#c: feedback

[jimilter]

Hey just wanted to say I re read ain’t no cherry now and then, really looking forward to the sequel 🥺💕

hello hello, dear anon! aaaa ARC, my baby! thank you so so much for reading, so happy to know you liked it - it truly means a lot to me 😭❤️

abt the sequel ummm i can't exactly make promises bec i discarded the previously planned fic, and the ideas i currently have are v v vague. but i WILL write it someday bec i miss my chaotic, horny duo :(

thanks for dropping by, anon, much love to ya! ❤️❤️❤️

[not-quite-ran]

Let's get married

(a dreamnoblade one-shot)

"Let's get married" Dream almost laugh, no, he did laugh, because he thought he was joking, because who would propose in the middle of the artic, just outside a secret base of an anti government organization that had just finished a meeting, besides it didn't even sound as a proposal, so he just laugh.

But Techno didn't laugh with him. In fact, when Dream turn to look his way, Techno was holding a circular object that was also very shiny that happened to look exactly like an engagement ring.

"Oh"

-----

Life after prision break wasn't easy, but Techno was there. 

Techno was there when Dream was physically able to hold a sword again.

Techno was there when he succeeded in hold a pen properly, and do readable orations instead of his usual cat scratches.

Techno hold him when the night terrors were unbearable and he live sleepless for a couple of weeks.

Techno was there when he had to empty his guts in the bathroom when he had a little too much food when his stomach wasn't able to handle it yet.

Techno was there, and even better, Techno was there for him.

So when Techno offered him a place at the syndicate table, Dream was euphoric.

Not everybody was exited to meet him at the syndicate table, but a couple of years had passed and he was unbothered, besides, the syndicate wasn't really busy, so it really was just an excuse to reunite in a calm place to chat and have some of the pastry Nikki always bake for them

It was nice.

Dream could get use to this.

And he did.

--

Dream wasn't a man of formalities in his personal life, and honestly after all the "no attachments" thing in his past he was kind of lost in the topic now. So when he and Techno past from foreign touches, to cuddles, to kisses, to straight up make out sessions and ,,, other stuff, they really didn't say much, it felt natural, maybe not really talk about it wasn't ideal, but it work for them and no one really never cuestion it, so, no need.

Dream had already sense the subtle change in their routine, they were entering a very domestic routine (more domestic that it already was), Dream could feel it, and it was nice, it was peaceful, and warm, and Dream was tired. Recovery was a very tiring process, and Dream wasn't complete heal.

He didn't think he would never be.

But it was fine.

He had Techno.

And it was very obvious right now.

Techno wasn't in his knees, Dream didn't think he could stand it if Techno kneel, but he didn't need to, because Dream was already in his horse and even if Techno was a fucking giant, Dream have to look slightly downwards to look at him from his place at the top of his horse.

Techno also wasn't offering the ring per se, he was handing it over, like it was anything but a fucking engagement ring-

"Okay, rude, you could had just say no instead of laughing at my face, but okay" Techno was teasing, Dream could hear it in his voice, but he also could hear the slight wavering, like he was insecure.

Techno was never insecure.

"N-No, wait ,,, what?" Dream tried, he did, but his brain refuse to catch up with all that was happening.

"I said, we should ,,," Techno bring the ring closer to Dream's face, again, like he was presenting anything but a ring. "We should get married"

Dream blinked,

Once,,

Twice-

"That it's the most horrible proposal I ever heard, and I have heard a few." Dream couldn't help but laugh, again, and Techno was about to retreat his hand when he lean in and put his hand over Techno's. Techno smiled.

"Okey, nerd, leave me alone, this is a full player thing I have zero knowledge about this kinda stuff in players culture." Dream couldn't help but smile

"Then you should try and do it in a way you understand it." Despite everything, Dream took the ring from Techno's hand and put it in his finger, and took his time to admire it, it was truly beautiful, Techno has put a lot of thought in it. He smile, "It's really beautiful Tech." 

"I'm glad you like it" Techno took Dream's hand, and he also admire the ring in his finger, he look proud. "And now that you accept my courting, it's the first of various ornaments that I should give to you, mate." It wasn't a question,  but it also wasn't a affirmation.

"Well, I think I would like to get married to you, mate."

Dream swore he had never seen Techno smile wider.

Yeah, he will be fine.

Because he had Techno.

And Techno had him.

[oneluckydragon]

✨🌸 Sunshine on your skin, flowers in my soul 🌸✨

🌊🫧Summary → In the midst of his reconciliation with Team Wish, Dusknoir begins coughing up flowers. This unfortunate brand of bad luck should be a cosmic joke. A spiteful punishment that the world has brought down on him out of malice, out of vengeance for his past deeds. A cruel, agonizing curse manifested with the single unjustified purpose of preventing him from realizing happiness, ever seeking redemption, ever righting his multitudes of wrongs and moving on with his life. But that's not true, and he knows it deep down. Knows it in the very core of his soul like the flood of petals building in this throat.

This is his fault because he is a coward, and that's all he has ever been. A backstabbing, lonely coward.

And now he is going to die because of it.

[AO3]

[CH. I -- Word Count -- 13,290]

🌒💫 Return → the act of going back to a place, person, or memory

[CH. II -- TBA]

[starlyte-writes]

Okay, I have a theoretical dsmp story idea in my head but idk if it's too far out there/confusing/complicated so I'm curious what do y'all think:

Basic concept (which it's hard to explain but hear me out) is that all of the characters of the dsmp are transported to a massive arena by XD. Each of them wakes up in a separate room, and when they do, they find they're not alone but are accompanied by a stranger who seems to vaguely/strongly recognize them. It's revealed that XD has selected one person from Earth that closest matches the personality of each dsmp member to become a team that will compete in a series of challenges broadcasted to the whole world.

To put it even more simply: each character is paired with a dsmp nerd that matches their energy whether they like it or not and I have an excuse to make a crazy Hunger Games-esque competition while simultaneously analyzing what makes every dsmp character unique.

Does this sound cool or do I sound absolutely insane (pls feel free to ask me questions or throw out suggestions this is a very rough idea as of rn)

[ganondoodle]

i am very much not normal about Shargon, Zaphira and Eadrya in particular but its so hard to get that across since they are very much only three of many OCs in a gigantic world and story i can never hope to truly bring to paper and it feels like my brain is trying to claw its way out of a prison and the bars are made of diamond

[marty--party]

admittedly, i am a little obsessed

+bonus lil fellas who love each other so much

[blackjackkent]

Giffing BG3, part 2/?

