#Why is Wilbur perpetually bleeding from his arm??!!

[hamletteprinceofdenmark]

Wilbur you’re going to explain the bloody bandage aren’t you? Wilbur - stop running away from me goddamnit! - Wilbur! You’re going to explain the bloody bandage in the last c!Wilbur streams aren’t you?

[luci-cunt]

Death is… cold. 

Well, not cold--just completely absent of all feeling and the first thing that manifests as is a bone deep chill. It’s cold not because goosebumps break out on your skin but because you feel in your soul there is nothing.

Death is a vast, utterly empty expanse. The sky is reflected on the ground, or maybe it just never ends. Time ripples across the planes of your new existence and the cogs turning in your brain gum up as you try to register exactly what you’re seeing--but it’s everything, everything at once. Cities, civilizations--masters and mentors and a child taking their first breath and then breathing their last as a feeble, world-worn adult in the space between blinks. 

Death is no place for a child, and yet one appears--cold--bruised--a scream still caught in his throat as he snaps out of existence. 

Oh god he looks small--eyes wide as he tries to take it all in. 

You’ve seen it all happen--existed with both the child and his killer. You were the seconds between the crack of his skull against obsidian and the bloom of pain he felt right before the end. You were the fist--you were the flesh--you were in their heads. 

You thought you were used to the pain--you’ve felt everyone’s pain for so long. Their pain and their sorrow and their love and their hate and their hope. It all exists at once but this one burns. This one is like a knife breaking through your ribcage and tearing through flesh and muscle. 

It’s easy to forgive people when you’re dead--you see into them, the whole them. You spread your father’s memories out like cards and read each moment as a novel. You’ve memorized the exact images going through his mind when he finished you off. That was cathartic--that was painful but healing. 

This--this is splintering. Every bit of you is fracturing. 

Stop it--stop it--stop it--Stop--!

It was quick, it was thoughtless, it was brutal and it was--above all--unfair. 

You’ve heard that before, life is unfair. Being dead proves it--makes you realize it’s one of the only truths that really exist in life. 

But oh god--

He’s sitting there, in front of you, barely a man and still shaking and you feel raw because it isn’t fair.

He’s trembling as recognition flashes across his eyes and they’re so wide and you can’t do anything but stand there and stare back at him. 

I’ll be seeing you soon Wilbur. 

It’s not fair. 

It’s not fair.

He’s the hero, he’s the shining light--he is invincible. He has the sun on his side and the odds perpetually tilted in his favor like the crooked smirk he never loses. Even in the ravine--even in that dark, dirty pit he was the light in a tower that guided you to the shore of your paranoid, decaying mind. 

Heroes live loudly and they die brilliantly--with a great burst or a bittersweet send off at just the right time. They don’t scream and beg, they aren’t children and they aren’t beaten to death by men other’s swore to protect them from. 

When you were a child, barely his age--you found a fox dead behind your house and you remember staring at it’s bloody, limp form--paralyzed by the reality of what you were seeing. The terrible afterimage of this child’s body laying small and bleeding, confined and with only his killer for company makes everything inside you rot. 

You wonder bitterly if they’ll bury him as a hero, if they’ll remember him as one. Or if his killer has taken even that from him--stripped him down to a lifeless child dead on a cold floor. 

Death is nothingness, but in this moment it’s a cold rage that tears through that. It’s a vicious, vile and destructive rage that must flash in your eyes because the child before you flinches and then the anger blinks out of existence and you’re crouching before him--whispering quiet, soft words of comfort and hovering your hands over his arms because everytime you touch him he jerks back so violently and it hurts and it’s not fair.

He’s asking what’s happening--where am I--why are you here?--What is this--where’s Dream--tell him to stop--SAM!

And the only thing you can do is shush him gently and clutch him to your chest. He goes stiffly, fighting against you for only a moment before it melts out of him and he sags--defeated and small. 

You’re holding your hero, your light, and he’s a child and it’s not fair because you’re dead and he’s not supposed to be. 

Not yet. 

God not yet.