Chapter Text
“What was that all about?” Tommy said, spinning around as soon as they were far enough from Bad’s mansion. “Tired of being enemies? It’s a good thing that bitch is gone!”
“Tommy, calm down.” Tubbo said softly. Tommy shook his head wildly, curls flopping into his eyes.
“I’m not going to calm down! We should be getting the discs back and partying, not offering to help!”
Didn’t Tubbo remember what Dream did to him? What he did to Wilbur? The man was a monster and Tommy was glad he was gone. In fact, he hoped the man never came back. He wanted Dream out of their lives forever.
“Tommy!” Tubbo said sharply. He stopped, grabbing Tommy by the shoulders. Tommy glanced away, not quite able to meet Tubbo’s eyes.
“You’ve seen what he did.” Tommy said, hating the crack in his voice. But Tubbo had seen how crazed Wilbur was when he was unveiled as the traitor. The fact he was even considering this was messed up.
“Of course I know what he did.” Tubbo said. “And I’m still mad about it. Furious actually. But I also need to do what’s best for L’Manburg.”
“How is helping with bringing bitch boy back helping L’Manburg?” Tommy said, gesturing wildly. That made no sense! “That man is the opposite of good for us! He’s actively trying to destroy us.”
“That may be true.” Tommy said. “But did you see how George and Sapnap looked at us? Even Bad.”
Tommy paused for a moment, thinking it over. Well, they had been all threatening and shit, but that didn’t mean much. “I doubt any of them would actually do that.”
“Definitely not normally.” Tubbo said. “But, End, Dream might be terrible but if they even think we were involved in some kind of scheme to make him leave the server forever… We’d do the same if we thought Dream did that to one of us.”
“We can take them.” Tommy said fiercely. He was stronger now. He’d fought them, and actually came out well before. And he was even better now. “It doesn’t matter what they think.”
“Maybe.” Tubbo said. But there was a crack in the anxious President facade Tommy had become used to seeing. “But I meant it when I said I’m tired of fighting. We can’t keep rushing into every fight. At some point, you gotta be the bigger person.”
“And forget about what Dream’s done?” If Tommy was calmer, he’d regret the acid in his words.
“No, I just-“ Tubbo released Tommy, his hands fluttering anxiously. “We’re not forgetting. And you don’t have to forgive. But if helping them find Dream keeps us out of a war, then I have to do it.”
“I still think it’s stupid.” Tommy said, gritting his teeth. Okay, maybe he was just a little bit tired of fighting too. Just a little bit. It was mostly for Tubbo anyways. “And I still think we should take back the discs while he’s gone.”
“Maybe.” Tubbo said. “But like fairly. Because we’re dealing with politics and stuff now.”
“End, I never should have done this. How soon can I quit?”
“You quit when I quit. We suffer together.” Tubbo said, mock seriously. Tommy grinned back at him. He wasn’t really okay with any of this. But he was always done to thwart Dream’s plans. Because this probably was some sort of evil scheme. It was exactly Dream’s style.
They started walking again. It was a nice day. Far too nice to have to deal with this.
“I really do miss him.” Tommy’s head snapped around to stare at Tubbo. Tubbo looked away, wringing his hands. “I can’t forgive him for what he’s done to you and I can’t ever forget it. But I miss the Dream from the beginning of the server. It’ll never be the same, but I miss who he was.”
“Dream was always a bitch.” Tommy said automatically. He didn’t like thinking of those times. Thinking of those times meant thinking of a time when Wilbur was sane and his brother, where fighting meant short scuffles with the Dream Team that could be barely called that.
Back when Tommy had three lives and a whole world in front of him.
“I mean, a bit.” Tubbo said.
“Oh, Tubbo’s popping off!”
“Really.” Tubbo said, giggling a bit. “But he was nicer then too. He used to tell us stories, remember? About all the crazy stuff they did. So, yeah, I don’t miss the Dream we have now. But I do kind of miss that Dream, even if he’s been gone for a long time.”
“I don’t.” Tommy said. There was too much hurt between him and Dream to think back to then. The Dream who told them wild stories was also the same Dream that had attacked them in the control room, that had shot him and taken another one of his lives. “You’ve always been kind of soft though.”
“Hey!” Tubbo said. He ran a hand through his hair. “We’ll offer help. Maybe we find him, maybe we don’t.”
“Maybe he’s a crazed psychopath still or maybe a slightly less crazed psychopath.”
“Let me finish. Either way, we’ve got to make sure L’Manburg comes through.” Tubbo said. “But you don’t actually have to help. I can handle it. There are others too, who’d probably agree if we asked.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Tommy said affectionately. “I ain’t fucking happy about the plan. But I’ll go with it, at least so I can tell you I told you so at the end.”