Meeting Us

[cdroloisms]

Oh I was just haunted by jmah!Dream’s deteriorating mental state

:C my BOYYY

and it's awful, too, because it's not like Dream is in a particularly good state of mind when the prison starts in the first place. and he's in here because he's terrified (and he's in here as punishment) and he's in here because even though Sam hates him--and he's ensured that Sam hates him, and he's planning to do more to make sure of that fact as well (in canon, c!Dream is talking to c!Sam 'all about exile' in those first few days)--Sam will do his job. he trusts him to do his job. he knows Sam, the man that he's worked with for the last month on this project, on making sure this prison is as secure as it can possibly be, one of the final few people to work with him before the events of the green festival, doomsday, staged finale etc. made sure he'd stand alone, just where he was supposed to. this is a Dream that's already been swimming in the lava before Sam travels back in time.

unlike Sam's betrayal in canon, there's nothing slow about what happens in JMAH. there's no ability for him to cope and go yeah, Sam's being kind of serious, but it's no big deal, yeah, this place kind of sucks, but it's survivable, yeah, there's some mistreatment, but I expected that. in an instant, Sam goes from a predictable cog in the machine meant to keep him alive into a stranger hellbent on torturing the fuck out of him, and he has no idea why. Sam is nowhere near as straightforward as Quackity in explaining what the hell he wants out of Dream--he asks for the book, sure, but also for information, also for complete obedience, also for explanations for things he shouldn't know and punishments for things he never did. there is no promise that the revive book will end anything, for this Dream, and no one to give him anything at all but the Warden.

just ,, the lengths to which this Sam is willing to go, the intensity of his obsession, the way he'd be left reeling with no choice other than to endure and wonder why breaks my heart. Dream has no fucking clue to what end this is all for, and i think he struggles a lot with that. worse than just the torture, perhaps, is the familiarity, the sparks of something that is almost fondness, the satisfaction in Sam's voice when he's gotten something and Dream isn't even sure what he's just given away--and maybe it'd be easier to understand if what Sam wanted from him were any more straightforward, if the desire could pan out as something as simple as sadistic pleasure at hurting him or deriving some kind of gratification from making him submit or wanting power or to eliminate a threat or anything, but all that is clear is that Sam wants something from him and will stop at nothing to get it.

c!Dream and identity is already a finicky thing as well as his whole complex about himself and evil--c!Dream thinks he's a person that does evil things to achieve good ends, but he struggles pretty heavily, honestly, with himself-as-evil and being viewed as evil-and-just-evil and actually being the tyrant-villain-monster-snake-that-just-bites, etc, which means that there is a level of vulnerability here when it comes to how he sees himself and builds his identity and the constant, relentless onslaught of . pain and torture combined with Sam justifying it all by Who He Is Innately and monologuing about how he deserves it all, because c!Dream isn't a person that doesn't think that punishment as a concept is wrong and doesn't necessarily disagree that he's evil either. and again. torture self harm box of mental illness. and part of the problem with a Sam that's fresh from Daedalus and then thrust into kind of the worst possible position of reflecting on those conversations by being in a place where he's able to fall hard on old habits to copium his way out of dealing with anything he personally might have done (because obviously he can just Fix It Now) while also having the additional cope of i-am-godsent-to-make-everything-better BY keeping dream in a box, you kind of get a situation where both Dream and Sam are psychologically in pretty vulnerable places and then you're taking a torture machine hammer to those stress points. so it's fun.

i have no clue if that last paragraph made any kind of sense btw.

but ... yeah. even for any character in any kind of state the insane torture contraption of torture efficiency would be. erm. extremely damaging to one's mental health, to say the least. the only good thing for dream i guess is that sam still has his head too far up his own ass to actually git gud at conditioning anyone deliberately and is therefore still largely skating by By Accident, because otherwise his head would've been even more blendered than it already gets.

[somegrumpynerd]

Time for a new toy!

Tube won by a pretty big landslide, so tomorrow there'll be a cardboard tube in the garden!

So that means..

(Note: I changed the paper option to pages just to make it less confusing now that paper bag is an option, it still attracts the same cat though!)

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

as someone who is both trans and disabled i think the fact that transphobia and ableism come from the exact same place isn’t talked about enough like. it’s the idea of someone being abnormal looking abnormal needing medication needing healthcare. it’s the idea of people changing their bodies to help themselves it’s the idea of bodily autonomy it’s the idea that the people you know will be abnormal in ways that cannot be hidden. being transgender is conflated with disability, both physical and mental, by transphobes, and cannot be talked about without talking about ableism.

you’ll see it in their talking points. doing shit like “would you let a MENTALLY ILL person around your DAUGHTER?” implying mental illness makes you a danger unfit to be around a child worthy of scorn and mockery, needing to be hidden away from the public instead of having their rights fought for. it’s in framing autistic trans people as unable to make decisions of their own, framing them as objects and pets and not people who should be pretty little dolls and when we're not we're clearly being manipulated into it. it’s in how they mock surgery and scars and treat the medical consequences of such as gross and immoral, framing surgery as something horrific to be avoided because of it being “abnormal”, talking about how no one should ever be on medication for life even though most people that are are disabled people who would be severely impacted and possibly die without it. it’s in the way they casually call trans people retarded and crippled. they’re the same thing.

and we see this! photomatt, the guy harassing a random trans woman for being mean to him on the internet and breaking the fucking law for epic owns, has told people with epilepsy who are in genuine danger from flashing lights in ads to buy ad free for basic accessibility and Not Dying. bigotry against trans people directly leads to bigotry against disabled people. bigotry against disabled people directly leads to bigotry against trans people. our struggles are linked so heavily.

[jimilter]

Just finished the new installment of TD&HK. They were doing so well together through the whole chapter, and then that ending happened. I'm so sad now. I felt really bad for him. He thinks that she doesn't want him and has completely withdrawn. She's gonna be so hurt thinking that she doesn't mean anything to him. I guess the next chapter is gonna have some angst. Is it the last chapter?

hello, dearest reader! 🥺 yes, that is absolutely true, she's gonna be really hurt :( and the next chapter will contain that hurt in BULK, so it will def be very angst-heavy :(

i am not fully certain if it'll be the last chapter, tbh. i do plan to make it the final one, but i have quite a few things in mind that i'd like to do with these characters, including exploring things separately w their povs. so if all of that clutters the next part, i will extend the series to a sixth chapter! :D

thank you so much for reading and leaving me your very valuable feedback! sending you love! 🥺❤

[gingerpeachtea]

🦀🦀🦀

15 sentences!!!!

Satine was lying on Christian’s bed, seated up against tattered pillows thin with use; she might have minded, if the smell of his shampoo and her perfume weren’t lingering so sweetly. She could recall their early days, before Christian had gotten properly settled, when all that clung was dust. Or, the bitter stench of absinthe, when the same could be said of his breath—when the green-cheapened poetry of his mouth swallowed the copper twinge in her own. A small mercy she'd held tight in her bloodstained fist. Paris backstreets shone among the red L’amour sign beyond Christian’s apartment, a mere glimmer peeking through the reflections cast on the window: Christian’s backside, lit warm by the bedside lamp while he excitedly leafed through the pieces he’d workshopped with Toulouse. He was always working on something new, jumping from project to project, passion to passion; a constant balancing act of his overactive imagination atop the cusp of fresh creation. He came home from each session with Toulouse more than eager to share his day’s musings with Satine. After all, try as he might, Toulouse was never too successful in pacing Christian, keeping him stoking one creative flame at a time instead of just dousing every concept in gasoline and tossing in a reckless match. No, it seemed Santiago and Satine were the lucky few capable of reining him in from careening wildly between ideas at the drop of a hat. (Nini had successfully shot down an idea of his once, though, after being forced to overhear him describe it to Satine in their dressing room between acts. She’d been a bit harsh about it, but he appreciated her honesty.)

i think this is more than 15 whatevs tho ily

(make me write!!!)

[driftwoodwolf]

BIG PSA: I've just noticed Tumblr saves the original text of edited drafts in blog post links. My latest artwork should have a link that ends in "lost" since that's the post text but the actual link is "unsharp" which is what I originally wrote in the draft to differentiate versions of the image for testing. This has the potential to be really bad in terms of privacy. @staff maybe you should look into this :')

If you're the type of person to edit drafts, please be careful...

[peninkwrites]

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine (And the machine is bleeding to death)

Tommy was going to break into the prison, he was going to kill Dream, even if he had to crawl in there with nothing but a knife to do it. An alternative to when Tommy and Ghostbur snuck into the prison to kill Dream.

Crossposted to ao3

(CW: claustrophobia, heat exhaustion, fear, panic attacks, ptsd)

~

Tommy will do this alone.

