#hob vs the 17th century

[quecksilvereyes]

An Introduction to Medieval History - Prof. Dr. R. Gadling, 8 A.M. (or: a ruinous love in three scenes)

AO3

This is how a conversation goes, between something endless and something that refuses to end, cradled in between dreaming and waking:

-    You’re not leaving again, are you?

-    I will be your ruin. I will destroy you and take from you until you have nothing left to give.

-    So what? There is nothing inside of me that I haven’t already given.

-    You will love yourself to death. There are blades for these things.

-    Cut me open, then. I’m not so fragile that I cannot be pieced together again.

-    You’ve a class to teach.

-    So come watch me. There is nothing left to ruin.

*

Professor Gadling stands at the overhead projector cradling his guts. He teaches an eight am class – medieval history, today – that sees one-hundred pairs of half-open eyes and cheap instant coffee gathering in little groups. It is silent, still, this early, and only the first row has their backs pulled taut, and their shoulders dropped. From his arms, something dark and warm drips into the carpet that was glued on antique hardwood floor in 1979. It has not been changed since.

When he opens his mouth, his words flood from him, slow and viscous.

“Good morning everyone”, says Professor Gadling. “Sorry about the mess.”

A student in the first row leans forwards. Their fingers tremble around the cardboard cup. Something careful lingers in their eyes. “I think you need an ambulance”, they say. Over them, the fluorescent light that was installed sometime in the 1950s flickers, and drips yellow light on their cheeks. It licks at their skin, and at the shadows sitting just under their cheekbones.

“Huh”, says Professor Gadling. “No, thank you.” When he speaks, something pulls at the skin of his jaw and at the stubble that is just forming. Dark, it falls from his fingertips, and wicks, ever slow, into the fabric at the bend of his elbows. His stomach.

Under the soles of his shoes, the carpet makes a sound.

The student grinds their teeth. Stone against stone against corn, amongst the roaring of water, something somewhere grinds things to dust.

“You’re bleeding”, they say. Their voice is quiet, almost too soft against the humming of the light and yet –

Professor Gadling grins.

His teeth are crooked in his mouth in a way they have never been. Like shrapnel, splintered things stuck in his gums, they drip all over the collar of his shirt. For a moment, his hair is a long, unkempt thing, tangled at his neck. For a moment, his hands are split open and his trousers are dripping wet.

For a moment, Professor Gadling’s eyes are white, and his mouth yawns open wide.

Someone screams. Someone else makes a sound at the back of their throat that might have once been a gasp.

Professor Gadling blinks. His hair is brushed. His cheeks are flushed. His eyes are still as brown as they have ever been. His fingers are curled tightly around his dripping bowels.

“I’m fine”, he says.

“Hob, you’re gutted like a fish”, says the student in the first row.

Professor Gadling laughs. The corners of his eyes crinkle under the pull of it and his eyes shine in the flickering of the fluorescent light. With a flourish, he turns on his heels.

The carpet squelches.

“I have ne’er met a fish what could walk, frend.” The lamp still flickers, and Professor Gadling still stands upright. His heart must beat, still, a steady rhythm as it pours and pours itself into the carpet and the floor underneath it.

Then, he tilts his head. “Now”, he says. “Hob. Interesting choice of nickname, isn’t it?” There is an accent in his voice, something sticky almost. As though he’s dragging his feet through soil, too wet to give halt, and too dry to give way.

“It fell out of use-“, a breath. In his arms, bowels twitch. “-A long time ago.”

A step. His shoes scrape against the carpet, drunk full.

Professor Gadling is still smiling. “We forget, I think”, he says, and looks at someone in the last row. His teeth are yellowed. His laughter sits in the fine wrinkles around his mouth where it has long since etched its place. “We forget, don’t we, that people back then were people, too. They had nicknames and they had lives. It is easy to open a history book and read about the kings. About the queens, even, or the nobility. We forget about the people who made the clothes, or the food.”

He opens his arms.

His guts drop, bleeding and alive still, to the carpeted floor. Professor Gadling’s mouth is smeared red. His stomach is cut, from the join of his ribs to the hard cup of his hips, and the shirt sticks to twitching muscle. To gaping flesh.

“We forget”, says Professor Gadling, and he is all teeth, somehow, all hollowed. Underneath his ribs, his belly caves in. “About the people who died for them.”

