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“Shadow Milk!”
Pure Vanilla’s feet sound deafening against the floor of the other-realm. The sky, once full of stars and galaxies now only houses blinking blue eyes. Though the priest has gotten used to their stares, what unnerves him most is the dark tears forming in each and every one. All of them avert their eyes from him as the blonde even turns in their direction.
The beast he runs towards sits on a patch of land in the middle of a moat of milk, only a small, decrepit wooden bridge connecting the island in the middle to the broader other-realm. Shadow Milk’s back is to Pure Vanilla, sitting with his legs crossed, right atop left. A habit he’s seemed to have long before the ancient ever came along. It always hurt attempting to mimic his sitting position as Truthless, which the beast would mock him relentlessly for while Shadow Milk would contort himself even further no problem.
It was only when they became one that he found out the pain of the jester’s joints is negligible in the face of his existence.
Milkcrowns nearly drown Shadow Milk’s presence. From far away, he looks to be wearing a ridiculously long white dress that covers the entire island he sits on, if you ignore his “arms” lashing in the air.
Gold and black at either side of his torso whip themselves in the space like the flags of the Vanilla Kingdom on a windy day. As Pure Vanilla gets closer, they slowly die down. Whatever possessed them calms, finally allowing themselves to lower to Shadow Milk’s sides. The left side of the beast’s face gets no reprieve, however.
Eyes constantly flow in a stream of agony through the crumbled blue dough of his left socket. Pink, red, and white reoccur the most before once again dissipating in the air as they’re replaced by even more. Each pupil is constricted in pain. Their reaction doesn’t change from their formation to destruction, unable to live long enough to know anything else.
Pure Vanilla’s sprint slows to a walk slows to a halt as he reaches the blue beast before him. His curled up legs raise so he can dig his chin in the dip. There’s no stability without his arms to wrap around them, but Shadow Milk doesn’t seem to care.
“Sha-“
“Why did you follow the path of truth?” Shadow Milk interrupts as the warm hand of the ancient’s almost reaches his infinitely crumbling shoulder. It doesn’t sound facetious. It doesn’t even sound pointed. It’s weary and genuine. A man reconsidering his worst decision.
“I…wanted to know why we cookies do anything. To search for a higher purpo- you already know this! Why ask now?!” Pure Vanilla shouts. He’s been chasing the beast between timelines for the past few months with the help of Timekeeper in White Lily and Silent Salt’s stead. He doesn’t care that these mind games and repetitive questions are deflections anymore. There is no saving a patient that fights you every day.
The beast shrugs. Little crumbs of his dough break off into the untamed energy making his arms and burn into nothing from the action.
“I’ve been hopping through timeline and timeline again. You know. You’ve been following,” he states plainly, trying to pick the flowers next to him before giving up as his “arm” refuses to obey.
“So many different scenarios, you know?” He chuckles. “I liked the Truthless one, even if me being a disciple of truth in your place is ridiculous! …Anyway I’m rambling. It was interesting that…no matter what, I was corrupted or felled in some way.”
“No good ending for me. Not if I corrupt or stay with truth or, witches above, even accept your olive branch,” he turns his head to look at Pure Vanilla. The eyebags that had made their home on the beast’s face far before the witches even abandoned him are darker than ever. They look like bruises pushed into his skull by someone pressing their thumbs right below his eyes.
His lips are torn and his eyes red-rimmed. He’s falling apart at the seams, and Shadow Milk doesn’t even care to lie to himself about it anymore.
“Why were we made? Why was I made? Every. Timeline. I am not granted a happy life. Those—those small moments where I thought it could be different!—were just a snapshot in time. An abused child laughing at a joke,” he hisses. The beast turns his head back to his knees like home.
The worst part is the position looks natural on him. A state of being he has made more home than any brick or plaster on Earthbread.
“Would you give me a quick ending?” He lays on his back, presenting what’s left of his soul to Pure Vanilla. The slit in the middle is possessed by the colors of his siblings eyes, minus Silent Salt. The ancient can’t move, rooted in place in equal parts confusion and hesitance. He came with the intent of sealing the beast laying at his feet, to remake the silver tree and repay all his debts by taking on the mantle all of his closest friend was killed for, but as he looks at the weary man in front of him, breathing stuttering from his failing body and dough slowly crumbling beneath him, Pure Vanilla can’t do it.
The energy that whips at Shadow Milk’s side in a facsimile of his arms slowly wraps itself around the key the priest carries ever since his awakening. It guides so gently, he barely even registers its movement, as locked onto Shadow Milk as he is currently.
It’s only when the beast sighs in something akin to relief as the end of the key drops to his chest that the ancient comes back to himself and yanks his staff away.
The jester makes a noise Pure Vanilla can only hope he misconstrued as a whine.
“Cruel,” is all the beast says before turning only his head to look away from the blonde.
“If you’ve come to seal me again, I’d rather you just kill me. I think that’s the happiest ending I’ll ever get.”