“You know what? If it goes that badly, go for it.” Tubbo said. Tommy threw an arm around his shoulder, pulling him closer. “I’ve always kind of wanted to play manhunt.”
“I never wanted to humiliate you like that.” Tommy said. He wheezed as Tubbo elbowed him in the side. “It’s true! I’d catch you in like five seconds. And you could never catch me.”
“I totally could win.” Tubbo said. “And who knows, maybe we’ll see the End.”
Okay, that was actually a very cool and tempting prospect. “We could start a smuggling ring.” Tommy said, already thinking of the possibilities. The End was banned which meant anything from there would be high value.
“Tommy, come on, we’ve got to look at least semi legal.” Tubbo said. “At least for a country that kind of started because of a drug caravan.”
“It’s like returning to our roots and all that shit! Everyone always talks about learning from your past.” Tubbo made a noise of pure frustration and Tommy laughed.
“And you took that to mean becoming a better smuggler?” Tommy flashed Tubbo a bright grin. Tubbo facepalmed.
“Exactly.” He said. They could totally do it. Technically, what he and Tubbo said was law. They could just make it legal. He could tell Tubbo knew what he was thinking because he started scrunching up his face in that ‘Tommy has a great idea and I’m not gonna acknowledge that’ way.
“Okay. We’re gonna table that for now.” Tubbo said with a sigh. “Let’s get back and tell everyone the news.”
“You think they’re gonna take it well?” Tommy said with a grimace. He wasn’t the only one with bad memories hanging around. End, he hated having to be the responsible one sometimes.
“Probably not.” Tubbo said. “But we can handle it.”
Tommy smiled back at Tubbo. Yeah; they could handle anything together.
And if Dream thought he could mess with this, than the smiley bastard would have a fight on his hands.
Dream was not plotting anything. In fact, he was just chopping down a tree.
He grimaced at the tree. It’s not that he couldn’t chop down a tree. He just forgot how slow and annoying it was with just a stone axe. Was Nightmare a bit overkill for chopping trees? Probably, but this slowness was the exact reason he had always used it.
Well. Until he lost it.
Dream took a step back, picking up the wood he collected. He had wanted to be better equipped by now, but lingering fear had pushed him to head further and further way before he started collecting wood and stone.
It was stupid. Even if someone decided to drag him back to a prison that wasn’t even built yet, who would notice a missing tree?
“Nobody that’s who.” Dream grumbled to himself. He checked the wood in his inventory before nodding. Honestly, he’d overcollected, used to overstocking whenever possible for manhunts.
End, he missed manhunts. The rush of adrenaline, the satisfaction of winning. His friends laughing and trying to kill him-
Dream cut that thought off. That- The manhunts had been before that. And either way, they were obsolete now. He’d doubted he’d ever play again.
Right. Dream pulled up the admin screen. Maybe it was cheating, just a bit, to check the biome. But it was cheating for a good cause! The faster he found a cave with iron, the quicker he could construct a nether portal.
He found a good sized cave around one hundred blocks away. Dream commanded the screen to close, stretching and letting the sunlight warm him.
End, he’d never thought he’d get so excited about standing in the sunlight. Breathing air that wasn’t tainted with smoke and the odd smell of crying obsidian. For a moment, the world was peaceful, quiet.
It was only because he was so still that Dream heard it. The crashing sound of someone walking through bushes.
He felt his heartbeat speed up, breathing quicken. It felt like someone wrapped a vise around his chest.
No one should be out here. He was far into the uncharted wilderness, away from either country. Even Techno’s house would be a couple days journey.
Either someone had suddenly decided to go exploring in the woods or he was being hunted.
But why? Why, why, why? Had he been that bad at this point in time? So bad that they wanted to imprison him again instead of letting him go into exile peacefully?
Dream forced his scattered thoughts back together, readjusting his mask. He couldn’t go back. That was ironclad in his mind. He couldn’t go back to the prison. It was too much, he’d never get freedom like this again.
With that in mind, Dream turned and ran, fleeing the clearing.
His footsteps were light and quick through the undergrowth, scanning for an escape. End, he just had to choose one of the flatter areas. Dream had always excelled in parkour and cliff diving, but if he tried to jump to the trees now, he’d be seen and there were no cliffs around.
Which meant he’d have to escape by getting out of sight before whatever searcher saw his player marker.
Making a split second decision, Dream slid to a stop, heading toward a tree. If he thought chopping wood was slow before, it felt like it took millennia now. The two logs joined his inventory and he quickly dug a hole beneath it.
It almost felt robotic. Dig three deep. Hop in. Brace for the short fall. Replace logs and top block of dirt.
Dream activated sneak, sliding down the wall of his hideout for a moment. Exhaustion weighed heavy on him, only reduced by the adrenaline pumping in his veins. He forced himself to his feet again, swaying with the effort.
