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It took him three days to do something for himself.
The days before had been a struggle - the three who took him would say the same. Despite the flurry of changes - an overwhelmingly familiar cabin now his shelter, biting cold his outdoors, someone not Dream his keeper - he refused to make a decision. He only knew to sit still and let his body be manipulated by whatever outside force decided to; if he waited long enough, endured long enough, maybe Dream would come to find him.
He couldn’t feel anything past the rawness of his nerves.
The three never left him alone, no matter how tightly he forced his eyes shut or how painfully he suppressed his own movement. They pressed spoons to his lips and urged him to take the foreign substance into his mouth. He never consciously did.
Soon, the unending fogginess - alongside the torturous drivel stabbing into every inch of his being - forced him to break his vow of stone. With withered legs and a mind filled with white-noise sludge, he stood.
On day three, he forced himself into the basement and extinguished all the lights.
He hated the darkness - despised it, really - but the sickening blackness felt more comfortable than the too-much that was the outside world. In the dark he let himself fidget a bit more, let himself revert back to his normal habits from home.
Discomfort twisted inside him in every waking moment. He didn't know whether to wait or break free.
Despite the area he forced himself into, they still never let him go unguarded. They never let him imprint the walls into his skin, nor did they let him go minutes in silence. They just stayed there, talking, coaxing him into breaking more and more of his resolve. He didn’t have enough energy to fight away the warmth.
On day four, his mouth clamped around an offered spoon, his indifference cracking as his body took control. He blocked out the rest of that incident.
Between the bouts of internal agony, through the steady pour of confusing kindness, before the sickening wave of darkness and denial - he wondered. Paused.
He didn't know when he could be human.
***
"Hey Tommy!"
At the mention of his name, he looked up before quickly correcting; Ghostbur - a lantern in his hands to replace the one sitting next to Phil - floated down the ladder in a ray of soft light. Phil stirred from beside him and stretched.
"We switching shifts?" Phil rasped, already half-standing. Ghostbur nodded.
When Phil turned at the last moment and ran a tentative hand through his hair, an overwhelming surge of comfort drove the static to right behind his eyes. He continued to stare slightly down.
"Call if you need me, okay?" Phil murmured, voice another cotton ball in his throat. His response came as a full-bodied twitch.
Ghostbur cleared his throat, the fading black of his pants just barely in the view of his half-blind eyes. "Okay! So, Tommy. Would you like to come upstairs? It's very dark in here."
He didn't respond.
"You sure? We can put you in front of the fireplace, so you don't have to use all those blankets."
His conscience powered through enough tar for him to muster his eyes to register. Thick sheets laid across his spread out legs - one for each of Phil's shifts.
"Okay then," Ghostbur chirped, the light following as he moved to his side. "We'll just have to stay down here. Would you like me to read something again?"
He didn't respond. He wasn't sure he could anymore.
In his left ear, he heard the hollow thud of Ghostbur settling next to the corner he had fallen into, followed by the crack of a leather-bound spine. The part of his mind still capable of forming conclusions recognized the sound from the previous days.
Ghostbur took a deep breath in and began to read.
The sound of Ghostbur’s voice washed over him immediately, the natural cadence of his words bringing slight stability to his completely scattered mind. He even managed to register a few words of dialogue - something about a baroness and her beloved queen - past the near-poetic rhythm Wilbur possessed. Just as the thought came to his mind, he quickly corrected names. The energy expended sent him back into the recesses of incomprehension.
“The baroness stared, eyes squinting impolitely in the illuminating light,” Ghostbur continued, the honey-cloying warmth dripping easy against his brain. “For she couldn’t restrain herself. There, haloed by dim garden lanterns and perfectly-bloomed camellias, was her closest confidant, her queen.”
The story settled over his mind in layers - in some ways, it felt akin to settling a blanket over a floor of broken glass.
Ghostbur spoke lightly, lilting. “She gasped loudly at the sight, her heart beating quick against her gloved hand as she tore her eyes away. ‘Your majesty- I must take my hasty leave at once! The crooning gossips are as plentiful as the stars on this clear night-’”
Ghostbur hummed a short note, interest obvious in the soothing noise. Soundlessly, Tommy felt himself do the same.
