Flattery, my darlings, will get you everywhere. *blushes* thank you for all the support and suggestions! im going to start posting this on my writing blog on tumblr from now on too. its gingerlafeywrites i you want to follow. o3o and sorry this took me so long i got a job recently and its kept me busy (so fair warning for later chapters)
It was dark, but not completely black, and it surrounded you. It was comforting like a large, warm blanket the color of the night sky, wrapping around you like a familiar embrace. You were peaceful like this. Sometimes lights would gently pulse in and out of your vision, soft and muted, fist sized fireflies that came in a multitude of colors. It was nice.
At some point you could feel a flat surface beneath your body, allowing your aching limbs to stretch out and go limp with exhaustion. You had a tired but overall happy feeling swirling around in your chest. It was nice to not have to think about anything and just enjoy the comfort. You were barely even aware that you were half conscious, but you let sleep take you completely anyway.
Your dreams start out sweet and innocent enough. You're floating through a mish-mash of old memories and good times. Soft feelings and muted laughter follow you through these memory-like dreams. You feel rather than see most of them. There's a flash of excitement and childish glee as you momentarily relive one of the many times your Dad taught you some new type of prank. A moment of giddiness and pride after mastering your first song on the piano. The sheer happiness mixed with a tinge of anxiousness when you first started befriending Dave, Rose, and Jade. The warmth of familial love when your Dad would sit down and watch your favorite movies with you. The bliss of a well baked slice of cake before you grew sick of it. Idle contentedness on one of those days you would simply sit out on your tire swing and think to yourself.
Happy, light, warm and altogether pleasant. You hadn't slept this well and this happily in months.
You knew it was too good to last.
The last good thing you felt was the exuberating and gleeful moment of when you first took flight with your windy powers and felt freer and more at home than you have ever been.
You dreams turned more towards seeing and doing rather than just blindly feeling. Your soft blanket was ripped from you and you were plunged into a more terrifying type of darkness. You couldn't move anymore.
You could feel the slimy slithering appendages around you, wrapping around your limbs and gripping you tight, but you couldn't see them. And that made them all the more terrifying. They were burning and ripping apart you skin, dissolving it like acid past the muscle and all the way to the bone. You couldn't scream. You could here the horrorterrors whispering dark, indiscernible things into your ears. They were merely watching as the Red Miles tore you apart. Waiting.
You were not yet truly afraid. There was worse yet to come and you knew it.
Your heart rate tripled as you felt your feet plodding determinedly on, left and right and left again. This was not a particular memory of your own, but someone else's. Your hand gripped your trusty hammer tight. You were absurdly confident and foolish. You stared at the mouth of the home of you Denizen. The part of you that was memory was intimidated but steadfast, the part of you that was still you was simply terrified.
You know the outcome of this fight, and it wasn't pretty.
Fighting your Denizen was an arduous task and something you were not ready for at this point. The fight did not last long at all. You had rushed forward, an adrenaline filled war cry spilling from your lips. You were not fast like Dave, you did not have foresight like Rose, you weren't as accurate a shot like Jade. Your Denizen, a large and shapeless creature, indescribable even to you now, was fast, faster than you though possible. It was made from the very air itself. You could not land a hit, try as you might, and it rumbled a laugh at your efforts. It did not take long for it to lose patience and simply incinerate you. Perhaps if you had acquired your God Teir powers before this point you would have made it. You did not, in this timeline, make it.
The part of you that knew this outcome was as equally terrified as the part that didn't. You braced yourself as the maw of the giant wind beast quickly approached you and blew a gust of wind your way. It was not just any type of wind, it was boiling hot steam and it literally melted the skin from your bones like liquid fire.
You felt every bit of pain like it was truly your own. You felt yourself die and that was it.
Sadly your dreams were still not done with you.
You felt hot breath on the back of your neck and horror suddenly iced your veins. No, anything but this one, you pleaded with your subconscious. You could handle any other memory or nightmare. But not this again.
"You cannot stop what is already here," you could physically feel the words crawl over your skin. Your muscles were weak and your bones heavy, you were the last one still standing and you could barely lift your warhammer, the others having fallen from sheer exhaustion before hand. Most of them were close to death.
That was what always hurt you the most in this memory, seeing you friends so near to the edge. You had been a failure of a friend-leader.
