Chapter Text
Nightmare distantly acknowledges the ground cracking beneath them both. He vaults himself over Dream as his brother tears through the air with a snap of his staff. Like a snake, his leg snaps out, and Dream drops to the ground.
This battle is wrought with sentiment, and while he would normally manipulate it; move around it like water, he wanted nothing to do with the subject in question.
"We were supposed to ascend together," his brother crackles below him, wide yellow eyes aglow with corruption. He could see it, winding through his face and his arms, like roots drinking off of his lifeblood. The transformation was beginning, Nightmare notes, and Dream continues to rant.
"You matter so much to me," Nightmare doesn't flinch. "You mean everything to me."
Nightmare races for the high ground, as the grass tears beneath Dream's bare feet, and the ground crumbles around him. Breaking their oaths was the last he would expect from Dream, but he always knew that power and knowledge came hand in hand with destruction. Unfortunately for him, Dream possessed only two-thirds of that equation, and Nightmare wanted to be part of none of it.
He forces his unwilling, heavy legs to continue his mad dash up their grassy hill, up their picturesque knoll in the middle of nowhere, where the sleeping gods laid their heads to rest and died. He did not want to become one of them, nor did he want to fully arise as one. Dream obviously sought differently, and his mind raced as he tried to think of ways to keep his brother from assimilating him into his despair-ridden state.
Behind him, there was a bellow, in that familiar tone Dream would always use when Nightmare purposefully tipped him over the edge. The only difference was that Dream was out to actually kill him this time. Nightmare decides the aid of his newfound limbs would help him crawl up the hill better. "If we become gods, there will be nothing left to stop us! No one would hurt you ever again, and I would finally be able to protect you!"
He was still trying. Nightmare throws open the front door and vaults over the stairs to their shared space, ignoring the still warm apple pie on their table, and the slices half-eaten on their plates. He ignores the tapestry and its embroidery, woven by himself, hung over their bed, and the unkempt side of it where Dream slept. Instead, he wraps his shaking, cold hands, around a familiar farming sickle he'd only use for wheat, and gives himself three seconds.
Three seconds, he thought to himself. To muster up the courage to cut his brother down.
In those three seconds, counting down the too long and too short moments between him and his brother, Nightmare rewinds himself back to the morning. Waking up entangled in their worn sheets, and with Dream’s stupid hand in his face. There was no trace of this betrayal in the tranquility of his expression, Nightmare thinks, as he stares at the bed. He was peaceful, and then he wasn’t, and it all went literally downhill from there.
Nightmare didn’t understand what the reasoning was behind this. He knew Dream, inside and out, and they were blood and bone as they were two halves of the same person. He knew Dream always held an especially protective streak for him, but when he learned of what the villagers had been doing to him all his life, Dream lost his composure. Of course he would, it was horrid, but it wasn’t bad enough to warrant a massacre.
(Was it?
Seeds of doubt tore through his chest, and he shook them. Death was not an acceptable fate for children.)
That day, just yesterday, Dream sat a moment longer than usual. He always did that when he was thinking too hard about something. Nightmare sat with him, because he listens to Dream, as Dream does for him. But Dream was off.
“I can’t believe they would do that to you.” Dream’s food laid untouched in front of him. Nightmare figured he’d down the entire meal within the next second, but he didn’t eat that night.
Nightmare winds bandages around his knuckles, just as he used to do when they got ready to spar. He fumbles, once, twice, then a third time, and curses aloud with his rough voice. He drops the gauze by his feet, and Nightmare feels a scream build in his chest.
“It’s not that bad,” Nightmare weakly protested. Dream’s eyes snapped to him, and Nightmare nearly flinched back. He was glaring at Nightmare. Dream has never done that. Swift, and to the point, Dream corrected him. “I will not stand them treating you like that. I will not stand anyone treating you like that.”
With one hand bound and the other clutching a simple sickle, Nightmare tried to think of what the hell he’d need in a fight against a demigod.
His chair scraped back from the table, and a fleeting thought crossed Nightmare’s mind. Would Dream strike him? But he quickly sent that thought off. Dream paced the dining room, his footfalls rhythmic, even as his mind was turbulent - like cutting waves against a seashore. “They never showed this side when we were together in the market, but I should have known. I should have seen it. I should have done something about it, anything, I should have known they would do this.”
He throws open the drawers and searches through the wrapped up envelopes and his pages upon pages of fiction, before finding it. His medallion. Dream hated this thing with a passion, and always said it felt horrible to touch. When Nightmare wore it, Dream said it burned to touch him. It was his gift from their Mother, the one who made them, whose death made their bodies. They never understood why she would give him a medallion that would separate him from his brother, that would turn the masses against him, but now he understands.
Nightmare has manipulated villagers before. He’s twisted them against one another, seeing every little bad thing inside of them, and cradling it in his freezing fingers to let them rip one another apart. It has had horrible conclusions, and the incident has never left his mind. They are not fully innocent at all, but he has hurt them. Telling Dream that, now, would only seem like he’s trying to defend them. So he doesn’t.
He is self-serving, he knows, but he does not see Dream in the person pacing the floor. He sees something else. He sees Mother.
The house’s air is cool and crisp, falling to fill the spaces between his ribs, and he wonders where his brother is as he gulps down breathes to prevent his panic from gulping him down. Then, he hears the sound of wings, and fear quickly takes the place of air. He throws the medallion around his neck, cursing faster now, chanting even, and wishing that he took the time to mend the hole in his damn shirt last night before his battle against an angel.
