Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Humans are afraid because their bodies are frail. You’ve learned this. They need to lie down every night and stay still for hours, and they need to eat every day.

They only have enough energy for three regenerations within a short time before their bodies give out permanently. The grace period for the body to recover can be anywhere from a few months to two years, depending on how weak in body and soul they are. Part of the horror is the uncertainty of whether a third death is actually the third and final.  

You’re not human. You hardly ever need to close your eyes and disconnect your mind at night, and your body isn’t satisfied by the same foods the others eat. You don’t know exactly what you are, but you know what you’re not.   

(The teeth jutting from your arms and stomach might also be a dead giveaway.)

You don’t die. Humans only have three lives, but you’ve never found your limit. (A lie—you’ve come dangerously close, years and years ago—) You’re not weak. (You’ll never beg again.)

You are not human, and you are not weak.

***

It’s been four days.

The mechanisms click repeatedly overhead, and the veil of lava begin to descend. There’s a visitor. You don’t know who because there’s no way to talk to anyone outside of Pandora’s Box.

Engrained habit makes you look around the cell to see if you need to clean up for a visitor. Really? you laugh to yourself. There’s nothing to clean. You’ve always been careful about your appearance, though. It’s part of the mask’s appeal.

Minutes later, the lava veil drops. It’s Punz.

Nerves clench up your stomach. You shouldn’t doubt, but you do—where do you stand with Punz?

Punz looks at you inscrutably. “Does anyone watch or listen to these visits?”

You shake your head. The islanded cell is too far out to be overheard unless they shout.

Lines appear on Punz’s face. “You’re an idiot,” he snaps. “You’re an idiot.” He says much worse, punctuating each with swearing.  

The tension in your stomach loosens with each insult.

“You almost died, Dream. What could possibly be worth that? You’re so stupid. And what the hell were you doing to those kids? Traumatizing them? Hurting them? The whole server was about to let you die for that.” Punz paces, voice rough with controlled fury. “Well?”

“I’m impressed you managed to unite most of the server,” you say.  

“It’s not hard when they all hate your stupid guts.”

You wheeze despite yourself. “Yeah.”

Punz stops pacing and folds his arms. He studies you, the cell, the low ceiling and the black walls. The combat specialist can’t see your face, but you knows he can read the small tells in your body language from years of sparring. What does he see?

“Would you have killed them?” Punz asks.

It’s—a razor down your insides, the guilt that suddenly spawns, as you remember Tubbo’s eyes, filled with resignation, and Tommy, crying. You remember thinking you’ve crossed a line and feeling it pass through your fingers, but you were too far in at that point and you couldn’t stop and maybe they’d think for once about what was and wasn’t dying for. People? Friends? Yes, but bringing your friend to fight for discs and things and pointless attachments…and having the nerve to hesitate when given the choice between them…

And—well, if you use that razor to cut to the core of it—you’ve always enjoyed a feeling of control, and of talking and being heard.

And it all compounded and compounded until you snapped, feeling, feeling—nothing. That’s what pushed you off the edge that night. The plan had been to threaten to lock both of them away until the server arrived, but you changed it at the last minute. Your control had snapped in a dizzying rush, like falling off a cliff you didn't know existed.

You’ve lost control of yourself twice. Once on that obsidian wall, and once in your obsidian pit.

(You don’t know if you actually would have followed through in killing Tubbo, in that moment. You were uncontrollable. Numb. Unhinged and disconnected from everything.) 

Well, now they’ll have time to recover. They weren’t seriously hurt, just cut a bit and leaving with a better grasp of their own mortality. They’d be fine, with time. A scare (or a scar) was sometimes the best teacher—you’d learned that growing up.

And, you reassure yourself, if you had slipped, you know you can bring the dead back.  

“Of course not,” you tell Punz.

“You’ve killed a lot of people before. It’s easy for you.”

You roll your eyes to break the tension. “You’re one to talk, mercenary,” you say playfully, using Punz’s self-proclaimed title, earned from his work on many servers, then drop the smile from your voice. “A hit to the heart’s an easy respawn, you know that. Nearly painless.”

He stares at you with an expression you can’t quite decipher.  

Are you being too flippant? You sober your tone. You can’t afford to alienate Punz. “Everyone’s okay?”

“Yeah. Surprisingly.”

“Good. Good.”

“Good?” Punz swears, walking forward and grabbing your shoulder with strong fingers. “You’re such a bastard. This is so damn stupid. You’ve traumatized some kids, hardened everyone, and for what?”

“I think you’re underestimating the power of trauma-bonding,” you say wryly. “And human hatred.” (You did. You did not expect to be spawn-killed over and over and begging for life. But, you suppose, you of all people can understand snapping points.)

“You think these bonds are going to last? Peacetime doesn’t stay,” Punz says. He would know, considering his profession and reputation on various servers.

“I think you’ll be surprised,” you reply. You briefly curl your fingers around Punz’s wrist on your shoulder, as comfort or warning you can’t tell, and Punz immediately lets go. 

Punz crosses his arms, and the anger seems to fade into something harder, calmer. Eyes narrowed, he asks, “Can you bring the dead back to life?”

“Would I say otherwise at this point?” You rest your head on your knee, smiling.

“Not with me, Dream,” Punz warns. Don’t pull the act on me. “Can you?”

“Pets, at least.”

Punz swears softly. He stares at you, and the clock ticks on. Pale skin, pale hair—it’s easy to see the blue circles below his eyes and the bruises on his hands. He looks tired, more tired than you’ve ever seen him. What have you done to this server? What have we all done to each other?

“I’m glad you visited,” you say softly.

“I’m leaving,” Punz says. “A few weeks. After this—all this.”

You nod. That’s good. That’s fine, though you’ll miss the prospect of Punz’s visits. But it’s a few weeks. A few months, maybe. You’ll be fine. You can handle this even if your only ally doesn’t visit.

Punz is, first and foremost, a good mercenary, which makes him the most trustworthy. He has principles outside of friendship and fragile favor. Once he decides to take a contract, he keeps and finishes it.

“Dream, you bastard,” Punz says, eyes tight, “you should have paid me more for this.”   

***

Eleven days.

The entire server believes that you’re on your third life, as it would be for any other on the server, and it’s true, in a way. It’s your third, but not final, life.

You’re not sure how many lives you have, but past experience says you can survive much, much more than you should. You’re not interested in finding the limit.

“If you don’t do it, I’ll just kill you.”

It’s been the constant threat for the past few weeks. You’re not afraid of losing your third life—the bitter fear is for the moment when your former friends will look you in the eye and decide with cold precision that you need to be put down like a mad dog. When you’re no longer useful.

It’s going to happen.

Whether after you revive the dead or when some faction needs a scapegoat. Whether they decide to execute you with a trial or kill all memory of you by sentencing you to isolation.

You’re not human, or hybrid, and you know this, and they don’t—but they’ve seen you as less than that for a long time now. A faceless mask. A heartless manipulator. Someone dangerous and uncontrollable.

But that’s what they are, you say to your clock. Dangerous. Uncontrollable. I wouldn’t have had to go so far otherwise.

***

You really don’t understand. You know it’s not kind, what you did, but you’ve been through worse. You thought you were being lenient.

It was like a timeout. Finally, some real consequences for Tommy’s actions. You gave him several chances, and trials, and warnings. He lied, and swore, and tried to threaten you. (He tried to threaten you—of course you’d retaliate harder.) When he was exiled, you let anyone visit.

You didn’t keep him in a cage. You let him walk around free—you told him he could move places if he wanted. You checked to make sure he had food, and weapons, and shelter. It's a far sight more than you ever had. 

Stomach cramps and you have no idea how long you've been in here and your body's eating itself —

Yes, making him drop his weapons and armor everyday wasn’t nice, but it was discipline. It made him behave better. It gave him something to do.

There’s not much room to move besides stretching to relieve some of the stiffness and if you move too much it'll draw attention—

You let everyone visit. (Not all of them at once for that beach party, of course—they’d probably turn against you and decide to bring him back with that many people together. Crowds were dangerous.)

He hated you for killing him twice (which was fair)—but both were in sanctioned warfare: once in a war they’d declared, and once in a duel they’d agreed to. It wasn’t like you’d spawn-trapped them all, caging in their location and slashing at your inhuman face each time you’d just come back to life hoping you’d stay dead—

Not the worst that could happen. 

Tommy got to talk to people. He was just stupid, and he didn’t learn anything. Why didn’t he learn anything? It worked with you, after all. You didn’t turn out too bad.

There are far worse things out there than big bad Dream and his obsidian walls. There are far worse things to lose than discs.

And yes, Tommy didn’t handle it as well as you expected, and that surprised you, that a few weeks of living in the woods was enough to turn that little gremlin hysterical. Maybe you did feel bad when you saw him trying not to cry, later, shaking at the sight of you, swearing weakly. But a quiet part of you scoffed in disbelief: that’s all it took?

***

It’s been twelve days and you’re not writing that novel for Tommy, thank you.

***

This prison will not break you. You know this. It may wear you thin, but you can handle it. You’ve done this before, and that, then, was far worse. Here, you get food, and books to write in, and space to move.

But one thing you realize is that past memories can’t inoculate you against present pain. Memories you thought you’d forgotten creep back.

The raw potatoes— as you prefer, not baked— aren’t enough to keep your strength up, but you refuse to ask Sam for raw meat. You’re not that type of monster.

Though you do nothing you get so, so tired. You sleep—or you think it’s sleep—without meaning to, and it terrifies you the first time you wake and you’re in a different position than you remember. People, humans, lie down and close their eyes at night, but you never have needed to sleep unless you’re sick, and despite the drama of it you’re scared of the feeling of brushing death when your mind slips away. Your mind is your weapon, your entertainment, and your solace, and having it glitch on you triggers a deep-set fear.

Because yes, you’re a monster for what you’ve done, etc., hurting the frail humans around you that you love, but you’re not insane. And you can’t be going insane.

You’re numb, and you’re bored, and you’re sleeping for the first time in years, but you’re not going insane. You’d know.

***

When Bad comes, you sit up and take notice. He smells strange. Like deep caves, but not the dust-scent of deep mining—the scent is like rotting vegetation, something sharp and sickly sweet.

Despite the smell, he’s so painfully optimistic, so Bad, it’s endearing.

“What’s your sentence? How long do you have?”

“Forever.”

“Well…forever’s not that long!” His audible wince almost startles a laugh out of you. Really, Bad?

He promises to advocate on your behalf and get plants, a definitive sentence, something. He doesn’t, and he doesn’t come back.

***

Sapnap visits.

You can’t hate him, and that’s what’s always made this difficult. He started so many wars and provoked so many senseless fights that you tried to mediate for, protect him, and yet he looks at you and says you deserve to be here.

You fake bravado. It’s what he expects, isn’t it? Stubborn, brilliant, determined, villainous Dream.

“If you escape, it won’t be Techno or Tommy who kills you,” he says calmly, with conviction. “I’ll be the one to take your final life.”

See—this? This is why attachments are useless.

You underline eventually and toss the book at him, turning away as he leaves.

***

It’s been thirteen days, and you’ve had four visitors if you include Sam.

It’s not difficult to figure out what each visitor wants. Mostly it seems to be satisfaction. They’re all seeking different reactions, and you give it to them, mostly.

Apologies. Humiliation. Humility. Tough stubbornness. Easy enough to feign. Sometimes you slip in some obvious manipulation that makes them immediately wary. It’s fun. Entertaining, you should say, or objectively interesting—it’s not really fun. It shouldn’t be fun.

Only a few visitors ever made the effort to submit to all of Sam’s protocols. The few visitors that came did so in the first week.

***

Seventeen days.  

You’re disappointed in yourself, because you’re already starting to crack. You’ve lasted longer than this in the before, haven’t you? And under far worse conditions.

The only difference now is that you loved and were once loved by are the ones who’ve left you here. Everything’s automated, by this point, so food comes without any human contact, and the only sounds are the hissing and crackling of the lava.

You get food! You get books! You have room to stretch your legs and water to drink! You even have a plan to escape eventually, so the situation is much, much different than before. You know how to deal with this—breathing exercises, meditation, brushing your hands down your arms and body to simulate contact.

But some seams are splitting, because the lava is beginning to sound like whispers, and memories you thought you’d buried are surging back in your waking thoughts. And you should be growing more tired from isolation but it’s a slow, poisonous, bitter anger that’s simmering through your body, getting stronger each day. The artificial fatigue weighs you down, yes, but in its place grows something ugly.

They did this to you, they left you here and hardly thought twice, they forgot you and you would never forget them, and yes, you’re a monster, yes, might deserve this but so do they for all the death and the hurt and the screaming and the lies and stealing that they’ve done to your world that you worked so hard to get and share—

This is why attachments are horrible and why they hurt—they will inevitably leave you for your flaws or they will be weaponized against you.

The fury makes you fantasize awful things that only bring guilt, not satisfaction, in the aftermath. Revenge is an unproductive concept but End it’s tempting some days, especially during the scarce visits where they look at you from the netherite wall with familiar eyes—eyes that look at you like you’re a monster, like you’re disgusting. (This time around it’s true, you guess. A year ago you would never have fantasized about putting an axe through Quackity’s smug mouth.) 

***

Ranboo comes. You talk.

***

Nineteen days.

“Dream?”

You freeze. It’s—you know that voice. That impossible, warm voice.

“Dream, I missed you.”

You cover your mouth, squeezing your eyes shut. It sounds like it’s coming from the entrance, but the lava is still hissing.

“Will you stay longer this time?”

Slowly, slowly, heart torn between longing and horror, you open your eyes.

There’s no one there. Of course there’s not.

***

It’s twenty-one days, three weeks, when you let yourself call out to Sam.

***

“The isolated cell was supposed to be a temporary thing, Sam,” you’d said to him on day five, and he’d replied:

“You’re too dangerous of a prisoner for any other cell. You built it for the most dangerous people on the server, didn’t you?”

You argued—“We built the other cells so people could walk around, Sam, because the prison was supposed to be humane and safe and just a temporary sentence for people who broke the rules, not—"

“Try to manipulate me again and your rations are cut.”

His voice had been so cold and sharp, so unlike Sam. Surprise and reactionary fear shut you up, and Sam was gone before you could open your mouth again.

***

And at twenty-one days, Sam comes, surprisingly. You immediately launch into your argument.

“Put chains on me, whatever you need, just take me to the normal cells for a day or so, please. I’ll comply with whatever security measures you need to take—just.” Your teeth snap shut. You’re not going to beg.

“Are you trying to give me orders,” Sam says flatly.

“It’s a—request. I can’t move, and it’s so hot.” You tap the obsidian floor, uncomfortably warm from layers of lava. “I—legitimately,” you huff a laugh, “I might go insane if I can’t move around.”

“Like Tommy went insane? Like how you drove him to the brink?” Sam’s hands flex on the trident. 

“I—” The quick turn-around trips up your sluggish brain. “I let him move around. People were free to visit him. He wasn’t ever in danger,” you defend.

“What a coincidence. People are free to visit you too, but they’re not.” He slams the trident on the ground—the vibration passes under your fingers—and stalks forward. “Do you think I can’t tell how different he was before and after? You think he hasn’t said what you did to him in exile? You manipulated him, his emotions, burned his things, and then you were going to kill him and Tubbo knowing they might be on their last lives.”

The trident presses into your shoulder.

“With how Tommy looked, he wouldn’t have survived another regeneration.”

You’re not going to win this if Sam concentrates on Tommy, but there’s really no way to divert the attention from that topic with it coming off as condescending or dismissive.

“I did go too far,” you say, softer, sincerity in your tone. Or should it be defeat? “That’s why I’m in here. I know that. Sam…”

“You are never leaving this cell, Dream. Get that through your head.” The trident suddenly presses harder into your chest. Sam looks down with disgust in his eyes. “I—and a lot of other people on this server—won’t hesitate to kill you if you leave this prison. By keeping you here, I’m keeping you safe and everyone else safe from you.”

It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt, because you saw this coming already. “And I get that, Sam—you can do whatever you want for security, things I don’t know about, but please let me walk around a bit.” Alright, you’re begging. You swallow. “Please, Sam, I’m hearing things—and I, I, my head, I could actually go—I can’t. Please.”

Sam turns, backlit by lava, and burns any further words from your throat with: “Good.”  

***

It’s been twenty-six days and you’re starving.

The prison gives you enough food, of course, if you’re behaving—it both was and wasn’t designed to be a slow death, metaphorically—but you’ve never eaten what everyone else eats and you don’t want to show that now.

Raw potatoes give you more energy than cooked potatoes, but you need something rawer, and you’re not about to ask Sam for raw meat. You’re not that kind of monster. Can you imagine how they’d see you, eating bloody chunks with your fingers in a cell?

***

Something’s wrong with Sam.

