With Your Eyes A Good Fortune One-Shot
Fandom: The Sandman (Comics & Netflix) Pairing: Dream of the Endless / Hob Gadling Rating: Teen and Up Word Count: ~4,000 Series: Part 2 of A Man of Good Fortune. Disclaimer: The Sandman, Dream/Morpheus, Hob Gadling, and all related characters and concepts belong to Neil Gaiman, DC Comics/Vertigo, and Netflix. This is a non-commercial work of fan fiction written purely for love of the source material. No copyright infringement is intended. Warnings: Discussion of past character death (Orpheus, Robyn Gadling) — non-graphic. Grief, guilt, and self-blame. Mentions of historical infant mortality. No explicit content. Summary: Dream has been human for a while now. He knows how to cross a street, how to make tea, how to sleep beside the man who waited six hundred years for him. He thought he had learned everything a mortal life demands. Then, one ordinary evening, Hob says the word child — and Dream discovers there is one door he never dared to open: the one with Orpheus behind it. A story about grief, second chances, and what two bad fathers might build together.
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The first thing was the word.
He had been in that body long enough by then to know that words, among men, weighed differently depending on the hour. Morning words weighed little: pass me the bread, it’s going to rain, don’t forget your scarf. Night words weighed more, because night loosens what the day holds tight. And words spoken in bed, in that warm strip between conversation and sleep, those weighed everything. Men saved for that strip what they did not dare say standing up.
Hob said the word standing up. In the kitchen. On a Tuesday.
They were washing the dinner dishes—he washed, Hob dried, an arrangement they had negotiated months before with the seriousness of a treaty—and outside the evening was dissolving into that slow blue of English summers, and the pub below murmured with its sound of glasses and conversations, and everything was so ordinary, so theirs, that he had let his guard down completely. That was why the word went through him without resistance, the way arrows pierce those who are not expecting war.
“I’ve been thinking,” Hob said, the tea towel in his hand and his eyes on the plate he was drying, “that we could have a child.”
He turned off the tap. The silence left behind was so sudden that the whole pub could be heard through the floor.
“A child?” He turned slowly. He searched Hob’s face for the sign of a joke and did not find it. “Hob. I already had a son. And you have had many: sons, daughters, wives. Entire lives of families.”
“I know.”
“Then?”
“You had a son when you were immortal.” Hob set the plate down. He set it down carefully, like someone putting aside something fragile so his hands could be free. “Now you’re mortal. It isn’t the same. It’s nothing like it, believe me, and I’ve been on both sides.”
He stayed there, looking at him. Water dripped from his fingers into the sink, a small and absurd rhythm against the size of the conversation.
“Right.” He sought refuge in irony, which was the hiding place he had learned from Hob and which he used, like everything he had learned from Hob, worse than his teacher. “And what do you propose? That I father a child with a woman?”
“Well.” Hob scratched the back of his neck, and on any other subject that gesture would have announced a joke, but his voice came out careful. “Medicine has come quite a long way since your days as lord of dreams. The practical part isn’t necessary anymore. There are clinics. There are ways. There are people who help people like us have families. It’s dreadful paperwork and it takes years and costs a fortune, but it exists.”
“Oh.”
That was all that came out. Oh. A monosyllable unworthy of someone who had guarded every library ever dreamed. But Hob was not fantasizing aloud: he had researched it. He had thought about clinics and paperwork and years. It had been growing inside him for some time, in silence, while they shared tea and bed and Tuesdays.
“Why?” he asked at last.
“Because I’ve seen you.” Hob leaned against the counter, facing him, leaving him no escape. “I’ve seen the way you look at children when we walk through the park. Not just looking. Looking differently. You fall half a step behind. Something stops in your face. Last week, that little girl who fell off the swing and you got to her before her mother... Don’t tell me no, because I saw you.”
“I think you’re mistaking...”
“No.” He said it without harshness, but with no room for argument. “I’m not mistaking anything. I’ve spent six hundred years reading faces, love. I’ve spent six centuries reading yours, and two years living right on top of it. I’m not mistaking anything.” And then he lowered his voice, and made it that warm and dangerous thing Hob’s voice became when he was serious. “Imagine it. A girl. With your eyes. With your skin. With those old-painting features of yours. Running down this hallway. Learning to read in your lap, and God knows we’re not short on books.”
And that was where the floor opened.
Because he saw her. That was the problem, the trap, the unintentional cruelty of the proposal: his mind, which had been the forge of all images, made her at once, perfect, without asking his permission. A pale, solemn girl with a book too large for her. And behind her, in the same blow of imagination, without transition and without mercy, he saw the island. He saw the sanctuary. He saw a bodiless head on an altar, eyes that were his own looking at him from a life that never ended, and a voice asking him for the mercy no father should ever grant and that he granted with his own hands.
