None of the Above 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 3 of A Man of Good Fortune. Disclaimer: The Sandman, Dream/Morpheus, Hob Gadling, Nuala, Desire of the Endless, 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: Non-explicit references to sperm collection (comedic/awkward, nothing graphic) Discussion of past character death and grief (Orpheus, Robyn Gadling) Brief unsettling presence of Desire Medical/clinical settings No explicit content Summary: Three months after Hob started this madness, the former Lord of Dreams is standing in a white bathroom on the third floor of a fertility clinic, holding a sterile plastic cup, being asked — by his own reflection, no less — to use his imagination. What follows is worse: paperwork. Catalogues. A doctor in a cardigan explaining that no contract in this country is binding, that they cannot choose the child's sex, and that they must select a woman from a list that measures height and university degrees and asks nobody what she dreams about. Dream has notes. Dream also has an idea, which he saves for the walk home.
They handed him the container at ten forty in the morning.
It was made of clear plastic, with a blue lid, and had a white label stuck to it where someone had handwritten a surname that was not his. Until exactly three seconds ago, it had been sterile. Now it was between his fingers, and he held it at chest height as one might hold a document of surrender.
It was not that he did not understand its purpose. He understood it perfectly. For ages, he had watched over the dreams of every creature that had ever closed its eyes upon the face of this world, and no function of the human body was unfamiliar or even remotely scandalous to him. Modesty was not the problem.
The problem was how mundane it was.
That this—the continuation of a life, the act by which species refuse to come to an end, the mystery men have sung about and wept over and made into religion since they first had mouths—should be dealt with on the third floor, north-east wing, of a fertility clinic, with a label written in ballpoint pen and a blue lid.
The nurse opened the bathroom door. She was in her twenties, wore gloves, and was avoiding looking at him. She was failing. He noticed it with some remote part of himself, the part that had spent two years learning to tolerate the uncomfortable fact of inhabiting a body that human standards deemed attractive: tall, slender, very pale, with tousled black hair and blue eyes that no longer held stars but which, apparently, still made people lose track of what they were saying.
“Mr Gadling,” she said. “You have ten minutes.” Then she closed the door.
He stood motionless in the centre of the room, listening to the echo of it. It was not his surname. His surname, if such a thing had ever existed, was a word no human tongue could pronounce in full, and when the time came to fill in the first form three months ago, he had seriously considered writing Endless. Hob had forbidden it. Sounds like a rock band, he had said. Then, more quietly, with that unerring aim he had for the things Morpheus did not want to face: and besides, you aren’t one anymore, love. Writing it there would be like burying you all over again.
So, Gadling. The surname of a man who had given it to himself six hundred years ago because he needed to be called something, and who had reinvented himself every time a new century forced him to become someone else. Hob knew how to create people on paper better than anyone alive. Certificates, records, registers: six hundred years of practice evading the curious had made him a forger of an almost endearing elegance. Thanks to that, he existed. Legally speaking, the former Lord of Dreams was a British citizen with no criminal record, a National Insurance number, and a library card.
He looked around the bathroom.
There was nothing remarkable about it. A toilet, a basin, a pedal bin, an optimistically arranged tower of toilet rolls, a mirror. The walls were that antiseptic white which is not a colour but an absence of opinion. There were no magazines. No screens. Absolutely nothing.
He recalled, with a certain resentment, an online forum thread he had read three weeks earlier. Because yes: the former Lord of Dreams now went online. He had discovered it early on and studied it with almost professional attention, indignant at first and then fascinated, because there it was—scattered across late-night screens, among adverts and spelling mistakes—the same nocturnal confession of humanity that had flowed into his realm for ages. The same fears. The same pleas with no intended recipient. People no longer told their terrors to their pillows; they told strangers at three in the morning, and he could not help feeling that someone had set up a rival business in the shop next door.
The thread in question debated whether clinics provided audiovisual material in their collection rooms. The general conclusion, after four hundred comments, was that it was an urban myth.
