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“I’m bored.”
“I know.”
“Are you bored?”
“Shut up.” Dream rolls over, trying to fit his body into a comfortable position on the obsidian floor.
“I’m going to touch the lava again.”
“Okay.”
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me not to?”
“Tommy, at this point I don’t give a single shit.”
“You’re a bitch.”
“You’ve said. Shut up.”
“No. Why’re you sleeping? It’s morning.”
“How can you even tell?”
“The clock.”
“I burnt the clock. Sam won’t give me a new one.”
“Won’t give us.”
“Won’t give me. You’re dead.”
“Still here, though.”
“I can tell.”
A moment of silence, then a bubbling, fizzing sound. “Hey Dream.”
Couldn’t someone have warned him what Tommy’s ghost would be like? Worse than the living boy. The living boy was fun. This faded shadow has no fight, just an everlasting interest in anything that can amuse him.
“Hey Dream.”
Dream clamps his hands over his ears. Few things really changed since he killed Tommy. At least he doesn’t yell for Sam. He doesn’t plead to be let out. He just speaks incessantly to the only other one there.
Dream’s definitely being haunted.
“Dream!”
He sits up and slams his hands into the ground. “What?”
“Look at this!”
Dream rubs his eyes and squints towards the ghost, half-blinded by the lava’s light. “At what?”
Tommy grins, and sticks his whole hand right into the molten rock. “Watch!”
His hand is flaming when he takes it back out. It’s clear of lava and Dream has no idea how the flames are even fueled on the ghost’s insubstantial skin, but it’s a gruesome sight. Perhaps he’s dead, but the fire doesn’t care. His skin bubbles and blackens under the flames. Dream grimaces but Tommy is still smiling.
“Couldn’t do this before.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you’re dead now.” Tommy’s hand is almost skeletal now, and the bones are beginning to char. “Put it out, would you?”
“Water hurts.”
“More than that?”
“Water burns, lava’s cathartic.”
Dream closes his eyes, only to escape the image of the burning hand. “Put it out.”
“No.”
“Put it out!”
“I don’t want to! You can’t make me do anything!”
“Fine. Then burn.”
Dream thinks he’d prefer Ghostbur, if he’s being honest. The two ghosts have different takes on how they rely on their past living selves. Ghostbur has nothing on Wilbur, Dream even has a theory that he’s an entirely different entity, something that was just waiting to be released into their world with Wilbur’s death.
Tommy, though….
Tommy hadn’t been able to think of a ghost name. And he’d decided he wasn’t different enough from the living Tommy to need a different name. Dream had tried to think of a ghost name for him as well, because he can see the stark differences between the ghost and his living self.
It wasn’t a difference that Tommy would have been able to notice. Ghost Tommy, that is. Ghostinnit? Dream had thought on that one for a while, but once he’d said it out loud, Tommy had shot it down.
“I’m just like him, I don’t need a different name,” he’d said.
There is a difference. It terrifies Dream. The man has preyed on Tommy for months, the whole nation knows that. All the nations know that, from the SMP to Kinoko. But he hasn’t hunted Tommy alone, Tommy is only interesting for his connections.
The ghost before him knows nothing but the cell he is now trapped in.
He hasn’t mentioned the name of anyone other than Sam since he’d shown up yesterday, as the warden arrived to take the beaten and bloody body Dream had been about to shove into the lava.
Tubbo, Wilbur. Ghostbur. Techno, Philza, Ranboo. No mentions, no signs of recognition. This ghost knows no one but Dream.
And that brought it back around. Tommy was only interesting because he cared so, so strongly for the people around him. And if he didn’t even know they existed, then he had no drive. Dream could do nothing but try to be as unresponsive to his constant chatter as possible.
He opens his eyes just a hair to try to see if the ghost’s hand is still burning. He knows there’s no real wound, and that the flaking bones are fabrications made by reality to try to make sense of the ghost, but it’s unnerving as fuck.
The hand is gone. Completely. The fire is out, and Tommy has just a blackened stump.
“Why’d you do that?” Dream asks.
Tommy considers his wrist a moment. “I couldn’t before.”
“So you did it now?”
“Didn’t hurt. And look.” Tommy shakes his arm around. Slowly something gathers around the stump and darkens into a fog. Tommy waits a moment, then shakes his wrist again, with a new hand now attached. The fog dissipates. “See? Definitely couldn’t do that.”
Gruesome, truly.
“Did you get your potatoes yet?”
Not even a moment’s break. Subject to subject for the last day. And there’s not enough topics to cover that time, Dream’s discovered. Tommy talks himself through each thing he can think of in a matter of minutes, no matter if it’s how ragged Dream appears or how many steps back and forth the room is.
“Not yet.”
“Are you hungry? I’m hungry.”
“You’re dead.”
“Still hungry.”
He’d meant to kill Tommy. The blood had been a comfort, it had been too long since he’d watched the life drip out of someone. There is a reason the world watches him through prison bars, Dream knows that. He knows that well. Reputations are a tricky thing and Dream has pruned his to the sharpest edge.
