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Whatever it is, anything Nightmare does is with deliberation and cold calculation.
He’s the guardian of negativity, and for the past half millennia — give or take a few dozen years — he’s kept the balance of the multiverse’s emotions all on his own.
The one time he’d done something without thinking it over, his own emotions had gotten the better of him. It had ended with his brother entrapped in stone, their universe in shambles, blood on his hands, and any instability to the multiverse took a century to fix. He’d vowed never to repeat that same mistake.
But, though he wouldn’t admit to it, it’s hard work.
Despite his newfound power, he can only influence the negative spectrum. And the balance needs positivity, too, he knows that. And without his brother to keep that half in check, he’d had to get creative.
Skewing the balance in his favor is easy — banal, even. But it’s the other way he has trouble with. He’d spent years upon years learning how to create positivity across the universes, in a way that wouldn’t leave him writhing on the ground and his layer of corruption feeling like acid eating away at him.
It’s hard work.
But he’d been the one to create a mess, and he’d be the one to fix it.
But it’s still hard work.
Everyone he comes across is full of emotions, and the negative ones are only slightly more bearable than their positive counterparts. Every universe he visits is rife with life, and thus, emotions. It’s tiring to feel all of them, all the time.
The only reprieve he gets is when he holes up in one of the empty worlds, taking it for his own and turning a dilapidated castle, once belonging to a version of an Asgore, into his own house.
When he’d been young, he’d dreamed of living in one, dreamed of living like the princes in the books that he’d loved so much, revered and pampered, surrounded by riches and jewels and gold… Instead, what he’d had was their mother offering only the barest protection against the elements and a village of people who hated him simply for his existence.
Well, he has a castle now, and enough power that no one could ever do what they’d done to him ever again.
He retreats there when it all becomes too much, until he learns what and how to do it to keep the multiverse from imploding in on itself, one way or another.
But it never stops being hard work.
The halls of his castle are grand, restored to their former glory and beyond, but they’re empty. The countless rooms are empty, go unused. The ballrooms are gathering dust. Empty.
It takes time, to break through his own stubbornness and admit he misses his brother. Or anyone. But there hasn’t been anyone but his brother, and he’s latching onto the few scant memories of being happy like a lifeline.
He wants company.
But company is hard, just the thought of being around other people is tiring to imagine. He wishes there was a way to turn his powers off, at least for a little while. Or maybe someone whose emotions aren’t so loud all the time.
It’s wishful thinking at best, and really, he’s not even looking for the solution to his dilemma when it all but falls from the sky for him.
A universe, devoid of life, with the smell of death cloying in the air, with dust coating the ground in a blanket morbidly resembling snow.
He stumbles upon Killer, an alternate of Nightmare’s template. A Sans. There are no feelings to be read when he looks at the ruthless murderer, his SOUL so detached from him that it’d taken all emotions with it. He is the perfect candidate for a companion. Nightmare decides to call it a henchman, to justify himself (if only to himself).
The universe is negative through and through, and he'd come to see what could be done behind the scenes to tilt it back towards balance. Killer stares at him when he extends an offer to join him, with sockets lacking eyelights and tar made of hatred and determination mixed together until there’s no telling the two components apart.
Nothing Nightmare does is without careful thought and deliberation. And he decides he wants Killer. He’s witty — downright rude at points — and he grins like there’s something Nightmare doesn’t know, and it’s thrilling.
He hadn’t met anyone whose emotions he couldn’t read, in all his centuries of life. Killer is an oddity, an anomaly, and it makes Nightmare want to keep him.
The Sans comes along, but not before some snarky remarks and a handshake that had revealed a whoopee cushion hidden in his palm. Nightmare had turned an unamused, flat stare on him, despite the fact that the whole exchange had reminded him of the pranks Dream had used to pull.
And so, Nightmare has a companion henchman now.
It’s a jarring experience at first. He finds knives taped to the undersides of furniture, Killer’s only explanation a shrug. Just in case, y’know? He has no idea where Killer keeps getting the weapons from, but he kind of circles all the way from bewilderment through exasperation right back to being impressed.