At first, Tubbo and Ranboo had wanted to come with him, but Tommy couldn’t let them do that.  He wasn’t sure why he refused them so adamantly, maybe because he didn't want to put them at risk, maybe because he didn’t want them to see the kind of person that man made him turn into.

Then, he considered Ghostbur.  He didn’t pose a threat to anyone, so surely Sam would let him into the prison, but when it came time to ask, to let him in on the plan, Tommy had taken one look at those pale, vacant eyes, and he just couldn’t.  Ghostbur wasn’t meant to go in the prison.  Something so gentle, so hollow, could not endure the very air that permeated the halls of Pandora’s Vault, let alone what resided in its heart.  Tommy could not endure what resided there.

He would do so nonetheless, and he would do it alone.

Sam’s design is a beautiful, horrid, living thing.  Tommy has seen how it works from the inside, and he explained every mechanism in great detail to Tubbo.

Tubbo, who had wanted so badly to join him, who had said, “really, bossman, do you think I’m gonna let you do this alone?”

And Tommy’s reply had been too simple, too desperate.  “Please.”

It had not been that one word, rather, the way Tommy had looked at him, pleading and needing him to give in and let Tommy do this.  There were some things Tubbo could never refuse, at least never refuse again, and Tommy asking something of him was hard to resist.

Ranboo was easy.  Ranboo, who, like Ghostbur, didn’t remember and didn’t want to do any harm, the difference being, when Tommy told him to stay behind with Tubbo, he had understood, he had been afraid for his friend in a way Ghostbur was incapable of being.

Tubbo, even as he had not been allowed to cross this line with his best friend, would do everything he could to help him.  Tommy, for all his pretenses of fearlessness, he’d told his friends about the prison.  Barely, and through trembling breath and a dizzy head and a face still bruised post resurrection, but he had told Tubbo enough.  Tommy needed this man dead, and he needed to be the one to do it.  So Tubbo listened, he thought out what he believed the plans could look like, and he offered Tommy something terrible and reassuring.

“Look, there needs to be a ton of space for the redstone to operate, not to mention vents to get in fresh air, probably decent-sized ones since he’s gotta be pumping the heat out of the main cell and getting fresh air in.  I’d imagine he doesn’t have the vents into Dream’s cell connected directly outside, he probably has a lot of them to diffuse the heat before he pumps it out, and if I were him, I’d have the ones pumping fresh air in go under the water, just to add to the cooling.” Tubbo tries to focus on the practical, on the analytical, assessing the functionality of a mechanism and nothing more, and not on the fact that soon his friend was dead set on crawling inside of that machine.  “I wish I had those stupid blueprints, if I could see the actual design I could work out a proper flaw no problem, this is just– it’s guesswork.”

“Come on, Tubster, you’re a fuckin’ genius!  I know you can figure something out,” Tommy says, trying to sound enthused instead of desperate.  Every minute he spends, even out, even free, even alive, his skin crawls knowing Dream breathes just across the water.  He has to do this.

Tubbo frowns, doubtful.  “Sam will have made the vents pretty small.  They need to be bigger than typical air ducts, just for the amount of heat he’s generating, but he’d definitely want to make sure, well, make sure nothing like what we’re planning on doing could happen.”

“Okay?” Tommy asks, pacing from foot to foot.

“Tommy… Aren’t you claustrophobic?” Ranboo asks carefully, looking too tall sitting beside the table in Tommy’s war room.  This is where Tommy had taken him after they had first met, this is where he had let Tommy drag him into mischief.  Tommy thinks Ranboo somehow looks smaller than he had then.  Tommy feels smaller too.

“I mean–” Tommy laughs nervously.  “Hardly anymore!  For a little while there I was, but– but I’ll be fine.”

Tubbo and Ranboo look at him and they don’t believe him, so Tommy tries another way, an old reliable method.  “Please.  I– I have to do this.  I already feel like I’m trapped in a little box all the fucking time knowing he’s out there, s-so, I– I have to.”

Tubbo and Ranboo exchange an indirect glance.  Tubbo refocuses on his loose notes, on the haphazard outline of the interior of the prison Tommy had pieced together for him.  He’s trying to work in negative space, to build a safe path out of absence.  “Right.  Well, we’re not sending you in the vent where the heat comes out, so we gotta find where he pulls cool air in.”  Tubbo has a hundred other concerns, the first ones coming to mind being that the actual drop into the cell could be far enough to do some real damage, that there would have to be lots of strong fans to do the actual venting, and how easy it would be for Tommy to die like that.  “A-And the vent should probably let out throughout the building.  He couldn’t let the redstone get too hot, it could fuck up the wiring.  So, if it gets to be too much, Tommy, you can always pop out.”

Tommy laughs, barking and sharp.  “Right, right, and how do I break the vents and shit when I wanna take a little rest, eh?”

Tubbo gives him a look.  “I dunno, Tommy.  Same way you plan on breaking through the fans or the grills that are definitely gonna be blocking up the vent?”

Tommy scowls.  “You’re the clever one, figure it out!”

“Milk?” Ranboo suggests halfheartedly.

“Nah, there’s two elder guardians to like, make sure that doesn’t happen,” Tommy waves him off.

“Not even long enough to break through one iron bar?”

Tommy shrugs.  “Fuck if I know!  I just know every five seconds it was boom! Elder guardian, elder guardian, elder guardian!” Tommy mimics firing a gun like the elder guardians had come at him like bullets.  “With the– with the freaky noise and shit!”

“Got it, no milk,” Ranboo says, eyebrows raised.

“And, Tommy, I don’t think you’ll be able to wear armor.”

“What?” Only now does Tommy falter.

“Well, even with the fresh air coming in, at some point you’ll have to crawl through a vent in a sea of lava, right?”

“I… I guess.”

“Tommy, you’d get fried in there.  I’m not kidding, even in Netherrite, when that stuff gets hot enough, it could literally start to burn you.  You don’t wanna make it that far and get convection baked, do you?”

“Convection ba–” Tommy sputters.  “No, no I do not.”

“So no armor, then,” Ranboo sighs.

“No armor,” Tommy mutters, his stomach in knots.

“Well, we won’t be able to know if any of this is a possibility until we look at the prison and see how big the vent is, right?” Tubbo points out.

It was, surprisingly, not all that difficult to find.  The decorative lines of iron bars on the exterior were not, in fact, all that decorative, and in the bottom of one of the alcoves, there was not blackstone behind the bars, but instead open space.  Just standing there, they could feel the air being tugged in.  Additionally, the size of the vent.  It was small.  Too small for Tubbo to fit, too small for Ranboo, beanpole as he is, but Tommy thinks it’s not too small for him.  He’d never really put on all his weight again after exile.

“Psh,” Tommy rolls back his shoulders with a scoff.  “I can squeeze in there!  No biggie.”

Tubbo and Ranboo once more share that stupid fucking worried look between them.  “It’s… it’s pretty small, Tommy,” Ranboo says carefully.

“And I’m just a little guy!  Come on, look at me, Ranboo,” Tommy says with his usual perfect puppy-dog eyes.  “I’m just a poor wittle guy!”

Tubbo, resigned, once more focuses on logic.  “Still, it’s… it’s small, Tommy.  How are you planning on dragging an axe with you in there?”

Tommy shrugs.  “I’ll figure it out!  I can always kill ‘im with my bare hands!” Tommy squares up, no longer a little guy and once more brave and swaggering.

“We can plan back at the house, I don’t wanna hang around here longer than we have to,” Ranboo murmurs, scanning the surrounding sea warily.

When they return to the house, it seems it is not to plan further, but to dissuade him.

