Chapter Text
In some recent years, Hob Gadling—currently Robert Goldman—has felt a bit too old to do much more than wait.
Hob has become quite good at waiting. Patience is a virtue, truly; something he had to learn early in his freshly immortal life, no matter how bitter he’d been about it at times. Sometimes, waiting is leaning back and watching an investment unfold piece by slow piece—sometimes, it’s keeping his mouth shut as the others around him chatter and squawk with gossip and news—sometimes, it’s sitting alone in a pub, nursing a pint of whatever passes for alcohol nowadays, watching the traffic flowing in and out of the door for a familiar face.
“I’m waiting for someone,” he tells the waitress when she goes to make away with the empty chair, trying for a smile and knowing he fails, if the odd look she slips toward him from the corner of her eye is any indication. She still smiles back and nods in understanding, but scurries away immediately after. He must make for a sorry sight, he thinks distantly.
Hob wonders if his desperation is coming off him in waves, even if he doesn’t want to admit it to himself. He does—admit it, that is—but he doesn’t want to. Who ever does? Who wants to admit to the crushing loneliness that attaches itself to waiting when it’s waiting for someone? For someone who Hob cannot even convince himself will come.
The first time, of course, there was uncertainty. Fear that Hob had… gone mad, or something. Actually died, and this was some sick form of Hell, where he’d be given everything he wanted and then have it all stripped away. Or maybe that it was real, but it would be taken away regardless.
But after that first time—after that fascination from his Stranger—Hob hadn’t been uncertain again. Not until now.
Hob isn’t sure when he started thinking of the not-man as his Stranger—maybe somewhere around 1889, Hob thinks only a little bitterly—but it fits.
There’s still so much he doesn’t know. Hob tilts his glass in circles, watching the drink inside swirl lazily. He doesn’t know exactly why, or how, he’s immortal. After all this time, the most he’s managed to gather is that his Stranger was interested, for some reason, in how a human would act if they escaped Death. A human, because Hob’s Stranger certainly wasn’t human, and Hob started wondering some odd centuries ago if the strange man had ever even been anything close to it.
He’s so… odd, Hob’s Stranger. Nothing but skin and bones, but it looks graceful on him, somehow. On anyone else, on anyone human, it would do nothing more than make him look wiry, like a particularly flighty cat or an especially haughty crow. Although those are still good descriptors, Hob thinks with amusement as he sips his beer.
There’s a power to him that Hob’s never been able to put words to, like the frozen moment when adrenaline kicks in and the world becomes clearer, everything sharper in the heavy breathing of danger. It had been the first thing Hob had noticed, all those centuries ago, when he’d been called on his half-drunken brag that he would never die. Hob still remembers those eyes, the way they’d gleamed from the inside in the firelight of the inn, the way they’d watched him for centuries after, waiting. Always, always waiting.
Hob spares a thought to wonder what his Stranger is always waiting for, but dismisses it immediately afterwards. What some endless being, some creature more powerful and incomprehensible than Hob will probably ever know, has to wait for, Hob is sure it’s not something he wants any part in.
The crowd around him is starting to thin. When Hob glances out the window, the sun is creeping closer to its bed in the horizon, weighing heavy down in the sky. Has he always waited this long, he wonders? When was the last time his Stranger waited until sundown or after to alight himself in the chair across the table?
Hob glances at the empty chair, positioned next to his for the very first time, and pointedly does not think about how obvious that probably is.
“You dare,” his Stranger’s voice lingers in the back of his mind, like a ghost’s whisper.
Hob tosses back the last drink of his beer and stands, reaching for his wallet to toss a bill or two on the table. The door opens.
“Robert Goldman!” says a woman’s bright voice, full of energy and a welcome unfamiliar to Hob, and Hob freezes, eyes lifting from his wallet.
Stood across the table from him, so silent that Hob hadn’t even realized she’d strode up, is a young woman with a dazzling smile. She’s in a neat leather jacket and sturdy jeans, the kind bikers wear when they know they could fuck someone up if they needed to. There’s a golden ankh around her neck, and a strange taste settles in Hob’s mouth when his gaze lands on it, like it’s staring right through him.
“Uh,” Hob says smartly, forcing his eyes back up to the woman’s face. The grin she flashes him is blinding. Her hands are shoved into the pockets of her jacket, and Hob briefly wonders if he’s about to get robbed in the middle of the inn. “I’m sorry, have we met?”
He’s very sure they haven’t; he would remember how bitter his mouth tastes as he runs his tongue over his teeth.
“We have,” the woman says. Her grin has settled into just a pleasant smile, and she takes her hands out of her pockets to gesture down at the table. Hob sits without thinking about it and watches her drag the other chair around to sit opposite him, folding her hands on the table politely. “Only the once, though, and you didn’t know it at the time.”
Hob squints at her. The woman huffs a soft breath out of her nose that Hob only recognizes as a laugh because his Stranger does the same thing.
Hob bristles.
