#tfw u learn the guy youve been dreaming about for 600 years and thought was just a figment of your imagination is real

[cuubism]

In Waking Dreams

Part 1 || AO3

----

Hob Gadling was halfway through his third drunken karaoke rendition of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” when he learned that he had a husband.

It came in the form of what Hob could only describe as a ransom letter, passed to him by the bartender as Hob paused mid-song to take a swaying, unsteady breath.

God, seven drinks was too many. Way too many. Hob couldn’t die, but he was pretty sure he could still get alcohol poisoning.

The song’s backing track continued on behind him, a grating bass line to the melody of his self-pity, as he read the letter with glazed eyes. The words, pasted together from magazine cutouts – Christ, was he in a cheesy action film or what? – swirled in whiskey-laced currents, but Hob managed to make it out.

heLLo ur Husband is In a GlasS JaR in Some Guy’S BaSeMEnt plS geT hIM out i cant taKE the mopiNG ANYmore -- A concerNed SisteR

What in the ever-loving fuck?

“Hey,” Hob said to the bartender, mouth uncomfortably tacky around the word. He really should swear off drinking when he was feeling morose. “Who left this?”

The bartender shrugged, already shaking another martini. The clinking ice met the ending chords of the song and set Hob’s head to pounding. “Some lady.”

Helpful. “She still here?”

“Nope.”

Hob let out a long, arduous sigh. So much for that.

He dropped his karaoke mic onto the stage with a clank and got up from his stool, letter in hand. “That’s it for me, then,” he said, not that anyone was listening. “Same time tomorrow?”

“Hopefully not,” grumbled the bartender, but Hob waved him off.

Outside, the air was cool and crisp, nudging away the haziest edge of Hob’s intoxication. He stumbled towards home, taking deep, settling breaths of the night.

The letter crinkled in his hand. Hob looked at it again, under the moonlight this time. It could just be a very strange prank. Hob didn’t have a husband, after all. Technically, no men had husbands, but he’d known more than a few who’d considered each other as such, so he wouldn’t get too pressed about the details.

Also, a jar? A JAR?

Really, this woman should go to the police if she thought her brother had been kidnapped and was being held in a basement somewhere. The least helpful thing she could do was to give a vague letter to Hob, who knew neither who this brother was, what was meant by jar, nor whose basement it was supposedly in.

Except…

No. That was stupid. Hob was drunk, not completely insane. There was zero chance this was about some guy Hob’s delirious and probably lonely brain had dreamed up. Zero. None. Dreams didn’t just… walk into the waking world.

Except.

There was the small matter of Hob being kind of…

Immortal.

Always threw a bit of a wrench in his ‘reality follows such-and-such rules’ monologues, that. It was kind of hard to make declarative statements about how things should be when one was violating several natural laws just by walking around every day.

And Hob’s Dream… he hadn’t seen him in a while, had he?

“Where’ve you gone?” he murmured, looking back down at the strange letter. “Stuck in a jar somewhere, love?”

Then he shook himself, snorting. Christ, he really was drunk, wasn’t he?

He continued on home, already anticipating tomorrow morning’s brutal hangover.

He tucked the letter into his pocket.

----

It was a quiet ceremony. Incense hung heavy in the chapel, candlelight flickering over the handful of guests arrayed in the pews. Sunlight streamed in from high stained-glass windows.

Hob stood at the altar, silk robe slipping over his shoulders. Waiting.

A man stepped up beside him, giving him a quizzical look. Hob wasn’t sure what that look was for. This was who he’d been waiting for, wasn’t he?

“You’ve drawn me into your dream,” said the man, a curious tilt to his head, intrigue in his voice. “How interesting.”  

“You’re my dream,” Hob told him, and got a tiny, startled smile in return.

“How interesting,” repeated his Dream.

Later, Hob would wonder about so much of it. The fact that he’d dreamed himself into a wedding. The fact that his fiancé was a man. Hell, the silk – Lord knew he couldn’t afford it in reality. But, in the moment—

Hob and his betrothed stood face-to-face, hands lightly clasped. Past Hob’s field of vision, an officiant read out the marriage rites.

“Last chance to back out,” Hob teased his fiancé.

His Dream looked around at the chapel, the officiant, up at the ceiling, as if wondering how the surroundings had come to be. Then he looked back at Hob, giving his hands a tiny squeeze. “This is your dream, isn’t it?”

