Abril: Holy moly I forgot to upload the rest of this story, I finished it months ago hvcbadjovhiao. Sorry for the wait if someone was waiting for this?
"Geez!" Hob startles back when the imposing figure of his stranger appears out of the blue in a swirl of mists and glittering dust inside his living room. At least, it should be an imposing figure that the being painted, but he seems, still, somehow diminished to Hob.
It's no matter though, he's too happy about the problem of the Ruby fixing itself and about seeing his friend so soon after their last meeting. Hob's about to say a very warm and smiley, 'hey you,' to his stranger when he notices the state he's in. He… he does not look good. He doesn't look good at all.
For his part, Dream of the Endless feels like a restless hive of bees. Everything is buzzing around him, within him. His vision is double, tripled, like looking through a crystal. He knows naturally, as dreams know things, that he has not been trapped, has not been caged or severed from himself again. This knowledge does not matter, cannot comfort him; he cannot process it for he is flaying at the edges.
Dream is utterly exhausted, he's been exhausted for a hundred years, and then some, and he's not had a moment's rest since he escaped his prison eight months ago. As he is summoned before Hob Gadling and his eyes are drawn towards something impossibly large held within such small hands. Dream is shaken to his core.
"Hob Gadling," Dream says and his voice shakes. "Please... please be careful with it."
The immortal looks down, eyes immediately pulled toward the object his stranger cannot tear his eyes away from. His Ruby.
Hob is about to say, 'Why, yes. Of course. I've been meaning to get it back to you.' But the words don't come out of him before his friend, his friend whose eyes are red with unshed tears, speaks again.
Too rattled to understand what's happening around him, too cosmically exhausted to express, Dream cannot see the kindness and softness in the immortal man's eyes. Dream of the Endless has been summoned and he cannot bear it a second time, not from one he's tentatively begun to think of as his friend.
"It's precious to me, please." That is definitely begging and it is not something Hob ever thought he'd see from his preternatural stranger. Hob is terrified about whatever is going on here that he doesn't understand. He's not the only one.
"Whatever you want, if it is within my power to give, is yours. Just please, please-" Dream doesn't know what he's asking for, he just knows the Ruby can't take any more damage, any more mistreatment from strangers. He can't take any more hurt onto himself.
"You hold something most precious to me in your hands, Hob Gadling, my soul-" the words slip from his lips without his consent, not a knowledge that should be in mortal hands ever, but he can't think, he can't- He can't do anything, he's too tired. He can't take anything more.
Hob is too speechless to form a coherent thought, the Ruby in his hands is held with limp fingers.
His stranger kneels then, arms extended in the air between them in supplication.
"What… do you want for it? What can I offer you?" And his wet eyes turn to Hob, a man at another's mercy.
"Here, take it!" The kneeling snaps him out of his stupor. "Please, take it, it's yours," he offers the Ruby, desperate to be rid of it, but more importantly, give it back to his owner. Dream's hands are weak and Hob has to close his stranger's fingers around the stone for him to be able to hold it. He's never touched his stranger before.
Hob quickly steps back and out of the being's space, as if it burns to be in the other's orbit. His friend holds the Ruby with tender despair and presses it tightly against his chest, like that way he might push it inside his skin.
Dream shakes, unable for a moment to control his body, and it is humiliating, but his mind and body are so uncomfortably full of every emotion that he has no thought to spare to his humiliation. Before he is aware of it, the Lord of Dreams is laying down on his side, curling around his cursed soul that will not allow him a moment's peace. It hurts to be near it but the thought to be parted from it hurts even more.
Hob… doesn't know what to do. His fingers are shaking slightly, the uncomfortable memory of his sins hitting him in the chest as suddenly as a train he never heard coming. He breathes in trying to calm his thundering heart.
