Chapter Text
After five centuries of living in stagnation and emptiness, it’s strange for Nightmare to wake up each morning to see the sun rising.
He can’t deny it’s doing him good; a stable circadian rhythm, leaving the universe that gave him enough trauma to write volumes upon volumes without even touching upon the most recent events, and being with Dream again have all chiseled at the marble that is his depression.
But five centuries in a universe with no sunlight have also made him sensitive to it. Bones normally bleach when they’re exposed to the sun long enough, but the first time Nightmare steps outside, patches of his skull bubble like a child’s science project.
Dream buys him a sun hat after that, a floppy straw thing with a pale purple ribbon above the rim.
Even then, each morning he has to steel himself for the brightness of the sun, the feeling of it on his body. His partners constantly hover after him if he goes outside - usually Dream, the only one of them reliably able to use his magic to heal.
It becomes their ritual - each evening, after dinner, they sit on Dream’s bed, in the relative privacy of the room he uses mainly for storage, and for decompressing when his senses have been overloaded by the noise of six partners.
Dream runs his hands over Nightmare’s bones carefully, passing over the slime easily, looking for any burns that need to be dealt with. Sometimes, Nightmare doesn’t feel when he burns, and only knows when Dream finds the scaly, blue-tinted patches of unhealed boils on the back of his skull.
He’s exceedingly gentle, trailing his fingers over the slime as if it’s the fur of a soft animal rather than the liquid negativity it is. When he’s finally satisfied that Nightmare is healed, and nothing is left that can hurt him - not until the sun comes out tomorrow, anyway - Dream finally agrees to allow his brother to return the favor.
His wings are neater than they were when Nightmare had first found out about them, right after they’d reconciled, but even the neatest wings require daily preening, and Nightmare is more than happy to take care of that. These days, though, they get more than just a daily preening - not only is Nightmare eager to do it, but Cross and Error both have habits of running their fingers through Dream’s feathers whenever they can.
He’s not as gentle as Dream is, but it’s less due to intent and more due to the fact that combing is more intrusive than caressing. But he’s just as attentive, plucking out each and every molted feather, and every broken shaft.
It’s never as bad as it used to be - Nightmare used to end up with a veritable pile of little downy feathers in his lap - but he still takes his time, smoothing each feather in turn, beginning from where they connect to Dream’s scapulas, all the way down to the ends of his primaries, near his femurs. All the while, Dream purrs contentedly.
Eventually, Nightmare stops being hurt by the sunlight, though. Privately, he mourns the loss of their little nightly ritual, though Dream seems happy to let Nightmare preen him even without returning the favor.
And every morning, before he steps outside, Nightmare puts that sun hat on, even if he doesn’t really need it anymore.
The hole in the corner of the yard is for an apple tree, though despite the abundance of flora in bloom, and saplings available for purchase at the organic wholesale a few miles away, it remains empty.
None of Nightmare’s partners mention it, though sometimes he catches Dream staring at it, deep in contemplation. Other times, Dust will join him as he sits beside it, and say nothing as he secures a few flowers beneath the ribbon on Nightmare’s sunhat, pecking his cheek before standing once more.
By autumn, the hole is full of leaves, though every morning he empties it and makes sure it hasn’t become refilled with dirt. Horror helps, sometimes, early-riser that he is, scooping the leaves much faster than Nightmare ever could.
“...Take your time,” Horror murmurs as he hands the shovel back to Nightmare, leaning against his side.
“It’s… I should just plant it,” Nightmare replies softly. His fingers twitch on the shovel’s handle, an unconscious urge to forget about this completely and just fill in the hole.
“Why don’tcha… plant somethin’ else?” Horror suggests. His arms wrap around Nightmare’s middle, and Nightmare sags into him, grateful for the warmth against the chill of the autumn wind.
“Because it won’t help.”
“...Sure it will,” Horror’s laugh rumbles in his aural canal. “Even if it ain’t an apple tree… Anythin’ you plant here is a step forward for you… Isn’t it, puddin’?”
He buys a spruce tree the next day, a little blue spruce that’s smaller than the rest. Cross drives him out to the wholesale, but he waits in their beat-up second hand truck, because he knows this is something Nightmare has to do for himself.
(He makes sure to check online before buying it, even though he’s already nearly sure. Blue spruce trees don’t lose their needles in the winter - of course, those needles already look far different from leaves. They don’t bear any fruit either, only dropping cones.)
Cross carries the sapling to the corner of the yard, but the hole isn’t big enough yet, so he places the tree to the side. Truth be told, Nightmare is glad, because he wants to plant it himself.