Sam comes anytime you do something remotely suspicious, so he’s the most frequent visitor. You need to see people to break the monotony since you’ve given up hope of going to a normal cell, so you throw little fits, changing it up when you get bored—tossing your clock into lava, burning your forearms, refusing to speak.

Sam is no longer Sam—he’s the Warden, and he’s as meticulous and relentless at that job as he would be with any redstone project. He’s harsh and cold and furious and paranoid in turns. You taste it in the air when he visits, even when he's silently bandaging your forearms. He’s dangerous—he’s realizing the power he has over every aspect of you, and he’s realizing that no one sees what he could do to you. Power changes people.

He likes the power he has over you, doesn’t he? He could do anything to you in here.

No one else comes.

And he comes in one day, when you’ve tossed too many things in lava, and he smells like burnt flesh. At first, horror churns your stomach because you’re hungry and does he smell like a meal? But then you realize you recognize the scent—it’s dead leaves under layers of autumn, it’s decay, and it’s exactly as Bad smelled those weeks ago.

***

Twenty-eight.

The impossible voice visits speaks again, and you shouldn’t want this, because it’s in your head and this is psychosis, but End you’ve missed hearing it—

“What new stories do you have to tell us this time, Dream?”

How long before the voices turn into visual hallucinations? How long before memories and reality mix? You know how the mind eats itself in isolation, if it’s too long, but knowing what’s happening only slows the process.

“Do you have any of those yellow apples? Those were really good!”

It’s easy to remember what you replied. “You only love me for the food,” you mouth back, a little smile wobbling.  

A young, brown-haired boy appears in the corner of your eye, stopping your heart with each glimpse.

***

Thirty-eight days. No one has asked you to bring the dead to life.

They locked you away and forgot about you.

It’s been thirty-eight days and you’re furious again for a brief flare. In a fit, you scream with horrible, grating sounds at the echoing walls, hearing the sound waves bounce back at your face.

The teeth growing from your knuckles haven’t been filed, barely peeking through the fingerless gloves, and you rake them down the obsidian. 

You scratch over, and over, and over, until it breaks the teeth tips into bits and pieces bounce off the floor.

When you tire, your hands are bloody and there are gashes in the obsidian. There’s a high-pitched, tinny sound that exists outside of your head.

It’s an alarm. The slashes in the wall were enough to summon the warden.

***

“Sam.”

Sam refuses to say a word, attaching cuffs to your wrists and securing you to the far wall. He replaces the obsidian block while you watch him.

“It was actually an accident, if you can believe that,” you say with some humor, voice rough from disuse.

The warden doesn’t respond. He leaves the cuffs on as he takes your hands to inspect them. Sam efficiently wipes away the blood and bandages the worst cuts. Your hands shake at the contact.  

“Sam,” you try again, but he leaves. You didn’t really expect much else, but something cold and horrible pushes you down to the ground when he’s gone.

***

You slash the walls again.

They want to break you down and defang you—and you know that, it’s why Sam put you in the Box and took away all the enrichment activities that should have been included—and you can fake it, you suppose, but your pride says otherwise. They won’t break you down into an obedient husk. You’ve done this before.

Sam chains you down for three days and thoroughly scours the prison for flaws. It’s overkill but part of you is gratified at the caution and wariness. At least you're still some sort of threat. Rations are cut. Sam says he’s prohibited visitors for bad behavior.

It’s not like people are lining up. Well worth it to feel Sam’s hands on you. 

***

So you have a mouth with thin teeth in your midriff, and the baggy hoodie does a great job of hiding it. You can eat with either one, but the stomach-mouth is bigger and can handle bigger chunks. Those teeth have also not been filed recently, like the ones on your hands, and the teeth rub and press uncomfortably when you bend a certain way.

It’s a good thing no one can see you here, behind the lava veil, as you slip torn pieces of paper underneath your hoodie. It would look really weird.

You chew up the pages into malleable pieces, then you roll it into thin ropes and twine it through your teeth to dry.

It means you have to eat raw potatoes with your smaller mouth, where you can actually smell it—which is not a scent you want stuck under your nose—but all plans have sacrifices, you suppose.

***

It’s been forty-two days and they’ve forgotten you, haven’t they. Is this better or worse than being taunted and tortured in a cell?

Don’t be stupid, of course this is better. You chose this.

***

“Hey, sweetheart.” The deep voice is directed to the boy. “What are you working on today?”

“Poultice. I need to stock up dried herbs, I think! This new book is fantastic—it has so many new remedies! Will you help me find them today?”

“Of course,” you say. “Cors, do you want to come too? We can make a family outing.”

“A family outing?” the voice repeats with some amusement. “Should I bring a picnic?”

“Yes, yes!”

Their faces are vivid on your eyelids as you wake. No tears, no sobs, just heavy breathing and shaking.

You can’t do this.

***

The breaking point is when you wake up and you don’t know what day it is or what time it is or if you’re in a dirt cell with bars or an obsidian box. You don’t remember closing your eyes. You don’t remember moving to this corner.  

Grabbing the book lying by your head, you flip it to the tally page. You stare at your book. You don’t know how many days it’s been. 52? 53?

You don’t know.

You don’t know.

You’re the only thing you can control in here and you can’t control yourself.

No breath. Chest stuck.

You’re not weak. You’re not back there.  

You can’t breathe.

You wake up, and you don’t remember moving.

***

You twist the paper-ropes into stronger ones, day by day. You file the teeth-claws on your hands to a sharp point.

***

It’s been over seventy days, and your head and eye sockets ache and pulse each time you open your eyes. You’re not meant to sleep like this. Is it sleep? The dreams are so vivid. The voices in the lava are more distinct.

***

You’re so hungry. Your stomach is a hollow maw with scraping teeth. It already was but now it feels like it.

“Dream, please don’t cook the beets—I’ll do it. You’re too impatient and it doesn’t cook through.”

“But I can do the meat?” you whisper playfully, hoarsely.

“As long as it’s not pink.”

“Of course not,” you say to the ceiling. “I wouldn’t risk you getting sick.”  

The memories hurt so much—it’s like another maw in your midriff. But it’s been so long since you’ve heard their voices. It’s been so long since you’ve allowed yourself to even think of them. 

***

Your thoughts are slow and static—you can’t concentrate. This is awful. Why did you ever choose this? Were they ever worth it?

There’s peace on the server, as your few visitors have indicated. A fragile peace, but you know how well a common enemy can unite people. It’s easier to push all blame onto one than to distribute it fairly to everyone.

So this peace—the first one in years—should last a bit longer.

But were they even worth it? You thought so. But no one has asked you to bring the dead to life. No one’s been here at all in so, so long. They dropped you so quickly. You didn’t need concern, because you were meant to protect them, control them so they wouldn’t kill each other, but not one of them had asked with sincerity—why are you doing this? Are you okay?

They just looked at you with monster and dirty behind their eyes and for a flash you hate them all—

Longing for a deep, warm voice and a bright smile washes through you.

They had been worth it. They’d loved you through everything. They’d known far more of you and loved you anyway.

They deserve the gift of life far more, a bitter little voice whispers.

***

You eat, and stretch, and sit down. The paper-ropes go on the floor, along with crumpled paper as kindling. Teeth-claws pressed together, you scrape furiously. Your hands are so, so heavy.

A spark.

A portal.

You’re surrounded by obsidian, after all. The sensors behind the stone don’t detect the portal ignition, so no alarms are triggered.

Looking around the sparse area where you’d spent the last near-year, there’s nothing to take save the book that served as a flawed timekeeper.

You’d like to break the clock, though.

The clock has some redstone in the center. You crack open the iron case to expose the small bead inside. A strange urge to eat it. Screw it—you eat it, enjoying the acrid-dust taste.

Closing your eyes, you pass through the portal to the prison’s nether-portal. The floor is built with sensors to alert Sam when someone passes through, and the walls are heavily lined with obsidian over a lava lake. In addition to the mining fatigue, there’s not enough time to break the stone to get out—and nowhere to go in the nether if you did get out.

You carefully hoist yourself onto the top of the obsidian of the nether-portal to wait out the mining fatigue affect without triggering any alarms.

There’s legitimately no way to go any further than this.

Every stone, top to bottom, surrounding the nether-portal is alarmed with redstone. You could maybe scratch with your claws hard enough to crack the obsidian, but it would take an obscenely long amount of time even without the artificial fatigue. By the time you could mine just one block from the surrounding layers, Sam will have arrived.

The fatigue gradually washes off over the minutes, and it feels like you can finally breathe again. You give yourself a few minutes to rest.

Time to summon Sam.   

***

In the prison, the first day, they’d forced you to empty your enderchest. For security purposes.

You’d refused, at first, saying that you couldn’t get to it anyway in a cell—and then Sam had slammed his trident on the obsidian and made the rapidly aging threat—“If you don’t, I’ll take your last life.”

So you did. You pulled out enough to be plausible, leaving a few items for later.

And there was a sword at your throat. “I know that’s not all of it.”

“Sam—”

“Drop it.”

They’d expect you to try to pull something, hide something, so you’d tried to make it plausible: “Look at how much there is, Sam; there’s not more room in an enderchest for—”

The sword tip had angled down to your unarmored chest, digging in.

“Drop your items.”

“Sam—aaeegh.” You’d snapped your mouth closed, surprised at the tip cutting through the already bloody rip in your hoodie. Sam’s sword drove in a little further. “Okay, okay, okay—"

You dropped the golden apples, a book of coded notes, and your second-best chestplate, but Sam’s sword didn’t leave. Blood dripped down your chest, draining health, bringing you closer to death. “That’s all, I swear! There’s nothing else! Sam—that’s personal stuff, I didn’t want it stolen, that’s why—”

“I don’t believe you. Drop the rest, Dream.”

The sword drove further in, blood welling.

“I swear, I swear, that’s it—” you’d said frantically. After all this, after all the events of that day, Sam might have actually followed through on the threat, you’d smelled it in his acrid sweat, and he had no one he wanted to bring back to life. “I swear, End, Sam, don’t—"

The pain forced you to your knees.

“See, there’s nothing you can swear on that we can believe. So drop everything.”

“I’m on my last life, Sam!” A lie, but your body had ached and burned with the bone-deep pain of two regenerations in a single day—in a single minute. You’d sworn aloud at the pain of that and the sword, pathetic tears clogging your throat slightly. The mask, at least, kept them from being seen. “End, dammit, Sam, there’s nothing else, I swear that’s all of it!”

He’d wanted to push you to your furthest extremes, wring every item and bit of honesty out your lying mouth. He’d only believed you because you were begging for your life.

The pathetic show had let you keep a few items, though.

***

Sam’s reaction time is impressive. Less than a minute passes before Sam, his seven-foot height, and his glittering netherite armor emerge from the portal.

You drop from the portal and sink your claws into the neck opening in his armor.

Again, his reaction time is impressive. He grabs the scruff of your hood like a kitten and throws you to the side. As you twist and land, you see him press a hand to his neck, staunching the blood, and grasp at his inventory for a healing item.

Before he can use a potion, you launch yourself at him. He’s forced to jab out one-handed with his trident. You twist and grab a prong, cutting your hand. You kick out at his thigh, yanking the trident from his single-handed grip, rolling on the ground. Immediately you dive to avoid a loaded crossbow, then a netherite axe is coming for your head. 

Sam’s used the few seconds of reprieve to throw a healing potion on his throat. “Stand down or I kill you,” he rasps, pushing against your trident with the axe. 

“That’s the idea!” you laugh. Your voice also sounds like it’s just been cut.

One hit and you’re dead. One hit on Sam and his armor might scratch.

This is the most exciting it’s been for months.

You grab his hand with yours, sinking in your hand-teeth into the axe hand. Your one-handed grip costs you as Sam’s superior height forces the trident to the ground and you have to awkwardly twist to avoid it. The axe bites into your side, lighting fire down your torso. Sam grunts at the pain of a punctured hand

You press in close. There’s only one vulnerable spot in netherite armor.

Knocking his axe aside with your trident, you use the second to rip off your mask. For just a moment in Sam’s furiously determined face, his eyes meet yours and widen.

—and you sink your teeth into his throat.

He makes a horrible sucking sound. One of your hands keeps his axe-arm pinned as you both collapse to the ground.

His other hand manifests a pickaxe, and you barely manage to block it enough so it doesn’t skewer you. As it is—you stiffen as the tip pierces above your hip—and you rip your teeth back.

Now, it’s you and Sam, you above, finally in control, and Sam bleeding out. Now he’s looking at you, eye to eye, no mask, as blood drips down your mouth and neck. He’s seen you. You look like a proper monster.

This will be his first death in months, by your calculation. He should regenerate just fine, if painfully.

Dying by suffocation and blood loss isn’t the best way to go, so you scrabble for the hilt of the trident while you still pin him, fingers barely reaching—and you thrust the prongs into his heart.

“Sorry, Sam,” you say, and you’re not sure if you’re sincere or not.

His wide-eyed expression remains etched in your mind as you thud to the ground.

There’s blood in your teeth. It tastes like gunpowder.

[Awesamdude was slain by Dream.]

Dumbly, you look at the ground. You’d assumed that if you won this impossible fight you could take Sam’s weapons and cut through the obsidian.

But all of his armor and weapons are gone. The warden had enchanted them all with curse of vanishing.

The madman—he’d just lost everything to spite you.

All that’s left are some potions and Sam’s master key. Fat lot of good the master key can do in the nether-portal.

But—of the potions, there’s a fire resistance.

You greedily chug all of the potions you can, feeling strength seep back into your body and the blood wash from your teeth. The punctures Sam’s trident and pickaxe left on you stitches itself together. Your mask is carefully replaced and tied.

No idea where this will take me, you think, looking at the portal. All portals in the prison are linked to this one nether-portal, so it’s impossible to tell which one you’ll exit through. Judging by how fast Sam had arrived at the prison—and how there have never been any guards other than Sam at the prison—you’re fairly certain that there isn’t anyone on the other side of wherever the portal spits you out.

It spits you back into your cell.   

***

The next few minutes pass by like a fever dream, like maybe you’ve never left the prison and you’ll wake up back inside your cell, cheek pressed to heated obsidian.

Swimming through lava. Putting the master key in your stomach to keep it from burning. Dashing through the dark halls of the prison. Communicator buzzing with the frantic plans of your friends to catch you. (Would Sapnap—?) Finding an enderchest where you remembered the locker would be and retrieving your incomplete set of backup armor.

Pulling out food—real food—for the first time in so long—juice of gold-crusted apples on your lips, washing away the gunpowder taste in your teeth, as you dash toward the prison entrance portal.

Fear and thrill. 

You sprint through the halls. People will have seen the death message.

***

Ninety-two days and change (and unaccounted hours), and you’re escaping the prison.

As you exit the main portal, the colors and sensations assault your senses. So much color—green fields, red-orange dusk sky, spruce wood beams, distant flags—after lava and black. Your body shakes from the feel of wind.

Hell, you don’t even have shoes. The ground is deliciously cool under your rough feet.

Sliding a hand under your mask, you stifle giddy hiccups.

It’s been, what—three minutes? Four?—since Sam’s message broadcasted. That’s plenty of time for people to gather. Sam is probably on his way with backup gear. There’s no time to breakdown.

The ground sways and contracts oddly under your feet as you run. You stumble, miscalculating distances as your body reaccustoms to the rhythm of the chase.

Exiting the portal, you’re met with three people sprinting at you from a distance.

Your enderchest had a few pearls that your tears had let stay, so you can make distance—but of course, they also have some.

It all devolves into a blurry whirl of chase and shouts and blood as the night falls. You’ve always been good at running, and you manage to stay ahead of your pursuers, weaving and dodging and fighting and using the land to your advantage.

Laughter erupts from your mouth.   

You gut a few people with your hand-teeth, and honestly, at the moment you don’t know or really care if they’re on their third life or not. If they’re risking it, they’re risking it. If they think that your imprisonment is worth their last life, that’s their decision.

Hours blur.

Voices blur.

The cuts on your feet and shoulder and body throb together under the rhythm of the chase.

The sun rises.

***

It’s been one day.

You’re near-delirious with the rush of freedom, and your body staggers forward from its own weight, but you can’t stop now. You’ve gone so far, and you need to go further to be safe.  

Humans are frail, and afraid because of it, and vicious for that. They’ll come for you, no doubt.

You aren’t human, and you have far more than three lives.

But you’ve had three homes—that place, those voices, and this server—and it seems that each of their deaths will stay. This last home, this world you loved and made and shared, is dead. The third death. One of your own making.  

Then again, you do know how to raise the dead. 

Chapter Text

Everyone has some level of inherent magic in them; it’s what people use to reset their regeneration points. Most enchantments require ore and materials, but a respawn anchor requires blood.

