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This isn’t how it’s supposed to go, she thinks. Not like this at all.
When Puffy stepped through that portal all those months ago, full netherite gleaming with power to take her duckling down, she thought she was doing the right thing. For herself, for Tommy, for the server (What had he even done to her personally? He had protected her, trailed behind her with adoration in his eyes that the server hadn’t seen in so long). Throughout the entire confrontation, that mask had hidden all his reactions, and Puffy felt the annoyance and anger that radiated off a few who wished to see the admin even a bit scared (so was it justice or revenge-) and she ignored it. It was for the good of the server she reasoned. He needed the lesson. So what if they never told him what the actual lesson was? So what if there wasn’t a trial? Keeping him out, free, was a liability. Dream was smart. He could figure it out. He had always figured it out in the past. What made this so different?
Seeing him face down on the obsidian, however, covered in blood, unmoving and still and so unlike her duckling made her thoughts halt with a screech. Her breath stuttered and if she stared closely enough, Foolish is lying right there beside Dream, eyes dull and unseeing as the life slowly left them. If she stared long enough, she would be right at the banquet again, the smell of iron slowly choking her from the inside out, guilt clawing through her like a wolf, staring her down and asking, ”is this what you wanted?” as her two sons bled out right before her eyes, Puffy helpless to it all. His mask is gone, and the pale, lifeless face that looked up at her nearly had her heaving at the cruelty of it all. The cruelty she had subjected by being at the confrontation and later denying him human company when he killed Tommy in the prison.
(When Tommy later admitted to Puffy under the mask of night that he had killed the cat in the prison and hit Dream first repeatedly, Puffy had outwardly sighed and praised him for opening up more. He fidgeted under her praise, mumbling about how the prison and its warden felt wrong and cold, like he was slowly going insane despite the company he had, even if it was “that bitchass green bastard”. Inwardly though, her gut stewed with something uncomfortable. A sense of wrongness that was now beginning to unravel and tangle with the truth of Pandora’s Vault.)
Looking back, for all his youthfulness, Puffy admired Tommy’s perceptiveness. Catching all the hints before anyone else could, even if he couldn’t piece the full picture together. She wished she could say the same for herself.
She had a speech ready. The words had been boiling on the tip of her tongue. She expected a still snarky Dream. A Dream who was still manipulating with all his might to hide any form of vulnerability that could be used against him. A Dream who would be cold and callous and cruel. Not this. Her last semblance of blissful ignorance shattered, grief washing over her anger at the Warden, at Sam who had been laughing and dancing with her while he let such inhumane conditions happen behind closed doors. Her knees gave out beneath her as she stumbled over to Dream, a shaky hand settling gently into his hair. She nearly wept with joy when he pushed softly into her hand, exhaling shakily at the comfort, and all she can say into the cold, heartless room is, “This is not the lesson we wanted you to learn. This was no lesson.”
Because Puffy, if anything, is the biggest liar out there. She’s the biggest liar to herself and to everyone she said she will protect. She wished she could say she threw Dream in here with good intentions, with intentions of bringing peace once and for all, but she would be lying. The truth was that she was scared. Scared of being associated with Dream, and from what it seemed like, he held the same fears as her if the immediate distance was anything to go by. Secretly though, Puffy could’ve cared less for the server. For L’manburg. It was why she provided the TNT after all. Her final act of rebellion to the system, however, after months of indescribable guilt and lying and pretending that she was fine, that this was what she wanted, was joining the mission to save Dream, taking on his title of Harpocrates temporarily. Hell, if it wouldn’t condemn her to a fate like Dream’s, Puffy would scream to the world that she wanted her old duckling back. She wanted the tall and intimidating and imposing duckling on the server over this. She would scream and beg to the fates for her manipulative and unhinged son if it meant not having to see him unmoving a second longer.
But the world isn’t fair and she has to sit and hold as her youngest son in her arms because what else is she good for? She doesn’t have brute strength like Techno nor healing hands like Phil. She’s the bait. The backup in case someone came in before the rest of the Syndicate could. All she can do is plead helplessly to the stale air before her. Hope and mumble small words of comfort to her duckling before her that it’ll be fine, that he’s finally free and that he can heal. Yet, Dream doesn’t respond to her words and barely reacts to her touches and Techno and Phil will be here any moment please please please hold on for me my love my pride and joy my forgotten and betrayed- and it hurts.
Because Puffy is the biggest coward liar hypocrite there is, and her love and joys are the biggest proof there is.