There are clothes strewn in the most curious places (like the living room corner, and the bathroom cabinets), most notably socks. Even that Nightmare learns to simply tolerate, though he does berate Killer for it. The socks disappear. For a few days, at least, and then they’re back. He decides it’s not worth the effort to get frustrated over such inane things.
He does, however, learn that mortals need to eat. The castle’s kitchen had gone unused up until Killer’s appearance; Nightmare didn’t have such a need, after all. But Killer had come to him with a frown, asking where the food was.
And thus they’d gone out to gently coerce an universe’s store to give them their stock.
The two of them sat in the dining room afterwards. Killer had made something he’d called ‘mac ‘n cheese,’ saying that not even he could fuck that up. He’d offered Nightmare a bowl of the stuff, and Nightmare had accepted it, if only because the only food he’d ever had the pleasure of tasting were apples. He pointedly doesn’t think about that, because he’s not sure he could ever stomach that particular taste again, even with no stomach to speak of.
It turns out there’s something to the whole food thing. Nightmare tries not to let his surprise show, but he’s not sure how well he succeeds, given Killer’s hearty laugh.
There are still no emotions to be discerned in him. It’s nice. He starts to take meals alongside Killer.
Life turns a little better. Nightmare sends Killer out to sate his ever-present hunger for fighting and keeps his own attempts at balancing it all out quiet. He’s built a reputation, and showing Killer he’s not the ruthless, all-powerful being of pure negativity like he’d introduced himself as feels… wrong, in a way. (Scary.) So he doesn’t.
(It feels like Killer knows, somehow.)
He’s content to have the other’s company, someone to exchange words with when the fancy strikes. Really, he doesn’t go out looking for anyone similar.
But it seems like Fate smiles down upon him, or maybe she’s laughing at his lackluster performance and wants to make it a bit more interesting than it already is. Whichever it is, they stumble upon a universe plagued by famine. Even being the prince king of negativity, he cringes at some of the things the monsters had resorted to doing simply to survive.
The Sans there is vicious and unpredictable, snarling at them one second and joking the next. There’s a hole spanning a good third of his skull and Nightmare isn’t sure he wants to know exactly what instrument could’ve caused that.
But he’s low on magic, what little he has feeling all too different from him, somehow, and he’s starving. Desperate men agree to nigh anything.
It sounds manipulative when he thinks about it that way, but he’s done worse things than manipulate people. The margin is wider than the page.
Horror’s tipping point is Nightmare offering shelter and food for his brother. Killer is an anomaly in this, as well, uncaring towards the fact that he’d killed his own brother in the hunt for LV, but most Sanses valued their brother above themselves, and Horror is one of those.
It’s not begging, not quite, but he changes his tune oh-so-quickly when the premise of his brother being taken care of surfaces. The offer being extended towards himself is simply a cherry on top.
Oh, Killer seems to be rubbing off on him with his witty humor. How curious.
Horror’s low magic makes his emotions muted, to the point where Nightmare can tune them out like white noise.
He finds it almost hilarious that for all the time he’s been traversing the multiverse, he’d never ran into anyone like the two of them, people that he didn’t get a migraine from for simply being in the same room as them, and then all of a sudden, he found two of them in the span of a decade? Either Fate really is playing a prank on him, or he’d finally, somehow, atoned for what he’d done. He likes to think it’s the latter, for his own peace of mind.
Horror is another curious element in the castle.
For all his years of starvation, he doesn't jump at their cupboards like Nightmare had expected him to. He makes sure Nightmare holds up his end of the bargain, which he does, pulling no small amount of strings to have Core Frisk agreeing to find a place for Shock — Horror’s brother — in the Omega timeline.
Honestly, if he doesn’t see the ghostly child for another millennia, he won’t complain. Their empty eyes are always too knowing, like they can see right down to his rotten core.
Hah, Killer is definitely rubbing off on him.
But once the deed is done and his favors with the child overseen expended, Horror’s demeanor does another one-eighty. It seems to be becoming the norm with him. Nightmare would almost say Horror trusts him.
He’s a man of his word, if nothing else, and he doesn’t go back on promises. Perhaps a remnant of his prototype. Or maybe his own stubbornness. It doesn’t matter much.
