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There is a specific form of anxiety- a kind of trepidation- which sits heavy in your stomach when you’re faced with the unknown. It’s a feeling Bad knows all too well; one he tries desperately to avoid but somehow always finds himself at the mercy of when fate is feeling cynical.
It’s been a long time since he’s felt fear in such an unrelenting capacity. He may be a guard of the prison- a safe middle ground in the hierarchy- but he still feels unnaturally trapped as he wanders the dark, twisting hallways and the sounds of agony ring off cracking stone.
And Bad isn’t stupid, for all the naivety he may present to placate the more aggressive forces of the world. He is competent to work out the source of the screaming after the first few times he hears it and the revelation sends his stomach sinking to the stone floor.
He’s known Dream long enough to recognise the sounds of his anguish, but he’s never heard it this loud, desperate.
It tears through his heart strings angry, unrelenting; shattering his skull and digging deep, deep into his brain until it plays in his mind even after he leaves. Sometimes, Bad hears screaming; and one day—
—he decides to push past the fear sitting still and stiff deep inside his gut and he goes to investigate it.
He prepares in advance, making sandwiches (because Sam only ever seems to bring potatoes to the cell) and grabbing a healing potion. He hopes he doesn’t have to use it, hopes his suspicions are wrong and Dream is safe, unharmed. The rational part of his mind says otherwise.
The visit goes like this;
Bad arrives at the prison just as Sam’s shift is ending, and he’s glad of that fact because the warden seems to have a surveillance of every inch of the prison when he’s present and Bad doesn’t have high hopes about him authorising his visit to Dream.
He wanders the familiar halls, his pace a little slower than usual as hesitation grabs at his ankles and drags his feet. Eventually, he pushes through a hidden door and finds himself in a small room with a wall of lava; and a single lever on the left.
And Bad does his best to compose himself, to swallow down enough of his discomfort to be able to stand up straight with feeling like his guts are going to spill out onto the floor. It takes a few moments, but eventually he finds his hands brushing against metal.
And he pulls.
The sound of dropping lava is not an inherently pleasant one. It sloshes against itself, hissing with its own heat and lapsing up against the walls as it tries to cling on and keep itself upright.
The sound is harsh against Bad’s ears but he supposes it is a small price to pay. He is the lucky one in this situation, after all. For all he feels so uselessly small and trapped when inside Pandora, he is not the one in the main cell. He is a guard, he is important. He had no right to wallow in anxiety-born self pity. Dream is the one who is suffering.
(Except Dream deserves it and Dream is meant to be here and they’re keeping everyone else safe by having him contained. That’s what he’s been told, that’s what everyone seems to think. But the screams he keeps hearing we’re not part of the deal. He was never supposed to hurt. Part of Bad fears that in letting Dream be put away- in forcing him to stay in ahead shaped like obsidian- he helped sell his friends soul to the devil and left him to rot in the flames).
The lava falls, fully, the only sign of its initial presence left in the suffocating heat. Bad inhales deeply, then raises his gaze.
Immediately, any nausea he had managed to bite back comes surging up in full force, and it takes every fibre of his being not to throw up right then and there.
Even from far away, Dream looks terrible.
Where Bad had expected him to be on his feet and staring menacingly over the lava with a sickening grin and a sarcastic quip waiting on his tongue, he is curled up in the far corner of the cell, unmoving.
Even from far away, Bad can see the blood.
There’s red, So Much Red coating the floor of the cell, splattered over the walls. The smell hits him all at once in the absence of the acrid stench of lava. It’s harsh and metallic and it cuts Bad straight through to the heart.
He doesn’t remember crossing the platform- doesn’t even remember pulling the veer for it- but within a moment he has bridged the gap between the cramped viewing platform and the somehow-even-more-cramped cell.
As the netherite barrier falls, Bad falters.
As much as he wants to run straight over to Dream and pull him up into his arms, he knows the younger well enough to think twice before touching him unprompted, especially when he’s hurt. So he stops where he is, and he clears his throat.
“Um… hi, Dream!” He announces, gently. “It’s me, uh, Bad… I just came to bring you some food ‘cause I heard you’ve mostly been getting potatoes and I thought you might like something new for a change! It’s nothing special, just sandwiches but they’re chicken, your favourite.”
He speaks slowly, trying desperately to keep his voice from shaking or cracking straight down the middle. He doesn’t want to startle Dream by barging over to him or demanding information out of him. But it feels wrong, to act like everything is fine. Like this is Normal.
Dream, unsurprisingly, doesn’t respond. His eyes are open, and they’re trained on Bad but his irises are fogged over, pupils blown and filled with more emotions than Bad can recognise. It’s hard to tell if he’s lucid, and Bad knows his words are probably falling on deaf ears.