Hob sits down on the ground, to make himself as unthreatening as possible. He yearns for something to do that will make this better. After a moment of consideration and with immeasurable fear, he scoots closer to his catatonic friend. Something is obviously wrong here, something outside his knowledge- as per usual when it comes to their acquaintanceship- has happened and he doesn't know what it is. It cannot be just that he had the Ruby with him, can it? Has he done this? Did he bring his proud friend to his knees without meaning to? Oh, he hopes so dearly that is not the case.
There's a thought in Hob's mind, something he wants to do that he's never done before, except for a few moments before when he gave his stranger his Ruby- his soul, good God above- back. It requires a leap of fate, it requires him taking a chance, but if Hob is wrong in taking this, if he makes the wrong call, well he might regret it for the rest of his immortal life. The mere thought of laying a hand on his stranger seems like heresy, and like lunacy. Like prey animals know to fear predators, you do not approach them, you do not get chummy with them, they are for appreciating from afar. But the sight of his stranger, trembling and disoriented on the hardwood floor of his apartment is too much for Hob to do nothing about. He's spent too many years of his life doing nothing about things. Now, almost a compulsion, he must do. And this is his friend after all, despite his knowing animal fear, despite knowing in his cells this is a forbidden act; how could he not do anything?
Hob scoots closer still and raises his hand slowly, giving the other time to read his actions though he's not sure how much his stranger is aware of. Hob lowers his palm and starts running his hand up and down the being's back in what he hopes it's something he might find comforting.
Dream's breath hitches, his shoulders tense up. Hob doesn't stop petting his back, though he does so carefully like one does a small, fragile creature.
"I do not... like to be touched," his stranger says with what sounds like tears, words pulled slowly and with effort from within him.
The immortal exhales, keeping himself calm. "Do you want me to stop?" he asks.
There is a moment of pause before the stranger moves; almost painfully so, he shakes his head in denial.
"Okay," Hob says softly, "but if you want me to stop, I will."
Dream nods slowly. He closes his eyes.
His friend remains shaken for a long while, so long that Hob's legs fall asleep several times but he dares not move. Finally, like the universe sighs slowly in relief, his stranger stops trembling and his shoulders unwind, bit by agonizing bit.
After a while, after he knows his friend won't implode into himself, Hob braves himself up to speak again.
"I'm sorry I scared you, okay? I don't know what I did. It came to me, I just wanted to give it back to you," Hob says quietly, still scared of what harm he possibly did, of the whole confusing situation. He hadn't known the Ruby was so precious. His soul. He held his friends' soul in his hands. Touched it again and again and again.
"I'm… sorry that I touched it," he adds hesitantly. "I'm sorry that it caused you such distress. That I caused you such distress."
"It was-" Hob is startled to listen to his friend's voice again, the words out with an exhale. "Not your fault," he continues slowly, "it's been coming for a while, you just so happened to keep it last."
Another shake runs through his thin friend. Hob can feel a terrible coldness emanating from him.
"I'll be right back," he says hurriedly and stands equally so, rushing to his linen closet and pulling down a heavy quilt, worried he might take a second too long and his stranger won't be in his living room anymore.
He's there when the immortal gets back, he was just away a couple of seconds but how frightening they were. Carefully, Hob spreads the quilt over the thin curled body, it's plush and the most comfortable thing he owns, though quite hot for when it's not winter. He hopes it might do something, anything for his friend.
"What-" comes the confused, weak reply from the entity, there seems to be more he wants to say but the effort to formulate such thoughts out loud proves to be too much at the moment.
"You're cold," Hob says uncertainly, "it might help."
"It… will not," his stranger says slowly. Despite this, he spares a hand to gently tug at the quilt a little higher and closer, so that the hand holding the fabric may rest closer again against the Ruby.
"I'm sorry," Hob says again.
His stranger lies down on the hardwood floor of his apartment for a long while.
It is dark when Dream next speaks. "I must return home," he says haltingly.
Hob looks like he wants to protest but knows not to impose too much on his otherworldly patron. So instead he says, "can I help you get there?"