It didn’t help how intensive sneak was. He had to focus most of his attention on the command, making him more and more nervous as the noise grew closer.
Did he activate sneak too late? Would they see the edges of recently dug dirt around the base of the tree?
The noise stopped. Dream froze, axe clutched tightly in his hand.
“The compass says he should be around here.”
No.
No no no nO NO NO NO-
They- they weren’t supposed to follow him. Dream pressed hard down on his mask, trying not to make any noise despite how his stupid body wanted to sob.
“I’ll be the one taking your last life.”
George never even visited.
He’d thought that no one would care about him leaving, that their anger would still be cool embers. And yet, here was Sapnap.
And if he had a compass, that meant only one thing.
“I told you that you were going to jinx it.” George. Dream’s heart plummeted further. “He’s probably a hundred blocks in the air, doing his stupid fucking wheezy laugh.”
“Language!”
Could this get any worse?
“I mean, he’s done that before. Above or below?”
Apparently yes.
Dream took a shaky breath, trying to press down on his emotions with every bit of the control he perfected for his plans. Alright. Logical planning time. He could… deal with the emotional bit later. Maybe.
Later, he could pick apart every word they say. Were they angry? Annoyed? Tired? He couldn’t tell. Not right now. There was bigger stuff to focus on.
He had four hunters after him who were all familiar with his traveling style. They had location compasses for him. Presumably they had come ready to fight too. And possibly, to take three lives.
Or possibly, to take one and imprison him again.
The only advantages he had was that they knew his general location, not his exact and that he had gathered some resources before they started pursuing them. But he couldn’t sneak here forever. Eventually, they’d dig around and find his hiding spot.
Dream swapped his axe out for a shovel, gritting his teeth. It looked like he’d be digging his way to the cave.
“Oh, Dream! Where are you?”
Dream stiffened as Sapnap called out. Pressed down on the habitual taunts, the laughter, the burning need to dig his way out, fling himself into the man’s arms and promise to be better.
Collapse to the ground laughing like they had done before, when manhunts were games, and everything was okay in the aftermath. Have a warm night around a hasty campfire, telling stories and crash hard in a tired pile, content that they had his back.
But he couldn’t do that.
He was a monster, their monster. They’d never let him go back peacefully. They had hunted him down when he chose to leave. If they missed him, they missed the Dream before this mess of a server had happened. Not the broken monster he was now.
Anger briefly sparked at that, he had done it all for them and they rejected him for trying to make things peaceful, keep the family together when everyone seemed to be trying to tear it apart. But he shoved it down. Anger had no use right now.
He couldn’t. He couldn’t stop now.
(But for all he had claimed to have cut all attachments, they had been the one chain he could not break. All he could do was hack away at their side until he knew that he would never be welcome again. And that had to be enough.
Tommy asked what he missed while in prison.
Dream had missed them long before he was trapped in that cursed place.)
He broke past the dirt into stone, their voices becoming more and more muffled. Mechanically, he swapped the shovel for a pickaxe, mind already running through calculations.
At most, he had a few minutes before they noticed and worked out the slight directional tilt on their compasses.
Outrunning them wasn’t his best idea, even if he craved the adrenaline that came from racing away from pursuers. Dream slammed the pick into the stone again, relishing the burn in his muscles. If they were smart, if they knew him, they’d have brought speed potions.
He was fast, but so were they. Speed potions put them on a field too level to be comfortable. One hard hit too many, and he’d be waking up, surrounded by enemies.
He should have brought Nightmare. Now, he was left scrambling to get resources while his friends were already geared up. He didn’t want to hurt anyone again, but sometimes the illusion of being willing and able was enough to drive people away.
Dream slammed the pick into stone again, ignoring how his hands were starting to shake. This tunnel wasn’t Pandora’s Box. But the stone seemed to press in on him, crushing him. If he closed his eyes for even a moment, he could feel the sweltering heat of the lava.
You’re not there, he thought. Not trapped. And if he had his way, he’ll never be trapped like that again.
Boxed like a fish.
That joke was less funny now.
He nearly cried in relief when his pick broke into open air, stumbling forward into the cave. It was tiny, but it kept going deeper.
Dream covered up the tunnel behind him, hesitating as he glanced up at that little glimmer of sunlight.
They would definitely notice if he blocked off the entrance, the dirt blocks lacking grass. It wasn’t because he was uncomfortable at the thought of being blocked in here. It wasn’t.
Just practicality.
Dream shouldered his pickaxe, footsteps echoing as he headed further into the cave. If he was lucky, they’d give up and go home without him.
If he wasn’t, then it would be time for a manhunt. And this time, he couldn’t lose. No matter what.