#i'm normal asdlkfhgl

[wordsinhaled]

more domestic vacation 'verse because it's apparently all i can think about now

-

It has been... good, being here. Quieter. Easier. The clamor of billions of visitors to the Dreaming is muffled, in Hob's flat. The things that dream here are calm things. Thriving things. Old and cherished things.

Loved things.

Here, Morpheus too has felt like something that could perhaps be loved.

In the mornings, after Hob has left for work, Morpheus draws himself soundlessly up from the bed and pads on bare feet to the record rack that stands overfull with vinyls in the corner of Hob's living room. He touches each record there carefully, the faint visions of musicians and composers flitting ephemeral beneath his fingertips. He selects his musical accompaniment for the day by intuition alone.

This morning, he finds a little yellow note stuck to Hob's copy of The Cure's Disintegration:

"You'll like this one. Promise. —H"

Morpheus listens to it five times through in its entirety with a cathartic sort of anguish. Afterwards he perches on the couch wrapped up in the blanket Hob has slept beneath each night these two weeks. The cedar and vanilla notes in Hob's soap still linger in the fabric, like traces of an embrace Hob Gadling has never given him.

He has especially enjoyed sitting on the floor by the window in the warmest patch of sun, holding court with Hob's houseplants. A marble queen pothos hangs there, suspended near the ceiling, its cascading vines of happy heart-shaped leaves long enough to trail down around Morpheus' shoulders. A row of succulents and a purplish-red bromeliad in a brightly enameled pot live lined up on the sill.

Morpheus gathers them all in his awareness, greets their leaves gently with the backs of his knuckles, speaks to them the way he speaks to all growing things. They whisper their daydreams to him in return, telling him tales of jungle and desert, and of the loving voice that sings songs to them each time they are watered.

Morpheus wonders what Hob Gadling sings, what he hums under his breath.

I would be sung to thus, he thinks. But would you sing to me, my friend?

He sits for long hours in the companionable silence. Lulled by the rhythm of verdant stories, he relishes the sun-warmth banking in the soft black cotton of his shirt, and feels some unnamed tension deep within himself begin to unravel.

Morpheus had not expected this from his stay with Hob. This comfort. This easiness between them.

How it has sunk into him and become something he could, in some version of the universe, come to require.

So, when on the eve of his fourteenth day Hob says, "I don't want you to go," Morpheus is surprised to find that the wistful note Hob cannot quite keep out of his voice finds a sympathetic echo in his own thoughts.

"I—" Morpheus begins.

It is rare that he does not find the ending of a sentence already laid out for him. Yet what is its proper conclusion? I also do not wish to go away from you is futile. An impossibility. He has a kingdom. A realm. A responsibility.

"You feel it too," Hob says. "Don't you?"

Morpheus does not need to breathe in the waking world. He does not need a heartbeat. These are paltry mortal necessities; mortal vulnerabilities. And yet he knows, suddenly, the kick of the heart against the ribs and the catch of a gasp in the lungs of his recalcitrant body. It pinions him to the moment.

"Hob," he manages to say. For a brief second, he is unmade and remade again by the hope in Hob Gadling's face.

"Dream. My dearest friend. I've been wrong before." Hob's eyes are wide and earnest. His voice is honey-soft and strong. He is wiser than Morpheus can aspire to be. "If I'm wrong about this, tell me, please."

"You were not wrong before," Morpheus says. "And you are not wrong now."