Chapter Text
There’s a dark place inside my head. Sometimes I like to walk there.
When I say dark, I don’t mean night or an unlit room. I mean a whole world of just nothingness, right there in my brain. That might say something about me, huh?
The place is beautiful, for whatever that’s worth. When I go to sleep and start dreaming (and I always dream, every night), it’s the first place I go.
It’s Friday morning I think, and I don’t know why I know that. I’m usually very bad at telling what day is anymore, ever since I stopped going to school in the spring because of the hospital and all. The days blend together here at home—they always blend together in the summer, naturally, but with the curtains drawn and my clock broken, I sometimes forget what time it is at all.
In dreams I don’t need to know the time. In dreams it can be whatever time I want it to be. But here—right now—it’s Friday, and I hate that. The knowledge makes me feel disgusting. I’m lying in bed now, sweating in the summer heat, and I can feel the weight of my own body.
I take a deep breath and leave my room (hate that, the way the dimensions shift), creeping to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal and milk. Mother is at work already, so I don’t have to worry about her catching me and asking me how I’m feeling, if I’m alright, if I should take a shower, if maybe I want to talk to someone. I don’t like having to lie to her about things like that. (The answers are always “nothing, no, no, not particularly” and they always get me in trouble.)
Finish the food, go back up, lie in bed again and I’m thinking about that dark world in my head. For some reason I’m also thinking about the way my knife glistens—not a real knife, but the one I have when I go to sleep. Real knives just reflect what’s beside them. My dream-knife reflects everything in the world.
Time passes. The blankets hold the heat in. they;re very heavy nd it’s nice and everything starts to sl | de. Gr@v!ty blccds sid~vvays.
t ｈ e ｗ o ｒ l ｄ ＢＬ I Ｎ K Ｓ
ａｎｄ weight changes so I know I’m in the other bed, in my other room. TV is looping through four different flickering images of an eye; I’d forgotten to turn it off the last time I dreamed.
“It’s not polite to stare,” I say.
The TV, being a gentleman at heart, clicks off.
I hop out of bed and stretch my dream self—stretch a little too hard, my arms collapsing into little coils like rubber snakes. I whip them back into shape. Sometimes things just get strange, lucid dreamer or no.
The Nexus is cold today. There must be something happening in the Snow World. I consider checking it out, maybe seeing how the Snowgirl is doing—but the dark room’s buried itself in my thoughts and there’s no way I’ll be able to get it out of here by just plain ignoring it.
I walk past the door to the Snow World and enter the one beside it.
My head cracks to life. My mouth and eyes melt into glass. Being a lantern can help in the Dark World if you don’t want to get lost, and I don’t—not right now, anyway. There are patterns on the floor. I want to trace them with my feet.
Far from the Nexus door are two huge markings on the ground in the shape of hands. I found a knife there a long time ago, when I first learned to explore my dreams. It reminded me of some old church song.
Thanks, God. I’ll go murder some people in my dreams now.
I trace the palms with my feet (“ah, this is your lifeline and oh dear, it shall be cut tragically short!”), walk to the tip of the thumb, and turn right.
The knife is there. My knife is there.
I walk closer, wondering if there’s something wrong with my eyesight…but there can’t be, not here. I mean, my head is literally a lamp, and there’s definitely nothing wrong with my eyes.
There is something wrong, though. I can feel it in my head now, a knife-shaped hole.
Someone took my knife. No one can take my knife.
“ ’Scuse me, would you happen to know where I am?”
Somebody’s sitting on the left hand. I don’t recognize them. I recognize almost everybody, from the bird people to Poniko and Masada. I know the shape of the worlds in my head better than I remember the hallways at school.
No one like this is supposed to be here.
“Can you talk?” they ask. They’re a little shorter than me, and about my age. Their skin is just a smidge darker than mine, and their hair is a wild, dirty brown mop. It falls in bunches over their lazy, half-shut eyes. “Can you hear me at all?”
“I can hear you,” I say.
They stand up and dust themselves off. I’ve never seen a shirt like that, all pink and blue striped. It looks too small for them. “I was afraid you were just going to stare at me,” they say. “It was freaking me out.” And then they crouch down, all casual and relaxed, and take the knife.
My knife.
“Give that back.”
“What?”
I take a step forward. “Give that back.” I don’t know what this new dream denizen is doing here, or how it took my knife from me, but I’m in no mode to deal with it.
“Give what back?” they stammer, and I answer with a lunge. I rip at their hands, pull them apart, feel the wooden handle of the knife and—and they jerk their arms forward, all surprised, and suddenly we’re tumbling in the dark world, rolling and pushing, the lantern-that-was-my-head clicking off as my concentration shifts to the fight, as my head turns back to normal again and
and the child (as old as me so why do I think child?) swats at my hands and I resist and push at them without even really thinking because it’s my knife mine want to keep them away and show them who’s really boss and there is
a red wetness
between my fingers all of a sudden and they
are looking up at me and I am suddenly wondering what I was doing and why, even though they are nothing more than a dream even though they’re saying something like:
“I didn’t know you wanted it so much. I’m sorry.”
and I’m wracking my brain for a good answer to that. “Oh. Um.”
They’re dripping still.
“Listen, alright?” I say. “You’re a dream. You’ll be back again tomorrow night, I promise.”
“Really. I’m a dream? Nice to know, I guess.” They grin. Blood seeps through the gaps in their teeth. “I know I’ll be back either way. Will you please promise not to stab me next time?”
“I promise that I won’t stab you,” I say. “Probably.”
“Probably,” they repeat, and cough up a lung or five. “That’s...fair. Long as you come back. Here, could you go ahead and grab that knife outta me? It’s real cold.”
“I mean, you’re here in my dreams,” I say. “I’ve got no choice. I’ve got to come back.” I grab the knife. The handle is wood as ever, but there’s a lot of blood running down it right now onto my fingertips. I don’t know what to do with that blood. I don’t know how to get rid of it.
What’s the proper social protocol for murder?
“It was nice meeting you,” they say.
“Really? After that?” I can’t stop myself from grinning.
“Really.” And now they’re grinning too. “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Call me Madotsuki.”
“Frisk,” they say. “Uh. Does it normally get darker the longer you’re here?”
“Nope. That’s probably the blood loss.”
“Ack.”
“Yup. Sorry. Again.”
“It’s okay,” says Frisk. “I’m used to it.” Frisk tilts, falls, and is gone before they even hit the floor.
So here I am in the Dark World holding the knife, dripping blood. I look at my reflection for a moment (red-tinged) and pull the knife into my mind for later use.
I wasn’t planning on going exploring today. I didn’t think there was anything left to explore here, really. There hasn’t been a new dream denizen for months, and this one is different.
Something’s changed, and I’m going to figure out why.