Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

All at once, it came to his attention that he was dreaming. 

The regular world of dream was a highly irregular place, made even more complicated when you sold your soul. His friends from the outer realms, as strange as they were, lived in a place that he wouldn't quite call comfortable. He was sure that no wholesome being had ever been there, none who hadn't sold their aforementioned soul anyway. But here he was, trying desperately to find his bearings. He only knew he was in the world of dream because of that unusual emptiness, the feeling that there was no floor underneath and no sky above. There were no walls. There was only pitch blackness. It was terrifying. 

Diamonds walked forward, across the nothing, into the Nothing. He was looking for something, anything. perhaps he would encounter one of the horrific denizens of the realm, of this big empty space. He doubted it. His patron was the only thing likely to take interest in conversing with him and he didn't know if the creature socialized at all. He was sure some of them had to, some of them screamed at least. Some of them whispered. They called them to this void of space frequently now, for reasons he never seemed to be able to discern. Sometimes, he sat down to wait. Sometimes, he walked in circles. Sometimes, he called out despite knowing that nothing conscious or good could probably answer his call. This time, he walked forward for an indeterminate amount of time, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing. He thought surely he would have encountered at least some sinister screaming, but he found nothing. No imitations of his friends, no inspirations of terror. No eyes, no mouths, no hungry throats. It was empty. 

He wondered for a second when he fell asleep, finding that he could not quite recall. He didn't think he'd laid down to go to bed, and he didn't think he'd fallen asleep anywhere intentionally, he didn't even remember sitting down. It was normal to have difficulty recalling such things during dreams, he reminded himself, but he was no less disturbed by the realization. 

Much to his surprise, his foot stubbed something. He felt around with his shoe, finding it something like a stair. He stepped up onto it and several more after it. He followed this non-existent staircase up, as much as there is up in a place with no direction, and looked down only to find nothing below. It didn't look like his elevation had changed at all. At some point, the ground leveled out again and he continued forward into the nothing. Forward enough and he encountered something, or so he thought. He walked into it, something about waist high. It jolted, invisible as it was, and off of it fell a little silver box. Diamonds leaned down and picked it up, inspecting the object thoroughly, and felt for that thing he'd walked into. He found nothing. He felt nothing. The object, cloaked in darkness as it had been, had vanished. 

He looked back at the little box in his hands and after focusing for a second, he realized that he saw something underneath it. He was standing on something. His gaze focused and it grew brighter and clearer, and he realized that he was looking down at the desert sand. In his hand he held a little silver box. 

Diamonds Droog looked at the desert wasteland surrounding Midnight City. He had no idea how he got here, he remembered. Last he could recall, he had just gotten home and taken a shower. He got in redressed to go work an evening at the bar and he expected light traffic. He stood in his kitchen checked the forbidden timepiece which he carried with him to and from the bar on these working nights. It was nearly time to leave then. An examination of it now revealed that he was supposed to be in the middle of his shift, a shift he clearly had not started. With the box in hand, he started back toward his waiting car, half afraid to open the damnable thing. He picked up his phone. He'd miss several calls, had several text messages, voicemails. It didn't really matter to him in this moment. 

With the car started an air conditioner running, he locked the doors. He seemed to have everything he was meant to, with keys in the ignition, his wallet in the passenger seat and his phone which had been in his pocket. He even had his revolver, settled into the cavity in the driver's door. He seemed very put together for having no recollection of how he'd gotten here. It last, he opened the little silver box. While he half expected some eldritch monstrosity to free itself of its eternal earthly confinement when he did, no such thing happened. Opening it revealed only a white ball. A cue ball, scaled down. 

He picked up his phone to call Spades Slick. Slick was undoubtedly angered by his absence at the bar, certainly at least a little flustered by it. His boss didn't like to bartend. Upon answering the phone, Slick begin shouting, but not quite what he expected. He said nothing about the shift, nothing about the closed bar, nothing of the like. He didn't even mention the sudden absence. Somehow, what he said was even more on settling, and all Diamonds could do was fear what that little black omen in his hands meant. 

"Wake up, you fucking idiot. You need to come get me. They fucking— left me here. Help."

Chapter Text

Going to sleep that night was nearly impossible. 

Slick hadn't been to banged up, mostly scrapes and bruises and little lacerations that he had to very carefully clean all the sand out of before he could bandage them up, but not terribly damaged. He'd been handcuffed to a light post and left out in the desert, assumingly with some intent for him to die. With two hands behind the post, Droog wasn't sure how he got his hands on his cell phone to make that call. All he knew is that he did, and as such, Droog, ever the good friend, made an appearance to save him. 

Laying there in bed, he reflected on the drive. It didn't quiet, strangely quiet. Spades Slick lived his life by the philosophy of stab first and ask later, so Droog found it incredibly perplexing when Spades Slick picked up the little white orb in his cup holder, examined it, and put it back down quietly. He didn't say anything. Instead, he rolled it around in his head like some cursed marble of thought, staring silently out the window until they had arrived back at the bar. There, Slick sprung the question. Not the question he'd expected, but a question nonetheless. "How the hell did you get out there so fast?"

