Chapter Text
July 5, 2020
8:00 AM
"That's it?" Tommy asked, face twisting in puzzlement.
"Mmm-hmm," Dream replied, crinkling his mask as he huffed. They were inside another truck, several vehicles away from the one where Tommy came to. Instead of medical equipment, it had diagrams, pictures, and binders filling up every wall and corner, each one looking very serious and very unreadable.
They were standing over a table with one large map unfurled on top of it. Tommy did not know much about maps (frankly, he found them boring. This one did the double offense of being too big and monochrome), but he figured that the four big circles must mean something.
He scooted to Dream's side, brain itching for something interesting. The words "Dallas" and "Fort Worth" popped out from the jagged swathes of gray and green. His eyes traced a line that ran through the two named points, moving southwest in a long, meandering course, passing through another one of the circles before terminating on the one with the word "Austin" in it.
His throat clogged as he realized what they were.
"See something?" Dream muttered, lifting an eyebrow at the distant look on Tommy's face. Realizing he was caught gawking, the boy shook himself and looked away, scratching his head.
"These must be all the places that were attacked," Tommy mumbled.
"Correct," Dream hummed, his eyes gleaming in amusement, making Tommy feel like curling into himself. "We surveyed all the affected sites first, evacuating stragglers and beating back curses drawn by the negative energy these Veils are creating."
Tommy's embarrassment ebbed as a chill began to form in his stomach. "You guys have been saving people?" he asked.
"Of course! Research, recon, and rescue. Three things we sorcerers do," Dream answered as he straightened, placing his hands on his hips.
"I'm aware," Tommy said with a strained chuckle. Then, he cleared his throat. "So, um, have you guys figured out how to deal with the Veils?"
Dream hummed in thought, then said, "Not really. We found out what's keeping them in place, at least."
Then, he loped forward, making Tommy skitter back in surprise. They held each other's gazes for a bit, the boy feeling the air get sucked out of his lungs as he realized how green the man's eyes were.
He's the strongest of them all, right?
"Wanna check it out?" Dream whispered coyly, wiggling his eyebrows for effect. Tommy spluttered.
"Uhh, are you, um, asking me to go with you?"
"Yeah, slowpoke. None of that British wit helping you, ain't it?"
Tommy bristled in indignation. "Pffft-what?! You calling me stupid?" he fired back. A part of him felt odd at how lightly he was speaking to this stranger, a fable even among their "kind."
"I didn't," Dream said, sauntering away. "I called you slow. There's a difference."
"Oh, yeah? Well, I bet the thing you're gonna show me isn't even as impressive or scary as it sounds," Tommy bluffed, drawing a cackle from Dream.
"You're new to all of this, are you?"
The air of bravado Tommy put on sputtered out as he gestured vaguely in an attempt for rebuttal. Then, he dropped his arms to his sides and said, "Fine then. A look-see's okay if you don't mind."
"Stick around, and you'll see even crazier stuff, kid," Dream said through a smirk as he rolled up the map they pored over. Tommy froze upon hearing that, nervousness gripping his innards. It was not the kind he had when he was stuck in Fort Worth, and it sent a wave of nostalgia through his brain.
"I can... stick around?" he asked gingerly.
"You wanna go home, instead?"
"Go-What? Home?" Tommy blurted in confusion.
"You said you were staying at Mister Watson's to train to be a... how d'you put it, big man ?" Dream detailed as he tucked the map into a nearby box and leaned on the wall with his arms folded. A blink later, his shoulders bunched with another bout of laughter. Tommy's jaw churned at this.
"Just get to the thing you wanna show me already," he muttered.
"Sure, sure," went Dream, fixing his mask as he strode to the truck door. "Just thought it was a funny way of saying you wanted to be someone important. Like a hero or whatever."
Tommy winced as he followed the man silently. He snorted and said, "You laugh 'cause you never worry about that, I reckon."
He walked right into Dream's back and yelped. But the man did not budge. With a lazy gesture, he swung the door open. Light and heat flooded the inside of the truck. Tommy had to shield his face as it washed over him. Peering through his fingers, he noticed that Dream was looking at him intently once more.
