#completelyhypnotic

3. “Could you be happy, here, with me?” and7. “I can hardly stand myself.”

The day dawns pink and soft, watery light struggling its way through wispy clouds. Dark blinks at the ceiling and does his best to stretch. His legs are pinned down by Wilford’s legs, so he can’t do much.

Wilford is still asleep. His face is relaxed, jaw slack. There is no mania, no quiet lostness in his eyes. Sometime in the night he’d managed to shift so that he was sleeping more on Dark than on the bed, but Dark can’t bring himself to mind. Rare are the nights when they both can sleep untroubled by nightmares. They are few enough to be treasured.

Dark tries to gently extract himself from Wilford’s sprawl, but he must jostle Wilford slightly too much, because Wilford sits bolt upright with a wild expression. His eyes search the room and he takes a few gasping breaths before he registers that everything is safe.

“Damn,” he mutters, and slumps back to the bed.

Dark sighs. He’d been mistaken to believe that they’d escaped the nightmares.

“Release me,” Dark says, prodding Wilford’s legs. Wilford does no such thing, instead grabbing a fistful of Dark’s hair and pulling him down to lay next to him. Dark rolls his eyes but goes without a fight. He allows Wilford to hold him close and matches their breathing. Dark doesn’t really need to breathe, but he does it for Wilford.

“Stay with me a little while,” Wilford says, more of an order than a plea, and something in the back of Dark’s head remembers a colonel, a military man, shouting good-natured commands at a man in a suit, who laughed and complied. 

“Bad nightmare?” Dark muses, and Wilford laughs.

“Aren’t they all?” he says darkly, and Dark can’t not agree.

“Generally,” Dark says, and they go quiet.

It takes a long time for either of them to speak, but eventually Wilford sighs and says, “I can hardly stand myself.”

Dark does not respond. There is nothing to say.

“Sometimes I remember being someone else,” Wilford says. “Sometimes I remember a big house, and people I loved. But then I wake up and you’re here instead of them.”

There is something akin to sadness brewing in Dark’s throat. He pushes it back aggressively. He has no room for emotions.

“Sometimes I think I’m entirely mad,” Wilford says sadly, and that is the breaking point.

There is a thing that lives inside of Dark. It sleeps in the broken bones of his neck and howls when he has nightmares and flinches away from gunshots, from Wilford’s gun. It shouts with joy when Wilford almost calls Dark by that other name, the one he doesn’t use and couldn’t use. The thing screams at him, tries to take his arms and put them around Wilford, tries to take his mouth and use it to say soothing words of love and promises and reminders. It beats on the cage he’s built for it in the back of his mind and batters itself raw trying to make itself known. 

For one millisecond, it gets free.

“Could you be happy here, with me?” Dark’s mouth says, and he crams the thing back where it belongs, back in the blackness where he stores emotions and sentiment. 

Wilford stares at him with confusion. 

“Of course I could,” he murmurs softly. “I’m always happy with you. Sometimes I can’t remember why, but I am.”

On a case by case basis:

Julius: holy shit the largest governing body on the continent has been completely wiped out holy fuck

Sina: Dragons?????? On my continent????????

Vesper: WHERE AM I GOING TO PUT ALL THESE PEOPLE

Oliver: damn I should have studied up more on dragons, what am I going to do with these fae and undead diplomas now

Whitney: LEMME AT ‘EM

Ludwig: oh god what are we going to do WHAT IF WE’RE NEXT I’m not ready to fight dragons someone help

23. “We’ll get through this, I promise.”

It’s dark. The clock on the wall reads half past three in the morning. The only sounds are the rushing of wind and the beating of rain on the window and the occasional clap of thunder.

Lightning flashes and thunder booms, and Wilford flinches. 

Dark sighs and turns another page of his book. He’d been unable to sleep because of the sheer noise of the storm and had sat up in bed to read about half an hour ago. Wilford is somehow still asleep, but flinches at every crash. 

A particularly loud blast of thunder shakes the house and Wilford startles awake, sitting bolt upright with real fear in his eyes.

“Gunshots,” he mutters, glancing frantically around the room. “Thought I heard gunshots.”

“Go back to sleep,” Dark orders, aiming for gentle but falling more in the range of mildly imposing. Oh well. Wilford doesn’t seem to mind.

“Sounds like gunfire,” Wilford mutters, but he lays back down. Dark sighs again as another thunderclap rattles the windowpane and Wilford flinches. Dark doesn’t have to think too hard to know the exact memories running through Wilford’s mind. The ringing of that final gunshot will be with them until they die, should they ever die.

“Hey, Dark?” Wilford murmurs.

Dark glances up. “Yes?”

“Aren’t you tired?” Wilford asks, and Dark rolls his eyes but complies with the unspoken demand nonetheless. He sets the book on the bedside table and positions himself so that his arm is draped loosely around Wilford’s waist, holding but not trapping. He takes a deep breath and almost wishes he had a heartbeat, if only for comfort’s sake.

Lightning flashes and Wilford leans just that little bit closer to Dark, and Dark musters every ounce of comforting ability he has, despite the bitter taste the platitude leaves in his mouth. He’s not good at being nice. He’s not nice.

honestly i’m down with pretty much any interpretation bc all three are very interesting plot-wise?

because on the one hand, Y/N is trapped in the mirror by dark, which gives dark that extra little bit of malevolence (how dare he trap Y/N in the mirror, what a douchebag, after all Y/N did pretty much give him the body)

but then, maybe Y/N willingly left the body. maybe Y/N realized that mark is truly at fault here and needs to be punished and left the body willingly so that dark could more easily use it. maybe Y/N is in on the whole kill-mark thing.

Terrible, Awful, NO GOOD things

satan-the-geek replied to your post: I don’t know what happened on Critical Role...

BE VERY AFRAID!!!! DAMNIT!!!!