This City Never Sleeps At Night

TW: Derealization

Tommy felt the warm sunlight filtering over his face and scrunched his eyes closed tighter. His entire body hurt, like Techno had accidentally slammed him into the bedframe again—his expression had been horrified when he realized, Tommy couldn't help but laugh.

Or maybe he slept wrong? No, his arm stung like he had a paper cut.

He flinched. Focusing on it made it worse. So, so much worse.

Any minute now, Wilbur would ruffle his hair or shake his shoulder or gently poke his face and Tommy would roll over and pretend to be asleep, then Phil would call them over for breakfast(Tommy's awakening signal) and Tommy would have the shitty sugar cereal—the rip-off marshmallow ones.

Then Wilbur would do something to piss Techno off and Techno would either ignore him or look up from his book and make a comment on Wilbur's general intellegence.

And then-

"Tommy..."

Then-

Tommy stopped.

No, wait... that was wrong.

Any minute now, the broken alarm clock would go off, and Tommy would do something stupid like swat it off the nightstand to make it turn off. Then Tubbo would drag him out of bed and over into the living room, and Tommy would get up before he was dragged onto the cracked kitchen tile.

Then Tubbo would make an egg or something and ask Ranboo about his odd jobs. And Ranboo would make his own breakfast-

"Their."

What?

But that didn't happen-

When did that happen?

Any minute now, Tommy would open his eyes and reapply the sunshine gold paint to his wings before going out to the living room to meet Poseidon for breakfast. Then he'd teach Tommy a new skill, and Tommy would try his best with the self-defense training, and-

"Tommy."

No.

Why did that sound wrong?

Any minute now... Again... Tommy would open his eyes and remember that they were dead.

What?

That didn't sound right.

The house fire, the jump, the fall-

"Tommy."

Tommy opened his eyes.

All the pain came back.

He could feel the cracks in his wings from Dream's exercises. He looked behind him. Dream had him reapply the dark green paint whenever any of it so much as cracked off, he was paranoid like that.

Maybe if they didn't have every damned villain on their tails at all times, Tommy's training would be at least a bit less stressful... But nooo, Dream had him scaling buildings and playing real-life fruit ninja(Although Dream preferred the term 'Reflex training').

Ah, Tommy remembered now—the encounter with the Blade.

Bloody terrifying villain, he was... Eyes went all red when he was controlling someone.

Tommy sat up, getting out of bed quickly. Waiting for too long would only make him more tired.

Dream was waiting in the other room, fingers tapping on the counter. "There you are," He said, voice mildly impatient. "Come on, we've got a lot to do today."