Chapter Text
They talked into the night. Until the crowds at the White Horse thinned. Until there was no one to cast disgusted looks at Hob for the reek that wafted from him. Until it was just him and his stranger, still perfect, still untouched by time or the muck that caked Hob.
But soon the tavern would close. They had already spent more time together than all of their previous meetings combined. His stranger listened. He ordered plate after plate for Hob without a flicker of judgment, until the desperate clawing hunger in Hob’s gullet was soothed and finally, what felt like hours into a meeting that usually lasted minutes (he’d counted), the hollow ache inside him was owed only to his awareness of the late hour. The fact that all of this soon must end.
“Thank you, my friend,” Hob murmured. The food and the warmth of the tavern had left him muddled and content and feeling safe in a way he had not in far too long. Or perhaps it was his friend that made him feel safe, shielding him from a world that would kick a man while he was down. But that too soon would end. There was a barmaid framed in the doorway, clearly impatient with these last customers. “I’ll spot you on the next one, aye? In fairness, I did provide a feast for you last time. You owed me anyway.”
Hob smiled weakly at his own words. It hurt to remember the past century, the beginning of it almost more than the end, with the bright light of his fortune and happiness casting a deeper, darker shadow over his present miseries. He shuddered all over even to recall it now. He’d grown less practiced at hiding his thoughts from his face when there was no one who would spare him a glance. “A hundred years, then?”
Hob glanced up at him and brushed some of his own lank, greasy hair out of the way to get a better look, half expecting his stranger had already vanished into thin air, as he seemed wont to do.
But his stranger glanced up, as if he’d been deeply lost in thought. He nodded and rose to his feet but stopped beside Hob and placed a hand on his shoulder. Had his stranger ever touched him before? Hob frowned in confusion at the white hand perched on his rags, his gaze climbing his stranger’s black-clad arm, expecting a farewell. Expecting that answer, Aye, a hundred years.
“Would you like to go somewhere else?” his stranger said. His voice was low and raw as ever, almost hoarse. Always he sounded so self-assured, as if he’d known every word he would speak for centuries before he said it. But there was something there, something Hob couldn’t quite put his finger on, as if his stranger, for just this one time, was unsure of himself.
Hob flashed him a grin, feeling a bit himself, a bit the old Hob Gadling from three hundred years ago, confident and sure, with no idea what was coming for him or what he would one day gain just to lose. “Are you buying?”
“Of course.”
Hob rose to his feet and pulled his tattered shirt around himself self-consciously. “Penny Whistle should still be open. It’s just down the road.”
His stranger nodded and matched pace effortlessly with Hob while they walked to the door. Hob kept his head down, letting his hair hide the view of him to either side. He could see his stranger’s feet well enough to know he was there, and he had little interest in seeing any more of the scornful looks from the prigs in this tavern than necessary.
Still, it felt… odd, to walk with his stranger. He’d only ever seen him enter and leave the White Horse. Every time Hob had dashed after him, the man was gone before Hob could catch up, vanished quick as lightning. Always they sat across from one another, just out of arm’s reach, distant and impersonal. Last time, his stranger had seemed like he wanted to be miles away from the moment he laid eyes on Hob. He wasn’t an idiot, he’d seen it clear as day. Like nothing he said was enough, every word just seemed to push his stranger further and further away. Christ, it had stung. There were whole years slaving away in the Tudor shipyards over a lifetime ago when it was the thought of impressing this man that was the only thing that kept him going, the thought of making something of himself with this glorious immortality he’d been gifted. And his stranger didn’t give a fig.
Hob sniffed, and realized the food and drink and the feel of someone giving a damn had made him maudlin in rare time. He cried easier these days, without much reason to stop himself, but still he clutched after his dignity now. Hob tried to make it seem like he was scratching at an itch on his face when he scrubbed the tears away with a ragged sleeve, no handkerchiefs here. His friend stopped walking, just before the door.
He’s reconsidered, Hob thought dully. I’m such a mess, he doesn’t want to be seen with me. Still, better to face it like a man. He bit the inside of his cheek and firmed his lip, raising his chin to look his stranger in the eye. “This it, then?”
“I…” his stranger hesitated. Fuck, Hob must look worse than he thought. He didn’t think he’d ever seen his stranger hesitate. “The weather has turned since we entered. It seems there’s a chill in the air.” It was early June, not perhaps the hottest night they’d had this year, but Hob had felt many that were colder. Most of them, really. “It occurrs to me that you…I would not wish for you to catch a chill.”
