Chapter Text
What led Hob Golding — at the time known as Robert Stranger, because he’d been in a permanent state of pettiness from 1889 to about 1904 and now he was sadly stuck with it — to the dank, cold, and dark basement of the Burgess house on March of 1957 was not so much coincidence or fate as it was curiosity.
Yeah. Cats isn’t the only thing it kills.
Alright, wait. Back up. Let’s start from the beginning.
It was 1957 and Hob Gadling was, by no action or choice of his own, sort of — it’s a bit embarrassing — a criminal master.
Not mastermind! He hadn’t planned any of it. Honestly.
Fine, let’s start earlier.
He was in France when the news broke: knee-deep in mud and ash and someone else’s entrails. His mood was as black as the smudge of oil along the top of his hand; an unfriendly reminder of the man he’d tried to pull out from underneath a tank whose belly had blown like a dead whale’s in the ocean.
He’d pulled half of the man out well enough. When he saw the rest of him wasn’t following, he got up and started walking, and he hadn’t stopped walking until eventually one of his fellow soldiers, blood-streaked and tear-stained and horrified, had snatched him by the arm and led him back to camp.
They’d asked, actually quite politely, if he’d like to go home on account of having been broken by the war in mind and body.
Hob had considered it. His body was perfectly fine — it always seemed to be, of course — but his mind did feel like it was free-floating unmoored inside his skull.
Six hundred years of life and death and he’d spent a good five hundred of them perfecting his skills in killing men less lucky and sturdy than him. But this war was different.
It was the mechanical, impersonal nature of it, he thought. Men killed by the droves from just one bomb.
Once, in some forest in the dead of winter, he’d wondered idly if he could lose fingers to frostbite as he and his comrades cowered in terror under the onslaught of mortar fire. The foxhole right next to theirs went up in the air in an explosion of raging mud and snow and ash and shrapnel, and the death of the men there was bad but the survival of the lad at Hob’s side with a shard of hot metal across his eyes was worse.
He hadn’t. Obviously. Lost fingers to fristbite, that is.
So he considered it. He thought: yes. I’m losing my mind. Send me back to England and let me crawl under some bar table and drink until my mind goes still and quiet. He let himself dwell on it for a minute, the idea of going back to London and coasting out the rest of this storm of blood and madness in a listless haze, disengaged from the world and life.
Then he watched in silence as an eighteen year old’s left leg was removed from the knee down, and a dark voice in the back of his mind said: the choice is yours.
Bugger off, he thought with equanimity, and then went about proving he was perfectly sane, thank you very much, and as a medic he could hardly be spared.
Ah, yes. That was a new one. He’d thought he’d try out something new for this war, and enlisted as a medic rather than a soldier.
Funny how saving people stained him more in blood than killing them. It was much easier to slit a throat than to stitch it.
So he was in France when the news broke, knee-deep in mud and ash and someone else’s entrails, and he knew there was nothing else he could do for this boy whose head was sitting very much at the wrong angle on his neck, and whose intestines uncoiled on the ditch by Hob’s battered boots like slick rope.
The other lad was screaming in devastation. His friend was dead; and judging by the state of his remains, and the amount of men around them in similar situations, he was unlikely to be shipped back to British soil for a burial.
No, he would be interred here, in France. Perhaps not even that far from where the mortar had felled him.
Hob let go the boy’s head and pulled himself to his feet. The mud and ash and blood made a brave attempt to suction his foot and trap him where he crouched, but Hob had seen by then six hundred years of war and death. Mud was nothing. He pulled free and put his arms around the screaming boy’s chest and stomach and dragged him bodily off, away from the ditch until the destroyed body was no longer in sight. Then he sat down and held onto the boy until he exhausted himself into silence and dry eyes.
Then he sat with him a little longer.
The sun came up, eventually. It always did somehow. You go through the worst night of your life, you see your friend die a horrible death in some ditch in France, and then somehow the sun has the fucking gall to come up and shine down on you like you’re not wearing bits of your friend’s stomach across your face.
Not to be dramatic — ha — but Hob sometimes rather wished he could punch the Sun in the face. Smug bastard.
The lad had fallen asleep at dawn, trembling with nightmares against Hob’s chest. That’s how their commander, Woods, found them. He stood over them and moved to block the sun from Hob’s eyes, looking down with somber eyes at the boy.
“Germany surrendered,” he said lowly. “There is to be peace.”
Hob had blood on his mouth; he could taste it whenever he tried to swallow.