His “arms” lay over his stomach in resignation. Like a corpse, he lays still, even his eye slipping shut and the stream flowing from his head slowing to a drip. His chest puffs up from his breathing, bringing his soul closer to Pure Vanilla like bait for a beast, coaxing the moth to light. It shines, the blue in the middle dimmed as his siblings’ colors fight to be the most prominent.
The beast’s breathing is labored and his expression is pained. Tears slip from his remaining eye to add to the isle of Milkcrowns.
“I’m dying, Pure Vanilla,” he wheezes. “Won’t you spare an evil soul as mine the injustice of getting to live another moment?”
The priest eyes his staff, then the beast, and back again. He should rid the world of this evil. Compassion can only bring him so far, and you can not tolerate the intolerant.
Shaky hands raise the golden key as the beast’s eyes slip close. Dirt-stained white fabric gathers at Pure Vanilla’s shoulders as gravity pulls at his robe.
He can’t bear to watch.
Golden lashes resolutely shut themselves closed as he slams his staff into the soul of the Beast of Deceit, aiming to kill.
What he doesn’t expect, however, is the light.
…
..
.
Everything hurts.
…Why does everything hurt?!
Shadow Milk shoots up from where he’s laying, eye(s?) snapping open to look around. No screaming cookies or red imps with pitchforks, so definitely not hell. Weird. Either Pure Vanilla didn’t manage to kill him or someone totally screwed up to not immediately ship him off to the firey lake.
…or those preacher cookies were wrong.
Still, after dealing with that revelation, the beast brings himself onto wobbly feet without his arms to help.
‘Ah. That explains why it’s so quiet, I must be rid of those pesky souls.’ Shadow Milk muses to himself. No arms likely means no left eye either. Shame, but it’s not like it worked well anyway. He had eyes in his hair for a reason.
Taking inventory. Right.
He’s standing in long grass, presumably soft, so it must be well-maintained. The sky has dark, rolling clouds, but there’s no strong wind near the ground and it smells of fresh rain, so it’s likely just a retreating storm. There’s no changing terrain for as far as he can see and-
“Little Learner?”
He freezes.
No.
No no no no nononononono.
He can’t turn around, mental notes dissipating to static as his blood turns to ice. Fear and grief wrap around him like an ill-fitting costume.
All he can register is ‘Danger’ in his mind. Curse his freeze instinct. The presence behind him grows closer, and he feels like a criminal being led to a gallows.
‘Pure Vanilla couldn’t have.’
‘DANGER.’
‘He doesn’t know her!’
‘DANGER.’
‘She’s dead!’
‘DANGER.’
‘She doesn’t care about you!-‘
“Little Learner?” A white, silk-gloved hand lightly placed itself on his shoulder. Small. Too small.
‘DANGER. TRICK.’
‘Shut up,’ he hisses to himself.
Feet pad along the grass, dress swishing along the blades. And there she stands before him, older, much older, smaller, cookie, but undeniably her.
First Milk looks at Shadow Milk. Her creation, his mother, her son. He looks terrible, falling apart at the seams, pupils in slits because of her.
He’s scared of her.
She weeps.
Those same white gloves shield her face as her sobs wrack her body, shoulders shuddering and chest heaving.
“My little Fount,” she chokes out. “What happened?”
‘You leave for millennia, let my people decapitate me, let me fall into corruption, and then want me to console you?!’ His inner voice rages.
“It doesn’t matter. If you want, go make it a grave and cry over that. Maybe you’d have known what happened if you hadn’t left,” Shadow Milk snarls, tongue barbed with the cruelty he’s had as his solitary companion since First Milk’s departure.
“Your ‘little learner’ is dead. And you killed him.”
Even looking down at his mother creator as she finally faces what she created brings him no solace. His entire life mission, his entire purpose for corruption, led to such a forgettable ending.
“I missed you so much,” First Milk weeps.
Rage burns like acid in Shadow Milk’s gut from her abandonment.
“Liar! You left me as soon as it got hard! And I kept faith for decades—centuries!—after you left! I had myself killed trying to please you when you weren’t even there!” He yells. His face contorts into fury, body instinctually going to bear his claws for arms he no longer has. Shadow Milk spits on the ground before her feet.
“I’m so, so sorry, my child. I promise you it was through no will of my own. I’m not…really a witch anymore, as you can see. First Cream, er…Witch of Light, as you likely remember her, she had us all turned to cookies from a botched spell. I swear I did not want to abandon you. I…can’t ask forgiveness, but would you please look at me?”
The beast’s face recoils in disbelief.
“And you never cared to look for me?! Your only child!” Shadow Milk hisses as he grips the front of First Milk’s robes with his lashing hair, breaking her out of her self-pity party.
“All my life I wondered what it was about me that made me unlovable,” he growled. “All my life I worked to get to this moment, where I’d see you collapse at my feet in regret for abandoning me, and yet, here we are.”
Shadow Milk gestures with his right shoulder to the infinite plains behind him.
“Taking inventory, now that we’re both at the finish line!” he laughs.