Hob’s brow furrowed, trying to puzzle out how exactly his stranger was trying to let him down gently, when his stranger looked away and down, then shrugged his black coat from his shoulders. Beneath, he wore a black shirt and black waistcoat, Hob wasn’t sure what else he’d been expecting really. His stranger proffered the coat, and only then did Hob’s sluggish brain catch up to what was happening.
“Now, hold on, wait a minute,” Hob protested. “You can’t give me that. I’ll…I’ll ruin it.”
“I have others,” his stranger said. “It will be no trouble to replace.”
“But I mean…look at you, skinny as you are. It’ll never fit me,” Hob said. He’d always been broad across the shoulders and this… gift, this immortality, it had strange effects. He had once, long ago, regularly eaten his fill and not gained an ounce. And now, after years and years of starvation, nights when he was sure he had not slept but actually died, only to wake up starving again, none believed him because still his body did not change, no matter how empty or how full. Sometimes the other beggars beat him, certain he was hoarding food, and the alms he received were often scarce, for many took him for a liar when he said he was hungry.
“I assure you, it will,” his stranger said.
Hob looked at him, at a loss. But, too worn to fight his stranger on this, he shrugged and turned around, as if his fine aristocratic stranger was his valet, helping him slip on the coat.
It did indeed fit like a glove. Hob blinked, wondering if his eyes had played tricks on him. Always possible. Reality didn’t seem as fixed these days as it once had, but he could have sworn the coat was smaller in his stranger’s hands than it was on Hob’s shoulders, where it seemed the perfect fit. And it might have been decades since last he wore one, but he still remembered the feel of a good-fitting coat. Indeed, this one even fit well enough to button fully. It hid the worst of his rags and, he realized with chagrin, perhaps that had been his stranger’s aim the whole time: to hide the state of his companion.
Well, whatever the intention, Hob felt better immediately. The coat was finely made, warm and sturdy. He knew his face was still a grubby mess, but at least at a distance, he would not signal all who looked at him that he was best chased off with a club. He stood a little taller and nodded to his stranger. With that, they set out into the night.
The Penny Whistle was indeed not far, and Hob caught himself flinching at the door when they arrived, expecting to be stopped at best and at worst, chased off, for they certainly knew his face here when he had a coin to spare. But the self-assurance of his stranger clearly spoke louder than Hob’s grubby appearance. His stranger swept into the room, past the man at the door, whose eyes seemed to track past the both of them.
Though the Penny Whistle was open, the hour was late. The fireplace cast a dull glow over the shadowed denizens, workmen mostly, cart drivers and dockworkers and others who put in long days and still needed a place to get a drink at the end of it. The ale was piss here but then, he’d never seen his stranger drink anyway. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to him. He’d expected to need to show his stranger around the place, but the man moved with the unerring certainty of a regular visitor, finding them a spot in the shadows beyond the fire and signaling to the barmaid to bring them drinks.
“Umm,” Hob said once they were seated. The coat wrapped around him like an embrace. On any other night he might have fallen asleep in that chair, let them shoo him out with a good kick once they figured out he wouldn’t be ordering more, but with his stranger there Hob felt out of his skin, alert and awake as if the whole world took on new colors when he was there. “How long do you reckon you’ll want to stay out? Only you don’t seem the type to enjoy a Penny Whistle ale. S’practically a watchword for cheap piss around here.”
“How long would you like to stay, Hob?” his stranger said.
“With you?” Hob said. The thought of it caught in his throat and pricked at his eyes. “Dunno, long as you’ll have me? We don’t have to talk or anything, not if you don’t want. Just having someone around for a bit? S’nice change.”
“I meant, at this tavern,” his stranger said delicately.
“Shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… there’s me talking again. You barely got a word in edgewise all night,” Hob laughed, dry and self-conscious. Christ, where was that ale? He’d give the last shirt off his back for a distraction. “Guess it’s still sort of the same, though? As long as they’re open, I suppose. Don’t really have another place to go. Kind of between things right now.”
“I see.” His stranger’s lips pursed and he looked away.
There was something there that didn’t fit in Hob’s estimation of this man, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. For some reason, the word chimneys popped into Hob’s mind. What was that again, he remembered talking about that once, long ago… oh, that was it. “They keep the smoke from gettin’ in your eyes.”
“What?” His stranger glanced back at him askance and there it was, perhaps there was some fire left in his old brain, his stranger’s eyes were unmistakably wet with unshed tears.
