#*cue the wonder woman electric cello sound* god I love writing ruthless merc hob

[sseanettles]

nothing grows in corpses (in the earth of me)

dream x hob gadling | mature | Finally cross-posting my take on the fandom classic of the show progresses as the comics do, even to The Wake. Until Death resurrects Morpheus and forces the choice of "redemption" upon him instead of suicide. It goes...horribly. No good. Very bad. Instead of learning the lesson, Morpheus (in his infinite wisdom) opts instead for a highly effective existence strike until one day Hob Gadling stumbles upon his ghastly handiwork and immediately decides that this just won't do. Man Who Refuses To Die vs. Man Who Refuses To Live: fight.

Dead Dove, Do Not Eat for the following: graphic depictions of starvation, illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, blood and gore, loss of autonomy, etc. etc. This is some classic old world whump, folks! But I promise it's also supremely healing in the end.

CH. 11: atlantic, pt. 2 | 3.2 k | AO3 link | prev part | next part

(or: the one where a necromancer, a talking bird, and an immortal walk into a flat...)

Something was half-crouched on his landing: something slight with long dark hair, an expensive winter trench coat, and a massive raven perched on its shoulder. It was looking down, tucking its lockpick away into a black leather physician’s bag, and so had not yet seen him in this heartbeat of an opening. The ozone stench was now overpowering and unmistakable.

Magic.

In the fraction of a second it had taken him to open the door and appraise the situation, the intruder’s head had also begun its upright snap, and Robert Gadling passed his judgement.

“AXE!” a man’s croaking caw of a voice screamed. “AXE, AXE, DUCK—”

“SHIT—” the young woman shouted, and Hob grunted as she dropped near-flat to the floor and the hatchet bit deep into the wall instead of her skull. The raven flapped its wings in a panic, going to take flight and cawing in distress as its talons instead snagged in the wool of her coat and held it firm. Its wings continued to beat about in a frenzy, smacking her in the head and partially blinding her as she fumbled her way upright and tried to shove the bird away, and Hob seized again the moment of surprise.

He ripped the axe free of the plaster and swung in the same backhanded strike, not about to waste the momentum, and a thrill of huntsman’s delight ignited through him as he felt the tell-tale judder of a glancing contact up his arm.

The woman cried out in pain and grabbed her ribs where the sappy, sullied blade had met its mark. Blood welled and seeped between her fingers like a spring, and her breath turned to a pained, startled thing.

Without pause, Hob kicked.

His bare foot struck her gut in a bone-breaking sidekick, and down the stairs she went, with such force and speed that Hob knew even before she landed that when she did, her skull would crack and her spine would segment upon the edges of the steps. He would have a body to dispose of, sure, but he’d done it before. Most importantly, they’d be safe. His Stranger would be safe—

His opponent’s arm snapped back with near-unnatural speed and splayed fingers, and Hob watched with widening eyes and a hardening battle stance as she bellowed a wrathful command in immaculate Latin.

An invisible force caught her a hair’s breadth before her fatal impact and shoved her right back onto her feet. She moved with such force that a spray of blood flecked the walls and floor in her wake, and she buckled forward on landing, catching herself on the steps as she gripped her ribs. The raven flapped frantically about the narrow hall, finally having ripped itself free from her coat, shouting intelligibly all the while, and she rose in a crouching stance of her own that left her mirrored to Gadling half a flight above her.

Her hair hung in her face, the strands blowing beneath her puffing breaths, and when she looked with a seething snarl from her wound to the man who’d dealt it to her, Hob’s heart stopped.

Impossible. That was impossible.

Hob Gadling stared directly into the face of Lady Johanna Constantine.

“That was a good shirt, you fucker!” she snapped, the blood still coursing from her ribs, and Hob barely had time to process the rougher accent in a voice he’d known as painfully posh—to connect a burglar with the spirit of a bar brawler to 18th century nobility—before her bloodied hands extended to him in a snap. Her fingers crooked and contorted on a wave of shouted incantation, and—

Fuck.

Hob ducked behind his arms as he caught a battering ram of flame and hell-screams to his chest, and the ground disappeared from beneath his feet. His ears shrieked in pain alongside the tortured chorus; his body seared. And quite suddenly the ground was back as he crashed to the floor and slammed into the base of their kitchen island with a choking cry of pain as one of the bar stools shattered into pieces beneath him.