“It wasn’t even a fraction of the satisfaction I wished for.”
The beast slowly lowers the ex-witch back down to the grass as his hair retracts. He looks her up and down, walking a small circle around her and nodding as if taking notes.
‘Undeniably her,’ his brain finally deduces. With this, he sighs as he plants his feet before First Milk once again, looking at her with that weary, unimpressed eye.
“I really just want to go back home,” he admits.
“Your home? Where is it?” First Milk asks with a voice even softer than her own, careful not to set her creation off again.
“In relation to this place? No idea. Can’t teleport if I don’t know the place I’m teleporting from. It’s like sewing blindfolded,” he grumbles.
“I have a bunch of maps in my sanctum if you’d like to look! They might be a little outdated though, sorry,” his creator offers, stepping past Shadow Milk and nodding her head towards the large medical building a far ways away in an offer for him to follow. Begrudgingly, his feet move despite his fight.
Hours into looking for a map including Beast-Yeast and wherever the hell he is right now, Shadow Milk starts to doze. Blinks become weary and his head starts to nod for longer and longer. First Milk notices, as accustomed to sleepy patients as she is, and decides to find a blanket to wrap the beast up in to touch him as little as possible. He may wake up with a sore back, sleeping in that chair, but it’s better that than having her touch him right now. Even through their map search, he’d eye her warily and bristle if she ever came to close to him.
Soft cream sheep wool is wrapped around the half-asleep beast, who subconsciously still flinches at the witch’s closeness before fully succumbing to sleep.
First Milk turns to the door, flicking the switch that bathes the room in dark, only the hallway sighting the mess of scrolls and books.
Looking over her son for the first time in millennia, she smiles.
.
..
…
Shadow Milk wakes up to some atrocious chest pain.
‘Last time I’m sleeping upright’ he snarks internally, entirely aware it’s not the first nor will it be the last time he’s sworn the act off.
He goes to rub his eyes before realizing.
‘Oh yeah, no arms anymore….or left eye.”
Groaning in annoyance, he has a few thick strands of hair go to rub his eye before he blearily looks up at the ceiling.
That’s not the sanctums ceiling.
That’s not his ceiling.
No, beige waffle cones arch with stained glass windows adorning every wall, tastelessly plastered with its benefactors image.
Unfortunately he’s only given a second before being jumped and restrained by said benefactor himself.
Warm arms wrap around his torso as Pure Vanilla weeps into his collarbone. From the eye bags the ancient holds, he’s likely been spending days stabilizing the beast. Losing that many souls in a couple days isn’t the best for such a frail body! Traitorous strands of hair comfortingly wrap around the body of Pure Vanilla like a third layer of clothes, some eyes held within weeping and others sympathetic towards his Nilly’s worries.
The sniffles of the ancient slowly die down after a while, though his hug is no less strangling. Shadow Milk tries to sigh in annoyance, but it’s more a heave of air with his lungs so mercifully crushed by the saints arms.
“Did you really think I’d go out that easy?” He teases.
Pure Vanilla shakes his head in Shadow Milk’s medical gown.
“What’s with the frown? I thought you’d be happy to see me gone!”
The ancient shudders under another sob.
“I can’t lose you too, Shadow Milk Cookie,”
The beast rolls his eyes, though his hair is almost entirely entangled in Pure Vanilla’s robes, pulling him closer despite the mental protest.
“What’s with the change of mind? I’m sure the other thieves wouldn’t be happy to hear your little ‘time-thief’ is still walking and talking in your castle!”
“After White Lily died,” Pure Vanilla sniffled, though recomposed himself quickly. “After she passed, I truly thought I lost everything. And then what little I had of her, Solidarity, you kept going after, like you were trying to break me again,” he explains.
“I…must admit I wasn’t in my right mind. I hated you. Blamed you for White Lily’s choice in…sacrificing herself. And I bought into you being that heartless creature Elder Faerie always described you as.”
Shadow Milk grimaces at the mention of his captor, but the ancient doesn’t seem to notice.
“But having you here in the kingdom, at possibly your most vulnerable, I couldn’t do that. You wept the entire time I was taking care of you, and…and I think you reminded me of myself. Well, me after I lost everything I suppose,” he chuckles sadly.
“And…I don’t think I would’ve wanted to be further isolated or finished off at such a low.”
A warm hand cups Shadow Milk’s face as beautiful eyes meet his, cloudy yellow and blue as beautiful as the blooms in spring. Warmth rushes to the beast’s face, which he tries to force down. He hopes the blind man doesn’t see the discoloration, the the healer definitely feels the warmth of his usually cold half.
“I want to give you one last chance, Shadow Milk. Please, don’t prove me wrong.”
By the end of his speech, Shadow Milk is tackled into another hug, landing him into the pillows padding his hospital bed.
‘Far too forgiving, the old fool,’ His mind supplies.
He’ll tell you it was against his will, a mistake, a mere misfire of synapses, but Shadow Milk hugs Pure Vanilla back all the same.