#idk how that works adhd at its finest i guess xD

[dingbatnix]

Venture

Chapter 6

Aww yea, an update! Eeeee. Also totally not me typing out whole chapters with a screwed up hand, sorry Becky xD

Anyway anyway, enjoy! Not much happens here and it's a bit short compared to the last one, but y'know. Injured hand and all that : D

Enjoy!

Chapter 1

Chapter 5

Dream + Tommy reference

Word Count: 1,901

Warnings: mmmm, mentions of starvation? Fear of reprecussions, I suppose. Not much going on here : D

They continued to travel, days passing as they grew closer and closer to the edge of the forest. Tommy wasn’t exactly sure how far they were from Manberg, but…it had only taken four days for the men who had previously kidnapped him to get as far as they did. Dream was either taking his sweet time getting to the capital, or…or he had lied to the teen about their destination. Tommy tried not to think about it too much.

It was a bit…disconcerting for Tommy, spending his days on a human’s shoulder, and, occasionally, in the human’s hands as Dream walked. The motions of Dream’s body as it moved felt different than when he had been in the cage, more…telegraphed than before, but Tommy couldn’t really find it in himself to complain. Often, he found himself being lulled into short, hazy bouts of sleep from the rocking, repetitive motions. He honestly felt more rested than he had been for several weeks, and it was very refreshing.

His clothes, unfortunately, were stained from the blood that had soaked into them. Both Dream and Tommy had tried their best to wash the remains of the faint tan smudges from his shirt and shorts, but they stayed stubbornly in the fibers of his garments. Tommy didn’t have anything else to wear, and Dream didn’t have any convenient stashes of smallfolk clothes, so the teen just had to deal with it for the foreseeable future.

Dream had been…surprisingly accommodating to Tommy, despite the fact that he’d had to carry and keep a general watch on the teen for the last couple of days. He hadn't even tried to put Tommy in any of his pockets, not since the teen had mentioned his fear of small spaces. That, among other things, had Tommy growing less and less wary of the human as the days went on. He learned that, pretty much no matter what he did, Dream wouldn’t hurt him. Even after the one time Tommy had managed to get his hands on an especially sharp stick and had stabbed the thing into Dream’s hand in a bout of defiance, all the human had done was curse, pull the splinter out from his bleeding skin, and ask Tommy not to do it again.

As usual, the human’s actions puzzled Tommy down to the extremes, but he wasn’t about to complain. He found himself enjoying the simple days of travel, especially when he got away with being ‘a little shit,’ as he had been called many times before. He thrived on being able to vocalize every little thought he had, and the fact that Dream would add on to whatever Tommy had to say made it all that much better.

Tommy didn’t think about their destination, or his approaching future, focusing more on the current moment. He’d decided that he would enjoy every second of his life while he still could, while it was still fun and painless. But, in the very back of his mind, the cesspit of anxiety, paranoia, and self-preservation roiled, waiting for just the right moment to rear its head and take control.

That’s why, when Dream had let Tommy down on the forest floor for a few minutes as the human dug up some sort of medicinal plant, Tommy took the chance and booked it, impulsively darting away from Dream and towards a nearby clump of weeds. He sprinted as silently as he possibly could away from the hunched, towering silhouette of the human, leaping over stray twigs and dodging around branches of grass and dead leaves. He dove under the arch of one such leaf when he heard Dream start moving, stifling a gasp with one hand as he sensed more than saw the shadow the human’s body cast over Tommy’s hiding place as he stood to his full, impossibly colossal height.

He heard the human’s voice, loud and pervading, blare out through the forest air. Tommy pressed himself lower against the cool, mulchy ground, holding his breath even though he was sure Dream wouldn’t be able to hear him.

"Tommy? Tommy?! Where’d you go?” The sound of shuffling, as if Dream were searching through his pack, then around in the nearby foliage, and then, Dream’s voice again, this time slightly hissed and flecked with an emotion Tommy couldn’t quite identify. “…Goddammit."

A small, triumphant grin slid across Tommy’s face, and he had to hold back a small laugh of victory. He was free! He was free! For the first time in nearly two weeks, his life was in his own hands, and nobody could grab him and keep him captive!

All he had to do was make his way further from Dream without being spotted, and he’d be free to go wherever he wanted!

It almost hurt to keep his gaze so high up towards the sky as he ducked and sprinted through patches of cover, but it was necessary for Tommy to keep an eye on Dream, and, more importantly, where the human was looking. Tommy didn’t think anything bad would happen if he were caught, per se, but his freedom to roam about the camp at night would definitely be taken away. Tommy frowned, realizing that, if Dream caught him, he might just stick the teen in a pocket and not let him out until they reached Manberg.

