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Wolfis TheSandman Library, The 💫Fairest💫 of Them All
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Published:
2022-09-04
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2024-02-09
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390,159
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56/56
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Hounds

Summary:

In 1989, Hob Gadling gets stood up. He waits.

A story about meticulously constructing an inn with soft focus, 80's goths and Berlin, a folding chair, The Princess Bride, blondes, blood, fear, Fates, and what was always written. What will always be.

Notes:

COVER BY @FISHFINGERSANDSCARVES

hob gadling himself seized me by the lungs and compelled me to write the first fic I have written in many years and the first I will be publishing on ao3.

I've tagged this teen and up only for language and descriptions of death/dying/bodily wounds/injury –– nothing too extreme, though I will update the rating if that changes, as this is definitely still a work under construction

this fic will center around a) hob gadling projecting his repressed feelings onto goths in the 80's/90's alt scene (and also coming to terms with his emotions I promise) and b) dream coping w having a physical form and also being a weepy_cat.jpeg of a being. am I projecting my personal issues onto these characters? yes. do said issues actually fit remarkably well with their existing characterization? also yes. thank you neil gaiman <3

it's character-study oriented, really, but there's definitely plot for ~flavor~. apologies in advance if any of my lore is incorrect, it's been a long time since I read the comics, but the show is very fresh in my mind, so hopefully I'll at least adhere to that canon.

I am unsure of length at the moment, but I will be trying to update regularly. things in my life are busy atm but by god do I want to have hobbies still. thank you for reading :) <3

(and I did in fact check if uno was around in 1989. it was.)

Chapter 1: I

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

There are parts of his life Hob Gadling sometimes wishes to forget.

While his biology has been sufficiently altered so as to ensure immortality (sometimes he wonders about this — a curious mind wants to know if there’s bits added to his genome or something), it’s still human biology, and it’s not really equipped to hold several centuries worth of memories.  Not to mention, he’d sort of been frozen in his body as it was upon The Meeting With The Stranger (capital letters in his mental history), which had been the body of a hard-drinking Medieval peasant who’d been in enough bar brawls to suffer a healthy handful of concussions, resulting in some gently loosened screws.  On the bright side, he hadn’t aged in the least, and maintained a respectable physique with minimal necessary activity, but it had taken time outgrowing the maladies he’d inherited at that date and time.  For the first few decades, his memory was exceedingly shoddy — names and dates slipped through like fine sand in a sieve.  Hob suspects, however, that his immortality had had a definite effect on his regenerative properties, and his body had healed from the way it was treated in its (in the scheme of things, limited) period of growth, because nowadays, while the day to day experiences a natural fading, many of his recollections are remarkably crisp.  Quite sensory, even — smells and sounds in particular linger, cueing visual playbacks if experienced in his routine life.  Good to have, really — when one has lived such an excessive amount of life, it’s nice to hold on to it a bit.  

Plus, he’d definitely started out colorblind, but by 1650 he was confident he was seeing red and green, so the “biology regeneration overdrive” theory was winning out.

There are unfortunate consequences, of course, to the pinpoint accuracy of the memories he did retain, namely that both the good and bad struck in equal measure and with equal vigor.  The peal of his wife’s sunlit laughter across the tavern on the night of their first meeting is as clear as a Sistine bell in still Roman air — the rank smell and soft decayed ooze of the bodies slumped into his shoulder on the plague-ravaged street as wrenching as their first occurrence.  The hunger, so rooted in the stomach it rose to the lungs and spilled to the base of his spine, that stretched onward, always unsated and always felt, the feeling of his body starving and dying and roiling awake only to starve and die again.  Sometimes, in his nightmares, he is there, in that perpetual shaking loop, his palms torn into thin red ribbons as he drags himself along the cobblestones, the light of the White Horse like an oasis mirage in the desert, always just a little farther, always just another little death away.  A shape in the doorway, black as night, still as clear water, waiting.  There.

But, all things considered, Hob has decided it’s a good thing.  His is a life long and richly colored, and no piece is suited without shadows.  The darkest moments are an artful chiaroscuro.  If not a want or necessity, at least providing shape and form.

“Whiskey, please,” he tells the bartender.

“Uh, you’ll have to be more specific.  We got a menu now.”

“Oh.”  The White Horse in 1989 is leagues cleaner than Hob has ever seen it, not overly modern but certainly dragged kicking and screaming out of the 1400s.  A menu is certainly a sign of advancement.  “What’s the oldest you’ve got?”

“Well, I’ve got a Glen Grant old enough to be your father.”

Hob can’t help it –– he chuckles.  “I’m older than I look.”

The barkeep laughs a bit in solidarity, though he can’t possibly understand the full meaning of the joke.

