Chapter Text
There couldn’t have been a connection, could there?
The thought remained settled in Dandy’s head, swirling and swelling like a pip about to bloom. Ever since Astro’s sudden collapse in activity and the news of unrest in town, Dandy couldn’t help but worry there was something stirring beneath the covers he’d drawn up himself. Maybe it was an instinctual, gut, feeling but it was still a heavy and all too present sensation in his belly, hot and uncomfortable. It blinked at him through the horrid sketches of Astro plastered over town.
It blinked at him through the way his hands shook when he reached for the unfurled petals on his head, Sprout mumbling praise of his growth under snarky comments and beats of hesitation. He was afraid of change as was Dandy.
And despite his bravery, Astro’s sleepiness reminded Sprout of something that plagued him as of recent. He showed this from the way he tugged at Dandy to follow him back to the grand house over the gated hills.
Sprout held his hand as they trudged through the ornate halls of the Sapling estate. He had yet to see his uncle, Sprout’s father, yet he didn’t mind not running into the old man. Maybe it was Dandy’s own reluctant bias for Aunt Lee that he chooses to ignore Mr. Seedly’s presence in their roughly patched family tree.
“I just want to show you someone.” Sprout had told him quietly, his voice uncharacteristically delicate for a rough-headed 14 year old like him. And like a good little brother, Dandy kept quiet and bit back his prying questions. He was yanked along, over the lush lawn and orderly courtyard to behind these waxed doors, detailed with golden flecks and ivory.
The estate was a pretty thing—an enlarged doll house of sculpted columns and glossy paint. Luxurious furniture glimmered in shiny plaster and the winding halls were decked with large pictures of the wealthy family. Dandy felt out of place and further disconnected from his former city-bound cousin than he had before, even if Sprout still had Jolly’s name on his tongue and rose tinted glasses perched on his nose to add to their rift.
Sprout waited at the end of the spacious parlor he led Dandy down. Then upon seeing no sign of his father or minty half siblings, he pulled Dandy past a corridor until they stumbled to a halt before a lone, tucked away, door. Sprout gently knocked twice before entering, wrangling Dandy in not a second later.
Dandy paused, took a breath, and looked around. A smaller(in comparison to the rest of the estate), compact nursery greeted his vision; donned with colorful wallpaper and a lofty, cushy bed in the center. The size of the mattress alone nearly replicated the square space of Dandy’s own bedroom, making him gulp by the sheer extravagance of it.
His mother had a small shed space worth of room to turn into a nursery —and at that time, Dilan Dancifer had begun to lose light in his eyes.
Dandy shook these thoughts away when he noticed the pale Florian tucked beneath a beautifully woven quilt. Her plump head was round and white, with a soft leafy loft of hair swooping down her temple. Despite her quiescent state, an electric ambiguity wafted around the air of her body.
Sprout rested his head over his arms, crossing them on top of the bed. He studied the sleeping Florian with a softness Dandy recalled him holding for his mother. A figment in his head of old strewn memories made of baseball and dice games.
“Who’s this?” Dandy asked in a whisper, a poor attempt to keep the serenity in the room. Sprout twitched.
“This is Auntie Holloway, she won’t wake up. She uh married my old man’s cousin so she’s like a distant aunt or something but the point is,” Sprout hesitated with a shy, timid, crease of uncertainty creeping on his green face. Dandy leaned close to hear him articulate better. Their arms brushed and Sprout looked away, bashful in the way tweens would get when talking about something embarrassing. “She’s pregnant.”
“Why is that a big deal? Her bein’ preggers?” Dandy blinked, stumped. “Your blushiness, I mean. Pregnant folk are normal.”
“Because!” Sprout blushed and refused to meet Dandy’s burning gaze. “I’m a boy and you’re a girl and it’s weird to talk about this!”
“I’m not a—“
Dandy felt his heart drop at the reminder of his presentation and of the stupidity presented by Sprout’s coy attitude. He chose to ignore the strained stab in his chest, the way his breath rattled treacherously as his eyes watered for a second—only to resume his gaze on the sleeping Florian before them both.
“You ain’t bring me here just for that, didya?” Dandy spat, not unkindly. “Do ya think she’s also infected by this insomnia epidemic?"
Sprout looked down at his lap and frowned. Soft and vulnerable, and suddenly too much like a kid instead of a stinky older brother towards Dandy.
“I think so.” Sprout whispered. “Kinda like your grockle friend, Stro or whatever.”
“Astro.” He gently corrected. Dandy reached for his hand and pressed his own palm to his cousin’s wrist. “If she’s family to you, she’s family to me too. I’m sure she’ll wake up in no time.”
Sprout stared ahead, his eyes glowering at a point in the wall. Occasionally, his arms tensed and then unwinded through sparse flexes of his limbs. Dandy wasn’t sure what was going through his head, but he figured it was a form of grief. His cousin soon stood up shortly and scrambled to adjust the stool he accidentally knocked over in his haste.
“I’m uh—I’m going to get Auntie Holloway a hot rag.” Sprout said. He paused to glance at Dandy. “Could ya watch over her?”