For a moment, everything went black. And as it returned in pulses of color and light, Hob struggled to move and took inventory of every pain. 

Ribs broken. Spine bruised, possible fractures on the middling vertebrae. Fracture to the left arm. Bone bruise to the hip and tailbone. Concussion. Possible ruptured eardrums. Surface level burns. 

This was going to suck.

“Find him!” Johanna shouted and stormed the steps.

Stranger. Hob gasped and groaned and stared across his floorboards in a twisted echo of his waking this morning as he struggled to break through the paralyzing pain. Stranger….

But upon the bed, buried beneath pillows and blankets, Morpheus did not succumb to terror or adrenaline-fueled fight. Instead, he blinked. 

He knew that voice.

Hob watched Johanna’s boots breach the threshold of his home, and he pushed the last of his pain from his mind. An almighty roar burst from his throat as he surged to his feet, fueling himself on his cry and desperation alone, and snatched up the axe as he went to hurl it at the impossible magician. She only just ducked its blinding flight, sending it slamming into the bedroom door instead of her chest, but it was enough. For when she turned back, Hob was upon her, knocking first one arm down and then the other before clamping his hands about her throat. Her chant choked, turned garbled, and she gasped and struck at his hands, his arms, his face.

He weathered her assault with shut eyes, allowing her to open as many wounds as she liked as he wrenched her sideways and struggled against her own surprising strength. He’d take her down to the floor, straddle her, and use his full weight to crush her neck. It was messier than he would like, and the wounds he’d gain in the meantime would be harder to explain. But it would be over.

In his bed, Morpheus struggled with his coverings, wrenching his way out of each layer with heavy, panting breaths and strength that weakened by the second. Gadling’s yells as they fought, overlaying Constantine’s increasingly frantic chokes, were battlefield cries, and Morpheus knew enough about mankind and enough about this particular man to know he was not going to stop. This was the heat of battle; this was blood-sight; this was a man protecting that which he cherished in his own home. This was an engagement with only one outcome: the necromancer’s death or Hob’s truly grotesque dispatchment at the hands of her twisted magic.

Neither was acceptable.

He hauled himself onto his forearms from beneath the blankets and struggled to claw his way up the back of the sofa.

The world had almost gone dark in Constantine’s eyes, her face mottled and purpled, her throat bruised in a relentless ring that would accompany her to her grave, when she finally landed her blow.

Her knee snapped into Hob’s groin with all that remained of her strength, and as he doubled over in a gasping groan, releasing her throat with one hand but not the other, she slammed her elbow into the exposed base of his skull.

Hob’s world went white with fissuring pain. His breath stopped. His grip on Constantine’s throat relinquished, sliding instead to anchor on the collar of her coat to keep himself upright, and she seized him by the front of his shirt, keeping him doubled over before her in a mockery of a bow as she breathed freely once more. Unseen above him, she pulled her elbow back for a second, killing blow to break the very top of his spine.

“You fucked with the wrong person, mate,” she panted.

Her arm cocked back the last degree.

“Constantine?”

Both Hob and Johanna’s heads whipped around to look at the sofa, the speed of the turn tipping Hob over into a nearly capsized kneel. Johanna let him fall and gripped her ribs instead in grimacing pain. Morpheus peeked at them both from over the top of the couch, nothing more than a thinned shock of black hair atop the very pale upper half of a face and scrawny arms that clung to the furniture and only just kept its sunken eyes high enough to see the room.

“Endless?” Constantine called, squinting through her oxygen-starved dizziness.

She had barely gotten a look at him before there came a great, cawing cry from the stairs, and a torpedo of black feathers and talons tore across the room to dive-bomb their mutual friend’s face.

“BOOOOOSSSSSSS—”

Morpheus ducked too late as Matthew struck him full in the head.

“Boss?! Oh man, oh man, boss, Morpheus—”

Morpheus’ fragile hands settled upon a body just as delicate, and its feathers ruffled to twice its normal size on a trill both mournful and moved at his touch.

“Matthew?” he murmured. The trill turned to gurgling coos, and that beak that had spoken enough nonsense to drive Morpheus mad set to his shorn hair in a frenzy of preening and affectionate nips. Amid all the pecks, sometimes, he would just lay his head atop his former master’s, pressing the underside of his beak and his throat flush to the once more feverish skin, and let out another rattling gurgle. Morpheus held him as close as he dared, as tight as he dared, and buried his face against the ruffled feathers as he breathed.