Hob sips his whiskey, leaning an elbow on the polished bar top, watching the crowd.  Gone was the tacky ale residue on the wood under his palms, the smell of goat piss marinated into the floorboards, the smoky haze that lent every feature a sense of rich soft focus.  No, the White Horse was most thoroughly modern nowadays.  The tackiness and goat piss he happily does without, but the lighting change evokes a twinge of melancholy.  The most concrete and vital memories of his life are in that orange-warm soft focused lamplight.  

Soft focus around angles, in particular, is shockingly arresting, Hob knows.

Did I hear you say you have no intention of dying?

The man’s pale face was composed entirely of planes, straight lines, around which any soft focus struggled to take hold.  No smile –– unusual solemnity for a tavern and rowdy conversation.  It was surreal.  He was as fitting in the White Horse as a lace glove in a cow pen.  But Hob couldn’t not look –– something about the dissonance seized him.

“Uh, yeah.  Yeah, that’s right.”

Hob swirls the whiskey in his glass, and gives the bartender a wry twist of the mouth.

“I think I’ve been stood up.”  

He dislikes drinking alone — its context is fixedly social, and Hob doesn’t care for loneliness, though he never truly escapes it.  It’s a continual foot race, a circular track — the loneliness, always, biting at his ankles.  

Then you must tell me what it’s like.

Hob knows his smile comes out more like a wince, but then again, most of his expressions tend to radiate a sort of general geniality, so he doubts anyone picks up on the note of genuine sadness buried in the tone.  Hob gets it, he does.  It’s something about his chin to nose ratio that sort of makes him look amiable at all times.  Probably why immortality has suited him so neatly — Hob could befriend a ravenous crocodile and feel relatively assured that the sheer force of his bullheaded good-naturedness would keep him from being eaten.

“We had a fight.  Last time we were here,” he adds.  It’s unpleasant to think about.  He has to tamp down a tightness rising along the back of his throat.  

The bartender, the picture of neutrality, responds: “Ah.”

“Wish I could say I was drunk at the time, but I was just an idiot.”  God, it’s nauseating to even think about how radically he’d put his foot in his mouth.  He’d overstepped, been altogether too bold.  Considering The Stranger acted largely like a feral cat, he shouldn’t have been surprised when he bit the hand.  Or tore a chunk out of its beating heart.  

It had hurt like a heartbreak, really.  Hob couldn’t conceptualize his life without The Stranger.  That gangly shadow, who packed volumes of meaning into a twitch of the corner of his mouth, was his only true constant.  Hob had watched friends die –– in trenches, in alleys, in bars.  He had given his heart, freely, and in exchange he had buried lovers in innumerable graves.  And he was, by nature, a person who loved people.  With a few anchors –– The Stranger, the White Horse –– he could handle the cycle of joy and grief with optimism and good humor.  Without them?  Hob feared he would become a drowning man.

“I’ve seen plenty of friends get in fights in pubs,” says the bartender gently.  “Even more of them laugh about it together later.”

For the life of him, Hob cannot imagine The Stranger laughing, but the thought brings a smile to his face.  “Maybe in another 100 years.”

“Ah.  You’ll have to have found a new pub by then.”

Hob stiffens in his seat.

“T his place has been sold to make room for new flats,” continues the bartender, wiping down the bar with a rag.  His hand moves in rhythmic circles.  “The borough council are trying to stop them, but if you've got enough money in this country, you can do whatever you bloody want.”

Hob feels suddenly incredibly nauseous.  This distracts him momentarily, until without conscious thought his eyes once again hit the door frame with powerful, vibrating hope.  No dramatic entrance — no swish of black coattails, no implication of moody underscoring, no comic book frame of black and white angularity.  Rat bastard , thinks Hob bitterly, fondly.  He’s almost as stubborn as I am.

“Pour you another one?  While you wait?”

“Please,” says Hob.  Already the gears in his mind are turning, planning for the White Horse’s future (or lack thereof).  “No harm in a little faith, right?”

He’ll wait a while longer.  Hob Gadling is a patient man.  And this is his bar –– his place.  Being here, he knows, is as close to he’ll ever get as being home.

+++

Suffocation, Dream learns, is like wet wool, and then a bed of nails, and then a burst, like the belly of a bloating animal.  The breathing of his constructed body had become such a habit, and to lose it was to experience its physical loss, as violently as the demands of biology required.  He knows his sister’s means are kinder, but her works are not for him.  In passing moments, he wishes they were.  He wishes she would come.

The cold is not so immediate as the suffocating, though it seems it should be.  It should be wickedly sharpened, but instead it is creeping low like thorned ground cover.  It is stiffening, abortive, removing first his fingers, then sending emissaries through the forearms, the ankles, until no warm core remains, only a glacier, slow and amassing.  Ice and stone down to bones he did not typically find himself acknowledging.  