“‘Yet even the stars are blinded by the light, are they not?’ The queen murmured, tongue poking from behind her rosy cheek. ‘As long as you remain by my side, the crones will have a better chance finding a speck of dust in your estate than laying their eyes on me.’”
He vaguely felt something inside him push, the feeling eased into existence by the effortless motions of language.
“And so they stayed- oh, I like this passage, it’s very pretty- with their backs turned in the way only one painfully aware of unwanted presence could. Their eyes - the same ones that had stolen portraits in the judgemental day, pilfered sips of each other’s intoxicating nectar - gazed up into the painted darkness of the night. With only each other as company, only themselves as their world, they soaked up their backdrop and prayed for what glances couldn’t give.”
Suddenly, he wished for his body to move on its own. He wished for it to tilt just so, to break its painful shell of stone and let itself descend into free fall. It had betrayed Dream's wishes before.
When his body only twitched, he decided to do it himself.
"They held each other’s hands tightly- oh!"
The lap he landed in chilled his face, the sensation pulling forgotten memories back into the land of remembrance. The cold tempered the expected heat, the expected pain; it felt almost as if like had met like, his skin melding more easily with a similar substance. A low buzz unified the shrieking in his veins.
Ghostbur placed a hand against his shoulders. He felt his hands dart forward to cling onto what they could.
“Okay,” Ghostbur murmured, voice soft as he pressed himself harder into the touch. A sense of mania overwhelmed him, hastened his long-petrified limbs - he burrowed deeper, frantic, pushing into the chill like a man greeting water for the first time in days. The touch was far from warm - yet it heated his colder skin, melted the sharpness in every cell of his body, burned tranquility into the air and safety into his ears.
He nearly felt drunk, riding on the waves of his own liquified mind.
Each shift of his head and twitch of his hands sent new layers of wax to harden over the wrongness in his body. It sunk deep - far down the escarpments framing his mind's arctic slush - and dethawed, illuminated, reawakened.
A hand ghosted over the knobs in his upper back, the motion a whisper of Dream’s preferred method of touch. Dream had always - only after giving him permission, only then - slammed a palm into just where his neck and back met, just where a flicker of more pressure would make the discs of his spine separate the two.
Immediately, he felt himself revert to stone.
Rules - rules he had broken, crossed without even a glance - tittered up the faint strings of warmth and froze. He felt his throat close, felt the mollified static resurge in a storm of choked breaths and harsh slams. Painfully, he uncurled his legs and lifted his head; perhaps if he pretended he never moved, he could avoid the consequences of his erroneous actions.
Ghostbur's hand flitted back to his shoulders, the frantic touch doing little to quell the gale. He tried to push himself up, tried to resist, yet a light chill suddenly pressed in with immobilizing softness.
Someone was shushing him. Ghostbur.
"Hey, hey, sorry- you can just stay there. I don’t mind, I don’t mind.”
He felt himself go lax again despite the tumultuous roil of his stomach. Hesitantly, Ghostbur began to read again - the contact between them told more than Ghostbur’s stuttering cadence ever could. He eventually lacked the power to focus on anything but the chill washing against his body.
Quietly, he wondered what state of duplicity Dream would find him in - if he found him at all.
***
In the next cycle of shifts, the barrier shattered just a touch more.
They had let him remain bonded with the ground, only noting his position when their ramble became lacking of fodder. Emptiness ate away at the little not claimed by fog or pins, a rawness swallowing the entirety of his upper body where Ghostbur used to be. The too-tight bandage of Dream’s old hugs seemed to only aid the wrongness under his skin.
“Weather is expected to be relatively warm in the next few weeks,” Techno mumbled, his voice continuously filtering in and out against his mind. “That’s very promising for game hunting- it might be good to invest in some quieter boots to maximize how much we catch. The snow outside is already getting lighter, but it still crunches-”
Abruptly, the urge to see the snow for himself crashed into him. With it, the exhaustion that came from being suspended and trapped by thousands and thousands of rules.
He directed his eyes toward the ladder separating him from the world, watched as gentle light filtered onto the dark chamber of his life. He yearned to step outside - prayed for it, really - and experience the brightness against his arms, the cradle of warmth so forgiving it housed every person without complaint. His legs stayed still.
