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Dream lies on the floor of his cell, hands behind his head, and watches the clock tick. The second hand moves slowly, regularly, predictably. Tick, tick, tick. No variation. No change. No fun.
Things he can hear: the bubbling of the lava. The beating of his heart and the rasp of his breaths. The ticking of the clock. The ever-present grinding of redstone mechanisms, somewhere deep within the walls, as the prison shifts around him.
There’s a crackle from the speaker, buried in the obsidian. Dream sits up so fast he nearly sprains his neck, then wastes a moment hating himself for his own eagerness, his own desperation to hear anything that isn’t the ticking of the clock and the beating of his heart and the incessant bubbling roar of the lava.
He’s just so fucking bored.
“You have a visitor, Dream,” Sam’s voice crackles over the speaker, as monotone as it always is, these days. Warden Sam. Dream wonders if he’s liking his new job. Wonders if he likes the taste of power and of absolute control it must bring.
A visitor. Dream smiles.
Tommy? It has to be Tommy, back to gloat again. There’s- well. There aren’t that many other options. If George or Sapnap were going to come, they- would’ve come by now. It’s been… two weeks? Three? And they still haven’t come. Nobody has, as he stares at walls and runs figures in his head and feels himself slowly losing his mind; nobody has, except for Tommy.
So it’s gotta be Tommy… maybe Ranboo? Tubbo? …No, probably Tommy. And that’s good. That’s great. Tommy’s always been fun and he’s always been predictable, and right now Dream is in desperate need of entertainment and control both. He needs pieces to play with again, now that the board’s been swept and he’s left to just look at the blank black and white squares left behind and quietly go mad from boredom.
The lava drains, slow, a low gurgling noise rising from the floor as it goes, and slowly, slowly, the curtain falls. He’s already turning over lines in his head, cutting or apologetic or hopeful or cruel, when the lava wall falls far enough for him to catch first sight of his visitor, and then the words die in his throat all at once.
It’s not Tommy. It’s not George or Sapnap, not Tubbo or Ranboo.
Puffy is glancing back over her shoulder, nodding at something Sam is saying, and then she turns back to look at Dream, and-
And it was easy when Tommy visited, all full of fire and vindictive glee, easy to mess with and even easier to read. It was easy, then, to plead and pout and scrape, to play the game just like the two of them always have and always will.
Puffy doesn’t- she’s not-
Why does she look so sad?
Puffy’s never been intimidating, not to him, all rainbow curls and big smiles as she is, but right here and right now, the grief in her eyes is so awfully heavy, and it’s so disconcerting that Dream has to glance away as she steps onto the platform and is ferried across the lake of lava.
There’s a long, stretching sort of silence as she steps off. He hears Sam say, dimly, “Enjoy your visit.”
Puffy looks at him with eyes that hurt, and for the first time since he was imprisoned, Dream wishes Tommy hadn’t broken his mask.
“I almost got got by a creeper two days ago, d’you know that?” she says suddenly, leaning against the wall and folding her arms, tone light and conversational. “It was kinda funny. I heard it! It was this rustling, in the bushes behind me, but I didn’t think anything of it until it was like right on top of me, because, well-“
She smiles, wistful, and doesn’t finish, but he can hear the end of the sentence anyways, hanging unspoken in the air. I thought it was you.
“Things are quieter without you out there, duckling,” she says after a moment, and something in his chest hurts. “In a good way, I think. Everyone’s finally got some peace, at least for the moment. I think it’s peace.”
He doesn’t regret anything, except maybe trusting Punz, and he has to keep remembering that, or else he’ll lose his mind in here. He doesn’t regret anything, except maybe the pitiless grief on Puffy’s face and the way her whole voice hurts when she calls him by that silly little nickname. He doesn’t regret anything.
“Well, that’s good,” he says. “I’m glad.” And then, a little hopefully, “I’d like to see it sometime, you know.”
She looks at him for a moment, then sighs, shakes her head. “I don’t feel bad for you,” she says bluntly. “If you didn’t want to end up here, you shouldn’t have hurt everyone so much! It’s nobody’s fault except yours that you’re in here. I hope you know that.”
He doesn’t regret anything.
“You could’ve- you could’ve just lived, you know? You could’ve…” she trails off, stares at the obsidian wall for a moment. “I made a house for you. Dunno if you ever even saw it. It’s gone now, anyways.“
He… thinks he remembers that, a little. It was a humble little thing, not really his style. He only noticed it once or twice, offhand, on the way to more important things.
There were flowers by the door.
“I missed you,” he tells her.
She huffs, and the sound is probably meant to be indignant but it comes out too wet to be effective. “Yeah, I bet.”
“I did! It’s- there’s nobody in here. Sam doesn’t talk to me, I haven’t even seen any of the guards- there’s nothing.” The desperation that comes out in his voice is a lot realer than he’d like it to be, and he stomps down hard on the edge of panic that tries to creep up on him.
She just looks at him, and she still looks so sad, but there’s no pity there, really, no remorse, nothing to leverage or pick apart or use. “I wonder if that’s how Tommy felt?”
And, well. There’s nothing he can say to that, is there.
When he doesn’t answer, she frowns and turns to leave, and his heartbeat trips in panic before he can help it. “Wait! Wait, wait, wait, wait,” he says hurriedly, reaching out for her shoulder before catching himself.
She pauses, looks back.
“Will you come back?” he asks, and tries not to sound like he’s pleading, he doesn’t want to sound like he’s pleading.
“‘Course I will,” she says, like it’s obvious. “Don’t be stupid, duckling.”
And then there’s shattering glass and the hiss of a potion and she’s gone, and he’s alone again, but for the sound of the clock ticking and the gurgling of the lava and the beating of his heart.
“I won, you know,” he says to the empty cell, to the place where Puffy isn’t anymore. “I did.”
And he did, and that’s true, because his world is at peace now, because everyone came together and everything is fallen back into its rightful place; and yet when the glassy smooth and unbreakable walls echo the words back at him, they sound terribly hollow.
Dream doesn’t regret anything, but standing there with bare obsidian walls closing in all around him, the ticking of the clock scratching slow and steady against his skull-
Standing there, he can’t help but think he’d like a little house with flowers by the door, right about now.