“Oh,” Hob breathed, feeling a bit stupid all of a sudden. A part of him, an old part, wanted to be ashamed, to be cried over like this, like he was pathetic. But…but all he’d really wanted last time was for his stranger to give a damn. And here was his stranger, very much giving a damn. Why then did Hob wish he could take it all back at the sight of his stranger’s tears? “Hey, now, no need for that. It’s all right.”
Hob reached out and caught himself just an inch away from brushing the tears from his stranger’s cheek, as if this was his wife crying, and he saw his own hand, grubby with black, dirt-caked fingernails, and his stranger, pristine as fine marble.
Hob jerked his hand back, pushing himself all the way back against the stiff wooden chair, and curling in on himself. “Sorry. Don’t know what’s come over me. Just… pretend I didn’t say anything.”
“Hob,” his stranger whispered. Hob flinched, expecting harsh words. But they didn’t come and he stole a furtive look up at his stranger, who was gazing upon him with the most puzzled expression, as if Hob had done something remarkable and not just tried to rub his grubby hand on that proud face. “Were you trying to comfort me?”
“Uh, yeah?” Hob hazarded. “Suppose I was.”
“Why?” his stranger seemed… genuinely shocked, probably the most emotion Hob had ever seen in him, and all of this was in the simple rise of those coal-black brows, the slight frown on his lips.
Hob shrugged, lopsided and unsure of what to expect if he told the truth, not really expecting any other plan to work. “Dunno. Suppose it… just doesn’t seem right, does it? Someone like you, weepin’ over someone like me.”
“I was not…” his stranger paused as if flummoxed at his own words. Were Hob’s breath not stuck in his chest for fear of breathing wrong in his stranger’s direction right now, he might have laughed at the sight. “I was not weeping over you.”
“Oh. That’s all right then, I suppose . Are you all…”
“I was weeping for myself.” His stranger’s words were a low, thoughtful rasp and his eyes were distant, unfocused. “For someone I was, long ago.”
“Oh,” Hob repeated. “Sorry, if I…”
“Do you truly still wish to live?”
That question again. The same question, over and over. It snapped Hob from his haze like a cold breeze on a spring day, shocking but somehow invigorating, because at least this one thing in his life was so clear. “Yes. Always. It’s…all I’ve got left.” Hob frowned, no that wasn’t quite right, was it?
“But if you seek death, then all of this, this pain, this suffering and misery... This unending slog through the darkness, without purpose, without meaning, just the same dreams and nightmares and petty games and jealousy and loss…” his stranger paused as if shocked at his own words. Sagged. Whispered, “It will finally be over.”
“Is that how you see it, then?” Hob said, stricken at the grim vision his stranger presented. “Life as just this…this great big bowl that does nothing but fill up again with the latest shit you have to deal with? Always something more that’s awful, always filling up again just when you thought you might get through it?”
“Perhaps not in those terms but…” his stranger paused, as if at a loss, unable even to muster disdain for Hob’s admittedly crude phrasing (but then, he’d been a soldier, not a poet). “Yes. What else is there?”
Hob stared at his stranger, aghast. “Everything.” He could see his stranger pulling back, withdrawing into himself at such a facile answer but something stirred in Hob’s chest, something frantic, desperate. “Here, just…” he reached out towards his stranger and once again saw his hands, saw the way his stranger flinched from his touch and God, how had he not seen it before. “Close your eyes.”
His stranger raised an eyebrow, the tension still there in his jaw, distrusting, remote but no, no, no, Hob could see it now, clear as day. In pain. In terrible pain, all of the time. “I fail to see how…”
“It won’t be for long,” Hob reassured him. “Just for a moment, all right? You know me, after all this time, don’t you? I wouldn’t lead you astray.”
His stranger frowned. Hesitated. Hob thought he’d refuse or worse, that he’d leave. But, begrudging every second of it, it seemed, his stranger closed his eyes.
Hob counted down from three, all the while watching his stranger’s face in repose. What would it be like to watch him sleep, to see him truly at rest? “Now open them. Think about what you see. Tell me, if you want, but you don’t have to. You never struck me as one keen to use his words. Not like me, who uses far too many,” Hob said with a half grin.
His stranger’s eyes blinked open and he took in the room. The stone fireplace, dimly lit, the dozen or so men hunched over their drinks. Probably not much to see, with its floor covered in straw to sop up the mess, the plain wooden furniture, the barmaid ready to find her bed, and the beer pale as water. It wasn’t much, but that was the point.