“Our dream,” Hob corrected. “Marriage isn’t just a one-sided thing, you know.”

“Hmmm.” His Dream’s eyes were like tiny stars. “You are a strange man, Robert Gadling.”

“Hob.”

“Hob,” he agreed. Then, strangely tentative, “…Husband?”

Hob couldn’t help his broad grin. “They haven’t finished reading the rites, love.”

His Dream chuckled. “They have,” he said. And they had.

Hob leaned in and gave him the softest kiss on his lips. His Dream was stiff at first, surprised to be kissed, but then his lips softened. He let Hob cradle his face in one hand and draw him in closer, pressing their foreheads together when they parted on a breath.

Hob laughed. “Husband,” he said, and got an answering smile.

----

The morning brought a full-body ache and a desperate need for coffee.

Hob stumbled into the kitchen, switching on the radio to catch up on news while his coffee brewed. He didn’t know why he bothered. Things had been shaky for so long now that sometimes it felt like they’d never stabilize.

Usually, Hob was pretty decent at looking on the bright side of things. Appreciating the coffee in the aftermath of the air raids, and so on.

But this century…

Well. He hadn’t been sleeping very well, for a start, and that never helped anything.

He turned the station to music, and sat down at the table with his coffee. He'd meant to open the book he’d been reading, a romance novel of all things, but found himself looking at that strange letter, instead.

In the daylight, the absurdity of it fell away, leaving only a more concerning message:

Your husband is trapped.

Hob worried at his lower lip. “Dream guy,” he murmured to himself, “now would be a great time to show up again.”

When had Hob last dreamt of him? It had been… longer than he’d thought, he now realized. He didn’t think he’d had a proper dream about his Dream since near the turn of the century. Occasionally, he’d have dreams that were more memories of things he and his… dream husband had already experienced. Like repeats of their wedding. But that was different; Hob could always tell when his Dream was really there with him.

Which was… a strange thing to think about a figment of his imagination.

He ran his thumb over the jagged edges of the pasted-on magazine letters. It really was like a movie ransom note. Begging for a life.

Stupid as it seemed, Hob couldn’t let it go. And it was better to try, and end up looking incredibly stupid, than it was to ignore it and later learn that his dream husband was real and Hob had left him stuck in a jar. Which, the more times he thought it, sounded less ridiculous and more horrifying.

I’m coming, he thought, hoping his Dream could hear it. If you’re out there, I’m coming.

There was a problem with this plan, though.

Hob had absolutely no clue how to find his husband.

----

The landscape was cracked and broken, an endless expanse of black lava fields, shattered mountains sticking up in jagged spikes, empty riverbeds curving into the distance. It looked nuclear. It looked long abandoned.

Hob picked his way across the rock, black sand scuffing the soles of his boots. He looked up at the grey, smoky sky, wondering just what was so familiar about the dreamscape. A relic of the war – wars – stowed away by his subconscious?

He knew it was a dreamscape, now. Over time, his dreams had clarified, became easier to navigate. That didn’t mean it didn’t feel real, though. The cold wind raised real goosebumps along his bare arms; the sand, when he bent to touch it, was harsh and scratched his palms; the smoke prickled in the back of his throat.

Something fluttered down from the sky before him. Hob reached out and caught it.

The solitary raven feather he found in his palm was soft where the sand had been harsh. Blood clung to the shaft where it had torn from the flesh. Hob looked up, but there were no ravens to be found in the sky. Just the whistling wind, and the clouds churning overhead.

His Dream had liked to carry a raven on his shoulder. Perhaps Hob was just missing him, again.

He held the raven feather in his hand and turned to go, to see if there was anything else here but devastation.

The ground rumbled.

Hob was flung into the sand as a crack! echoed across the lava fields and a gaping crevasse opened before him. Steam lifted from it, burning his face. Don’t cross, it seemed to say. Don’t go.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Hob told the dream.

A swarm of ravens erupted from the crevasse, steam streaming from their wings, caws echoing in the air. They blew past Hob’s face like a cyclone, feathers all a-flutter. Their wings brushed his cheeks. Claws grazed his skin, but didn’t draw blood. He closed his eyes, held his breath so as not to be smothered.