“Hob”, says the student in the first row. Their hair is a wild thing, standing from their hairline as if in the eye of a storm. They don’t move.

Professor Gadling slips his hands into the pockets of his trousers, and leans back against his desk. “Witch hunts are easy to put into an essay, too.” The light flickers. The carpet that has long since eaten up the antique flooring browns at the edges. “Easy to write about. Interesting, too. Have any of you ever sat with the thought of the drowning, though?”

A shrug. Someone mumbles something. Someone else draw a breath that is more salt than air. Professor Gadling unspools his smile, for a moment. A breath, really. “It takes about 3 minutes to lose consciousness if you can’t breathe, sitting in that thing. Takes about three times as long to die. Your brain just shuts off, really. Your lungs aren’t meant to breathe water. Which, of course, takes us back to the fish.”

He draws his hands from his pockets to the top of the table. Then, with a tilt of his head, the smile comes back. “The worst thing is the starving, though. Nothing worse than your stomach trying to eat itself.” Around the gash, his muscles twitch.

By now, the shirt is more liquid than cloth, and it drips from him heavily. With a shrug, Professor Gadling reaches for it, and starts twisting it between his palms. A slow thing, something red wells up between his fingers.

“Hunger hollows you out. It eats away at you. The things you are willing to eat if you’re hungry enough would haunt your dreams.” He doesn’t sway. The colour in his cheeks doesn’t drain. His smile is just as it has always been, dimpled and wrinkling the corners of his brown eyes. The overhead projector behind him hums softly. “Nothing lays a man bare like hunger.”

Professor Gadling stands at the front of his class on a Monday morning at eight am and teaches until he has bled out.

He keeps going, after.

“Hob”, says the student. Professor Gadling smiles at them, and there is something alight in his eyes.

“Are you hungry?”, he asks.

*

Dream needs no food. Dream needs no touch. He needs no mortal, cut open and bleeding still, with his hands on the expanse of his spine. Needs not the mouth on his throat or the teeth in his flesh. The warmth against his chest. The brown of mortal eyes, spilled over the steps of his throne room.

But something sits deep in his stomach, eating away at him.

Something scrapes against bones he does not possess, something takes pieces from lungs that need not move. Something somewhere in the hollow of this endless body whets its teeth on every soft part of Hob Gadling’s body.

The blood on his skin is warm, and Hob Gadling is alive, yet.

“Break me”, he says, with that same voice. With those same eyes. With his laughter etched into his face, and stubbornness sitting in the hollow of his teeth, he reaches for Dream.

Dream, who is more than gods. Dream, whose lips are full of iron. Whose hands are full of human, coming apart at the seams.

“Hob”, he says.

“Ruin me”, says Hob. “I will live. I always live.”

He’s beautiful, says Despair – Desire – Delirium. Eyes shining, fingers sharpened at the tips, Desire’s lips sit on Hob’s throat. Despair’s palms fit into the crack of his bones. Delirium’s arms barely weigh down Hob’s shoulders.

Leave, says Dream. He’s mine.

“Nothing good can come from this”, he says flush against that body brimming with blood, and Hob laughs. It echoes, soft, a span of 600 years, callouses from swords long rotten pressed against endless ribs.

“Who cares?” His lips move, slow, against skin that is more dreaming than it is waking. “There is so much to live for, frend. Come live it with me. Sew me up and take me whole.”

“Hob Gadling-“

A hand on his jaw. Brown eyes. A smile, heavy with fondness. “I have known hunger in ways you cannot understand. Six centuries of hunger, sweeting”, says that mouth. Soft, and flush with life. Sticky with blood. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

Dream kisses that mouth. And Hob Gadling doesn’t taste like iron at all. There is only the bubble of laughter that always sits in the corner of his eyes, given breath by that voice.

“Dream”, says something that refuses to end against endless lips. And in endless eyes sits the universe, bright as the north star.

__

Hob almost gets himself fired btw. Somehow, he manages to convince his boss that it was a very elaborate rpg thing. Very pedagogically worthwhile. Very realistic, too. And it was just the eight am class, most of those kids were probably still asleep.

He does teach medieval history and period accurate swords aren’t really safe to handle in class, you see.