“You good?”
The words died before they even grazed his tongue.
A sudden build-up rose in his throat, the sensation most likely air yet its push a vessel for the hundreds of words so desperate to leave. It forced its way up, drowning his oxygen with its wiling ways and uncaring in how it scratched the edges of his throat - yet it could only slam repeatedly against the impenetrable barrier of his mind. His finger tapped twice, the motion backed with practice.
“Do you- do you want to go upstairs?” Techno guessed, ever so perceptive - or, perhaps, wishful.
Somewhat used to the feeling of betraying his owner, his fingers rapped once again.
“Okay,” Techno replied, shifting just before his instinctual twitch. “Am I going to have to carry you? I mean, it’s fine, but- yeah, I’ll carry you.”
He pulled himself through the recesses of his mind to grab the reins of his muscles, forcing them to tense in preparation for inordinate heat. A light feeling - young, dim, dissolving under his focus the second he thought to address it - melted smooth in the cracked walls of his mind despite his shallow lungs. A distant part of him identified it as anticipation. Excitement.
The thick layers swarming him dipped and changed, moving to tightly swaddle all of his already numb skin. His eyes shut as the pressure sunk deep into his soul.
“Alright, now I just have to maneuver- of course you’re completely limp, that makes my job so much easier, thanks.”
He felt the steady support against his side disappear, replaced by a firm presence against his chest. His head lolled down without his control, the motion abruptly stopped - a shoulder, he realized, his face had fallen into Techno’s shoulder - yet the sudden onslaught of warmth crashed over his scalp and wiped clean any thoughts. The coherence he already struggled to grasp dissolved as he sunk deeper into the waves of soft heat, fell away as he trembled along the line of drowning and treading syrupy liquid. Each motion, each tilt - they only served to run up his jaw submerge him farther under his incomprehensible high.
Something grazed over his hair, solidifying only to push him more securely into the heat. He couldn’t remember being so close to both breaking and exultation.
After an indeterminable amount of time, the rumble of his support shot him into focus. “We’re upstairs now. You can open your eyes- if you want to, of course. No- no pressure.”
Dutifully - as if his allegiance were to Techno, not with whom it was supposed to be - he opened his eyes.
Light.
His eyes snapped open wide as Techno maneuvered his body somewhere safe, imbibing themselves in the light now mellow enough to not cross into the territory of all-encompassing. He glazed over the shelves, the drying clothes, the rich wood something urged him to scratch; despite the waves upon waves practically ensnaring his concentration, he could now spot tiny notches in the floorboards and indentations on various book spines. As he felt himself settle into a sea of layers and soft solace, the edge of his lip twitched.
For the first time in what felt like years, rebellious spirit sparked in his chest.
***
He started walking around. The path of his steps only consisted of small circles, similar to the ones he traced around Dream the occasional time he allowed him to. His body could barely manage a few before his heart stabbed into his breastbone and his legs tightened into painful freezes.
As his body stood defiant and his static minutely quelled, he felt the chokehold of Dream’s orders loosen.
***
“Do you want to take a shower or would you rather stay where you are?”
They had been doing that more often - giving him options on what he could do. He toyed with the rope in his hands, fingers twitching against the still-undone strands; just a few hours before, Techno had given him the option between braiding rope and languishing in his static. His fingers ignored the implications of their choice.
Phil moved in the corner of his vision, light blue robes streaming down his form in swathes. “It’s fine either way- I just think you would like to wash your hair. It’s getting pretty greasy, isn’t it?”
He wordlessly responded in agreeance. Spindly vines of his hair cut his vision down the middle - memories resurfaced of rough fingers using them as leads - and splintered into oily strands the moment he thought to touch it.
“So, yes or no?” Phil asked, the creaking of leather and sudden dip at his side signs of Phil’s reclining. His fingers tugged against comforting cord as his mind swayed dangerously under the concept of warm water.
Words bumbled just under his tongue as they so often did, discarding their previous struggle against the unmoving walls of his lips - instead, it seemed as if they had found satisfaction in crowding themselves into the open space of his mouth. Each tumble of a vowel and roll of a verb acclimated his mouth to the sensation of their existence, reacquainted his throat to their unfairly natural taste. His legs twitched.