"You're right," he heard him say, his silhouette darkening in the stark sunlight, bringing out his green, green eyes.
"I don't."
I don't?
Right.
Mulishly, Tommy followed Dream as he man leaped off the truck and strolled casually down the rubble-ridden road. The boy squinted at the sun-drenched surroundings in irritation, then paused.
He had just noticed how deathly silent everything was save for the sounds of their footsteps, the ruffling of trash over debris, and the distant chattering of Institute staff. The buildings were just as tall and grand as he remembered from the last time they visited Dallas, but their glimmer belied the glaring lack of life that choked everything. "Is it all like this now?" Tommy thought as he looked around. He wondered if all the people that once populated these great structures were somewhere safe.
The people in the Veil were surely not as lucky.
His stomach churned, and he gagged. This part of Dallas was much like where he was in Forth Worth save for the sunlight, which could not cheer the desolation away. There seemed to be no refuge from the evil that fell upon them on that day, and a dreadful image came to his head of this same desolation spreading further and further until it breached the coasts and cast itself over the sea, a leprous growth that would corral the last bits of civilization in some pitiful, shrinking corner, where all would cower in despair at the cureless cancer of the world of curses.
Is it all like this now? Even there?
Are they okay?
Is Tubbo —
"What's the matter?" he heard Dream ask. The man stooped over his hunched figure, looking at him curiously. His pale face quickly flushed, and he waved him off, rolling his shoulders in a show of relaxation.
"Just psyching meself up, like a big man, yeah?"
I sound stupid.
Dream looked at him unimpressed. "Right," he drawled, before turning around and then sighing.
"I'll never get used to it."
"To what?" Tommy asked. In response, Dream lifted a finger and pointed ahead.
The boy's stomach dropped. There, looming up like a wall of impenetrable night, was the Veil. Even from where they stood, the thing remained imposing from its sheer size. All light failed to pierce the consuming darkness that comprised its vaulting shape, and it stood like a proud beast with the promise of shadow and terror within.
Tommy took a shuddering breath, which caught Dream's attention. He saw the quailing in the boy's blue eyes and the trembling in his lanky arms.
He remembered seeing the same look on Bad, George, Karl, and Nick on their first mission together.
"I got the feeling you wouldn't like walking all the way there," he mused aloud, meeting the boy's gaze as he placed his hand on his chin.
As Tommy lowered his eyes in shame, Dream raised his left hand and planted it palm up on the boy's shoulder.
"Grab on."
"Huh?" went Tommy. When Dream merely raised his brows, he gingerly wrapped his fingers with his.
Suddenly, he was yanked sideways by an invisible force. A scream ripped through his throat as he hurtled through a vortex of purple shadow, assaulted on all sides by screeching wind and flashing lights.
He tried to calm himself down, a difficult thing to do when you rocketed through a seemingly endless space. As he tried to pull his limbs together, he felt his own hand getting pinned down by something steady and strong.
Dream! Dream was holding him!
Before he could turn to him, there was a loud whoosh and a crackle. And then, they were back in Dallas.
Several feet above it, to be precise.
"Woah," Tommy went as he looked down, watching the towers and roads and the Veil turn from shapes on the plane of the Earth into rapidly rising three-dimensional forms as they fell down, down, down.
"Woah, woah, woahwoahwoah!"
The vortex appeared again, sucking Tommy back in. His shout of fear melded into exhilaration as he found his bearings thanks to Dream's anchoring hold.
He looked around and marveled. The purple void that stretched endlessly did not seem so frightening, and the lights were more than just lights. They were tapestries of stars and planets in many shapes and sizes, glimmering in the light that came from themselves and reflecting from others in an unending carousel of astral bodies.
And Dream? Dream looked like the lord of all these things, powerful beyond compare even in his casual get-up of a lime green hoodie and denim jeans. He seemed to surf upon the roiling space, poised at the ready yet relaxed in the surety that only mastery could give. His green eyes blazed gloriously, and even through his mask, Tommy could tell he smiled.