“Mortals craving rest. Craving dreams they won’t remember and sleep that will never be enough to soothe them,” his stranger said in a tight voice. “Endless work and responsibility that will never be known or appreciated. And one day, all of these people will be dead, and all they have dreamed will be forgotten.”
“But they’re not dead yet. And until they are, just… look again. Really look. There is endless possibility out there! Everything can change in an instant, just like that. At least, until you die. Then that will be the end,” Hob said. “The real one. Nothing after that. Whatever bad day you just had, it’s the last day you’ll ever have. And if it’s a good one, you’ll never get another. It all just stops.”
“Most of your kind believe there is a reward of some sort waiting,” his stranger observed. “Or a punishment.”
“Don’t believe in any of that, do I?” Hob said softly. “Don’t have any proof of it. And if there really is someone up there who caused all the terrible shit I’ve seen, the wars and the plagues and the little children dying, or even someone who allowed it to happen, then if I got the chance to meet him I’d punch him square in the mouth, and that’s just the start of what I’d do to him. All we’ve got is people, my friend, the good and the bad. It’s all we really know is there. And if we’re just sparrows flying through the mead-hall, as old Bede said, with darkness on either side and only a glimpse of a warm hearth, then why wouldn’t you stay by that hearth as long as possible? There’s music there, dancing, love, and the mead, of course, don’t forget that.”
As if summoned, the barmaid finally seemed to remember their order and deposited two watery brews before them. Hob shooed her away with a quick, thankful grin and turned back to his stranger, proffering the beer as an example. “And awful as it can be, as full of suffering and lover’s quarrels and the bloody hangover to boot, it’s still the good mixed in with the bad, isn’t it? And out there? Out there, before and after we live, there’s just the darkness. Or there’s whatever awful bugger allowed the bad in the first place.
“Either way, yeah, there will be bad. God knows there will be, I’ve had little else lately. But there was good too, my friend, there always was, even at the worst of it. A warm hearth, a friendly smile, someone to sit with you in a place like this when you’re both so sore and lonely you feel the ground will swallow you up and it would be a blessing, and you don’t even know each other’s names but you’re there for each other, for a little bit, at that moment. Could you imagine if I’d said no in 1389? Then I never would have met that person. They’d be sitting alone. And my… my Robyn wouldn’t have been born. And I’d have never met my Eleanor, or any of the hundreds of friends or lovers I’ve had besides, good people. People who were there for me. People I was there for when they needed it. I wouldn’t have been there for you, on a night like this where whatever awful shit that happened to you feels like it’s going to swallow you whole.
“I can see it, my friend. I don’t mean to overstep but… you’re like me, aren’t you? You lost it all. And you don’t know how to get back to who you were before, if it’s even possible after the pain of it. That’s why you visit me, isn’t it? To see if I’ll give up. Because if I do, it means you’ve got permission, too. It would mean there’s no climbing out of this hole you’ve found yourself in, after whatever terrible thing happened to you, after losing whoever it is you lost. But I’m not going to let you go, because I am never going to give you that permission. By now you should know that about me.”
At some point, he’d grabbed his stranger’s hand. When the fuck had he done that? Why hadn’t his stranger pulled away? He looked as if he wished to, his stranger was staring at him, wide-eyed, jaw tense and when he spoke the words grated out one by one, “You dare to think that you would have any say in whether or not I choose to continue with this life?”
“Yes,” Hob said, clenching his hand around his stranger’s, in for a penny and all that, and he felt the man’s hand jerk in his, as if he’d meant to pull away. Hob's other hand joined the first, clasping his stranger’s marble-pale hands in his own. “Or at least I’ll try. I’ll try my damnedest, because I care about you. And if you don’t believe that, then at least believe it’s because you’ve already done the same for me. Knowing you’d be here every hundred years, knowing that if I can just get to you there will be a familiar face waiting for me at the end? Do you know how much that has meant to me in my darkest hours?”
A muscle twitched in his stranger’s cheek. “I have offered you no comfort, no succor for you to hold that view of me.”
Hob shook his head, bewildered. “Do you think that matters? This isn’t a business transaction, you are my friend, even if you do not consider me yours. I know I don’t cut the most inspiring figure right now. But what is most important is that I wish for you to live. I wish to see you here, again, in one hundred years, and a thousand times after that. I wish to know in the time between that you are out there, and that you are happy, I hope. But I know that, even if you are not, that one day happiness will return to you.”