The stranger sighs tiredly and shakes his head no. But he does not move from the ground. It's pretty evident there won't be any going home tonight.
"Please stay?" Hob pleads quietly, mad with worry. "Only until you recover enough strength."
His proud stranger looks defeated. It is not something Hob ever thought he would see, the idea impossible enough it had not even registered as something that could be.
The immortal man does not know this, but while yes, Dream has never been weaker, it is not a weakness of the body that ails him but a weakness of the self. Everything that the Endless is screams at him and the continued wrongness of the Ruby. He is exhausted in every way that one can possibly be, and he does not possess the mental or emotional strength to go back to his kingdom or do anything much at all.
Dream nods and impossibly small nod.
He lets go of the quilt and pushes himself up to a sitting position with impossibly slow movements. When Hob offers to help him stand, Dream does not protest. And when the immortal man arranges his thin arm over his shoulder, the Endless just lets his weight lie there, appreciating a contact that does not hurt him in any way.
Hob places his stranger on the couch and Dream lies down like a plaint doll.
"Thank you, Hob Gadling," is all that he says.
Next morning, the stranger is gone from Hob's flat.
Hob Gadling startles so badly he almost drops his coffee the next time he sees his stranger.
He is seated at an outside table in front of the New Inn as if he were any other regular bloke waiting for his morning cuppa.
"You… you look terrible," Hob says. And it's true. He looks just about as he did last time. Wan and slumped, and despite having no eyebags, incredibly exhausted.
His patron only hums.
After an awkwardly long time of standing around, Hob snaps out of it and sits down on the other chair.
"How are you?" He asks, his worry for the other coming through his light greeting. "Would you like a coffee or a tea?" He doesn't wait for an answer for that as he's already gesturing down Eli towards their table. "Hun, would you mind bringing my friend here ah… black coffee," he says when his patron remains silent.
"Of course Robbie. Anything else?"
Before the silence can go on for too long, Hob shakes his head and thanks her. The quiet continues, morning birds chirp about them and the sounds of people doing their morning routines paints their backdrop. The long pause keeps blooming between them when his stranger still does not answer the question.
"Why are you here?" Hob finally asks, deciding his stranger might respond better to something straightforward. After a moment where Hob thinks the silence might stretch again, he looks down for a moment, then up. "I'm sorry about what happened…"
"Don't be," his stranger says softly, his piercing eyes finally setting on Hob. "I feel… like I owe you an explanation."
"You don't owe me anything," Hob shakes his head with evident discontent.
His stranger nods in easy acceptance. "Still, you saw me at a very… low point and you did not take advantage of this. I must thank you, perhaps even offer you-"
"Nothing. You'll offer me nothing. It was nothing. Of course I wasn't going to take advantage of the situation… whatever the situation was. I'm your friend."
"Here you go gentlemen," Eli says, putting down the white cup before Dream. Hob snaps his head in surprise towards her, then back again at the other. The waitress leaves promptly, feeling she's intruding on something.
"I'm your friend, and I wouldn't do that, okay?"
Once more, his stranger nods, this time more hesitantly.
"My friend," Hob stresses, visibly concerned. "Are you well?"
This time his shrugs. That is not very encouraging at all. The raven haired brings up his hands from where he rests them over his lap and in them he holds the Ruby. The Ruby.
Hob leans back somewhat and gulps quietly.
"I am not well, Hob Gadling," Dream says simply.
The statement strikes Hob and robs him of breath. He feels the weight of the words pressing down on him like an anvil, with the implied seriousness of it. Just what in the world is going on with his friend? Hob takes a breath.
"Do you know what this is?" his stranger asks and Hob has to look warily at him.
"Your soul," he says somewhat hesitant.
"Hmm, yes, you would know that now."
Coming from anyone else it would sound like an accusation, but not from his stranger. Still, Hob feels guilty.