"I drove."

"You were already out there," was his first accusation. 

"I was."

"Why?"

Diamonds paused. Not for long, but for too long nonetheless, and Spades caught the lie before it was even able to leave his mouth. He only knew this because Slick all but shouted it with the way he raised his eyebrows. "I was meditating."

"About weird ass little white things?" was his second accusation. 

"About dreams I've been having," was the veiled admission. It hung in the air for a few breaths before Diamonds asked, "what happened to you?"

"They picked me up, kicked me around, locked me up, and said they'd come back soon. Called you and now we're here."

"How did you call me?"

"Siri."

"Oh, you figured that out?"

"Mhm. Reckon it might've just saved my life." Slick let this sit a second before picking back up. There was a heavy dread in the atmosphere. Droog hated to find out that this was the beginning of something. "What're you dreaming about?"

So, he told him. He neglected the sleepwalking detail, mentioning only that he'd dreamed of finding cursed artifacts, but never what they were. And Slick, for his part, told Droog what happened without mentioning the motive, which Droog was sure the guy had to know. Things weren't honest, he reflected, but they were even. He rolled onto his back, eyes closed. He couldn't help but feel like he was staring at the ceiling through his eyelids. Or maybe the ceiling was staring at him. Maybe, the distant feeling of reality eroding away was not immaterial after all. 

He opened his eyes again. The ceiling was dark. The walls, dark. His sheets, which in the waking world were a deep red, were pitch black too. The realm of dream opened up before him, speaking all around him in Slick's voice. "What're you dreaming about?"

Chapter Text

Waking up in the world of dream was a largely unpleasant experience. It immediately reminded one that they would not be feeling rested when they will, it was only an extension of waking life in your sleep. At least, that's how Diamonds saw it. It was, at kindest, a huge inconvenience. He processed it as such, acknowledging that he would be exhausted when he woke up tomorrow. It would be a long, long shift of babysitting Spades Slick with his obnoxious intuition about Diamonds's honesty. 

Now awake and seemingly lying on some surface, Diamonds selected to stand up. He stood up, threw off the covers, and started walking. He followed his feet, as he did occasionally in these dreams, and then, when he felt the time was right, he stopped. He looked around and all he saw was blackness. Endless uninterrupted darkness. 

Something about this inky blackness was different than the inky blackness every single time before. He spent years observing that odd quiet. This, this was not quiet. This was loud. There was a rushing that ebbed and flowed underneath the silence, both in terms of sound and appearance. Despite seeing nothing at all the surrounding space seem to pulse with life. endless black noxious life that pressed in on him from every angle. This was different than the usual nightmares about nothing, about the abyss. Here he was, watched, seen, known. He knew not what saw him and he knew not why it saw him and he knew not were from, but he knew that something certainly must have seen him. 

The thronging blackness produced nothing of interest ahead and after a while he stopped walking to examine it again. He wasn't sure about the physics of this place, but he was sure there was an educator out there who would do unimaginable things even for glimpse of a world outside of the waking dimension. He reached out to touch nothing and then put his hands in his pockets. In the leftmost pocket of his coat, he found something interesting, he found a little white marble which he stared at in something like disbelief. Then, it did something even more unbelievable than simply appear in his dreams again. It blinked. Porcelain white spread wide open briefly and closed quickly to reveal what looked like an eye. It startled Diamonds enough to make him drop a little artifact and look around him, and suddenly, he saw many more of them beginning to open out of the blackness. Many eyes opened and gazed upon him, seeing him, exactly as before. 

Somewhere ahead of him, a great big smile full of sharp teeth cut the air open. It became to hiss out words in a way that was most detestable as it should have been to any sane or normal person. It was nightmare incarnate. He would never forget the sounds that he heard and the sounds that it made when it spoke, it sounded far off, distant, despite clearly being right in front of him. He wondered if perhaps that didn't mean the beast's voice didn't project from somewhere else all together, perhaps what he saw was an illusion of something even worse that he could not see. It called him his name first and waited for him to nod, to tell it yes, to let it know that it was correct about who and what he was. It smiled impossibly wide and every time he thought it must have surely met its limit, it smiled even more widely than before. Surely, this would keep him up for many nights in the future. 

The thing did not care, it paid his fear no mind. Heeding the fear of mortals, he assumed, was not in the wheelhouse of such a thing, whatever this nightmare thing was. Part of him wished to call it a deity, but it was no such thing at all. To call it a deity would be offensive to the mild and wholesome deities of the earth on which we all reside. this thing, it was a monster. 

Diamonds lean down to pick up the little marble that he found in his sleep and the looked up at the beast, it, with all those eyes, looked back at him, waiting. Then, it asked him to return its eyeball, which he did without any hesitation. He didn't really care to keep any part of any such cursed thing is this one ever again. After fastening the marble into the empty space in front of him, he stepped back, and the thing blinked what was almost a thanks. He looked at the ground, half hoping to see the desert sand opening up beneath him again, with no such luck. Instead, he was obliged to look up at the thing when it began to speak one last time, and to listen when it said, "Ask me before you remove it next time. I was watching for you."