“Of course.” Dandy nodded.
Sprout exited the room as if his heels were on fire, all gangly and twitchy. When it was just Dandy left to keep his estranged, distant, in-law company—the quiet returned in an unsettling blanket of ambience.
The static around Mrs. Holloway's head grew. Frizzy and grainy and too present for Dandy to ignore. It beckoned him to scoot closer, to follow its lull like a shepherd caroling sheep. Maybe his head was clouded with untouched dreams or sheathed pin feathers of rest—whatever it was, it was too much and almost suffocating the second Sprout left him be.
Dandy shuffled closer to Mrs. Holloway and the second his arm brushed against her hand, his head swelled with an explosion of stars.
✧─── ・。゚★: .✦ . :★. ───✧
“You tellin’ me ya never celebrated Holly Day?”
Dandy opened his eyes at the sound of his own voice trailing out of his mouth without hesitation, eager and happy and gleeful yet ever so curious. When his vision settled, he was in his living room, Astro sat across from him with his lanky legs crossed over each other, and his mother humming in the back as she worked on dinner.
Astro stared at his face, his eyes narrowed and dull. A frown twitched on his lips and he shook his head.
Dandy spoke again before he could even think of what he was saying.
“That’s so sad.” What was? What was so sad? What was he talking about? How did he end up back in his home? Why was Astro sitting right there when his mom was in the room?!
“I don’t think so.” Astro said, his voice clear and quiet and soft as the wind. “It wouldn’t have been fun without you.”
“You’re gon’ make me blush.” Dandy said. “But seriously? Never? No holidays or any celebrations from where you’re from?”
Astro’s face darkened and suddenly, the soft spoken best friend Dandy had grown to adore was no longer with him. A tall creature of blue smoke and glimmering stars in a sphere of void, stretched before him, long limbs contorting until they fit painfully in his couch and a leer so sinister, it made Dandy freeze.
𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐭
Dandy gasped awake. Only…he wasn’t awake. That he instantly understood when he looked up at the headspace looming before him. It is a stark white abyss with nothing and everything, feelings that burst into flames inside his chest, beating away at his ribcage. Just as there was a blank void, figures bled into his line of sight; his mother overgrown with vines, Sprout with splintered hands, Wheatly, Wheatly, Wheatly, Wheatly.
Heather peered down at him, her fingers in his petals, tugging and tugging, scissors glimmering in her other hand.
“Astro!” Dandy realized sharply. The sensation, the static, it was the same tug of Astro’s magic. “Pull me out! Make it stop! I don’t want to dream anymore!”
“You’re not dreaming.” His mother’s voice crooned. She tutted, appearing next to Heather, face soft and pitying. “My poor, little daughter, so distraught and angry. Why are you trying so hard to prove this foolish thing? That you’re a lad?”
“That you’re cool?” Sprout’s voice drifted in.
Heather sneered, shaking her pretty head. “That you’re beautiful?”
“That you’re loved?” Astro.
“You’re an ugly thing.” That was his own voice, soft and feminine and too girly to the point it was overwhelming. It’s not him! “I’m such an ugly thing pretending to be pretty.”
“Astro, pull me out!” Dandy, his Dandy, he is Dandy afterall is he not—shrieked. “Stop it! Stop it, Astro! I don’t know how you’re doing this but stop it!”
“Jolly, Joelene, enough with this nonsense.” Darling whispered. “Who are you fooling if not yourself?”
Dandy shook his head.
Sprout poked at his rib. “I’ve never met such a delusional weakling like you. Stupid bumpkin.”
“Sprout, what are you saying?”
“You ruined our friendship.” Heather spat. “With your wretchedness trying to taint me!”
“No!” Dandy cried out. He wriggled until Heather’s hands were ripped from his head, burning and blistering. The tear of his petals echoed in the nothingness, ringing and ricocheting until it sprung back to slap him.
“Astro!”
Dandy sank to his knobbly knees, floating and adrift. He heard the telltale chimes of another figure moving to greet him but he couldn’t look away from his trembling, dirtied hands where his bloodied and matted petals fluttered through his pudgy fingers.
“Astro…what are you doing to me? To these people?” Dandy whispered.
The creature before him knelt to face his wretched form. It wasn’t Astro, not quite, but a creature of a similar wave length. An early version of Astro that Dandy met once in passing, when Astro first crashed into his backyard as a larger, more intense, starwalker of higher order. This was Stellam was it not? Tall limbed, many eyed, mystical and powerful.
Dandy felt his heart stutter and bleed. He felt it pound away beneath his skin, his body growing colder by the passing second the longer he stared at this being.
“Did I do something wrong?” Dandy asked.
Astro—Stellam—this thing— rippled. Then, cold fingers wedged its way through Dandy’s temple, the scene shifted until the void dissipated into a quiet meadow and Astro finally appeared, distraught and frustrated, but ever so Astro.
“I’m sorry.” The moonling whispered, clutching Dandy’s hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll wake up.”