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If a world could cry and Wilbur didn’t hate water so much, it would be raining cats and dogs.
He didn’t say that, of course. Tommy didn’t know if a demon’s mindscape counted as another world – if it counted as anything more than a giant, shitty hallucination – but he wouldn’t put it past the thing to fuck with the weather, if he mentioned it. As it was, he was really doubting the fog was anything but Wilbur’s fault.
Hurt hung heavily in the air, weighing down the clouds until Tommy could barely see his hands. He’d tried anyway, glaring into the fog and waving outstretched arms about in front of his face, beating his wings in a meagre attempt at clearing the neverending white. Nothing worked – it was bloody unnatural. No matter what he did, fog clung to his skin, tingling with magic and sending shivers down his spine.
Sticky fog was just one of the perks of being a demon of despair, he supposed. Even if it was fucking bullshit.
Tommy scoffed, hoping desperately that the sound would cover up just how much he wanted to scream, and brushed off his knees as he rose back up to his feet. Every shaky step he took was preceded by ginger toe-tap.
If he tripped over another fucking pothole, he was going to kill someone. His palms were still smarting from the last time he fell.
“And you’re sure?” An ingratiating voice, overflowing with tuneful whimsy, wound about his ears and Tommy glared harder.
“Yes,” he gritted out, biting back a lurch of fear as the pavement took a sudden dip, stumbling backwards and blinking back tears, brows as furrowed as he could get them. He chased off the welling upset with a fit of fury, growling out his frustrations – he hated this. Every minor challenge, every tiny bump in his way, felt like a knock to the knees. He hadn’t had to chase off this many tears since he lost his chicken when he was two.
Wilbur dredged up the memory and Tommy choked down another sudden swell of grief. They never did find her. He hoped–
No.
Tommy flooded his mind with pictures of wild– wild chickens. Of turkeys in trees and quails near lakes. More and more images, growing increasingly ludicrous with every one he conjured, until his sadness began to shrink.
He couldn’t lie and say he didn’t miss Henrietta; that he could eat the meals Dream cooked, meat and all, and not think about her. Honesty was just another one of the rules set up in this place and this – Tommy blinked up at a sign just above his head and scowled, threatening tears finally abating – was just another road. If he was lucky, it was the road. The exit. His freedom.
He’d said the same for the last road, too.
“I don’t think you are,” Wilbur hummed. Its voice swirled about Tommy’s head, tone thick with disbelief, just as it had every other time Tommy bothered to respond to it – an increasingly infrequent occurrence, as it happened. But somehow, it still managed to be every bit as annoying as the last.
Tommy toe-tapped forward until he found the edge of the pavement, carefully swiping his shoe along the edge and dipping his foot as he tried to measure the distance between him and the road. It was a slow process but, unlike his emotions or the demon in his head or falling over or any of the other uncountable worries he had, time was no issue.
Wilbur never said how fast he had to be, just that he had to keep going. He’d been going for hours, now.
“People process sadness differently, Toms,” it cooed, gentle and kind; a shoulder to cry on, “I’ll give you as much time as you need. Always.”
Tommy pretended to gag, even as his heart grew fuzzy. His leg was still sinking, so he sat down to help extend his reach, kicking the fog in an attempt to stir up another bout of righteous anger. Wilbur could be as mushy as it wanted, Tommy wasn’t falling for it. Not again. Never again.
“...so if you want to amble through the trial like a lame sloth, I won’t stop you.”
“Oi, fuck you!” Tommy cried; Wilbur cackled. The boy could feel his nails digging into his palms. “You call this a trial?” He gestured wildly to the fog and all the fuck-all he could see past it– “This is a playpen. A– a pigsty, ” he spat. “And sloths are badass, so fuck you.”
Wilbur kept laughing. The fog curled under Tommy’s nose, figure-eighting around his legs (one of which was still sinking), and he didn’t fight the smile worming its way onto his face. He wanted to, fuck, he wanted to; he wanted to hold onto the sting of betrayal and never let go, but that was a beaten horse at this point. The anger was fading. Even if he wanted to sock Wilbur in the jaw – even if he wanted to kick himself in the stomach for still liking the thing, after everything it did – he couldn’t.
