Inspired by a post on the Sandman discord by @aquabluejay that caught my brain and did not want to let go!
Hob walks into his Magical Sociology class on Friday still sniffling from the flu from hell, thermos of tea clutched in his hands like it is the Holy Grail every damn Templar in the world has been frothing over for the past millennium.
The door bangs closed behind and he’s half way through a, “Good morn—“ before the scene in front of him stops him so fast he hears his tea slosh in his hands.
He likes this class, most days. A little bit of magic, a little bit of theory, nothing too wild, and the most danger usually comes from a too excited and excitable freshman citing an outdated grimoire or trying to argue that demons have excellent union benefits.
Today is shaping up to be a different kind of problem.
His students are sitting in their chairs like someone used magic glue on their asses, backs stiff and faces even more so, wide eyed stares pointed to the front of the class. Hob doesn’t get that kind of attention even when he goes on a Shaxberd rant, and he finds it kinda insulting.
The person - presence - that has everyone’s undivided attention stands at the front of the class. A tall, pale figure, more angles than anything else, sits on Hob’s desk. Not a man, more like the idea of night coalesced into something palpable, hair long and dark and spilling onto every direction like he is floating in water, and two eyes as dark as a starless sky.
Those exact eyes pin Hob in place as the idea of a man turns his head slowly in Hob direction. Lips part, the shine of too many teeth as he speaks.
“You dare bound me here, humans. With your petty words and your small magic.”
The shadows in the corners melt and drip down the walls like tar, and Hob suddenly smells iron and ozone and, surprisingly, roses. A few students whimper, and the lights flicker like they’re threatening to pop.
Hob blinks, and takes a measured sip of his tea before turning towards his students.
“Three days. It took you three bloody unsupervised days to summon an eldritch horror. Which one of you daft bastards came up with that idea?”
Of course, no one answers. They’re all too bloody terrified of the creature leaning on Hob’s desk that looks to have grown claws somewhere in the past five seconds. Hob is absolutely convinced Alex is having a fear induced stroke, poor stupid boy.
The figure tilts its head, quick like the fall of a guillotine's blade. Everyone in the front row flinches, and Hob takes another sip of tea.
“They do not comprehend the crime they have committed,” he (it?) says, voice a rumble that settles down Hob’s spine. “They tore open a path to me through their—“ and the voice grates and distorts, a thousand nails on a chalkboard, “— shortcut.”
A trembling hand lifts. Lucy, stupidly brave that girl, will make a killing in defensive magic next year.
“The TA said— he said we could use, umm,” her voice trembles and her shoulders curl inwards when Hob lifts an expectant eyebrow. “He said we could use ChatGPT.”
Hob closes his eyes. Under his feet, the floor shakes and for a moment he feels like his heels are digging into mud before the world rights itself. He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs the sigh of someone who’s had centuries to get used to humanity’s stupidity and yet still gets surprised by it on a regular basis.
“Brilliant,” he says and gives the lot of them a glare. They all cower even lower in their seats. “Bloody brilliant. I leave for three days with the flu and you all try to bootleg a chatbot into a bloody grimoire.”
The pressure in the room changes and Hob’s ears pop, just as the lights above flicker dangerously. The figure on the desk leans forward, edges of it melting like sea foam, and dark eyes narrow as it hisses, “Do you mock me?”
A few students whimper, and two of them dive under the desks like they’re waiting for the ceiling to collapse. Hob holds the creature’s gaze and takes an annoyingly slow sip of his tea, working his jaw until his hearing rights itself.
“Don’t take it personally, I mock everyone. A personality defect of mine.” He places his thermos on the edge of the desk, and watches as a few strands of darkness curl around it like tentacles, and shrugs his jacket off and drops it on the back of his chair which seems to be slowly sinking into the melting hardwood floor. “Okay, I feel like we’ve started on the wrong foot here. I’m Robert Gadling, Professor of Magical Sociology and sometimes dabber of Magical History. And who do I have the pleasure of meeting?”
Those eyes fix on him, a slow blink, a curl of lips that look like rose petals in moonlight. Another tilt of that face, and it is a face now, a sculpture come to life like the sparkle of starlight in darkness.
It is, Hob has to admit, a very beautiful one.
