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False doesn’t know how to say this, but… she didn’t exactly trust the idea of Tommy at first.
And, really, who can blame her? Some random, beaten and bruised child showing up randomly in the jungle can’t be a good sign, even if he is a sweetheart at his core.
She’s never met Tommy in person, only hearing rumors here and there. “Oh, Tommy’s a sweetheart” from Gem, “Jellie loves him!” from Scar, “I wish he could just trust me” from Xisuma, and many, many more.
False hasn’t made any move to find Tommy, although she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t curious. Now, however, the poor boy is missing, and everyone is running around and pretending like they have actual ideas.
The ideas include:
- Murder
- More Murder
- Jellie(?)
So, not exactly the best ideas.
Despite her lack of knowledge about Tommy, False considers herself fairly talented at tracking people and things, even though her coding knowledge is lackluster. She’s flipping a pencil between her fingers when Joe approaches in all of his strange glory.
“Howdy, False!” he greets her with a kind smile, but she can see the bags under his eyes. “Any ideas yet?”
False scoffs and shakes her head. “No, not yet,” she admits, but the gears in her brain are turning, shifting like a well-oiled machine, because there’s something that can get these people there.
“He mentioned being from a L’manberg,” Joe says, his disco lights significantly slower and dimmed out now, “but I checked so many books and couldn’t find a thing.”
That’s it!
A lightbulb flickers and twitches on in False’s brain, and she whirls her head to face Joe, who looks like he’s either about to start breakdancing or immediately pass out. To be fair, it’s Joe—I wouldn’t be surprised if he somehow manages to do both at the same time.
“False, you have the ‘I-have-a-genius-idea’ look on your face,” he notes, and then he leans forward impatiently, ready for what she’s about to say.
Joe has always been a curious figure. Many people rule their knowledge with an iron-tight fist, keeping everything they know locked up tight in neat filing cabinets in their mind. Joe’s knowledge is the perfect storm, a free range farm, a thousand different facts and thoughts floating lazily about until he plucks one out from the puffy white clouds in the sky.
False cracks her knuckles and smiles wolfishly at Joe, excited to finally have something interesting to do now that they have a lead. “Joe, go get Xisuma,” she says, watching with a smile as Joe scrambled to do so.
Xisuma rushes over with wide eyes and shaking hands, and False gives him the look.
“Go to your mainframe hub or whatever, and search for any mentions of a L’manberg,” she orders him, and a holographic screen immediately appears in front of Xisuma, letters and numbers scrolling down so fast that she can barely read one word, let alone all of them.
With careful, practiced concentration, Xisuma slowly plucks word after word from the strings of code that wrap around his body. Finally, when it seems like he’s about to drown in white lines of illegible text, he pulls out a single string.
The rest of the coding vanishes without a trace, but a single line of code stays.
Ranboo [ALL SERVERS] (New L’manberg, Snowchester, Syndicate): I’m not sure if this will work, but if it does, I need user TommyInnit to get out of here immediately. Please help.
A sick sense of dread starts to pool in False’s gut, and she turns to Xisuma, who also looks a little green in the gills. “Can you trace the message?” she demands.
Xisuma nods sagely, blinking a few times to focus back on the task at hand. After a few moments of rapid-fire searching, he seems to find something, and every single hermit (bar Grian and Scar, who are both fast asleep in the throne room) gathers behind Xisuma, eyes staring down at the holographic screen.
“It’s blocked by an even heavier firewall than our sever is,” Xisuma mutters, fingers flying in the sky like he’s composing a frighteningly rushed and panicked melody, full of tense violin stingers and whispered betrayals.
Bdubs makes an affronted noise from where he’s practically glued to Etho’s side. “How come Tommy managed to get here?!” he argues, although he doesn’t exactly sound scary when his eyes are bloodshot and his cheeks tear-stained.
“Tommy showed up here on accident, Bdubs. It was a fluke,” Xisuma replies, firm but not unkind in his words, “this will take… well, I don’t know how long. For now, though, we need to figure out who we’re sending to rescue him.”
Everyone immediately dissolves into clamoring shouts, and False leans back against the wall with a small smile. Even in moments like these, filled with stress and uncertainty, she can always count on her friends for being the same selfless morons they always are.
“Bdubs, you literally just finished crying, he’s not going to send you,” Mumbo scoffs from a corner, and Etho has to literally restrain the short man from pummeling the wet noodle into the ground.
After a lot of arguing and some childish insults, Xisuma eventually chooses two out of the three people he wants to send—Tango and Etho.
Both are good choices, False supposes. Opposites, in a way, but they work well together nevertheless, what with Tango wearing all of his emotions on his sleeve without apology, and Etho keeping everything close to his heart.
“…and, for our third person, I want to send False.”
False lifts her head up in surprise. While the other hermits seem a little shocked at first, since she had never mentioned any interest in Tommy before, they all seem to trust Xisuma’s judgement. “You don’t know him, you won’t get blinded by your emotions,” Xisuma explains.
Ah, well, that puts a little bit of pressure on her head, but False squares her shoulders and nods at the admin. “You can trust me,” she tells her old friend.
“We’ve got a child to rescue.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The threads settle deep into his skin, flowing with his bloodstream. When it whispers its poisoned words softened by a façade of honey, he twitches in his sleep, whimpering out a cry for help to unfamiliar people. When did he stop crying for his father? Has he finally learned his lesson?
Tommy wakes up in a bed of chrysanthemums.
The petals shift and squish under the weight of his body, and the pure white color is off-putting in such a small underground room.
In the back of his mind, Tommy wonders if he’s in a blocked-off cave. Dripping noises and low groans of zombies echo from nearby, but he can’t find the energy to lift up his head from the sea of white flowers spread around his body like an angel’s wings.
