this world we have built is burning down around us | Dream SMP Time Travel Fic

i pick scab wounds on skin until they bleed cause they itch while healing

"I'll be gone more soon," Theseus told Eret that evening, after Sam had left, and the king was pleasantly surprised to be greeted by the blond, visible and having taken the steps to come down to the kitchen for the first time.

"It hardly ever feels like you exist," Eret teased, trying to make light and not dwell on the last time he'd seen the boy, crying and angry and screaming in his face all of the king's regrets and more. "Nothing much will change, so don't worry about little old me."

"I'm not," Theseus argued, eyes flickering warily around the kitchen and keeping his distance, stood in the doorway instead of sitting at the table, even though Eret was by the counter. "I'm just telling you because I don't want you to, like, start getting any ideas about looking for me or some shit. I'm not wasting invis pots around here now that you've already seen my ugly mug, so if I'm here, I'm here, and if I'm not, then I won't be."

Eret hummed as though he understood, captivated by the speech patterns that were so Tommy on the face of a man that looked so different. "You're not ugly." The blond's name was on the tip of his tongue, but Eret knew where he stood in Theseus's eyes and didn't dare cross that line unless given express permission; he'd carelessly crossed too many the night before, and he knew it only set the young man further back in trusting him.

"For a split second, like everyone else, I feared for your life, and I hated myself for it when I realized you were the one who gave us up. You turned tail and ran, never looked back; you never saw, did you? You never watched your friends be slaughtered around you, heard your brother scream in pain and plead for your life before he died. Dream slit my fucking throat open and just watched me bleed out in the middle of my friends' bodies."

Eret had known the pain he caused his friends, inevitably, but never like that. The chests in the room were supposed to be so that they could take the group hostage and force them to give up the items they had left; Eret had not meant for them to be killed. He hadn't had a choice, though, when the Dream Team had begun to swing mercilessly on the panicked group. He'd gotten a wound himself from a stray sword, not that he'd ever mentioned it, and he hadn't had the guts at the time to yell at Dream for the divergence in plans.

Hearing Theseus scream at him had hurt, rightfully so, and Eret wished with all his heart that it could have relieved Theseus's own hurt from betrayal; he knew it never would.

Theseus's words made Eret feel pathetic for trying to ask for forgiveness, even if he still wanted it.

"Trying to butter me up with compliments, eh?" Theseus snorted, and Eret couldn't tell if the blond was biting at him or simply being sarcastic in the way that Tommy always was. "Your lies won't work."

Perhaps both.

"You're still not ugly," Eret repeated, stirring the soup that sat atop the heated furnace. "Scars don't make you ugly." Hedging, he added, "Girls think battle scars are hot."

"I don't need battle scars for women to love me," the blond told him, and Eret could tell by the way it was abruptly silent afterward that the response had been near automatic in the same way that the current Tommy was always speaking his thoughts before reacting to them with everyone else who heard the nonsense spill from his mouth.

It was funny how Tommy's words and actions had always been distinctly childlike many a time, much like now, Eret mused. Most everyone had always chalked it up to Tommy being a child, but Theseus could not have been a child even if he should have been, and he still spoke like Tommy too often not to be him. He had to wonder if that meant that Tommy's childlike behavior was him being the child that he should have been as well as he could or if it was some sort of coping mechanism, one that many on the server made fun of him for.