So the first thing you do when you collapse in the crevice of a cramped cave is drip the blood from your fingers onto the stone, whispering the enchantment language.

You’ve set your regeneration to outside the prison.

The magic takes a lot out of you—that, with your injuries, send you straight to unconsciousness.

***

It's been over fifty days in the prison, and you've lost count of the days. Then Quackity comes, and once more you have a way to mark time between your spats of unconsciousness.

It’s easy enough to put the pieces together, even though your face goes cold and numb as you click your teeth shut on your next call of “Sam!” The Warden’s authorized this. He gave Quackity an axe and a sword, and he’s turning a blind eye for the next however long.

You’ve always healed quickly. You’ve survived this long because of it, because the world is not kind and there’s not even mercy for children.

So you’ll survive this. You know you will. Your heart may not, though.

“You can’t kill me,” you say, trying to appeal to Quackity’s logic. “I’m the only one with the knowledge, I’m the only one who can do it.”

“Oh, I won’t kill you,” he says. “I’ll make you wish you were dead. I’ll be here every day until you tell me, Dream.”

Do you run? Can you avoid him? It’s such a small cell, and you’re better at combat than Quackity, but your body is weak. It’s working hard enough to even keep you alive with no food, minimum water, and constant heat.

So you try to avoid the man as long as you can, but the cell’s grown smaller since Sam’s been installing more layers (trying to break you with claustrophobia), and there’s only so long you can keep circling away from Quackity.

“Let’s stop playing games, Dream,” he says, advancing, his sword held to the side. It’s such a stupid grip, and you should easily be able to knock it from his hand, but the handle is clearly glistening with a binding curse. “Stop trying to run, to hide, and take it like a man. Or you can tell me.”

“The second I tell you, you’ll kill me,” you say plainly.

“Maybe not.”

Your legs are shaking from fatigue, and the heat and curses in the box are sapping you strength, and you can’t dodge and circle Quackity forever. You’re the prey, low on endurance, and Quackity is the human hunter slowly advancing.

Quackity’s patience fails, and you stumble, and the sword flashes out and carves your arm from shoulder to elbow. When you gasp, freezing, Quackity drives down the sword into your shoulder, into your clavicle, and you’re driven to the ground.

Blood streams at an alarming rate from your shoulder. Already you feel lightheaded. It hurts so bad already.

You’re willing your mind to go back to that blank state you’ve wrapped yourself in this prison, to just sink into disassociation until you barely remember you have an aching body, but there’s no relief and there’s no fade to black when Quackity begins cutting.

It’s loud and messy and you hate how weak you are. This is what you get, ever attaching yourself to anyone at all, letting them in to your server.

You’d liked Quackity at one point.

“Just tell me, Dream, and it’ll all be over.”

“Why would I tell you?” you laugh, gasping. “It’s the only thing keeping me alive—”

It cuts off into a shrieking pant when Quackity stabs instead of slices. Blood flies up onto his white shirt.

Sam was all blunt force and stern face and follow the rules prisoner or the Will Breaker comes out, but—Quackity? He’s creative. He’s the knife to Sam’s blunt pickaxe, and once the blade’s in, he twists it, and he watches your mouth and listens to your breathing to see where your pressure points are.  

“Tell me, and I’ll stop,” Quackity repeats, over and over, frustration growing until the menacing tone rises to shouts and he’s pressing down, shouting it, straddling you. “Tell me. I’m a businessman. I’ll stop, deal? Tell me, bastard, and I’ll stop.”

Did he think you’d break that fast? Was he hoping you would, so this would be over and he wouldn’t have to dirty his hands anymore?

He brings out an axe that your eyes track with frozen fixation, and he brings out shears, and you know that every single one was approved by Sam to take in here.

“Tell me!” he shouts, and the slashes grow sloppier. Desperate.

Blood pools under your clothing, sticky in your long hair. It’s lifeblood, and you’re colder. You’re going to die. You’re going to die, and they’re going to know you have more than one life. If you die, they’ll keep hurting you forever.

“Careful,” you rasp, and a knife pommel slams into your mask.

It doesn’t crack, but the sound reminds Quackity that it’s there. “Why do you wear a mask? You’ve always hidden your face—now what do you have to hide?”

You’ve been pliant for a while, but when Quackity’s fingers reach for your mask, your body spasms and you twist away. Managing to wrench one arm out from Quackity’s weight, your fingers splay over it protectively.

He smirks, he actually smirks. “There’s a weak spot! Wouldn’t want you to feel uncomfortable, huh? Huh?” He reaches again, like it’s a game, and you twist further away.

“You’re enjoying torture,” you spit, since you have enough breath to speak for a few moments.

The sword comes down, and you scream, high and loud, as it pierces your thigh.

Quackity leans in, using one hand to pat the mask while the other twists the sword. “We’ll save that for later, then,” he hisses.  

He stands up and looks down at you.

“I promised you, Dream,” he says. “I’ll be back every single day until you talk.”

You were somewhere around fifty days when you lost count. Quackity helps you keep track again.

You heal quickly, but not quick enough. There’s always a backlog of injury for your body to ease, and you never catch up.

***

You did kill Tommy. You’re borderline insane, he’s provocative, it’s a bad match. You don’t think about it. You don’t think about it. You fixed it.

You brought him back. It sent you into day-long coma from the energy it took to do it unprepared, but you did it. You fixed it.

People die and regenerate all the time. Tommy hadn’t had the energy to regenerate after his previous two deaths, so his soul had detached from his body.

Why was this time so much more traumatic? He went hysterical again. Oh—the time disconnect is an interesting twist. And Tommy got to see Wilbur again.

You’d love to try it out. Just to see. He saw Wilbur. Who would you see?

***

You don’t break the first session. Of course you don’t, but he seems…disappointed? Dissatisfied? There’s a deep hunger in his eyes that he thinks your blood will satiate. He wants so badly to be a Butcher, and now he can.   

You’ve done this before. You can handle it. You’ve done this before you’ve done this before you’ve done this before

You thought you could do this again, but you can’t, you can’t you can’t—

Pleadings fall from your lips by the end of the first week, and you hate it, you hate it, but you can’t help it. You try to bargain until you’re incoherent and then it’s just a litany of no and please and stop

***

Itching hands and pain wake you the next morning—blood crusts your knuckles, and there’s a particularly large puncture in your side that you don’t remember getting. When you sit up, your vision goes white, and you dry heave to the side.

Gritting your teeth, you get to your feet, clutching the sloped cave wall.

I have to run.

That’s right. You’re out.

You’re out!

Little half-bursts of air leave your lungs at the thought. You’re touching stone that isn’t obsidian. Your feet aren’t burning. You breathe faster.

The plan, though—who cares?—It’s ruined. I can adjust it. It’s fine. I’m so WEAK. I couldn’t last long in there—you aren’t weak—you killed Sam, didn’t you? And escaped the unescapable on your own—this wasn’t the plan. You tore out his throat. What else could I do? I licked the blood—he deserved it— It doesn’t matter what you think about it; it’s already done. End, you’re free! How will you stay ahead? They’re going to execute me if they find me, no doubt now. Why is that a surprise—you know what’s right. The plan has to change. I was too weak to wait. I know what I have to do—End, how can I do this—you licked the blood—I can’t do this—

Your hands are grabbing your skull, keeping the racing thoughts from bursting through the bone.

“Every plan has sacrifices,” you whisper to yourself, over and over and over until the thoughts fade and you can draw whole breaths again. “I can’t stop now. I can do this.”

The server will have peace.

There will be order.

They will be safe.

It takes some time, but you finally calm your racing heartbeat. Lifting the edge of your ruined undershirt, you examine the puncture. It’s deep, deep enough to have caught the edge of your mid-mouth and hit teeth. Now both mouths have scars through the lip—a wheeze bursts out at the thought.

You try to walk. It hurts. It hurts so bad. There are other injuries too, fresh and old, some half-healed and some freshly bleeding from the movement.

You start running. Stumbling. Pathetic. But at least you’re moving.

You’re tired. You’re so, so tired.

You’re not so prideful that you can’t see that the prison left its mark on you. You’re shaking near constantly, you can’t judge distances well, and each sound and shift in the woods lights off an instinctual flight-or-flight response.

And you’re going to murder the ones who hurt you like this who forced you to the ground and left you helpless and begging—

And the voices are still here. They’ve accompanied you from the lava hisses to the wind in the trees, and the words are more distinct.

It’s not a bad thing. You’ve missed them.

The leaves overhead rustle. “Where’re you going to sleep?”

“I usually sleep in trees,” you tell him.

“In the trees?”

“Mm-hm.”

“What about th’monsters?”

“High enough up, and they can’t see you.”

“I’ve got a place to m’self. You can stay the night.”   

When Robin, with his big eyes and peculiar lilt, tugs you to the village, you expected the stares directed at your wrapped face. You don’t expect the looks that Robin gets. Is this how strays are treated here?

The people here have grey faces and stone mouths. Evidently times are hard, and the people harder. Robin ignores them, leading you in a winding path to the other edge of the village, where there’s a tall man weaving cloth in front of a small cabin.

“Who’s this?” The man extends a hand, and Robin takes it, tugging him gently to you. The man’s eyes are unfocused, but he sends a fond smile in Robin’s general direction. He’s blind.

“Welcome,” Cors says simply. His hand looks like it would be warm. Cors extends it.

You reach for his hand and nearly fall—now there’s tree bark roughing your hands—there’s a sharp bite in your side—you’re so dizzy—

Above you there are trees; around you there’s no one.

“Hi,” you whisper back.

***

If you were human, you’d likely be dead. You’re not either one. Your energy comes from a different source, so as you run for days, and your blood drips steadily as wounds reopen, and infection tries to set in, you can still run and walk and stumble forward.

It’s never far enough. You have to go farther to be safe. If you think about what’s behind—if you get close to that edge—it’s a horrifying abyss you can’t get near.  

They’ll come for me. Of course they will. That was the plan.

But this—bleeding feet, deadly manhunt—was not the plan.

They were supposed to ask, dammit.

They’ll be united in hunting me down, you think. And they’ll kill you over and over until you wish you could stay dead, and they’ll stick you in a dirt-floor cell and try to—

Stay away from that edge.

“I’ll kill them,” you snarl aloud. Sam, Sapnap, Quackity, Tommy, anyone who comes for you. Anyone who’s hurt you. “No—I won’t. I won’t.” Yes you would. You’re a cornered animal—you’re just as monstrous as they’ve always said you were, and you will kill them now with little remorse because you are never going back.

***

The worst offense, the one you’re going to kill Quackity for, is taking off your mask. When you’re too weak with blood loss and pain to move, he unlatches it slowly, savoring every second, as you lie there with curled hands and unfocused eyes. Your hands twitch up. He notices.

It peels from your face from the sweat beneath, and still you try to turn your head to the side to avoid his gaze. His hands are soft—he’s no warrior nor worker he’s just an opportunist he’s a walking corpse—as they grab your jaw and pull it back.

“Oh? Look at you.” He smiles down. “I thought there’d be something horrific under there. We’re a little bit alike, then.” He traces the scar that cuts down his forehead and jaw. “Where’d you get all those?”

You stare at a block of crying obsidian above his shoulder. You will not look at him.  

“It’s almost an intimate moment. I’m glad we got to share this. How many others have had the chance to see Dream’s face?”

He drinks in the shudder you make when his fingers touch your face. His hands are horrible. They’re soft and they catch on the rough scars up your face.

“Of course you’d have green eyes,” he laughs. “They’re pretty. The rest is pretty damn ugly though, not going to lie. Can you even see out of that eye?”

The pad of his thumb taps the more heavily scarred eyelid. You flinch away, breathing fast. He can see your eyes flicker, now, and he’s going to soak it in with pleasure.

He tosses the mask aside. It clatters against the far wall. Your eyes track it, then snap to Quackity when he digs his fingernails into your cheek.

“Now I’m going to look you in the eyes, and you’re going to answer me. Tell me what’s in the book.”

***

It’s been so long since you’ve done this—scavenging the land for food, drinking from rivers, wadding herbs into your wounds, looking for a good night shelter as you run. Thousands of blocks, tens of thousands. You’ve always been fast.

Your body gives out a few days later. Forehead burning, side aching. Your feet are bloody. You collapse under a tree and dig down and pass out again. This is far enough.

You wake up with a fever and far more injuries than you remember getting. Good thing you’ve always healed quickly.

Stumbling along, you run and walk and stumble until you literally, physically, can’t put one foot in front of the other anymore. Again. This time, you’ve collapsed at an idyllic spot with a creek and trees. The spot’s cozied up to a small mountain.

“We’ll fix the roof ‘n time, right? It won’t take t’long before winter?”

Yeah. I’ll show you how, okay?  

For a second you remember a young, trusting face at the edge of an older, taller forest. It’s too late—your heart’s set on this spot. You’ll stop running.

It’s a simple build, just a small shelter by a creek. It’s made of wooden slats with slightly pink clay from the river sealing the gaps.

It takes an embarrassing amount of time to finish it. You’re weak from the prison. Frequent breaks are necessary. At least once you sit on the riverbank to rest and lose all sense of time, startling awake minutes or hours later, realizing you never finished placing

Something inside you has been knocked loose, and it’s uncontrollable. When you scrunch your toes in the creek and dry them on grass, your eyes burn and strange hiccups hit your chest. It takes an hour for it to stop.

It’s just grass, you say to yourself. Why would that, of all things, affect you?

***

In your before, years ago, you’d traveled through a dense spruce forest, and you found a small, dirty, brown-haired child staring up at a particularly tall trunk.

You deliberately make heavy, crunching footsteps to warn them of your approach—even with the warning, it’s impressive that the child doesn’t startle. They just stare at you, eyes roving over the loose grey cloth you’ve wrapped your face in.

You hold up your hands cautiously to show you don’t mean ill intent, then circle around to see what the kid’s looking at. It’s a beehive.

“You want the honey?” you ask. They nod slowly.

The child, whose clothes suggest a young boy now that you’re closer, has sharp cheekbones and sharp wristbones and the largest, softest brown eyes. He’s hungry. You can instantly empathize.

“I dunno how to get it out,” he says.

“I can show you,” you tell him, keeping your tone soft. “I’ll get you some.”

His eyes brighten with a touch of awe as you scale the tree, perch, and light a small fire. He settles cross-legged on the ground as you cultivate the smoke to lull the bees calm, and his eyes follow your movements with concentration, no doubt committing it to memory. 

“Okay, you ready to run just in case?” you call down. “Some bees might still be mad.”

The boy nods, stiffly getting to his feet. 

There’s nothing to worry about, in the end—the bees are sleepy, and you’re gentle as you cut out honeycomb and brush the smaller bees off. Jumping down, you hold out the honeycomb.

He approaches slowly, something like a cat in his steps and wary eyes.

“You should eat some now before it hardens,” you say, a bit awkwardly in the silence. “It’s still good, but the texture’s different. Unless you were saving it for something? I don’t know what you’d use it in; I’ve only eaten it straight…”

Taking the honeycomb, he looks down at it with huge brown eyes before quickly crunching into it. His eyes half-close at the treat. “T’anks,” he says finally, and swallows. “D’you…d’you want some?”

He’s underweight and underfed, and he’s offering some to you? The kindness makes something melt inside, and it’s too late—too far—you’ve connected with the child. You know how hard it is to share food when hungry.

You hold up a sticky hand cheerfully, licking off the excess honey. “I have enough right here!”

That startles a smile out of him.

The two of you don’t talk much as he scarfs down the rest. You give him some dried meat in exchange for directions to the nearest village, and the boy trails shyly behind you when you start to walk.

“What’s your name?” you ask.

“S’Robin. What’s yours?”

No one’s asked you for so long that your mind blanks for a second. What is your name? Your real name’s odd and memorable, and you don’t want anyone to connect you to other incidents.

“Cornelius.”

“You hesitated,” Robin says immediately.  

“What?”

“You hesitated. You can tell me. I swear I won’t tell anyone else. Don’t haf anyone to tell it to anyway.” The last part’s a little quieter.

You blink, then smile. “Okay. But it’s a secret, okay?” you whisper playfully.

Robin giggles. It’s a beautiful sound, though dusty.

You tell him the name your mother gave you a long time ago. “It’s Dream.”

Chapter Text

Mobs—human mobs—are dangerous. It’s like the collective intelligence drops significantly when people think they have the advantage of numbers. An individual has to carefully think about survival, but a mob doesn’t have to worry about making mistakes that might cost their life. It’s power-drunk complacency.

It’s a mob that kills you for the first time. It’s a mob that’s killed you every time, actually. You and your family.

* * *

It’s so strange to settle and build a small shack by the river. You’re used to a nomadic lifestyle or building functional bunker-holes beneath the ground.