(He doesn’t want the others to see him crying, because he’s hasn't kept a plant alive since he became corrupted. Anything that wasn’t Horror’s vegetables or Dust’s flowers, he couldn’t resist killing, solely because it could have been an apple tree.)
“Are you okay?” Cross asks softly.
“Yes,” Nightmare forces out, and he knows that Cross knows it’s a lie. “Please tell Horror I’ll eat later,” he adds after a moment. “I… need to do this now.”
“...Alright.” Cross squeezes his hand, gentle as anything. “It’s okay if you can’t.”
Nightmare doesn’t respond, though he hums when Cross nuzzles him gently before he goes into the house, light against the darkening evening sky, and certainly warmer.
Then, he turns and begins enlarging the hole.
It’s tough work - his fingers ache, and he has to fight back a groan every time he leans down to scoop out another shovelful of dirt. Hours pass, and soon he’s working through the darkness, only the moonlight illuminating the patch he works on.
“Brother,” a soft voice says, and Nightmare’s ashamed to say he startles badly, to the point of dropping his shovel onto the ground with a clang.
Dream stands behind him, eyelights glowing their soft golden-yellow in the gloom of the autumn night. He’s bundled up more than Nightmare, in a scarf Error gave him, and one of Killer’s thick hoodies.
“Here,” he says when Nightmare seems to have calmed, pressing another scarf into his brother’s palms.
Nightmare wraps it around his neck with a grunt of thanks as Dream picks up the shovel, less to take the work off Nightmare’s shoulders than to simply keep him from doing it. “You work too hard.”
“I need to finish this,” he replies simply, and when he reaches for the shovel Dream acquiesces easily, handing it back without a protest.
There’s an unhappy feeling in his apple soul when Dream leaves - unhappiness of his own, not someone else's feelings that he’s picked up - but he ignores it, pressing it down like a seed into dirt, in favor of digging the shovel into the cold ground once again.
Then, another shovel joins his own, and Dream doesn’t say anything when Nightmare looks up. He only keeps eye contact for a moment, before joining Nightmare in the work.
Despite his earlier adamance that he be the only one to work on this… project, Nightmare can’t help but admit that having Dream help feels right. It lifts a little heaviness off of his soul, even as each shovelful of dirt he and his brother lift out in opposing rhythms makes his back feel like the weight of the world is on his shoulders.
The moon is high in the sky when they finish. Nightmare is panting, his tentacles laying limp behind him with exhaustion. Dream is less affected, although both his face and wings are dirt-stained. He smiles, but doesn’t speak, and though he places both hands on the burlap-wrapped base of the sapling, he doesn’t lift it until Nightmare does the same.
They move in tandem as they place it into the hole, silent as they cut the burlap off of the roots and gently unwind it, moving as one. Instead of the shovels, they use their hands to fill in the holes, patting it down softly with their hands even as dirt works its way between their bones.
It isn’t until they both stand, Dream moving to lean on him, that Nightmare realizes he’s crying. Dream wipes the tears away with one end of his scarf, untucking it from where it rests inside of his sweatshirt. He says nothing, and Nightmare is grateful.
Dream is sobbing a bit too, nearly silent, gasped noises, but Nightmare’s scarf is as dirt-stained as his hands, so he only nuzzles his brother softly. He doesn’t speak either, but the proximity of his own apple soul to his brother’s matching one feels like a soft blanket, wrapped tight around him in safety and warmth.
Even though its species is called "blue spruce", the tree looks blue-green in the moonlight, and the sight of it, planted by himself and his brother, feels like he’s ripped a bandage off. A bandage that covered a wound created five hundred years ago, when he felled that apple tree so many universes away in a rage.
And it feels like that won’t help, ripping a bandage off such a large, still unhealed wound, but underneath the bandage, the wound is infected, and the old bandages only make it worse. It’s as if planting this tree allowed him to see that, and Dream’s help with it and closeness after the fact is a balm for the infection, a new dressing for the wound.
He presses closer to his brother, and Dream wordlessly pulls them both down to sit on the ground, his wings wrapping around Nightmare's body like a blanket. “I love you,” Dream whispers softly, voice cracking from emotion. There’s more conveyed in those three words than anything - they’re two halves of a whole, more than brothers or lovers, or both or neither, either.
“I love you, too,” Nightmare whispers back, and he hopes it conveys the same unspeakable, gigantic feeling that wants to burst from his soul and take root in the very ground beneath them.
By the way Dream sags against him, a bittersweet smile on his face to match those same bittersweet tears, Nightmare thinks he understands, and it feels like, maybe, the wound might start to heal.