Total Corruption

Unfortunate encounter

Where is it? Nightmare prowled along the deserted streets, hunting down the source for which the miasma of negativity came from. His magic roiled with power and his tentacles writhed in anticipation. He couldn't wait to kill it.

He paused, certain that his victim was close. He looked left. He looked right. There. In a moment, the door was flung off its hinges, and Nightmare burst into the small living room, only to find...

It was not a pretty sight. How Nightmare didn't notice Dream's faint positive aura before, was very clear.

Drowned in depression and self-loathing, Dream's positivity was almost negligible. It was not a pretty sight.

Not a pretty sight...what a joke.

Blood stained the floor; it was everywhere.

With the dripping serrated knife in Dream's hand, and the utter mess that was his arms, it was pretty easy to connect the dots.

The Guardian of Positivity had a deer-in-the-headlights expression, staring up at his brother in shock, as time appeared to freeze.

Well, Nightmare had been wondering where Dream had run off to.

Dream broke the silence first, scrambling away in an attempt to escape confrontation, but a tentacle snatched him up, coiling tightly around his weakened frame. Unable to fight back, and already dizzy from blood loss, Dream passed out in seconds.

Nightmare stared at his brother, his eyelight flickering across the visible wounds. There were so many, the few on his upper arms neat and orderly, before devolving into chaos, the worst affected being the wrists, which had appeared to have been slashed numerous times, as if Dream had tried to cut his hands off entirely. One was worse off than the other, which probably indicated when panic drove Dream to abandon removing one of his hands in favour of mutilating the other.

Nightmare's gaze then drifted to the rest of the room, where the floor and walls were decorated in a morbid display. It looked kind of like a rose, with petals fanning out from the centre in sprays of blood, climbing up the walls and engulfing the whole room in the image. One could call it beautiful, yet it was also worrying. Just how much did Dream hurt himself?

Truth be told, Nightmare had anticipated finding his errant brother for months, ever since the Apple Incident, and making the positive guardian pay for having the utter nerve to befriend those disgusting villagers, for turning his back on his own family.

But now... well, Dream had taken his punishment into his own hands. Hilarious.

Well, it would have been, if Nightmare could feel amusement. A side effect of ridding the world of positivity.

What to do with the pest, though? Nightmare could just leave him here, and he wanted to, but something held him back from doing so.

...

Not like this. Nightmare used his goop to transport them both to a nearby river, carefully laying Dream down in the water and washing off the blood. His movements were somewhat mechanical, void of any emotion behind the act, yet there was a sense of dedication, of duty, that made Nightmare softly scrub and rinse the congealed blood off of his unconscious brother.

...He didn't want to be noticed. The task completed, Dream's wounds were more visible, more startling, the red blood in stark contrast to pearly white bone. Old scars could be seen now, faded yet distinct, which made the negative guardian reassess his estimation of his brother's actions after the positive guardian had run away, run away of all things, from everything the twins had ever known. Granted, the place did look like a war zone. As he watched, red faded to pink and began to softly glow with the golden luminosity of Dream's life, an illusion fading away.

Not enough. Nightmare, although not very good at healing magic, pumped as much as he could into the wounds, focusing on closing up the worst of them. He then raided a nearby house for bandages, and wrapped them around his brother's arms and wrists. Movement would be an issue, but that was Dream's problem, not his.

There. Nightmare was about to leave, satisfied with his work (Satisfaction... isn't that a positive emotion?), until a dreadful thought entered his head.

He's just going to do it again, isn't he? And all his work would go to waste...

...Oh no. Nightmare was going to have to keep him...

He turned back towards Dream's sleeping form, watching as his brother's chest rose and fell, which was somewhat confusing, since skeletons didn't even have lungs, but this little anatomy fact had never been questioned by either twin in the past.

Nightmare froze. He's not smiling. Dream's face was set in a firm frown, bonebrows furrowed in discontent, as if he felt the leftover echoes of pain from deep within his subconscious.

Nightmare knelt over his brother, pressing his thumbs against the corners of Dream's mouth, in a vain attempt to turn the frown upside down.

It didn't work. Of course. Nightmare picked up his twin, cradling Dream's frail body against his chest, and disappeared into a pile of goop.

Where did your smile go, little light?