#tw maiming

The villain unlocked the door and stepped inside. Her shoes stopped in front of the fairy's face. Instead of her usual sleek, black boots, her feet were clad in something crude and oversized. The old, brown leather was covered in suspicious stains.

“Good morning,” she purred, crouching down. Her face came into view, along with the rest of her clothing. She'd tied back her hair and exchanged her fine clothing for simple brown.

“What did you do to me, witch?” the fairy rasped.

*coughs... Don't ask us which eye it is, we don't know either. (5/29/26)

And before anyone gets into "wikislop" or any Backrooms discourse we missed, just shut up- it's a concept, for crying out loud, there's no rules to it. Plus, Pigeon is AEONI's OC and backstory, not yours.

There we go. Anyways, here's the wiki page. Please note the trigger warnings.

The Phobic Centipede

(Nix made a joke about it being homophobic, lol)

Backstory plans/adjustments under the cut.

HAHA god box AU is so nuts soooooo nuts

just checked my tag man I gave yall NOTHING didn't I ??? okay okay box AU information. once again, here are the main two posts about the premise of this AU, which is actually an extension and sort of "bad end" for my and kat's JMAH AU. In short, when jmah!Quackity takes over the prison at the end of the AU, the dominos fall so that jmah!Sam offers to let him visit Dream to get the revive book (like he did in the first canon timeline) in the prison to bargain his way out of the main cell. Quackity scoffs at Sam's attempt at a deal, considering the guy doesn't have any real leverage, but realizes that he needs to protect the prison from any Technoblade-related interference (especially because at this point Sam has spilled about timeline #1 and has either directly said that Techno was responsible for things going south with the prison the first go around in some kind of emotional or pain-driven rant, or Quackity has put that together himself) and that he can get much-needed Sam revenge by fucking with Dream. As a result, Sam is let out of the main cell, and Quackity tortures Dream daily much like in canon--only this time, he answers to no one, he's the Warden now bitch, and Sam is his shitty little janitor/mechanic/punching bag probably sometimes when he gets pissed the fuck off, which is often. Sam is allowed into the main cell post-sessions for only 30 minutes a day.

For Dream...it's a horrific betrayal. Worse than the first, honestly. When Sam first arrives in the jmah timeline a stranger to Dream, the emotional impact was kind of secondary to being suddenly thrown head first into the deep end of "Sam is unrecognizable, crazy as fuck, and probably about to actually murder me" -- in canon, c!Sam's whole deal at the beginning of the prison is still sudden, but at least there's some sense in connecting Sam as Warden to the man he was before. With a year's worth of context missing, Dream is honestly too busy what the fuck-ing to process how badly he's been betrayed by Sam. No frogboil, this time -- just the alarm of Sam building what ends up being a torture machine on day two (2) of the prison. On the other hand, the last year of his life has been spent playing catch up, having to make sense of the man that Sam now is Or Else. He has devoted everything to figuring out the rules to abide by, mathing out what makes the Warden grimly satisfied and what makes him give into sudden and alarming violence. Sam at the beginning of Dream's prison stay is a stranger, but by the end he very much isn't one, and it's the Sam that has become his whole damn world that sells him to save his own skin.

That being said, it's still just Sam. Quackity's visits are. Well, they're not pretty. He doesn't have to answer to Sam, this time, and is actively against the idea because jmah!Quackity REALLY REALLY hates Sam. Dream is angry at first, because of fucking course he's angry, he was sold, he's utterly fucked, Sam broke something unnamed but fundamental between them, every time he's left bleeding out it's because his Warden let another man own him--but at the same time, there is nothing else. Nothing else. Quackity is barely even in this for the book, honestly--what's more critical to him is 1) revenge and 2) the power of having control over Pandora's Fucking Vault, and both are kiiiinda dependent on using Dream against Sam but not really about Dream. The book would be a great cherry on top, of course; he has zero love lost for either person here, but what's most important is Making Them Pay.

