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He blearily blinked his eye opened as he slowly returned to wakefulness. It was a soft wakeup, nothing had startled him awake, and so his body took its time slowly adjusting to the waking world. He blinked a bit more to try and remove some of the fog from his sight, it didn't do the same for his mind. His thoughts felt like there was tar dragging at them, preventing him from fully grasping them. But his instincts drove him to lift his head upwards; On reflex, he began to count the other beings in the room with him.
one…two…three…four…-…FOUR?!
Instantly, Nightmare snapped awake, his peace long forgotten amidst the panic he now felt. There was one missing. He bolted upwards, trying to get a better view of the room. His panic surging forward, driving him to count again. Who was missing? Who was missing? He had to be wrong.
One; Red scarf-On the right.
Two; Black streaks-In front, on the floor.
Three; X markings-Tangled with Two
Four; Glitching code-In the armchair, to the right.
Five? Five? Where was-
A loud snore cut off his panicked thoughts, and he sought desperately to find where the noise had come from. He almost believed he'd imagined it, some hallucination born out his mind's attempt at preservation against the panic, until he heard it again, and quickly whirled to face the direction it came from. It took a few moments for him to realise what he was seeing, but then he fell back with a sigh.
Five; Cracked skull-Under the table.
Well, there was definitely no going back to sleep now. He grumbled to himself as he surveyed the chaos of the room; the remains of the movie night they'd had, before everyone had drifted off to sleep wherever they had been. Apparently, for some of them, that had been a rather unusual place. The title screen of the last film they'd watched, some B-rate horror flick that Killer had picked up in the last above-ground timeline he'd entered, played upon the television screen, casting the only light upon the scene. It was a testament to how tired he was that he didn't even realise he'd woken Dust until he went to get up in order to start cleaning (Because there was popcorn everywhere, it was in his carpets), and found a pair of hands dragging him back to the couch.
"Nope, too early." With that eloquent sentence, Dust, terroriser of worlds, murderer of hundreds, let out a kitten-like yawn and fell back into position against Nightmare's shoulder. He really didn't want to disturb Dust, but there wasn't any way the leftover anxiety was going to let him rest.
"Let me go; Someone has to pick up."
"It can wait until morning."
"Technically, it is morning." Dust made a noise somewhere in-between a snort and a groan at his reply and raised half-lidded sockets up to glare at him without any heat.
"You know what I meant; It can wait until a reasonable hour." He squinted and grumbled to himself as the light from the TV caught him the wrong way. "What are you even doing awake? It's far too early to be up. No one else is even up yet." A pair of clicking needles quietly wormed their way into the conversation to dispute that observation. "Well, except for him."
In fairness to Dust, Error had been pretty quiet. Sitting curled up in the armchair that they'd reserved for when he wasn't feeling up to physical contact, he'd been quietly knitting away since before Nightmare had even stirred. But, then again, Error had sleep patterns that put Nightmare's to shame, so it wasn't that unusual.
"Dust has a good point; what did stir you so badly?" Error carefully set his knitting to the side, staring intently at the two on the couch. "You woke peacefully, I had assumed you would just fall back to sleep. What startled you?" Nightmare grumbled a bit, his face tinting blue slightly.
"…I couldn't find Horror…" It was all he said, but it was all he needed to; Dust and Error let out groans in unison.
"You stress far too much." Dust settled against his side, doing a wonderful job of, almost innocently, pinning Nightmare in place; it was quite the good deception, even though Nightmare already knew about this trick of his. "Not a single being, no matter what their skills, would be able to sneak into this place undetected, and you know it."
"Besides, you'd hope that after last time, people would have more sense than to try taking one of us." The only reason Error could say it was because he was the one taken, but it still made Dust and Nightmare wince at the reminder. A Swap!Papyrus, not the Swap!Papyrus, but one who'd heard about Error and that particular Swap!Sans, had thought himself clever to kidnap the destroyer of AU's. Nightmare and the rest of the evil Sans' had taken offence to that and rained hell upon his entire world. By the end, they'd made him regret ever thinking up that particular scheme; or he would have regretted it, if he'd still been alive to regret, but that was beside the point. Nightmare didn't think he'd ever had been as emotional as that time. (The others had thought it to be rage; Privately, he thought it was fear. Whichever it was, he'd made sure to keep them all in sight for the next several days. It eased the coil in his ribcage, being able to check on all of them at once.)
"The point remains, Nightmare, you should go back to sleep. We're all here, we're all safe, and cleaning can wait until a proper hour." And apparently, that was all Error would have to say on the subject, as he picked up his knitting again and continued with some new project. Dust seemed quite welcome to the idea, settling down almost immediately; he'd been hanging onto consciousness by a thread, and now that an opportunity to go back to sleep presented itself, he took it. He was soon slumbering against Nightmare's shoulder. With no other option presented to him, Nightmare took one last glance around the room; making sure everyone was exactly where he'd last seen them. His eye closed almost against his will, and he found himself curled up to Dust. The steady clicks of the knitting needles slowly eased the last dregs of tension and anxiety that had coiled in his ribcage; he drifted off without even realising.