Then they were gone, and so was the feather in his hand. It had left behind a pile of dark sand, softer than that on the ground. Hob tried to disperse it into the wind, but a sudden visceral aversion to doing so had him closing his fist over it instead.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he said again. “I don’t know what you’re telling me, my Dream.”

He didn’t know why he addressed him directly when he was hardly present. Perhaps he just missed him, so much that he wished this strange and gruesome landscape was a message of some kind.

“I’m sorry, love,” he said. “You’re going to have to give me a little more to go on, if that’s really you there.”

The ground rumbled again in increased agitation, the rock below him fell away, and Hob tumbled into an infinite abyss. The knowledge that it was a dream abyss didn’t stop his breath from lurching into his throat, and he flailed for a grip somewhere above him.

The sand streamed from his grasp and was lost in the falling wind.

----

The nineteen-thirties were, quite frankly, shit.

Everyone had partied it up in the twenties, and that was all fine and well. Hob had partied it up, too, why not? Whichever year you found yourself in, you’d never see it again, would you?

Now, he couldn’t help but feel this cursed decade was some kind of recompense for all that indulgence.

Everybody was out of work. Hell, Hob was out of work, and would have been fucked if he hadn’t been like five hundred years old and thus had had plenty of time to squirrel away money. Plus, something was stirring up in Germany – nobody seemed to be paying much attention to it, but Hob had witnessed enough wars in his long life to recognize the ingredients for one, and dear God they did not need another.

So, the thirties thus far were decidedly terrible. Hob was greatly looking forward to the time when things finally tipped over for the better, whenever that was. He wasn’t confident it would be soon.

But, if he was being honest with himself, all of these growing problems paled in comparison to his personal life. If he was really being honest, it wasn’t a problem with the nineteen-thirties; Hob’s life had been steadily going downhill since around 1916 – when he’d, well, basically stopped sleeping.

Or stopped sleeping well, anyway.

As the war ended, Hob’s dreams had grown restless, shadows curling in the corners of his vision every time he closed his eyes. Where before, he’d been able to find peace in sleep, even during the most brutal of historical times, now his dreams were just chaos.

He wished he could attribute it to the war. But his terrible dreams weren’t full of young boys’ bodies broken in the trenches, or the green English fields empty of horses. Instead, they were, well—

Birds rushing through a dense forest, stripping the trees of their leaves as they went and leaving feathers behind—

Flashes of an empty altar and rotting rose petals—

A bloody hand pressed against glass—

Echoing gunfire—

Strange creatures shredding apart into dust—

Book pages fluttering to the muddy ground—

Hands, briefly holding each other—

A child’s terrified face—

A phantom press of familiar lips against his own—

Incoherent images tumbling over each other in an endless stream, straining, pounding at his mind. Hob could find no consistency or narrative to them, not even the nonsensical type of narrative common to dreams. He could make no sense of it whatsoever.

He never woke up well from those dreams. He woke up troubled, unsettled, like there was something he needed to be doing but he didn’t know what it was. He carried that feeling from his dreams and into the daylight. It trailed him like a shadow.

Hob used to love dreaming. Now, any night that he didn’t dream was a mercy.

Hob felt bad trying to get a job when there were so few available and others didn’t have five hundred years of savings to back them up. Instead, he’d set himself to trying to help other people get jobs using whatever connections he had. Admittedly, he’d let his connection with society slack a bit in the last few years – if his sleep had been bad since 1916, it had been downright atrocious since 1926 – but he was doing his best.

In reality, this effort entailed a lot of waiting around. Sending letters, waiting. Submitting documentation, waiting. Calling people, waiting for a call back. Etcetera.

In the middle of one of these days, Hob slipped into a doze at his desk. He was tired, after all. He was tired almost all of the time, nowadays. And in his dream—

His husband was sitting in the tall grass, his long coat arrayed under him as a blanket. Hob sat across from him, legs folded underneath himself. Between them was a plate of pastries that Hob had brought, because his Dream was seemingly incapable of procuring food; he never ate it unless Hob prodded him to, either.

The sun beamed down gently upon them. Insects buzzed and sang in the nearby grass, but none bit or even landed. Such were the privileges of dreaming.

His Dream gave him a tiny smile, as if Hob had dozed off and just come back to him. Hob remembered that smile. That exact smile, as a matter of fact. That exact scene. A memory, then. Not real, not really there.