Sam, therefore, is actually in a really uncomfortable position, because the reason why he proposes this deal (and his mindset as he proceeds through this time period) is that he doesn't actually want to be on opposite sides from Quackity. He killed Q, but because he was a security risk, because he had broken into the cell because he was going to take Dream away -- Sam hasn't exactly mathed out the fact that his complicated ass camaraderie with Quackity in canon is COMPLETELY in ruins in jmah's timeline. He's working on a plan to get the prison and prisoner back into his control, of course, but he wants to believe that the current situation is controlled and sustainable, just a different name for what had been the arrangement in canon--even though, y'know. That's absolutely not the case.

The way this works is largely that Quackity more or less visits daily to torture Dream (but unlike canon, he's not exactly beholden to any kind of Sam timekeeping or pedantics on the schedule or hemming and hawing about visitation) and then lets Sam visit for 30 minutes a day to patch him up. Otherwise, Sam's job is to reinforce the prison from Technoblade--something where he and Quackity are actually on the same page, so Sam is definitely working on that, but he's also trying to rig things up without Quackity's knowledge to get control back of the prison pwetty please. Quackity definitely keeps Sam in one of the other cells when he's not around, for obvious reasons. Sam keeps trying to appeal to him and honestly probably gets punched and shit for it LOL. LMAO. It's a strange and unsettling dynamic for Sam, who has seen something so similar to this before but not quite the same--he's still patching up Dream after sessions, but he's hesitant to ask him to give the book up to Quackity, who has made it quite clear that Sam will see hide or hair of the damn thing if he gets it--nah, he'll just kill Dream and Sam can have his old room, how about that? He's coaching Dream on how to respond to Quackity.

He knows that Dream can endure a lot. It's been an obstacle for so long, but here it works in his favor--he'll get control over the prison and prisoner again, soon. All he's asking from Dream is to endure it--and he already knows that he can.

Quackity isn't barred from permanent damage in quite the same way as he was in canon, but it takes awhile for Sam to really grasp the implications. Here's a post delving into some of the details about the way that the torture progresses--in short, Sam tries to cling to the cope that he and Quackity are on the same side, it's not all that different from the first go around, he can make this work without having to choose one side or the other in a super definitive fashion--until Quackity drives him to the edge and he recognizes that his options are to kill Quackity or to lose Dream, and we all know what happens when it comes to that ultimatum.

After Quackity dies, the dynamic changes quite a bit for Dream and Sam again. Quackity takes Dream's leg, Sam only barely manages to keep him alive through a failsafe he'd installed in his old dispenser system, Quackity dies in a pretty bloody fight with Sam fueled by pure Dream-related desperation and little else. The cell is...a wreck. Sam had been pretty adamant on keeping it more sterile than the first go around, absolutely hating the mess that Quackity and Dream were responsible for, but he's hardly had the time to clean the thing in his half an hour granted for him to do everything he can to keep Dream from bleeding out before Quackity arrives again. His perfect system has been tainted with layers and layers of grime and blood and viscera--Quackity has taken to shit like writing on the walls with Dream's blood, at least in part just to fuck with Sam (Sam tried to have A Conversation with him like he would've in canon about the state of the cell, and Quackity does nawt appreciate Sam's acting like the Warden, especially when he no longer has any power to back up the posturing.) And for Dream...Sam betrayed him, yes, but more recently and more importantly--Sam saved him. Sam protected him. Sam has brought him somewhere light and soft and clean and is telling him no more Quackity, ever again, you're safe, and isn't reacting violently when he behaves erratically and touching him gently and his leg is gone he can't fucking run and Sam saved him.

Sam is around Dream...quite a lot, after all of this. He's um. Well. Clingy, honestly. Being so far removed from the prisoner, what was happening to him, having zero control, often not even being allowed to supervise the visits from the atrium (unless Quackity wanted him there, in which the visit would've been So Obviously a show to fuck with him)--it really was his worst nightmare, in many ways. And Dream is dealing with like, a month or so of horrific trauma on top of almost a year's worth of Sam-related conditioning, and now Sam is being strangely nice and lenient and he's in so much less pain than he's been in a very long time. It's not the best mixing pot of mutual mental illness and codependence and intimacy...at all. Aha. (the c!awesamdreamons get. A LOT WORSE.)