Rose's breathing was shallow as she fought for life were she lay, having been earlier struck in the ribs with the butt of Lord English's gun. Jade was simply listless and could not move were she had fallen earlier, the effects of the Batterwitch's possession hitting her all at once after the Condense had been offed by the Lord and rendering Jade paralyzed. Jane was in a similar state. Dirk's body lay off to the side, headless (he had placed himself in front of Roxy, taking the blow instead in a heroic maneuver). Roxy herself had fallen next, strangled as she had tried to summon an object to defeat the Lord (the Game saw fit to see that as a heroic cause as well). Jake had been put under English's control long ago and was now a lifeless puppet. The trolls had all been dispatched before this battle. Dave... Dave was still struggling to move as his thigh had been pierced by Dirk's katana after the Lord had taken it from Dirk. It went right through Dave's thigh and into the ground below, trapping him. He was covered in blood and slowly bleeding out, vainly attempting to activate his time powers. His was the worst for you to handle.
You squeezed your eyes tight because you knew what came next. You lifted you hammer and swung anyway. Lord English's maniac laughter rang out before ended with a flash. Painful and searing. The worst pain you had ever felt in any timeline.
The memory ends and so does your sleeping.
You feel your body jolt and your eyes snap open. You're breathing hard but you haven't moved much from where you were laying. You chest rises and falls erratically to match the frantic beating of your heart. Every inch of your skin is hyper aware with fear and you can feel every pump of blood through your veins. Your ears are open to every little sound and your eyes are desperately trying to focus even though they can't because you have terrible eye sight.
It takes you far too long to even think about the fact that you have no idea where you are and that there is, in fact, a sleeping body beside you. Your fear and anxiety had just calmed down enough for you to think back as to try and figure out what happened after you got into that fight (only having been reminded of said fight after feeling the burning across your chest). You remember propelling yourself with your windy thing, landing near a diner. Did you go in? Yes, you can recall the little sound the door made when you opened it. What happened after that? You were woozy, you know that, and you think you might have found a booth to sit in. And then that's it. You can't think of anything else from there.
So where the hell were you now?
You furrowed your brows and tried to remember. You decided that you were not going to try and lift yourself from this position to try and find out.
You were, however, startled greatly when it finally hit that there was a person beside you and you could probably ask them. So you did.
You tentatively lifted your arm and began to shake their shoulder. You registered the fact that you were on a relatively small bed and you and said stranger were slightly squished, though you couldn't find out much more because you didn't have your glasses on and couldn't see.
The stranger merely grunted and mumbled something in their sleep, shifting to shrug your hand off.
Rude.
"Hey, guy," you stage whisper, "can you please wake up and tell me why I'm in your bed."
Mumbling and shifting but still a stubborn refusal to wake up.
"Dude, please," you aren't really shaking his shoulder anymore so much as softly beating it up (was that even a thing?), "I just want to know what happened. You don't have to be such an insufferable prick about it!"
You are past whispering and are now yelling and shoving, which is almost absurd because you're still laying down on your back and using one am.
You hear a dejected moan before the person beside you decides that he will at last regain full consciousness and sits up.
You say nothing as he takes and few moments to rub at his face throw off the last bits of sleep. You vaguely register that the guy looks familiar. Where have you seen such blonde hair before? And what you can see of his face is definitely familiar.
"Um, hello?" you decide to call out and remind him of your presence. Then maybe you can get some answers and see the rest of his face.
You swear the guy jumped a few inches off the bed.
"Ohshityou'reawake," spilled out of his mouth before he fully turned to you.
You were not expecting this. Why did he look like Dave? It couldn't possibly be Dave, you weren't that lucky and you were fairly sure every inch of the universe hated you. So what the fuck was going on here?
There was a moment of tense silence that bordered on awkward as you just laid there and stared at his slightly fuzzy face (fuzzy or no you could still tell he looked like Dave from this distance).
It kept straying closer towards awkward before he smirked and said "Like what you see there, Egbert?"
You blinked in surprise, "How do you know my name?"
The stranger huffed, "What? Can't recognize a fine Strider ass when you see one?"
"Dave?" it came out as a reverent whisper. Like your life depended on the answer.
"The one and only."
"Holy shit," it was the only thing you could come up with.
You could hear the amusement in his voice, "Yeah, I know."
"Well?" you gave him a look.
"Well what?"
"Are we going to have a righteous, tender bro-hug or not?"
"Yeah," you could hear the joyful smirk in his tone.
You lifted your arms and he lifted you up gently until you could wrap them around his shoulders. At first you snickered a bit until you started clinging to each other like a lifeline instead. You were both alive. You were both here, together.
You weren't alone anymore. And the fact that you found each other gave you hope that you might find others as well (and that, just maybe, they were also alive and well).