Christ, Hob missed him so much. He wanted his real Dream back, not the memory-version. Not that he was entirely sure what the difference was, in a dream world. Both had been conjured by Hob’s mind. There was a difference, though. He knew there was. The more lucid, the more aware of his dreams he’d become, the more he’d known.

“My Dream,” he said anyway, as he had before. “There you are.”

“My dreamer,” replied his husband in a familiar refrain.

Hob picked up one of the pastries, a tiny strawberry Danish, and bit into it. The Danish was perfect, buttery and flaky and sweet, because of course it was. This was a dream. Hob wished, with a sudden, strange fervor, that something about it would be imperfect. A little too tart, a little too sticky. A little more real.

He held the other half of the pastry out to his Dream. Held it to his lips until he finally took the hint and let Hob slip it into his mouth, his tongue brushing Hob’s fingertips. Then Hob leaned in, rising onto his knees to get closer. He drew his Dream in with a hand on his cheek and kissed the corner of his mouth. He watched him swallow.

“You are in a good mood today,” observed his husband, voice rumbling under Hob’s hand.

“When am I not, when I’m with you?”

“Hmm. This is true.”

“You’re in a good mood,” Hob pointed out. “That’s far rarer, isn’t it?”

His Dream smiled. Hob was still close enough that their cheeks were brushing, so he could feel it. “That is even truer.”

Hob kissed his cheek, then under his ear. “You should be happier.” He amended his phrasing. “You deserve to be happier.”

“I am happy. When I am here.”

Why haven’t I seen you, then? Hob thought, but it was pointless to ask this of a memory.

Instead, he drew him down into the grass, which, being dream-grass, was unnaturally soft, like a wild blanket. Hob couldn’t help being hyperaware of how it wasn’t scratching his skin. He didn’t know why he couldn’t quite lose himself in this dream. He could not seem to let go of the fact that it was a dream, and not only that, but a memory. He couldn’t stop thinking, thinking, thinking, and remembering.

Where are you? he thought. Where are you?

“Where are you?” asked his Dream, lying beside him in the grass. There was still humor in his gaze, as if he hadn’t caught on to the depths of Hob’s troubles – but of course he hadn’t. This had all already occurred. “Your mind is in the clouds. Found a better dream?”

Hob kissed him, one hand cradling his cheek, the other sweeping through his unruly hair. His Dream hummed, satisfied.

“No such thing,” Hob said against his lips.

His Dream tangled a hand in the collar of his shirt and—

Hob startled awake to the sound of his desk phone ringing. He brushed his hair from his forehead and a line of drool from the corner of his mouth, and picked up the phone.

“‘Ello?”

He listened to his acquaintance on the other end of the line, who was trying to tell him about a job that might be open for one of Hob’s ‘clients’. Hob took this in, but most of his mind was still on the dream.

He hadn’t seen his Dream, really seen him, in so long, now. Was it his fault, somehow? Hob had dreamed him up, after all. If he’d been absent, it must be Hob’s mind failing to conjure him. Failing to find him.

These memory-dreams were almost becoming more agonizing than the chaos of his usual nights, for all that they reminded him of what he had lost.

I miss you, he thought, doubly despondent over being so distraught over a dream. Still, his Dream’s elegant face hovered in his mind. I miss you. Come back to me.

----

“Hello.”

Hob looked up. Standing in the doorway to his tiny kitchen was a thin man, finely dressed in black, his sure steps stuttering to hesitance as he hovered on the threshold. A smile broke out on Hob’s face before his mind had even caught up.

“Hello, you. God, you’re so lovely that for a moment I thought I might have just dreamt you up.”

The man – his Dream, or so Hob thought of him because having such a man must be a dream come true – let out a startled huff and sat down across from him at the kitchen table. “I had wondered how much you might remember.”

His movements were tentative, like he wasn’t yet sure of his place in Hob’s space, here, so Hob took his hand. His Dream looked down at where their skin touched, flexing his hand experimentally.

“Forget you?” Hob scoffed. Forget his own husband? Who could do that? “I could never.”

“Evidently so.”

“Never,” Hob repeated. “I believe you’re rather stuck with me now, love.”

His Dream studied him, looking for an answer to an unknown question in Hob’s eyes. “Hmmm,” he agreed at last, squeezing Hob’s hand in return. “I do believe that I am.”