As much as he likes to lean in to being an airhead, Hob isn’t stupid. He’s not slow on the uptake. Oh, it’s easy to let people think he is, especially when he needs something out of them, but six hundred years of life teaches a man how to be intelligent and observant, even if he didn’t start out that way. And the wrong taste in Hob’s mouth, and the knowingness in the woman’s smile, and the way her eyes shine just too far to the left of the inn’s lighting, well…
“You, uh.” Hob closes his wallet and puts it back in his coat pocket with one hand, using the other to gesture vaguely toward his new tablemate. “You… Y’know?”
The woman raises one eyebrow, her smile blazing with amusement. “Do I know?” she asks, in a voice that says she damn well does.
If her huff didn’t confirm it for Hob, so similar to his Stranger, well; her apparent fondness for making fun of him does the trick.
“Yeah.” Hob slumps back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach. “You do.”
There’s something in the woman’s gaze—an oldness, a knowledge, a patience, that Hob has only ever seen in the mirror and across a pub table. It’s a little funny, now that Hob is thinking about it; he never would have thought of his Stranger as patient, before. Willing to wait, yes, but not exactly patient. Briefly, Hob wonders if patience comes with being human, but then he thinks the woman sat across from him carries an air with her far too great to have ever been human.
The woman watches him, hands folded on the table, something almost like curiosity written quietly in her expression. It’s so similar to his Stranger that it throws Hob for a loop, just for a second, but then her smile turns sad and Hob’s blood turns cold.
“You’re waiting for him, aren’t you?” she asks, not unkindly.
Hob swallows thickly. He feels too vulnerable, suddenly, leaning back in his chair, so he sits forward and grabs at his empty glass, poking at the handle idly. The change in position doesn’t help—it feels like this woman and her necklace are looking straight past him and into his very soul, laying him bare right here in the middle of the inn. “Yeah,” he croaks, then clears his throat, tapping his nails on the side of his glass. “I, uh—yeah. You-You know him?”
“I do,” the woman confirms, not that it’d been much of a question, then hits Hob with, “He’s my bullheaded little brother,” like it’s the most casual thing in the world.
Hob chokes on his own spit, a cough and a wheeze and a hand up to cover his mouth, eyes bugging out over his palm. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the waitress from earlier shooting him and his new guest a startled look. Hob feels for her, in that moment. The woman—his Stranger’s older sister, Christ above, what a thought—only watches him with wry amusement.
“You,” Hob wheezes, moving his hand from his mouth to run his fingers through his hair, “You’re—alright. Yeah, alright, Christ. Dunno why I thought this couldn’t get any fucking weirder. No, y’know, no offense.”
“None taken,” the woman hums. She looks pleased with herself in a smug sort of way, like there’s a point she’s all the more closer to proving to someone. Like a cat waiting for the mouse to come out of its hole, Hob thinks. This family is awfully akin to cats.
They stare at each other for a moment, Hob trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and the woman, seemingly, reveling in his confusion, before her smile fades. Hob has only known her a few minutes, and yet seeing her without a smile, even a sad one, is something that he knows to simply be wrong.
“There’s something you should know, Hob,” she tells him, slow and quiet, and Hob doesn’t like what she has to say even before she continues, “He won’t be coming.”
“If you’re here, too, it’ll be because we’re friends! No other reason!”
For the very first time in his long, long life, Hob Gadling feels like his heart truly stops.
Hob is familiar with loss. He has to be, living for centuries. He was even before his sudden gift of immortality; soldiering is a business wrought with loss on all sides, death and decay and despair following every man who steps foot on a battlefield. Hob has held his friends as they died, has stood at funerals far too many to count, has carried caskets of good men and women taken too early—has borne the burden of the death of his only wife and son, destroying him from the inside out. And yet, still, he’s gone forward, because for all the death he’s witnessed, he loves life.
But with all the loss he’s seen, all the centuries of it he’s carried with him, there is something so different about the ice that pieces his heart with those words. He won’t be coming. Oh, how stupid Hob had been. The death of his own flesh and blood to compare, and yet Hob sits in this pub in 1989 and feels for the very first time that maybe he’s finally died and this is his real Hell.
“Oh, Hob,” murmurs the woman, so full of pity it makes Hob feel sick. She reaches across the table and rests her hands atop his, gripping his empty glass so tightly he’s distantly surprised it hasn’t shattered. He can’t bring himself to shake her off.
“I, ah,” Hob hears himself say, his voice low and creaking, “I probably shouldn’t surprised. Had a fight, last time, y’know. Just—didn’t think he’d send his sister for him, instead.”
There’s a fierce bitterness, a shade of anger, in the jab, but the woman seems to know it’s not for her. She squeezes Hob’s fingers, tilts her head down to meet his eyes—Hob hadn’t realized his gaze had dropped away from hers—and tells him, just as quietly, “It wasn’t his choice.”
What, says Hob’s mind in the middle of its whirlwind, so abrupt and resounding that it makes everything come to a standstill. “What,” says Hob’s mouth, hoarse and thin.
