Chapter Text
Hob lifted his tea to his lips, only to realize it had gone cold long ago.
The man across from him said nothing, looking down to the table and tracing the mug stains with one finger. He looked smaller, somehow, than normal. But more present as well.
What happened?
“I thought I scared you off last time. Kicked myself when you didn’t show up thirty years ago.”
Thirty-three. But who was counting?
If the man could go even more silent, he did, his mouth pressed into a small line. “That…was no doing of yours. I was unavailable for other reasons.”
Hob didn’t push. Not because he didn’t want answers, but because he could see the black-clad shoulders tense ever so slightly.
To other topics then. “You say it’s rude to keep a friend waiting. Well, maybe we can start over, forget what happened last time.”
The man looked up, frowning. But there was a curious tilt to his head, the motion made inhuman by the depth of deep-water eyes. Hob felt that if he looked too close he would fall through.
Hob shuffled the papers he was grading to one side and propped one elbow on the table, extending a hand across wood. “The name is Hob Gadling. And it is nice to meet you.”
Speaking each word slowly, Hob tried to give the man time to reply without looking too anxious about his response. It had been six hundred years, surely he deserved a name?
But if this was what sent the man running again, out the door of the New Inn and away from Hob, he would be glad to sit in dead silence if it meant they could make up for lost time.
A slow smile spread across the man’s face. If it could be called a smile. Hob hadn’t seen anything more than a gentle tilt to the lips in all of the centuries they had known each other, and on a normal person it wouldn’t be considered anything more than a twitch in the face. But Hob knew.
Out of the darkness of his sleeve, a pale, long-fingered hand extended and clasped Hob’s in a long awaited handshake. The man’s skin was cold. An internal cold that radiated outwards. Hob didn’t know whether that was normal or had something to do with how tired and thin the man looked.
“You as well, Hob Gadling.”
So it wouldn’t be that easy. Ah, well. Hob hadn’t thought it would work anyway.
Going back to his papers, Hob held up one to make sure he hadn’t gotten tea stains on the creamy pages. “I started teaching at the local university some years ago. English and a bit of history. Keeps me young, being around the kids. Always learning something new. If you had to ask, they’d probably tell you they want to die right then and there, but they come to class anyway. Dramatic lot of daydreamers.”
Something in what he said made the other man shift in his seat.
“Technology has gotten way out of control. Do you know what a smartphone is? Of course you know what a smartphone is. And electric cars! I remember when carriages and trains were the height of progress.”
Still the man said nothing. Incrementally, he had begun to relax, dripping off the chair like a pool of shadow. Hob kept talking.
“When they closed the White Horse, I thought that was it for us, if I hadn’t already screwed us over. So this is all mine, now.” Hob gestured with a pen to the room around them, the new home he had created. “Wanted a place you could find if you ever wanted to come back.”
It had been a pain and a challenge setting it all up. He wasn’t one for barkeeping, and the insurance was a chore, but Hob liked a puzzle. Something new after all these years.
“So, before you ask. No. I’m not done with life yet. Don’t think I ever will be, at this rate.” He watched as the man watched him. “Though you should know that by now. It isn’t everyday that Death decides to overlook someone for so long.”
The man leaned back in his chair. Hob took him in as much as he could without being obvious. Between the black, the combat boots, and the gravity-defying hair, he looked like the lead singer to a bad emo-punk band from twenty years ago.
“I am not Death.”
“Never said you were.”
He paused for a moment, turning to look out the window. The man had a ridiculous jaw line, sharp enough to cut yourself on. All shadows and angles and pale skin. Hob glanced where he was looking and saw a large black raven sitting on the sill outside.
“My sister thought it would be an interesting project.”
“What?”
“You.”
The man-in-black looked back to Hob, and once again he thought he might fall through those eyes.
“Your sister.”
The man nodded. Hob, though still in his chair, was chaos on the inside.
“Asked if I wanted to do it, or if she should. I think she knew I needed…something to look forward to.”
Something to look forward to. So this once a century date was important to him. Maybe as important as it was to Hob. He had always wondered whether there were others like him, people out there in different countries who had lived for even longer, all caught up in whatever this immortal game was.
He’d thought it was a test at first. That when he finally gave up he would be going to hell or somewhere worse. But no. His later hypothesis had been right.
This man, whoever, whatever, he was…was lonely.
Blinking, Hob turning to a slightly more manageable subject. “You have siblings?”
“There are seven of us.”
Seven.
Seven of these eternal beings of light and shadow. That was not only a little terrifying.
Hob swished his tea in his mug, mouth dry. Then he stopped, the liquid threatening to make it onto his papers after all. There was something about how that last conversation had gone that made too much sense.
“Death is your sister.”
Now that could be called a real smile. Not a big one, but a smile nonetheless crossed the man’s face. Hob felt like he had won some kind of battle.
“She is.”
“And that makes you…”
“Guess.”
So that was how they were going to play it. There was something playful in his tone, miles away from the frown he had worn earlier.
Hob stuttered a response. How could he possibly respond to that? “I don’t know? Destiny?” It seemed to fit the theme, at least.
The man frowned. Hob was worried he’d messed up his one chance, but it was more of an annoyed frown than an angry one.
“My older brother would never interfere as I have. I shouldn’t have done this at all. Which almost makes me want to do it more.”
Hob’s heart was pounding. What sort of creature had death and destiny as siblings? And he was staying. He was staying and talking and Hob was getting answers for the first time in six hundred and thirty-three years.
“So, what then?
No response.
“It has been centuries. I don’t get even a little hint?”
“I already gave you hints.”
Hob groaned and rolled his eyes theatrically. The man watched every move with rapt attention.
“Fine. Why are you doing this, Hob? Why continue to live after so long?”
That wasn’t a question Hob was expecting. “Because I still have so much to do. There is so much to see.”
He didn’t add that most of what Hob wanted to see was sitting across from him.
The man stopped to think, and for a moment Hob wondered if he could read his mind.
“What keeps humanity moving forward? What keeps them alive even in the darkest of times?”
The man was leaning against the table now, hands clasped in front of him. Hob matched his position, and they were closer than they’d been in over a century. There was a light in those eyes, like a beacon underwater or a lost star. Somehow, Hob sensed that this was more than a quiz for him. An exercise in self-reflection, perhaps.
This was an important answer. He looked down to the papers written by his students, new minds still so full of…
“Hope. Hope is what keeps us going.”
The man’s eyebrow quirked a fraction. Hob was getting close and he wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t going to explode when he did.
It was sort of silly really. But he still believed it to be true. “Our hopes and dreams.”
There was the slightest exhale of breath across the table.
Hob fiddled with the edge of one of the papers, an essay about the importance of self-discovery in the novel they were reading for class.
Death. Destiny.
“Dream.”
Hob finally looked up. He couldn’t breathe. He felt as if he found the holy grail. And it was sitting right in front of him.
The man across the table, Dream, extended his hand once again. There was a light to him now, though that might have been Hob imagining things.
“I am Dream of the Endless. It is very nice to know you, Hob Gadling.”