Not yet – not until he won.
Besides, happiness was, by far, the best at keeping sadness at bay.
…he was pretty sure legs weren’t meant to go this far down.
Tommy hadn’t reached the road yet, but at the rate this was going he was starting to think there wasn’t one. When he swung his leg it met no resistance, as if the pavement was nothing but a thin platform. For all intents and purposes, it may as well have been.
A dud.
With a sigh Tommy shuffled back, getting himself more comfortable as he slowly began pulling his leg back. This was, what, the tenth failure? Since his first attempt, he’d long learnt that trying to yank his legs out only caused him pain, and pain wasn’t exactly conducive to keeping his emotions in check.
It was boring – fighting off the fog’s feelings was harder when he wasn’t allowed to fight. He was stuck until he got his leg out, vulnerable to Wilbur’s magic.
No way to run. No way to shout – not really. While anger might have been the easiest to conjure up, it was also one of the easiest to turn wet. Wet anger was quick to get even wetter and– well. The fog had a way of bringing out the worst in him.
Tommy resisted the urge to frown, took a deep breath, and kept pulling. It was taking longer than last time; felt heavier than last time. The fog was more cloying here, too. Thicker. Hungrier. Sadder. The loops it was spinning around his body, which he’d thought were affectionate, were weaving webs of misery in his throat.
Just let it all out, a whine whistled through his head, and Tommy– paused.
It sounded like him, like his voice, but there was something off about it; something tinged just the slightest colour of wrong.
Won’t you feel better?
Oh. He thought Wilbur stopped using that thing ages ago.
Relax.
Apparently not.
An alarm started blaring in the back of his mind but Tommy just kept breathing, kept pulling, kept glaring. He clenched his fists as much as he was able, fending off every single flux with open eyes.
“...but are you really?”
Another breath. “Yes, Wilbur, I’m sure.”
“Okay,” it sighed, and Tommy– Tommy wanted to spit; to scream. Fuck this. Fuck this world, fuck this spell, fuck this demon – fuck it all to Hell. Everything about this whole clusterfuck could up and bury itself in acid and he’d play a flute at the wake. Fuck. This.
The whine giggled; Wilbur echoed.
“But master,” it purred. A phantom pain burned up Tommy’s back, between his wings, spreading like a palm of lightning, and his stomach spun with nausea. He swallowed.
“I told you not to call me that–”
“Master,” it sang, lilt and sweet and birdsong in all the right ways that, if it weren’t for the green flashing before his eyes, he wouldn’t have been able to resist the smile tugging at his lips. He kept glaring. “Hell doesn’t exist!” it continued, chipper and perfect.
– and wrong.
“The fuck did you come from, then?”
His leg was still struggling to come out. No matter how long he pulled, no matter how far he went back, his knee was still bent over the edge of the pavement and his calf was still plunged into the abyss. It was like his limb was being stretched for all the progress he was making. It made no sense – he shouldn’t be able to move if his leg wasn’t; he should be feeling some resistance if he was being pulled down.
“A fridge!”
Tommy’s brain stuttered – “What?”
“You know, those ice boxes they use at the capital?”
“I know what a fucking fridge is, Wilbur.” Dream had three for some fucking reason – he didn’t even use all the space in them. “But those things were invented three years ago. You’re telling me you’re three years old?”
Wilbur hummed. “Well, not exactly.”
Tommy tried to suspend his disbelief. Was he really being tortured by a toddler? What the shit?
“It’s more complex than that, Toms.”
“No, it–”
Wilbur dove into Tommy’s mind again, forcing up flashes of his life. Ploughed fields, where will-o’-the-wisps danced in the treelines on the edge of his run. Eating a shining golden apple; waking up the next day with yellow wings and bloodsoaked blankets. Cloudless skies shooting lightning at a crooked green-shelled tower hovering in the air.
“Sure,” Tommy sighed. Magic was weird when he was a farmer, it was weird when he was an apprentice, and he sorely doubted it was any less weird just because he got nabbed and shoved into a pocket dimension.