"But it is so much more," his friend says in a velvety voice, enrapturing Hob without even meaning to. His blue eyes bare into his. "You've wondered for a long time about my nature, have you not?"
"I have… How could I not? Immortality, right when I asked it… Makes a man think."
For a moment Dream says nothing. He palms the Ruby in his hand and the light of the sun hits it. Out here in the open, there's an eerie quality to the giant jem as it gleams with the sun.
"Well, I will tell you this-"
"Wh-why? Why now?" Hob interrupts his stranger.
"Because you are owed an explanation, whether you think so or not. And… I appreciate what you did for me," Dream says somewhat slowly.
"Wow, this is really hard for you, isn't it?" Hob blurts out without thinking, nor with any real malice intended by his words. But it is just too evident the way his friend looks like it hurts him to say these words.
His glares at him slightly but he doesn't look like he's about to bolt from Hob's apparent insult.
"Sorry, sorry," he amends. "So… you were saying?"
"I have," Dream begins, his words slow and full of meaning, "tools of power, of office. This," he holds the Ruby between the fingers of his left hand. "Is one of them."
"The sand," Hob suddenly whispers to himself and a small glint-like smile appears in the corner of his stranger's lips.
"Indeed." He pauses. "Some time ago, these things -these very important things- were stolen from me. I got them back but…"
"Something's changed," Hob concludes. His stranger nods.
"Just this one," he looks down at the Ruby. "It has been… altered."
"How so?" Hob asks and realizes how very close to whispering he is. Lately, his friend has been drawing him in with a sort of mysticism that's always been there under the surface but that Hob could never fully see for seldom had his stranger really talked to him. But now his stranger is talking, and it is such wonders that he brings into the world. And Hob, like a starving man, wants more of what his friend has to offer.
This knowledge about him is tantalizing.
"The Ruby it… is a tool to help me shape reality. Make dreams… come true. At least it used to be. When I made it I spun it from the deepest part of myself, all that made me, me. After its corruption though… It's become a flawed thing."
Hob wants to say something. He wants to say very many things. He wants to express his horror because if this is his stranger's soul, and someone has tampered with it, that would be such a violation with repercussions Hob in all his vast experience, cannot even begin to imagine. But there's a pensive, tight look to his stranger. It makes Hob think there's something the other is struggling to say.
Blue eyes pierce into him. Hob is a butterfly pinned under the blue; there is something dark there, but he's not afraid as the naturalist examines every inch of him.
His patience pays off.
"The one who took the Ruby from me, they thought they could steal all of my power. Absorb it… me into the Ruby."
"Did they-?"
"They succeeded," his friend says simply. But the weight of the confession presses hard against Hob.
"But you got it back," Hob smiles, trying for the bright side as always. "You won."
"Hm, so I did."
It does not sound quite like the affirmation Hob was looking for.
"What's the problem then?"
"The problem is that the power is still within the Ruby, and it no longer recognizes me as its sole master."
"Isn't- isn't there a way for you to unmake it? To take what it's made of back?"
Dream shrugs morosely.
"With the changes it undertook, it solidified too much into its own thing. It's a stone now, no more abstract matter." The endless being rubs a thumb over its warm surface and feels its wrongness prickling at his skin, squeezing his breath away. "And it's a dangerous process that not even I am sure I know how to do."
"Well, you're creative. You made it. You just need to find a way to safely unmake it."
"Robert Gadling, this is not an apparatus that can be rearranged at will. There's never been anything like it and there never will be again. If you took a chair apart you will still have the pieces, you would know how to use the wood for other things or a new chair. If I try to take the Ruby apart, I know not what will happen. It might destroy reality or myself. Wrap time and space around it. It might shatter every dreamer's sleeping and waking dreams. And what would a world without dreams be?"
"Oh," Hob says, stricken. Though wondering, his insatiable curiosity ever gnawing at him, why a stone that shaped thing would affect people who dreamed.