The irony makes Tommy’s lip curl in a twisted reprise of a sneer.
His head feels like it’s full of a heavy fog, thick cotton clouds weighing him down and breaking apart every coherent thought he tries to muster.
It’s not like the moments when Bdubs preens his wing, with the comforting haze in his mind making it easy to nod off into a light sleep, still faintly hearing the man’s mutterings and mumblings just at the back of his mind. It was almost an anchor, at the time.
His body is weighed down by poisonous green clouds, and he lets a little whimper slip out of his throat. The room is so dark, the only visible things being the chrysanthemums he woke up in. Tommy opens his mouth to cry for help, or maybe just cry, but all that comes out is a hoarse rasp.
Heavy footsteps, familiar boots that stomp on the ground with an aura of confidence and venom, flood Tommy’s ears until the dripping sounds are barely an afterthought. He closes his eyes.
“Oh, Tommy,” a voice croons, comforting and chilling all at once, sending Tommy’s body into a thousand senses of cold and hot and shivering and sweating.
A hand brushes the white strand of his hair possessively, twirling it in his finger and tugging just hard enough to get a whine of pain. “You left me all alone,” the voice sing-songs, “all by myself… made me go through all the effort into finding you again.”
The threads pull upward, and the boy sits up, back against the damp stone walls, gray eyes glossed over and shining with just the barest hint of fear. Good, it likes things that way.
“It’s easy to fall back into a familiar routine, isn’t it?”
Tommy nods, and a hand ruffles his hair too roughly, leaving glowing green stains in their wake. The stitches in Tommy’s mouth break apart, and he slurs out just a few words, his mouth heavy and tongue too big in his mouth.
“I want to go home,” he decides, eyes slipping shut and going back into a world of soft moss blankets and sweet-smelling daisies.
Cleo makes good flower crowns, he thinks absentmindedly, glancing at the rotting chrysanthemums on the ground. The smell is sickly-sweet, the petals shriveling up and rotting the longer he stares at them.
“You’re home already,” Dream says, an otherworldly glow emitting from his cracked mask, stringy hair falling in front of his shoulders, “back where you belong, with me. You’re the only interesting part of this shithole server anymore, I can’t afford to lose you.”
The threads turn into chains, and Tommy finds himself unable to move. Will he rot here, with the flowers? Degrade to bits until he’s a skeleton that Dream can puppet and wrap around his strings, dancing him around a stage built from corpses and loathing?
“I won’t let you leave again,” Dream whispers, running a hand along the edges of Tommy’s one good wing.
Through the thick and heavy fog, a jolt of panic sears through his body, and Tommy looks at Dream with wide, fearful eyes. “Dream, please, don’t,” he asks, whimpers, begs, pleads.
Dream seems absolutely gleeful at that, and the man throws his head back in a laugh without any mirth. “You’re so pathetic. Begging? So soon?” he jeers.
Tommy starts to freefall into his own subconscious as Dream continues to talk. The green clouds flood his mind until he nestles into a dark, comfortable corner of his mind, away from everything and everyone.
A knife drags into the old scar of the smiley-face. Faintly, Tommy can register that it hurts, it stings, it burns, a thousand flames licking at his skin and taking sadistic delight in the agonized screams that pour from his lips, but he is still far away.
The blood pools onto the ground, painting pictures of all the lessons he’s forgotten, all the people that never cared about him.
“Your wing is next,” Dream whispers, jabbing the knife into one of the rotted petals, a putrid smell exuding from the sweet flower, “are you afraid?”
Yes, Tommy thinks, tears spilling onto the ground and diluting the blood in a sickening drip-drip-drip, I’m so scared. I can’t even think properly, can’t breathe, just when I get all the things you’ve done to me out of my head, you take me again. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you—
Tommy thinks about peanut butter toast and moss blankets.
“I’m not scared,” he says, his voice wavering a bit at the end.
The damp stone walls start to press in, and he whimpers, curling into a ball and squeezing his eyes shut. I’m so scared, please, I want to go home, I want to see my friends again, I miss when I felt warm and safe and happy.
Tommy thinks of a large dungeon, shared laughter bouncing off the walls and ricocheting out of the cavern until his stomach hurts from how funny things are.
The petals are in his mouth now, his nose, decomposing in his ears and eyes, filling his mind and body and soul with how it’s so much easier now, everything’s familiar again, if I just do what Dream says he’ll stop hurting me and I can live comfortably in my mind.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Tommy thinks about a man with a purple helmet who never really meant any harm. I’m so sorry, Xisuma, he thinks, the tears falling faster now, I wish I wasn’t so scared of you. I wish I got to know you better before I left.
A hand cards through his hair lovingly—that’s not right, though, is it—and Tommy cries even harder, although he can barely hear it. “They must have been really mean, huh?” Dream asks sympathetically.
“W—what?” Tommy asks, caught off-guard by the question, because the very thought of that is absolutely absurd. Not the hermits, not the people filled with endless amounts of love and even more to give away.
Dream sighs a thousand different sighs, all of them bouncing around the walls and slipping into Tommy’s influence. “How cruel of them, to lift you up so high, and then give me access to the server just like that, already sick of you? I won’t get sick of you, you know this.”
No, that’s not true, that can’t be true.
The hermits love him, they care about him, they said so themselves…
Right?
“They don’t care about you, Tommy,” Dream says sweetly, sitting down next to him. The cavern wall seem to contract and expand with every path, and Tommy wonders if he’s gone mad.
They don’t care about you.
They don’t care about you.
They don’t care about me.
They’re never going to rescue me.
I should just listen to Dream.
It’s easier this way.
It’s easier.
It’s easier.
I’m better off this way.