🥰
A break from the angst perhaps.
Me, sweating as I don't have a ton of fluff written 😅 So instead I shall gift you a little thing I wrote that's not quite fluffy, but I'm not sure if it's actually going to amount to anything, just some musings that I wrote down.
“You are. Pensive, Hob.”
Hob blinks, coming back to himself. “Yeah.” He sighs, takes a sip of his tea. Dream waits, with all the infinite patience of a geologic age. Hob tries to pull his scattered thoughts together.
“I, uh, taught about myself today. Wynkyn de Worde.” He smiles a little, at his past self. He’d been so young. “Old Billy died just two years after our meeting, and I took over. Had to figure out what kind of stuff was worth printing, since we’d started to get competition.”
Dream listens, clearly fascinated. It’s not just the hundred and thirty years that he missed; Hob is learning that the years immediately following their century meetings are of extra interest to Dream. The kind of things Hob would skip over during his recitation in favour of more recent events.
If he’d known then what he knows now, he never would have left the printing business, would’ve personally ensured as many stories made it out into the world as he could. If he’d recognized Dream’s interest for what it was, he would’ve chased stories in every lifetime.
It is, he reflects ruefully, exactly why Dream didn’t give him any such indication.
“One of the really popular ones was a version of an old French story. Valentine and Orson.” He hums, a little bit, the words coming back to him, slow and aching, like the turning of rusty gears, but they come. “Alas I was borne in an vnhappy houre for to suffre suche payne, and for to fall from so hye estate vnto suche pouerte, for of all the vnhappyes I am the moost vnhappyest. Now is al my ioyes transmued in to dystres, my laughynges chaunged in to wepynges, my songes conuerted in to syghes.” It had been one of the things his mind had latched onto, as he sat in misery, the chill of the cobble streets leaching into his backside.
Dream makes a sound; Hob shakes himself a bit, gives him a fleeting smile. “It’s all right, love,” he says, and it is. The cool fingers that curl around his when he reaches out makes it more so. “Anyway, I was just thinking. That story, it’s about twin brothers abandoned in the woods — that’s Romulus and Remus. They’re separated and Valentine grows up to be the emperor, while Orson becomes a wild man who is eventually tamed by Valentine and becomes his servant and companion — that’s Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Connections I couldn’t make at the time, but now…”
He takes a deep breath, trying to figure out how to word what he means. Dream just watches him, the way he’s watched everything since those ancient Sumerians were putting stylus to tablet and even before.
“It’s all just… stories, isn’t it?” The old stories will always return to their original forms, Dream had said, and Christ, Hob had thought he’d meant Shakespeare, meant his patronage, but it’s more than that, older, back and back throughout the ages, humanity making sense of the world, howling at the dark. “It’s all… you.”
“Yes,” Dream says simply, voice gone layered and resonant, and Hob wonders what it says about him, that his first instinct is to reach out and touch, to lay hands on the demiurge. Probably it’s something profound about the human experience, but Hob has Dream in his arms, on his sofa, drinking his tea, and finds that all the rest of it doesn’t much matter.