Killer offers Horror some of the grilled cheese he makes for dinner one day. His repertoire in the kitchen is limited to mac ‘n cheese, grilled cheese, ready-made mozzarella sticks, and fries. It would be an ungodly amount of cheese, if he didn’t all but drown it in ketchup. (It makes it taste better, Nightmare has to admit. Especially when he chars the food. Or it just masks the flavor of burn.)
Horror stares at the offered plate owlishly. They’d learned it takes him a bit to respond sometimes, most probably due to the head injury, but he could also be frighteningly quick on the draw, at times. He keeps up with Killer’s silver tongue when he wants to. He takes it, but accompanied with Killer’s little huff of amusement, he simply holds the plate, a little lost.
Nightmare takes his seat at the table and thanks Killer when he’s brought his own plate. Killer goes to prepare his own and Nightmare turns to Horror, raising his browbone.
“It won’t bite you,” he says. It’s enough to break Horror out of whatever little reverie he’d fallen into.
He sits down at one of the empty seats and picks up one of the grilled cheeses. His hand dwarfs it, but he holds it like it’s made of glass, like it might crumble to dust and slip between his fingers.
“I ain’t the best cook, but ouch,” Killer comments, snorting at the look Horror is giving the little piece of bread.
Almost tentatively, Horror brings it up to his mouth and takes the smallest bite Nightmare had ever seen anyone take of anything. He chews diligently, and when he swallows, his eye tears up.
“Aw, fuck,” Killer mutters, sounding a bit more genuine now, “it ain’t that bad, is it?”
Nightmare takes a bite of his own and shrugs. It tastes just the same as it always does, cheese stretching obscenely long because Killer always puts too much of it inside. Horror shakes his head, but he doesn’t — can’t — answer.
He weeps all over the meal and fills the room with the vaguest taste of gratitude.
Nightmare finds he doesn’t mind his emotions, even when they’re at their strongest. He doesn’t get a migraine and he doesn’t mention it, and neither does Killer, for once.
They settle into a cohabitation. Nightmare has two people to seed chaos and discord around now, but he’s still alone for the other half. At one point, Dream breaks out of the stone prison, and when Nightmare runs into him, he can’t decide between being furious or relieved. Dream is back, which would lift the burden of keeping positivity in check off of Nightmare’s shoulders. But he doesn’t believe him when Nightmare tries to explain he’s still the same.
Dream comes to believe the corruption had changed him. And maybe he’s right; he isn’t the same person as he’d used to be, but what would Dream expect, after five hundred years?
His mind is made up for him when Dream summons his staff and attacks him. Any shred of relief he might’ve felt dissipates like sugar in a hot cup of tea. It feels like betrayal, and though Nightmare emerges victorious in the battle Dream starts, it’s a hollow victory.
He returns back to the castle with his henchmen and their concern is palpable even with no emotion to tell him. He isn’t sure when either of them had started to care about him, but he waves them off with no small amount of irritation.
Care.
Hah! Dream had cared about him, too, once upon a time. And look at him now. Caring only means he’d get stabbed in the back by them sooner or later.
The next time he finds a henchman, he goes out looking for one. It's one more potential dagger in his back, but it’s also one more pawn that might lay his life down for him. Aimlessly, he wanders around the multiverse in search of someone whose emotions aren’t there.
When he happens upon one such universe, he almost thinks he’d found another iteration of Killer. He almost leaves outright — Killer does what he tells him to, but he doesn’t have emotions. No emotions means no attachment, no loyalty. One of those is enough. More than enough.
He knows he’s being unreasonable, but if Dream, his twin, his other half, could forsake him so easily, what’s stopping these skeletons, who barely know him?
The universe doesn’t have Killer. Instead, this Sans wears his hood up and has a crimson scarf wrapped around his neck. He’s covered in enough dust to amount twice his bodyweight, and he’s talking to himself, quiet enough that Nightmare can’t decipher what exactly he’s saying.
And the only thing he can feel from this one is apathy. It’s deep and potent and crushes anything else under it as it swathes him. He’s perfect. He’s depressed, and has reached the point where he doesn’t believe in hope anymore.