“I am Dream of the Endless,” the creature, Dream, says, and the air splinters with his words. “The King of Dreams, and the Shaper of Nightmares. I am the warden of sleep and the darkness, and older than your stars. When they gutter out, when you and your kin are ash, I will still be.”
A few of the students whimper, some gag, and poor Alex drops his head to the desk like he hopes that if he can’t see Dream, the opposite is true.
“Lovely,” Hob says cheerfully, words almost like a cut through the rising storm. “It is an honor to have an Endless in my classroom. And please accept my apology on behalf of my students, hope the ride was not too bumpy.” He gestures to the students, like he’s in the middle of a class. “Now, normally I run a very ‘no eldritch horror in the classroom’ policy. It is both bad for attendance and my nerves. But seeing as you are Endless,” Hob goes on, steady and not moving his gaze from the endless nightmare, “I’m willing to make an exception. Temporarily.”
Dream leans forward, hands gripping the desk’s edge, fingers dark like coal and ending in pinpricks of talons. When Dream opens his mouth, his teeth look sharper than they have any reason to be.
“You presume much.”
“Part of the job description,” Hob shoots back, unflinching as he holds that beautiful, terrifying glare. “Welcome to Intro to Summoning Disasters, I suppose.”
A few gasps behind him, a creak of a chair as one of the students looks like he’ll throw himself out the window. Around them, the smell of irons and roses deepens, sharp and cloying and dripping down the back of Hob’s throat.
“You are not afraid.” His voice is flat, even if there’s a hiss under it, a slight edge of curiosity, like Hob’s lack of fear is the true weird thing in the room.
“Correct,” Hob says, leaning his hip on the desk’s corner. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, teaching that is. I’m honestly more afraid of the bureaucratic nightmare that is higher education and a freshman who thinks he can summon a demon with just two books and the self preservation instinct of a gnat.”
He shoots a glare towards the students who look, for a moment, like Hob is the scarier of the two creatures in the room.
Hob turns his gaze towards Dream and holds his hands up in a placating gesture.
“Now, before this gets out of hand and we have a mass fainting, how about we call it a day? Please?”
For one long heartbeat, nothing moves, the world stuck in place like a fly in amber, no breath, no sound. Dream tilts his head in a way that is unnatural, like bones and vertebra are things for other people, and his hair spills over a bony shoulder like ink on wet parchment.
“They are mine,” he says, whispering the words like a threat. “Until I am answered.”
That pushes Hob into action. He claps his hands once, sharp and loud, and the students all flinch, a few gasps broken from parted lips.
“Yeah, sorry, mate. Not today,” he says, still holding that fathomless gaze. “You heard me, come on. Out you all go. No homework, no detention, just the mercy of your survival. Go before I change my mind.”
It’s like someone has finally unpaused the world. The room is suddenly filled with the sounds of chairs scraping back, of rushed feet and small whimpers, as the students more or less run towards the door. Lucy has to drag Alex by the elbow, and Martin trips over his own backpack, but in a few seconds the room is blessedly empty.
Except for Hob and Dream.
Hob takes a deep breath and stares Dream down. For a moment, nothing happens, but then Dream screeches, a sound sharp like glass. The pressure in the room reaches a boiling point, and Dream’s claws drag over the wood of the desk, leaving dark smoke behind them.
“You dismiss them. But you cannot dismiss me,” he says, voice scraping, a threat.
“Didn’t say I would,” Hob shoots back, softly. “But they’re kids. Dumb kids, but still kids. There’s no need for their death, no matter what you say. Scaring the shit out of them, yeah. But nothing more.”
Eyes like the cosmos stare at him, shadows coiling in the air, around Hob’s feet, and Hob sighs.
“Look,” Hob says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I’ve been doing this for a while, longer than you think. And I’ve learned there’s only two ways these things go: either you tear me limb from limb and feel better for five minutes or,” his mouth quirks, “you don’t.”
The shadows slink around him, until the classroom lights look like pinpricks of light a mile away. Dream’s teeth flash, a snarl of too much sharpness in the dark.
“You think yourself beyond consequences.”
“No,” Hob says quietly, unflinching. “I just think you’ve already made your choice, or I’d be dreaming in pieces right now.”
The screeching hushes, cut off suddenly and Dream stills. The pressure in the air is still there, of course it is, but it is no longer a promise of violence, but more like sharp curiosity.
