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Tommy was, as most understood it, a regular teenage boy. He went to school and did his homework. His parents were absent but they worked a lot. Tommy himself was an annoying student, sure, but that wasn’t abnormal. There was nothing exceptional about him, nothing separating him from the other million naughty boys called Tommy that lived in England.
Except, most teenagers didn’t walk through windows to get to school. Most teenagers had parents and most students didn’t spend most of their time running a shop of magical items.
To say that it was a shop would be an understatement. Tommy’s emporium was a large, wooden building in the styles of old with a strange, thatched roof that seemed to slide a little to the left. At some point, the building had been placed on L’manberg Street, a place where the likes of Jack the Million-eyed and Niki the Fish spent their days, a street where you’d be hard pressed to find a common human, somewhere that magic sang from the very seams of its residents' clothes.
It was not the only shop, however it was one of the most peculiar. Its windows were small and squat, like someone had stolen the top half of them. The tired walls sunk down like a dragon was nesting on the roof and unlike most shops, there was not an hour of the day that it closed.
Inside, Tommy delighted in displaying a million different items, each blessed with some form of magic traced from some strange source that not even Tommy himself could fully comprehend. The creator of all of them held one sole name: Tommy Innit. As a transmogrifite, Tommy had been blessed upon birth with the power to shape the form of one object into another, more magical form. He could turn even the dullest sword into a great battle-weapon, the brownest button into a trinket of luck, the sourest sweets into a spell to make you dance.
In short, Tommy Innit sold everything mage or non-mage alike might want to buy.
One fine day, he was stocking up on his Potions of Death (which were really perfumes so awful that they would lure away any potential awkward dates or unwanted visitors) and sweeping the ground with his sentient brush. Really, potions of time travel were ingenious pieces of kit and Tommy was glad that he had learned to make the strongest variant.
School had ended only fifteen minutes prior but Tommy had climbed through the bathroom window at school and had promptly ended up back at his shop where his future self was already sweeping the floor. He took pleasure in keeping his shop clean without the use of much magic with a brush that went around to give everything a thin layer of clean dust so that his wares appeared more ancient and powerful to the average consumer.
Not many customers came in at 3:15, in part because that was the hour of drinking in New Pogtopia but also because most of his customers waited until the sun fell for aesthetic purposes. It was a silly practice, Tommy believed, but it couldn’t be helped. The Beyond had different rules to Earth and Tommy had become somewhat used to them over the years, especially after his parent’s ‘accidents’.
Despite the usual lack of foot traffic, Tommy kept his shop open at all times, if not to sell more things to keep himself busy. Most of the time, Tommy kept himself sequestered in the back rooms where he experimented with new spells and used up enough energy to avoid any potential accidents. It was fun, really, despite the lack of people. Tommy had himself if it came down to it and he considered himself decent company.
His usually calm afternoon was interrupted with the chimes of the bells.
Tommy put the potions down and walked to the front of his shop to see a man in a green hoodie. He strongly suspected his potential customer was from the human world as the average monster had not even heard of a hoodie let alone wore one out of the house. He himself had stripped off his clearly mortal school uniform in favour of a relaxed yet regal flowy red cape, something respectable yet comfortable for a shop owner.
Tommy didn’t expect much of this customer. The man in the hoodie was casual enough that this clearly wasn’t his first time in The Beyond but clearly hadn’t been there enough that he had learned the customs. Tommy walked behind the counter, giving his customer a casual wave.
“Hi, what can I get you?” Tommy asked, staring directly into the man’s eyes. For some reason, it made him feel uneasy and he lowered his gaze so that it avoided his customer’s face entirely.
“Uhh, so, I’ve been having some bad luck recently. You know, the usual stuff for here, and I wanted something that would..stop that,” the man declared.
Tommy carefully held in his laughter as he nodded along. Yes, it was clear to see that whoever this hoodie-wearing man was, he was probably just your average run-of-the-mill American just a few months ago.
Tommy pitied him, he really did. Luck curses were common and while he didn’t want to assume, he figured that someone didn’t like the man’s hoodie as much as he did and decided to curse him.
“Okay, so you want a Good Luck trinket,” Tommy decided,”’Cause I think you’re cursed, Big Man. You can’t get rid of shit like that but it is possible to cancel out the effects with a powerful Good Luck trinket. I’ll start you on one of the lower level trinkets but feel free to bring it back and buy a stronger one if it doesn’t work, okay?” he asked, writing down 1X WEAKEST GL TRINKET on his notepad.