“No pressure, but I would like an answer.”
“Sure,” He rasped thoughtlessly, and immediately froze.
He felt his shoulders dig as far down as they could go, panic marring in his already-warring sea to create an overwhelming surge - it stoppered his lungs, pierced his eyes, promised slams of his body not from his own hand. The image of armored hands flashed like lightning through the buzz, so alive he could taste sweat and so fake he could feel them hit. Drowning, choking, screaming through the impending onslaught of consequences, he realized bitterly how still his body stayed. A frozen shell.
A hand pressed onto the area of his shoulder shielded by clothes. Vaguely, he could hear a smile in Phil’s voice.
“Okay, okay. Good. I’m going to grab your arm, okay? I’m going to guide you to the bathroom. Feel free to use me as support if you get too tired.”
He couldn’t understand how his body moved.
In some unexplainable jump of time, he found his eyes staring down at the crack between a painted-white door and the dark panels of Techno’s hallway - the little energy still present in his thighs shrieked painfully, pulling at the string squeezing his heart. The steadying press of Phil’s hand kept him still despite the wrenching tides.
“For safety’s sake, I’m going to check up on you every few minutes. I won’t actually step into the bathroom, but I will need confirmation that you’re okay. You don’t have to speak if you don’t want to, you can just knock.”
Phil’s voice lit up with panic before he quickly pulled it under soft consideration.
“With your hand,” Phil hurriedly added. “Knock with just your knuckles - hard enough to make a sound but not hard enough to hurt, alright?”
His distant clarity noticed the strange stillness of his hands.
“Tommy?”
With a shot of focus, he forced his head to nod.
His eyes began to wander as soon as the door opened and closed, the fading of light footsteps background noise as he registered each tile of the floor and bump of the painted walls. The faint smell of mist clung to the air, one towel - fluffy-looking, easy to hold - strewn messily atop the already-disorderly pile of folded cloth. Fogged, warped glass panels blocked the far end of the restroom from his vision.
With only moderate opposition, his clothes landed on the floor and his body jumped in.
The warm water immediately scalded the hairs of his arms, sapping away his strength and dripping like hot butter through the dust clinging to his skin. His shoulders slackened, neck tilted, mind settled - his fingers unbound themselves from their angered movements and aided his hair in soaking up as much as it could. Soon soap joined in creating streams across his face, the action instinctual and peppered only by a few knocks against the wall. Worry of disobedience bubbled into his mind before washing away with the rain.
People could shower. People used towels.
He dried himself off with hesitant giddiness bouncing in his chest, the plush material in his hair reassuring and the dirt-caked rags he called pants discomfiting against his legs - a small, irritatingly obvious part of his mind murmured of how people wore pants. Emboldened, he chanced a look up to the mirror.
The thing practically groveling where it stood could not be human.
Its skin blushed a spidery purple as blood congealed under its dead skin, lumps of veins so stiff they pressed horrid lines into its hands - he spotted areas along its shoulders, along its chest, where the curdled masses had once broken free and marked their exit with banners of discolored red. He caught grooves along its body, out-of-place planes stretching under and over in unnatural juts of flesh. A mangled mess of cords replaced its neck, blackened barbs replaced its fingers, a shattered husk replaced its chest. His eyes forced up, avoiding.
He caught sight of its ears. Water began to gather in the hollow corners of its eyes.
He could gather faint memories with its ears, could remember a soft cradle that spread light bubbles through his nerves. He could think of thousands of hollow moments, could recall millions of times when its appendages served as invisible weight or the heavy marking of the damned - yet the feeling of cold fingertips and safety still diluted years.
Ripped into the right ear laid a hole, a chain coated in solidified blood poking through white fur and calling attention to the sensitive membrane flushed an inflamed pink. A tag - a large, revulsive, sickening green - hung from its glorified vein.
His fists slammed into the basin and the creature disappeared.
“Tommy? Are you okay in there?”
A groan battered against the iron guard of his teeth, the near-invisible markings of suds numbingly in focus as lappings of frantic noise punctured his ears. He could distantly register the sound of once-oiled hinges - the sight of his fingers clutched desperately against white felt more important.