His stranger tensed, Hob could feel it in his hands and God, had he really done it this time? This was when his stranger would tell him off for his silly platitudes and his presumption, for being a beggar who thought he could befriend a king. When he spoke, the words that emerged were not a shout. They were barely more than a pained rasp, “I very much doubt it will.”
Hob went still. Despite the dim light, he saw the redness in his friend’s eyes, though no new tears yet fell. Saw the empty, desolate expression on his face and felt, in their clasped hands that his friend had still not withdrawn, a shiver that raced through his shoulders, hunching them inward. “My friend, what happened to you? Why do you think there is no joy left for you in this life?”
His friend’s lips parted but no sound emerged, only a puff of air. Hob held his breath. He held his friend’s hand in his own. He waited, as he always had for his stranger, and he would wait another hundred years if that was what it took because these words looked as if they would tear his stranger in two.
“My son is dead.”
Oh, Hob sucked in a breath as it all fell into place. One scene after another. “Did I hear you say you have no intention of ever dying?” said with such mocking disdain three hundred years before. The shock on his stranger’s face two hundred years ago when Hob still wished to live. One hundred years ago, it wasn’t the sight of Hob that drove his stranger away, was it? Nor was Shaxberd, for all that Hob had blamed him ever since. It was the moment he’d taken out his portrait of Eleanor and Robyn and there had been, too fleeting for him to understand it then for what it was, that bottomless devastation in his stranger’s eyes. Not jealousy, but grief for Hob, knowing what was coming, and grief for himself. And earlier that night, in another smokeless room, the tears in his stranger’s eyes as Hob related his last eighty years of misfortune and loss. All familiar to his stranger. All like looking in a mirror, desperate to see a way forward for himself, half wanting there not to be one at all.
Because Hob knew the feeling. When he’d buried his son it was the closest he’d come to wishing to join him, compounded as it was with the grief of losing Eleanor, the baby. If not for his friends he might have. If not for the promise to his stranger in a hundred years, mortal friends might not have been enough.
“I’m sorry,” Hob murmured. He felt he should let his stranger’s hand go, if that would make him more comfortable, but he didn’t have the heart to do it so he just sat there, holding his hand. “Your wife?”
“We parted ways, after. Many years ago. We have not spoken to one another since.”
“Will you… will you ever return to her? To each other?” Hob said hesitantly, not sure what answer he hoped for. He wanted his friend to be happy. Christ, he’d give anything to anyone who promised to return Eleanor to him. But at the same time, he felt a jealous ache on his friend’s behalf, a protectiveness against this woman he did not know who had left him with this grief.
His stranger shook his head, not looking at Hob, as if lost in memory. “No. That will never be.”
It was more than Hob had ever learned about his stranger but he didn’t feel any better for it. In truth it almost didn’t feel as if this was his stranger, the being that appeared once a century to cast his pale, stone-faced judgement upon Hob, all the while assuring him there was no judgement at all (he’d felt it anyway, especially that last time). No, this just felt like a friend. Another man who had lost a child. Hob had known many, too many, over the years.
“Fuck any God that would allow that to happen,” Hob muttered in what he hoped came across as the painful sympathy it was and not as blasphemy. Was his friend devout? It was hard to tell when his friend possibly being a god himself had ranked high on Hob’s theories over the years. “Fuck any God that would allow a world where we must bury our own children.”
“It was not your God that killed my son,” his friend said in a strange manner, as if there was another, different god who might be to blame. “But… I thank you. For the sentiment.”
Hob offered a weary half-smile and looked down at their joined hands. “Of course.”
For once, the ale being little better than water was a benefit, to wet his throat without stealing his wits. He did not want to forget a second of this night, this strange night where his friend was so open with him. Hob released his stranger’s hand with a gentle pat and took up the tankard. But after a moment, Hob paused his drinking. He kept the glass up before his face, hiding it as the thought rose: he did not want this night to end. Always before, his stranger left when he pleased and Hob had done little or nothing to stop him. This being would come and go as he wished.
But tonight… Hob lowered his tankard, taking it in both hands and staring at the shadow of his reflection, thankfully too muddled to see anything but the outline of his shape. Tonight, he did not wish to say goodbye to his friend. Not for a hundred years. Not even for an hour. And it was not all his own loneliness speaking, for he felt it, that bottomless well of sorrow that had always lurked behind his stranger’s eyes. Finally, the wall around it had come down, so Hob could see how deep it went, how horrible the darkness. Once, he had wondered: how could anyone carry such sadness who was as powerful as his stranger, able to grant immortality, or as beautiful as his stranger, untouched as he was by time or any hardships of the world?