Despite that, he burns with determination and tells Nightmare ‘no,’ punctuated by a bone attack. It almost catches him off-guard. He’d unlearned not getting whatever he wants.
It turns into a fight. Nightmare isn’t known for his patience, especially when he’s already ticked off, and the Sans is obviously not inclined to talk. Nightmare would commend him for his strength — full of LV and cold calculus just as Nightmare himself. But it’s obvious which one of them is the stronger one, and it’s not this dust-coated idiot with a death wish.
Nightmare has thrice the limbs to take him on with, and it’s only a matter of time until he has him pinned down on the ground like a butterfly model, panting and sweaty and tired.
Mortals get tired out so easily, Nightmare has found. He’d called the Sans an idiot, but he’s not stupid. He knows when it’s pointless to keep fighting, and he goes limp underneath the tentacles.
The apathy is all-consuming. It’s a tangible thing where there should be nothing, and Nightmare finds himself loving the taste of it in the back of his mouth.
He asks one more time, ever merciful, and has no qualms about shattering the feebly beating SOUL when he doesn’t get the answer he wants. He’s far from done, however. He’s merciful, after all.
Once the universe resets, he comes back and extends the offer again. This time he finds the Sans drunk — or absolutely shitfaced, if he’s being technical — but the answer is the same. And so is the outcome, then. Again and again, he has no reservations about ending the life presented to him, not if it means he’ll get what he wants. And this way, he’ll have a minion who will know his strength firsthand. Fear is a powerful thing. Loyalty borne of fear will ensure this Sans — apparently called Dust — will not step a toe out of line At least that’s Nightmare’s plan.
Time after time he’s refused, and yet all Dust does with his time is slaughter all the monsters he can, wait for the human to kill them as well, and drink his nights away. It’s pathetic. And yet Nightmare had already invested more time than he should’ve into this pathetic whelp to stop. He’s not exempt from sunk cost fallacy.
He makes sure to keep his distance from Killer and Horror. The inferno of his brother’s betrayal has turned into little more than leftover embers, but he doesn’t need to expose any potential weakness to them.
He’s Nightmare, the god of negativity, a deity far above them in any and all aspects. His power is vast and he will not let a couple of mortals make a fool out of him.
Over the course of his toil, Dust grows despondent towards him, as if he were just another inevitability in the cycle of his universe’s resets. On one hand, Nightmare supposes he isn’t wrong. On the other hand, he knows how to make someone despair. One reset, he doesn’t show up.
The cycle of Dusttale is completely dependent upon the human and the force that controls them, and if that force decides it won’t reset for months, then it won’t reset for months.
When he comes back the next reset, Dust almost looks relieved to see him. Almost. Maybe he’d convinced himself Nightmare is a figment of his imagination, just like the ghost of his brother, always at his side. Ridiculous. But it's something.
“I can make the cycle stop,” he says, and this time, the answer is a weary, dejected ‘okay.’ It makes Nightmare wonder exactly how long the Sans had been trapped in the never ending loop of nothing but death, but he dismisses the thought.
He sees more of himself in Dust than he’s comfortable with. If he’d been offered help when he’d needed it, would he have accepted it? Probably not.
Both Killer and Horror are surprised when he brings Dust with him, probably blindsided by the —what must’ve seemed like — sudden addition. Killer tries his usual approach or banter until he gets a reaction, but he probably doesn’t expect the reaction to be Dust pinning him to the wall with surgically precise bone attacks.
He doesn’t try such a careless approach again, and Horror learns from his mistake.
Now with three minions at his beck and call, and the assurance that Dust wouldn’t try anything, too disinterested in opposition and knowing what would happen if he went along with it, Nightmare feels a little more like himself. He uses his tools as he sees fit, sending them off to counteract Dream’s, frankly excessive, positive influence on the multiverse, or if the fancy strikes him, simply on gruesome fetch quests, almost like a test. He has no need for any secret correspondence of some backwater universe, or heads of human children, but he revels in the simple knowledge he can have them if he wants.