“Tommy, I really don’t think you can manage it.  Like, that vent was tiny.  You won’t be able to crawl all the way on your knees.  Like, even if you can fit at all, you won’t be able to even move enough to reach into your inventory.  You’ll just be able to keep crawling.  Sam designed it so a person couldn’t fit in there.  Are you really expecting us to believe that doesn’t scare you?” Tubbo tries emphatically, a hint of panic evident.

“Nah!  Not gonna get scared by a fuckin’ vent,” Tommy scoffs.  “A-And!”  He scrambles for a bright side.  “No detector shit on the inside of that, so if I break the bars, it won’t tell Sam or nothing!”

“I know you feel like you need to do this, but if you actually like, can’t…” Ranboo trails off, unsure of where to go from there, because there isn’t anywhere to go.  If it’s impossible, Tommy can’t do it.  Convincing Tommy of that is a different matter.

“I can do it!” Tommy sounds more desperate now.  “Why the fuck wouldn’t I?!  I can fit in there, it just probably won’t be much fun,” a panicked laugh.

Another exchange of knowing glances that makes Tommy want to claw his friends’ eyes out.

“Tommy, what if we take a pause, and… reevaluate?” Tubbo offers.  “There’s gotta be a way in, bossman, nothing is unsinkable, as they say.  But I don’t think this is it.  What if… what if you give me a few days to work on it?” Tubbo tries.

“Work on it?” Tommy says doubtfully.

“I’ll see if I can figure out more about the redstone!  Maybe we can�� hack the keycard system, or get you inside another way to a spot where you can open the doors using the redstone!” Tubbo hopes he sounds convincing, that Tommy will think it’s at least possible.  Honestly, Tubbo has no idea.

Tommy scuffs his feet on the blackstone floor of the war room.  “Fine, fucking hell, if you can come up with something in a few days, I’m all for it, but otherwise, I am goin’ in the vent!”

Another fucking glance exchanged.

“Alright, that’s the plan for now, then,” Tubbo agrees, but Tommy notes he doesn’t promise.  He doesn’t say that it’s a deal or it’s even the plan, just for now.

“Good,” Tommy says irritably.  He stares at his two friends with the feeble, frustrating realization, that they don’t think he can do this.  They don’t want him to do this, and they seem to think because they’re so worried about him it’s within their rights to stop him.

He doesn’t know why he thought they understood that when he says he has to do this, he’s not exaggerating.  He’d say it’s this or kill himself, but he already knows where being dead leads, and that’s not a way out either.  He has to kill Dream.

So Tommy waits, and once he is alone, once he has convinced his friends he’s agreed to wait, he goes to the prison.  He’s grateful at the start of this process he’d made sure to tell them both how much they meant to him.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was a goodbye of some sort, because it’s obvious to him, maybe it’s even obvious to Tubbo and Ranboo, that he won’t be coming back from this one.  If he manages to crawl all the way to that cell, how the fuck is he going to crawl back out?  No, he’ll do what he came there to do, and then he’ll wait for Sam to check in and let him out.  Or maybe he won’t let him out, maybe he’ll keep him there again, this time for murdering his only prisoner.

Tubbo was right that he couldn’t take an axe with him, it’s too tight, he doesn’t know how he’ll do this as is, let alone dragging that with him, so instead, Tommy has a knife.  It’s small enough he can keep it between his teeth.  He can’t bring a pick either, not that it would do him any good, so he has a few sticks of TNT.  He’s tied it with chord and threaded his flint and steel on it so he can keep it around his neck.  He’s got three sticks of the stuff.  He hopes that’s all he needs, if there’s more than three fans to blow up, he’s fucked.

Tommy waits until it’s well into the night to start walking, glancing around, constantly expecting someone to appear despite the lateness of the hour.  He wishes he hadn’t tied the tnt around his neck right away.  He could’ve made up some excuse for walking around at night, but someone would definitely question his morbid looking suicide collar.  It’s late, and therefore dark, with scant moonlight, but Tommy won’t have to go far once he leaves the light of the server, so he shouldn’t have to worry much about mobs.  Still, entering the blackness lit only by veins of lava threaded between the ramparts, it makes what he’s about to do a lot more tangible.  Tommy stares through the metal grate, already breathing hard.  Surely just from the climb up here.  He’s brought a few more things, things that won’t follow him inside.  A night vision potion, a fire res potion, and a bottle of milk.  Eight minutes on each potion.  He’ll have eight minutes of light, eight minutes of protection from the heat.  Tommy drinks the milk.  He breaks through the iron bars just in time to flinch away from the elder guardian coming down over his eyes.  He tosses aside the pick and the iron bars.  He stares into the dark and downs the potions, first night vision, then the fire res.  Being able to see what awaits him does not make it any less terrifying, but with the potion he can now see a drop off about ten blocks into the prison.  He hopes it’s not far enough of a fall to kill him; that would be a pathetically short attempt at a break in.

Tommy stares into the vent, knowing the clock is already ticking on his potions.  He cannot wait anymore.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck–” Tommy hisses through his teeth before muffling himself by putting a knife between them.  A knife.  That’s all he needs.  Dream is weak and armed only with potatoes.  Now Tommy has the advantage.

He starts to crawl.

The tunnel is so narrow his shoulders scrape against the sides, it’s so low he cannot crawl on his knees and instead must wriggle forward, dragging himself inch by dreaded inch on his elbows.  Tommy feels sick.  He cannot hear his racing heart over the ominous tones of the elder guardian and the distant low hum of the vents, and the sounds make it feel like it’s Pandora’s Vault itself breathing around him, the air still flowing past him, still being pulled in, is its slow, steady inhale.

Tommy could maybe back out at this point, but then he reaches the drop off.  With the night vision, he sees it’s only a drop of about six blocks, more than survivable, but definitely not climbable.  Tommy almost wishes he’d brought ladders before recalling, as Tubbo had said, the vent is too fucking narrow for him to even reach down to his pocket to access his inventory.

Tommy stares down at the point of no return and gets dizzy.  He starts to back up.  The way out is only ten blocks behind him, backing up hurts worse than crawling forward––he keeps hitting his head on the top of the tunnel––but he only backs up maybe a foot before he stops.  He rests his forehead on the floor of the vent and tries to breathe.  He feels the moisture accumulating on the blade with every exhale.

You have to do this.  He cannot still be out there.  He cannot be able to do this to you again.  To do this to anyone else.

You have to do this.

Tommy crawls forward.

He stares down into the dark, now realizing he has no idea how he’s supposed to drop down there.  It will have to be head first.  The vent is too small for him to turn around.  Tommy pulls himself forward, inch by wretched inch, until he dangles over the edge, the corner of the vent digging into his waist painfully.  Tommy stares at his own stark white hands against the black, held out as if to keep something at bay, but he knows they’re there to catch him.  That’s all he’s doing.  He’s not shielding himself from an axe or a fist, he’s just going to catch himself.  Tommy wriggles forward a bit more, and a bit more, and then his center of gravity is over the edge and he falls.  Tommy cries out and drops the knife, it nicking the corner of his lip on its way out, but he catches himself.  His wrists ache sharply, as do his palms, but he hasn’t broken anything.

Tommy pauses only for a moment to ease some of his trembling, but he has to keep going.  He’s currently trapped himself in a very uncomfortable handstand.  Tommy winces, his left arm aching in painful protest as he raises his right to grab the knife and put it back between his teeth.  This corner where the two ducts meet is the only point with enough space where he could have, in theory, accessed his inventory.  He didn’t think to bring anything.  He sort of wishes he’d brought a gapple, just to get some courage.  He knows it’s a bad habit, but that feels so trivial right now.  Tommy, knife back between his teeth, slowly starts to turn around until he is facing the next duct, still upside down, blood is starting to rush to his head, making him feel heavy and strange.  From here, he slowly lowers himself to the ground, pushing his torso into the next tunnel until he sits at an angle, legs pointed upward, resting against the wall of the duct he had fallen down, and laying on his back in the next one.  Tommy also realizes the temperature has dropped.  Tubbo must have been right, these ducts must run over the water to cool the air further, or maybe Sam even has pools of water inside the prison to do so.  As he lies there, the blood begins to redistribute through his body, his legs still up in the air, but his head no longer feels weighted.