The man nodded and Tommy got to work.
First, he crumpled the paper up and focused hard on it. A Good Luck trinket was fairly easy, especially if you were as practised in making them as Tommy. About half of his orders were something related to luck because apparently fate had written that everyone had bad luck.
He opened his eyes again to see a pale, grey slab in the shape of a small disc.
He looked up at his customer (holy shit those eyes) before lowering his gaze to the man’s chest again. For some reason, he received the strangest impression that there was light around his head. Though, considering the door was open, Tommy reasoned it had been a simple trick of the light.
“Do you want to put it on a string or should I? It’s an extra 2 primes,” Tommy informed him.
“Uhh, I guess. What’s the conversion on that?” he asked.
“Fuck if I know. I don’t spend enough time around mortals. It’s not much because apparently the economy’s gone to shit or something. Cheap, though,” Tommy informed him.
The man hummed, tapping his hands on Tommy’s counter like an annoying prick for a few seconds too many.
“I’ll take it with a string,” he decided, finally taking his hands off the fucking counter.
Tommy smiled his best customer service smile and added a string.
“That’ll be 15 primes,” Tommy announced, relieved to finally be done with his annoying prick of a customer.
“Sure, here,” Dream said, passing the primes over to his hand in such an unhygienic way it made Tommy’s skin crawl.
“Most people here don’t pass money over to shopkeepers. We put it in the plates over there and it gets cleaned. Curses, you know?” Tommy stated, immediately putting both his own hands and the primes on the plate to be cleaned. However, while his hands stayed on the plate, the primes vanished, heading off into the back rooms to be used as change.
“Oh, sorry- what’s your name?” his customer asked.
“Tommy,” Tommy informed him.
“Thanks, Tommy, that’s why people have been looking at me weirdly,” he announced, as if he’d just had the world’s greatest epiphany.
“Glad I could help you, man,” Tommy said cheerfully though with such urgency that he hoped it would prompt Dream to leave.
“Thank you - I’m Dream. I hope I’ll see you around,” Dream said cheerfully.
Finally, Dream turned around and left, leaving Tommy to his own thoughts once again.
Dream finally gone, he retreated to the back rooms where stack upon stack of paper waited to be seen.
Tommy was quickly able to forget Dream to the million other weird people who entered his shop. When half his customers had at least two extra limbs and a strange power of some variety, you tended to forget a slightly off human. Dream wasn’t even interesting enough to bring up at the weekly road meeting.
—--
“So, what’s your shop been like, Tommy?” Niki asked, pouring a cup of tea for herself from her tank.
Tommy wasn’t quite sure why a fish lady would drink tea but she did it rather frequently and Tommy had quickly learned to not ask questions, especially those involving race, so he pushed that thought out of his mind and shrugged.
“Business is good, I guess. Honestly, nothing really happened. The drunk guy with three heads came back and - you know the really small bird woman died?” Tommy asked.
“Wait, what? I thought the small bird species usually lived for ages!” Jack frowned, looking almost mournful for a moment before snapping back to his usual self.
“It’s not like she died of natural causes - ran over, you know?” Tommy informed them.
“Not outside your shop, right?” Niki asked,You remember the Warden got sued when someone got ran over outside his prison,” she reminded them.
“Oh, shit, yeah, I remember that,” Tommy said,”but it wasn’t outside my house. A few people told me because she came here quite often, you know?”
“Mmm,” Niki hummed, downing the entire pot of tea as if she was somehow dehydrated.
“Speaking of crimes, did you hear that President Tubbo’s place got burned down?” Jack offered.
Tommy’s eyes widened,”What the fuck? How did that not want to make the news?”
“They don’t want any copycats,” Niki guessed.
“I guess…” Tommy shrugged, feeling uneasy.
He felt a warm feeling around his crotch only to realise he’d spilled his tea all over himself.
Tommy sighed, turning the teacup into a napkin. A stain-like pattern was already on the cup, remarkably resembling a smile.