“Thank God,” Woods added.
“What the fuck’s he got to do with it,” Hob asked flatly.
A month later he was shipped to England regardless of his mental state, and hilariously they commended him for his service and bravery.
His brain was still unmoored inside his skull. There were celebrations still, in London. He had come home to the largest street party he had ever seen, which was interesting as his flat, unfortunately, had not made it through the Blitz.
In a daze he’d let his feet walk him wherever they chose, and like an idiot had found himself at the damn White Horse.
The barman had taken one look at him and poured him a beer without asking. Hob drank it, and then drank the next, and then the one after that, and it wasn’t until about seven hours later when he stumbled to his feet that he realised he was, again, waiting.
Hoping.
It was 1945. Even if the Stranger got himself out of whatever black mood his blasted pride had dug him into, he wouldn’t be making an appearance for the next forty-four years.
“That’s what friends do, you wanker,” Hob told no one. “They’re there for one another. So where are you? I need you.”
For what, though?
He didn’t have an answer. Which was just as well. He apparently didn’t have a friend either.
Anyway, you’d think things would get better after the end of a fucking World War.
You’d be wrong.
Oh, Hob got better. Hob always got better, regardless of his thoughts on the matter. His mind eventually reattached itself to the inside of his skull. The buzzing of unreality that crawled across his skin whenever he sat at a bar smoking and the happy university boys he watched blurred into blown-out bodies and wide dry eyes began to lessen. He slept; he didn’t dream, which was well enough.
God knows what sort of bullshit was crouching at the back of his mind waiting to come forth at night.
The problem was that the economy didn’t get any better. Well, in fairness, half of London was fucking rubble. Thousands of soldiers had returned after the war with skills they could not apply to civilian life and having lost the skill to apply themselves to civilian life. The government didn’t know what to do with all their walking wounded, so they didn’t. Do anything.
But Hob, like always, got better, and he knew how to pick himself up. The difference was that now he didn’t just want to pick himself up; he wanted to help other people pick themselves up.
So one glittering winter night in early January in 1947 he trundled through knee-deep snow until he found the old elm and tipped-over dark stone that marked the place, and he spent a good three hours digging until he struck gold.
Literally. He’d hidden this stash of gold sometime in the… oh, 1700s? He’d learned his lessons though life: to live well you’ll need money; things can too easily go south; always be prepared; uppity black-wearing strangers with eyes like stars will happily and willingly cut off their own noses to spite their own pretty faces.
Wait.
“No, wait,” he told himself, pausing to lean on his shovel and shove sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes. His breath condensed thick and white in the freezing air. “Pretty? Since when?”
Since when are you a liar, is real question.
“Fuck,” he told the tree, which offered no reply.
He bought two buildings in Whitechapel and made them into apartments, and rented out the rooms at laughably cheap prices to war veterans trying to get themselves back on their feet.
For the first couple of years he managed them himself, but by 1950 his bones had settled back inside his skin and his mind was clear and his mood back to the glittering happiness of life — that dear old thing, there you are. I’m coming to get you.
So he hired a couple of people to manage in his stead and traveled around for a bit. Hob Gadling, man of the world. And what a world it was! Alive again in the aftermath of the war, it felt everywhere he went celebrated peace still to this day. He ventured back to France to see how it, too, had gotten better.
On his first night in Paris he was mugged, stabbed, and robbed of all he possessed.
He went right back to London in a sulk, and continued to sulk more loudly when he discovered his nice little flats had turned into what the priest from the nearby church — a snot-nosed squat little fellow Hob delighted in tripping whenever the occasion presented itself — called a den of iniquity.
Turned out his building manager was a crook!
“You didn’t even interview me for the job,” she pointed out, when he kicked up a fuss.
“Oh, you’re right. It’s my fault you’re a criminal. I should have foreseen that.”
“I’m not a criminal,” she replied, offended.
He stared her down.
“I’m criminal-adjacent,” she admitted with dignity. “I just provide safe-passage and safe-houses for people in questionable circumstances.”
Hob, unimpressed: “I see.”
She continued, “And possible a getaway team, when sorely needed.”
Hob was wondering if he should chuck her out the window. “Right.”
“Medical attention occasionally.”
“The heart of kindness,” he said, glancing out the windowsill. There was water right under the window, so she wouldn’t even die of it.
“Do you know what, technically this is on you,” she said sharply.