He’s not sure if he’ll be able to rotate so he can crawl forward again, but the thought of trying to shuffle down the vent on his back sounds fucking intolerable, so he still has to try.  Tommy pushes himself further into the vent using his legs, and once he’s all straightened out, he tries to turn.  Tommy shuts his eyes tightly, wincing as his shoulders are crammed between the top and bottom of the vent.  It hurts, it hurts shoulders, his collarbones, his muscles as well as his bones protesting with sharpness and aches, as nonetheless, he crushes himself between the rocks, still pushing, still forcing himself to turn.  He muffles a cry as his skin is scraped raw through his shirt as he nonetheless drags his shoulder to the other side until finally, there’s give.  And he’s back where he’d started, laying on his stomach, breathing hard, knife still between his teeth.  The prickling sharpness of the pain on his shoulders tells him he’s bleeding, that what’s dripping there is not just sweat, although he’s definitely sweating too, even in the brisk air from outside, but Tommy ignores it.  It doesn’t matter.  There’s no going back now.

The thought hits him like a ton of bricks––or perhaps a familiar blast of TNT––and he cannot go forward for a moment, consumed by a deep rooted, animalistic terror that he has just buried himself alive.  If he were to try to back up right now, the exit is not waiting ten blocks away, but rather at the top of that little ledge.  Tommy once more presses his forehead to the stone beneath him, elbows tucked into his chest, breathing hard, wheezing and desperate, eyes open wide, staring at the unnaturally visible blackstone beneath him.  You have to do this.  You have to do this you have to do this you have to do this––

If Tommy were facing the other way, maybe he could jump, grab onto the edge, and hoist himself up, but he’s not facing the other way, so there’s nothing he can do except keep going.

That fact is almost calming.  He can only move forward, and that lack of choice, that simplicity, it allows him to function again.  Tommy refuses to think about what lies behind him, about ocean air and moonlight and the ability to stretch out his fucking arms, and only thinks about what lies ahead.  Tommy looks up.  About twenty blocks ahead, there is a turn.

He keeps going.

It’s painfully slow, and it’s painful as well as slow.  Even though the width is a bit greater than the height, his already bloodied shoulders still drag irritatingly along the sides, his knees keep on colliding with the stone painfully, his forearms too do not appreciate being forced to drag all his bodyweight forward inches at a time, but he just keeps his eyes fixed on that bend in the vent, as if trying to convince himself that just around the corner awaits open space and light and freedom and oh, is that carrot cake?  And Henry, good to see you!  How are you, my dearest cow!  Thank you, for the apology, Wilbur, why don’t we all go home to L’Manberg and everything will be fucking perfect!

Tommy lets off a muffled laugh that sounds more like a whimper, his internal monologue a distraction for only a few feet, and then he reaches the bend.  Around the corner is not paradise, rather, another long stretch of blackstone, and at the end, he sees the spinning blades of a fan.  The moment he reaches the corner, the low hum of the fan is doubled into a dull roar in his ears, the steady thrum of the blades whirring along is overwhelming.  Tommy stares at it warily, as if it might suddenly start spinning toward him, one hand going to the bundle of TNT heavy around his neck.  Not yet.  Tommy, somehow the prospect of blowing something up in this tiny tunnel does not terrify him, but rather spurs him on, gives him a tangible goal beyond endless ducts.

Tommy thinks his knees must be bleeding now too, his elbows are stinging as well, but he can at least see his elbows, and while they’re definitely scraped, not enough for bloodied drops just yet.  His brief enthusiasm certainly didn’t help, not that being slow and cautious could save him from any harm.  The echo of the ducts had made the fan loud enough, so being this close isn’t much worse, but it’s certainly not something he can crawl through.  The blades look awfully sharp, spinning too fast for him to see through them clearly, so he does as he’d planned, and slips one stick of TNT loose from the bunch.  His eyebrows furrow, unable to frown with the knife between his teeth.  He’ll have to back up super fast if he doesn’t want the rest of the TNT to blow up in his face.  That is going to be hard and it’s definitely going to hurt like a bitch.

Tommy places the stick of TNT down wedged in the corner between the edge of the fan and the duct and begins to hit steel to flint.  Sparks, the hiss of a fuse, and Tommy has never crawled faster in his fucking life.

He scrapes his head against the stone, busts up already bloody knees, and fucking eviscerates his elbows, dragging himself back through his own now visable trail of blood scattered along the stone, but he makes it almost back to the bend in the tunnel when the TNT goes off.

Tommy should’ve covered his eyes, maybe held up his hands over his face, but he’d been so desperate to get away, to keep an eye on the fuse, he’d stared unblinkingly directly at the blast.  The sound echoes along with the force of the explosion, hitting him hard. Tommy has no sense of what a miracle it is his head wasn’t cleaved in two by shrapnel, instead he’s more preoccupied in an older, more reliable terror.

“Put your armor in the hole.”

“Do you want to be a hero, Tommy?”

“Or I’ll kill you.”

“We had to send a message.”

“How about you get in the hole, Tommy?”

“God help anyone who gets caught in the crossfire!”

“Our story will never be over.”

His life has been ripped apart by explosions too many times and by too many people.

Tommy covers his ears, eyes closed even as the light of the explosion is seared into his eyes.  He’s bit down even harder on the knife, the metal making his teeth ache, his lip bleeding worse, and all he can do is take desperate, wheezing breaths through his nose, tears joining the clammy sweat already covering his face, as his whole body aches with tension.  He’s rigid as a board, wishing he could curl up into a ball, but he can’t fucking move and it feels as if the walls are snaring tighter, like they’re wrapping around his very lungs and oh god I don’t want to die down here.  I don’t want to die here.  I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t–

Tommy doesn’t know how many precious minutes he wastes before he seems to register he’s still alive, he’s still generally unharmed, and there is no one bearing down on him to do him harm.  His eyes are no longer left flooded with white from the explosion, and the night vision is still doing its work for now.  He doesn’t know how it hasn’t been eight minutes yet.  It feels like he’s been down here for fucking hours.  Ahead, Tommy sees the fan has been torn to bits, and he thinks it might have broken a few blocks as well.  Tommy, spurred on by the thought of being able to fucking move scrambles forward with more urgency, all the more careless as his body has already been scraped up, he doesn’t know what more harm he could do.

The stone gets hot underneath him, not painfully so, almost a relief after the chill of the past tunnels, and he can see bits of burnt metal and tries to push it out of his path.  Tommy realizes with a funny turn in his stomach like he’s skipped a step, that he could’ve just drowned himself.  The coolness in the air makes him think he’s now under the water, and he just tried to blow a fucking hole in it.  Tommy registers what had saved him from that fate, feeling deranged and a bit stupid.  There had to be space for the redstone wiring, so this particular section of the duct had more stone around it.  Hopefully that means he won’t drown himself at the next fan either.  At the point where the fan had been, there is enough stone broken apart that Tommy can sit up, and he thinks the relief of it might kill him.  Tommy sits up, body aching, every muscle relieved to be able to do something beside lie flat and shuffle forward.