He set the container on the edge of the basin and stared at it. Ten minutes. Probably nine by now.
He knew what had to be done. That was the point: he knew, and he resisted. It felt unnatural, cumbersome, anything but dignified, and the word dignified came to him in the exact voice of who he had been for ages, with a cloak and a throne and a dignity that, viewed from here, was beginning to seem slightly comical.
He raised his eyes to the mirror.
Six seconds were enough for the reflection to cease being that of a man in a clinic bathroom and become something else: a figure standing in an endless gallery, holding a helm that was not a helm, ordering the dreams of an entire planet with the same ease with which he now buttoned a coat. There he was. Still inside this face. The other life, crouched behind his cheekbones.
Three seconds more, and he was already thinking of other eyes.
Not Hob’s. Nor those of the little girl they had both imagined one Sunday among the flowers. His sibling’s eyes—his brother’s, his sister’s, the thing that was both and neither—those mirrored, thirsty eyes that had been waiting since the beginning of time for precisely this.
Because this was Desire’s home. This white room, this container, this body that demanded and promised and betrayed: his sibling’s territory from end to end. For entire ages, Desire had made a game of dragging him here. Of making him fall into the flesh. Of turning him into a creature that wants and can be humiliated by what it wants. It had cost him a son, and a war, and several millennia of resentment, and always—always—he had emerged from the game with his chin held high and his dignity shattered inside.
Now he was here willingly. With a blue lid. With nine minutes.
He could almost hear the laughter. Clear, delicious, without a single note of cruelty, which was the worst of it: Desire never needed to be cruel when being right was enough.
He turned his back to the mirror. He unfastened his belt with an abrupt gesture, more from irritation than anything else, then stopped again and stood there in the middle of the room, seriously considering opening the door, crossing the corridor, removing Hob from Dr Stevens’s consulting room, and going home to pretend none of this had happened.
Because when they had discussed it—that night in the kitchen, with the tea towel and the dishes, when Hob said medicine has advanced, there’s no need for the practical part anymore—he had not pictured this. He had pictured a solemn little girl with a book far too large for her. No one pictures the logistics. That, he suspected, was why the species continued.
“Mr Gadling. You have five minutes left. If you need...”
He said it quickly, cutting her off, because allowing that woman to finish any sentence that began with if you need would end with him striding out of there without looking back. No. He could endure the indignity. What he could not endure was the look on Hob’s face if he returned empty-handed. Not disappointment: Hob would not look at him with disappointment. He would look at him with that broad, uncritical understanding of his and say it’s all right, love, we’ll try another time, and swallow it, and Morpheus would have to live with knowing he had swallowed it.
Six hundred years waiting in taverns. That man had done far more difficult things for him.
He raised his eyes to the mirror one last time. The reflection, which had his face and the same insufferibly arched eyebrow, asked him in his own voice:
“Could you use your imagination?”
Five minutes later, he emerged from the bathroom.
He did not look at the nurse as he handed her the container. He did not look at the label or the tray or the glove. She said something about temperature and not shaking it—not shaking it, as though it were a cocktail, as though he were about to juggle the thing down the corridor—and he responded with a bow of such absolute, ancient-court solemnity that the poor woman was left wondering whether she had just been blessed.
Then he walked to the door at the far end, where he knew Hob was waiting for him.
The consulting room smelled of new carpet and had two chairs in front of the desk, one already occupied.
He said it without looking at Dr Stevens, who lifted her head from the screen. She was a woman in her fifties, wearing a moss-green cardigan and spectacles hanging from a chain, and over the past three months he had developed an irritating fondness for her, of the sort one develops for people who refuse to be intimidated.
“Are you?” Hob asked, his face perfectly innocent.
“Yes,” he said, uncomfortable.
“We need to talk about the surrogate,” the doctor said.
“The woman who will carry your baby.”