His demeanor doesn’t go unnoticed, at least by the two seniors, who had known him longer than Dust. ‘Known’ being empathized here, because they didn’t know him. And that’s the bare possible minimum. Killer tries to ask him if anything had happened, in that roundabout way of his that disguises it as nothing but playful conversation, but Nightmare sees right through it. He doesn’t take the bait, would be an idiot to. Horror goes about his attempt a bit more gingerly, bringing Nightmare trays of food to his office, like offers at an altar. He finds he likes the comparison, and that’s probably the only reason he allows the bigger skeleton to keep it up, allows him a little closer to himself.
That, and the fact that Horror’s motives are sincere, even as dull as his concern is. He packs a mean dose of intent into his food. It's almost cloying at times. At times, Nightmare can’t stomach it at all.
Horror understands.
Dust doesn’t know he’d used to be… nicer, so he mostly stays out of the way of the others’ attempts. He stays out of the way, period, opting to nurse a bottle and squabble with his imaginary friend. Killer does try to get him to help out, and Dust tries, all of once.
“What changed you?” he asks, peering at him like he’s a puzzle to be solved, a rubik's cube only a couple moves from being finished.
“Nothing,” Nightmare scoffs at him.
But later, when he’s alone, with just the tray of food that Horror had brought him, he finds himself pondering the question. What had changed him?”
The apples, of course. But that had been eons ago, and not what Dust had asked him.
The real answer is, unfortunately, Dream. He doesn’t like admitting it. He knows he’d been the one to betray his brother first — however justified he’d been in his actions - but Dream’s payback still hurts him. It’d made him bitter, made him feel like he wasn’t himself anymore, even if he knows better. It’d been a hit below the belt.
He ponders, late at night and taking a page out of Dust’s book — nursing a glass of wine — whether his minions are like his brother. Surface-level? Ye, of course. They’re all a version of the same person, however removed from the original. But beyond that? Not really.
He’d never been as close to any of them as he’d been to Dream. That’s a given, Dream is his brother. They’d never gotten close enough for any betrayal to sting anywhere near as much as that. Granted, they haven’t been allowed five hundred something odd years.
Yet.
And that little yet is all the difference, isn’t it? The world deigned to give him not one, but three chances to trust again, and he’s here squandering them away over his brother, who had never even been as good as his nostalgia and guilt made him believe.
He polishes off his glass and turns over a new page, pretending it’s just in his current book.
They notice. Of course they do, they're all the same person, and that person is perceptive as hell. Killer asks Dust what he’d done to have Nightmare conversing with them again. The only thing Dust can offer is a shrug, and the truth, and so Killer returns to his banter, twice fold. It’s as if he’s trying to make up for the lost time. It’s about as endearing as it is infuriating.
He finds himself seeing little things that he didn’t allow himself before. Such as the fact that Killer isn’t as emotionless as he’s leading everyone to believe, himself included. Jis banter and jabs never stray towards topics that are obviously a sore subject, and if it does, he offers an apology in his own, twisted way. Such as that time he’d brought Dust a copy of Peekaboo with Fluffy Bunny after a vitriolic accusation of Dust not caring about his brother that had ended up in a fight and the eastern wing of the castle destroyed
The discovery culminates over time, solidified when Killer’s SOUL shivers one evening, flashing into a more traditional SOUL shape. For the quick moment of it, Nightmare feels the amusement radiating out of Killer. It’s faded, like it’s stuck on the other side of a long, long tunnel, but it’s there nonetheless.
He learns Horror is a fretter; he keeps check of their food stores obsessively, keeps stashes of food all around his room (and the others’, as well), but he also does believe he’ll never face another famine. It’s a belief that makes him content and grateful, despite the compulsive check tics.
He also frets over them — Nightmare included. It’s obvious in the way he makes sure everyone has a meal three times a day, going as far as bringing Nms to his study as ever. It’s concern and care. It’s his way of showing affection, because food means a lot to him, understandably. Nightmare isn’t sure how he ever saw it for anything else.
And Dust, with his marrow deep cloak of apathy and nonchalance and getting through everything with either a grin or a poker face, is also just a monster.