The space disappeared again, giving way to eye-crushing darkness. Then, Tommy saw skyscrapers bathed from below in a ghastly glow from numerous floodlights arrayed at road level.
They were inside the Veil. Fear crawled in Tommy's chest, but it did not choke him as it usually did, not with Dream still holding him.
So he thought, but it was too soon. Tommy huffed and puffed in anxiety as something huge and winged zoomed past them and circled back. It opened its beak, loosing a demented shriek that sounded vaguely like a storm siren and someone shouting "Flight delayed!" into a megaphone.
"O-Oi!"
"Pipe down, kid," Dream hollered. Then, with a flick of his heel, he blasted through the air and the winged curse, silencing it as its shivered corpse fell in fading chunks.
Tommy's eyes and jaw felt like they were about to dislodge from his face. "That was poggers! Mad poggers! How did you do that?!"
"Comes with the job!" Dream replied gamely. Then, he looked at Tommy, the corners of his eyes crinkling in glee.
"Want another go?"
"Fuck yeah! Wait, what do you—"
They finally landed on top of the Bank of America Plaza, a good 72 stories above the ground. A sheer, cold wind gusted over them, but Dream walked forward unbothered even as his hoodie rippled wildly. Tommy tried and failed to match the sureness of his steps once he caught his breath back from the recent bout of hollering he did.
The sky above was pitch-black, much like in Fort Worth. Tommy had to prick his senses to follow Dream, stomach sloshing with how dim it was and high up they were.
He was going to ask the man where in the world the thing he wanted to show him was when an awful reek crashed into his nose. He covered his face with his hand, holding back a retch. Cold stabbed into his chest, and he knew immediately that the source of the smell was emitting large amounts of cursed energy.
"Ever seen anything like this before?" he heard Dream's voice sail over the wind. Tommy turned in its direction, too distracted by the reek to notice where the man went. But then, he heard a click. A beam of light appeared a few yards from him, pointing at something large and irregularly shaped.
Tommy squinted at it and then gasped. It looked like several corpses bundled together tightly with rope, black feathers stuffed into the orifices of bloated faces. Black fluid already seeped through their tattered clothes, and an angry, red aura bubbled from them, rising in slender threads into the dark dome above.
The urge to retch grew stronger.
"Wicked, don't you think?" he heard Dream say, the man now standing close to him.
"Vile," Tommy replied as he blinked away tears. Dream's shoulders shook at his reply.
"We think it's some sort of shrine," the man began to explain. "Curse users can use complex structures to cast powerful techniques, much like this Veil here. Elaborate requirements can raise the potency of your powers."
Tommy nodded. Dream went on, "Thanks to all the great lengths the person who cast this went through, this Veil is not just unusually vast. We're thinking it's designed to keep a large number of powerful curses in one spot! The more of them stay in one place, the more negative energy is created, and the more curses are born."
The sound of explosions and roaring erupted from a distant corner of the Veil as if to prove his point.
"We tried destroying it, of course. But we lost a couple of our auxiliaries just by standing close to the thing. Melted them like butter! Even one of our strongest agents could do nothing against it."
Tommy creased his forehead. "What about you? Did you try?"
Dream merely hummed as he tapped his chin. Then, he shrugged, much to the boy's confusion. "Would be a waste to get rid of it so soon when we could study it instead."
"Study?!" Tommy cried.
Dream gestured at it as he looked at the boy's indignant expression. "We don't see things like these every day, you know? If we take time to better understand what it is, not only can we better know how to deal with it. We also gain a new spring of data that can be useful to us in the long run. It's like how some people try to reverse engineer tumors. This here's an opportunity to tap into the endless potential of curses!"
The man spoke as if he was talking about the next big business proposal that would shake the world. But Tommy held to his supposition.
"I think it would be better to just be done with it," he challenged.
"You're not seeing the big picture here," Dream said with slight exasperation. Tommy's stomach twinged at his undertone. "We destroy this now, we lose all the things we could possibly know from it. And all we know right now..."
He raised a finger, pointing at the Veil.
"... Is that this thing is a massive fish tank!"