“I killed my son.” His voice came out colorless. “Twice, Hob. I abandoned him when he begged me to help him, I left him for centuries on that island as a head that could not die, and when I finally returned, it was to finish what the women of Thrace had left half done. That is my record as a father. I was never a good father. I do not know if I know how to be anything other than what I was.”
He waited for the retreat. He waited for Hob to gather up the proposal the way one gathers up a tablecloth, with apologies, and for them never to speak of the matter again. It was what he would have done for ages: register the other’s wound and archive it, and circle it forever with the courtesy of those who do not ask questions.
Hob did not retreat.
“Well,” he said. “Exactly because of that.” And at the look on his face, he went on. “Maybe this time, between the two of us, we can do it better.”
“You do not...” He could barely manage language. “You have not done it badly. You are not me. You...”
“You don’t know that.”
Two words. Hob said them looking at the sink, and something in the way he said them made him go very still.
“You never told me anything,” he said slowly. “In our conversations. Six hundred years of meetings and never...”
“Well.” Hob shrugged, and the gesture tried to be light and failed. “It’s not as if you asked.”
The silence that followed was different from every silence they had shared. He felt it settle between them with a weight of its own, and understood, with a slow and retrospective shame that rose through his chest like cold water, that Hob was right.
He had not asked him. Never.
Six centuries of meetings. Six centuries of sitting across from that man to listen to the report of his fortunes: the printing press, the horses, the wool, disgrace, the escaped gallows, infamous businesses and regret. And he listening from his height, taking note of the specimen, the human who did not want to die, curious about his experiment and blind to his person. Hob had mentioned wives. He had mentioned children. My Robyn died in a tavern fight, two years ago now. He had told him that in 1589, his voice broken, and what had he done? He had nodded. He had archived the fact. He had changed the subject toward matters that seemed more interesting to him, because the grief of a mortal was, to the Lord of Dreams, one day’s weather in a kingdom of ages.
“I am asking now,” he said. His voice came out rough. “I am asking you now, Hob. Four hundred years late. What happened to your children?”
Hob went a while without answering. He finished drying the plate that was already dry. He put it away. He closed the cupboard with exaggerated softness, as if someone were sleeping inside it.
“Come,” he said at last. “This isn’t something you tell standing up.”
They sat where they always sat, by the window, with the evening already beaten and the streetlamps coming on below. Hob poured two glasses of something amber and did not touch his. When he spoke, he did it looking at the street, and his voice had a texture he did not know in him: the texture of things told for the first time after a long while, coming out rigid, shaped like the drawer in which they had been kept.
“I had more children than I told you. In those centuries, children were had the way harvests were had: many, because you knew not all of them would make it.” A swallow of air, not drink. “I buried the first ones almost without names. Creatures of days, of weeks. Back then people didn’t mourn them as much, or that’s what everyone said, and I repeated it, God willed it, and helped dig. A lie. They were mourned just the same. Only in silence and quickly, because the sowing had to continue.”
He listened without moving. He had presided over the dreams of millions of grieving parents. He knew the statistics of human pain better than anyone who had ever existed. And he knew nothing, he understood. Nothing of this. Because a map is one thing and a friend telling you I helped dig is another.
“Robyn was different.” Hob’s voice dropped a tone. “Robyn grew up. I had him for twenty-odd years. He was...” He laughed, briefly, without joy. “He was a charming brute. Quick to laugh, quick to fight, just like his father at that age, and I knew it and did nothing, because I liked seeing myself in him, do you understand? I liked it. I laughed at his swagger instead of stopping it. People told me: Gadling, that boy is going to end badly, and I bought another round.” Now he did drink, a short sip. “A tavern fight. A knife wound over a worthless bet. He was twenty-three. By then I had lived two hundred years and did not age, and my son died before me at the age I appeared to be. Like a brother. I buried my son with the face of a brother and I could not even scream it, because in that village people were already beginning to look at me strangely for not aging, and a father’s grief on a twenty-five-year-old face raised questions.”
“Hob...”
“Let me finish. Now that I’ve started, let me.” He passed a hand over his mouth. “What I never told anyone is this: I was away when it happened. Business. I could have been there and I wasn’t, and not because I couldn’t, but because in those days I came and went, I had all the time in the world, literally all the time in the world, and for that very reason I managed it like a miser. Why stay another week if there would be a thousand weeks? Immortals are the worst with time, love. Mortals spend it badly because they think they have plenty. We spend it worse because we really do.” His jaw trembled, barely. “After that came the others. Other wives, other children, other centuries. And with each one of them I arrived with the lesson badly learned: loving them with the brake on. Knowing I would bury them. There were children of mine I didn’t let myself love completely, do you understand what I mean? To protect myself. Children who looked at me from the cradle and I was already, in some room at the back of my head, at their funeral. That was my sin, and I committed it for centuries. Not hitting them, not abandoning them: loving them halfway. Which might be worse, because they noticed it and had no name for it.”
