Tommyinnit Oneshots

Hide and Seek

TW: brief allusions to blood, wounds

---

Shroud was a well-behaved child. Since Tommy had first adopted him he had done everything the blond had ever asked of him, which wasn't much. After all, what reason did he have to disobey? Tommy was super nice and funny, gave him dinosaur nuggets, played with him, and fought off the other bigger spiders. He knew whatever Tommy asked of him was to keep him safe, which is why he immediately listened when his dad had turned to him, eyes wide and face pale, and told him in a very serious tone to hide.

Naturally, he had gone to his favorite hiding place he always went to when they played hide-and-seek together: the closet inside the bathroom, a place only he could fit with all the junk piled in there. He stayed there for a long time and held a hand over his mouth to stifle his giggles, but he was starting to get the hide-and-seek feeling of needing to pee he always seemed to get when he was hiding, and he hoped Tommy would come looking for him soon. Since when did he start counting so high? He breathed into the darkness a whispered question of where are you? and their cozy little house met him with great, big silence. 

He had been sitting there so long his feet were starting to tingle (he always said that feeling was from the ants living inside his body that controlled him and his dad would always laugh) and he really hoped Tommy would come looking for him soon or else he was gonna pee his pants. In fact, he was beginning to debate leaving the closet to sneakily pee —after all, he was inside the bathroom— when there was finally noise from downstairs, but it wasn't Tommy's overplayed tickle-monster hunting for a little spider, it was loud shouting. It sounded like two people were screaming at each other: one angry, the other scared. The scared one sounded like Tommy.

Shroud didn't like hearing people yelling, he didn't like hearing Tommy yelling, and he definitely didn't like hearing Tommy, his fearless father, sound scared, so he did the only thing he could do: he covered his ears as tight as he could.

Low, muffled sounds crept in between the cracks of his fingers but not enough to hear what the words were, to Shroud's relief. 

It got louder and louder, however, until his head hurt from how tight his hands clasped either side of his ears, and still the noise seeped in. He couldn't escape it.

It all came to a standstill. Time seemed to pause as the shouting stopped, and it was so quiet that Shroud could hear his own small breaths in that dark closet.

Somehow, the silence was scarier than the shouting, because he didn't know if Tommy was okay. 

Should he leave the closet and make sure his dad was alright? No, Tommy had told him to hide, so that's what he would do: he would keep on hiding.

Shroud did end up peeing his pants eventually, wiggling in discomfort in his wet clothes, eyes brimming with tears that soon fell in silent drips. It felt like that one time when he was hunting with his siblings but they left him behind and he was stuck in the middle of the forest, nothing but trees towering over him, mocking him and telling him how lost he was. He had cried that time, long and hard. He had screamed too — screamed for his siblings, his parents, for anything or anyone to come help him, getting no response.

He could almost feel those trees looking down at him now, no clues to indicate where he was or how to get home. Why did he feel so lost in his own house? A scream itched in his throat because, in his mind, a worried Tommy would hear the scream and come barreling up the stairs to his protection, saving him from whatever had been attacking him. He imagined his dad tearing open the door, looking down and seeing Shroud okay, and breathing a big sigh of relief. He would pick him up, tell him it was okay to wet his pants sometimes, and help change him. Then, they would go downstairs and eat cookies.