“You… do not beg.”
Hob shrugs, despite the pinprick of pain and shadows climbing up his legs, crawling on the back of his neck.
“Not my style,” he says, shrugs again as he holds Dream’s eyes. “Besides, I don’t think you were hoping for cowards when you were summoned.”
Dream moves then, sharp and violent like the sea. His shadows ripple across the floor, over walls, form leaning forward and the graze of sharp talons over the inside of Hob’s wrists. For a moment, he is incomprehensible, the way the dark depths of the cosmos are, quiet yet terrifying, dark and beautiful.
Hob can feel the air spark with his presence. He’s so close Hob can see the shimmer in the depths of his eyes, so close his hair caresses over Hob’s cheek, the touch cool and soft and not meant for mortals. The air cracks with the scent of him, roses blooming in the air, the crack of a hammer on burning iron
For a moment, it is almost unbearable, the pressure and presence of him, the heat where Hob expected cool night. He knows he should flinch, blink, do something, but he doesn’t.
Dream’s lips hover over his, and he inhales, a slow and long draw of breath. Hob’s pulse jumps in his throat, and he bites back a very inelegant noise.
“You have been touched,” Dream says, voice almost a whisper. “By one of mine.”
Hob lets out a breath he was not aware was clawing at his throat.
“Yeah,” he says, softly. “Death. A long time ago.”
The name hangs heavily between them, a hook in the air. Dream shifts, a slow blink of those predatory eyes, a breath Hob did not know he possessed like a caress over his cheek.
So he slips, like the idiotic mortal that he is.
(Just like with her.)
“You’re—“ he says, throat working and words catching in the softness of his tongue. “You’re beautiful.”
(It ended up better than expected, with her. Immortality has never been sweeter. Hob crosses his fingers and hopes he is still good at charming the Endless that seem to stumble into his life.)
The silence that follows is heavy like lead, and for a moment Hob thinks that maybe this is it, he’s finally put his foot in his mouth and so far down his esophagus that it will come out the other end, and he’ll be turned to ash where he stands.
And then Dream’s lips curl, not a snarl, not a smile.
“…Reckless.”
The word cuts through the air like a verdict, yet Dream does not pull away. The shadows of his self hover around Hob like the terrifying curl of fog against the cliff’s edge, and the room smells like the aftertaste of lightning. Darkness coils around them both, not expanding anymore, but threatening to swallow them both.
Hob just grins though, and says, “Might not surprise you to hear I’ve been called that once or twice before. Mostly by people less terrifying than you.”
Dream’s eyes narrow. “You think flattery will spare you.”
“It’s not flattery if it’s true,” Hob says calmly, even as his pulse beats a sharp rhythm under his skin when Dream’s fingers caress over the inside of his left wrist. “And I’ve always thought truth’s the better gamble.”
How do you think I got your sister’s gift, he does not say.
“Fascinating,” Dream says, this time less sharpness, almost a rumbling purr between teeth, in the skin of his pale throat.
And Hob, mad bastard that he is, grins wider and says, “I’ll take fascinating over ashes any day.”
The smallest sound leaves Dream’s lips. If Hob were a betting man, he would almost put all his money on it being a laugh, the breath of it caught between lips that are slowly melting from inhumanely white to the pink of blossoming roses.
The sound lingers in the air, and Dream’s grip on his wrist goes softer, just the tender suggestion of danger in a slow caress. Hob swallows against his dry throat, and he is close enough to count the sharp edges of Dream’s teeth, close enough to see the faintest hint of color blooming on his skin.
When Dream speaks again, his voice is still a terrifying thing, yet this time it holds a note of curiosity.
“You court danger as though it were a lover, Hob Gadling.”
Hob huffs a laugh. “Not the worst habit I’ve picked up in a few hundred years.”
“You are no ordinary mortal.”
“Never said I was one,” Hob says, his smile crooked and, just as Dream said, reckless. The pressure in the room thrums, but this time it feels like it is waiting, the snap of a chord, the pop of a bubble.
Dream’s lips are so close, just a breath against his. In the corner of his vision, Hob watches the slow drip of shadows, the coiled tension in their smoky edges.