Hob leaned his weight back against the edge of the window and arched his brows at her. He meant it to look inviting, but he might also have looked a little bit like an threatening psychopath, because he hadn’t shaved for a week.
Oh, and the priest had thrown the incense burner at his head so half his hair had burnt off. He’d had to cut off the rest, and he didn’t have the face for hair this short. His jaw preceded him anywhere he went. He was a man attached to a jaw.
“You said this was a safe space for us to pick ourselves up!”
“By robbing houses?” Hob asked. For confirmation.
“What else is there to do!” Edith threw her hands up in exasperation. “You know there are no jobs! Rich people get richer and the rest of us starve on the streets. We’re not hurting anybody. Those rich cunts don’t need all that gold anyway, they just have it hanging on their walls!”
“Someone got shot just last night.”
“He shot at me first,” she said sullenly.
Criminal-adjacent, he mouthed at her.
“Alright! How about this. You keep letting me manage this building and I will give you a cut of every single thing we do. Thirty percent! And you get the satisfaction of knowing we’re fucking over the rich and powerful.”
The hilarious part of this is that Hob had never really been a criminal. He’d been a mercenary, and he’d been a soldier; a printer, a businessman, a Lord, a father, a husband. A not-friend (still sore about that). But criminal? No, he’d never really gone into that.
It was a new age. Maybe it was time for something new.
“Forty percent,” he said flatly.
“You’re killing me!”
So, alright. Maybe he planned it a little.
The thing was — the thing, right? The thing was.
Hob was good at this criminal thing.
Six centuries of life had taught him to be watchful, patient, meticulous. He would plan their hits with every care and ensure that no detail was left in the air; all seconds of every robbery were accounted for. He and Edith worked together like a well-oiled machine. Each participant knew precisely what their role was and at which time they were meant to be performing it.
They had a little — well, Hob didn’t want to call it a gang, but the Police disagreed. Anyway, hey had a friend group. With very particular skills.
Anything you might need for a successful and enjoyable robbery; we have it all! Someone to climb a wall? Easy. Locksmiths? We have two! Need a doctor? We’ll get you stitched up in no time.
So it was maybe only a matter of time before Edith and Hob agreed that renting out their services was, perhaps, the most efficient solution. There was always someone out there that needed something to be located and then, ahem, relocated. For a fee, of course.
Hello, mercenary life, my old friend. I’ve come to speak to you again.
“Oh, I think you’ll like this one,” Edith said, in January of 1957. She waved a letter in front of Hob’s face, which he batted away because he’d finally caved and started reading The Lord of the Rings and now he couldn’t put it down.
He was distressingly close to the end and this lot was nowhere near fucking Mordor. Talk about fucking an easy task up.
There better be a fucking sequel.
Edith sighed and sat down next to him, purposefully kicking him when she crossed her long legs. Hob angled himself in the other direction.
“Big house just out of London,” Edith said. “Biiig old house. Old money. Or so they used to have, until some very clever girl did away with it in the thirties. I like her, we should hire her.”
“We’re not recruiting,” Hob replied distractedly.
“Apparently they have some sort of buried treasure in the basement.”
“If it’s a basement, it’s not buried.”
“We’re talking old gold. Gems! Jewelry of any sort!”
Hob hummed.
Edith sighed. “And apparently a wealth of very old and valuable books.”
Hob looked up, interested. “Books? How old?”
She despaired. “And to think once I thought you were a greedy animal who only wanted money and power.”
This was a lie; Edith had always very much liked Hob, whom baffled her entirely and seemed to float through life with equal parts ruthless pragmatism and childish optimism. He was a puzzle.
Excellent skin, too. Not a wrinkle on him! Bastard.
“If it’s a Shakespeare,” he started darkly.
She waved him down urgently. God, don’t let this become another rant on what a cunt Shakespeare was, the overrated twat, came by it honestly my ass, can’t rhyme to save his life etc etc. She’d heard it a dozen times and once, she swore on her life, was more than enough! You’d think it was personal!
“No, no. Not at all. But you could have a look for yourself! This one needs infiltration.”
She used the word infiltration like this was something that would move Hob’s little heart to flutter. Actually Hob was ambivalent on the matter of infiltration; the problem was that he was also fucking excellent at it. After all, he’d lived this long and only almost been burnt at the stake the once.
Once, to be fair, was enough.
“I’ll bite. What is it and what do we need?”
“Burgess House,” Edith enunciated carefully. “And they just happen to be looking for guards.”