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“Hey, Dark, watch—AARGH!”
Dark looked up in time to catch a faceful of sickeningly pink, translucent blood. Oddly enough, it still left the reek of rust in his nose, terrifyingly sharp. “Wilford?!” Dark could’ve sworn that Wilford was standing in the room with him, obnoxious and loud as he was. And yet—
“Dark?” Wilford’s voice echoed from the other side of the apartment, strained, and Dark got to his feet. This was a tense kind of panic, pulling at the base of his spine.
“Will?”
With a pang, Dark saw him. Or, rather, a part of him.
Wilford’s arm lay detached on the floor, and it would have been almost comical if it, the carpet, and the front of Dark’s shirt weren’t all drenched in an alarming amount of rose-colored blood. If the arm itself wasn’t ripped flesh and bone, and wasn’t twitching spasmodically, and hadn’t been attached to a living (albeit annoying) person not a moment ago.
Panic was replaced by hot, pulsing fear. “Will?!”
“Can you—can you come here, please?” Wilford’s voice shook with shock, with pain, and Dark nearly sprinted across the room. He stopped at the door, a flashing second of clarity, then made for the kitchen. Something, something, had gone terribly wrong.
Dark sunk his nails into the kitchen doorframe, trying and failing to stay composed. “Wh—what?”
Wilford had the corner of the kitchen table in a one-handed death grip, blood spattering the countertops. His hand, however stained, was nothing compared to the absolute fountain gushing from his shoulder, where his arm used to be.
Where his arm was supposed to be.
“Mind giving me a hand?” Wilford managed, before his head hit the ground with a crack.
The first thing that Wilford realized was that he was in Dark’s bed, and that alone should have set off alarm bells.
The second thing he realized was that he could only feel one set of his fingers, and that was enough to send him bolting upright. Eyes still gummed shut, unfocused, he grabbed at air.
A familiar set of hands pushed him back into bed, cold hands against his chest. “Stay still,” Dark’s voice came, a bite, an imperceptible sniffle. Wilford lay back, hesitant, and it all came rushing back.
“What the hell,” Dark scoffed, and there was the sound of a shifting chair, “were you trying to do?”
Wilford’s eyes focused slowly, the stained ceiling above him. The world was spinning. “I was trying to—” his voice was a rasp, and he cleared his throat.
Dark pushed something towards his side, the place his arm should’ve been, then paused. With a mutter, he reached over Wilford to his other hand, pressing a bottle of water into his palm. “Drink.”
Wilford chugged two bottles before trying to speak again, his empty stomach churning. How long had he been out? “I was trying to poof from the living room to the kitchen.”
“Poof?” There was a sneer in Dark’s voice, and Wilford glared blearily over at him.
“Teleport. If you want to call it something boring,” Wilford huffed, mustache quivering, “so be it. But for me, it’s ‘poofing.’”
Dark scoffed, but said nothing, waving Wilford on.
“I did it,” Wiford said, chest puffing with pride. “I poofed. But it hurt. And…”
“You left something behind,” Dark said, and Wilford saw a twisted kind of smile touch his lips. Dark reached down, out of sight, and there was a sound like shifting bottles in an ice chest. With a heave and a slight turn of his head, Dark dropped something unnaturally cold and all too familiar by Wilford’s side.
“My arm.”
“Your entire arm.” Dark’s eyes glinted, and Wilford wasn’t sure that was a good thing.
Wilford reached over, stiff, to grab it. It was his own skin, quite literally his own flesh and bone. Oddly heavy in his uninjured hand, all stained with orange-brown blood. The end of it, where it would have connected to his shoulder, boasted the edge of a sharp bone wrapped in haphazard gauze. Shifting in Dark’s bed, sitting up, Wilford could feel more bandages wrapped around his shoulder. He felt oddly off-balance.
“Woah.” Dark grabbed him by the injury, and Wilford didn’t know if he’d intended to hurt him or not. With firm hands, Dark helped him sit up.
This was too-familiar a scenario, now. One of them bandaged, bloodstained, broken. The other slow, supporting, suspicious. It was a mutual trust, an all-or-nothing partnership, a weapon to use and be used against.
Wilford leaned heavily against the headboard, disembodied arm across his lap, bloodstained sheets. He looked at Dark, a question in his eyes. “Do you think...”
Dark sighed, stiffening, steeling himself. He nodded. “Yeah, I do.”
Wilford scrunched his eyes shut, pain spiking through his side. “This is gonna suck.”
“‘An ‘oo ‘urry up?!”
Dark, tongue between his lips, shot a glare up at Wilford. “Just a moment.” His voice shook slightly where his hands were steady, a needle clamped between his fingers, slick with blood.
Wilford clenched his jaw on the towel stuffed in his mouth, fighting a scream. His working hand fisted in the sheets, knuckles white; his other hand limp, dead.
And yet, Dark was passing the needle and thread through the skin of his shoulder, through the raw flesh where his limb had been ripped off. Bone popping from a socket, muscle fibers and tendons stretching, then tearing like thread. Now, Dark pushed the cold flesh back into place, a worn puzzle piece, and sewed the skin to hold it all haphazardly together.
Dark drew back, the end of the thread hanging loose from his teeth. “Done. You’re bleeding.”
Wilford spat the towel out of his mouth, pink with blood. “Obviously,” he shot at Dark, shifting.
His arm flopped lifelessly, pulling at the stitches, and Wilford winced. He pretended that he didn’t see Dark look away, gritting his teeth.
“Well,” Dark breathed, looking down, hands curled into fists. “Now what?”
Wilford paused, breathing deeply. “Help-- help me stand up,” he muttered, casting the sheets off of him, hating the way they dragged, blood-sodden and wet and heavy across his lap.
Dark nearly caught him as he stood, supporting most of his weight. “You have a plan?” he almost sneered, even half-covered in Wilford’s blood.
“Of course I do.” Wilford managed a grin, steadying himself. “I’m going to poof from here to the living room, and everything should go back to normal.”
Dark stepped back, eyeing Wilford with a mixture of horror and respect. “And if it goes wrong?” he half-whispered, half-growled.
Wilford gave Dark a look that screamed pity. “Then it goes wrong,” he shrugged. And in a poof of pink smoke, he vanished.
The words that pass between them are few, these days. Wilford’s arm, even healed and fully functional, bears a scar that they don’t speak of. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d sat with a towel clamped between their teeth as if to dull the pain, nor the first time they’d stabbed a needle slick with blood into streaming, gored flesh, over and over.
They look after each other, under it all, and it’s not a friendship. No, a friendship would have been some gossamer thread, a back-and-forth dance, a honeyed note of confidence. This is firm hands against oozing wounds, a push that’s not always reciprocated with a pull to stop from falling off the edge, the music of two balls rattling around a box, unable to exist without the other. This is Wilford and Dark’s existence, until the Doctor comes along.