For his part, if Dream can be sure of one thing and one thing only, it is that the undoing of the Ruby will kill him. One way or another. He will not tell that to Hob though.
"Fixing it is the only solution," but it is so hard a solution. Dream sighs.
They sit quietly for a long while. Hob is so lost in their conversation he cannot even remember where he'd been off to before encountering his stranger. His friend fiddles with the gem, light fractaling as it goes through it and shining dots of red light over the table.
"It is odd to be so connected to one thing that feels so unlike myself," his friend says not to anyone in particular. He lays the Ruby down. "Such is the war within it, I feel as if… I could break it without much more than a touch."
Hob sees a white finger press down slightly on the Ruby as it lays flat on the table. He has to hold in the urge to slap away the hand after that particular statement. 'It's not like he's suicidal,' Hob admonishes himself.
Nothing like it happens, but Hob could swear he sees the red cristal cracking.
"How did this person do it?" Hob wonders out loud. "I mean… how did they manage to change it so much?"
Blue eyes lift up from the gem to him. The immortal man feels like a butterfly pinned again.
"It's just hard to think… how someone could even command such a thing," 'of great power,' he doesn't say, because his friend has never told him so, but he doesn't have to be a genius to know that there is great power within the Ruby.
His stranger hums again. "It listens to dreams and… desires," he says with an oddly disgusted grimace.
"That's why you came to me?" Hob's eyes widen.
"That's why I was pulled to you," Dream corrects tersely.
"Yeah, sorry," Hob looks down, feeling guilty once again. But he soldiers on, as he always has. "Can't you do that though?" Make it listen to you? Wish it back into being however it was before?"
"The Ruby… repels me. Its nature is too changed from mine. We disgust each other. But I cannot part from it."
Hob notes there is solemn sadness to his friend's words. And then, an idea takes hold of him, and his stomach is filled with the dread of anticipation. "And what if…" Hob looks away for a while, but quickly returns his eyes to his stranger. "Could someone else do it?"
The ice in Dream's eyes sharpens.
"What if I did it? Could it be done?" The immortal presses on, heart thundering inside his chest.
"You?" Hob feels this one single word reverberate through his bones. Or perhaps he's imagining things.
"I-" Hob gulps nervously. "Well yes, you said it listened to me and it won't listen to you, not fully at least."
Hob sees pale long fingers tighten slightly around the Ruby. Posessively. Maybe even a little frightful.
"You think I would allow you such power?" His stranger hisses insulted, and frightened, definitely frightened.
"No, I don't think you would, not under normal circumstances." Hob wets his lips nervously and once again dares. "But you're desperate, I can see it."
It is a terrible sign when his stranger in all of his pride can't challenge Hob's words.
"Listen I know you-" 'You're scared,' he doesn't say. "I know it's difficult to trust me with this. For what little we actually know each other, I can tell you're not the trusting kind. But, believe me, please believe me when I say I would never do something to hurt you, not on purpose. I'd never take advantage of this if- if you were to trust me with it."
There is silence between them and his stranger's eyes burn him.
"I know it's…" Hob takes a breath, "Very presumptuous of me. But I am offering if you are willing to accept this. Maybe… is there someone else who could do this for you? Someone you trust?"
If possible. His stranger's glare intensifies even more. Hob may be hallucinating but he feels like maybe the world is warping around him just a little.
And, despite this, Hob saddens because isn't this just what he thought? That there was no one the stranger had? That he was lonely?
"Listen, just- Just think about it okay? I-" But before he can say more his stranger stands up abruptly and Hob's heart sinks. "Wait, please. I'm sorry, I-" But when Hob next blinks his stranger is just gone.
"Shit," he swears, passing a nervous hand over his hair. "Shit, shit, shit." Hob presses his fingers against his face and wonders how this could've happened to him for the second time.
Abril: This relationship is way too stressful for poor Hob.