Nightmare has never tried to do this before. He has never tried to manipulate his brother, he has never brought his freezing, cold fingers into his scalding soul and turned his anger at anything, but he searches - and he cannot find anything to work with. Dream is blinding, Dream’s soul blinds him and melts his hands, and he cannot turn his brother. It hurts him as well.
The roof caves in, and Dream laughs.
Many normal things have come to inspire fear in him, today.
Dream, however, is no longer ‘normal’, and Nightmare strains to look at his brother now.
There, he stands in front of him, in their room, bright enough to light up a cavern. Behind him, there are several pairs of wings. They are horrible, and they make him nauseous to glance at. Nightmare hates listening to Dream talk sometimes, but when he opens his mouth and the words come out, Nightmare cannot help but pay attention. His voice is suddenly too loud, like a bell, and it resounds in his mind, their mind, like a thousand songs all at once, harmonizing in the most horrendous song of destruction and paradoxical despair.
Dream’s eyes flash, golden, a burning orange, and then white. He watches the colors change, fire trapped in a familiar body, and they set the floorboards aglow.
“Take off the necklace, Nightmare.”
He doesn’t even need to give his refusal. Dream presses on, breaching his privacy, breaching the mental boundaries between them both. Nightmare feels a deeply-buried, sharp fury slide through his marrow, and he breathes. It comes out as smoke.
Golden ichor drips from Dream’s eyes and his nose, falling onto the floorboards. It’s thick like blood and sap, and bleeds into the cracks between the wood. His words boom louder, like a howling wind in Nightmare’s head, filling the empty spaces between letters and disrupting his thoughts.
“You’re being childish.”
Nightmare steps back from him, keeping his eyes off of Dream’s pleading but manic expression, the way that his wings have folded behind him to keep their glare from blinding him, and his outstretched hands. Dream glows from the inside like those paintings of gods among mortals, and Nightmare cannot bear to look at him. That was the body of his brother, filled with… filled with someone else. That couldn’t be him.
He runs, and he skips the stairs, because with these new limbs on his back, he doesn’t need stairs in a chase. Dream follows behind him, close, as usual, and Nightmare throws the table down to the floor to stall. The plates shatter on the floor, and Dream yells his name, but he keeps running.
The long grass slows his feet, so he tears through with whatever else he has. The writhing appendages that broke through his ribs form into spider legs, and he clambers away from their birth home, from the hill and the mountain and the trees, and takes cover in the forest.
Dream’s wings will take him into the skies, so he cannot be in the open. If he must, Nightmare frantically thinks, he will hide in the caverns, underground. It will be incredibly painful for his brother to find him down there, because the night harms him in ways Nightmare never would. But for Dream to force a golden apple on him, a forbidden fruit that would literally kill Nightmare to eat, he must take equally drastic measures.
Even now, crawling through the trees and over roots, he apologizes to his brother. In response, he feels his brother’s fury, his grief, and his pleas. There are no words or thoughts between them, but only feelings and images and memories. With their boundary broken, a dam overflows, and emotions crash against each shore. Nightmare tries to hastily rebuild it, so he can hide away, before Dream digs his burning hands into Nightmare’s mind to tear the answer of his location from him.
Dusk will fall soon to the night, and Nightmare knows that Dream has little time left to search for him now. Even with all the glow that he puts off, Dream cannot be in the dark. He will extinguish, and become a magically preserved corpse until day arises again. Statues, Nightmare grimly remembers as he clambers over a dead animal, became very nauseating after learning that. Nightmare has a similar condition to the daytime, but clinging to his brother abated the pain of heat cracking his bones. Their sacred grounds, the land which their home was built upon, was a sanctuary from this rule.
Was.
Nightmare finds the cavern which he lost his brother in, another day, another lifetime ago, and he throws himself inside.
His back aches and burns horribly from the usage of his new limbs, like a muscle overworked. Nightmare ignores the pebbles that get stuck in his feet or the rocks he trips over. His ribs choose this time to send searing pain through his chest, and occasionally, he heaves from overexertion, because he never had to run this much from a mob. The house was never that far away from the village.
The darkness is unveiled by his peering eyes, appearing through a tinted filter. He misses cracks in the ground, ignores the dust that covers his toes, and presses on. He goes deeper into the caves, squeezing through small spaces, and is lost in the maze.
Long ago, he ventured this cave with his brother, holding a bright, bright lantern. That was Mother’s gift to Dream, his lantern, so he could venture the night with his brother. But Dream, Nightmare supposed, did not have much use for that now. He was brighter than that lantern, even if it did feel so comforting to be near. Nightmare secretly wished he could do the same with his own gift, but his touch left the lantern extinguished.
Done with his reminiscing and too tired to keep going, he stops in a familiar location, unaware of the golden threads slipping through his thoughts.
Exhausted, he collapses against a boulder. It hurts, the dirt getting into the huge hole in his back, but he doesn’t try to move any more. His entire body is thrumming with magic and with fear, and his heavy breathing is the only thing he can hear in this empty cave.
Nightmare finally lets a sob rip through his throat, and he shrieks into the darkness, unheard. Warmth begins to thread through his arms and his back, and he cannot help his involuntary reaction to curl into it. Dream’s empathy, his pity, and his regret slip through to him, even with his frantically built wall, and Nightmare does not cry.
He refuses to cry, but someone continues to wail in this cavern with him.