He looked at Hob. Hob patted the seat of the empty chair twice, with the ease of someone who had spent six centuries getting people to sit where he wanted them. He sat down, though not without huffing first.
“I thought we had already discussed this.”
“We discussed the general principle. Now come the decisions,” the doctor said, turning the screen towards them. “And there are quite a few.”
What followed lasted an hour and forty minutes, and for years he would remember it as one of the most bewildering experiences of his existence, including the time he had been imprisoned in a glass sphere for seven decades.
First: the separation of roles. The doctor explained that, in most cases, it was preferable for the woman donating the egg and the woman carrying the pregnancy not to be the same person. Fewer legal complications, fewer emotional complications, a cleaner bond.
“We would rather it were the same woman,” Hob said. “We’ve already discussed it. It feels more...” He searched for the word. “More honest. One person. One relationship. Not two women to whom we owe different things.”
“It is an option.” The doctor removed her spectacles. “It is legal, but it is also the most difficult of all the decisions you will make today. I want you to understand why.”
And that was where it began.
In this country, no surrogacy agreement was legally binding. None. They could sign whatever they wished and no judge would enforce it.
The woman who gave birth was, legally, the mother. From the very first second. No exceptions, no nuances.
If that woman was married, her spouse was the child’s second legal parent, even if they had no genetic connection to the child whatsoever.
The two of them, the fathers, would have to wait six weeks after the birth before they could even apply for a parental order, and that order required her consent, freely given at that moment, not beforehand.
She could not be paid. Only reasonable, documented expenses, supported by receipts.
The whole edifice—the pregnancy, the child, the entire family—rested on one thing alone: that she continued to want it. Every day. Until the end.
He listened to all of it with increasing stillness.
“Allow me to see if I understand,” he said at last, very slowly. “You are telling me that, in this matter, there are no binding agreements.”
“There are agreements. But they are not enforceable,” the doctor clarified.
“An agreement that does not bind is not an agreement. It is a hope with witnesses,” Morpheus protested.
Hob snorted with laughter. Dr Stevens did not even blink.
“That is one way of putting it, Mr Gadling. The law is deliberately written that way. Because a woman cannot promise today what she will feel nine months from now, and forcing her to honour that promise would mean forcing her to surrender something she does not yet know the meaning of.”
He leaned back in his chair.
He could not explain it to anyone in that room, least of all to the woman in the green cardigan. But for his entire existence, every last moment of it, he had been a creature of rules. His realm had been built upon agreements. His whole family operated according to duty and function: Destiny walks the path, Destruction abandoned his and paid for it with an age, and he himself had spent decades imprisoned in a basement precisely because the rules of magic are the rules of magic. He had bestowed gifts and exacted prices. He had allowed a son to die rather than break a law he himself had helped to write.
Rules. His mother tongue.
Now it appeared that the most important thing he would do as a man—bring someone into the world—belonged to a territory where his language was not spoken. Where there were no guarantees, no contracts, no agreed price. Only a stranger, and nine months, and good faith.
He glanced sideways at Hob.
Hob was calm. Completely so. He nodded along with the explanations wearing the same expression he used when listening to a beer supplier. Of course he was calm: that man had spent six hundred years living in precisely this way. Without a contract, without a guarantee, without knowing whether his friend would appear at the tavern a century later. His entire life had been a wager upheld by nothing but the will to show up.
One of them had spent six centuries training for this moment, and it was most certainly not him.
“Continue,” he said, with a composure that cost him dearly.
Genetic screening of the donor. A family medical history spanning three or four generations.
“This is where we always get stuck,” the doctor said carefully. “Mr Gadling, your family history is still blank.”
“That is because I don’t have one,” Morpheus replied calmly.
“I do not.” And because that sounded evasive, he added with a precision that was strictly true and utterly useless, “I was not exactly born, doctor.”
Hob stepped in with the ease of a man who had solved this problem in eleven languages and across six centuries:
“Adopted. Records lost. There was a fire.” He smiled. “There is always a fire.”
