Chapter Text
The first symptom is difficulty breathing, perhaps a tightness in your chest – manageable at worst, and hardly noticeable. Next is the blood. And the petals. And perhaps worst of all the smell – sweet and oh so venomous. It chocked anyone who came close in a wave of flowery aroma, all but the victim's love, who remained none the wiser up until it was just a tad bit too late.
Shadow Milk Cookie knew that smell all too well. In his many years of teaching, back when he was the Fount of Knowledge, he'd encountered a plethera of infected – both his students and his colleagues alike – and had long grown accustomed to it. After all, there are few places where more unrequited love is in the air than school – all it takes is a bunch of hormonal already not kids but not quite yet adults, and all of the classrooms have to be aired out three times a day to rid of the putrid flower smell.
Teenagers were always advised to remove the flowers surgically. Young love hurt and rarely paid off, it was certainly not worth dying over, however Shadow Milk had his share of pupils who thought they had found their soulmate and flat out refused to let go of that feeling. He always thought they were foolish. He always thought that if presented with the choice between love and life the decision would be painfully obvious. He'd never loved before.
Shadow Milk was not happy.
Ever since his spire collapsed, everything's descended into havoc. There was so much that needed to be done – they needed a new place to stay, a new plan to drown the world in deceit, new aliases – and quite frankly, Shadow Milk could not be bothered to care. If it wasn't for his handy minions he'd probably be sitting under a tree somewhere and scaring the local wildlife. Instead, he was now sitting in a cramped hut – one that Black Sapphire (somehow) managed to bargain for his pair of gemmed earrings – and scaring his servants.
Everything's been weird.
He wanted to blame it on his new surroundings – the tiny building was hardly a suitable habitat for a great and powerful beast of all cookies – but deep down he knew that the hut was hardly at fault here.
Shadow Milk sat on their tiny kitchen table, cross-legged and radiating irritation, all while his staff were attempting to make dinner – which you can imagine proved quite difficult with their boss taking up most of their workspace. However neither dared to ask him to move: Shadow Milk hardly ever complied even with the simplest requests, especially when he was in one of his moods like today.
This was a difficult situation to come to terms with. Not so much the living circumstances as he's realised, but Pure Vanilla Cookie. He hated that even now all he could think about was that pretentious old fool. Him and his stupid friendship offer – he knew Shadow Milk would never accept and yet he made a point to ask. Pathetic.
And yet he had to give him some credit: his words did have an effect on the jester, perhaps not the desired one, but an effect nonetheless. They made him think.
Not the regular type of thinking – not one involving others, but instead, himself.
Shadow Milk hated thinking about himself.
It made him miserable and rarely led to any positive outcome – so he tended to skip out on it.
Right now however, he had no other choice – it was either this or shouting at his minions, and while in normal circumstances the latter would seem far more appealing, these were not normal circumstances. Plus, he'd never admit it but he's been putting a lot on their plate recently, and they've been trying oh so hard to please him.
Shadow Milk was trying to figure out why.
Why he'd hesitated.
Why he showed that sliver of real emotion.
Why he'd almost said yes.
He sighed dramatically and slid off the table, now sitting on the floor and somehow taking up even more space. Candy Apple, who happened to be carrying a bowl of questionable looking soup, had to hop over his outstretched legs to not fall and make a mess.
Black Sapphire just quietly frowned. Sure he may be younger than Shadow Milk by a couple millennia, and is often quite brazen in his own right, but in moments like these he found himself feeling like a single mother (or at the very least an extremely attentive older brother).
But at least now they could set up the table.
The mystery soup turned out better than any of them expected. No one had much of an appetite of course, nor were any of them in a mood for conversation – hell even Candy Apple didn't utter a word. Black Sapphire offered to clear the dishes after they were done, there were no objections, as expected, and both Shadow Milk and Candy Apple turned in for the night – or at least tried to.
Shadow Milk of course had to have his own room, and he always got what he wanted, which meant Candy Apple and Black Sapphire were left to share. His room wasn't ornate or luxurious by any means but it sufficed: a double bed and heavy curtains to cover the windows was all he really needed. His minions shared a bunk bed in the room nextdoor and would no doubt fight for the top bunk if it wasn't for the haze of exhaustion that hovered over even the two of them.
Shadow Milk curled up in the cheep sheets but sleep didn't come. It wouldn't come for a while. He didn't need to sleep of course but... It was the best way to pass the time.
The sheets were itchy on his skin and the pillow was a tad too hard to lay on comfortably. The springs of the mattress dug into his back whenever he so much as slightly shifted. Sure, he could probably magic up a bed far more comfortable...
Probably.
Truth be told he's been feeling unnaturally drained since the spire fell – something about it being a part of him and all that. He sighed and rolled over onto his other side, then back to his previous position; when that didn't help he resorted to casting a sleeping spell upon himself. That seemed to do the trick and soon he drifted out of consciousness, and into the strange part of the mind where dreams happen.
