How to Establish Your Gang and Take Care of the Children in It

Rule 10: Don't Forget, Your Sunshine Brother Has a Personality Too

Three months wasn't really a long time. Not in Nightmare's opinion, anyway. When he'd been alive for at least seven centuries, months tended to escape his notice. Days passed by almost like a blur. Minor bonding moments or events slipped through his memories, and if anything major had happened, he didn't really remember.

It had been three months since Dust's attempted murder. Nothing noteworthy had happened, other than the face that Shattered still was nowhere to be found. It was fucking annoying, playing the guessing game and hopping from AU to AU to find some trace of his brother. Or some trace of his lost memories. He'd found none so far, and it was honestly pissing him off. Being chased out of AU after AU, spat at and cursed at and oftentimes attacked right off the bat, was making him both increasingly annoyed and confused. He could swear he'd never met a single one of these people in his life, never visited any of these universes. And yet even the most obscure AU's seemed to recognize him. And hate him.

Nightmare. King of Negativity. Hated and feared throughout the multiverse.

Something must have happened, Nightmare had decided. Whatever he'd done to gain this body, whatever had happened before or afterward, had been so terrible that he'd acquired a reputation that stretched far beyond himself. Whatever he'd done, he'd made even people he didn't know fear him.

Or maybe... maybe he'd done more than one thing. Maybe the reason people treated him like a mass murderer was because he was a mass murderer.

Nightmare. King of Negativity. Was his crown stained with bloodshed? Had his coronation been filled not with accepting subjects, but fear-filled slaves under a tyrant?

The thought saddened Nightmare immensely. Despite being the Guardian of Negativity (King of Negativity... he winced at the connotations of the title), he was a basically decent person. Even having been corrupted by eating a once-golden apple, Nightmare had a moral code. It had just been altered a bit. One thing, however, had stayed the same.

No making innocents suffer.

This rule had been bent once or twice when he'd deemed it necessary, and things like destruction and murder were usually if not always on the table. As long as he targeted his attacks to people who deserved it, pretty much anything was on the table. He was a bastard when it came to morality, and he knew it.

But... this? Subjugating thousands if not millions of people under the reign of a tyrant? Causing death and destruction and suffering to innocents? Playing with people's lives as toys for his own amusement?

... Okay, that last one was something he did anyway. As long as they were terrible, it was fine by his book.

But becoming a malevolent dictator? That he could all too easily imagine himself doing, and hating himself for it every step of the way.

... Wait, which side of the argument was he on again?

Both, Nightmare answered himself with a sigh. He leaned back against the back wall of the Grillby's he'd just been kicked out of, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. At least this time he'd only been asked to leave. The past few AU's hadn't been so kind. I'm on both sides, because I'm arguing against myself.

He sighed, wishing for the millionth time that Shattered was there next to him. His brother would make some sort of joke about Mare's mental capacity, or punch him on the shoulder and tell him that he looked like he was participating in a funeral march and offer to make a real funeral so he'd at least have people joining him in his melancholy, or just generally be such a fucking bastard that Mare would feel better.

But Shattered wasn't there next to him. He was gone, and for some reason he didn't want to see Mare. And there was no indication, no hint that he'd ever want to see Mare again. Just dead ends and empty silence at every turn.