You’re too weak to move far or dig deep. You’re sleeping so much as your body desperately tries to heal all of the accumulated damage of months. It’s nerve-wracking—you’re so vulnerable when your body’s splayed and insensate—so you pile blockades around the shelter for extra protection (but it would only stop monsters and wouldn’t stop people from getting in—)

The golden apples you snatched from the Enderchest run out quickly, even though your stomach’s shrunk and you can barely eat a few bites at a time. Crawling from your ugly shelter, you lie on the riverbank grass and submerge your arms in the water for hours until fish swim by and you can grab them, twist them, and eat them there on the shore.

For the first time in so long, your stomach’s full. It’s such a nice feeling that you lay your hands in awe over the little bump of your stomach. There’s a gentle sun and a slight breeze and why are your eyes stinging?

Leaning over the riverbank, you look at yourself.

Red-rimmed eyes and hollow cheeks stare back. Your hair, once long, is shorn and choppy, ugly. But you can fix that now, as soon as you can find something sharp. Your hair will have to be short, rather than long as you prefer, but at least it’ll be even.

You open your mouth and bare your teeth. Each tooth is pointed, sharp, and narrower than humans are comfortable with. There are unnatural gaps between the flatter teeth in the back of your mouth. A gaping hole marks where a front canine once was.

“What the hell is wrong with your teeth, Dream?”

End, you’re ugly. And pathetic. Tears rolling down your face because you got to eat. Staring at yourself in the first mirror you’ve seen in months. (You’ve always cared about appearances, though, even by yourself.)

What you should really be upset over is losing functionality. You look down at your hands, where the last inch of your index finger is missing, and the entire pinky is cut off at the palm. It affects your grip on weapons. You don’t want to respawn to fix it yet, though. It’s fine for now. 

You’ll adjust.

Will you ever be free of them?

“Prisoner. You know the rules. This is your punishment.”

“You’re making this hard on me, Dream! Why can’t you cut me some slack? I guess we have to up the ante.”

Eventually you’ll regenerate, and the physical marks from the prison will fade. Should fade. (Some scars don’t fade, and some injuries don’t heal completely if the body doesn’t have enough strength for a full regeneration—or if the damage is too deep.)

Small sounds from the forest spike your heartrate, and you’re sure the server mob is getting closer every day you crawl from your shelter and slowly build strength, but there are brief moments when you can close your eyes and eat your food and feel like your mind hasn’t splintered and reality’s not blurred between now and then.

***

When the sun is gentle and the breezes cool, it signals autumn, and it signals that winter is near. You know you need to prepare while it’s still easy to scavenge food from the land.

The two strangers who welcomed you into their house and became not-strangers are not prepared for winter. Hardly anyone in the grey village is ready for winter. It makes you nervous. You’ll have to stay. You have to teach Robin and Cors how to survive.

“You don’t have enough to eat,” you say. They look at each other.

“The village is in rough times,” Cors says. “We make do. We’ll get through this one like the other ones.” He’s being positive for Robin—you can see that.

“I’ve lived in the wilds for years,” you say. “I can easily gather enough food for all of us.”

“Teach me,” Robin says immediately. “You gotta teach me.”

“We don’t have anything to pay you with,” Cors says, slightly apologetic.

“I don’t need money,” you say. “Just—maybe what I bring can pay for a room?”

“I’ve extra space in my old house,” Robin says. “You can stay there. No one’s there anymore.”

“You sure, Robin?” Cors’ voice is calm and steady—he’s asking if Robin’s comfortable spending time with a stranger or if he feels he has to.

“I—this could be good. Real good. Yes. He helped get me honey!”

“If that’s what you want, sweetheart.” To Dream, he says, “Thank you. Take care of him. You’re welcome to stay here with us.”  

They trust you so quickly? 

Something strange is lodged in your throat, and you audibly talk around it when you give a polite thank you.

You stay days, teaching Robin of the obscure secrets of the wild, and Robin in turn excitedly teaches Cors everything he learned when they return. And days turn to weeks turn to a season, and Cors sews you a quilt and a poncho, and you teach Robin to read, and the nights grow colder and food grows scarcer.

You take care of them. They would not have survived the winter comfortably without you. They need you.

Robin grows tall enough that Cors sews new overalls for him, and you shower both of them in praise. Your family. So handsome and grown-up and talented—

“Stop it!” Robin laughs when you coo over him.

Cors teaches you how to weave and sew, and you’re better at weaving than sewing, so you sit at a loom to prepare the cloth while he works with a needle. Robin sits close because he says you’re very warm, though there’s a fire burning in the corner.

Cors’ lovely voice rumbles with quiet laughter, and Robin’s eyes grow brighter and brighter, and they say you spoil them with all of your gifts, but what a gift it is to have someone to give to.

***

When you’ve rested enough to walk again, you have the luck of finding three white sheep in the forest across the river. Their coats are thick and begging to be cut.

It’s simple enough to entice them with wild wheat to a pen beside your shack. They’re calm and sweet and they stare at you with trust in their eyes as you feed them.

They don’t mind when you sit next to them and run your hands over their wool over and over. When you tentatively wrap your arms around one, it sits closer so you can reach more comfortably. It sits very still, nuzzling closer.

This is nice, you think. You can use the wool to make new clothes. These ones are disgusting. You wrinkle your nose to yourself. Well, I was murdered twice in them, and then I murdered a man in them, and then I bled all over them. Your injuries still aren’t healed…At least you’re not bleeding anymore. Except for the ones on your legs—they still crack open when you move a certain way.

Focus.

Shear the sheep. Wool. Clothes.

The sheep don’t mind being choppily sheared with a stone knife. It’s not a close shear. You make sure it never gets close enough to cut their skin.

You touch a hand to the back of your scalp, where there’s a messy scab.

A few more days flow by where you spin the wool to string and weave it to cloth. You know you’re not nearly good enough to try sewing legs yet. Your first attempt at clothing yields a flowing skirt that rests around your calves.

Again, you’re pretty sure you’d ruin sleeves if you tried another hoodie (and you want new clothes now), so you sew a poncho and a sleeveless, blocky shirt. All of the clothing is pure white, which is hell to clean, so you set about finding some sort of dye.

There are poppies, but you don’t want more red clothes (though it would hide future blood), and there are a few daisies, but the yellow color’s too harsh. You settle on a nice blue cornflower to use for dying the skirt, and the color from the crushed petals is a gentle dark blue.

Wearing the skirt and the sleeveless shirt, you look at yourself in the calm shallows of the creek.

Your bared arms are hideously pale and thin, of course, but aside from that, you’re pleased with the results. The fabric is rough, but it’s so light and airy and flowing that it’s heaven on your skin. You can easily move around in it.

The discarded clothing lies in a crumpled pile as you give the skirt a spin. The torn hoodie has innumerable stains, and the prison jumpsuit underneath it as well. The hoodie was your signature piece, and it’s still mostly intact, but the stains might not come out.

“Should I burn it?” you ask the sheep.

The most huggable one bleats at you.

“Agreed,” you say, and burn the jumpsuit. Later you’ll revisit the hoodie. Next up on the list, now that you have some usable clothing, is weaving pants (to wear alone or under the skirt) and then a new face covering. You’ll need more wool.

You spend the next few days feeling a mixture of free and vulnerable with the loose fabric around your legs.

Only a few days later, and the sheep have grown back their coats incredibly quickly. Have they always grown this fast? They bleat happily when they see you.

“Yes, I’m here,” you coo. “Is that coat getting heavy? It’s hot, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I’ll fix that.” There’s so much wool. The extra wool pads your bed. It’s so soft. It’s so different than burning obsidian, but you’ve had no problem adjusting to sleeping on something other than stone.

The first attempt at pants isn’t the best, riding a bit short over the ankles, but they’re sturdy. A squid had washed up the other day on the shore, so the pants are dyed black with the ink.

Next to weave is a face covering. Hopefully you’ve practiced enough to make this project’s texture smoother than the other two (it would be horrible to feel fabric catching on your rough scars). The mask is cracked and shards have shattered off, and you don’t have the tools right now to make another mask. It seems you’ll have to go back to your original look of wrapped cloth.

You’re alone out here, but it feels strange not to have something covering your face. Maybe you’ll only cover up to your eyes.

* * *

When your hands shake and you drop a tool because you’re missing a finger, you seriously consider how you’ll kill them.

They’ll deserve it. You’ve had Sam under you with his blood on your teeth. It should be Q’s turn. Take his hand, lay it flat, smash it, smash a vial of healing on it, then smash it again. Then you’ll do the same to his face.

They called you a monster, and sure, maybe you are, but you know it and you’ve never dressed up your actions to yourself—and you’ve never held someone down and find where to slash to find the best screams and you’ve never starved anyone or ripped off their mask or other clothing in the worst violations or tried to break someone to insanity (just obedience, which is fine even if it’s not nice because children need discipline, and you’ve never gone too far) and you’ll never let it happen again and they deserve whatever you decide to do to them because nothing you do will be as depraved as what they did. You’ve got to make this right. You’ll fix this. You can’t let them go after what they did. If you let this go then there won’t be consequences for what they did to you. You’d lose the power of intimidation. They’ll hunt you down. 

Sam will come for you. That’s a certainty. He’d do whatever it takes for control over his prison, and he’ll never let you go.

If they fear you again, you’ll be safe. Maybe you should kill someone.

* * *

You quickly realized that Quackity was new to using weapons like this—to deliberately hurt. He’s good at cutting words, but he’s never been good at combat. He doesn’t recognize how high your pain tolerance is. If you scream a little too early, if you never try to hold in your shouts and nos, he thinks he’s gone far enough. You can save yourself some pain at the expense of some pride.

He learns, though. He graduates from using sheer blunt force to employing psychological games designed to humiliate and crush both your mind and body. The levels creep up and up as he wears you down until you’re close to the limit.

The screams are real. You’re shaking near constantly. His goal isn’t just information anymore. He wants to break you. Like Sam does. The invisible assistant.  

Is it working? Your memory’s fading. Time is marked only by the marks on your body. Stretches of time when you’re alone or with him are missing.

Nothing is worth this. You would never break someone like this.

You hate them.

Your flames had been smothered and settled by the prison, but Q reignites them and extinguishes and lights them again each visit—it’s worse than ecstasy, barely above hell, as nonsense tumbles from your mouth in language to language until it’s a flow of disjointed, insane half-words. 

“What language are you even speaking? If you’re telling me what’s in the book you gotta translate.” His hands have long stopped shaking when he does his work. Eyes once fevered are now flat and glassy. He thought you’d break so much sooner, didn’t he? Now he has to endure this.

After days and weeks or however long of enduring, your body betrays you when you break down into exhausted tears and sob for it to stop, skewered on the ground.

“I’m going to make your last days in this prison hell.”

But you can’t tell him, because then he’ll kill you. And then he’ll realize that you can’t die and he’ll kill you over and over to satisfy the hunger that’s driven him to this.

You’re actually crying? he says, incredulous, and then a slow, relieved smile. We’re so close. Come on, babe, don’t cry. Just tell me, and it’ll stop.

It doesn’t stop.

He tears off your mask again, and his face twists for a moment when he sees the physical evidence of tears.

It doesn’t stop.

You come close to death. When you scratch that door, Q dumps a healing potion over you. Q never prepares potions—these are Sam’s, aren’t they?

Coward. Cowards.

You hate them. That fire burns. You hate him. You’re going to kill him. You should have just killed Tommy and Tubbo and everyone else in that blackstone room. Monster now or monster then, what’s the difference?

You sharpen your teeth. You chew paper and twine it in your teeth for kindling.

* * *

The villagers’ eyes make your skin itch. You wear your face-wrapping around them to hide your glowing eyes and too many teeth, but they somehow still see your inhumanity in the way you fluidly step, or the way you rasp when you talk. Their eyes are wary, and they don’t speak to you.

(Mobs are dangerous..)

“S’not just you,” Robin says matter-of-factly when you’re both out in the forest. “They look at most new people like that. S’like they’re looking for an excuse to dislike people. S’weird.”

“Weird to dislike people?” you ask, curious. Robin has a brilliant mind, you’ve found, and it’s a shame that it’s been consumed with hunger and survival for so long without room for much else. He’s talking more and more, now, as he eats more, and he’s even growing taller.

“Well, yes and no. Why would anyone waste time actively looking for things they don’t like in other people? S’waste of energy, and it just makes you sad. S’no point.”  

“They might be afraid that I might hurt them,” you point out.

“Nah,” Robin says easily. “They looked at me like that too when m’parents died. They thought I was a drain on their resources. No way they’d be scared of an orphan. Or Cors, because he’s Cors. So yeah, maybe they’re afraid of us ‘cause there’re more mouths to feed and they don’t want to feed’m, but we’re doing fine on our own.”

He grins up at you, hands deep in the roots of a tree, and pulls out brown mushrooms.

“Yeah.” You smile at him. He’s sucked up all of your knowledge of the wildlands so fast.

The villagers are easy to tolerate when you have your family. (The villagers are positively kind when compared to some others you’ve been in—)

Robin and Cors love you, they love you, and they touch you gently and they make meals with you and they fill a hole you were almost convinced didn’t exist. When it’s cold you all share a blanket for warmth, and you feel comfortable enough to drift into a light sleep with them.

One night you wake up shaking, making soft noises that you cut off once you’re aware, and Cors is there shushing and calming you. “You’re here now, you’re safe,” he whispers in a comforting rumble. “Oh no, don’t cry,” he shushes when tears start. You wouldn’t have cried if you’d woken alone, but the gentleness cracks through layers of memory and protective shells and unravels you. Trying to stay quiet, because Robin’s still asleep, you bury your wrapped face into your hands as Cors rubs your shoulder.

It feels like natural progression when you finally take off your face covering in the forest, far away from other eyes. Robin’s fascinated, asking a million questions and asking to touch your sharp teeth and wondering why your eyes glow. He’s fascinated by all things to do with anatomy and medical knowledge. “You really don’t look that different from us,” he says, “just with a few added features!”

Cors, of course, can’t see you, but when you wake crying he wipes away the tears with his thumbs, his hands brushing gently over your scarred skin.

Their eyes on you are a comfort. You’d gladly spend the rest of your life like this, with them.

***

Once the small shelter is shored up and reinforced, you turn your attention to digging a tunnel. You’ll need an escape if (when) they come for you. Far, far beneath, you build a nether portal and leave it unlit, and you bleed onto a mat beside it and speak the enchantment words to anchor your regeneration.

It’s a last-resort escape. You need to plan and prepare.

“Get some supplies…” you say to yourself. “Another armor set, weapons, food…Potions? Maybe. Need to enchant sooner than later so there’s time to recover…”

Tools, weapons, and armor could be enchanted with some supplies, enchantment language, and the user’s energy. Generally someone would gradually build up an item’s enchantment strength over time, which was why fully enchanted gear was so valuable—the hours and energy poured in were immense. People got attached to their workpieces, feeling as if a part of their self had been worked into the metal.

You…don’t really have that feeling. It would be a pain to lose your things (and it has been inconvenient when running for your life) if only for the time and energy required to recraft them. Otherwise, you don’t really care. Things are things. Replaceable.

People aren’t.

(It’s part of why it infuriates you that the server would let themselves be controlled by discs or items or weapons or things—if they’re that stupid, then they’re practically offering themselves up to control.)

***

You’ve always valued function over style in your bunkers and houses, but you’ve obsessively reviewed and styled each plank and panel of the little shelter you’ve made until it’s practically a little cottage. After so long in that obsidian hell without any choices over your body or your surroundings, it’s a rush just to control how your cottage looks.

It’s satisfying to craft river-clay tinged with pink and smooth it over the walls of your cottage. It touches something inside of you when you expand the sheep pen so there’s more than enough room for them to move around. It’s soothing to plant beets and carrots and wheat and sink your fingers into the rich earth.

You heal and you build.

The surrounding land has given you so many gifts. Beets. Carrots. Fish. Sheep milk. When you try something new, your stomach rebels for a day or so—(but it’s fine, you’ve only thrown up twice)—but with slow repetition you can handle new foods and there’s so many colors and flavors and you’d forgotten that carrots are naturally sweet and beets restore the iron in your blood and that sheep milk is creamy.

***

Sam’s communicator was one of the few things that hadn’t disappeared when you killed the warden, and you took it with you. It’s not long after you’re able to walk again around your little shelter that you receive a message.

Are you safe, the communicator pings.

It makes you smile. yes, you reply.

Almost immediately, Coordinates.

no, you type, not safe for you.

Yes safe for me.

no :)

I’m going to find you anyway. :)

He’s such a brat. A weird wheeze falls out of your mouth, and it’s the first time you’ve laughed in so long. Your face feels like it’s cracking.

please wait, you type. If he comes to you too quickly, disappearing for stretches of time, it’ll draw suspicion among the other server members. They’re probably in a manhunt at the moment, looking for scapegoats, and while you know he could feasibly escape them you don’t want to run that risk.  