The doctor wrote adopted, no records with the resignation of someone who had heard everything, and he found himself thinking, not for the first time, how little stood between a man and non-existence. A piece of paper. A file. An invented fire.
She called it something else—donor profiles—but a catalogue is a catalogue, even when it comes on a screen. It opened before them in orderly rows. Each woman, a profile. Height. Weight. Eye colour. Hair colour. Blood type. Education. Occupation. Ethnic background. Hobbies. A section entitled personal statement, two hundred words long, and another called message of goodwill to the child, optional.
He read three profiles in succession and felt something turn sour in his chest.
“It is information,” the doctor said.
“It is a cattle market with better typography.” He pointed at the screen. “It says here that this woman is one metre seventy-two and enjoys hiking. She is going to give a stranger half the material from which an entire person will be made, for ever, and the form wants to know whether she enjoys hiking.”
It was the first time in three months that Dr Stevens had caught him off guard. He fell silent. He looked at the screen, at the rows, at the metres and kilograms and hobbies.
“I would ask what she dreams,” he said at last, quietly. “What she dreams about when she is tired. Whether, in her dreams, she helps people or watches from afar. Whether she is someone who runs or someone who turns to look at what is chasing her. Whether, asleep, she has ever acted generously with no one there to applaud her.” He paused. “That says more about a person than one metre seventy-two.”
Silence in the consulting room.
“It’s a shame that form doesn’t exist,” the doctor said, and she meant it.
Hob put a hand on his knee for a moment, then removed it. Then came the part he had been waiting for from the beginning, the question he had not dared to ask aloud for three months.
“About the sex,” he said. “We discussed a girl.”
“It is prohibited by law, except for serious medical reasons.” The doctor shrugged. “The viable embryo is transferred. What comes, comes.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
For ages, he had built entire worlds with a movement of thought. He had shaped cities, monsters, complete paradises, made to the exact measure of what a dreamer needed. And now a woman in a green cardigan had just informed him, without ceremony, that it was not his decision to make.
“Very well,” he said after a moment.
“Very well?” Hob glanced at him, amused. “Just like that, without arguing?”
“It is all right,” he repeated, and discovered, to his surprise, that he meant it. “It would be intolerable to be able to choose everything. I would rather someone arrived than have someone made to order.”
Hob said nothing. But that look came over his face.
The worst was still to come: the counselling sessions. Mandatory. For both of them, for the surrogate, and for the surrogate’s partner if she had one. Interviews about motivation, support networks, stability, what they would tell the child and when.
“There is a standard question,” the doctor said as she closed the folder, “which always comes up and which you would do well to think about beforehand. You will be asked it. It is this: have either of you suffered a significant loss?”
Neither of them answered.
She looked at them both over her spectacles, with the well-worn perceptiveness of someone who had spent twenty years sitting opposite couples in those chairs, and did not press them.
“Give it some thought,” she said. “I’ll see you in two weeks.”
They stepped outside at twenty past one in the afternoon, and the day had turned ridiculously beautiful, one of those July days when London pretends to be another city.
They walked for a long while without speaking.
“Well,” Hob said at last. “You survived.”
“Antiseptic,” he said. “White. No windows. With a blue-lidded container and a label bearing your surname.” He thrust his hands into his pockets. “Ten minutes, the nurse said. Like putting an egg on to boil.”
Hob laughed with his whole chest, that tavern laugh of his, and Morpheus felt something loosen between his ribs and decided that enduring the ordeal had been worthwhile just to make him laugh.
“Well?” Hob looked at him sideways, one eyebrow raised. “What did you think about?”
“I am not answering that.”
“Oh no, don’t even dream of it, this does not end here. Four hundred years of waiting and at last I have a question I can ask you.”
They walked. A bus, a cyclist, someone arguing on the phone across the street. Ordinary life, indifferent, glorious.
“I thought about my sibling,” he said, without looking at him.
