Work Text:
He knows not how he got here. He knows not why he can breathe.
But he knows this earthy ruin.
A shell of a man picks himself up off the crumbling stone, tasting the wreckage and asphalt on his tongue, feeling the weight of the soul lantern’s dim energy waft through the air and stick to his skin like bandages wound tight around a bloody wound.
He traces a hand idly across his wool jumper, over his abdomen. No cut, no trace that there ever was a mark.
The world stands still around him, eerie nothingness looking down at him. The shadows and the crevices cut through thick granite and coal lurk in his peripherals, all to peer at the one who interrupted their hollow slumber.
The darkness hangs heavy.
Wilbur Soot is awake.
He doesn’t quite believe it.
The ravine calls to him. His throat bobs.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Where has the void faded away to? What trick is this, tormenting him, forcing him to reminisce? He despises the memories, the past, the pain, and he had shoved it down, lost it in the tumbling blacker-than-black abyss by cutting a thumb on the sharp vinyl edge of an eight of spades, letting the blood run down his fingers and drip into nothing.
Smoke stings in his nose and he recoils. This nightmare is peculiar. It lingers at his vision, is crafted with such authentic precision that it startles him. He can turn his head, then turn it back again, and the details go unshifted. The buttons on the walls remain where they stay, the halls keep quiet.
He takes a step. Wobbles a bit at the uneasiness in the muscles. It aches.
He feels torn, scattered, shredded. It stings and it wraps around itself in endless cycle, hurt and comfort in tandem. So strange, that dreams can take such a heavy toll on the boy. Nightmares, though? That’s easier to believe.
After all, Wilbur is a haunted man.
And right now, he stands in a ghost ravine.
It beckons. He obeys. Traces a hand along the walls, nails scratching softly into the layers of dust he finds as his feet carry him knowingly through the caverns. He doesn’t even need to think about where he’s going, and his breath catches in his throat. Paths previously worn rugged from his pacing when he was alive are now untouched. He passes the pit. Techno and Tommy’s fighting had been so delicious, so appetizing to the mania and the chaos. They’d fallen apart that day, the three of them. The stage set for betrayal and broken ties. Wilbur feels a stab of pain in his chest. The thought of his brothers is too cruel to his already unsteady mind.
Tommy was despicable. He’d came and went in the void, visiting for merely a month. A month, whereas Wilbur had lain cold and breathless there for nine years with nothing but his alcoholic archrival and a newer, nonsensical man he did not know but Tommy had. And he’d taunted the boy, ridiculed him, mocked him, but when Tommy’s words faded away and Wilbur found himself speaking for no one, the hurt had risen anyways.
Dream had used the book on Tommy.
And now its powers had been extended to Wilbur as well.
The realization hits him like bricks, stabs him like a sword, twists the air around him into something curdled with rotten anger and spoiled fear.
Oh Gods.
He’s alive.
Wilbur clutches at his chest, feels the pulse thrumming through his veins, tastes the saliva and soot. It burns, it burns. It’s oh-so-real, and it’s just out of reach, and he wants the void and he wants his brothers and he wants Phil’s warm embrace but not with blood smearing the space between them and he wants to die again and he wants to live but he wants to destroy the world, wants everyone to burn with him, and-
His communicator pings. Once.
The sound is the loudest thing he’s ever heard after nine years of death. It rattles in his skull like he’s a pinball machine, echoing long after it’s left his ears. He clenches his teeth, the pressure mounting into an almost unbearable gnashing of bone against bone.
He digs his hand into his trench-coat pocket. Feels metal and plastic, scoops it out roughly. The glass screen flickers into color with a press of his thumb. A single line of text rolls across the liquid crystal surface.
<Dream> Welcome back to the land of the living. You can come thank me at the prison.
Oh.
He owes the man his life.
Wilbur sighs. Cracks his back, his neck- stars, he feels old- and sets to work up the deteriorated stone stairs.
Pogtopia is a suffocating, abandoned ravine, his very grave, but once he’s retrieved Dream, he will return. How can he not?
It’s his only home.