There’s no reply, but that’s not unusual. Through no fault of his own his mind is a sieve, cracked and leaking, and he lives a half-life where half of him doesn’t know you.

***

There is one person on this server who’s purely yours and who purely loves you. The ties between the two of you are reinforced by blood and time and shared experience, and you keep him secret to protect him.

You’d found him by some instinct tugging you toward the forest. His body was small, then, and twisted and bleeding in terrible ways where it lay crumpled on the ground. 

The slits on one side of his face—the unnatural glow in one eye—had identified him as yours yours and you’d carefully bundled him up and pulled him deeper into the forest. His blood was black under your hands, eyes half-slitted in half-consciousness, and he’d smelled like fear and pain.

At first he’d weakly pushed against you, but your careful movements and shushing, and his fading strength, had calmed his movements. You’d looked down on him and tugged down the cloth wrapping your face. His eyes had fixed on yours, the same glowing green. He’d looked at you with exhaustion and pleading and longing and hope, and before you could say a word to comfort him, his eyelids had slid shut.

Like a key slotting perfectly into the lock of your heart, he’s yours.

***

∷ᔑリ melts out of the forest with purple particles sparking to nothing. You jump when you see a figure appear from the corner of your eye. His eyes, glowing, fade to a normal sheen, and they rake over you.

“What did they do to you?” he asks immediately, stepping forward.

“∷ᔑリ? ⍑𝙹∴ ↸╎↸ ||𝙹⚍ ⎓╎リ↸ ᒲᒷ?” you rasp, before collapsing into coughs. Words scrape on your throat, and he’s immediately on his knees by your side, pushing a water bottle into your hands.

“How’d you find me? Is it safe—?” You break down into more coughing.

“Don’t talk, don’t talk,” ∷ᔑリsays, worried.

He touches your shoulder, and you involuntarily flinch back before deliberately relaxing. You sip from the bottle, hyperaware of the feeling of metal on your mouth—it’s been months since you’ve drunk out of anything but your hands, either from a cauldron or a river.

“I, em…I looked for you,” ∷ᔑリ says to fill the silence. “I can find you anywhere, I think. It took a really long time, though. Even teleporting it took me a few days to get here.”

“Wait, you haven’t slept for a few days?” You sit up, frowning.

He shrinks back at the tone, then relaxes and rolls his eyes. “You’re worried that I haven’t slept in a few days?”

“I’m full-blood, and I don’t have a trigger that can activate with sleep,” you snap back.

“It’s fine, it’s fine! Okay, okay.” ∷ᔑリ holds out a placating hand. “I was worried about you.”

“And I’m worried about what they’d do to you if they ever found out you were connected to me,” you hiss. “∷ᔑリ, I told you I was fine, but if you’re gone for days, they might think…” You trail off, noticing that ∷ᔑリ isn’t listening and is instead staring down at your fingers: your scarred hands, broken claws, the uneven stump on your index finger, and the missing pinky.

“You hands,” he says softly.

It makes you swallow down furious shame. What must you look like? You’ve healed since you’ve been able to eat again, so you think you look better when you stare into the river reflection, but months of torture aren’t easily shaken.

“Is that why you escaped?” ∷ᔑリ asks. “You were planning to stay until they asked for your help…”

“The plan changed,” you tell him, keeping your voice steady. “They waited too long. And their power over me went to their heads. They did much, much worse than lock me up, ∷ᔑリ,” you say, suddenly vicious with memories, “and it’s what will happen to you if they think we’re connected at all.”

“I was supposed to get you out,” he says, sounding near tears, “if you needed me to, but my other self…Sam wouldn’t let me in to visit anymore, and I should have just visited when he wasn’t in the prison but—”

Sudden remorse makes you soften your tone. “Don’t worry about it,” you tell him before he can actually start crying. “∷ᔑリ. Look at me. ꖎ𝙹𝙹ꖌ ᔑℸ ̣  ᒲᒷ It’s not your fault. I was handling it until I couldn’t anymore, so I got out.”

“I’m so sorry.” His clawed hands pick up your mutilated one, and you let him. “↸∷ᒷ , I’m so sorry…”

“Hey, hey.” You take off your mask so you can look at him properly. His glowing eyes dart to yours, then dart away. Carefully arranging your face into a comforting smile, you say, “It’s fine, it’ll grow back. And the plan’s fine, you didn’t ruin it—the server’s the closest to peace we’ve ever been. No one’s fighting.”

“Because everyone’s fighting you,” he says miserably. He leans forward, and you know what he wants. His long, long arms wrap around your shoulders, and he’s shaking a little. Your hand climbs up to tenderly cup the back of his head, your fingers resting on an old, raised scar under the curls.

(Mobs are dangerous.)

“So,” you say, tone deliberately light. “Tell me about the good things in the last three or so months I’ve been gone?”

He tilts his head, drawing back with a confused frown.

“While I was in prison,” you repeat. “I lost track of the days, so I’m probably a little off.”

“Dream.” ∷ᔑリ’s mouth opens, then closes. “You weren’t in there for three months.”

 “Okay." It makes sense that you'd be a few weeks off, so you'll forgive yourself for the mistake. "How long, then? Four? Five?”

“Dream,” ∷ᔑリ says, “You were in there for almost a year.”

Chapter Text

Sickness comes to the grey village during your third year with Cors and Robin. As the most knowledgeable in the village because of the books you’d gifted him, Robin is the most qualified to treat the sick, and his time is filled treating patients. He takes to wearing a face covering like yours so as not to get infected himself.

You’re scared enough that you leave them for a time to gather supplies for golden apples if Robin or Cors get sick. You press them and nearly force them both to eat one with every meal while the sickness rages.

“Do you have any of those yellow apples?” Robin asks, the next time you return from the forest with supplies. He wraps his face as he prepares to visit the sick. “Those were really good! They help with healing, right? I might take a few slices for some patients.”  

Luckily, the sickness didn’t take anyone’s life, and from then on, Robin became the village doctor despite his young age. Using some of your expertise in identifying plants and combining it with the remedies taught in the books, Robin crafts new effective medicines and treatments. He’s brilliant and already so much taller than he was when you met him under a beehive years ago.

“I need to stock up dried herbs, I think! This new book is fantastic—it has so many new remedies! Will you help me find them today?”

In your fourth year together, the years of adequate food and sleep and kindness have been good to you and Robin, and you’ve both grown taller. You’re not sure how old you are, but you think you’re reaching adulthood. It seems like the right amount of years.  

In your fourth year together, strange men come into the village and start asking strange questions.

In your fourth year together, you’re lightly sleeping next to Cors when hands grab you in the darkness. There’s more than two—multiple people are there as they drag you from the covers, blanket wrapped around your ankle, and you start struggling—

“Dream? Dream! No!”

—and they stab you in the heart.

You gasp soundlessly as blood spills down, and then you’re in the void and then you’ve regenerated on your bed. The pain leaves you limp, and Cor tries to tug you to his chest and turn to protect you, but—

“Stop, please, no, don’t take him, don’t hurt him—!”

—they hit Cors (no did they hit him with a knife is he dead is he regenerating) and they grab your arms and collar and they drag you outside. It’s cold. Your bare feet thud painfully over the entrance stairs as you scrabble at their arms.

Cors’ voice (he’s alive they didn’t kill him take him) screams out into the night, and you can hear him throwing open the door and trying to follow. “DREAM! Dream! Stop—why—Dream!”

“Cors!” you scream back.

You try to swipe out, hit the men holding you, but they grab your hair and hit you so hard you can’t breathe for a moment.

You can hear Cors crashing through the forest, screaming for you, growing fainter. You scream for him as long as you can so that he has something to follow—you thrash, driven wild by his desperate shouts and tears behind you, and they shove a knife in your side.

Cors’ voice grows fainter. “Dream! DREAM!”

 It’s the last you ever hear of him.

You’re weak and dazed from the exhaustion of a regeneration and the waves of pain in your side, and every time you try to move the knife moves with you, inside you, and you nearly black out. Eventually the men bring you to the side of a river, where they stretch out your arm and bleed you out onto a dirty mat.

One growls out the enchantment language to bind you here for respawn. You recognize the voice, and you can make out their features in the torchlight. You know them. They live in the village.

You plead with them by name. It doesn’t matter. They’re mad with bloodlust—they’re a two-person mob, and nothing stops the knife coming down—

When the enchantment’s finished, they skewer you again. The second respawn is more painful than the first, body strained to regenerate.

For what they assume to be your last death, they hold you under the water. It takes a while for you to stop thrashing.

You’re drowning. Hands are pressing you under.

You can’t breathe, and your chest aches, and your senses are painfully alight, yet you can’t seem to see clearly.

“—eam? In with me, right, yeah, and then out. Dream, you’re okay. You’re safe. Dream. ↸∷ᒷ. ||𝙹⚍ ᓵᔑリ ʖ∷ᒷᔑℸ ̣ ⍑ᒷ. ||𝙹⚍'∷ᒷ ᓭᔑ⎓ᒷ.”

Your hands grip your skull.

A year a year a year you can’t have missed a year a year are you insane did you have so little self-control memories gone pieces in your head missing what did they cut out of you how did you miss days weeks months a year a year—

You were doing so well pretending you were fine. You thought you were fine, Ran thought you were fine.

Something wet slides down your face and for a moment you’re convinced it’s blood again, and you make a sound and wrench yourself back from the reaching hands.

“You’re safe here. Relax your hands, ∷ᔑリ. It’s okay. Breathe in with me.”

“A year—” you gasp out. “Can’t be—”

How broken how weak your memories your mind betrayed you it’s all you can rely on and it’s wrong not weeks not months they ruined you for a year—

“You can hear me, good. Follow my breathing, okay?” Shuddering breaths are sucking the life out of you.  You sense his hands reaching out hesitantly, and you cling to his claws. “Okay, okay, okay,” he whispers, and eventually, slowly, you can breathe again and see again and the world comes back into proper focus.

Very slowly, with his left hand, ∷ᔑリ wipes at your cheek.

“I was keeping count,” you say, exhausted. “I had a count. I was counting.”

“It’s okay if you’re missing a few memories,” Ran says, voice low and soothing. “Remember what you said to me? ‘Let go of your past—it will only weigh you down.’ You’re okay. You’re here now.”

“I can’t have missed months.” The hysteria rises up again. “I was, I was…”

“You’re okay. You’re here, you’re safe.”

And it’s like everything else; you thought you’d made progress, then progress is torn away. Again you can’t breathe, and the world is an awful, contradictory mix of blurry and painfully vivid against your senses. You’re sucking in air because you’re drowning again.

End, you’re pathetic. A year.

Dimly, through the tears, you sense Ran hesitantly wrapping his arms around your back and legs, and you’re lifted from the ground. He bundles you up and carries you to your little shelter. The contact feels awful and wonderful at once—you’re too weak to defend yourself or wrench yourself from the arms holding you, but they’re Ran’s arms and you know he won’t hurt you. He still needs you.

∷ᔑリ sets you on your wool mat.

Eventually the world comes back once more, and the sounds that ∷ᔑリ makes begin to make sense again. In the soft, rasping language of your shared heritage, he talks of his pets, and his small automated farms, and the untouched lands he’s traveled through.

He’s sitting beside your mat, back against the river-clay walls. When you’re more aware, your hand moves toward him, and he settles his palm over yours. Twin urges to shove away the contact and cling tighter war within you. How long has it been since someone’s touched you kindly?

“You need to get back,” you say hoarsely. “You can’t avoid sleeping this long.” And no one can notice he’s been missing for days (right after a breakout—what would they do?)

“I have an enderpearl stasis chamber. I’ll just comm Phil. Don’t worry. I can stay however long I want.”

Smart. At least when Ran returns, he’ll only have been gone for a few days and not even longer with the return trip. Too tired to argue, you don’t say anything more.

“I think you need to sleep some more, actually,” ∷ᔑリ says. “Why don’t you take a break for a bit, and I can stock up on whatever you need here?”

“I don’t need to sleep.” Sleep helps, but your energy comes from another source: consuming an enigmatic mix of innate magic and specific foods and metals. You’ve never quite understood how it works, learning mainly from trial and error.

“Mmhm, mmhm. Well just rest then. You’ve done a lot here. Lots of projects. What’s next?”

“An icebox downstairs,” you say slowly. “To store fish.” You know what’s coming next—

“Okay!” Ran says cheerfully. “You tell me where to dig.”

“I’m not going to just watch you work, ∷ᔑリ.”

“But you’ll be telling me where to put it.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Mm-hm, mm-hm.”

You’re tired, and a bit humiliated, and you know Ran won’t hurt you, so frustration wells up and you hiss, “Don’t—don’t patronize me. I’m fine, you just caught me off guard. I got out without your help, and I can survive out here without it too! Who taught you how to survive, again?”

Hurt and surprise flash across his face, then he holds up his hands in surrender. “Okay, ᓭ𝙹∷∷||. Sorry.”

You refuse to feel guilty, so you struggle upright and rest your head against the wall. Ran silently sets down his enderchest and begins to pull out supplies. 

He pulls out iron, diamond tools, raw steak, and several potions. Ran doesn’t offer them aloud to you, just lines them up near the wall.

“Do you remember how it was after you found me?” Ran says. “And I was like skittish and didn’t say anything? I remember I was a little feral. Like, I think I remember nearly biting you once ‘cause you surprised me?”

He’d been small, then, with mismatched eyes too large for his face, and his face had had the same hungry edge as Ro—

No.

You narrow your eyes at Ran, wondering where this is headed.

“It’s kind of nice that I can take care of you now.” He pulls out a second enderchest and places it by the other supplies, a chest for you to keep. “Like I can pay you back.”

“You don’t owe me a favor for that,” you say quietly. Ran is the closest thing you’ve found to family—he’s the same blood, and different rules apply, and you’ve taught him that in your survival lessons. Take every opportunity to have someone owe you a favor—except if the other would willingly give favors over and over again without any promise of repayment. Like family should. Don’t trust anyone fully—except for each other, monsters that were beaten to death in the forest or drowned in the river. The only ones to understand each other.

“Well, it’s like the roles are reversed just a little bit,” Ran says. He withdraws raw beef wrapped in thick paper and hands it to you.

Humor tugs at your lip. “You’re calling me feral?”    

“Of course not, of course not.” Innocent.

“You’re such a brat,” you say, but with fondness. You accept the meat from his hands. It’s been chopped into small pieces, like you’re a teething child, but you don’t call Ran out on it.

“Mmhm, mmhm.”

The meat’s so tender you can chew it easily. It’s so good. It’s been so long since you’ve eaten steak. You stay quiet, watching as Ran digs out a small tunnel down for the future icebox.

“You’re literally the only one who’s ever called me that, you know,” he says, to fill the silence. “I’m an angel.”

You snort softly. “No one’s seen this side of you.”

“Angel.”

He’s teasing, playful, just like the Ran you know. The look on his face is nearly the same from when he only came to your waist. “You’ve always been a good kid,” you murmur, and he immediately soaks in your words.

Maybe he judges the situation sufficiently calm for another attempt. “You don’t have to, but—do you, do you want to talk about what happened?”

A year your mind is a sieve and your memories the sand a year a year—

You slide your slitted eyes over to him. The answer should be obvious. “You just caught me off guard, ∷ᔑリ.”

“Do you think it’s like what I have?” ∷ᔑリ continues. He’s a lot braver with all of his memories. His hand unconsciously reaches up to the back of his head, where an old scar bisects the nape. “The memory issues? Do you think it’s a head injury?”

You don’t know. You’ve lost time sitting at the side of the river, and you lost time staring at the lava in a haze of pain. Is your memory going from a head injury or insanity? How could you have lost days, weeks, months?

“Could be,” you say. “The brain also doesn’t want to remember pain sometimes. Could be that. A survival tactic.”

Your brain had given you that mercy, long ago, with dirt floors and dirty hands and reentering the cycle of life and death over and over until it’s a haze of memory— 

Ran hums in reply. “Then maybe it’ll get better naturally? Or maybe I’ll need to learn how to use the book too, for you.”

“That’s not happening any time soon,” you warn him. “We don’t know if it would take too much energy from you.” He’s half-blood, half-ender, and though the teleportation is useful, it dilutes his healing factor. You gain your energy from a different source—the sky, the ground, the life around you—while Ran still needs cooked food and sleep.

“Then you need to heal up so you can heal me,” he returns easily, “so that maybe I can heal you.”

“I am not using the book on you until I’ve done more experiments, we’ve been over this—”

“Want to know how many totems I have?” Ran interrupts, grinning.

His smile’s infectious, and you calm down a bit. “You found more?”

“Guess.”

“Well, more than two, I’m guessing.”