The woman’s smile returns, even sadder than before. “He’s not standing you up,” she says softly, “He’s trapped, Hob.”
“Tr—he—you—what?” Hob barks, lifting his head to meet the woman’s eyes again properly. His anger at the world, at his Stranger, at himself, ignites quickly and suddenly, reaching up from his chest and clogging his throat, waiting for a direction to turn itself towards. “What’re you talking about, trapped? How can a god get trapped?”
“We’re not gods, Hob,” the woman corrects gently. She strokes her fingers over Hob’s, such a sisterly gesture that Hob feels his shoulders relax, just a bit. “We all have our weaknesses, still. Magic isn’t as widespread as it once was, but sometimes… Sometimes, someone gets lucky.”
“Who?” Hob demands, something like a growl in his throat. His mind is stuck on his Stranger’s face, that night in 1889. On the quiet, righteous anger and the hissed words meant to hurt; on the shock at Hob’s audacity; on the fear Hob had seen in those burning eyes, just for a moment, gone in a flash but Hob had gotten good at reading this strange man, so detached from humanity as he wanted to be and so much closer to it than he seemed to think.
Trapped. Hob’s own eyes are burning, now, throat tight, fury burning hot in the pit of his stomach, and he wants very badly to hit someone, and maybe also shoot them, preferably somewhere lethal.
“I don’t know,” says his Stranger’s sister. She sighs slowly. “At least not for certain.”
“Who do you think, then?” Hob pushes. His tone is far too snappish considering the woman he’s speaking to—considering who and what she is—but she doesn’t seem bothered by it. Whatever she’s the goddess of—because Hob refuses to believe this lot aren’t some kind of gods—it must require an astronomical amount of patience.
“A family,” the woman starts, with just the barest hint of hesitation, “In Wych Cross. Back in 1916, they… well, they became awfully lucky, and when the head of the house died in 1926, I had to wait for him, outside the house—like something was stopping me from going inside to get him myself. How odd is that?”
Hob squints at her.
“Oh, sorry,” the woman laughs lightly, “You see, I’m Death.”
Right. Okay. Like Hob’s life couldn’t get any more fucking bizarre. He’s hundreds of years old, holding hands with Death over a pub table, discussing the apparent entrapment of her brother, who—
“Well,” Hob says, only a little detached, “At least I’ve gotten a name out of one of you, huh?”
Death blinks at him, surprise turning her gaze owlish. “He hasn’t told you his name?”
The incredulity in her voice is so thick that Hob can’t help the mildly hysterical laugh that bubbles out of his chest, at least until the rest of her words catch up to him.
“You-You said 1916? That was fucking—that was seventy years ago, you think they’ve had him that long?” Hob has experienced such a wild range of emotions over the last ten minutes that it’s a wonder all the shock of it hasn’t given him a heart attack. That’s a death he hasn’t experienced yet, but he feels like he’s inching closer to it the more he speaks to the Grim Reaper.
The fragile mirth in Death’s expression melts away, and it’s just as unsettling to see her serious as it is to see her without a smile. “My little brother went missing the same year,” she murmurs. Her gaze drops to their hands on the table. Hob glances at them, too, and is only a little surprised to notice that he’d let go of the glass to return her grasp without even realizing.
“I tried to look for him, at first,” Death continues, “But there’s only one of me, and so many of you, and something is hiding him, besides. That family in Wych Cross; the only reason I suspect them is because of how odd it was that I couldn’t enter the house. Only powerful magic can impede an Endless like that.”
“An Endless?” Hob asks, softly, because it feels like a question that needs to be soft.
“That’s what we are,” Death responds, trying again for a small smile. “Me and D—”
“Don’t,” Hob interrupts, far stronger than he meant to, and Death looks surprised for as long as it takes him to get out, “Don’t, please. I-I want to hear it from him.”
Sympathy colors Death’s gaze even as Hob feels his face burn. Six hundred years, Hob thinks—he’ll be damned if he finds out his Stranger’s name from anyone but the odd man himself.
“What’s the family name?” Hob asks. It’s a poor attempt at redirecting, but Death humors him anyway.
“Burgess,” she replies, and somehow, somehow, Hob isn’t even surprised.
He’d heard of Roderick Burgess, back in the 20s. Christ, who hadn’t? The Magus, that insufferable old man had called himself; the upper crusts loved to flock around that haunted old mansion of his and cling to his tailcoats, tittering and chirping about fortune and luck. Hob had thought it a whole load of bullshit and kept far clear from it, especially after he’d overheard some fancily dressed ladies at another party entirely gossiping in too-loud whispers about a devil locked up in the basement.
Fucking Hell. A devil in the basement—not a devil at all, Hob realizes now, and burns with the fury of it.
“I know exactly where your brother is,” Hob tells Death in a low growl, and the glimmer in her eyes shifts ever so slightly closer to what had been in her brother’s: something sly, powerful, and predatory.