Hob stopped laughing at once, without making a show of it, which was another thing Morpheus had learnt to love about the man: he knew how to stop dead when needed.
“That room was their territory. That entire clinic is.” He lifted one shoulder. “They spent whole ages trying to drag me there. Trying to make me want something with my body. To make it possible to humiliate me for wanting it. And imagine that... today I went there alone, of my own free will, with a container in my hand.”
“And I discovered their game only works if you are ashamed.” He looked up at the clear sky. “I was deeply ashamed. For ages. Now, frankly, I am forty-one on paper, I have a pub, a man who snores, and no cosmic reputation to defend. They can laugh if they like. They have laughed at worse things.”
Hob brushed the back of his hand with his knuckles. He did not take it, because two old women were approaching and Hob had six centuries’ worth of superstitions about certain neighbourhoods, but he brushed it, and that too was a language.
“We need to talk about the woman,” Hob said as they turned towards the pub. “The surrogate.”
They went upstairs. Hob put the kettle on out of pure English habit, and Morpheus sat in the chair by the window, and so, with the noise of the pub below them, began the conversation that had been waiting since the green cardigan.
Hob talked about the practicalities. That she should live nearby, so they could go with her to the appointments. That she should already have children, because women who had been through it before knew what they were giving. That she should be someone with a life of her own already in place, not someone trying to mend it through this.
He listened. Then he set out his own observations, with such meticulous seriousness that Hob had to cover his mouth with his cup.
That he did not care about height, or eye colour, or hair, because all three were inherited in such capricious ways that planning for them was superstition in a white coat.
That a woman’s university education told him absolutely nothing about her intelligence, and rather a great deal about her parents’ money.
That he had read the two hundred words of the personal statements submitted by eleven candidates and nine of them wrote as though filling out a job application, which was not their fault but that of whoever had designed the form.
That, if anything, he cared about only one thing: how the woman behaved when no one was watching.
“That isn’t in the catalogue, love.”
“Precisely.” He set down his cup. “That is what I am saying. The catalogue measures what is easy to measure. I spent eternity watching people in the one place where they cannot perform for anyone, and I assure you that height predicts nothing and kindness does. But I can no longer enter that place. I can no longer look.” His voice failed him slightly then, and he stared out at the street. “This is the first time I have missed my realm for a practical reason.”
Hob sat opposite him, in the other chair, the one he always used.
“Then we find someone whose character we already know.” He shrugged. “That’s what people do. You don’t choose a stranger from a list if you can choose someone you already know.”
That was when it came to him.
It happened quickly, as thoughts came to him now: without ceremony, without galleries, without the majestic slowness of before. A thought slipping in through the servants’ entrance.
He went very still, his cup halfway to his mouth.
“Someone we already know,” he repeated slowly.
“Not someone from a list. Someone I already know exactly how she behaves when no one is watching. Because I saw it. For years. Every day.”
Hob set his cup down on the table. Very slowly. Wearing the expression of an old fox beginning to catch a scent.
The name remained there, in the middle of the room, between the two cups.
It meant nothing to Hob. Morpheus knew immediately from his lack of reaction: not a muscle moved, not a flicker of recognition, nothing. Yet Hob straightened in his chair, because he had spent six hundred years reading that face and no one in the world knew it better.
“You said that name differently,” Hob said.
“Yes.” He was not angry. If anything, he was terribly attentive. “You say every other name as though you’re reading from a list. You said that one the way a person says the name of someone they owe something to.” He leaned back, folded his arms, and there were six centuries of patience in the gesture, ready to wait all afternoon if necessary. “Very well. Start at the beginning. Who is Nuala?”
He looked at his cup. He looked at the window. At last, he looked at the man before him, who was no longer the curious mortal from a fourteenth-century tavern, but the person with whom he shared his bed, his bread, and a blue-lidded container bearing his surname.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“Love.” Hob smiled, poured himself more tea, and settled in. “I have all the time in the world. Literally. It is the only thing I have.”