That was the horror of it –– so corporeal .  All of it.  So physical.  The binding spell tore his powers from him, leaving behind only a form, a form brutally unadapted to existing as such.  Dream knows he cannot cease to exist, not in this manner.  His being is not threatened vitally.  This does not mean he does not feel it.

The bloodstain is dry on the surface of the glass.  It is new, and also old.  He does not know how long it has been there.  Jessamy’s faint soul pecked at the glass, but his sister came and left and the little battle was ended, in merciful silence.  Death’s eyes on his turned back were the closest thing he had felt to touch in longer than he could conceptualize.  It was uncanny.  Death had such a stare, like a silk glove on satin.  But he did not ask for her help –– whether it was pride, or grief, or fear for her, he still does not know.  For all the time he has to contemplate his motives, he does little of that.  He can’t seem to think clearly, as bodied as he is.  It is all feeling.  He does next to nothing.

Not even red is warm here.  Dream twists his spine and cants his shoulders, muscles stiff and inflexible, until he can look up at the bloodstain, chin skewed back, neck curved.  The blood has dried in varying opacities –– from beneath, the dark architecture of the stone ceiling is visible through it in minute specks and suggestions of shading.  It is like an inverse of the night sky, black stars in a void of burgundy and sanguine.  He thinks of the Dreaming –– he wants to remember how it feels, but the memory is painful to him.

He keeps thinking in textures, as if trying to hold on to them, when before they had mattered so little.  All his dream creations were born of sand, like mercury in his palms, and their feel was of no consequence.  His shaping was of spirit, of intent, of purpose –– creating the physicality of their forms was an intuition so deep he need not consciously consider it.  But here, now, he feels , so alarmingly, with such need, that, were he aware enough to sense fear, it would almost frighten him.  The glass offers nothing; no soft feathered blades of sweet grass like Fiddler’s Green; no pockmarked leather like the spines of the cedar-scented volumes in Lucienne’s library; no splintered wood, prickly but grounding, like the docks on the shore of his nightmares’ ocean.  It is frigid and smooth, as the touch of his own hands against his shoulders has become.  It is hostile.  It is nothing.

Dream watches the bloodstain.  A few of the slow drips have dried against the curvature of the sphere like falling comets, perpetually inches from colliding with the crown of his head.  His muscles have begun to atrophy, a sensation he reviles but cannot find the will to combat.  He blinks only to keep his eyes from losing sight entirely –– his body, too real, too built of flesh, begs for air, and with a shudder the vacuum in his lungs collapses, and his Endlessness begins to rebuild.

“Creepy fucker, ain’t he.”  A guard, slumped in his folding chair like a wet cardboard box, tosses a card onto the table.  “Greens.”

“You said it.  Christ almighty, he’s been sittin’ like that for a month now.  Greens?  Hah.  No luck, bastard.  Draw 4.  ”

The guards come and go.  Dream doesn’t notice them.  Time scales have collapsed.  The days are so uniform.  In the beginning there was rage, burning in his marrow.  Now there is a cold desolation, and hardly even that.  Now there is the flat stain like black stars.

“Arsehole.”  The first guard takes two cards from the deck.  “Are you ever gonna clean that bloody glass off?”

Dream wants to remember what the Dreaming feels like.  The fabric of his coat.  The arm of his throne.  The glide of Jessamy’s wing.  Like oil.  Like ash in oil.  Black stars.

“What, you wanna walk over there yourself and do it?  Huh?”  The second guard plays a red 6 on top of his Draw 4.  “It’s reds now, twat.”

Dream thinks of the White Horse.  Lantern oil and melting candle wax.  The wood grain beneath his palms.  The sweat on the side of a mug of ale.  Such a tactile place.  So suffused with human touch and texture.  He thinks of Hob Gadling. 

“I’ve got seniority, I don’t have to.  I’m your elder, you prick.”

“Fuck off.  Burgess specifically asked you to, not me.  Also.  Uno.”

Hob Gadling had eyes like the fur of a mink.  Plush and downy.  Warm.

With a grunt of frustration, the first guard throws the last of his cards onto the table and levers himself out of his seat.  “Fuck you .”  He pulls a stained handkerchief from his uniform’s back pocket and shuffles across the stones, stepping gingerly over the moat.  There’s hesitation in his shoulders, tension, like a hunter approaching a wounded bear.

Dream does not see him approached.  The guard’s handkerchief, doused with water from the moat, moves in swift circles over his private inverted nebula, and it’s gone, save for a few missed comet tails of red near Dream’s upturned face.  Dream does not notice the change.  His limbs are numb with cold, so numb he cannot move from his position.  In his liquid blue eyes, there are black stars in a blood sky.  There is the fur of a mink, in soft focus, warm and aching.

Notes:

things are gonna happen I swear this is setup it's almost time to hit the club babey

also a head's up there will be canon divergence in dream's method of escape