He can only hide his emotions so deep, so long, before they bubble up like lava erupting from a volcano. It’s an apt comparison, given that it’s usually accompanied by his overcharged magic doing just that. Flares of LV are something all three of them suffer through, but Dust’s are always so much more obvious.
His psyche is riddled with guilt, with shame and regret and self-loathing for all he’d done in the name of justice. He doesn’t fear Nightmare, but he does fear ever returning to the endless cycle of resets and slaughter, and having to murder his brother again. The ghostly hallucination he insists on being real despite not believing it himself might have something to do with that.
Nightmare had picked up a ragtag group of idiots that had been hurt by fate (and maybe Fate) just as much as he himself, and believed them all to be nothing but mindless puppets. (He pretends Dream hadn’t thought — doesn’t think — of him in the same way.)
He’d become the white-steeded knight of his childhood dreams, without even realizing it. Isn’t that hilarious him, the prince of negativity, being the one to alleviate such things.
Hilarious, indeed.
Once he recognizes that, he’s able to (somewhat) embrace it. When he happens upon the ruined remnants of X-tale and the lone skeleton imprisoned there, with all his loud, deafening emotions, all the regret and fury and loneliness, he doesn’t think of him as another asset.
He doesn't think about how all the emotions make his head pound and his SOUL feel alight. He thinks of the Sans — of Cross — as a person, a person who was manipulated and controlled for someone’s amusement and experiments.
He offers refuge that Ink never has, and Cross takes it like a drowning man takes a stray piece of driftwood. His emotions are nauseating and conflicting, but Nightmare ignores them outright.
Cross isn’t like the others; not just because his emotions are loud, but because he’s not like them. They’d all slaughtered countless monsters and humans alike, whatever the reasoning — famine, defense, adaptation — but Cross hadn’t wanted to take all the lives in his universe. He’d confessed he’d believed it was the only way to take control of the universe from X!Gaster, to stop him toying with them all like they meant nothing.
He doesn’t like the concept of killing, and he’s justifiably wary once he learns everyone in the castle is used to killing in cold blood. Or marrow.
Fact of the matter is, Nightmare isn’t SOULless (not anymore, at least) and the thought of forcing someone to do something they’re not willing to do is where he draws the line. Cross is eager to please, and wears all of his feelings on his cheek. He would kill if it meant he’d be useful, but instead, Nightmare assigns him as a watchguard. He has no qualms about laying his life down for whatever he watches over, even if it’s a ruthless killer, and if that isn’t scary, Nightmare isn’t sure what is. The simple knowledge that someone thought so little of their own demise that they’d see it as a viable solution to a situation is unnerving.
It also means he warms up to the others, in his own way. It’s easy to play along with Killer’s teasing, to let him run his mouth and give him a rebuttal that stops him dead in his tracks. Horror’s mother-henning is something Cross accepts, although reluctantly, full of shame at being so starved for it. And he manages to break through Dust as well, just as Horror had, bonding over their shared likes, which are surprising, to say the least. Nightmare never would’ve guessed Dust would like drawing, of all things.
(There’s a part of Cross that locks up whenever drawing, or making any form of art, comes up. But Dust has an aura that can put anyone at ease, just as it can put them on edge. He doesn’t care, or at least pretends not to, and there’s no judgment in his flat intonation if he doesn’t want it to be there.)
Nightmare watches them grow from colleagues (henchmen, nothing but tools), to tentative friends, and then into a veritable team. None of them would betray him; Killer’s true feelings show themselves once in a blue moon; Horror’s are always there, just in reach when Nightmare needs the reassurance of his loyalty; Dust pretends well, but only for so long, and Cross is loud and unabashed in his loyalty.
The castle, once a silent refuge, a reprieve from the world, has turned into the very thing Nightmare had tried to avoid before — a space full of life, full of loud emotions, full of noise.
And yet, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
He’s Nightmare, the guardian of negativity, the prince of a ruined world, a god amongst mortals, and he has the protection of the best of the best. Dream had been right — he’s no longer the Nightmare he’d known all those years ago.
And he doesn’t stand a chance against the new Nightmare.