----

Hob had once declared that he would never die, but it was highly likely that he did, in fact, have a death wish.

Or so his dreams seemed to be telling him.

He could not, would not, get that one dream out of his head. He was so lost in thought that he stumbled in the mud, sword clanking at his side, and would have fallen were it not for one of his mates pulling him upright with a laugh.

“Had too much to drink last night, Hob?”

Hob affected a smile. “Something like that.”

If only.

No. Something far more troubling had Hob’s mind in a haze and his feet tripping over themselves. Someone.

What in the bloody hell was he thinking about, dreaming about a man?

Generally speaking, Hob did not care much what other people did. He also could hardly be considered the arbiter of all morality, so who was he to tell other people what to do, really. However, Hob was very aware that many people did not hold this sort of live-and-let-live mentality, and that those people could get rather upset about certain things.

These were dangerous dreams to be having.

“Hob!” called his friend from up ahead. “Quit lagging behind!”

Hob supposed he was fortunate it was just dreams he was having. Not that he was necessarily opposed, the more he thought of it, but it would certainly make his life more complicated, having such a thing in the real world. More dangerous, too.

And yet, he couldn’t get his dream husband out of his head. The dark swoop of his hair over his neck. The intensity of his eyes. The curiosity he seemed to have about Hob, about the marriage Hob had unknowingly dragged him into.

Hob had kissed him, after. Not the chaste kiss at the altar. After, when they’d slipped away to the back of the church, hovering in the shadows at the base of the stained-glass mural above. Lost in the dream, he’d had no hesitance, no self-consciousness, had simply pulled his Dream closer and kissed him. Hands twisting in the lapels of his long outer coat, he had held him close and tasted his mouth, and his Dream had kissed back, dragging a moan from him with the skillful use of his tongue.

Hob hadn’t known kissing could feel like that, buoyed by the very real dream-love he held for his dream-husband. The passion this nameless, mysterious man he’d dreamt up had inspired in him.

And how real it had felt in the moment. Not only consciously, but bodily, the very real pounding of his heart and the heat under his layers of clothes, the very real wetness of his Dream’s mouth and the ache in Hob’s bones for him. He could still feel the press of his lips on his own, and touched his hand to them now, absently. He shuddered.

“Hob!” yelled his friend again. “Supper is not getting any warmer!”

“Yeah, coming,” Hob said. “I’m coming.”

Physically, he trudged on through the mud, hefting his pack higher on his shoulder. Mentally, he stayed in the shadow of the church, lost in the press of his Dream’s warm body.

Dangerous dreams, indeed.

----

There were an ungodly number of buildings in the United Kingdom that had basements.

Hob knew exactly how many now. This was, of course, assuming that the basement in question was, in fact, in the United Kingdom, and not Papua New Guinea, or somewhere.

Hob looked at his extensive list of basemented houses in dismay.

No. Fuck this. This was never going to work. It would take him years to search them all, and who knew if his Dream had that kind of time. Hob didn’t know how long he might have been imprisoned for already.

He threw the list on the floor.

Time for a different tactic.

Assuming his Dream, was, in fact, a real individual who existed in this world as well as in dreams… Hob could only assume something supernatural was afoot. Unless both he and his Dream had somehow acquired the powers of dreamsharing, such as it were.

But also, Hob was immortal. How, he still didn’t know, but he was. He had no choice but to believe in some element of the supernatural, or the divine, or the occult, or whatever it was. The idea that his Dream was some kind of supernatural figure, one that existed in dreams as well as reality, was certainly within the realm of possibility. Was likely, even, as, while it was certainly not impossible that someone would be keeping a normal human in some kind of glass prison in their basement, it seemed somewhat of a strange thing to do with a prisoner. Wouldn’t they want to hurt them, or get something from them? Torture them? Why simply leave them there, and in a glass prison, of all things, rather than just a locked room?

No, Hob was feeling more and more certain that his Dream was supernatural, in some way. It explained far more than the alternative. He pushed all the weirdness of that aside for now – there would be plenty of time to have a minor crisis about his apparent six-century-long marriage to God-knew-what later on. Right now, he had a more pressing investigation.

Who would know about a supernatural being, have the means and knowledge to trap one, and the ability to keep one for who knew how many years?

Hob knew what he had to do. Rather than searching through basements –-

-- he should be searching through occultists.