—--
A few days later, Tommy was enjoying his Saturday morning by ignoring all his homework and messing around with some Vanishing trinkets. He’d found one that made the wearer’s body invisible and everything in their possession vanish, a trinket that was currently illegal in New Pogtopia. Not that Tommy cared: shops like his had a duty to supply the real shit to their customers. It was easy really: Tommy used much the same spells as his fellow shopkeepers to hide the good shit from the wrong eyes.
Saturday was usually busier than most days. Even in The Beyond, Saturday and Sunday were off however there, Monday was thrown in as well. Tommy was very envious of New Pogtopian teenagers: they spent all day learning magic at school and then didn’t do anything for three days. Though rationally Tommy knew he could stage his own death and live permanently in his home-world, his pride wouldn’t allow him.
It was raining cats and dogs - literally. Some fucking idiot had messed up a Familar Creation spell and now people were getting crushed to death under layers of cats and dogs. The over-road roof had been placed down but he could still hear the thuds of the poor, dying animals through all twelve layers. For a completely unrelated reason, he hadn’t had a customer all day.
The bell chimed and Tommy was drawn from his experiment to the front of the shop where he was once again greeted with the sight of Dream, that oblivious human he’d met days before. Dream still wore his green hoodie, though the Scanner trinket he wore around his left ankle informed him that it was a different one. He really loved those hoodies, didn’t he?
Tommy made sure to look away from his face. If he even thought about it, he felt incredibly sick as though he’d just swallowed a million bugs.
“Hey, Big Man,” Tommy greeted warmly,”You got used to this place yet?”
Dream frowned, seemingly taken aback at his kindness,”It’s fine. Your trinket doesn’t work. I’d like my money back,” Dream declared, utterly deadpan in much the same way someone would speak after witnessing the death of their partner and children.
Tommy noticed it then: a massive smear of blood across his face, small chunks of flesh across his shirt… He quickly realised that Dream hadn’t been as lucky as most. Tommy understood that Dream was very likely in shock if the way he spoke meant anything. He just didn’t know what to do with that information.
“Uhh, do you want a drink?” Tommy asked, unable to find any other thing he could possibly say.
Dream shook his head. “No, I just want my money back.”
Tommy frowned,”Okay, so I gave you a very low-powered trinket before. I’ll give you a higher one if you want - free of charge. I can see you’ve been through some shit.”
Dream slumped down like a giant moments away from collapse.
“I’d love that,” Dream decided, pulling on the strings of his hoodie nervously.
Tommy nodded and grabbed yet another piece of paper. He didn’t waste any time on writing what it was supposed to be, merely closing his eyes. When he opened them, there was a brilliant emerald shard on a similar string to Dream’s last one.
“So, you’re wearing your old trinket, right?” Tommy asked.
Dream nodded,”Yeah.”
“Can I have the old one back, Big Man? Someone else might want one at that level even if it’s not quite right for you,” he asked carefully. Dream didn’t seem to be in the best state of mind.
Thankfully, Dream passed his old trinket over without incident. Tommy noticed that he’d been wearing it around his wrist - there was no reason it shouldn’t have worked. Either Dream had messed with the wrong person or he wasn’t wearing it enough. Tommy didn’t know but he was sure that he’d find out in the coming weeks should Dream turn up again.
Tommy tried to meet Dream’s eyes as he left but failed, deciding instead to give him a calm wave.
What had someone cursed Dream with? That (and Tommy had met many strange fucking people) was weird. Even for The Beyond. Tommy didn’t doubt that Dream was at one point a human or perhaps even still believed himself to be a human but if you asked him, there was not a bone of humanity left in Dream’s body.
A feeling of intense pity remained even after Dream had gone. He clearly wasn’t suited to this world but Tommy knew that whatever he was, he wouldn’t be able to go back to a regular human existence.
Tommy actually believed himself to be rather privileged in that regard: many of his customers could not pass as human for a single interaction while he could spend the entire day at a human school without any alarm.
Still, there was nothing he could do for Dream besides call in a curse specialist if his new Good Luck trinket didn’t work.
Tommy didn’t have to wait long for his answer. Not a day later, Dream was back, a money bag bulging with primes strapped to his waist. He was actually rather impressed that Dream had managed to get all the way to his shop without being mugged, even if it was 3 in the afternoon.
“Hey, Dream,” Tommy greeted, eager to make his most pitiful customer a little happier.
“Tommy,” Dream returned. Then he froze.