A part of Tommy wanted to double down on his point of view. But the odd feeling in his gut made him doubt himself. What could he possibly know to refute the ideas Dream propounded at the moment? He had none of his knowledge and experience, himself feeling like a schoolboy out of his element every time the man spoke. Fear grew in him, the fear of being seen as idiotic by the person in front of him.
"I guess I can't argue with that," was all he managed to say in response. Dream gladly offered only silence to his reply as he continued to marvel at the abominable thing before them.
Idiotic. Small.
Weak.
Tommy sighed. "There must be something like this in Manburg, too, then?" he muttered.
Dream looked at him intently. "You're thinking of going back there now?"
Why, to help them? Can I actually do that with just...
This?
"I'm not sure," Tommy answered, lowering his face. "I don't think I'm useful there."
"Useful?"
"When I wandered my way there, I wanted to be someone who people can count on," the boy said. He shook his head at some recollection and sighed. "I snuck my way here in the first place to get away from my old life. I had this notion, see, that if I stayed in Britain, I would age out of the foster system and... I don't know, die in a ditch like some common madman?"
Tommy then stooped to the ground, hugging his knees to his chest. Dream observed him quietly for a while before following him, sitting right on the dust-covered rooftop.
"When I found out that this whole thing was real, everything became so clear," he continued. "I thought becoming a sorcerer was my ticket to finally having, meaning? Direction? I trained hard, even when I didn't feel like it, because I thought it only made sense. I had to become strong enough to help people. Or else, there was no point in coming here at all.
But it turned out that the things I was going up against were way too... big. I was just too full of shit to realize it. I couldn't help anyone, save anyone. I failed."
Tommy covered his face in his arms, pressing hard on his eyes to keep the tears from falling.
Then, he heard Dream say, "You remind me of people I knew."
"Yeah?"
"They pretty much thought the same way as you," Dream explained, his voice turning quiet and wistful. Suddenly, he snickered. "Their end goal was different, though. They said they would put in all the work and power through the hardship just so they could rightfully stand by my side."
Tommy uncovered his face and turned to him. "Where are they now?" he asked. Dream made no reply, but his eyes turned glassy and distant, misting over with memory.
The boy understood at once. "I'm sorry."
"It's fine," Dream assured him as he slowly rose to his feet. "I'm not really sad because they're gone. Not anymore. Besides, they live on through the faith they had in me," he said, putting his fist to his chest. "I carry more than one life in this fist, kid, and I intend on making sure they never gave them away in vain, that their deaths would make sense one day."
Tommy listened rapt to Dream's words, a solemn respect replacing the vague awe and trepidation he once held toward him. He got up and walked to his side, his steps quiet and careful as he kept his eyes on the man's obscured face.
"What I'm getting is that you want to make your life make sense, right? And you'll do that by becoming strong enough to protect others."
"... Yeah."
Dream looked at him, his eyes crinkling with a smile. "I can help."
Tommy's jaw dropped. "Really?"
"What, don't believe me?" Dream snipped. He raised his right hand, clenching the fist save his pointer, waving it around. "Don't you know I'm the strongest sorcerer alive? If you stick with me long enough, some of it's bound to rub off on you."
Don't think it works that way.
Tommy stood in quiet shock. Was Dream offering to take him in? The strongest, no, the biggest man around?
Before he could take longer in thought, his mouth moved. "You're on, big man!"
Here you go again. Stupid!
Dream chuckled and relaxed his hand, now holding it out to him in an offering of a handshake. "Consider this your induction into the Institute. Let's start with the formalities. I'm Clay Dream, Special-Class Sorcerer and Head. You are...?"
My name's Thomas Steers. I'm sixteen years old. My parents tried to throw me out a window when I was a baby. I've come a long way since then. I'm going to become someone people will think of, someone they will admire, someone deserving respect and remembrance! I'm going to save people, dammit! I'm Tommyinnit, and I'm going to be the biggest man alive!!!
"Tommy," the boy replied, grabbing Dream's hand and giving it a gentle shake. "Just Tommy."
Dream smiled beneath his mask. "I hope we'll have an interesting time together, Tommy."
