Chapter Text
On the other side of the door, finally, finally alone, Sam set out to clean up the rest of his base.
Stone, newly smelted from his demonstration earlier, was set to go in another round in the furnaces to replenish his smooth stone supply. His potion brewer was checked and restocked, extra potions carefully gathered and stacked in chests hidden in a back room. He even got around to his long neglected chest organization, carefully sifting through the contents of the many scattered chests thrown around the entrance to his base and sorting them into a neat wall of labelled chests he decided to make on a whim: various woods thrown in the chest in the top left corner, a collection of old weapons hastily shoved in one on the right edge, redstone and its many related blocks and machines filling the bottom row. With that done, he even broke into the collection of ores he had silk touched, going through them with his Fortune pick and gathering his spoil into his chests and enderchest. Anything to keep his hands busy, to keep his mind off of the ghost sleeping in the blue-lined room just behind the wall and the lonely grave in the middle of the woods and the prison floor, still stained with days-old blood-
He stopped, breathing ragged, hands tightening on the pick in his hands until his mind caught up and that, too, disappeared in a flash of light and his own faint pulse of horror.
His head tipped against the wall in front of him as he closed his eyes, forcing air into his lungs as he willed his mind to go silent. Flashes of gold-edged memories painted the back of his eyelids, blurry at the edges like a dream, and each image of all of them, young and carefree and sunlit, made his chest grow tighter. He hadn’t thought about the past in what felt like forever, but somehow the sight of the wavy-haired ghost in the other room had dislodged all of his carefully constructed walls, sending snatches of laughter and the warmth of sun-soaked skin floating up to the forefront of his mind, cutting through the cold almost recklessly in their sharp-edged warmth.
They’d all changed so much since then.
He was one of the later additions to the group, had come to know Bad first and his pack of hellions not too long after. It was an old world: Bad’s world, to them, even if he wasn’t really the Admin, the place where most of them first learned how to brew a potion and construct a portal and enchant their first piece of armor. It hadn’t taken much before Bad - perpetually frantic but ceaselessly kind, even then - had invited him to join their group with open arms, and Sam, living alone for about as long as he could remember, content to experiment with redstone on his own until he’d come to meet this unconventional family of bright-eyed kids, had eagerly accepted.
The memories bubbled forth despite his efforts to push them back down, refusing to be caged as they had been before. Sapnap - then Pandas - fiery in every sense of the word, unruly hair and a heart of gold, an expert at getting into trouble and almost as good as getting himself out of it; George, older and therefore meant to be one of the more responsible of the group, but usually on the side egging on the chaos much to Bad’s disapproval; Ponk, enamored with his lemon trees already, a perpetual glint of mischief shining in his eyes; Alyssa and Callahan, always a unit, attached at the hip as a tag-team that everyone knew better than to mess with between the former’s endless determination and the latter’s whip-quick mind. And Dream - a natural leader, even as young as he was - usually at Bad’s tail, dutifully following the older with bright, intelligent eyes, a stone axe slung over his hip at all times to aid with the mobs he’d fight in the evenings and early mornings. All of them young, light on their feet from learned caution, but carefree. Happy.
They’d all drifted to their own separate circles as they grew up, Sam spending more time running redstone experiments, Alyssa and Callahan continuing to go world-hopping, Ponk busying himself with one project or another. They’d kept in touch, of course, the Dream Team coming to visit between the manhunts that’d become their new thing as of late, Ponk crashing into his base without warning every few weeks, Bad making sure to run around and send care packages and worry over all of them in turn - but it hadn’t really been the same. So when Sam received an invitation in Dream’s familiar scrawl, asking him if he’d want to join a world of his own making, start fresh in a new place for all of them to call home, he agreed near instantly.
It’d been good, at first, which was probably the worst part of it all. The center of the server was thick with old memories, of fishing on the roof of the community house, shoulder to shoulder under a night sky, of finding Fran for the first time and bringing her in the lop-sided brick box of a house that had been their first attempt at making something somewhat presentable, of shoving each other off of the rickety wooden paths and laughing at their waterlogged glares of betrayal.
And then- and then- and then-
He’d left, and come back to whispers of war and blood and explosions, to a home split in two, a ghost of a house that no one lived in anymore. Faces that he didn’t know, rumors that somehow always lead back to the masked nightmare that he’d once called a friend. He’d learned to keep a sword within easy reach, resolved to smooth over the cracks in every guarded person he met with slices of pie and an easy smile, knew, even then, that it wouldn’t be enough.