“Wait, shouldn’t you be at school or something? Or do they do school a little differently here?” Dream asked.
“Oh!” Tommy sighed,”Yeah, I don’t go to school here. I go to school in the mortal world.”
Dream stared back at him, confused.
Honestly, Tommy was confused, too, because he wasn’t looking at Dream and really wanted to know how he knew that Dream was staring at him.
Tommy inhaled and began to explain,”So, I go to a mortal school. I just time travel,” he summarised.
“Would that mean that you’re twice as old as you’re supposed to be?” Dream asked, though Tommy didn’t mind explaining. Magic theory had been one of Tommy’s special interests since his childhood and he’d become very good at explaining all its intricacies in simpler terms to his audience of newcomers.
“It would - if I wasn’t wearing the Anti-Timestream Lifesteal trinket,” Tommy informed him, pointing to the lilac trinket around his ankle.
“Which one is that?” Dream asked, inspecting his leg worth of trinkets.
“It’s the lilac one - the one that’s fucking… pulsing,” Tommy specified.
“Oh, huh. I didn’t know you could do that. So, were you from here or are you like me?” Dream asked.
Tommy guessed that Dream wanted someone to look up to, a buddy to tell him how this place worked. And honestly, Dream seemed pretty okay.
“I’m like you, yeah. It was so fucking cool when I found this place. I accidentally jumped into a window when I was fucking… I don’t know anymore. It was a while ago. Anyway, I ended up in a forest near here. Then when I touched the tree it turned into an apple. Then it all went from there,” Tommy explained.
Dream began to wheeze like a tea kettle. Tommy stared in horror as he awaited Dream’s imminent explosion but it never came.
“You- Jumped into a window?” Dream wheezed, unable to speak for sheer laughter.
Tommy blushed,”I was five! I was reading this book about witches and shit and I thought to myself ‘Oh, I can do that’ and- you know what, why the fuck are you here, Dream? I hope it’s not just to bully me,” Tommy said.
“Uhh, yeah, I have a list,” Dream declared, pulling out a fucking behemoth of a list that reached all the way to the ground.
What the fuck was Dream up to?
As it turned out, Dream was very interested in magic. Of course, Dream was a little upset when he realised that he couldn’t create shit like he could but Tommy showed him books and supplies on everything, from the first herbology books to the book titled ‘Necromancy for Dummies’ that Tommy perhaps didn’t expect Dream to pick up on his first shopping trips.
Honestly, Tommy was glad that someone was buying all his books. Not many people bought them from his as it wasn’t like he could make any himself. His speciality lay, naturally, in trinkets, as his shop was renowned for and most avoided buying anything else from him, likely on the account that he was sixteen.
By the time Dream had finished his shop, he was in possession of two Strength Enhancement trinkets and a Purse Pusher trinket to help him carry it all. Truthfully, Tommy was surprised that Dream could afford it all but he supposed the exchange rates had been a bit fucked over the past few months.
Still, Tommy could hardly prevent himself from cheering as he read out the total.
“2817 primes, please.”
Dream barely batted an eye at the cost like the rich bastard he was because holy shit, that was more than Tommy’s Mortgage. Dream calmly handed over the money as if it was normal for him and appeared to not notice Tommy’s half-open mouth.
By the time Dream left, it had reached five and the sky was beginning to darken overhead. Tommy knew that the nighttime rush would begin soon but for all the stress it would bring, he’d already made more money off Dream.
In fact, Tommy wished that every customer was like Dream. Calm, probably weak and very, very interested in what he had to say, Dream had quickly moved up the ranks from one of those scared mortals he got sometimes to someone he assumed would be a customer for quite a while.
Thankfully, he was correct.
“Tommy, necromancy is essential to the natural order of the world! Sir Rogers was a knight - they objected to necromancy on religious grounds so you can’t expect him to have a well-rounded opinion on it,” Dream sighed, picking a Swift Regeneration trinket off the shelf.
“Sir Rogers was cool as shit! He went around bashing people’s heads in and he meant it, you know? He saw death a lot and lost a shit load of his friends. Despite that, he was still against necromancy. Also, Dream, stop stereotyping. Not all knights hated necromancy,” Tommy declared.
“But Sir Aphard, Sir Roger’s closest friend wrote extensively about his hatred of necromancy. Whether Sir Roger’s Criticism of the Un-Sacred Arts of Necromancy was written by a friend of an necro-hater is entirely important!” Dream rebutted.
