ALP - 7 - Life

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We were still kept in kiddie prison after five months for one reason: Ink, of course; even if there was no reason to keep us locked up except his villainous whims, we still were. Dream and the swap - and Outertale - brothers still kept us company even on 'Ink days,' which made us happier. We were only in danger when we were alone with him; we had those moments, unfortunately. He really wasn't a good skeleton; we had known that since we first came together, but Dream and the others didn't see, even with all the hints we dropped. Ink really had them wrapped around his phalanges, didn't he? Nightmare and Dream had somewhat of an agreement about how to keep the balance in order to prevent death, and it had been working out so far; we didn't know what to do about the corruption, though. Without being able to leave, Error wasn't able to do his job, which was arguably more important than ours. We needed a way to leave, but with Ink in our way, that wasn't happening anytime soon. At the moment, it was an Ink day, and we weren't in a mere little amount of pain; we were in absolute agony, but we were also alone with Ink - that was unfortunate. He laughed at our pain.

I didn't believe that there was anybody in the multiverse as cruel as Ink was; he enjoyed torture - who enjoyed torture?! We didn't get much sleep at all when Ink was present, since he woke us up early and didn't allow us to take naps; it felt like a military camp. In many ways, it was more like a prisoner of war camp, because we had a search in the morning and at night, we had to do whatever Ink wanted us to do, and we were in constant pain the entire time he was in the room; yeah, he was tyrannical in just about every sense of the word. He even managed to time everything perfectly: when somebody was about to enter the room, he always knew, and he always made it seem like we were just playing a simple board game or something as he 'watched us' carefully; we wished he would get caught. Just once, we would have liked to see him have to explain why he was abusing children and laughing about it. We wanted to see him as he tripped over his words in a frenzy to make an excuse for the inexcusable. We wanted him gone. We never wanted to have to lay our eyelights on him ever again. Perhaps that was harsh; we didn't think so. When we heard the door being unlocked, we knew we were safe for a while; Dream walked in, completely oblivious to what had just happened.

"Hello!" Dream greeted. "Is everything okay? I thought I heard something.."

"Oh, Nightmare just fell off a bed." Ink answered honestly; he would know. "He's all right now, though."

"Oh no! Maybe I should take a look at him!"

"Of course."

Dream quickly made his way over his brother, who was most certainly not all right, but was crying - in fact, most of us were; Ink was mean. Dream wasted no time in wrapping his arms around Nightmare and offering the required comfort, which Nightmare gladly accepted; Dream was nice. Ink had no choice but to allow us to have some time to heal as Dream decided to stay for a while, and we were almost certifiably safe when the swap brothers joined the party; we could relax for a bit. Ink watched with a bored expression as we played various games and defied his authority with relative ease; he couldn't hurt us in front of his 'friends,' and we didn't have to listen to a word he said, which made everything better. We played for about an hour before Ink made an excuse for the others to leave; he was clever, but we knew better. When Dream and the swap brothers left to 'check on Underfell's inhabitants,' which obviously would have taken a while, Ink turned to us with an angry expression; we were frightened. It wasn't that Ink scared us, but rather, that we couldn't do anything to stop him. As children, we were severely weakened and couldn't fight back with much strength. 

"Now that they're gone.." Ink approached us and grabbed Killer and me - the two that ignored him the most; I was starting to regret that decision. "Let's play our own game."

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