The relief might actually kill him, because he can’t imagine he has much time left on his potions, and he has no idea how much further there is to go.  Tommy’s whole body hurts, and it is that ache in the quiet, in this moment of rest, that gets him moving again.  He’s been scraped open against stone before; head bashed against obsidian, ribs cracked against stone, over and over until it stopped, until everything stopped, except for the pain.

Tommy crouches down in front of the next stretch, knees aching, swallowing back sickness, he takes a deep breath, returns the knife to between his teeth, and resumes his toil.  Another dozen blocks ahead, another turn.  It is not until he gets closer that he realizes, it is at this point that the duct goes up.

Tommy freezes.

He’d been prepared for a fall, but he must be fucking dense as a brick, because he hadn’t prepared for a climb.

Tommy has no choice but to continue forward.  He’ll at least get to stand up, he supposes.  It is here, that the droning hum of a fan resumes.  Tommy reaches the corner, and looks up at spinning blades far above him.  It must be fifteen blocks at least.

Tommy also realizes, he’s going to have to turn around again.  Thankfully, this way, his shoulders are at the bend in the vent, so there’s enough room he doesn’t destroy them again against the walls of the duct, but his hips certainly don’t appreciate it.  Still, after some wriggling, he’s sitting up at the corner of the duct, legs stretched out, sitting upright.

Now what?  What the fuck are you gonna do?  Sprout some spider legs and scurry on up the sides?!

Tommy takes the knife out of his mouth, leaning back against the stone, taking deep, shaky breaths.  “Fuck…” he sighs, staring up at the spinning blades too high above him.

He tugs out another piece of TNT a little hopelessly.

“Aw, Tommy, did you really think you could kill me?  That you could get to me all on your own?  You’re weak and pathetic.  And you were stupid enough to find another way to die, huh?”

Tommy shudders, Dream’s mocking voice crawling from his subconscious, rage mingling with disgust, until Tommy yet again forces himself to keep going.  He stands up, he slides the TNT back into the length of chord, and puts the blade between his teeth.  Staring up at the fan, he feels a bit like a wingless, burrowing version of Icarus reaching towards the sun.  Tommy plants his hands against one side of the duct, narrow enough he has to bend his elbows, and presses his back against the other side.  He pulls his knees up as much as he can, feet planted against the wall beneath him, so he’s wedged himself between the two sides of the vent.  The grip of his sneakers seems to hold, especially considering how fucking narrow it is.  Okay.  He can do this.

Tommy presses his hands flat against the opposite side, letting the tension between that and his back support him as he pulls his legs up a little higher.  Progress.  He begins to inch-worm up the vent toward the spinning blades.  His shoulders continue to get scraped raw against the stone, and the tunnel is so narrow he can only move up a few inches at a time, but he’s moving .

The sound of the fan is getting louder, he glances up intermittently to see how close he’s gotten, and about halfway up, the lights begin to flicker.

At least, that’s Tommy’s first thought as darkness flashes over his vision, before he recalls that there are no lights.  There’s only his night vision potion, which is currently running out.  And then it does.

“No!” Tommy cries out, panicked, lucky enough to catch his knife not blade first on his legs.  He fumbles for it in the black, hissing as his fingers find the blade instead of the handle, but he holds onto it tightly, gasping for breath.  He cannot relax.  He cannot stop.  He needs to keep pressing against the walls or else he’s definitely going to fall far enough to hurt himself.

He cannot see a fucking thing.

Tommy doesn’t think he’s experienced darkness this consuming since Limbo.  This is the kind of blackness that he cannot comprehend existing in the living world, but nonetheless, it does.

There’s no light forward.  Not for a long time.

There’s no light back there either.

“H-Help me!” Tommy doesn’t know why that pleading slips past his bleeding lips, but he can’t help it.  He doesn’t know what to do.  “Anybody!  Please!  Please, someone help me!  I’m stuck!  I’m fucking stuck down here!  Hello?!”  His own voice echoes back, and he hears his own terror a dozen times over.  Hello?! Hello?! Hello..?!

Tommy wants to cry again, but he has a feeling if he starts sobbing he’ll lose his grip on the wall and tumble down and end up in a heap of broken legs.  Tommy is still breathing hard, he’s still shaking, and he still thinks any moment he’s going to fall, crying or not.

That’ll really give you something to cry about, eh?

Tommy suppresses a shiver.  I’ll give you something to cry about.  Tommy can’t figure out if it’s something Dream ever actually said to him, or if it’s just too fitting so he can still hear it in his voice.

I’m gonna kill him.

Tommy stays aloft, he keeps himself pressed to the walls of the tunnel, and his breathing slows.

I’m gonna kill him.  Those words feel almost like an oath, or perhaps a prayer, whatever it is, it’s enough that he keeps moving upwards, the sound of the fan blades warning him as he gets closer.

The sound is close enough, the pull of the air strong enough, he thinks the fan must be only a few more feet above.

Okay, how are you gonna blow it up?

Tommy once more fumbles to take out the piece of TNT, staring at it––or rather, staring at where he thinks it is––and tries to figure out how the fuck to do this.

It’ll have to be a gamble.  He cannot think of a reliable way around it unless he feels like sacrificing his fingers to the fan blades.  He’ll need to light the TNT, and then chuck it at the fan and pray that it sticks.  If it falls through while already lit…

Maybe he’ll get lucky and manage to put it out before it goes off?

Tommy laughs weakly around his knife, feeling more than a little deranged at this point.  He wedges the TNT between his knees, feeling for the flint and steel around his neck.  Tommy makes one spark, he doesn’t hit the fuse, but that moment of light leaves Tommy almost giddy with relief.

It’s not Limbo.  You can see light.  It’s not Limbo.

Tommy makes it spark again, and he’s so startled that he manages to hit the fuse blind on the second try, he almost panics.  He grabs it, fumbling and desperate, heart racing, and throws it up at the fan blades.  He sees that hissing speck of light disappear through the metal, and then it starts to drop back down.  Tommy’s heart is beating in his throat.  There’s a dull clang! and the light stops there, caught on the other side of the fan.

Tommy cannot pause to relish in the relief, because right now he would be best served being about six blocks lower than he is currently.  Tommy lets out a stream of unintelligible curses from around the knife in his mouth as he lets himself drop, catching himself about ten blocks down with jarring pain that knocks the wind out of him and absolutely fucks up his knees.  Tommy has about a second to brace at that point, with enough sense to cover his head, as soon there are shards of hot metal ricocheting down the vent.  Tommy grits his teeth as something cuts open his arm, burning it too, and another piece of hot stone bounces off of his head before clattering down to the bottom still a good ten blocks below, and then it stops.  No more shrapnel rains, he is not dead, and there is no longer the dangerous drone of the fan threatening to shred him to ribbons if he kept climbing.  Tommy looks up, before remembering he can’t see a fucking thing, rendered worse by the brief flash of light.  He could be shuffling up into exposed blades of hot metal.  He won’t know until he moves.

Tommy’s whole body is in agony, the muscles of his legs are screaming at him as he’s been forcing them to keep him aloft for far too many minutes now, but nonetheless, he makes them go a little further and he’s somehow fortunate enough they don’t give out on him.  Tommy is startled to fall backwards, and that sudden loss of tension almost sends him slipping back down the chute, but at the last second he scrambles to push his legs out straight and keep himself steady.  He’s reached the explosion point, and therefore a ledge.  Tommy sits back further, legs now resting on the other side of the alcove, forced to stoop over as this explosion broke away less stone than the last, but nonetheless, for a moment he can sit and rest.

And once more, that relief reminds him that he doesn’t think he can keep doing this, even as he knows he has no other choice.

The potions have run out.  Maybe you can just rest?  There’s no reason to rush anymore.