“What the fuck is a necro-hater, Dream?” Tommy laughed, doubling over as he processed Dream’s words.
“I thought you were smart enough to tell, Tommy. A necro-hater is like you except they don’t sell books on necromancy in their shop,”Dream joked.
“Okay, blame the fucking shopkeeper for what sells. Fuck you, man. I didn’t know you hated small business owners,” Tommy replied, matching Dream’s tone.
“‘Small business owners? How many times have you been offered another shop? For free?” Dream asked in feux-aggression.
“Again, blaming the small business owners,” Tommy mourned, placing Dream’s stack of trinkets down on the counter.
“Small for the aesthetic, doesn’t mean you’re a small business,” Dream argued.
Tommy sighed,”So, does your Good Luck trinket work?” Tommy asked.
“No, I’m still tripping over stuff, people keep dying around me, I got hit by another dog- It’s hard at the moment,” Dream said, turning serious for a moment.
“Sorry to hear it, Dream. Here, the strongest I can make,” Tommy informed him, chucking Dream a trinket made of a light jade rock with a golden trim.
“See, I think you’re defrauding me, Tommy. You like your nicknames: Fraud Innit,” Dream wheezed, seemingly forgetting near-instantly his shitty situation.
Despite their friendship, Tommy couldn’t help but feel sorry for Dream. He was constantly pounded by every chunk of bad luck under the sun.
“Fuck off. It’s supposed to be 335 primes but lets round that up to 670, eh?” Tommy decided.
“Tommy! Do you want to be reported for fraud?!” Dream exclaimed, aghast.
Dream dramatically raised his hand as though he was about to faint.
“Do you want to be reported for necromancy?” Tommy replied confidently.
“And when they ask who sold me the books, guess what I could tell them?” Dream shrugged, tightening his hoodie as he paid up.
“Why do you always do that when you leave? It’s fucking weird, Dream, gives my shop a bad rep, Dream. The ladies! Oh, think of the ladies!” Tommy sighed.
“The ladies all died so I need to go back home to bring them back,” Dream decided, turning.
Tommy lost his step as he exited his booth, almost tripping on the ground. Dream grabbed him just in time, pushing him upwards.
“Oh, thanks, Dream,” Tommy smiled, slightly shocked at the fall.
“No problem, Tommy,” Dream declared, walking off with stacks of books and trinkets on his person.
Tommy continued to trade till late into the night, hundreds of eager customers lining up for the greatest custom trinkets and potions ever seen. Tommy dealt with everyone the same, selling his wares without kissing ass to the wealthier and ignoring the poorer. To Tommy, every customer was the same. Tommy did not apply the same policy to non-customers but, well, that was a different story.
Tommy had just finished making two delightful Beautification-De-aging trinkets for someone’s dying grandparents when he turned to look around the shop. All was quiet - too quiet.
He shrugged it off as merely his nerves. He was not an anxious person by nature but some inspectors were supposed to be coming round in the next few days to check that his potions were up to snuff. Tommy didn’t doubt that they were but still, the subconscious loves to play tricks on people.
Another person stepped forward, a strange mix between bird and human. Most people like that were the product of experimentation but Tommy assumed that she was a second or third generation considering her general ease and lack of huge medical scars.
“Hi, what brings you to this here shop?” Tommy asked.
“You got any fire breathing potions?” She asked, her accent clearly very Scottish.
“Yeah, I have a few. How many do you need?” Tommy asked.
“Three, maybe?” she guessed.
“Cool, three fire breathing- you don’t mean fire resistance do you?” He checked.
“No, of course not. I need to breathe fire, for a bit.”
Tommy could understand that. Sometimes everyone needed a stupid potion for something. Maybe she was doing a human barbeque (which was almost more ridiculous than it sounded) or something of that calibre?
Either way, Tommy was more interested in the several primes she had to offer than the actual reason she needed them. Don’t ask, don't tell, as they say.
The potions suddenly appeared on the counter, bubbling with flames. Tommy almost doused it with water for how violently they were shaking but he decided that they would be easier to sell if he ignored it.
She paid, she left, as all good customers do.
With that, he was onto the next person.