They left the Veil and explored the ruins surrounding it together. Tommy spent most of the day peppering Dream with questions, and while he feared that he would eventually get bored, the man kept indulging him with short answers in a ho-hum tone. Good enough for him.
Eventually, lunchtime came. Dream picked out a ration pack for Tommy, earning him odd stares from the other personnel present in the line. The boy wilted from their gazes, but Dream waved them off and told him to try the delicious, if cold, chicken.
"So when are we gonna start with the lessons?" Tommy asked in between bites.
"Hm?"
"Like, when will we start training, big man?"
"Tommy..."
"What?"
"We just got to know each other," Dream pointed out.
"So?" went Tommy, looking overly eager. Dream launched into a laughing fit, dropping his fork into his food pack while he wheezed and cackled. The boy fumed silently, then noticed the odd way the man was eating. He kept scooping portions into his mouth from behind his mask, refusing to take it off.
Before he could ask him about it, he suddenly noticed two figures huddled together, looking at him from afar. They were both women and had armbands that indicated they were high-ranking members of the Institute, according to what he gleaned from Dream. One was short and had a meek air around her. The other was tall and had a lab coat and gloves on, and the look on her face was of utter boredom. When they caught him staring back, the short one darted away while the tall one waved at him coyly with a strange, almost knowing smile.
"What're you looking at?" Dream asked.
"Those two women over there. Who are they?" Tommy asked, nodding his head in their general direction. Dream turned before the short woman could get away far enough, and he snorted.
"Just a bunch of small fry," he replied.
They spend the rest of the day doing nothing, which put Tommy in an antsy mood. Instead of discussing sleeping arrangements upon nightfall, the boy insisted on showing Dream what he learned so far as a fighter. The man complimented him openly as he showed him his moves, swelling his confidence so much that he eventually dared to spar with him.
His bark as strong as his bite, Tommy naturally ended up on the ground within seconds.
"You're... you're good!" he wheezed as he got up, clutching his stomach.
"And you're sloppy," Dream said back, holding back another bout of laughter.
"Pfft."
Grumbling, Tommy patted himself down, his palms brushing roughly against the rims of his pockets. The sensation lit up something in his head, and he jumped in sudden panic.
"My things!" he cried.
Dream tilted his face at him quizzically and then nodded as he understood. "I think you can find your stuff in one of the trucks. Standard protocol to check things found on unidentified persons, sorry."
"Oh, no big deal," Tommy replied, looking visibly relieved. "It's not like I had a lot. Just a dead phone, a couple of candies, and a trinket."
Dream hummed. "A trinket? I don't remember anyone fishing out a trinket from your pockets."
"What? Bullshit!" went Tommy. "It's not exactly hard to miss. Old-timey looking thing, it is, something of silver and barely big enough for my palm. It's also a cursed object. Has a technique that lets it point in the direction of its other half no matter how far apart they are. Even has a compass and all. I remember holding on to it for weeks on end."
"Tommy," Dream insisted, his voice turning grave. "Nobody found a trinket on you."
Irritation flickered in Tommy's chest. He very clearly remembered holding on to the thing like a lifeline as he wandered in the Veil at Fort Worth. He opened his mouth to protest...
But then, he felt something odd creep into his brain from some distant corner.
"I, uh, are you sure?" he mumbled.
Dream sighed. "Look, we can check right now if you want."
When they found the truck where they confiscated his belongings, Tommy found that Dream spoke the truth. Which was wrong, terribly, horribly wrong to the boy. His head began to hurt with the clashing bits of information in his brain.
"Must've dropped it," he said in defeat.
"Is it super important? We could try looking for it."
"No. No, it's alright."
"You still look upset, bud."
"I gotta think," Tommy muttered before jogging away, weaving between the vehicles in the caravan to the empty blocks beyond. Judging from the tone in his voice, the boy was sore about losing the trinket. He decided against following him to give him space to grieve.
Softly, he reached into his own pocket, feeling around the space until his fingers grazed something small. Without hesitation, he clutched it and gave it a hard squeeze, not stopping until the thing broke apart in his fist.
I knew it.