hob does not seem bothered. Hob brings him forward slowly, feeding his hard cock into Dream's mouth, sliding salt-wet along his tongue. Dream moans in agreeable pleasement, and above him Hob swears again, a broken, "Christ, fuck," as he finds a metronomic rhythm, chases his own pleasure with Dream's willing mouth. The feel of him is a gentle tingle on his palate, and he distantly remembers being told not to touch, but his hands lift anyways, as if drawn by strings, hovering uncertainly over the bump of Hob's hipbones, where the corset has made him so sleek to behold.

"Yes," Hob says, "you've been good, Dream, so good, you can touch, yes." So Dream lays his palms on the inward dip of Hob's sides, the faint-textured material of the corset another feedback into the core of him, and Dream moans weakly, glutted by senses, unsure of which to focus on, and so letting them wash over him instead in one steady and overwhelming tide. When Hob's prick bumps against the back of his throat, when Hob says, "Go on, good boy, swallow for me," he does so without question, feels the faint hint of a gag around the bulk of him that smoothes easily into acceptance. Hob makes a wounded noise, gone deep and rough, and fucks into Dream's throat in short and sharp jabs, Dream's nose butting into the shelf of his pelvis. He does not need to breathe, and yet his vision blinks and flashes at the edges, until Hob draws back again, and he is allowed to suck in a rasping breath that settles him, quiets him again.

"You're perfect," Hob says, and with his other hand he makes a fist around the shaft of his prick, tight strokes that slide him forwards onto Dream's tongue and then back again. "You're so good, so good for me, keep your mouth open, yeah." Hob grunts, his fist working harder, and Dream feels the first pulse of him, the fat head of his prick lying upon the flat of his tongue, the vein thick and thrumming, Hob coming with a bitten-off gasp and a muttered curse that burrs into obscurity and is lost. His come is bitter salt, puddling in the cup of Dream’s tongue and running over, slow wending trickles from the corners of his mouth that drip down the scarp of his jaw and over the edge of his neck. The sight of this must please Hob, because he squeezes himself again, another spurt of come into Dream’s mouth, and the taste of it, and the smell of it, is as overwhelming and desirous as being presented with any feast. Dream shudders, and Hob has said he may touch, and so he digs his fingers into the creaking steel bones of the corset, feels beneath Hob’s body, the dearest of forms, and another wash of delight radiates through him, a weaker pleasure than the first, his cock twitching, and dribbling another thin rope of seed that falls in soft drips onto his thigh.

“Oh my god,” Hob says, “did you,” and then he doesn’t say anything else. He lets go of his prick instead, and puts both hands on Dream’s cheeks, his thumbs urging shut his mouth, stroking the wings of his throat.

Dream swallows, because it seems the thing to do, because the thought occurs to him, in a vague sense, that he would like to have Hob inside him tonight, and this seems the most expedient way. Hob whispers, “Dream,” and bends down, and covers Dream’s mouth with kisses at last.

“Beautiful,” he is saying, “perfect, darling,” pretty and fanciful nonsense compliments that all begin to bleed together into an indistinct sense of wellbeing the longer he listens. When Hob scoops him up from the chair into both arms, Dream goes with no complaint, too caught in the waver-lined euphoria of being. Of being held. Of Hob’s neck presented to him at the precisely correct height for him to tuck his nose against, and kiss, and to smell the cleanness and the sweat of his skin.

Hob carries him to the bedroom, and it must be awkward, because it is no swift journey, but Hob, also, does not complain. When he deposits Dream upon the bed, he does so with such tenderness that Dream feels himself a priceless work of art, and not a person; he is allowed the luxury of stretching out, boneless, touching the fine cotton of Hob’s bedsheets, thumbing the silken smoothness of the pillowcase. Hob must leave him for a moment, but it is not long, and when he returns it is with a warm cloth that he swipes across Dream’s belly. His strong and clever fingers undo the zip of Dream’s jeans, disentomb him from their grasp, and the warm cloth returns to wipe slow-drying spend from his cock, and to clean once over his thighs, perhaps for good measure.

Everything is warm, Dream thinks. Not furnace-hot, as before, but warm, and very soft, and if this is being Hob’s boyfriend, he does not think he will ever be able to give it up.

“There you are,” Hob says, and slides into bed alongside him; he has removed the corset and boots at some point, though Dream is unsure when. There is now only Dream’s shirt between what feels like miles of soft hair and golden skin, and he wriggles closer, and Hob’s arms open to him. Easily. Completely. “Give us a cuddle, then, while you come down.”

“Come down,” Dream murmurs, and Hob’s fingers make another appearance, this time stroking through Dream’s hair in easy motion.

“Mm. Mister ‘I’m aware of dominance and submission.’ I’m flattered I got you there this easily.”

Dream considers this. Beneath the smoothness of the pillowcase, and the hair of Hob’s belly a light scratch against his own, and beneath the smell of his skin and the light that shines in amber resplendence through his hair, beneath those things he can feel some parts of him beginning to separate. The Dreaming prods in apologetic tendrils at his thoughts, as though begging to be let back in. It was never truly gone, he thinks – but quiet. For a time.

He misses it. That almost-silence. But he does not feel it keenly. It creeps in, a soft ache, a reminder of what he is, and what he is for.

But for a time, he was something else. Someone.

“The only one,” Dream says, and Hob’s arms tighten around him. “To have me. Like this.”

“Like this?”

Dream sighs, and burrows further into Hob’s embrace, pushing into the stroking hands, and reveling in the face that he sees in the busy workings of his realm, the curve of Hob’s cheek an edge of sunlight, the shadow of his beard a carpet of moss springing under bare feet, the sound of his pleasure a crash of distant waves.

“Mortal,” he says, after long moments of contemplation. And then, “Me. And you. Us.”

Hob strokes his palm down the length of Dream’s spine, bunching up the fabric of his shirt, sneaking beneath to count each vertebrae with careful deliberation. And if he does not understand, he does not speak it, but in the way he has talked of identity, of the importance of being yourself, Dream thinks he has, perhaps, an inkling.

In the close-kept sanctity of Hob’s arms, Dream turns his head and rests his lips against the tan line of his lover’s tricep, that liminal space between the intimate and the public, and lets himself exist there, also, himself, only himself, just for a time.