meet me at twilight

ix

Sapnap sat in the chasmic abyss, tears in his eyes and his hair tickling his forehead. It felt like decades, like when he'd stand and wake, the apartment would be gone. The lavender and poppies would be wilted, crumpled, trashed when he woke up, he was sure. He sat there to avoid it, feeling his joints scream for him to move and his muscles throb from staying flexed. Sapnap continued to refuse opening his eyelids, empty black replacing the nightmares of his vision.

When Sapnap gazed up from burrowing his brow in his knees, covered by black jeans with a checkered shirt draped on his chest, purple glared at him. Gentle, calm, and the exact opposite of how Dream and George had appeared for their trials. Shifting in front of him, the purple slowly became pink before it was completely replaced by Karl's own apparition. Sapnap scrambled to standing, lungs breathing hard at the prospect of seeing Karl for reasons he didn't want to face.

Karl's tone was strung from silk when he spoke, standing in a black turtleneck sweater and bermuda shorts. Somehow, the boy guided Sapnap in ripping his heart away, his words full of honey. He convinced Sapnap it was okay. Sapnap's hands dipped into his chest this time, willing to give up the sacred part of him to the grinning, soft boy. Heart shaking and dripping blood into ink, Sapnap held out the barter piece, breaths shaking from nervousness. Why was he only able to tug his heart out for Karl?

The bubblegum-haired figure took Sapnap's heart before ink dripped from his eyes, galaxies bleeding from his tear ducts and the beds of his fingernails. It doused Karl as Sapnap scrambled away, fear pulsing in his gut as he watched the boy turn revolting- skin blotchy, eyes all pupils, teeth like coals, with sludge and ooze sliding down his body. With a snicker, Karl dropped Sapnap's heart to the ground, gazed directly at the trembling, panicked boy, and stomped the aching organ to a pulp.

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Sapnap woke up with tears in his eyes, sheets falling from his skin when he sat up with his pained expression. Stomach heaving and hair still a rucked, messy swatch from tossing on the mattress and his intimacy with Karl, Sapnap couldn't calm down. He couldn't remember the diction, the words howled and bared by the ghosts from his subconscious, but the tone made him continue to cry. Dream and George were bitterly cruel, spitting and snarling until Sapnap's brawny frame had bent in on itself; Karl had been compassionate, spreaded with sugar and treated with sweet, calm taste. Until it turned, and oh god, did it turn.

Gelid, attentive, and still alarmed blue eyes gazed around the room, which was smoky with twilight and hazy with his sleepy vision. Even with all the panicked blotches on his eyesight, Sapnap could clearly see that Karl wasn't there. With haste fueled by his nightmares, Sapnap stepped off the bed and forced all his clothes on, the sweat slicked against his tanned skin clinging to the fabric. He didn't bother rubbing his eyes, wiping the saliva from the corners of his mouth, taking inventory of all the hickeys, just rushed from his room and immediately looked around the apartment for Karl.

The pool of water, reflecting and warping what it saw, got its moment. Sapnap, after gazing through the apartment twice over, spoke, "Karl!" His tone started like a shout, like Karl's panicked wail in the flower-ridden bayou before it shattered in the same way.

It as around that moment that Sapnap gazed down and jolted back, shattered glass a breath away from making his skin split. He bent down quickly, pretending he didn't care if the crystal splinters burrowed themselves into his fingerprints, and grabbed the sheet surrounded by the transparent fragments. The photo, the one he liked the most and the moment that he always thought of when he questioned why he stayed with Dream and George, was thin and dainty in his hand.

The boy sucked in a breath through his teeth, sliding his vision over that photograph with care. It took a ridiculous amount of control not to pay attention to the vibrant colors of it. Sapnap slid his fingertips across it, lips parting with absolute disbelief. Over the eyes of George, lips puckered and demeanor lighthearted, were two, coal-black x's. They crossed over where his closed eyelids would be, the picture capturing him with a kiss being pecked to Sapnap's cheek. It was a crude, thinly veiled thought, with 'fuck you' practically scrawled out in ink- except it was, too, scarred across Dream's emerald eyes.