He fell silent. Outside, a bus passed, and its light swept across the ceiling of the room and went away.
“So no,” Hob said at last, turning to look at him. “I did not do it well. I did it badly in a different way than you, but I did it badly. You failed through pride and because you did not know how to bend. I failed through fear and by managing love like a miser. Between the two of us, we have gathered every way there is to be a bad father.” And then, against all logic, he smiled: a small, crooked smile, with bright eyes. “And that is exactly why I’ve thought about it. Because no one in this world, I swear to you, no one knows better than the two of us exactly what not to do.”
He did not answer that night. Nor the next.
Hob did not press him. That was one of the things he had learned to love about that man with the slowness with which true things are learned: Hob knew how to wait as no one had ever known how to wait. He planted a seed and stepped aside. He had waited six hundred years for a friend; he could wait a few weeks for an answer.
And he, in the meantime, did what his mortal body had taught him to do with things too large: carry them around. He could no longer retreat to a tower in his realm to contemplate the problem from outside time. Now problems were carried to the market, and on walks, and into insomnia, sewn inside the lining of one’s coat.
He caught himself looking at children in the park. Now that Hob had named it, he could no longer fail to see himself doing it. It was true: he fell half a step behind. It was true that something stopped in his face. He watched a clumsy father trying to free a pram and felt a pang that was not of the body. He watched a girl explain to her mother, with absolute seriousness, some invented law of the universe, and thought, unable to help it: I would know how to listen to her. Now I would know. Now that I am no one, I would know.
And behind every pang, punctual, Orpheus.
One night he dreamed of him. He no longer ruled his dreams; they came to him like they came to everyone, without warning and without obedience. He dreamed of the island, but changed: in the dream Orpheus had a body, and he was small, a child of five or six sitting on the steps of the sanctuary, holding out his arms for him to lift him. And he, in the dream, could not move. He wanted to go and could not, with that thick paralysis of dreams, and the child waited without lowering his arms, without reproach, simply waited, which was the worst of it.
He woke with the pillow damp and Hob already turned toward him in the dark, not asking, only opening his arm to make room for him. He let himself be gathered in. He had learned some time ago to let himself be gathered in, and it remained, of all human arts, the one that cost him the most.
“It was him,” he said against Hob’s shoulder, when he could. “He was a child. I never knew him as a child, do you know that? When I... when I was there, he was already a young man. His mother and the muses raised him more than I did. I appeared. Like with you. I appeared, presided, and left. My son learned to walk and I heard it from others.”
Hob’s hand moved up and down his back, slowly.
“What if I do it again?” There it was. The question underneath every night. “Hob, what if it is something I am and not something I did? I was made to be a function before I was a person. Father of a realm, never of anyone. What if I do to that girl you imagine what I did to him? Appear and preside and leave, even while living in the same house? One can abandon without leaving the room. I am an expert.”
Hob stayed silent for so long that he thought he had fallen asleep. He had not. He was doing what he did with important things: weighing them before handing them over.
“Do you know what convinces me most that this time would be different?” he said at last. “It isn’t that you’ve changed, though you have changed. It isn’t that you’re mortal now, though you are, and time finally costs you what it costs everyone. It’s this thing we’re doing right now.” He squeezed his shoulder, barely. “This conversation. At three in the morning. You, saying out loud to me I’m afraid of failing her.” Hob let out his breath slowly. “The you that you were would not have said that sentence under torture. The you that you were did not know anything was missing from him. Truly bad fathers, love, do not spend nights awake wondering whether they will be bad fathers. They sleep wonderfully. The fear you have is the best letter of recommendation I have seen in six hundred years.”
“Fear does not raise children.”
“No. Fear doesn’t. But look at what you have around the fear.” Hob propped himself up on one elbow to look at him in the half-dark. “You have memory: you know exactly where every stone you stumbled over is. You have time, the good kind, the kind that runs out, which is the only kind anyone takes seriously. You have me, with centuries of practice and all the mistakes catalogued. And you have something you did not have with Orpheus, and it changes everything.”
“What?”
“Now you know what it costs.” He said it very softly. “Living. Being cold. Needing. Before, you looked at your son from above, from what does not die, and there was no way, physically no way, for you to understand his despair. Now you have a heart that will stop one day, just like his. You would no longer be his king. You would be his equal. One mortal raising another mortal, both learning at the same time.” A pause. “Which, by the way, is all a father has ever been. No one knows. I swear it on six centuries of seeing it: no one has ever known. You learn with the child in front of you, late and by blows, and you ask forgiveness a lot, and some days it works.”