“Matthew…”

He still smelled of dreamstuff, of a place and time now far beyond his reach. Of home.

Hob looked between the sofa and Constantine, trying and failing to look dignified as his vision continued to lighten and darken in turns, and he almost tipped over altogether. “Hob Gadling,” he groaned and extended a wavering hand up to her. “That one’s best friend.”

She regarded him, panting still, holding her side together, and shook his hand.

“Johanna Constantine.”

“I know,” he groaned and finally toppled, rolling onto his singing back while still holding his semi-fetal position and massaging his aching head. She watched him go, unimpressed. “Never break into my flat again.”

“You’ve got no argument from me there, bruv,” she scoffed and peeked at the wound beneath her hands before redoubling her pressure. She made a beeline for his kitchen and snatched up the dish towel, wadding it into the cut. “What’re you doing? Throwing axes at people like a goddamn huntsman—”

Hob gaped from between his fingers, and gingerly allowed his spine to flatten.

“Me?!” he demanded. “Who are you, breaking into homes and slinging magic—”

“—at least have some modernity or style to your—”

Hob forced himself onto one swaying elbow, not quite making it all the way upright and still bracing his head. “Modernity or style?”

“Hey, both of you, shut up!” Matthew snapped and appeared once more on the back of the sofa in a fluttering of wings. For a raven, he looked decidedly unwell. “Jo…you, uh…” His feathers ruffled in a shiver. “You better get over here.”

Constantine glared down at Hob, and he quickly held up both hands where she could see them.

“I found him like that,” he said before she could speak and took pains to keep his words low as he continued his warning. “It’s…it’s not pretty. But you’ve got to understand, it’s already a little better than it was yesterday.”

The new Constantine stepped away from him toward the sofa, her distrust still apparent in the way she watched him over her shoulder all the way. The raven—Matthew, apparently—looked genuinely disturbed as she came, as if he were trying to play off distraught as mild concern. Hob couldn’t blame him.

“He looks worse than he did in Hell. The new kid wasn’t exaggerating.”

Dream, Hob realized as he let his head thump back to the floor in a spin of vertigo. Dream sent them.

He pinched his nose as he fully processed his insight. 

That kid needs to learn how to talk to people.

Finally, Johanna saw what lied in the bed.

“Oh fuck,” she blurted, and Hob slowly brought himself upright into a nonplussed seat as she…fled. The woman who had just dropped him while on the brink of death herself walked right out of the flat onto the landing and leaned against the wall, bracing her head on her forearm and breathing deeply with her eyes shut. She looked distinctly ill.

After a moment, she straightened herself back out, took a deep breath, and walked back in with her typical imperviousness as if nothing at all had happened. Hob tracked her as she came, and she stopped at Morpheus’ bedside with both hands pressed to her ribs.

“Sorry. You just…you look like Rachel did.”

I know passed between them unspoken, carried in Morpheus’ sunken eyes and the press of his newly split lips.

“Thought you died,” she challenged.

Morpheus raised a single eyebrow in an echo of old.

“I…did,” he whispered, and Constantine didn’t seem fazed in the slightest by his ghastly voice. She removed her coat in an awkward shuffle and draped it along the armchair like a tarp for her blood before flopping into it and kicking her boots up on the edge of his bed.

“Didn’t take, huh?”

Morpheus swallowed and tried as best as he could to wet his drying mouth before managing his answer. “Should…have….”

She looked to Gadling, and her silently questioning stare demanded if he was to blame for this. He lurched to his feet with a groan.

“Family had other plans.”

“Good riddance,” she scoffed. “Welcome to being human, though. We don’t like to let people tap out early, us.” She prodded him with her toe, as if he were nothing but an old friend, and Morpheus scowled as he moved to intercept her and push her from his space.

As he did, Constantine caught sight of his gut, and she sat upright like a shock.

“Shit,” she said, “are you bleeding?”

“Oh, fuck!” Matthew blurted, and Hob stumbled to join them, bracing himself on the bed and chair as he came. Sure enough, a new bloom of crimson spread along Morpheus’ stomach, weeping as well from the dressings on his hip and knee. Morpheus blinked, stunned, as he stared down at himself.