“Forty-two,” Ran says.

What.

What.

“What?” you wheeze out, surprise deflating your lungs.

“Mmhm.” He looks far too pleased with himself.

“You’re insane,” you say, doubled over and wheezing. “You’re actually insane.”

“Now you can get started on those experiments whenever you’re ready,” Ran says happily.

Forty-two! Even you only have four in your inventory, and that’s considered overkill by server standards.

“How the hell did you get so many?” That’s a rhetorical question, because you know how. Teleportation comes in useful. “Then…then it’s normal for you to slip away for days at a time…”

“Mm-hm. So don’t worry about me staying for a bit.” He bends down and sits cross-legged, taking a break from fixing up the cottage. "Just focus on healing."

"And the book," you finish. You’ll argue with him later, because he still needs to get back soon if your joint plan is going to work (and you never lose an argument). “Tell me about the server,” you say instead.   

Years ago, before the server, back when your memories started forming, you didn’t wear a mask. It feels almost like a child’s tale.

It was a place far away with dry sands and constant humming in the air and a velvet-dark sky full of stars. The people, your family, spoke with hushed language and long sighs, and they wore their claws and teeth-slits with open pride. The Ancient Ones molded their bodies with care, sharpening body-teeth and twining colorful thread around their limbs and draping cloth to accentuate their features and painting lines around their glowing eyes.

It seems so odd, now. A different world.

You don’t know what happened. Much the same that happened to ∷ᔑリ happened to you—there was violence, and fire, and your memories are shuffled and fractured. All you know is that they’re gone, and the only things that remain of them are the shards of debris buried deep in scattered worlds.

Before you settled in permanently, Robin always asked for stories from your travels when you flitted in and out of the grey village. “What new stories do you have to tell us, Dream?” he’d ask, and the journey back to them was always faster than your sojourns out. Excitement would quicken your footsteps and let the trunks fly by as you headed home.

Your feet are bleeding now.

Your murderers must have thrown your body in the river to wash away their murder, because when you wake next, however long later it takes to regenerate while drowning and freezing, you’re washed thousands of blocks downriver. It takes you days to limp back. When you return, you’re far too late.

Robin had always had the scent of ink and herbs on his fingers, and the wool, cloth, and dye of flowers always clung to Cors. When you return, you can faintly smell them under the overwhelming scent of blood.

The grey village is silent. No one is here, not even your murderers. What even happened? A pillager raid? Sickness?

The true story is worse, you find.

They’ve built an execution pit. It’s a contraption that, when the level is switched, sends somebody falling into a natural lava pit far below. You find it, and you stare at the edge. There’s a bloodstained mat nearby, and it stinks of respawn magic.

It smells like ink and herbs. Underneath, there’s also a faint scent of wool and flowers.

No.

It can’t be they have several lives left 

No.

what could they possibly have been accused of ? maybe they lived—they escaped—(you’re not stupid—)

No.

but what could have happened and how could it have happened so fast—they can’t be they can’t THEY CAN’T BE WHY HOW WHEN—

Small rock shards dig into your hands and knees. You’re on all fours, and you can’t breathe. You’re drowning again.

Mobs are dangerous

Had they even hesitated? Mobs are dangerous, and people want an easy target. How long had it taken them to rid themselves of the outcasts and weak? How fast did they execute them? Were they the scapegoats? Was this just an excuse to dispose of the unwanted?

Robin was just hitting his growth spurt. Cors had just finished the final stitching on Robin’s new boots he and you had secretly crafted for him. Will everyone you touch, every family you’ve had, why do they…

They didn’t deserve this. They didn’t. It can’t have happened. They could have escaped they could be far from here they could still be alive—

It’s senseless. Why had this happened? The blood of the other villagers also stains the ground. Had they used the lava twice, then the sword, for their executions? Did they want information, so they dragged it out and threatened them with a blade for the final death?

(How long had it taken for Robin and Cors to die, regenerating over and over in the pit—? How much pain had Robin been in when he was forced through two successive regenerations and too drained dry for the third…? )

There’s fresh earth nearby. A final death always leaves a body. Like a spectator to your own movements, you stagger over to the mass grave. There’s not even a marking. No stones, no sticks, no flowers.

(Had Cors or Robin gone first? Who had buried the other?)

Your eyes are painfully dry. You’ve been immersed and soaked in water for so many days that maybe there’s nothing left to cry. Despite the lack of tears, strange sounds rip from your cracked chest and leave you hunched over the turned earth.

You’ll never tell him a story again. You’ll never force-feed them golden apples. Nothing can heal the dead.

Chapter Text

Necromancy is the art of healing the dead. Raising the dead is much like healing the living: cells are replaced, blood flows, and souls are stitched back to flesh.

In essence, necromancy is the art of healing. If a part of a living person were dying, why couldn’t it fix that wound as well?

***

You’re worried that the child with the mismatched eyes won’t make it—there’s blood on his thighs, bruises down on his chin, and dark clumps in his hair. The worst of it is a blow to the back of the head. You’re afraid to touch it, afraid of pressing too hard on bone and feeling it give, so you wipe away the blood and dirt with the gentlest of touches.

He has broken bones. Arm, leg, ribs. It’s good he’s deeply unconscious, because you have to set some messy breaks. Luckily you have some experience and skill.

He’s breathing, at least. But he doesn’t wake up.

Days pass, and you hardly leave your bunker in the woods (one of many) as you spend all of your time making sure his small, unconscious body keeps breathing. There’s an irrational fear that if you stop looking at him, his heart will stop. If you’re not there for a minute, his chest won’t rise again.

“ᓭℸ ̣ 𝙹!¡, ᓭℸ ̣ 𝙹!¡,” he whimpers, once, when his fever spikes.

Herb-soaked sponge baths and poultices for the infection. Stitches for the worst cuts on his legs. His clothes are unsalvageable, so you repurpose your own and sew them smaller.

When the fever spikes, you try cooling him with towels soaked in cold water, but he writhes in unconscious pain when the liquid touches his head—is it the water? Is it his Ender side? What do you do? How can you cool him down? In desperation, you freeze the cloths in healing potions and place them on his forehead, and this, thankfully, works. The fever cools, and his skin is unburnt. 

You’re running out of healing potions. “I should have been more prepared,” you hiss to yourself in agitation, fingers flexing. You’re running close to the limit, and you should have had so many more potions, golden apples, supplies, in reserve, and you can’t fail in this, this child with your eyes—

And it’s unnatural, that someone with blood of the ᔑリᓵ╎ᒷリℸ ̣  𝙹リᒷᓭ  should sleep so much. It may be the head wound. How much damage did it leave?

He’s so small, you think. He’s buried in the nest of wool blankets.

His fever drops and his bones knit together, but he doesn’t wake up. It’s a coma. All of your pillows (some newly sewn) go to his mat and nest of pillows. (With the blood from his wounds, you’ve bound him here for regeneration—if he dies and revives, he’ll respawn here in safety.)

If he could revive. His body’s so weak you’re not sure he could struggle back to life. And who knows how many lives the monsters who did this to him already took?

But his thin chest keeps rising, and he’s strong, and he survives.

Two weeks and three days, and your child opens his eyes.

***

At the sound of nearby footsteps, you blearily open your eyes.

Ran’s rearranging something off to the side. You’re on your mat, and you blink lethargically. Apparently you slept, and now Ranboo’s cleaning up something.

“You’re like my little…servant,” you say raspily.

Ran jumps and then fixes you with an unimpressed look. “Had a nice nap?” he asks sweetly.

It’s only ∷ᔑリ’s voice, and it shouldn’t remind you but it does—Wake up, Dream. A kick. We’ve got things to do! Ready to get started—?

Shaking off the clinging memory, you say roughly, “Oh shut up.” Ran snickers, and you huff a tired laugh as the memory of cold hands dissipates. “How long was I out?”

“Just a few hours,” Ran says. “Not long. And yes, yes, I’m leaving soon.”

You sit up, feeling much better than you had before. “I still can’t believe you got married without me,” you say, just to mess with him. He’s getting too smug.  

“Wha—just for taxes!”

“That’s how it starts.”

“Oh my g—”

“Marrying the enemy. You’re on your enemies to lovers arc.”

Ran rubs his forehead. “You are the worst.”

There, now he’s on the back foot, like it should be. Your mouth splits open into a yawn with too many teeth as you scrub away the strangeness of sleep. “You’ve been busy,” you observe, watching Ran avoid your eyes as he fiddles with newly organized supplies.

Ran pulls a golden apple from one of the new chests lining the wall. “I put in—there’s a bunch of new chests. I wasn’t sure where, where to put them exactly, but it’s lined up here and they’re pretty organized. Organized for me, at least. You might have to—yeah.” He hands you the apple. You try not to bite into it too quickly.

Ran continues rambling. “Extra food, some armor. Materials. What kind of weapons? Ax, shield, crossbow? That’s your, your preference, right? I have these and you can enchant them if you want, or I can.”

You swallow and gesture to the wall. “Are they in—?”

“Yeah, this chest. And here’s another enderchest for you. And stuff for potions, I know you like having extras of those. I was thinking emeralds, maybe, but I’m not sure what you’d need it for out here? I have extras if you want, though…and how much netherite do you want? I know it’s easier to just enchant the diamond and then craft the netherite on it later…”

Taking a quick peek in each chest, you can see that they’re brimming with supplies. It’s nearly overwhelming. It’s so many things. You’re used to…to lack of. To want and hunger. To an empty room where each item needed to live took so much time and effort: time between and effort to crawl to the dropped rations. 

“I forgot you’re rich,” you say, forcing a teasing note in.

“Yeah, I kind of am.” He grins. “Happy to share. Want to try on the armor? I made a rough set that you can fine-tune.”

One of the lessons you’d drilled into ∷ᔑリ’s head was to always wear armor with rare exceptions. Attacks, deadly ones, were rarely expected. Even here, sitting with the closest thing to family in the world, Ran wears dark plates of netherite armor that in certain light shimmers with the uniquely colored shadows of Ran’s innate magic. 

In one of the chests lies a set of diamond-scale armor, unenchanted. You pull the chestplate on over your homespun shirt. It’s heavy on your chest, digging into your clavicles with only a thin shirt as padding.

It’s just the chestplate, and it’s heavy.

You’re standing in the center of your cottage, wearing second-hand armor somebody else made for you, and your legs are going to start shaking soon because it’s heavy. Looking down at yourself, it doesn’t look much better than it feels. It gapes over your hips and sits wide over your shoulders. It’s like a kid playing dress up.

You’ve lost so much weight. Most of your muscle is gone. A fight right now, even with armor, would not end well. (It was a miracle you’d killed Sam at all, looking like this. Desperation had made you vicious.)

Desperation has always made you vicious.

Sitting down hides the fresh trembling in your legs. “These will be useful,” you say by way of thanks. The chestplate digs in uncomfortably, but it also brings a sense of security you hadn’t realized you’d been missing.

“Before I go, I have to ask.” Looking to the side, Ran fiddles with his sleeve. “In the prison, with the TNT, why…no, I guess, why did you kill Tommy?”

Ran’s unnervingly good at slipping under people’s defenses, making them underestimate him. He likely planned it so that he’d bring this up when you’re wearing armor and feeling relatively safer.

“Everyone heard about it,” Ran continues. “They weren’t sure if…if you brought him back or if it had just been long enough since his first death.” The death limit a body could handle, generally, was three regenerations within one to three years. If it had been long enough, the body could handle another one, though unhappily. The physical effects after each one were progressively worse. “Just…what happened?”

The apple juice lies flat on your tongue. Tommy. It’s always Tommy, isn’t it. From the very beginning, stealing and screaming and mugging and emitting just enough rough charm to get away with it all. 

“I brought him back,” you say. Hopefully he’ll leave it at that. “I fixed it.”  

“Was there a reason? To, you know?” Ran’s eyes are big, as they always are, but you can’t read them—is he disappointed? Curious? Disapproving?

“I fixed it.”  

“Was it timed? Is that why you asked for the TNT then?”

Oh, that’s what’s bothering him. It makes more sense now. Ran had lit that TNT above the obsidian cell as a test on the prison’s security. He’s feeling guilty. He was always soft about these things.  

“You weren’t an accomplice to murder. At most you did some property damage. The rest was all me.” Your voice is thin and tired.

“Oh.” Ran’s silent for a moment. “Did you want Tommy trapped in there with you?”

“Who would ever want to be locked in a box with Tommy?”

“Then why did you ask me—?”

“I timed it like that, but I didn’t think the Warden would just leave him in there. Best case scenario, I would have used Tommy as a hostage to get out. Most likely scenario, I’d see the prison protocol for potential break-ins.” Once you’ve started, the dam breaks and details flow out. It’s a confession, just like the ones Sam wrenched from you, but it’s to Ran and you don’t need to sensor your words. “He just screamed the whole time in there—drove each other insane, got violent. He doesn’t listen to reason. He’s insane. He ate all of the food and threw some in the lava.” You half-laugh. “I gave him most of my rations too—that kind of food doesn’t really help me, you know—and he’d complain or say I was manipulating him, like I wasn’t the only one keeping him alive since Sam decided to starve us.” Because he didn’t know Tommy was alive—just the monster, the villain, who was hard to keep down but too tough to die from starvation.

Your mutilated hands are shaking. Ran’s face is easier to read, now—he just looks sad.

“He brought a cat in,” you say, words spilling out. “She was there for the weeks. The collar had the summon charm that accidentally activated, I think—he didn’t mean for her to come in. She liked me more.”

Purring, warm, lying on your chest, the cat had been the first in so long to willingly seek out your touch. She’d liked you more, always circling widely around the teenager, hiding behind your legs. The gnawing maw in your stomach, the ice clinging to your ribs, had shivered with some sort of feeling for the first time in so long. In your mind you called her Hope. A name fitting for Pandora’s Vault and the first living being dead within it.

“He killed her because I liked her. We fought. I killed him. Brought him back after a day.” And you’re still not sure what to think of it—there had been reasons, it wasn’t senseless death, but you’d still lost control. It wasn’t a victory. It wasn’t a loss.

“You don’t sound happy about it.” At least, is unspoken.

“I fixed it. And now I know how the book works.”

Ran’s silent again.

“Okay,” he says finally. “That makes sense. But why did you plan to use Tommy to test it?” He knows you too well, or he thinks too much of you. He thinks that you plan everything and anticipate every move. In that, and that alone, he’s like the rest of the server.

Is it unthinkable you could make a mistake?

“I didn’t,” you say quietly. You’d lost control, and the consequences that followed…you never could have expected blatant torture. “Just a nasty, desperate prison fight.”

“Desperate?”

“He hadn’t been starved for weeks.” You’re sure he would have killed you if you’d let even one of his hits go unanswered. So you hit back, and he hit harder, and it escalated until you knew your reputation and his residual fear wouldn’t be enough to stop him, so you had to. “And he didn’t think I could actually resurrect anyone. People believe what he says. And the book’s the only reason they kept me alive apparently.”

“So it was partly to prove a point?” You don’t reply, and Ranboo continues, hesitant, “That’s awful, with the cat, but…killing him and bringing him back on purpose…testing out the book on him…you do see why that’s, that’s not right? Maybe that’s not the right word. It just feels too far. Coming back, it…it did something to him, and he’s been...”

You snap.

“Maybe if you got locked in a box and chained down and starved for months, you’d make more rational decisions,” you snarl. “Killing him was obviously a mistake. It proved that I could revive the dead, but it also left the Warden open to torturing me to death. What do you want to hear? I fixed it, it works, and I’m not about to feel sorry for him for being trapped in a cell for three weeks, because apparently I was in there for a year having skin torn off!”

The air is sharp in the silence. Your mask is off. Your eyesight’s going blurry.

Ran lets out a small sound.

Oh no. The fury-revenge-regret sweeps away as quickly as it came, leaving you hollow. “∷ᔑリ…”

“I’m sorry,” he sobs, tears running down his cheeks faster than he can wipe them away. “I’m so, so sorry. I’m sorry…”

Looking around, you snatch up the nearest cloth—your homespun skirt—and press it to his face before he can permanently burn his skin.

“This whole situation—” he stutters out. “What happened on this server?” He smothers his face in the cloth to soak up the tears at the source, words muffled. “I thought it would be different here? I’m so sorry that they hurt you. I’m so sorry everyone’s hurting. Why are people like this? Why would anyone deliberately hurt or torture someone else—?”

Isn’t that a question?

(Senseless deaths and unmarked graves. Unworn leather boots and a cabin’s broken door. A broken skull and unfocused eyes.)

“People can’t be trusted not to hurt each other,” you say. “That’s why we need something to make them listen. It’s why the book’s important.”

Ran doesn’t say anything as he tries to recover, hunched over.