He looked at the ceiling. The strip of lamplight coming through the badly closed curtain. The weight of Hob’s arm across his chest, that anchor.
“She will ask,” he said. “Children ask everything. She will ask about my family. About my past. What will I tell her? That her father was one of the forces of the universe? That her other father is six hundred years old? She would grow up on a lie.”
“She would grow up on a story we will tell her when she can carry it, which is what everyone does with everything.” Hob yawned, and a smile slipped into the yawn. “Besides, a lie? Excuse me. We’ll tell her the pure truth from the first day: that her father came from very far away, from a country that no longer exists, and that he lost his whole family, and that he started over, and that the man who loves him waited for him his whole life. There isn’t a false word there. The details can be negotiated along the way.”
“The details.” He closed his eyes. “You call Eternity a detail.”
“I call everything a detail that isn’t this.” And Hob kissed his temple, clumsy with sleep, his voice fading. “Think about it as long as you need. There is no rush. I mean, there is, now we’re both in a rush, that’s the point of it... but the good kind. The kind that makes things matter.”
He fell asleep halfway through the last word, as he always did, all at once and without ceremony, six hundred years of practice in that too. He remained awake for a long while, listening to him breathe, with the old question from the grass—why am I here—circling again. Only this time it did not come empty. This time it came with a possible shape inside it, small, solemn, with a book too large for her.
The answer did not come the way answers come in stories, with music and on one’s knees. It came on an ordinary Sunday, weeks later, at Columbia Road Flower Market, among the shouting of vendors and the smell of wet earth and eucalyptus.
There was a lost girl.
Four years old, perhaps five. Standing in the middle of the river of people with that absolute stillness of children who have just understood they are alone, not yet crying, still in that icy second before tears. The crowd passed around her without seeing her, as crowds pass around everything.
He saw her before anyone else. He saw her as he had learned to see: not from above, from within. He recognized the icy second because he had lived it, in the grass, that first morning, when he woke alone in a world that passed around him without seeing him.
He crouched to her height. He had learned that from Hob too: that people who are afraid must not be spoken to from above.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is...” and he gave the ordinary name he used now, his mortal name, the one Hob had helped him choose. “You’re looking for someone, aren’t you? I got lost once too. It was horrible. Do you know what I did? I stayed very still in one place and let them find me. Shall we do that? We’ll stay here very still, both of us, very dignified, as if we meant to do it, and wait.”
The girl studied him with that infallible scale children have for weighing adults. And she must have found something, because she nodded and put her hand on his sleeve—not in his hand: on his sleeve, her small sovereignty—and the two of them stayed very still and very dignified among the flowers until a woman came pushing her way through the crowd, shouting, and the girl detached herself from him and ran and was lifted and cried over and kissed.
It lasted three minutes. No one else would remember it.
He straightened and found Hob a few yards away, a forgotten bunch of dahlias in his hand, looking at him. He said nothing. There was no need. His face held the expression of someone who has been waiting for weeks in front of a door and has just heard steps on the other side.
“I do not know how to do it,” he said, when he reached his side. The market roared around them; he had to say it almost into his ear, and perhaps that was better, because that way he could say all of it. “I want that to be clear from the start. I do not know how to be a father. I failed at it in the most complete way anyone has ever failed, and the fear will not go away, and there will be nights when I dream of an island and I will be useless, and you will have to do it alone on those nights.”
“All right,” Hob said, very still.
“And I demand...” His voice broke, and he remade it. “I ask. I ask you to stop me. If you see me appear and preside and leave. If you see me loving her from above. You know what that looks like from below; you saw it for six centuries in a pub. If you see me doing it with her, tell me. Even if I do not want to hear it. Especially if I do not want to hear it.”
“Deal.” And Hob held out his hand, formal, absurd, with the dahlias in the other, in the middle of the market. “A bargain like ours. Every hundred years we meet and evaluate... no, wait.” His eyes were shining, with laughter and with the other thing. “Every day. Now it is every day. I always forget how rich I am.”
He shook his hand. The rough, warm, six-hundred-year-old hand that had brought him inside on a cold night and had not let go of him since.
“A girl,” he said, and saying it aloud made her feel possible, made him feel the vertigo and not turn away from it. “You said a girl. With my eyes.”
“With your eyes.” Hob smiled from ear to ear, and suddenly he looked four hundred years younger. “Poor world. It has no idea what’s coming.”
They started walking home, among the flowers, without hurry and with all the hurry in the world, the good kind, the kind that makes things matter. And he thought, while the Sunday sun warmed the back of his mortal neck, that Hob was wrong about only one thing. They were not going to do it better because they knew what not to do.
They were going to do it better because this time, when the child lifted her arms from the steps, there would be two men in the world trained for centuries, each in his own terrible way, in the exact art of never again standing still.
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