He refused to have dreams – he avoided them like truth, however that didn't stop dreams from haunting him either way, especially tonight.
It was opressingly silent, only the soft crunch of leaves beneath his feet echoing through the air. Shadow Milk found himself in a graveyard, his feet carrying him down a leaf littered cobblestone path that writhed and coiled among the tombs like a giant serpent. He could almost hear it hiss in the quiet of the night.
His feet were forced to a stop by two matching tombstones – the only tombstones, as he'd come to realise – perfectly identical if not for the inscriptions etched into the cold weathered stone. The left one read 'Black Sapphire Cookie' and the right one 'Candy Apple Cookie'.
Shadow Milk's heart dropped as he read the names – they weren't dead, no, they couldn't be, they were just having dinner together they were just—
But when was the last time he really saw either of them.
When was the last time he heard their voices – their annoying, pesky voices, ones that filled the silence when lies and cheap jokes couldn't, ones that trusted him, ones that followed him wherever he went.
Maybe they've crumbled a long time ago.
Maybe he simply didn't notice.
The scene swam, and Shadow Milk couldn't tell if it was tears or simply his eyes falling him but when his vision returned, he found himself in a classroom, clutching a textbook.
He was back in the academy, no longer the feared almighty beast but instead the Fount of Knowledge – respected and praised. Strange. He hasn't been in the Fount's eyes in quite some time.
His feet dragged him along once again, down the once familiar hallways of his youth, hollow and winding, and they would be memory-perfect, if it were not for the flowers that infested the walls around him.
That smell – that horrid smell filled his lungs, forcing itself through with each breath his body took. It clouded his thoughts and his senses, and were it not for the legs that so persistently carried him onwards, Shadow Milk would have surely given into the venomous embrace of the pollen and petals.
Those who say flowers are harmless have never walked through a poppy field.
The red of their petals can only be compared to that of freshly squeezed blood – a bloodstain of the earth if you look from a bird's eye – and the smell... The smell is the worst part. You know they say you can fall asleep if you breathe it in for long enough? That's because the poppies want you to stay. They want you to lay down and decay alongside them, they want to sprout from your maggot infested flesh, they want your blood to mix with the red of their petals.
And yet some call poppies a symbol of hope.
But I digress.
The flowers crowding the hallways were every colour one can imagine – and some even broke that spectrum. They watched Shadow Milk as his body dragged him along; judging, hating him. He knew not what he had done. He'd never know why those flowers grew eyes – why they frowned and silently wished him dead. It hardly mattered, he'd reached his destination: a classroom – his classroom.
It hardly changed from how he once remembered it, the same walls (thankfully no flowers here), the same chalkboard, the same bookshelves lined up along the back. The only difference – his desk was not there.
In its place stood a tree – not any tree, no, he had to give it some credit, – none other than the silver tree itself. The one he'd been imprisoned in for so, so, so long. It rose from the floor boards, its roots digging into the foundations of the building and its mighty branches reaching up to the ceiling... No, past the ceiling, up, up, up, so unimaginably high, rising over everything.
The body was no longer Fount's. It was once again Shadow Milk's, and it couldn't protect him from the tree that towered over him.
Needing protection from a tree – pathetic.
In that brief moment of self-spite, Shadow Milk almost forgot to be afraid.
Of course that failed to last, the fear swept over him once again as his own voice called out from inside the tree. He was trapped – again. But this time he could fix it, this time he could set everything right, he could reclaim the world, he could help himself for once, he could... Shadow Milk found himself clutching Pure Vanilla's staff.
There were no decisions to be made.
All he had to do was aim.
A blur of white light erupted from the staff and ripped hungrily through the tree, tearing it apart with a horrid crackling sound that rang throughout all of earthbread, for everyone to hear: at last, he could be free, he could be whole, no one was there to shun him any longer. It took a while for the blaze of the blast to die down, but once it did, there was no tree.
There was, however, Pure Vanilla Cookie.
He stood precisely where Shadow Milk had aimed. Precisely where the tree should had been. And precisely in the middle of his chest was a gaping hole.
Shadow Milk dropped the staff in horror – this was not his design. He had meant to destroy the wretched tree not.... Him. But... Was there really any difference?
Pure Vanilla staggered forward, some miracle keeping him breathing, and collapsed against Shadow Milk, who was rooted in place. He brought his mouth up to the jester's ear and whispered words that would echo in Shadow Milk's mind for a long time:
"You are the flesh maggots adore, my dear."
The sentence left his mouth just as the life did his body. The healer hung limp for a brief moment against Shadow Milk's shoulder before crumbling into a pile of flowers.
Gentle, yellow roses.
Shadow Milk Cookie woke up.