Well, he had his answer. He’d lost his child. He’d lost his wife, if not to death as Hob had lost Eleanor. Those things changed a man. He knew many who never came back from that loss but descended into solitude that was not unlike madness, shutting themselves off from the world, drowning in their misery. Hob wasn’t sure yet if he could count himself as outside their numbers. If he would ever come back from what he’d lost. He knew for certain that without the gift of his long life, there would be no chance he’d live long enough to emerge on the other side of this grief.
“It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?” Hob said into his drink. Their night would inevitably draw soon to a close. Might as well throw caution to the wind. “I’d guess a few hundred years but, knowing you, it’s probably more like a thousand, isn’t it?”
“Two and a half thousand,” his friend said. Whatever mischief had once made him smirk through Hob’s questions, at his ceaseless inquiries after his friend’s name, was gone. He appeared drained and as human as Hob had ever seen him.
Once, Hob might have blanched to be quoted such a number, but he was beginning to grow accustomed to the true meaning of immortality, and he’d always known his stranger was much older than he appeared. “Sounds right. So the poets really are liars, eh? Time never heals this wound.”
“No. It does not,” his stranger murmured.
“Are you alright?” Hob said and his friend looked up at that, his glance questioning. For once all the walls seemed to have come down on this strange night, this witching hour of truth and shared pain. “Stupid question, I know. Are you going to be alright? I hate to think of you by yourself at a time like this. Not if it means I’ll be drinking alone in a hundred years.”
His friend’s eyes widened, perhaps at his bluntness, but Hob didn’t dare be any more diplomatic than he’d already been with such a question. He needed to know how close his friend was to that precipice. Not that there was fuck-all Hob could do about it once his friend departed but… he had to try. It was the least anyone could do for another man. To let him know Hob would be waiting, expecting to see him.
“Is this your way of taking your leave for the evening, Hob?” his stranger said, a deflection. A rare attempt to lighten the mood, Hob could see right through it and he wasn’t laughing.
“No, it’s just…” Hob shrugged. “I know I won’t sleep for worry about you in this state.”
“All you have suffered these past years and still it is me that concerns you?” his friend marveled.
“Well, it’s easier, isn’t it? Looking after someone else?” Hob offered a wry smile. “All I seem to do is fuck it up when I look after myself. Maybe we should switch? You look after me, I’ll look after you. Maybe we’ll both do better that way.”
“I do not require anyone to ‘look after me’,” his friend said and there was an echo there of power and self-assurance. But it seemed only that, an echo, the words memorized by rote, hollowed out.
“I know. I mean, look at you, of course I know that. You’ve made it for thousands of years on your own. I can’t even imagine that,” Hob said softly. He sloshed the ale around in his tankard, staring into its depths. “But do you ever miss her, your wife? Or even just...being married? Having someone to look after. Having someone to look after you. Not sure if it was the same with your family, but for me… I felt right? Like I was always meant to be someone’s husband, someone’s father, and I just didn’t know it. Like the rest of my life had been mere practice until that day. Only for it to… anyway. It’s all gone wrong since then, so maybe there was something to that. Maybe that’s just how I’m meant to be or else I’m… nothing.”
“Aye. But our marriage did not last long,” his stranger murmured. “Twenty years, barely beyond the stretch of a common mortal’s.” Hob went still, afraid to move lest he should scare his stranger off from this rare confession. “And it was… passionate rather than peaceful. We were both artists in our own way and our visions often clashed. But when they did not, what we made was beautiful. Our son was beautiful.”
“I believe it,” Hob said sincerely. One need only to look at his stranger to imagine any child of his would be heartbreaking to look upon and heartbreaking to lose. “I know I’m already pushing my luck with all of this unsolicited advice but… I’ve had many friends who had relationships that sounded like yours. Passionate. Wild. Begun and ended quickly. Never a moment’s rest when you’re in them but while you’re together you feel alive, often as not because you're angry at one another. The blood runs hot but there’s never a moment’s peace. Am I close?”
His stranger’s lips pursed and his eyes were unreadable but he nodded. “Remarkably close.”
Hob smiled sheepishly. “I also feel like I’m remarkably close to overstepping.”
“In all likelihood,” his stranger agreed with an almost imperceptible smile of his own. “But I am curious where you are going with this.”
