Okay okay hear me out. The year is 1924. Roderick Burgess is keeping the Lord of Dreams in a snowglobe without really knowing what he has. He's still throwing things at Dream to, largely, no effect.
And then something happens. Some ancient scroll found in the shipwreck of a trireme off the coast of Crete makes its way into Burgess' hands and this time it does something. The orb shatters. Every window in the house breaks. Everyone falls, quite permanently, asleep.
Dream of the Endless, Prince of Stories, stumbles out of his prison. He's cold. He's hungry. He's naked. He's LIVID. He cuts his foot on broken glass and it HURTS.
It hurts. It bleeds. It's not... supposed to do that.
He's breathing. He has a heartbeat. He has a little panic attack as he realises what's happened: he's human. And a fairly mortal, fragile human at that, starved and exhausted and, again, naked.
A couple of days later Captain Robert Gadling answers his door and Dream just. Falls through it into his arms. He weighs about three stone so Hob carries him inside and gets him a brandy (cures everything) and then pats his back as he chokes on it. He can tell there's something wrong but he thinks this mostly calls for tea so he does, in fact, call for tea but hides Dream from the maid because he's not entirely sure how to explain the half-dead man in his sitting room.
Hob gets in touch with Johanna Constantine and pays her handsomely to Do Something.
The task of getting enough tea and food into Dream goes excruciatingly because he's NOT used to being human and he doesn't understand anything and Hob has to give him a crash course but it's obviously a lot to suddenly be something you only sort of theoretically understand and it turns out people's dreams do not prepare you for the realities of all the little things humans just take for granted. Anyway they're having A Time. Dream looks fantastic once they get him into some clothes that fit. Hob nearly swallows his own tongue at the tailor's.
He tells people Dream's a friend from the war and Dream looks haunted enough that no one doubts this and also they do quietly understand that Friend From The War means they are fucking or at minimum have once fucked and like. Hob is so lovely that everyone he knows would defend him with their lives. It explains why his friend looks at him Like That.
Anyway Dream settles into living as a human and once he feels like he's not constantly on the verge of meeting his sister as a mortal it's not... bad? Really? He's still gathering strength, he knows he needs to get back to the Dreaming, he knows about sleepy sickness but also. He's sitting on an antique settee in front of the fire with a brandy in his hand and Hob pressed against him from knee to shoulder and it's nice. It's so nice just to exist so peacefully for a little while.
They go to parties and nightclubs and get very drunk and do coke because this is the 20s and this is Hob Gadling, of course they do. They stumble out into the night together, holding each other up for the walk home and the warmth and maybe because it's nice to be close, because Dream has never known what it is to feel human skin against human skin. He kisses Hob in the front hall and Hob chuckles and sends him to bed to sleep it off and then in the morning he kisses Hob again and this time Hob kisses him back. It's glorious. It's the best thing that's ever happened to him. He learns why humans dream about sex so often if THIS is what it feels like for them all the time.
He has to go back to the Dreaming. Johanna comes back with a solution, sand, helm, and ruby in hand.
Dream doesn't want to go. He's in love with life and with Hob and with this glimpse of how humanity lives and why Hob loves it so much, why he'll never die.
Hob tells him it's okay. It's good, actually, because it's been lovely, it really has, but he's not ready to let go of life when Very Mortal Dream goes in a few dozen years and he'd much rather have him once a century than not at all.
Dream sheds a couple of tears over it, and then he reclaims his powers, and goes.
A week later Hob finds him on the settee getting into the brandy again.