And- maybe he shouldn’t have tried, maybe he shouldn’t have tried to build bridges over chasms reinforced by blackened blood and TNT, but by prime, how could he not? He’d taken and taken and taken, old hurts and new ones tearing at his heart as he lifted them onto his shoulders, seeing the smiling faces of a family he’d once loved in the hardened eyes of each kid he’d met. They were all so young, and he did not know what stole the innocence from their expressions and painted their eyes grey in grief, but he could stand by and take their hurts and give parts of himself in exchange.
It wasn’t until Pandora that he’d really realized what it all entailed, realized that there was only so much of himself that he could give, so much he could take before his bones buckled under the weight. By the time he’d felt the extent of the burden, he was a frog boiled alive, a man taking the mantle of a god and collapsing beneath his own hubris, held together only by duty and exhaustion and the same spiraling sentences of contracts swirling in his brain. He’d given his kindness, given his warmth, given his gentle hands and soft-edged words and sunlit love and filled the gaps left with ice, stripped himself brick by brick by brick until the cold was all that remained-
A scream.
Sam jumped to his feet, sword appearing in his hand automatically as ran to the side of his base. The screams continued, high-pitched and awful, and his fingers scrambled over the redstone by the entrance in his panic to little success - prime, how was he messing this up? He could feel himself hissing louder as the frustration built, the screams from just beyond the wall further messing with his head and making it impossible to think, and with a wordless roar he switched to his pickaxe and slammed it into the smooth stone wall.
The blocks crumbled under his pickaxe, falling into his inventory as he crashed into the room, the process feeling far too long even though it must’ve all happened in the space of a second or two. He looked up, breathing ragged, at the source of the screaming echoing in his ears, looked into unseeing void, the noise growing impossibly louder- and froze.
The child ghost was sitting up on the bed, backed against the headboard, face pale and slack with fear. Tears - void-black, the same lightless darkness that painted his eyes - swelled on his cheeks and dripped down to his chin, his lips parted in an intelligible shriek. And yet, it were the marks that kept Sam pinned in place still and silent against the side of his makeshift doorway, deep and black and seeping over his skin, a perfect replica for the open cuts that had marred Dream’s skin following Quackity’s last (in every sense of the word) session.
What the hell-
“Please-” Dream screamed, voice hoarse, and a thousand repetitions of the same words reverberated in Sam’s skull, the exact same plea said in the exact same way over months and months overlapping and roaring in his ears until it was the only thing he could hear, “Please stop- please I- please don’t I’m sorry- please-” His voice, high-pitched and trembling, keening into pitiful shrieks that deflated into seethes of air between his bared teeth, flagged in his chest further with every word, quieting as his throat could no longer bear the strain. “Please- please- ”
Sam could hardly move forward, feet rooted in the ground as the ghost curled more into himself, his knees pulled to his chest and arms curled around them, shoulders shaking with the force of his crying. His screams died down into breathless sobs, whimpering and broken-sounding, the inky liquid bleeding from the spiraling cuts dripping from his skin and disappearing just before hitting the bedsheets. He watched numbly as the sound of his crying muffled, quieted, desperate wails becoming a hiccupping sniffles from the ball nestled in the back corner of the bed. The marks, too, disappeared, gradually fading into freckled, unblemished skin, until he was sitting, silent, looking for all the world like nothing had happened at all.
“Sammy?” The kid looked up, fixing a blank stare his direction, seemingly completely unbothered save for the slight, confused wrinkle between his eyebrows. “Wha’s up?” He rubbed at his eyes, voice thick with sleep. “Are you crying?”
Sam exhaled, lungs shuddering dangerously, suddenly aware of the uncomfortable, sticky feeling of half-dried tears against his face. His legs finally, finally, seemed able to move again, even as his gut lurched at the sight of the kid perched loosely over his pillow, and he stepped back into the light of the main area of his base at his back.
“No,” he lied, voice raspy and rumbling. “It’s just- allergies.”
“Oh,” Dream shook his head slowly, eyes fluttering shut, “Mmkay. D’you wanna hug? Hugs make ‘veryth’ng better.”
“...no, thank you, Dream.” He reached for the two smooth stone blocks he had mined in his entrance, struggling to keep his voice unbothered, something dark and cold and awful crawling up his throat and crisscrossed lines of black and red painting the backs of his eyelids every time he blinked. “Get some sleep.”
---
He didn’t sleep.
It shouldn’t have bothered him, not really. It was- startling, to see that the ghost perhaps wasn’t as amnesiac as he thought, but the screams, nightmares, memories- whatever- they shouldn’t have left him shaking, stumbling for a glass of water that he stared at for a solid half an hour before drinking. They shouldn’t have left him crying, of all things, shouldn’t have left screams in his ears as a faint ringing he couldn’t shake, shouldn’t have left him staring numbly at the ceiling of his bedroom until the sun came up again in the morning.