“Shit,” Hob groaned and sat beside him, catching Morpheus’ hands as he moved to examine the blood. “Easy, Stranger. Probably don’t even feel this right now, do you?”

Morpheus shook his head in dazed quiet.

“Constantine, there’s a first aid kit in the bathroom beneath the sink, down the hall on the left—”

“Yeah, I’ve got you.”

He began to apply pressure to his stranger’s abdomen while Constantine went to fetch their next round of supplies, and he winced in sympathy as Morpheus swallowed a groan and tried to pull back from his ministrations.

“Sorry, mate…know this hurts,” he murmured and cast a dour eye to the bird. “So,” he began a touch coldly, “Dream sent you, then?”

“Hey, this one never mentioned you to me, okay?” Matthew immediately snapped back, indicating Morpheus below him and flapping his wings with a touch of indignation. “All Dream told me was that Morpheus was alive and that he was with someone named Hob Gadling, so I went to Constantine to help me out with locating you, and uh, it turns out that we both get a little paranoid. So, sue us.”

“You broke into my flat and tried to murder me.”

“Only after you tried to murder Constantine!”

“Well, that’s just tit for tat.”

“Enough,” Morpheus breathed. Sweat glistened a bit more heavily on his brow, his chest, and Hob gave him a teasing prod to draw his fading attention as he first increased the pressure on his stomach and then indicated their feathered companion.

“You never mentioned me to him?” It was a joke. He was joking. Mostly. “I’m your oldest friend, me.”

“…I think maybe he just wanted something that was only for himself,” Matthew answered slowly just as the silence among them was forging its way into uncomfortable territory. “Right, boss?”

Morpheus looked to Matthew with clear relief in his eyes and even gratitude in the way some of the harsher lines in his gaunt face softened. He nodded, small and true. The raven nodded back to him, almost bowing, and turned to Hob.

“So, you were the boss’ friend?”

“I am his friend.”

“Well, good,” Matthew said after a beat. He ruffled his feathers, shuffled the lay of his wings atop his back, and held his head high. “Me, too.”

“This what you wanted?” Constantine called as she returned, hefting the case in her hand.

“Yeah, perfect.” He took the box and indicated the armchair as he set to work preparing his field kit. “You sit, too. I’ll do you next.” 

“Bossy,” she muttered but accepted his offer with little resistance. “In all seriousness, you look like shit, Endless.”

“You…too…”

Hob hid his snorting laughter in a cough and focused with exaggerated intention on his task at hand. He re-sutured and repacked Morpheus’ wounds, his Stranger tensing and gritting his teeth beneath him on every pass. But never once did he cry out or weep.

“Fucker,” Johanna grinned.

“I’ve…been…known…to….”

Hob dropped his gauze in a start, and Johanna’s grin broadened with a snort as Matthew squawked, caught entirely off-guard.

“Boss!”

“What have you got him on?” she laughed, and Hob pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Too much narcotic apparently,” he said and had hardly taken up his supplies once more when a strange sound began. It was harsh and grating and sounded a bit like a dying donkey trying to bray, and….

And it was coming from his Stranger. 

Hob could only stare as the worst laughter he had ever heard in his life shook its way from his Stranger, who now grinned and snorted in his bed, utterly unguarded, like some kind of ghastly Halloween decoration. Constantine had similarly stiffened in her chair, staring at Morpheus as if expecting him to transform into some sort of doppelgänger demon-spawn.

Dream’s laughter outside Fawney Rig had been a dread sort of whimsical, horrible and delightful in its incongruence all at once, but this….

“Does he just sound like…that,” Hob asked as the hellish sound eventually tapered off into a dazed sort of half-sleep, half-stupor, “or is there something wrong here?”

“No idea—”

“Nope.” They looked to the raven atop the couch. “Nothing wrong.” Matthew watched his former master, his friend, slip into that senseless in-between of the narcotic high where little held to sanity or memory. He was sure Delirium was about to stop by sometime soon, not that the other two humans in the room knew anything about that. But if a raven could be described as content, as adoring, that was how Matthew watched Morpheus drift away. “He just sounds like that when he’s happy.”

Hob looked back to his Stranger. And the slowest grin spread across his face even as Constantine shuddered and set to work taking off her blood-soaked shirt so he could check her ribs.

“I love it,” he beamed and meant it with all his heart.