You crouch next to him and try to reassure him, “I’ve figured out how to bring back people from the void. That’s the first step. Then we can figure out how our other ᔑリᓵ╎ᒷリℸ ̣abilities work and we’ll make them listen—”

“We should just leave,” Ranboo says, looking up at you.

Your hand jerks on his shoulder. “What?”

“We leave this server, try to figure out the ᔑリᓵ╎ᒷリℸ ̣book somewhere else.” He blinks shiny eyes, lips still pressed together to stifle more burning tears.

“We can’t,” you say.

“They’re going to hurt you again,” Ran says. “They’re talking about it. They’re going to keep searching.”

“We can’t leave the server.”

“I know you worked hard to get this world, but—”

“It’s my server.”

“We can buy another world somewhere else!”

“I can’t.”

“But—”

“I can’t, Ran.”

“If we can’t afford another, we can just leave, like we did before—”

“Listen to me, ∷ᔑリ,” you snap, frustrated. “I literally can’t.”

Ran’s mouth opens to argue more, then freezes. His mismatched eyes widen, realization slowly dawning, staring at you with something like horror.

***

He’s small, and underfed, and his eyes glaze over far too frequently.

Sometimes his memory is so bad he can’t remember who you are—the only one in his world—until he checks his memory book. Sometimes there aren’t any gaps in his mind and he speaks ᔑリᓵ╎ᒷリℸ ̣ perfectly. And sometimes he’s trapped in the memory where large hands slashed at his skull and split his mind.

You’re too afraid to let him try a respawn, unsure of how long his last regeneration was, and you’re not even sure that would fix his mind—regeneration replicates a person’s essence but it doesn’t always heal major damage.

“I’m going to teach you how to survive,” you tell him, and you drill those lessons into him over and over, written into his little book, so he won’t forget, until he could say them in his sleep.

Ran soaks up your lessons like a worn cloth to water.

You want him to survive, above all. Maybe it’s not nice, what you teach him, but if he lives—if he just lives—it doesn’t matter how harsh the lessons are.

Ends and means. What better end than keeping him alive?

***

“You didn’t,” Ran whispers. “You…did you really? You figured out how to…”

“Yeah.” You flash something that might be called a grin at him, too many teeth. “It worked out, didn’t it? Look around.”

“When did you even…?”

“When you were wandering Hypixel.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“It was supposed to be for you.” Your mouth twists. “It was supposed to be for all of us.”

Ran makes a small sound, leaning over and pressing his long fingers into his temples like a headache’s splitting his skull. Is his memory acting up? “I wish you’d told me.”

You ignore that. “I’m powerful here. I could be a god, once I figure out the rest of the book. I can fix your memory. I can make sure no one can touch us. I can teach you how, too.” He’s half-ᔑリᓵ╎ᒷリℸ ̣, so he can probably use the book’s techniques as well. How on earth Schlatt had ever stumbled on an ᔑリᓵ╎ᒷリℸ ̣book was a mystery, but it had unlocked abilities you’d never dreamed of. Of course you’d had to switch sides once you’d realized what he had—a piece of a people long dead and long silent.

Ran rubs his forehead for a long minute, silent.  

“I know it’ll work,” you rasp, shuffling closer. “It worked with Tommy, in the prison, and I’ll practice until I’m sure it would work to heal you. Necromancy’s just bringing dead cells back to life. It should work on dead tissue.”

Slowly, he reaches out to your hand, and you let him take your scarred fingers into his. The touch is still strange; your skin is cringing yet longing at once.

“I do want to get better,” he says. “I just want you to be safe too. I’m so scared for you.”

Something in your chest feels like it’s cracking, bleeding. It hurts. It’s warm. It’s strange.    

“Worry more about yourself,” you say, forcing lightness in. “You really need to sleep. And you need to head back before people wonder where you are.”

∷ᔑリ nods.

***

He’s the first one to ever ask why you cover your face.

“You’ve never covered yours?” you ask in surprise. You’d thought the monsters who left him for dead had torn it off. “Your parents—parent—never told you?”

It’s the wrong thing to say; his forehead scrunches worryingly as he chokes, “I don’t remember.”

You kneel down to his height and tug down your face wrap. It had only covered up to your eyes, but now you expose your whole face—scars and sharp teeth and glowing eyes.

“It’s our tradition. Only family can see our faces.”

You reach out and trace the small teeth-slits on the lighter side of his face. Whether because he’s a child or a hybrid, the teeth haven’t grown in fully. The slits are just hardened lines similar to a scar, which is what most people would assume them to be.

He reaches up and touches the spot your fingers had brushed against. “Why?”

“Showing your face means you trust someone with more than your life. And it means you love them. The rest of the world doesn’t deserve to see your face. And, I guess,” you add, “it keeps you safe from…from people who don’t like people who look different.”

Tentatively, Ranboo reaches up to your face, touching the scar near your lip. You hold still.

“Should I cover mine?” he asks softly.

“Only if you want to,” you say. “And you don’t need to around me. We’re family.”

“We are?”

“We are,” you say firmly. “You’re mine.”

He doesn’t quite smile, but he’s happy—you can tell. Later you see him scribbling furiously in the notebook he’s started to carry around.

(And later, much later, when his mind feels whole as he teleports through the server, he covers his face as tribute to his heritage.)

Chapter Text

Servers go by different names—worlds, universes, realms. With a map, a portal, and a whitelist key, anyone can travel to a new world. There are thousands of them placed throughout the greater Universe.

Occasionally explorers discover new worlds as they gaze into the code of the Universe. There are a limited number of known worlds discovered, so to own one is rare—and expensive.

Worlds are a limited commodity, after all. They can’t be created.

* * *

When little Ran wakes and heals, you teach him how to run.

Once his eyes regain focus, weeks after he wakes up, you show him how to siphon energy from the ground so he can run for days without stopping. The two of you run through countless biomes, for countless seasons.

"It's like a heartbeat," he whispers in awe, hands flat on the ground. "Or a...a voice?" 

You show him how to cover his face, hide his dyadic hair, outrun any hunter. He’s the only one you’ve seen who’s like you, and he’s been attacked already.  

His head heals, and he starts growing taller. You can tell he’s going to be ridiculously tall.

You teach him to fight. How to talk persuasively, how to sink into shadows. How to jump worlds without invitations. You teach him everything you know, so he can live.

Your child with mismatched eyes teaches you how to live, too.  

* * *

The smallest sheep climbs into your lap as you sit idly tugging at blades of grass. After the past two weeks, you’ve gained enough weight to pad your ribs and pelvis, enough that it’s no longer painful to sit on the ground. 

“You’re pushy, aren’t you?” you say, burying your scarf and face into the wool. The sheep wriggles slightly, a living, breathing, warm being under your hands.

The creek burbles along, and the weather’s gentle. Birds chirp deeper into the woods, and if you listen carefully there’s a fox kit yipping near the roots. Ran’s made sure you have a full icebox of fish and enough netherite to coat an axe. Your stomach can handle food without squirming in nausea, and the constant gnawing under your lungs is no longer a constant, and your teeth-claws aren’t brittle and breaking.

The sheep bleats conversationally as you stroke the wool clouds. “Mm-hm,” you reply, sighing. You’re alive, you’re alone, and you can breathe.

The life-pulse hums under your fingers, through the grass and the sheep and the streams. If you concentrate, you can soak it into your fingers slowly, gold sinking in like sunrays to skin. Closing your eyes, you can feel your heart beat stronger, faster.

You’ve always gained your energy from another source.

“Wᒷ ᔑ∷ᒷ 𝙹ꖌᔑ||,” you hum to yourself.

The sheep nibbles near your fingers, and with a small laugh you conjure wheat. She slurps it up, then lays her head down to idly nibble at the grass near your knee.

“You’re happy with what you have, hm? Not going to ask me for more?” You lean forward to press your scarf closer to her wool, breathing in the pungent scent. You never thought you’d love the smell of sheep. They really stink. “You’re already better than people, you know. Smell better, too.” When your giggles fade, you sigh. “If you give people something, they’ll just keep taking and taking. No gratitude, no limits.”

If you gave them your face, they’d claim your body; if you gave them a room, they’d burn the house; if you gave them a world, they’d take your humanity; if you showed them your loves, they’d kill them.

Animals make so much more sense than people. If you feed them, they come back. If you ran out of treats, they wouldn’t run you down and loot your body out of spite. People would. People do.

An animal might kill you, but they wouldn’t betray you. They’re honest in their selfishness.  

The sheep shifts, and it tugs on your scarf, so you tug it back up.

Your communicator pings.

The communicator blinks at your side, and you look down. There’s only one person who’d directly message you.

Dre, they’re coming

Ice floods.

I don’t know how but they’re going in the right direction

Please be safe

I’m coming too

Ran’s given you a warning. It’s a jolt to the heart—it’s iron in your lungs—but it’s not a surprise.

Sam was always going to come. There’s a pack in your house, potions in your inventory, and enchanted netherite weapons.

Your armor is mostly leather, though. Agility fails you with netherite, as you are. So leather it is, with light scales of netherite lining your torso and thighs—a sort of samurai look. Maybe you can pull it off as a stylistic choice instead of the limit of your atrophied legs.

Your arms still shake under the weight of an axe, so you have to settle for a sword.  

It will come to blood, you know, as you strap on your bow and sword. If I kill them, that’s their choice. I gave them so many chances. And they took and took…

If Q comes…you’re not sure what you’ll do.

You’d like to push a blade through his sternum and drag down, down…but maybe your body will betray you again, and you’ll freeze with muscle memory. A deer under a hunter’s scope. Maybe the terror and helplessness will surge again at the worst moment.

For now, though…there’s no fear. There’s not much of anything. 

Looking over your little cottage, the pink river-clay walls, the sheep pen and small creek—this is the work of weeks and the evidence of Ran’s love and worry. It’s just another attachment. If you cling to it, it’ll kill you when the others come.

In a flash, the axe comes down to break the fence. The sheep look at you, blinking.

“Out.” Your throat’s dry. They’ll be eaten if, when, the others come.

Your favorite sheep trots up and stuffs her nose in your middle. You push her head. “Leave. Predators are coming.” She doesn’t move. “Out!” you order, but she doesn’t move. The other sheep haven’t left the pen, either.  

So you light the grass on fire, and finally they run.

The fence catches fire. Clay’s flammable, too, and flames start to lick at the cottage walls. Better you burn it than they do.  

* * *

From your first home, you can barely remember your family; in your second, your family was taken; in the third, you’re beginning to realize that you were never a family at all.

You’ve had three homes, and the second was Robin and Cors. You’ve had three homes: that quiet place, those voices, and this world.

“What new stories do you have to tell us this time, Dream?”

“Hey, sweetheart. What are you working on today?”

“I’ve missed you.”

I’ve missed you.

"Will you help me find them?"

In Pandora, the voices of your second home came to visit you.

There was a period of time after Robin and Cors that slips from your memory like water through thin fingers. You remember marking their graves with carved stone, and you remember stumbling away from the grey village like another corpse of its victims. There may or may not have been fire and smoke clinging to your homespun poncho. There may or may not have been blood under your hand-teeth, but you’re sure there was some in your mouth. 

And, mechanically, habitually you did what you do best: survive.

Looking back and reflecting, you think insanity might have touched you. Insanity, though, was something defined by outsiders looking through a window into someone’s inner world—the house occupant thinks their routine normal, but the neighbors whisper. When you ran for days and collected flesh strips with your claws and sob-screamed under a studded sky and lost days of time to the void, it was normal. It was survival.

It’s hell.

Your first house was clumsy and drafty—half carved out of the dirt of a hillside, and half a scavenged mix of mismatched woods. It’s something, though, somewhere to wait out the nights you don’t sleep and avoid the teeth of the undead.

Trial and error helps you survive.

You suck up strength from the surrounding woods until it’s only a husk left behind.

You live. You search.

You can’t find your family’s murderers.

You survive.

You find them and nearly die. But you finish it. It’s done. There’s nothing left in this world. Nothing worthwhile but two small stones. 

Eventually you found the portal out of that world, and eventually you figured out how to connect to other worlds without an invitation. You left to hone your fighting skills. No one would murder you again. No one would dare.

* * *

Running. Slapping branches. The dull, steady pounding of the land's heartbeat beneath your feet. Fluttering panic sapping energy.

Of course they’d come to ruin this, this pseudo-home—the server invitees consume everything you make. Why won’t they stop?  End, you should kill someone again.

“I just want them gone,” you whine to the trees, the earth, the sky. If you could manhandle all of them out of the world’s portal, you would—but you’re only one person against many, and your track record against mob mentality isn’t great.

If you kill them, though, then revive them with the book right next to this world’s exit portal…That could work.

That could work.

* * *

Only four people have compasses that can find you. You’d hoped…Well, it doesn’t matter. The most likely answer to how they’ve tracked you down is that they’re using one of those compasses.

Bad and Ant find you first.

A few years ago, outrunning them would have been easy, but now, even with the world feeding you all around, you can’t avoid them forever. The scars and missing chunks of your feet skew your balance as you run. Better to stand and save your strength for the inevitable confrontation.

So you find an area where you have the high ground and an escape route, and you turn to wait for them. Heart pounding.

The hunters emerge from the forest into your clearing. For a moment, you all blink at each other. Bad and Ant look healthy, covered in their self-enchanted shining netherite armor, but they smell like decay. Rotted leaves and moldy earth.

“Dream!” Ant says.

Carefully, you adjust the scarf around your lower face. Bare to the world, your slitted eyes fixate on them.   

“Your eyes are glowing,” Ant says casually. “Look at that!”

“Oh, and you’re scarred,” Bad says, eyes roving over your eyeline. “That’s terrible.”

Their voices are as sweet as rot, and they’re as sincere as an infested wood foundation.

Show no weakness. Leave me alone won’t work; they’ll smell blood. “Why are you looking for me?”

“We missed you, Dream,” Bad croons.

It’s nearly enough to make your heart hurt. The words mean nothing. “This is about the Egg, isn’t it.” You tilt your head.

“The Egg wants to meet you, too.” Bad steps around, tail flicking, deceptively casual. “Says you have an interesting connection to the land, since you discovered this world. Is that true, Dream? You can come back with us. With our empire, you’d be safe. We’d protect you.”

A horrifying snarl rips from you, and Bad has the gall to look surprised. It’s an inhuman sound.

“Now you want me?” you hiss.

“I…” Bad’s eyes flicker red. “I always have, Dream. I can’t change the past. I didn’t have as much power as I do now. Now we can protect you.”

“Stop lying. You aren’t any good at it.”

“I can convince them not to kill you if you help us, our empire.”

“Just like you convinced them to spare me down in that vault?” you spit bitterly. “When you all watched while I was killed over and over? After I surrendered?”

Bad doesn’t speak.

You’ve made your decision. You deliberately force your body casual, settled back, relaxed, reasonable as you prepare. If you time it right—

“I know you’re being influenced by the Egg,” you say softly, calmly. “So I won’t hold it against you that you never tried to help me while I was in prison. While you were a guard.” If you time it right— “So, Bad, that’s why—”

You dart forward mid-sentence, pushing past his guard before he can block. 

—it won’t even be a fight.

[BadBoyHalo was slain by Dream.]

Chapter Text

Numbers and code make up the fabric of the universe. Each discovered world has a unique seed number that travelers use to arrive at the world’s portal.

The one portal is the only place for welcomes and goodbyes. To leave a world, a traveler must find the world portal and go through.

***

Possibly the worst moments are when Q sets aside the knife or shears or pliers or axe and tortures entirely with his hands.

They’re disgustingly soft and warm as they ghost up your legs, trace every blood-let and puncture—

“You know I can do whatever I want to you, right? You’re not playing this very smart, Dreamy.” His fingers dig into a flap of skin on your arms, and your breath hitches. “No, no, no, don’t make a sound. This isn’t that bad.”

When you tense, muscles stiff, his nails pull at a cut until whimpers escape, and you force your body to relax under his hands until his hands skim slowly up and up. It’s degrading, it’s nauseating, but there’s less pain. It gives you a session with less injuries. Accepting the humiliation is a tactical decision.

It’s training. It’s learned helplessness under his hands. He wants you pliant. So you suppress your sobs.

It generally ends with his hands on your mask, and there you always fail. A broken hand shoots up to hold onto the mask or push weakly at his fingers—gasping in miserable panic—and he takes that hand and crushes it on the ground with fractured carpals or a pinning knife.

The mask comes off, and you refuse to look at him until he—

“Look at me, Dream! You know what you’re supposed to do! This is a nice break and you should be grateful. Say thank you. Say it. Say it!”

A shriek, a spurt, writhing and panting, and part of you splinters and dies as you meet his eyes and thank him for the violation. The words are thick and wet and stuttered.  