Shouldn’t, Sam thought bitterly, was starting to be a word that he really really didn’t like.
Exhaustion clung to him like a heavy fog, weighing down his eyelids but sleep still failing to come as he watched his ceiling lighten from a dark slate-grey to a light silver, flopped over the covers of his bed with his arms splayed at his sides. He was no stranger to sleeplessness, had struggled with it regularly following his appointment over the prisoner, but he’d gotten used to it in time. It had been a while since he’d pulled an all-nighter and he could feel the effects in every twinge and ache of his tired body, muscles complaining with every movement he made as he rolled over to bury his face in his pillow.
As much as he might’ve wanted to simply sit in bed and ignore existence for the rest of the day, the sun’s return to the sky meant that he would have to get up eventually. Sure enough, from just beyond the doorway of his room, he could make out a dull scratching noise, the tell-tale sounds of nails clicking against the tiled floor, and another minute brought Fran, tail wagging, in a white-furred blur that skidded to a stop by the side of his bed.
“Good mornin’ Fran,” he rumbled, reluctantly pressing himself up into a sitting position and hissing in pain as his body screamed in protest. “Guess I better get up, huh?”
She barked, loudly, and he huffed in amusement as he ran a hand over the fur on top of her head.
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
He stood up, forgoing his usual golden armor in favor of a comfortable hoodie and pair of sweatpants - hey, not being the Warden had many perks, and no longer having a dress code was by far one of them - pulling his mask from the dresser by his bed and strapping it around his head with practiced fingers. The familiar process allowed his mind to wander, and he pulled at his lip with his teeth as he tightened each strap; no matter how many “shouldn’t”’s he could think of (and, well, there were many), it didn’t change the fact that he had been affected by whatever the hell last night was. That something - or many things - had been knocked loose by the sight of the ghost now haunting his base, bringing long-forgotten memories and feelings bubbling to the surface one by one.
Sam buried his head in his hands with a long-suffering sigh, trying and failing to quiet the swirling thoughts in his head. He’d learned, quickly, that regret had no place in the heart of a Warden, that he had no choice but to trudge on without looking back as his role meant more and more blood ended up on his hands. Remembering did nothing but keep him from sleeping; guilt did nothing but steal his appetite. Anything and everything that got in the way of his efficacy as the server’s protector, as Pandora’s Warden, would have to be quickly and ruthlessly destroyed.
It sounded awful, now, but he’d gotten used to the screams, to the torture. The same sounds that had bile scrambling up his throat the first week barely even made him flinch by the third; the paralyzing hesitance that gripped him every time he entered the cell slowly diminished into nothing at all. He’d seen the same happen in Quackity, watched as the unease fell away from those dark, intelligent eyes until there was nothing but a voracious anger burning deep and cold within them, listened to Dream’s screams with no more than a detached sense of duty and a faint sense of annoyance.
By all means, nothing should have changed. He’d been in Pandora, in that same blackstone-lined room, waiting and watching across the lava not even two days ago, had tuned out the screams in favor for scratching out blueprints of his bank less than forty-eight hours before. It wasn’t even as bad - the cool air of his base beat out the musty, lava-heated room in Pandora by a mile, free of the smell of smoke and iron that clung to every inch of the place; the screaming had lasted no more than fifteen minutes, no match for the hours and hours of agony that characterized each of Quackity’s sessions- and yet- and yet-
Fran pawed at his legs, huffing sharply through her nose, and he bent down to scratch her behind the ear as he pushed his thoughts away. It didn’t matter; that part of his life, Pandora and the Warden and the prisoner and Quackity and what it all entailed - it was behind him, now. He didn't have to think about it at all. His communicator buzzed; he lifted it up to read the message.
<Quackity whispers to you: Any new developments?>
Or - well - mostly behind him.
<You whisper to Quackity: No>
<You whisper to Quackity: You know what to do.>
<You whisper to Quackity: Keep quiet.>
Sam sighed, heavily, as the message came through near-instantly, the uneasy feeling from earlier in the night returning, combining uncomfortably with the ache of his head from a lack of sleep.
<Quackity whispers to you: Will do>
<Quackity whispers to you: Partner.>
He pushed the communicator back down on the table maybe a little harsher than he intended, sinking back down onto his bed as Fran squeezed herself against his legs, laying her head on his knees. He smiled wanly, pressing the palms of his hands on both sides of her face, looking into the dark browns of her eyes.
“Fran, what did I get myself into?”