#before realizing he wouldn't be able to get actually thin and keep his weight there for longer times

[moorishflower]

That long lost!Addams ficlet is a delight. You KNOW Gomez would be so absurdly proud if his new great x100 uncle then managed to bag an actual eldritch terror as a partner. Wouldn't even miss a beat.

"Hob Gadling," Dream says, and Hob makes a frankly embarrassing sound -- not a shriek, nothing like that, but maybe a startled yelp -- and jerks off the side of the bed and onto the floor. Dust from beneath the bed settles immediately in his hair, and the floorboards creak alarmingly under his weight, but, after a tense and breathless moment, nothing happens. Hob exhales, and finds himself looking up between Dream's long and slender legs. He's wearing skinny jeans, Hob notes, and he can't resist the urge to grab hold of both of Dream's calves, just above the ankle, and Christ, but he's so skinny Hob can nearly get his fingers to touch.

Dream only raises an eyebrow at him. "Why do you keep the company of witches?" he asks, and Hob strokes up the length of his legs, as high as he can reach, humming softly. His heart is still hammering with excess adrenaline, and he's got to channel it somewhere. Lust for his lover (partner? boyfriend? they haven't really discussed --) is as good a cause as any.

"Hello," he says, attempting to maintain some manner of social nicety. "Good to see you, darling, how's your day been, mine's been fine --"

"Hob."

"-- I only learned that I've apparently got relatives, still," he finishes, and Dream's other eyebrow joins the first. Hob uses Dream's ankles to hoist himself further from the edge of the bed, and then picks himself up gingerly, brushing dust from his hair, his shoulders. It falls down from him in a grey cloud, and he's not able to suppress a sneeze before he says, "Loads of them. From my mam's side of the family. Apparently she had a sister."

"And you decided to visit."

"There were extenuating circumstances," Hob says, thinking of the diary, the bidding war, Gomez's unflappable enthusiasm for the esoteric. "But yes. What's this about witches?"

"Many of your relatives are. Though this explains, somewhat. How swiftly and easily you took to immortality."

Witches are real? sits on the tip of his tongue, and Hob only narrowly swallows it back. "Am I a witch?" he asks, half-fearing the answer. It'd make his drowning in the 1600s a lot less poignant, maybe. If he's been a witch this whole bloody time, if 'witch' is a thing that's somehow separate and distinct from human...

"No," Dream says, and all the tension leaves Hob's shoulders at once. He sits back down on the bed with a shuddering sigh. It's a nice bed, a four-poster with a canopy, and Gomez and Morticia had reassured him that this room did not contain anything that lived under the mattress. The sheets are heavy velvet, in deference to the cold Chicago winter, and yesterday morning he'd woken up to the sight of Wednesday Addams standing over his bed with a morningstar in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. She had been contemplating the best way to wake him: by cutting his hair (he'd needed to explain to her that it would take time to grow back), or by caving his chest in (requiring a totally different, but no less important, conversation of its own).

"Good," he says, and Dream makes a low, thrumming noise, and straddles Hob's lap.

"You did not tell me where you were going," he murmurs, and strokes his thumbs down Hob's cheeks, catches his nail on Hob's bottom lip and pulls it down slightly to expose his teeth. "I felt you, still. In the Dreaming. But The New Inn was bereft of you."

"I didn't realize I was coming here until the second I did it," Hob admits, and Dream seems to take this in stride. "Besides. I've got no way to contact you. I sort of hoped you'd just...feel where I was."

"I did. I do. And yet. To hear it from your lips would also be...pleasing."

"You're allowed to say you're miffed, love," Hob says, and lays his hands in the cup of Dream's hips. Thin and bony and his. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you where I was going. Maybe we can figure out some way we can talk not through the Dreaming, in future. Dunno if you get cell service there."

He means it as a joke, but Dream tilts his head to the side, considering. His thumb sweeps up from Hob's lip, touches just below his eye, the firm bone of the orbit.

"I will consider it," he says, and then bends down and gently covers Hob's mouth with his own. His lips are soft, and Dream always runs closer to lukewarm than he does body temperature, but now Hob gasps because Dream's mouth, when it opens against him, is chilled. Sweet and cool as wintermint, and his tongue licking at Hob's lips is like a round of ice that thaws and melts and slowly slips inside, until Hob can drink him the way he would snowmelt, held in the cupped chalice of his tongue --

"Dios mío," comes a familiar voice at the door, and Hob frantically pulls his hands from where they had been inching over Dream's arse, and then just as frantically tries to rearrange himself so that his erection isn't immediately visible. He's not sure how he manages this last, since he feels hard enough that it could be seen from space, but if that's the cross he must bear, then so be it.

Dream, as always, is utterly unflappable, and turns to the bedroom door looking every inch a king; he's wild-haired, Hob realizes, and the skinny jeans aren't so much gone as they are flickering, like a projector caught between two slides, flipping back and forth between Dream's usual peacoat and jeans, and what Hob's become used to seeing him wear in the Dreaming, what he thinks of as Dream's robe of office, flowing like ink, black as the starless sky.

Gomez, standing in the doorway, looks between Dream and Hob, and then a wide and cheery grin nearly splits his face in half.

"Mi querido niño! You did not tell me you had a paramour! And who is this enchanting creature? Gomez Addams, my friend, at your service!"

Dream blinks slowly, and Gomez, to his credit, does not come forward with a proffered hand or, thank God, a hug. Only beams at Dream from the doorway, until Hob's increasingly eldritch lover breaks the silence at last.

"I am called Morpheus," he says, "Lord of Dreams and King of Nightmares. Shaper of Form and Prince of Stories." He inclines his head slightly, and Gomez looks as though he might faint with delight. "And lover of Hob Gadling."

"You did not tell me you were royalty," Gomez says. He strides into the bedroom, and thankfully it's Hob he's bound for, Hob's hand that he grabs. "Royalty! Why, the Addams haven't hosted a king since good old Henry!"

"Which Henry?" Hob gets out, as he's forcibly removed from the bed and dragged, almost bodily, towards the door. Gomez is strong. He keeps forgetting.

"It doesn't matter! They're all quite dead. But yours isn't! Come, my liege! Allow me to escort you and your Prince Consort on a promenade of the grounds! Have you ever been to America before, sir?"

"I am a representation of all sleeping minds, and of the dreaming subconscious of all living things," Dream says, sweeping behind them, stately and imposing. "So. Yes."

"Oh, splendid! That means I don't have to explain baseball."

"What is happening," Hob whispers, as he's manhandled out into the hall. His mind is caught somewhere on prince consort and doesn't quite want to let go of it, but he feels like that's a conversation he ought to have with Dream in private.

And Dream looks at him, smirking faintly, his starlit eyes flicking from Hob's mussed hair to his kiss-pinked lips, and down to the way that Gomez so effortlessly steers him by the shoulder out into the manor proper.

"Family," Dream says, and reaches out, and laces his fingers with Hob's.