Hob Gadling/Dream of the Endless (Sandman) — Right Here Waiting(Richard Marx)

The love of Hob’s life had just said they weren’t even friends. He could take friends — Hob didn’t have a whole lot of dignity left after five hundred years; he’d crawled through mud and shit in France more than once, he’d stolen coins from the plague pits in the 1600s, and he’d pined like a teenager after a pretty lord for centuries, seizing on every brief look, every almost-smile, every glint in those storm grey eyes. Hob could bear unending millennia of mooning after his stranger. He could not bear this. This abandonment that… that was his fault. He could not take this. And yet he did. He would. As he had born the cold water closing over his head when the witch hunters threw him to the merciless river, and the pain of suffocation and the spasms of his muscles clenched around his last breath, the sting and horror when his mouth finally opened and the river rushed in to claim him as he thrashed under the weight of his iron bindings, he would bear this. He would bear it for the same reason that kept him from begging for Death in the river. For the hope of breath — for the fact that somewhere above him, out of the muck and the horror, there was air, and even as he thrashed painfully beneath the weight of the flowing stream, of the changing tides, of the implacable, grinding force of time, Hob wanted that breath more than he wanted to die. He wanted his stranger, his breath of air, his hope, more than anything in the universe. He would wait. Dream had thought that ending his dalliance with the human would put things back on track. Lonely! Him? Dream of the Endless! He was a force of the universe. What sort of power could lay him so low as to be lonely? Seventy three years in a glass cage had knocked Dream low. As he crouched alone in his dim prison, skin pressed against the cold sphere, his vast mind and powers bound fast and thrust down upon the earth, Dream found some other things that had been cast away — by him — deep into the muck of his consciousness. Things that he, having tumbled lower than he’d ever though possible, could not now turn away from. When he tired of looking at glass and moldering stone, he closed his eyes and saw a pair of kind, brown eyes. Friendship? Hob’s voice twisted Dream’s heart as easily as if he’d reached out of the memory and into Dream’s chest and grasped it in his fists. Naked, mired in indignity, in a torment that did not even grant him the distraction of pain, Dream had no escape from the punishment of his own mind. Time passed. And Dream’s vast consciousness was all bound in this one place with nothing to do but feel the time grinding away, to count the hours, the days, the decades. He felt it when 1989 came. June 7th passed into June 8th like a blade bisecting his body, cutting through his very core, delivering a pain worse than any torture Roderick Burgess could have devised. The imagination of the Prince of Stories hurled scenes at him, scenes of Hob waiting in the White Horse, alone, abandoned, perhaps deciding that this was the last indignity he would take. That if the one person who had been with him nearly all his long life had decided it was time to make his exit, then perhaps it was his time, too. The years ticked on and the pain grew and the horror of the stories that Dream’s own mind had concocted continued to assault him. If he had lost Hob… if the world had lost Hob… Dream had never been so close to calling upon his sister himself and pleading with her to end his torment. But Hob wanted to live — he had always wanted to live. And Dream was Endless. He could wait until the moldering stone wore away and the glass crumbled back into sand. As long as there was any hope that Hob would be there, Dream would wait. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sources Here We Are short film:    • Here We Are (2019) by Alexander Vlahos   Silo trailer:    • Silo — Official Teaser | Apple TV   The Sandman on Netflix #tomsturridge #ferdinandkingsley #thesandman #neilgaiman #HereWeArefilm #ExercizesInAngst