A/N - How does Bim know where Silver will go?

A few years ago…

"Talk to me Tobi."

"No."

"Please."

"No."

"Tobi."

"Leave me alone."

"Please just tell me what's wrong."

It's a grey day and Tobi is curled in on himself, doing his best to block out the world around him. He hates it here. He doesn't want to be here. He's shaking as he feels Bim's hand rubbing at his back. He's trying to be reassuring but it's not working.

There's silence for a few more moments before Tobi mumbles that he wants to go home.

"…We're in your room." Bim sounds confused.

"MY home." Not this madhouse filled with the not-him and the not-Will and the other crazies who just look at him like he has a second head, all of them waiting for him to lose his mind and become like the not-him.

"Oh."

Tobi waits for the hand at his back to disappear, he waits for Bim to give up and walk out because that's how these things work. Nobody ever stays. Nobody ever cares. Everybody, everybody, always leaves him.

"Tell me about Will again."

Tobi looks up, eyes tired, watery, half-glaring at Bim. He knows what Bim is trying to do, and he's not being subtle about it. Except Bim does look genuinely interested, despite having heard this about a hundred times before. And maybe it'll help.

"I didn't always have a human form. I was….I guess you'd say like a smog cloud or something." Bim laughs. "Don't laugh. I didn't pick it. " Though Tobi himself is smiling slightly. "I found the smiling man and the nervous lady and when they realised I wasn't going to hurt them they were so bright and happy to see me, every time.

"Then the war came for them. Soldiers burst in and shot the lady and dragged the smiling man away screaming. She was dying and he was gone, so I joined with her soul. I wanted to save her. I wanted to save him.

"Her soul gave me a human form, but I was grey, and distorted. Suddenly I felt things and I knew things and I set out wanting to save Will. Because that's what we both wanted."

Tobi pauses, his fingers curling tight, fingernails digging into his palms as he remembers.

"I was too late. They'd made him into a berserker soldier. A weapon that would kill without prejudice, to release onto the battlefield when the fight was already lost. When I found him, he was the only one alive, stood on top of a pile of corpses, chastising them for falling asleep on the job.

"I startled him and he shot me. But he took me for help. Told me he knew what I was, what I'd done and promised he'd look after me. He even gave me a name."

"What was your name?"

Silver falls silent. It's always painful to remember because he knows what this name had meant to the smiling man and the nervous lady. What they had planned to use it for. And yet Will….Will just gave it to him. "…..Damien."

Bim reaches to pull Tobi in for a hug. If he thought for even a second that he could convince his friend to stop his story there then he would, but the hero never stops there.

"Hundreds of years, it was me and Will. But then he'd disappear and I'd wait for him to come back. Sometimes for years. And when he was there it was like it always was. Just the two of us against the world….but then he'd leave again.

"Then I realised. I realised he was only coming back when I was in trouble. When people would accuse me of murder, when they would see me as a monster because of how I looked. Always Will would swoop in at the last minute and save me." Tobi allows himself to be held. It doesn't help as much as he wishes it did. But he's come to accept that he's probably never going to feel right again.

"I hadn't seen him for nearly two years before I wound up here. And I nearly died twice." Literally close to drawing his last breath, levels of dying. Yet Will never came back.

On Tobi's grey days, he remembers the smiling man. How all he wanted was to save him and how he failed. How the smiling man became a broken husk who slowly started to give up on him. At least that's how he sees it. Why else would he never see Will any more? Will probably hasn't even noticed that 'Damien' is gone.

On grey days, he can't leave his room for fear of running into Wilford who's so much like Will that sometimes it hurts just to stand near him. Tobi's never even said 'hello' to the pink man because he can feel Dark watching his every move. When he hears Dark call Wilford 'Will' it makes him want to throw up.

All Tobi wants to do on his grey days is to see Will again. But that's never going to happen. And sometimes a grey day will turn into a grey week. When this happens, all Bim can do is his best, because that's all he can offer.