“Oh, Tommy,” Phil murmured, voice splintering under its own pain.
His tie to the stone faltered somewhat, yet the thought of reacquainting himself with that creature expunged all thoughts. Pure, ragged revulsion crawled into the soft tissues of his windpipe. He could feel the heady mist cloaking his thoughts whip around each swell of static - an unheard voice screeched to be done with it all.
“What’s going on?”
The roaring in his mind paused.
“Is Tommy okay?” Ghostbur asked, voice tender and safe and unfair in its capability to tighten his chest. “No, no- he doesn’t look okay. He looks like- when- Tommy, would you like some blue?”
Against everything, his eyes trailed over to the dark, thick-soled shoes warping slightly under fragmented light. Yearning pierced his jaw and impaled his neck, beating against every area in his body where soft things should have gone. Painfully, he shook his head.
“What happened? Did you see something triggering?” Phil tried. Annoyance surged through him, coloring each of his already-amplified feelings and torturing in its presence.
His fingers worked faster than the roiling conflict in his mind and shot up with the intent to yank. They managed to curl around crusted metal before an icy chill seared into the back of his hand.
“Hey now-” Ghostbur’s voice barely carried over the agony of his maneuvering arm- “That’s not good. You don’t want to hurt yourself. I don’t want you to- please, have some blue.”
Something pressed into his palm - as if his hands had the capability to hold, as if he possessed digits, not paws - with the grating texture of thousands of barely-meshed strands. Slowly - only when the dark tidal spires lessened enough for sight - he registered the loose, uncoordinated knots in a glorified ball of blue yarn.
“It was supposed to be a hat,” Ghostbur said nervously. He felt the hesitant tremor rumble against his scalp.
“It looks more like a headband,” Phil interjected. “And it’s yours, you can keep it. We can also do something about the-the ear accessory. We didn’t want to do something without your consent.”
Phil continued to talk, voice sheets of white noise. He stared down at the sad little excuse of clothing, noted its tight knots of pulled yarn and gaping loops consisting of its structure. The only thing echoing in the cavernous destruction of his mind became how it was his.
When no one could see him succumb to the reverie of humanity, he put the headband on.
***
“Do you know where my beanie is?” He asked, voice still quiet and marred from weeks of silence.
A considerate hum intermingled with the dull thud of a knife against wood, his own hands shaking slightly in their hold of soapy plates - past the ever-present stench of dirt and stale air, he caught the pungent aromatics currently in the process of being destroyed. He forced his mind to focus on the rush of sink water, not its own irritating buzz.
“What beanie are you talking about?”
“The-the one,” He huffed. “The one that Dream gave me.”
Phil’s form stilled, knife no longer coaxing instincts from his resolve. Were he to look to his face, Tommy had no doubt that only bewilderment colored his features.
“He gave you a beanie?”
“The red one-” He hissed in the back of his throat as water lashed cool lines up his arm- “The one I always wore.”
Phil shifted on his feet, beige slippers unnervingly silent. “What do you mean? You had that hat before you even heard of Dream. Deo gave it to you, didn’t he-”
In a flurry of uncoordinated crashes and jolts, the front door to his supposed home slammed open.
Underneath his raised arms, he spotted the tattered and ripped ruins of a once-pristine suit - within the voids of each clothing hole, pallid white skin or dappled black. Memories rose past the sudden roar in his ears, ushering and whispering of promised bonds long since left to languish. Muscles close to snapping and breath just barely reacquainting itself with his body, he lowered his arms.
His eyes trailed up - towards Ranboos chest, not his eyes - before his body turned to stone.
There lay Tubbo’s body, dressed in the skin of the dead.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry I just- please, you have to hide him, you have to keep him safe,” Ranboo rambled, Tubbo’s limp corpse shifting in ways completely sacrilegious to his virtuous life.
“Calm down, calm down,” Phil took a step forward in his periphery, closer to Tubbo’s remains and farther from where he began to imitate his friend. “Here, breathe with me. There we go, there we go. Now, calmly, explain what’s going on.”
A thought crossed oceans to remind him of the words’ application to him.