A curl of annoyance whirled in his stomach as Wilbur laughed again. The whine in Tommy’s head bubbled up to laugh with it, perfectly in sync. His stolen voice blended well with the demon’s, fitting together like two parts of a whole; like they were made to be together.
Tommy stomped down on the jealous want needling his heart – they sounded like they were meant to be together because they were meant to be together. They both belonged to the same pest, after all.
The laugh stopped.
“That’s not nice,” Wilbur muttered, sounding unfairly despondent. Another perk of being what it was – Wilbur was always so sensitive. Whenever Tommy fucked up, it got angry on his behalf; offended
Tommy stomped down on his guilt.
“No?” he scoffed, hands trembling, wings flaring out to help him balance as he pushed himself back a little harder. His leg still wasn’t moving. He still wasn’t making any progress. He could still feel the pavement sliding out from under him as he shuffled back, but he wasn’t changing anything.
Wilbur could whine all it wanted, every shred of sympathy he had for the thing was squeezed out of him when it decided to pull him into this hellscape.
He ignored the empty pang in his chest when it didn’t laugh at the pun, grimacing. “Well sucks to suck, dickhead.”
Tommy didn’t realise he was waiting for a response until it didn’t come. For once, there was silence. True, ugly, and awful: silence.
The town was deafening without the omnipresent buzz in his ear and another pang thrummed through his chest. That… he’d forgotten what silence sounded like, oddly enough. Weeks of hearing some excited – no, deranged – voice in your head would do that to you, he supposed. He’d forgotten how disgusting and sticky it was. The way it clung to every crack and seam, weaving through every stitch and teasing open wounds he didn’t remember getting.
The fog grew thicker, the air grew heavier, and the reality of his situation finally began sinking in. A sob bobbed his throat and he couldn’t hear it; couldn’t hear anything. He couldn’t even feel the tears trickling down his cheeks, only the telltale sting of his eyes and the fuzz in his ears. He was– oh gods, he was crying. He was fucking crying. Was that really all it took? Some loneliness and bang, off go the waterworks?
He didn’t know if he cared.
The fog grew even thicker and Tommy couldn’t see anything, now. Everything was white, everything was static, everything was nothing. A demon’s playground; a trial. A trial he’d fucking failed. A trial he’d failed and– and it hadn’t ended yet, had it? For all he knew Wilbur was still there, still talking, and Tommy had just broken. For all he knew, all the sounds and sights he’d had before were conjured up by a trick. For all he knew, he wasn’t crying; he still had a chance. He kept pulling.
And pulling.
And pulling.
And pulling.
His thoughts kept straying.
Tommy was never meant to have met Dream. He was just a farmer’s kid. Then his village was attacked and that weird magic man that had visited just hours ago seemed like his best bet– he was. So Tommy was alive. But he didn’t know the first thing about magic, spells, the in-between, demons.
He didn’t know what to do when they summoned the demon and it latched onto him instead of the totem. He didn’t know what to do when it started talking to him. He didn’t know what to do when he started talking back.
And now he was here. Possessed. Trapped. He was so hilariously out of his depth here that it was a marvel he hadn’t succumbed sooner. Why he kept refusing to take the bait.
It was maddening, knowing that despite all his senses saying something was changing – that he was moving backwards, that he was making progress, that he was close to escape – he knew he wasn’t. That he wasn’t going anywhere. That, if Dream was here, all he’d see was a little boy too stupid for his own good sitting on the edge of the pavement, as still as a statue.
Maybe he wouldn’t even see that. Maybe Dream was already here, standing in front of him, staring at him and tutting with that half-smile in his voice, saying “Yep. He’s stuck. What a shame.”
Who knew – Tommy’s chest heaved – maybe that had already happened. Maybe Tommy was in a hospital bed, wasting away. Maybe he was still standing there, a corpse frozen in time in the middle of a ritual circle, a testament to the hubris of humanity. You couldn’t tame a demon. Why the fuck had they tried? Why did Dream think he was going to be any different?
Tommy hated how he didn’t know who that “he” was supposed to be.