Yeah, and you’ll sleep your way to the bottom of this fucking vent and kill yourself.

Tommy needs to move right now, or he’ll pass out before he can even try.  He can’t see.  For all he knows, the next bend is twenty blocks above him.

Or it could be two.

You can make it up two.

Tommy leans forward, one hand feeling for the lip of the alcove so he doesn’t bash his head on it, the other supporting his weight against the bottom ledge.  Tommy rests his feet on the ledge on the opposite side, and uses his hands to shimmy up the tunnel until he’s almost standing up straight.  One leg at a time, he pulls his knees back up to support him.

Inches at a time, he keeps moving.  He feels blood flowing more steadily from the cut across his arm and he realizes how lucky he is that the bit of stone that hit his head wasn’t moving at the speed of a bullet from the explosion and had instead probably bounced off the edge and lost that momentum against the stone instead.  Lucky.  None of this feels especially lucky to him.

Then Tommy’s knees hit open space instead of stone.  The tunnel is narrow enough that at this angle he doesn’t send himself falling back down to what is surely a fatal drop at this point.  Tommy freezes, scared to move and risk losing any of the tension currently stopping him from turning into Tommy mush at the bottom of a hole.  He doesn’t know how to move forward head first.  His knees are currently what’s keeping him anchored into the new section of tunnel, and if he moves them back to actually crawl forward, he’s pretty sure he’ll slip and kill himself.  Tommy slowly, carefully, keeping his back pinned to the wall to support himself, reaches forward with fumbling, blind hands for the ledge of the next section of tunnel.  Tommy will hold on, and pray he can support his own bodyweight with just his skinny fucking arms, and then he will lower his legs and lean forward.

It feels like a teetering balancing act, his palms flat, and the upper half of his body leaning forward just as he allows his legs to drop back down into the tunnel below, but enough of his torso catches on the ledge that he doesn’t kill himself.  Tommy, eager to be away from the drop off, kicks himself forward, wriggling back into the narrow but blissfully horizontal tunnel ahead.

Maybe Tommy is imagining things, or maybe the vertical section of vents had been bigger than the tunnel before, but he swears it’s somehow gotten narrower.  He can barely move his arms, he cannot bend his legs enough for them to be of any help moving him forward, and each painful pull of his forearms pressed to stone, dragging him ahead a few inches, also scrapes his already bloodied and raw shoulders against the stone.  Tommy suppresses every evil and rational thought warning him he’s about to get stuck, that he’s about to wedge himself in here so tightly he won’t be able to get his arms free at all and then he will die here, slowly and painfully.

It’s also warm up here.

After the damp chill, maybe it should have come as a relief, but it’s very warm up here.  He must be in the lava now.  Tommy manages to wipe sweat from his face.  It burns every scrape it touches, which is probably 70% of his body at this point.  Tommy should have saved the fire res.  It ran out down in the cool damp of the last duct, and now he’s going to boil unaided.

Tommy has once more crossed a point of no return, all he can do is go forward and hope he can make it to the end.  That is one solace, even as the stone pressing in around him gets hotter, not quite burning him yet, but something close, he at least knows he’s almost there.  He’s in the lava now, and next is Dream.  Tommy is finding it hard to breathe.  Not only because taking a deep breath is enough he can feel the tunnel wrapping even tighter, but the heat as well.  Tommy knows cool air was being pulled in through the vents, but considering Tommy has been hard at work blowing up every fan that did so, he knows that whatever cool air had been coming in before is definitely hot again.  Without the cool air, is it hot enough in here to actually kill him?

Tommy buries the thought.  He cannot afford to think like that, all he can do is push forward, to drag himself inch by wretched inch, to let his skin sear against stone that is only getting hotter.  There’s no light.  Even as lava must glow brightly only a few blocks away, the tunnel remains pitch-black.  Tommy cannot make out the next bend in the duct, he cannot make out any light, there is only the immediate walls pressing in on him, there is only the heat, and the sound of the lava bubbling, as if mocking him in his efforts, and eventually Tommy just stops.  He needs to keep moving, he knows stopping is all but embracing his death sentence, and he knows death is not going to offer relief.  But he can’t do it anymore.  He just needs to pause, to catch his breath.  The walls pressing in, touching his shoulders, searing the front of his body, all of it reminds him he cannot stay here, but he’s so tired.

You can lay down and die, Tommy.  But not until Dream dies first.

Tommy tugs himself forward, elbows burning, barely keeping his head off the ground, kept from collapse only by the heat, and he tugs himself forward again.  His limbs ache, weak and struggling to move any further.  His mouth is so dry.  He’s scared he’s going to drop the knife.  Tommy takes the knife from his mouth, holding it in his hand tightly, the leather-wrapped handle hot, the metal hotter.  He’s close now.  He’ll need to have his knife ready.  Tommy doesn’t know if the end is in sight, but it has to end somewhere.  It cannot go on forever.

Tommy stops moving, and blearily, frantically, he thinks he’s stuck, his shoulders are burning up, his knees, his arms, his stomach, but the vent hasn’t gotten any smaller, he’s just gotten weaker and moving has gotten harder, hurts worse.

Tommy weakly remembers a different time, the antithesis of this moment in its entirety, he remembers escaping, he remembers talking himself down from suicide and fleeing over snow, the way the cold had burned then too, and he had felt like he was going to live again.

Here he was, trapped, heat closing in, clawing his way back toward Dream, not an open expanse of snow, but blackness and the world closing in on him.  His weakness grows worse as he dares to think, what if Tubbo was gonna come up with a better idea?  What if you did this to yourself for no reason?

He cannot afford such a thought.  It’s not an option.  The only choice is to move forward an inch, and then the only choice to will be to move forward another.  Tommy has been looking down for a while now, his head feels too heavy, so it’s only when he’s close, close enough that he can see the outline of his trembling fingers, see the shine of the knife, does he realize there is light again.

Tommy looks up.  Ahead, shining up from the ground, light.

Tommy crawls more frantically, his breathing coming out in wheezing, whimpering gasps, but he still holds onto his knife.  He buries the more innate, animal need to move and breathe and see, and focuses on what makes him human.  He’s going to make it there, and then he’s going to kill Dream.  Tommy sees one last barrier, one last set of fan blades, rotating more slowly than the last and guarded by iron bars, and he fumbles for the last stick of tnt.  Tommy hesitates for only a second on the thought that a few blocks away is a sea of lava.  He’s hot enough as is, the lava pouring in can’t make him much hotter.

Tommy sees his own hand, outlined from the light below, light a spark, and then the fuse glows.  Tommy had forgotten he had to get the fuck away.  Perhaps too late, he crawls back into the heat and the dark.  He covers his head with already burnt hands, and then it goes off.  Tommy feels the blast, but no shrapnel comes his way, even as he hears the screech of broken metal and crumbled stone.  Tommy looks up and savors one more shred of luck.  The vent was angled down, in a small drop off, so Tommy was shielded from most of the blast.  No lava pours in, but Tommy has exposed something else.  Sensors.  The redstone blinks back in warning and Tommy knows he is once more on the clock.  He crawls forward, despite all his exhaustion, all his pain, he’s determined.  He can do this; he has to do this.

Tommy tumbles head first back into that awful cell, catching himself with already burned palms, clinging to his knife like a lifeline, and then he’s on the ground.  Tommy thinks he must have sprained his left wrist, but his right one, the one with the knife, is doing just fine and that's all that matters.  It’s cooler in here.  Barely, considering Tommy had been blocking up the cooling system, but it is.  It helps that he can move again.  Tommy doesn’t get the chance to stand before there is a figure towering over him.

“Tommy?!”