Hob licked his lips nervously but felt the thrill of daring stir in his breast, so long buried it was as if it rose in him with a puff of dust. “And my guess is, if you married a woman who you so clashed with, that this wasn’t the first or only of a tumultuous string of lovers?”
His stranger went still, his chin rising and the daring in Hob’s breast shuddered, the instinct replacing it to cringe back from anticipated wrath, but he held himself firm. Even this weak brew was giving him a hint of his old spine back, or perhaps it was spending a whole evening remembering the man he was. “Now you are treading perilously close to overstepping, Hob Gadling. Have a care.”
Hob blew out a sigh of relief. “But I’m right?”
“Close enough,” his stranger said. “My past entanglements have been fleeting even by the standards of mortals. Marked by passion, as you say, and by… tumult. They do not end well. I found it best to abstain altogether of late.”
Hob propped his chin up on his hand, looking across the table at his stranger. “I could tell you what I told my friends. Or we can leave the matter there.”
His stranger’s eyes flicked up, studying Hob, as if truly seeing him for once. A hundred years ago he might have exulted to be the singular focus of his stranger’s attention. But that instinct was dampened by the mood. He was not trying to win some sort of game by gaining his stranger’s attention. More than anything, he just wanted to be here, now, having this conversation before, like Bede’s sparrow, he would have to dart back out of the mead-hall, into the darkness of what his life had become. “Go on.”
Hob drained the last of his ale and set the tankard aside, pausing to gather his thoughts for the most delicate way to express what he was about to say. “I have had my share of passionate lovers and I don’t pretend I've never made mistakes. Or that I’ve never fought with a man or woman I took to my bed.” His stranger raised an eyebrow at that declaration of preference and Hob shrugged. He’d been beaten for much less and his stranger was not human, so Hob hardly expected him to be a stickler for the written laws of the land. “But, my friend, I hope you understand that not every fire need be hot enough to burn the city down. Sometimes, it is better that love be a hearth, a place waiting on the other side of the storm to offer shelter.”
His friend studied him. “And where is your hearth now, Hob?”
“You—” Hob stopped, and ducked his head, staring down at the table, so that he would not do something stupid. “You know that there isn’t one. Not anymore.”
“...I see. For what it is worth, I am sorry, Hob,” his stranger said in that slow, hoarse voice, “for the suffering you have endured these past years.”
“Not your fault,” Hob waved him off then paused and looked up. “Unless somehow it is?”
His stranger shook his head. “No. Your tragedies are of the world’s making, not mine. And so long as you choose to live, they will continue.”
“Suppose that means there’s nothing for it, then,” Hob said with a tight-lipped smile.
“Except for the choice which is always open to you,” said his stranger.
“I’m afraid you’re not getting out of our next meeting that easily, my friend,” Hob said. He rolled the bottom of the empty tankard along the table then let it settle flat. This tavern too would soon be empty and then it would be time to go. “I hope you will think on what I said. I hope... when we next meet, you will have found some happiness again. Or at least, some peace.”
His friend went silent at that and Hob felt he knew a dismissal when it finally arrived. His pint was empty. There were only a few patrons left and the barmaid was clearly trying to shoo them along. And his friend looked distant, distracted. Even if they were the last ones to remain, they would be pushing it to try for even another half hour. He should try to depart with some dignity, instead of clinging on pathetically to the end. His stranger would probably appreciate that. “One hundred years, then?”
“You wish to leave already?”
Hob frowned, glancing up at his friend who watched him as if perplexed or perhaps… dismayed? It was a surprisingly young expression on his friend’s face, forlorn, with his lips slightly parted, brow furrowed. Hob settled back into his seat, crossing his arms around him. Would Hob be asked to give the coat back? Of course he would, what was he thinking… “No! No of course not, but...?" he said, nodding towards the bar. "They’ll be closing up here soon.”
“Is there not another pub nearby that we could find?” his stranger said.
“At this hour of the night?” Hob’s eyebrows rose. It was past midnight. He might have even laughed at the question if his friend did not appear so earnest. “Penny Whistle’s the only one around, my friend. There is nowhere else.”
God, did he wish there were. He could talk with his stranger for hours and the thought even now of leaving the warmth of this place to go back to his wandering, to where he was kicked and despised, to not knowing where his next meal would come, it would have been enough to make him break down were he not in front of his stranger. Later, maybe. Once he found a place to sleep.