Tommy could smell the slightest smell of something on fire. Those potions had probably fired out a spark somewhere. He didn’t mind. His shop very rarely experienced any form of fire damage for all the magic around it. For anything to happen, he’d have to be incredibly unlucky.
It was twenty minutes later that he realised that thick smoke had filled the room. Clearly, it was coming from somewhere.
“One minute,” Tommy declared, leaving the counter.
Tommy raced through the shop in an attempt at finding the cause of the smoke to no avail. It was thick in the air, to the point that after a few minutes he couldn’t even see where he was in the shop. He couldn’t see anyone else. His customers had all gone, leaving him to deal with the fire. But how? He was lost in his own shop.
Tommy tried to calm himself but his usual strategy of breathing didn’t work when the air itself was suffocating.
And then, he saw it.
Tommy didn’t know how he hadn’t seen it before. In fact, Tommy was absolutely astonished that he hadn’t seen it because it suddenly registered to him that half of his shop was reduced to one massive fireball. His whole section of books on Energy? Gone. All his books in general, even? Also gone.
Tommy then realised the scale of the situation: his shop was burning. Badly.
Unfortunately, he didn’t keep much water on him but he tried to, little by little, turn the fire into water. Unfortunately, fire likes to spread. In fact, it likes to spread very quickly. Tommy, on the other hand, was a transmogrifite and while that was all well and good on a usual day, he spent most of his time messing around with magic that didn’t involve water.
In short, Tommy was fucking screwed.
Tommy could see light in the distance, light that was less intense and therefore less visible. Wiping tears from his burning eyes, he ran for what he assumed was the exit.
Only, it wasn’t the exit. It was the back rooms.
Tommy was coughing up a storm. His throat tasted like ash and smoke, mixing together to create the single most unpleasant taste he’d ever experienced. All he could smell was wood burning, the wood that made up his shop.
Everything he’d worked for years to build was burning up right in front of his eyes and he could hardly believe it.
Without a moments’ more thought, he jumped through a window and turned back time by a day.
Tommy didn’t know how he behaved normally the entire day at school. Probably because he didn’t. The entire day, Tommy was a distracted, distant and panicked mess, jumping and gnashing at whatever someone had to say like a violent dog.
He had been sent out of two different classes and made to sit in isolation for the rest of the day. Tommy honestly preferred that. He didn’t care about however apples reproduced: his shop was burning. His teachers didn’t - couldn’t - understand! He was supposed to be stopping his shop from burning down but, as it turned out, Tommy was too much of a coward to skip.
It was hours before his shop was to burn and yet Tommy was filled with the most unpleasant feeling of dread he had ever experienced in his life. He’d been having the worst luck: his whole house had burned to a fucking crisp, gone! Even though it hadn’t gone yet, Tommy was painfully paranoid that it had already happened. Because it had - sort of.
Claustrophobic black barriers separated him from the other inmates as he remembered the smoke wrapping itself around his lungs. Realistically, he realised the chances of him dying were well over zero. He could have died. He could have gone missing, forever. If nobody else cared, what would his teachers say once they realised he was missing? When they went to his address and realised that it was a derelict, decrepit apartment that had legally remained vacant for almost a decade?
Tommy’s brain was mush as he stared at the maths paper he’d been given to do. The teacher supervising wasn’t really paying much attention. Could he just-
“Sir, could I go to the bathroom?” Tommy asked with as much politeness as he could muster.
“Be back in five minutes or I’ll call the headteacher,” Mr Marriott decided, eyeing him up and down as though he’d already done something wrong.
He didn’t fucking vape! He could admit freely that he wasn’t the best of students but he didn’t fucking vape!
As Tommy walked out of the thin room, Tommy’s mind snapped back to the smoke. It was so massive and unending, so barren despite everything that it was supposed to be. Tommy’s shop was supposed to be a magical place where people got along and bought shit and made him money, not the cause of a million nightmares.
Tommy shook as he walked to the bathroom. Without even locking the door, he crawled through the thin window to his shop.
Thick relief flooded his heart as he stared at his shop in its full glory once again. He could almost pretend that the horrible smoke and the burning flames and his choking lungs were nothing but a horrible nightmare. The possibility was there for it to never have happened. His shop could be saved no matter what had happened the day before.
It was real, but it didn’t have to be.
