Whatever It Takes

Falling

Over the passing weeks, Silk had grown accustomed to life with Tommy and Wilbur.

She spent most of her evenings with Wilbur. They would either sit reading in the library in peaceful silence or stay up until the early hours of the morning in the alchemy room brewing and experimenting with potions.

Things were simple when she was with Wilbur. She felt a deep-rooted sense of peace. Wilbur also seemed happier. His airy demeanour remained, but it seemed to have morphed into genuine happiness, rather than just being oblivious to sadness.

Coming home to see Wilbur curled up with a book on one of the chairs and a smile on his face filled her with a warmth that had nothing to do with the fireplace.

Tommy had also come to consider her house his home. Most of his belongings had come to reside there, his bedroom became his permanent residence and he came and went as he pleased. Silk had taken on somewhat of a parental role to the younger boy. She would stitch his clothes back together when he got into fights, they bickered about him eating his vegetables and maybe sometimes he would occasionally bring her flowers or similar trinkets he had found on his adventures (but of course Tommy vehemently denied any thought went into these gifts). She cooked him meals in the evening, yelled at him when he tracked mud through the house and sat up with him through the night when he had nightmares.

The latter is the exact situation she found herself in now.

It was somewhere around 4am and she was sitting cross-legged on Tommy's bedroom floor. Her head was resting on the side of his bed and she was blinking at Tommy sleepily. Tommy himself was sitting opposite her, waving his hands around in an animated fashion as he told her a story about one of his many adventures.

He had tiptoed into her room half an hour earlier, shaking her awake and looking at the floor guiltily when she cracked an eye open. She had sighed, rising from her bed and ruffling Tommy's hair gently. "Okay. Let's go bud."

Sometimes Tommy wanted Silk to sit with him until he fell asleep. Other times he just wanted to talk about something else until he was sufficiently distracted from his nightmare. Only very occasionally would he actually talk about his nightmares.

Tommy was slowly becoming more forthcoming about the topics of his nightmares. He never went into detail, but he had told her that he had regular nightmares about the wars he had fought in. More specifically about all the times he had almost died. He had inescapable dreams where he died over and over again in different ways.

Silk had felt a familiar burn behind her eyes on the night that Tommy had told her that.

Silk tuned back into Tommy's story when she realised he had interrupted himself with a large yawn, stopping to rub at his eyes.

"You ready to go to sleep again?" Silk asked

Tommy paused, casting his gaze to the floor, and fidgeting with his hands. He shook his head slowly.

"I...I can still see it." He spoke quietly

Silk shifted closer to Tommy, stroking a tender hand through his hair. "If you want to talk about it I'm all ears. I'm not going anywhere."

Tommy looked hesitant, his blue eyes darting across her face as if he expected to find evidence that she was lying to him there. Eventually he sighed, biting on his lip anxiously. "I keep having a dream that Dream kills me."

Silk arched an eyebrow, but made an attentive noise. Dream? What did he do that made Tommy's unconscious that scared of him?

A nauseatingly satisfied voice in her head cooed praise to her for being right. There was something off about Dream. A decent trustworthy person wouldn't be giving a child nightmares where they murder him.