He just… kept pulling. Resisting. No matter how bleak it became.
He kept pulling when a warm, too-large hand with too-long fingers settled around his throat. He kept pulling when a weight pressed against his back and rumbled through his bones. He kept pulling when a heavy scent unlike ever he’d ever smelled before trickled into his nose to melt his muscles.
“Stop it,” he protested weakly, trying to twist away. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the way it traced every single scar lining his skin, how its fingertips curled over his feathers, how, no matter how he twisted, it always followed. His shadow.
Tommy’s pulls were little more than tugs now. His arms had fallen to the floor and he could hardly push against the weight behind him.
Or, he could – it moved when he moved, ever-present, as immaterial as the mist – but he couldn’t because every inch of his soul said he couldn’t. Said that there was an immovable object behind him, propping him up; that every push into it, away from the pavement’s edge, simply leaned him into the touch.
He couldn’t avoid it. And slowly, he didn’t want to avoid it.
It didn’t help that every press made the rumbles grow louder, pleased. Content, just as he should have been.
The whisper, the one that sounded so much like him, returned with a vengeance. There was nothing he could do but give in.
He was safe here, he knew. Undoubtedly and irrevocably safe. Wilbur wouldn’t judge him for crying, wouldn’t tell him he was being a crybaby, wouldn’t stop him.
The too-long arms tied over his body belonged there, the too-sharp chin nestled in the crook of his shoulder belonged there, as well. The breath that wasn’t breathing so much as a wisp of music from the pluck of a harp, brushing past his cheek – that belonged there, too. All of it, merely a trick of the mindscape.
Tommy kept crying as warmth finally returned; as the fog cleared and the air thinned and he gasped, sucking in great lungfuls of air. He kept crying because, as the fog of despair rose from his brain, he knew he’d lost.
Wilbur purred behind him, murmuring secrets into his skin just as it had when they first met – when the first spell first went wrong and a demon slunk in to nestle beside his soul.
His leg, the one he’d been trying to pull back to him, finally slipped away from the void, pushed up toward his chest by foggy white serpents. They coiled around his ankles, creeping up to his wrists to hold them together. Tommy hadn’t escaped with his head up high, with a glare furrowing his brows, or with anything at all. He’d lost. Tommy sobbed again.
“There we are,” Wilbur whispered, with its thousands of voices like the peals of funerary knells and the wails of weeping mothers. The voice in the back of his head joined them, just another note. “Not so bad, is it?”
Tommy didn’t answer, voice locked in the thick of his anguish. It was unnatural – he’d never felt like this before; this overwhelmingly, inhumanly sad. He was fucking inconsolable, reduced to sniffles and sobs even if his mind finally began perking back up. A single moment of loss, of– of whatever Wilbur called it, and he’d lost.
“We’ll do so many things, you and I,” it continued, uncaring, stroking along every bob of his throat. Viciously clawed fingertips careful not to draw blood – so unfairly, horribly careful. “And the others. Oh, we’ll bring the world to its knees, Toms. Just for you.” It sounded delighted at the idea, its choir humming a litany of blissful sighs.
“Fuck you,” he heaved, sobs welling up in his throat and eyes squeezed shut with anguish. He didn’t know if he could handle more demons. He couldn’t even handle one.
Wilbur just laughed, delight shuddering through its body as the mindscape finally faded away.
Tommy’s eyes were wide open, tears pouring down his cheeks, pinned in place by thin fingers of fog. He was still standing in the middle of the ritual circle. Dream was at his feet, facing toward the sky, his face– Tommy gagged. His face. His fucking face.
Tommy’s hands were sticky and wet and he didn’t need to look at them to know why. He didn’t want to look at them, no matter how sweetly Wilbur asked him to. Wilbur, who was still behind him, still clinging tight, practically glued to Tommy’s back.
He almost believed he was still stuck in the mindscape. Long, serpentine tendrils of dark hair slithered over Tommy’s shoulder, over his eyes, and his shadow was far taller than it had any right to be. His wings drooped like the tails of a coat.
“Oh, yes,” it chucked, “they’re going to love you.”