Chapter Text
Dream woke up to sunlight, the rays touching skin that was far too pale, eyes that were far too dull. At first he was confused. Confused why it wasn’t dark, wondering if his escape had just been another dream. It wouldn’t have been the first time. But the panic faded as the light slowly warmed, the softness of its heat unfamiliar against his skin. It was different from the lava of his cell. Kinder.
Still, it took minutes until the panic had faded from his chest, minutes for the world to come into focus. As he moved to sit up Dream landed on his broken wrist, letting out a broken gasp at the pain. It buckled under his weight, jagged edges of bone pressing against tender flesh, and he was sent falling back towards the roof he had been laying on.
He bit down on his cheek as he housed himself off of the roof, tears forming at the corners of his eyes before rolling down his cheeks. The coppery taste of blood filled his mouth, but he couldn’t bring himself to care nearly as much as he should have. After all he had been through worse.
At least the pain was familiar.
A couple minutes later Dream managed to get down from the roof, half crawling, half falling onto the grass below. It was wet with dew, and he took a moment to admire the drops. The way they shone in the sun, the way they felt against his bare hands, cool and crisp. All little things that he had missed in the prison.
There, the water had always been uncomfortably warm. That tended to happen when you were surrounded by a fortress of molten rock.
Shaking the memories from his head, Dream turned back to the blades of grass, still covered in tiny droplets. They sparkled as he blinked his eyes, and he reached out his hand to touch one, to make sure that it was real this time. To make sure that it wasn’t another one of his cruel dreams.
As the wetness rolled down his finger, Dream let out a breath that he didn’t know he had been holding, his lungs complaining as he did, sending burning ribbons of pain shooting out from his chest and leaving him gasping for air. When he reached a hand up to his mouth, it was stick and red, and he couldn’t help but smile. Because he was dying, he had to be. Because after everything, this was what would finally end him. The gasps eventually turned to coughs, and he doubled over the ground, as his body shook.
He didn’t want to die. He wasn’t ready.
And maybe he had been wrong, maybe he was the monster that they saw in him, but he was still scared. Scared of what would come afterwards, terrified of what wouldn’t. And maybe, just maybe, there was a tiny bit of him that still needed to say goodbye.
It took Dream far longer than he would like to admit to get his breathing back under control, but eventually the blackness receded from his vision. Months of involuntary practice helped, but there were still limits to what he could do. What he could survive. At the end of the day, he was only human. At the end of the day, he was another one of them.
There had always been limits. There had always been lines he didn’t dare cross, rules that even he couldn’t bend.
He lost track of the minutes it took him to finally push himself to his feet, leaning against the skeleton of the building for support. He tried to take a step on shaking legs, but his knee gave in and he fell to the ground again, new waves of pain washing over him. He was drowning in it, floating all alone in a massive ocean with no hope of being saved. This time, he couldn’t help the nausea that rose in his throat and he gagged as more blood splatters landed on the grass below him.
But Dream had never been one to give up, never been one to stop. And so he kept swimming even though he couldn’t see the shore. Step after step, minute after minute, he finally made it through the doorway. The sun was already high in the sky and what was left of his uniform was coated in blood, but he didn’t care.
He finally let his eyes fall shut as he slumped against one of the chests. His entire body burned from the couple of steps he had taken, and the taste of iron had mixed with the bile in his throat.
Sometimes, the pain seemed endless. Sometimes it seemed infinite. Every time that Sir left the vault, Dream thought that the next time couldn’t possibly be worse ,thought that there was nothing more that they could do to him, nothing that they hadn’t already done.
Every single time, they proved him wrong.
It took all of his remaining strength to reach into one of the chests, to grab an apple and bring it to his mouth. To hope that it would be enough to heal him. That somehow, he was still strong enough to make it through this, even after the months of torture.
The one thing that kept him alive was the knowledge that he had to survive. Not only for him, but for them. To prove them wrong, to prove himself wrong. And so as his vision turned to black, Dream prayed for the mercy of whatever gods there were. As the darkness took him, he prayed that he would live.
The next time he woke up, it was dark outside. He remembered that his mouth was dry and had vague memories of stumbling out into the night, before it turned to gray again.
And if Dream imagined hard enough, he could almost hear a familiar voice, could almost feel arms gently picking him up and carrying him away.