But the silence in the cell is deafening, and he keeps rambling (to himself, more than Dream) about sandwiches and potatoes and any other words he can string together from a mind hazy with soul-crushing despair.
At some point, he finds himself kneeling on the hard floor. (And he had to try very hard to ignore the blood soaking into his pant legs). He moves forwards slowly, but still keeps a fair distance. Enough that Dream still had room to pull away. Enough that Dream can (hopefully, please) see that he’s not here to hurt him.
He slowly lays a crumpled napkin on the floor and sets a sandwich on top of it; explaining every action as he moves with slow precision, keeping both hands in view at all times. Dream follows his movements sluggishly, but otherwise he does not acknowledge the action.
Once he is done, Bad moves back again, moving himself to smile as convincingly as he can. “Ta da!” He half-exclaims, half-chokes out. “Enjoy Dream. When you’re ready to, of course.”
Dream, for what it’s worth, blinks at the words as if trying to process them. (And Bad wonders quietly, as his stomach sinks further if even possible, how long it had been since Dream has experienced such simple kindness. He looks perplexed by Bad actions, confused almost. It contrasts the apathy form when he’d first arrived, but it’s no less unsettling).
Bad holds his smile, for longer than is perhaps natural, before reaching for the bottle attached at his hip and placing it on the floor beside the food. The liquid inside- pink and bubbling- sloshes around and glows bright in the faint light of the glow stones in the corners. Dream’s eyes widen at the sight of it, and where Bad had expected some flash of relief- he sees only panic.
Dream scrambles to force himself further into the wall, mumbling incoherent pleas under his breath as he moves. Bad wants to go to him, to hold him close, ground him.
But he knows that look, that deep-sunk terror. He’d never been sure how to react to it, how to handle such raw anguish. But the one thing he’s sure of is that it's near impossible to pull someone out of it once they’ve sunken too far.So instead of yelling or grabbing or drawing anymore attention to himself, Bad simply pulls the bottle back and out of Dreams' sight.
Were this the Bad of almost a year ago, he might have dove straight into a frenzy himself. He would be calling out desperately, lunging forwards. He would be crying freely and prying Dream's hands away from his scalp as his nails dig in, begging him to Stop even as he pushes and pulls and screams to be let go.
Bad of almost a year ago would have probably escalated things much further. But then again, he was inexperienced.
Bad now, sitting on his knees in a cell damp with blood and the stench of a long lost soul is hardened and better versed in this situation. Months of watching others shoot up in bed from nightmares teaches you how to be patient, to wait for people to wake up on their own.
Weeks of watching friends stumble how hardly lucid form infected wounds or fever or pure exhaustion teaches you how to sit steadfast by another as they feel and push aside questions and scoldings until the danger has passed.
Days of watching the people you care about slowly slip away until they’re barely recognisable in your eyes, and the fact you have to learn to live with that- with the realisation you are partly to blame- teaches you to stay strong. And robs you of any tears left to cry.
Bad moves to leave, deciding that his presence is not the saviour he had hoped it to be, and having at least one of his questions answered.
That the screams he heard were real. And the screams he heard were Dream’s.
And he still doesn’t know what caused such sounds of anguish but he can harbour a well educated guess and with that the question becomes a matter of who, not what. Because there is no way even in the hell of Pandora Dream could do this to himself.
And as Bad goes over to a chest in the far corner, to leave a potion in Just In Case, he finds this is not an original idea. Only, the bottles in the chest are not dull like his, but near-empty, many shattered or cracking.
There’s no way they belong to Dream, because he has no access to the world outside (Sam made sure of that, Bad had Helped make sure of that-) Meaning whoever had come in, whenever had hurt Dream for however long Bad had heard the screaming, for longer even maybe—
—they had been bringing him potions to keep him alive. So they could do it over and over again. The terror in Dream’s eyes makes sense, all at once, and in that moment Bad wishes he didn’t have such a quick thinking mind.
He leaves the cell without another word, not that Dream would hear him anyway. He’s stilled by the time the platform begins to move away- Bad on it and with his back turned- but his eyes are still wide and he seems lost deep, deep inside his own treacherous mind.
Sometimes Bad hears screaming.
One day, he faces his fears and finally narrows down the source.
Later that night, he regrets it almost as much as he regrets letting Dream be out in that cell in the first place. Stupidly, selfishly, he wishes to forget all he had seen.
Later that night, Bad finds himself with a bottle in his hand, and tears brushing against his cheeks. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, waiting for the pain and hate to subside.
He wants nothing more but to forget the prison altogether.
And that’s just how it goes.