“Reckless,” Dream says again, and his free hand moves to Hob’s cheek. One finger drags over the stubble, the scratch of a claw loud in the suffocating, pushing silence. Hob swallows, throat too dry and heart hammering loudly in his ears, and he lets out a shaky laugh.
“You keep saying that like it’s an insult,” he says, and he sees the widening of Dream’s eyes, the spark in them. Hob’s breath catches, and the world narrows to just the space between them.
And then he moves, mad and unstoppable, and pressed his lips to the beautiful and unknowable creature in front of him. And gods, he is beautiful, and Hob wants to make every unknowable part of him known.
So he parts his lips, and it feels like tasting the night, endless and dark and beautiful, sweet like how he imagines stars sing. Dream makes a noise in the back of his throat, a soft rumble that sets Hob’s nerves on fire.
When Dream pulls away, his eyes are cornflower blue and almost human, if it weren’t for the depth of the stars that shine inside them. Hob’s pulse beats a frantic rhythm in his ears, in the dip between his collarbones, in the place where Dream’s claw ripped fingers still grip his wrists.
He laughs, an exhilarating breath in his throat.
“Bloody hell,” he says, lips curling in a smile. “This is what I call practical magic.”
Dream’s eyes narrow, and the blue of his eyes shines like an infinite sky reflecting in a lake as his gaze moves to Hob’s smile and back up again. His grip on Hob’s wrist softens, the memory of danger still present, but gentler now.
Then a sound leaves his lips, just like before; a laugh, maybe, something warmer than the dangerous rumble of before.
“Practical,” he says, lips curling into a smile of too sharp teeth, but still a smile, almost soft at the corners. “You call this practical?”
“Well,” Hob says, and Dream’s other hand finds his throat, a slide of cool skin and shadows over the edge of his jawline, up the back of his neck. “It’s definitely hands-on.”
That sound again, and this time Hob is convinced it is a laugh, even if it sounds like the grumble of rocks, and Dream’s head tilts with it, following the pleased curve of his mouth.
“Beautiful,” Hob says again, because he means it. A slow blink of Dream’s eyes, more human by the second, even as the blue shines like gems. The word hangs between them and Dream looks, for a moment confused, even as a talon drags down Hob’s cheek almost gently.
Hob’s pulse is a frantic, loud thing, tension dripping down his spine, so he does what he always does when staring down kings, gods and the occult.
He keeps being reckless.
“So,” he says, grin still bright even as Dream’s claw digs in the smile lines around his mouth. “As much as I’m enjoying this, the faculty will probably be here soon with pitchforks, holy water and salt. How about we move this somewhere else, and see where this date will take us.”
A quick blink and the shadows around Dream ripple like he is taken aback by the sheer mortal cheek.
“Date.” The word is spoken like it is something new and confusing, a new taste that he rolls around his tongue.
Hob nods, and turns his head until Dream’s talon drags over his lower lip. “Yeah. Date. You know, two people— umm, one person and an entity, a pub, a few drinks, a conversation. You know, the usual.”
Dream’s grip on Hob does not loosen, but the threat sparks and disappears between one of Hob’s breaths and the other, and the darkness around him pulls close, in wonder.
“You would. Court me.”
“Court, flirt, buy you a drink, whatever you like.” His smile softens, and he places his hand over Dream’s over his cheek. “Point is, we take it out of the classroom before admin storms the place waving fucking magic tomes at us.”
He can feel Dream’s cool breath against his lips, the smell of roses and night almost overpowering, Dream’s gaze piercing and heavy on him.
And then Dream smiles, faint and sharp and real, the kind of smile that feels like it hasn’t been worn in centuries.
“You are a curious creature, Hob Gadling.”
Hob laughs, and presses his lips to those of the Endless being in front of him, feels the small gasp of surprise, the softening of Dream’s mouth against his, the nip of fangs over his lower lip.
When he pulls back, he says, “I’ll take that as a yes.”
When he shrugs his coat on and heads for the door, velvet night falls into step with him, and pale fingers intertwine with his in a gesture that feels more earth shattering than all the claws and teeth in the world.
The hallways light flicker above them, and behind them the classroom still smells of roses and ozone.
Hob holds the Dream King’s hand and grins as the evening stretches wide open in front of him.
I am losing all my marbles, this art is AMAZING 🤣