“L’Manberg is gone. Dream- Dream blew it up, blew up everything, for no reason. He then tried to kill Tubbo, so I- I grabbed him and ran. He’s still alive, but he was really exhausted, and- I’m so sorry, here was the only place I could think of.”
The vague noise of Phil continuing to converse drowned under the thudding of his mind, any previous reservation choking along with it; the relief of Tubbo’s existence - the sheer elation of watching his chest shallowly rise - transcended any possible consequence to his hurried steps forward. His breath
He trailed his trembling fingers over Tubbo's dust-encrusted clothes, his body and mind unified in an all-consuming vengeance. Gently - exactly how Ghostbur touched, harnessing the same care and respect - he pushed his hand against Tubbo's beating, lively heart.
“Dream did this?” He asked. He refused to wait for a response.
With his voice and the vehemence still recovering from their burial, he breached the discipline reserved only for a pet.
“I am going to fucking destroy Dream.”
***
He began going outside.
The icy stone of Techno’s front porch quickly became a suitable place to rest, the stiff freeze of his covered toes his begrudging company - an offensively correct voice alluded to how his toleration stemmed from the sight of his estranged friend. Tubbo would join him in the milky unknown - persistently wrapped in more bulk than an overgrown sheep - to lose himself in the rhythm of caring for Techno’s apiaries. He found himself savoring their moments together. Stumbling through each of their new sharp points, the tundra became home of their familiar reconnection.
The tundra also became home to Tubbo helping him practice speech.
“Getting kind of tired, Tubbo. How long until you’re done?” He rasped, fingers easily working along the length of Techno’s hose - Tubbo had asked him to disentangle it - as he concentrated on the hardy greens thriving under Tubbo’s manipulation.
“Just a bit more-” The blade in Tubbo’s hand moved, cutting through another frozen neck- “Last night’s frost hit a lot harder than I hoped. Try out the nonsense thing, yeah? Just as a little wrap-up.”
The rubber withstood the playful clench of his fists. “Fine, fine. But if I start fucking choking and shit, that's on you. Alright, okay- I went to the park and I saw many women. N. N- Nobody saw them except for me, because they were invisible and shit. T. Tubbo starts with T, and- and that rhymes with me. E. Everyone knows that my- my voice is fucking giving out.”
A hacking cough tugged at his throat, pulling at the raw surfaces and wounds caused by overuse - ease poured instead of blood at the sound of Tubbo’s laughter.
“Okay. Just a few more stems and we can go inside. You’ll help me on the Snowchester schematics, right?”
With lightness warming the chilled depths of his insides, he nodded.
They fell into the same silence that had fallen upon them thousands of times before - calm, steady, bound to be shattered the second Tommy’s insides surged too high. Thankfully, his throat found reprieve from his chatter by the continuous motion needed to unfold every unyielding bend. Something almost akin to peace tittered at the precipice of his mind.
“Tommy?”
He startled up, eyes darting from where they had been drifting and focusing on the pale stalks dusting Tubbo’s gloves green. His clippers bled from the blade, droplets of chlorophyll tainting the snow in splatters of dark color. Tommy cleared both his nerves and his throat.
"I've been thinking," Tubbo began, fists strangling the already-dead plants. "Do you mind looking me in the eye?"
His body adopted the characteristics of ice. To expect a different reaction would have been to expect the ground to turn to air.
Quietly, he exhaled - the thought of daring to pose himself as Tubbo’s equal, the thought of standing himself on the same ground Tubbo walked choked him far more than any blacked-out room. Yet under the watchful gaze of his friend - so expectant in his compliance, as if him glancing up was normal - worked down the fog of his hesitancy and cloaked each reservation. Without it, he only remained with the tiny voice so eager to reciprocate. He forced his nerves to steel and his neck to tense.
“Alright,” He croaked. “Looking up in three, two…”
He looked up into Tubbo's sea-green eyes, the strands of flecks of silver reflecting his maimed free will. He continued to stay, continued to stare - as if they comrades, man and man.
Perhaps they were.
"Hey Tommy," Tubbo whispered, reddening cheeks breaking under the force of his grin. "It's been a while."
***
Under the combined forces of them, their enlisted forces, and the two men well-versed in cheating death, Dream never stood a chance.