Tommy flinches back––how can he not?–– as he sees Dream in all his pathetic glory, hair longer and matted, a little bruised, without a mask, and merely baffled by the sight of him.  Then Dream sees the knife, and Tommy starts to stand, he starts to swing, he’s going to gut that man, to shred him to fucking pieces so he can never hurt anyone ever again–

And then Tommy is back on the ground, chest aching, the wind knocked out of him as he struggles to process what happened, to comprehend that after enduring all of that, after fighting his way here through the veins of this awful slice of hell, he could still fail.  His blurred vision focuses back in on Dream, still standing over him, still puzzled rather than afraid, and still holding the knife.

[that-angry-noldo]

(one taste of the sound from the sirens in the water, and i'm thinking - i should get out: the sharp is sword and suit of armor so i can be ready to strike - but i pause, one more time; one last taste of the sound, and i'll cut the sirens down... - Sirens, by the Grey Havens)

They dance.

The ballroom is loud and bright. Finrod grins to Curufin, having Celegorm in his side vision. He takes a step forward and ignores his screaming thoughts.

(It's the first ball since Bragollach. Curufin spent a lot of time to convince Finrod in necessity of a one. Balls give people a sense of familiarity, a sense of security, a way to escape dark thoughts.)

Curufin smiles at him and extends his hand. Finrod takes it, and they dissolve into dance.

And Finrod tries to relish in it. Tries to laugh and to drink. Tries to forget himself in the lights, tries to go blind in the shining starlight of Nauglamir, tries to become one with a masquerade mask he's wearing.

He tries, he tries oh so bad.

But there's always that one tiny part of him that whispers, this isn't true. That knows this won't be true no matter how hard Finrod tries to pretend.

Curufin laughs. If Finrod tries hard enough, he can convince himself that laugh is sincere.

~

Finrod is a snake.

His cousins are spiders.

Celegorm talks nonsense. His clothes are rich, sewn by the best craftsmen. He opens Finrod's cabinet, gets out a bottle of sweet dwarven wine. Curufin watches him from his place on the armchair.

Finrod sees a web being woven around him, sees a snare ready to close at any moment. He sees it, and takes a glass of wine from Celegorm's hands, and he smiles, dumbly and sheepishly.

That fool, Curufin says later with disgust, will drink even poison, should it come from our hands. I almost pity him.

Finrod stays in the shadows, letting the brothers pass, thinks - bitterly - that they are right.

~

They have him wrapped around their fingers, and Finrod knows it.

Snap out of it, something inside of him barks. You see what they're making out of you. You see their plans, you know their intentions. Live up to your symbols, Felagund. Be a snake, strike them down.

He almost does, once. He sits in his office, and picks up his pen. He's ready to drop his mask, ready to show Celegorm and Curufin his true colors.

But then they walk in, and Celegorm drops a joke, and Curufin nudges his shoulder.

Please, Finrod then begs himself, a little bit more. Let me believe this a little bit more.

~

You know this is not true.

I do.

You know the consequences.

I do.

This is selfish. You are selfish!

... I know; but am I not entitled to a little bit of selfishness? Do I not deserve it after all these years of neglecting myself, of mourning, of always thinking about others?

Please, my heart. Let me have this. Let me taste this lie while it lasts.

~

In the end, the lie inevitably breaks, and it's too late to try and fix it.

Finrod knew this would come. Finrod knew Celegorm will rally his people. He knew Curufin will poison their wills.

He just hoped he was wrong. He just hoped, foolishly, stupidly hoped, that he was wrong.

He knows the consequences. He knows his realm will fall. He knows Orodreth wouldn't hold the crown for long. He knows he himself will die alone, in the dark, paying for his foolish hope.

The words are bitter on his tongue when his mask finally drops, shattering on the cold stone floor along with his crown.

Hold on, my heart; you once were full and sang a praise! Hold on! Hold on, my heart; you've tasted joy, there's more than this! Hold on!

[blackjackkent]

The Hellraisers - Chapter 1

Pairing: Karlach/Male Custom Tav, Tav & Wyll, Karlach & Wyll Characters: OC Male Tav (Hector Carlisle), Karlach, Wyll Rating: E (Fic), T (Chapter) Warnings: None Descriptors: Post-Game, Action/Adventure/Romance, Eventual Happy Ending Chapter Word Count: 4.5k Chapter Setting: Avernus, immediately after the end of BG3 Summary: Hector Carlisle, a Selunite monk turned adventuring warrior, follows his lover Karlach and his friend Wyll into the depths of hell after the fall of the Netherbrain. Together, they take on an even greater foe - Zariel, the Archdevil of Avernus. The Hells won't know what hit them. Chapter Summary: Hector, Karlach, and Wyll arrive in the Hells after a panicked flight from Baldur's Gate - and the weight of what they've decided to do starts to sink in.

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Hector Carlisle’s journals of the Absolutist crisis provide one of the most comprehensive summaries available to modern historians of the events leading up to what is now called the High Hall Shattering. There is not a single day for which Carlisle does not account in detail between Alturiak 10 1492 DR (when he first obtained pen and ink after the crash of the nautiloid which kidnapped him) and Uktar 24 (the night before the Netherbrain’s public attack on Baldur’s Gate’s Upper City). However, after the defeat of the Netherbrain, his own records of his activities abruptly become much more intermittent and rather staccato in nature, lacking the level of detail common to his so-called “Tadpole Chronicles.”

There are multiple theories regarding this sharp change in Carlisle’s record-keeping tendencies. Some of these theories incline towards the conspiratorial - suggesting that the monk’s disappearance into Avernus was associated with some sort of nefarious activity which he was unwilling to commit to paper. Some even go so far as to accuse him of sacrilegious behavior, though this is rendered unlikely by records of both Carlisle’s own Selunite convictions and opinions from all who knew him.

A far more probable explanation is that Carlisle’s thorough record-keeping in his pre-Shattering travels emerged from a sense of obligation. As a monk at the Silverlight Monastery, he had primarily occupied himself with transcription and scholarship of historical texts, and his training placed considerable emphasis on self-reliance and emotional reserve. As such, he considered his own journals to be necessary documentation in the same vein, and he prided himself on impartial and factual chronicling. 

His departure to Avernus with Wyll Ravengard and Karlach Cliffgate would ultimately prove no less impactful to the world at large. However, it is clear that he considered it a far more personal endeavor, as evidenced by the remarkably succinct entry from Uktar 25 1492, his first entry after his departure from the Material Plane:

Uktar 25 1492

She’s alive. She’s going to live. Thank the gods.

~ Excerpt from “Raising Hell: A History of Zariel’s Fall” by Harlow et. al., Blackstaff Academy Press

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"Hec, look out! On your left!"

Hector dodges to the side just in time to avoid the imp diving towards him; its claws skim the side of his head and score a painful line along his temple. Pivoting onto his heel, he spins, bringing his right fist around to slam heavily into the imp's thick torso. The evil little creature’s spine snaps and it screeches with pain. He takes no satisfaction in it, but watches with blank exhaustion as the imp falls to the rust-red dirt and is still. 

"Nice one!" Wyll calls. He withdraws his rapier from the body of another imp and points past Hector’s shoulder. "Looks like another wave coming in - off to the west." Hector follows his gaze and groans; sure enough, another band of the imps is closing in on them, surging over the horizon like a swarm of bees.

It’s been like this ever since they arrived. They’ve had no chance to orient themselves, no time to get a foothold after their panicked flight from the Material Plane. Avernus rose up to meet them like a body driving out an infection; the first wave of defenders appeared within minutes, closing on this raw strip of hellish wasteland to which they brought Karlach to save her life.

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