Pressing his back teeth together firmly, Oswald forces himself to endure Ed's vague gushing in favour of trying to hear what's in and around the words themselves, piece them together with what else he's been told so far and try and make sense of everything as best he can.

Maybe he has to entertain that this dream is real for now, just in the hypothetical.

Say it is real, he reasons with himself, say that Ed has been here for almost half a year. Oswald had five months of Edward on ice only to find that nothing has truly settled in terms of his feelings about their whole messy departure from one another.

But this Ed, if what he says is true, doesn't know about their 'argument.' Hell, this Ed has never even met Isabelle. Isabella. Whatever.

Whatever happens, has happened, you are my only friend and I am attempting to help you right now.

It would be such an impressively good ploy, an opportunity to reenact the very play Ed used on Oswald before, a true feat of 'fool me twice' of epic proportions.

Oswald sucks on his teeth, the tip of his tongue caught between them behind his lips as he tries to keep himself grounded.

"I already hate this place," he admits, "Dream, nightmare, hallucination. Whatever it may be. It's a vicious mockery of a place purely in its inception."

Just as you are. He imagines stabbing Ed in the throat for a brief moment, flexes his fingers a few times, forces them still and into a fist instead as he remembers something else.

"You said Victor is here also. That he told you about our... disagreement," he pauses, watching Ed's reactions out the corner of his eye, "He didn't tell you about the nature of it? What it was about?"