He cleaned the shop as normal, attempting to hide to the best of his abilities from both himself and Dream. He wanted to protect his past self from what could have been even if it was difficult. The Tommy Innit of yesterday wasn’t ready for it- he wasn’t ready for it. His shop was supposed to be his legacy but this?
The hours went by and he became increasingly tense and vigilant. He cursed himself as he realised that he had no idea how his shop had burned down. Yes, it was true that he’d assumed it was the Fire Breathing potion but that didn’t make it true.
He realised that he couldn’t second guess himself then. He’d watch that stuff like a hawk and hope that he was right. It sickened him, yes, but what could he do? What else could he do when his whole life was at risk?
As night fell, he hid in the rafters above his counter. Most were too distracted by his amazing wares or their beloved shopkeeper to even think of looking up. And if they did, the shopkeeper himself in the rafters wasn’t the weirdest thing you could see in The Beyond.
As he lay there, he realised how tired he’d become. He hadn’t slept at all the following night, curled up in the school bathrooms. He probably should have gone to sleep but he’d been too hypervigilant, the memories of the burning flames ravaging his shop threatening him in the day, ready to burn him by night.
Tommy almost didn’t notice the bird lady - avians, Tommy thought they were called - arriving in the shop.
He doubted the avian had done anything malicious but still, he couldn’t help but feel a burning resentment for her. His eyes were almost red with rage as he remembered everything that he’d watched burn to a crisp every book, every notebook, every memory held there.
All because she wanted a fucking potion.
Tommy realised that he’d missed his chance to get rid of the situation entirely when Beau was handed the potion but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t prevent it from getting worse.
Tommy hunted for the sparks like he was a starving wolf searching for a fish. It was probably sizzling or crackling or making some fiery noise.
Still, he didn’t see a thing.
He subtly jumped down onto the ground, still in his school uniform so he was less obviously himself. There he was, looking exhausted, erratic and painfully mortal as he searched for the flames.
Again, like last time, the room filled with smoke. It was then that Tommy realised he’d failed: well and truly failed. There was no second chance, there were no backsies. His shop was going to burn.
The flames appeared out of nowhere - they really did. It was like…
Oh.
Someone had used illusion magic, hadn’t they? He’d been searching for something invisible like a fucking idiot when he should have been trying to find the hot spot.
The smoke became choking once again though this time, Tommy stared at the burning bookshelves and grieved. There was no doing anything: the fire was too out of hand. His shop would burn, miserably. No matter what he tried, there was no way around it. He had failed.
Sobbing, choking - from the fire or his hatred, he didn’t know - he watched as he tripped over himself, unmoving.
Past Tommy screamed for him to get out, unable to recognise himself for the smoke.
He’d not only failed but actively made the situation worse.
His heart ached at the realisation, a stabbing pain close to that of a heart attack.
It was almost funny, wasn’t it? Scratch that, it was very funny, funnier than Dream’s wheezing laughter, funnier than Erecto-feed, funnier than any potion he’d even sold.
He had spent fucking ages worrying about getting this wrong, planned and yet he’d still failed. Going in with past information had fucked everything up even more. Tommy ignored that his past self had already got up.
He didn’t care anymore.
He felt a pull as he was transported back to his own time. He ran out of his shop to the outside where crowds had gathered to watch it burn. He could see ambulances and people with Water Control badges but still, they weren’t doing anything.
They stared at him as he left the building in his (admittedly silly-looking) school attire.
He would have blushed if he'd had any care for anything anymore.
“Tommy? Tommy!” Dream called, pushing through the crowd to meet him.
“Dream?” Tommy asked, disbelief in his voice as he looked at Dream.
“Tommy, I’m here, I’m here,” Dream declared.
With that, Tommy broke.
He didn’t care that there were hundreds of people around, he didn’t care how stupid they, two humans in mortal outfits, looked hugging.
Tommy couldn’t recall the last time he’d been hugged but he did know that he didn’t get it. Why did everyone seem to think a hug or a kiss or anything was comforting when it did absolutely fucking nothing?
His shop was burning to pieces, his thatched roof fucking destroyed. Everything he’d worked so hard for was gone, thousands of irreplaceable papers he’d forgotten to copy lost forever.
Tommy couldn’t even see anymore, his vision a disorienting white inspired by the brightness of his rapidly burning shop.
This was it: everything was gone.
And it was all his fault.