Butterfly Reign - SilentTeyz

31

The air rattles like window glass. The wind wafts the smell of burning from somewhere in the northern forest, where lightning had blown a hundred-year-old pine tree to splinters. Even the palace, so bright and lively in the blaze of daylight, sullenly fades into the stormy sky. Somewhere a pale gleam of light flickers in the windows; flickers and evaporates into shadows, failing to reach the dark figure that lunges time after time at the training dummy.

Tommy can't tell how much time he's spent swinging a sword at the piece of crude wood. The handle has wiped his palms bloody, and his clothes are soaked to the skin, clinging to his body in unpleasant cold lumps. The rain hasn't stopped even for a second, hitting him mercilessly on the back and fevered face, but even that hardly dampens the feeling in his chest as if someone has pinched his heart in scorching-hot tongs. He pauses for a moment to let his exhausted muscles rest and it swells anew, the treacherous warmth in his eyes. Tommy shakes his head violently, grips his sword tighter, and strikes the dummy with a spurting frenzy. Better this than letting himself break down again; better yield to anger than helplessness.

A flicker of green in the corner of his vision has Tommy biting his lip so hard that he tastes copper. Prince sloppily perches on a branch, struggling to fold his wings. Wet feathers clinging to his body make him look half his usual size. It echoes of the day Tommy first met him all those months ago during an afternoon stroll - back during the time when the most thrilling thing about his day was exchanging letters with a faceless addressee. Now it all seems like half-forgotten fragments of another life.

"I wonder what you were planning to do if you succeeded," Tommy says, his voice almost lost to the rain. "I'd be mourning my brother, and you'd be acting all compassionate and supportive, manipulating my grief to your advantage... was that always a part of your plan, Dream?" He draws his gaze up. "Or should I call you Prince?"

Dream - still in the shape of the parrot - shrinks on himself, his head lowered. The silence, the lack of defense, of bold speeches that Dream is normally so full of, bursts the bubble of Tommy's quiet sorrow. He clenches the sword harder. "At least have the fucking decency to look at me at with your real face."

Dream dives from the branch after a moment of hesitance. Mid-fall his figure distorts like somebody has swiped a brush across a wet painting. On the ground, on two feet, lands a man.

Somewhere beyond the overcast horizon, lightning splits the sky. Dream watches it with his head drawn back. Tommy still hasn't moved an inch from his position in front of the training dummy. It feels like if he stays stiff enough, if he doesn't move at all, he can make the time pause with him.

But then thunder rumbles, and Dream glances at him again, saying, "We need to talk."

Tommy raises his gaze at him briefly. Dream looks the same as in his fight with Techno earlier this night. Only his neck, peeking from under a ripped collar, sports a distinct twilight shape of fingers. There has been a half-hearted attempt at bandaging the deep cut splitting his upper arm, but it's all soaked now and colored in crimson hue. Combined with the water running down his face in silver steaks, it hardly seems like an expression of triumph.

What more do you want from me? Tommy squeezes his eyes shut so he wouldn't have to look at Dream; at the despair that seems so honest, so real that he's afraid he might not withstand it. Is it not enough what you have already done?

It's hard to breathe. His lungs won't expand all the way, meeting some invisible barrier. The sword trembles in his hands. Each new second is a memory unfolded in painful clarity ('Will you trust me?', 'Truth to be told, I admire you...' 'You think that after everything- I'm the one who needs...?', 'Selfless. Never stupid, or naive, or whatever else you were made to believe you are.', 'I swear, on my title and on my life, that I will never not care about you-'). It couldn't have all been a lie... or could it?