“Perhaps we could walk?” his stranger said. “There might be a quiet place for us outside.”
“By the river? In this city? At night?” Hob said incredulously. “No, I cannot in good conscience take you out there, my friend. Not with that ruby at your throat. You’d be set upon in minutes.”
“I do not fear for my safety, I...” his stranger said and looked as if he would say more, only to stop himself.
“I do,” Hob insisted. “I can’t die, remember? But you? I would never forgive myself if harm came to you. Now, I would dearly love to continue our evening as well, Christ would I, more than you can ever know, but that is…” Hob stopped, swallowed to clear his tightening throat and continued in a rasp. “That is your decision. You have always set the rules for our engagements and I… any other meeting I would invite you to my home but that isn’t… that isn’t… possible, right now.”
His stranger’s jaw tightened and he glanced away as if struggling with some internal war. Hob held his breath. There was no lie in what he said. He would beg to stay with his stranger if he thought it would help, but why would it when the man would not even give him his name three centuries after their first meeting? He’d made his desires clear, they were always clear. He put his heart on his sleeve for this man, offered everything he had the last time they met, back when he had something to offer. Now he had only himself and if his stranger wanted the tattered remains of the man he’d been, they were his. They’d always been his.
“Where will you go?” his stranger murmured. “If we part ways this night?”
Hob shrugged with one shoulder and looked down. “I think you already know.”
His stranger’s lips thinned to a line. His pale hand rested on the table and Hob watched, mesmerized at his fingertips tapped once, twice against the surface. A small gesture from any other man, but never in all their meetings had Hob seen his stranger so much as gesture, let alone break his poise in such a manner. He might as well have slammed his fist on the table.
“Listen, my friend, you need not worry for me. I can take care of myself. Always have,” Hob winked, trying to summon a bit of the mercenary he’d once been. Or the nobleman. Hell, he’d settle for the printer’s apprentice, but even that seemed so far away, so impossibly difficult to find again within himself.
Something sparked in his stranger’s eyes, something close enough to rage that Hob flinched back. For a moment, he thought he’d seen his friend’s eyes go black, the pupils glinting like a cat’s.
His stranger rose to his feet, towering above, and extended his hand to Hob.“We are going.”
Hob accepted his stranger’s hand on instinct, hardly realizing what he did. It was cool, dry, and pale as marble wrapped around his. Hob rose to his feet, never taking his eyes from his stranger’s. “Alright. Where to?”
His stranger hesitated and his eyes narrowed in calculation. “I have…a house nearby. It is not far.”
Hob stared. “If you’ve had a house in London the whole time we’ve known each other, my friend, I am going to be very cross that you did not once offer to meet between centuries.”
His stranger glanced at him, amused. “Nothing like that. This location is temporary, set aside only for this day.”
“Oh. Well, suppose that’s all right, then.” But his stranger was already walking towards the door. He barely looked when he dropped off a pair of coins on the bar and pulled Hob with him out into the night. Still holding his hand.
Well, Hob wasn’t complaining. If anything, he could barely feel the ground beneath his feet. He felt as if the rush of elation, of sheer disbelief coursing through him, had granted him flight. Three hundred years since they met, and his stranger had never taken more than a moment’s interest in him. Now they spoke for hours, this man he’d spent centuries chasing after, thinking of, wondering about the mystery of the immortality he'd granted Hob.
These past eighty years in particular had been… hard. Losing everyone he knew, one by one, first Eleanor and the baby, then Robyn, then one by one the friends he’d known, either drifting away when Hob’s grief consumed him to the expense of all else or dying themselves. And then the witch hunters came and he’d learned just how friendless he truly was.
Friendless, except for the man who would be waiting to greet him in 1689. Hob had not relied on the idea, at least he had not meant to. He’d meant to pull himself back up. But every day just grew harder, every chance snatched away, until fortune itself seemed set against him. Until there’d been nothing else, nothing at all to look forward to except this meeting.
He knew he’d built this meeting up too much in his mind. His friend would not save him. He never had, except for granting this gift in the first place. He offered no advice, no guidance. Last time, he hadn’t even offered his full attention. Hob had known he was setting himself up for a disappointment that would no doubt break him. There was so little hope left in his life and he placed it all on a man who had never given him any reason to do so, except by being there once a century.
Yet here they were. Walking together through the streets of London, hand in hand, towards his stranger's house, and it was more than Hob had ever dared to hope. Even if it was just for a night. Even if it was just for a few more hours.