But oh, how he enjoys that moment before death and after life, a soul in a bleeding shell, fading lights and muted screaming. A comfort, a safe place. There’s nowhere for someone to go from that point but beyond this world.
Dream hadn’t wanted to wash his hands. He didn’t want to let the red flow down the drain. He liked his stained fingerprints. Sam had forced him towards the sink with a sword to his back until he’d scrubbed his hands clean.
He’d meant to kill Tommy. The end of their story. There was no point in him staying alive: Dream was never leaving prison and Tommy’s life was left with nothing that meant anything to the older man. There it was, the tangle, the split in the road, until a knife or a boulder or perhaps fists beat it back into a steady path forward. Nowhere to go but beyond. No sound but the silent screams Dream revels in.
A connoisseur of sorts.
Somehow, Dream lasts another eight hours with the ghost, eight hours as best as he can guess. He sleeps fitfully as he tries to avoid throwing himself headfirst into the lava, and his sleeping mind is filled with fire.
Of course, the ghost is still there when he wakes.
“You can leave,” Dream says to Tommy.
“How?”
“The lava doesn’t kill you. You’re a ghost, just…go through the walls.”
“Why should I?”
The problem of his memory. A cell with the one person he knows, or a cold, cold world? Why should the ghost leave, anyway? Dream can’t think of anything that a Tommy with no connections would be tempted by in the outside world.
“Just should.” It’s a weak argument, just as it was the other times the conversation has drifted to that point.
Perhaps it’s nearly forty hours after Tommy’s death. At first, Dream had hoped the ghost would fade with time. Maybe all people leave specters after death, and they gradually vanish and follow the soul into the world beyond.
That was the thought of a more naive man. Dream wants to bash his own brains out on the walls. This ghost isn’t fading. If anything, he’s more solid.
“Are you my friend?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m a bad person. You’re supposed to hate me.”
“I’d be even more bored if you weren’t here.”
“If I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t be either.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Dream tries to let that topic die there.
“Was I your friend?” the ghost asks.
“Nah.”
“Really?”
This time, Dream takes a moment to think. Thinking is always the problem. Tommy isn’t his friend, and Dream hadn’t been his. That’s what thinking tells him.
Exile had been fun, more fun than Dream had had in ages. Wilbur and Techno had stolen the thunder for Manberg. And the next best thing after exile was Doomsday, L’manberg’s final death. And after that was Tommy’s end. Dream chases the highs that ends bring him. Can he make something out of this?
Dream sighs. “You were my friend, actually.”
“What? Why? I don’t like you much, now.”
“That’s your fault. What’d I do to you?”
“You killed me.”
“Did it hurt?”
“What?”
“When you died.”
“I don’t like this.” Tommy stands up and walks back over to the lava.
“Tommy, Tommy. How did it feel to die?”
“I hate you, actually.”
“I thought you’d be bored without me.”
“I’d be alive.”
And here it is. “And would that be a good thing?”
The ghost’s chest is heaving, like he’s holding off crying, though he has no need to breathe. “Living hurts.”
“And dying doesn’t?”
“Dying’s too close to life to not. But death is kind.”
Kind? Nothing Dream has ever observed indicated that. Death isn’t supposed to be a release for anyone he’s killed.
“I don’t remember how pain feels. How anything feels. Don’t make me wash my hands, that’s as close as it gets.”
“I won’t. You’re my friend.”
Tommy sticks his hand into the lava and the moment vanishes. Dream had brought the chatter to that point, the best precipice to find out more, but he falls back down the hill. There’s no point in clawing his way back up.
The next best spot would be to speak to someone heading the other way, a road back from beyond, into this world.
And the chatter continues.
A road back into their world. This is as far as Dream can think. Can ghosts have defence mechanisms? If they can, this one uses speech. A moment of silence is too much for him.
A road back.
When you close the book and open it again, which cover holds the pages? The front or the back. The last word or the first word. It would all happen again, but which way to stack the time?
“What’re you doing?”
Dream crouches over a blank book, pen in hand. “Go away.”
“No.”
“Then shut up.” It doesn’t matter what the ghost does. Dream speaks only to let his mind drift back.
Revival isn’t for the living to know, and Dream has a method to overcome that barrier. If he doesn’t think about it, his hands know the motions.
“That’s some weird writing.”
“I know.”
“I can’t read it.”
“I know. You don’t have to.”
“No one’ll read your book if it’s written like that.”
“It’s not for anyone but me to read.” Dream closes the book. This is the revive book now, for the next thirty seconds. He’d burned the first and he’ll burn the next.
How long has it been? Two days? Two days with this ghost. That’s as long as Dream can stand.
He hadn’t particularly meant to bring Tommy back to life. But he wants the road back, he needs to know how dying is painful and how death is kind.
If Sam takes living Tommy away, at least Dream will be halfway free.
Dream joins the ghost by the lava.
“Tommy. Look at me.”
The ghost tears his eyes from his new flaming hand and stares at Dream. Dream swallows. An end. His heart is racing.
“I’m not your friend.”
He tightens his hand into a fist.
“Give my regards to Death. I’ll see you in a moment.”
Dream sinks his arm into the ghost’s chest and crushes his still heart.