Well, I guess that’s just more incentive to not be caught, then, Tommy thought, swallowing down the knot in his throat and clambering over a particularly large log of a stick. He glanced back and was unable to see any sign of Dream behind him.

Deciding that he was far enough out of sight to properly start moving, he set off, picking the direction that would take him furthest from Dream, and started fast-walking. He was eager to see where his path would take him, and even more eager to see where his newfound freedom would bring him.

°°°°°

He’d been walking for about an hour now, and was gradually coming to realize that this, escaping into the forest, had been a terrible idea. He’d already had to run away from two trapdoor spiders, and one huge lizard that had persistently chased after him until Tommy managed to juke it out through some roots curling up out of the dirt.

He was tired, and his feet kinda hurt. He had a nasty scrape across his right shin from a broken stick he’d tripped over, and his hands were still shaking with the vestiges of adrenaline from the lizard encounter.

Huffing slightly, Tommy plopped down on a stone that jutted out of the ground at about knee height, slouching as he caught his breath and rested his legs for a moment.

Tommy knew jack-shit about the world of nature. He'd spent most of his life learning the ins and outs of being a borrower, an inchling that lived inside big-folk houses, where there were very few dangers aside from being caught by the owner of the house, or being bitten by a wayward spider or rat. Tommy knew that there were smallfolk that lived their whole lives outside in the wild, and that there were even whole villages built out in hard-to-reach places, like burrows and crevices and hollowed out trees, but he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t know the first thing about outside living, or, hell, even outside travel!

In the house that he’d lived in before he got kidnapped, there was a garden balcony with many, many plants. In the seven years that he had lived in that house, he’d only gone out to that garden twice. There were so many crows and bugs and critters bigger than he was populating that small patch of greenery that he hardly ever dared to venture out into it. He would have been plucked up and eaten in a heartbeat, he just knew it.

The point was, Tommy didn’t really know what he was going to do now that he had escaped. What the fuck had he been thinking? He was gonna get himself killed! He’d been safe with Dream, if only until they reached Manberg.

He couldn’t go back, though. It was partially from a point of pride, because he didn’t want to go crawling back to Dream just for the simple fact that he couldn’t handle being outside. The other part was from a slowly growing sense of fear, an unnerving buzz in the back of his head that tried to convince him the longer that he was gone, the madder Dream would get. It had already been a little more than an hour. Tommy didn’t want to know how pissed Dream was. Of course, there was the small chance that the human had given up chasing after the teen, but Tommy didn’t take Dream for the type to let go of something so easily. The human was definitely still trying to track him down.

He had to keep moving. Tommy pushed himself up, and continued walking.

Eventually, he came up to a massive wall of stone that blocked his path, rising at nearly a ninety-degree angle to bar Tommy’s trek forward. The teen’s brow furrowed as he scowled, glaring at the unprecedented obstacle. Now what?

His only options to continue were to go right, left, or to climb the stone cliffside all the way to the top. Tommy took one look at how high the crest of the cliff was and chose left. After that, it didn’t take him long to find a crack that split into the stone, one big enough that it might as well have been an invitingly wide door. It took little effort to scramble through it. Tommy hoped that it would lead to a path to the other side of the cliff.

The crack opened up almost immediately into a huge, dimly lit cavern, so huge that Tommy couldn’t even make out the ceiling above his head. He gaped for a moment, thrown off by the sudden expanse of space, but shook it off fairly quickly. He wanted to keep going.

Oh, what if he found diamonds in this cave? The thought brought a grin to his face, and he started moving, keeping close to the wall he had come in from.

As he wandered deeper, searching for a way through the network of caverns to the other side, his mind started drifting towards what might happen once he got out of the cave. What would he eat? Where would he sleep? How would he find fresh water that wouldn’t steal him away with a simple current?

It had gotten so dark. Tommy didn’t feel the most confident about wandering through the caves now, unable to see much other than the occasional flash of the pale skin of his hands as he felt his way forward. He should probably go back. What if the cave only got deeper and deeper and deeper? He could get trapped down here, and he’d starve to death, or die of thirst.

Tommy needed to go back. This was a terrible idea. He’d find some other way around the cliff, or pick a different direction to travel in. Anything would be better than continuing on in this abyss-like darkness.

The ground disappeared out from under his feet before he could turn around, and a terrified shriek escaped from Tommy’s lips as he plunged down, down, down…

…

…

Poor toms...Anyway, taglist!

@brick-a-doodle-do @i-am-beckyu @da3dm @kayla-crazy-stuffs @local-squishmallow @skullsnbruises @munchkin1156 @gt-daboss