When fingers worm inside your mouth and cold metal slides under your tongue, you can’t even bite. You can’t do anything. The consequences are so much worse if you do. You lie there and let him put his fingers inside. Let him touch your eyes. Let him lean close and wipe his bloody fingers off in your hair.

“Why are you making this so hard, Dream. Isn’t it better when you just give in?”

***

When Bad goes down, there’s no look of betrayal or shock on his face. Every expression is muted under the overpowering scent of rotting leaves. His sword rolls from his hand, and with a twitch, his body’s gone to be restitched at his blood anchor.

Ant’s face is unnatural. No grief, no sound at his friend’s death.

There’s no grief in you either. A small bit of satisfaction. They can handle the pain of a single regeneration. You handled the pain of torture and betrayal just fine.

As your sword slides out from the gap of Bad’s armor, Ant pounces forward.

Ant is more difficult to kill. It’s messy. You’re weak, so weak, and he bashes away at your sword until your hand is numb. His shield punches into your chest, forcing out air, and when you stagger he pins you to the ground.

It’s messy brawling. It’s almost like being in the cell with Tommy again. Flaring your arm-teeth, you cut deeply into his sword hand, his sword flying out of his hand. He yelps and drives a fist to your face, tugging the cloth aside.

Technique’s gone out the window, and you both roll and snarl and bruise each other on the dead leaf bed. The scent of rotting leaves is overpowering, this close to Ant.

“The Egg wants you, Dream,” he snarls, “and it’s going to have you. Just—”

The Egg is a problem for later. You elbow Ant in the mouth.

Ant’s canines sink into your arm.

It’s messy, and your face covering’s torn further down until your mouth is showing, and you bare your teeth, and—

It’s like with Sam. It’s messy, but you’ve won. Ant’s body quickly unspirals. The blood remains.

There’s blood in your teeth, down your chin. Again.

You’re going to have to clean it before the others come, or you’ll look horrific. Don’t want to look like a—a—

Falling back against a tree trunk, you start to giggle, hand on your forehead.

The communicator pings. You look down.   

Bad: -18440, 45060

Bad: Dream’s last location

It’s actually pretty impressive that Bad’s recovered this quickly from his death to be able to type that. Humans and hybrids usually lie in achy pain for a few hours.

Another ping.

Ran: There are others coming. Not with egg.

You heave yourself upright. Being caught and put back in the prison is not in the plan. It would be a major setback.

Ran: Don't do anything stupid. I’ll be there soon

You type back: no. come later.

Ran: If you get caught I’m going off-script.

You: fair.  

***

There are enough terrors in the world for isolated, wandering children that being taken to be sold is not an uncommon tragedy or a unique trauma—it’s the course of every harsh, lawless world, and there are many anarchy worlds in the universe. Where there are weak ones, they will be prey. And children are weak.

Even for human children, not just exotic hybrids, it’s common to be caught and sold. When Dream is dragged from the woods, his captors don’t know he’s Other. They don’t even realize he’s not human until one has torn his shirt and recoiled from the fused baby-teeth on Dream’s stomach.

The captor doesn’t dare touch Dream anymore, shaking his hands like they burned, and his swearing brings his companions over.

What is it…?

They’re unnerved by the teeth-slits and glowing green eyes. Unnatural, deformed, they say, but really isn’t it strange that they don’t have any protection on their flat soft skin? One grabs your shoulder, and your baby-teeth flex and crush his teethless fingers.

Monster, they say.

A monster must be chained. They take you to what you later realize is a woodland mansion. You’re chained in a dirt-floor cell, two by two blocks wide. No food. No water. No light.

Your stomach cramps and that gives you an idea of how long you’ve been in here—

There’s not much room to move besides stretching to relieve some of the stiffness—

You only live because your bare skin presses into the floor, into the dirt, and slowly soaks up the energy from the ground. They were trying to break you with no food or water for three days, but they couldn’t. When they finally crack open the wooden cover overhead, letting sunlight fall on your face for the first time in days, it’s a relief. Until they try to do to you what starvation couldn’t. 

Slashing at your inhuman face each time you’d just come back to life hoping you’d stay dead—

It ends with you weakly sobbing on the ground, please please stop, in a voice that hasn’t yet pitched downward.

Through the heart. The throat. Torso.

After the tenth or eleventh respawn, they start to realize you can’t die and it’s not a lucky glitch. You’re a corpse on the ground and barely moving, but you still breathe. Fresh scars grate down your body and blood soaks in the earth.

They’re unnerved.

Why won’t you die?

A monster.    

They try again, over the days.

Slashing at your inhuman face over and over—

Left alone for days, you see impossible shapes in the darkness. Running your hands down your arms and legs helps stave off the longing to see anyone, even those who just stare at you. The isolation breaks inner pillars you didn’t know existed.

We’ll get rid of it soon enough. There are plenty of sellers for something like this. Just have to break the little monster first.

There are pillars in the soul that can be snapped by horrors the body and mind experience. If they wanted a monster, they made one. When they grab you, you sink needle-teeth into one’s arm and rip and chew and End have mercy on you, you swallow—

Where is your limit? you wonder between thin screams and heartstops. Can you even die?

You’re pressed to the earth, heart slow as your body siphons energy. You’ve never reached so far down into the world or as deep inward.

Your baby-teeth fall out. Middle-teeth are brittle and slow to grow with starvation, but they do grow. Now, they’re long enough to sink into a throat.

Is this maturity, for someone like you? Sharper teeth, deeper connection to the world around, seething hatred and endless hunger? You’re stronger, body longer, but mostly it’s viciousness that gives you strength. What pushes someone to want and plan to take a life? 

Years and years later, you’ll escape another prison with blood in your mouth. The first time you escape, though, there’s red down your chin, your arms, your legs—rust stains soaked into your thin clothes from weeks of lying in your own puddles—skin under your claw-teeth—scars across your eye hollows. The fire overtaking the woodland mansion warms your back.

The men who took a lost child from the woods never sold it.

* * *

You’re too hurt to run fast from that last fight with Ant. You can run, but not at top speed, and it would burn energy you need to save for fighting.

And so when Sapnap arrives, you’re sitting in a tree, crossbow across the knee.

His face, tanned from summer, his hair grown long and tied back; his dark-burning eyes of blaze hybrid. He looks tired. He was your closest friend. He’s promised to kill you.

The world is silent, for a moment, and you think—I should feel something. You should feel spark of fear or regret or fondness, but your insides are numb.

He looks up from his compass, quickly spotting you like he has so many times before. His eyes widen and he unsheathes his sword. His eyes are locked on yours, and you sit and feel nothing.

“Dream,” he says warily. When his eyes meet yours, he falters, surprise flowing over his ever-expressive face. He’s never seen your eyes, has he? You’d forgotten, out here. You’ve always worn a mask, and now you only have the lower half of your face covered with home-spun cloth. The mask had been too cracked and bloody (and covered in Q’s fingerprints) to use anymore.

“Dream, your face…” Sapnap says, stunned. Can he see the glowing green? Does he care about the scars?

Should you feel exposed? Is this even a violation? Showing the eyes violates ᔑリᓵ╎ᒷリℸ ̣ custom, but you’ve been violated in every way already. 

You don’t reply.

He takes another moment to rover over your exposed skin, and in the silence, his face hardens. “I’m taking you back,” he vows.

Your ruined mouth audibly clicks as the lips unpeel from each other. “You saw what it was like in there.”

Really, even if he didn’t know about the torture—or reasonably suspect, since his fiancé left bloody every day for months—he should have seen the small cell. The lack of bedding, soap, food. The endless heat. The solitary confinement for weeks. Dogs weren’t left in such conditions. It was inhumane.

“I—you know why you were in there! You deserved it. Prison,” Sapnap says, anger rising. “And I made you a promise, and I’ll keep it if you won’t go back.” His hands spark with agitated anger. That is generally his response to confusion.

“Deserved that,” you say flatly. It doesn’t hurt—you’re still numb.

“Yes, and you know it! You know that. It’s that or we kill you, Dream.” He makes a step forward, and your loaded crossbow shifts to compensate the new angle.

Sapnap freezes, tracking the tip.

It’s that or we kill you, Dream. Execution. In your hidden vault, a year ago, after that farce of a server reunion—he’d watched you be killed twice. He’d watched you beg for your life with a blade over your neck.

And he’d watched.

“How many lives do you have right now, Sapnap?” you ask, voice dead.

“More than one,” Sapnap retorts, fire in his eyes. That’s right, he thinks you have one left. A year isn’t enough time to regain the energy from two successive deaths. He thinks you’re ready to fight to defend your last life.

You tilt your head, muscle memory from when you had an unexpressive mask. “Ever been killed twice in a row?”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen here, Dream,” he growls. And it’s true—you will not win a sustained fight against him. Your body’s healed your cuts and broken bones, but it’s fighting against a year of starvation.

“It hurts worse each time,” you tell him. “You can barely move.”

With a distant sort of interest, you watch as Sapnap’s face twists in momentary guilt. It’s a fascinating reaction. You didn’t think it would work at all. Predictably, he pulls himself together and grits his teeth in determination. “Would you maybe stop trying to manipulate people for two seconds? Don’t make me kill you—”

You lift a mutilated hand from the crossbow. Sapnap’s angry torrent stops at the sight of the missing fingers. “Asking for a friend,” you say, “how many respawns would it take to regrow limbs?”

“What happened,” he asks automatically, shocked. The grip on the sword flexes sympathetically, like his body’s checking that his fingers are still there.

“Ask your fiancé.”

“What? What the actual f— is that supposed to mean?! Don’t try to bring Quackity into this,” he snarls, lifting his shield. “See, this is—this is why— it’s always lies and hiding what you think to play your games with us like we’re, we’re fun to you. Why can’t you just say what you mean?”

It’s not a surprise that he thinks you’re lying. When he believed an enemy’s words—rash, emotional, impulsive—over you, a friend of several years, that showed how he thought of you. How deep your connection ran.

Trust no one, you’d taught Ran, except for the ones who understand you. You made that mistake, trusting anyone but family, and look at this.

At your silence, Sapnap continues, “What happened you?”

Why’d you become Dream, he means. Why did you become you. There’s always been something of uncanny valley in the way you step, talk, interact—Dream the feared, the inhuman, the ever-so-subtly not right, on edge, monstrous thing behind a mask. It’s an old story.

“Do you want an answer to that?” you say, mostly to yourself.

“Yes,” he snarls.

The block of numbing ice cracks, and what leaks out is bitter and edging on insane. “You watched them do that to me, you stood there and watched.” It’s too emotional, and you bite your traitor mouth to stop any more words falling through the cracks—when did you ever try to talk to me through any of this—you’re all the same, and you don’t care that I look like this—cut up, scarred—why did I ever try—

“And all the -— you pulled before that?” Sapnap yells. “I had to! You were doing—you were becoming a monster! You used us! Why would you do that?”

“You knew what I like before we came here.” You’re not even sure what you’re looking for. He won’t understand what you mean, so you cut him off before he can speak. “How long until they get here?”

“Soon.” Defiant.    

This man has seen you laughing so hard you’ve fallen to the ground, he’s seen you get pushed into a pond, he’s fallen asleep next to you. He’s been at your side while you stress over battle plans; he’s jumped into fights for you; he’s helped you craft TNT cannons. How does he not know you? 

“Tell me why you did it. Was it worth it, getting rid of us?”

Like a bird, you tilt your head and stare at him.

His face is flushed, and his eyes track your crossbow. He’s waiting for an opening.

“You—we were friends, and then you started using us, me and George, and then you killed people—Tommy? In the prison?—and used their things to try to blackmail them, and I don’t understand why,” bursts out of him, uncontrolled, even as his experienced body stays alert to a fight. “Doomsday—I died that day too. I was underneath. You realize that? You killed me? You became a monster and I know you won’t stop because you never stop once you start something!”

Sapnap’s filling up time until the others come and break the stalemate, as a tactic, but the words are shouted with terrible, sloshing emotion.

‘A monster.’

“You don’t listen,” you rasp.

“You don’t control us!” Sapnap immediately shouts. “We don’t have to listen to you!”

“You asked why.” You’re tired. You’re so tired. When will the others come so this can be over? “You don’t listen to the answer.”

“Because you don’t explain anything!”

Your eyes drift over Sapnap’s head to see if anyone’s coming yet. Sapnap steps forward with his shield, noticing your distraction, and your eyes snap back.

“Going to kill me before you get any answers?” you ask dully. It’s what held Quackity back. You’ve talked more today than you have in weeks—a dry cough crawls out your throat. It cracks open to heaving fits of air, rattling your chest, and you sink a claw into the tree bark to siphon the life force. When you blink the tears from your eyes, Sapnap’s at the tree’s base, reaching for your leg, and you shove the crossbow downward as a warning. His shield comes up.  

“Dream…” Sapnap falls silent.

Not going to say anything? Not going to piece anything together? It’s so much easier, isn’t it, to have the tyrant Dream as the scapegoat of every story. To lock a door and close a book. If he can’t see, with you pathetic and half-rotted away, eyes bare and skin stripped to the world, then he doesn’t want to see.

Had they ever been worth it, you wonder.

“I’m taking you back to the prison,” he says finally. “You know how this ends. You’ve got no armor. You can’t load a second bolt fast enough before I get to you. Don’t make it hard on yourself.”

The trees are humming of people approaching with heavy footsteps. Time is short.

What last words do you want to say in your final solitude together?

“Pandas,” you say, feeling nothing at how he recoils from the name, eyes wide. Even saying the old nickname exhausts you. You’re so tired. Your hands shake as people approach—people who will see your eyes—and your voice shakes too. “Of course I know how this ends.”

You only need one arrow.

With shouts of alarm and triumph, the server mob arrives. Their voices are a wall of sound, and you can’t differentiate the owners. Colors waver over your vision. End, you can barely breathe. Mobs are dangerous.

Slashing at your inhuman face and eyes over and over—

They shout something, words, but it doesn’t register. Their armor glistens with years of layered enchantments. Their swords and axes point.

When you siphon energy from the branch to clear your head, the flaring light in your eyes reflects from the crossbolt.

You raise your eyes and meet theirs and it’s like you’ve been thrown in a freezing river again. Quackity and Sam, in armor and with—with a knife and trident in their hands.

It’s like heaving aside a solid steel door, but you push past the instinctive terror. Focus. You know how this ends. Before it does, you need information.

Hooked claws draw out more lifeforce from the tree beneath you, giving the shot of energy needed to open your mouth. The branch is growing brittle from all you’ve stolen.

“How did you find me?” you ask tonelessly.

They all fall quiet at the sound of your voice. It sends a little thrill, drunk-giddy, to see that you have some control over them. They still think you’re dangerous.

They’re here they’re all here surrounding you they’re going to kill you and send you back why have they—

Push through the fear.

They don’t answer the question. There’s a swell of sound, voices overlapping and crashing each other, and words are indistinct but the tone is obvious: disgust, fear, hate. There’s Tommy with his defiant set to his mouth but fearful eyes; Tubbo the same; Jack and Puffy and Eret and Fundy and others, just a wall of glimmering netherite. And there’s Quackity. And Sam.

Injecting some disdain into your voice to provoke them to answer, you say, “It takes this many people to read a compass?” At ‘compass,’ some of the group look at Sapnap, and that’s as good as a confirmation: this is how they found you. There’s no helping it—you laugh in a wheeze that turns to a weak cough. “Did you keep our manhunt compass? Aw, you kept it?”

Sapnap has it. There’s no doubt. Now you have to get it. Destroy it. You destroyed Bad’s.

It should be the last compass that could track you. (George has been gone for months…)

The voices rise again, everyone shouting, brandishing weapons and inching closer.

You suck more life out of the tree, and the branches creak dangerously. With the unnatural green flash of light in your eyes, you shift, deliberately poised and exuding authority, and hope this works.

“Listen,” you say in the war voice, as you think of it, and to your relief it works. There’s a collective silence that means they’ll let you get a few words in before the spell breaks. Under the scarf, you lick dry lips. The fear bubbles under your chest, barely under control, but you have to keep in control and you can’t show weakness even if you want to beg and scream and you have to start talking soon before someone in the crowd breaks the fragile quiet—

“You want order, you want stability, right?” you say in your most reasonable tone. “The reasonable thing to do is to have a trial before you execute someone or im-imprison them.” What are you saying—give them what they want—see if words work this time—buy some time— “Did any of you know what was happening in the prison?” You raise your mutilated hand. A terrible suspicion arises—“Did you all know?” No, focus. “We, we need to have a process, a, a, precedent for this. Right? We need to have trials for this sort of thing, not like—not like Schlatt. You can be better than him. You can have a trial, and, and talk this over. If it’s like that, I’ll even come willingly.”

You can hardly think—your eyes dart from person to person—don’t stop talking or they’ll jump in—don’t look at Q don’t look at Q—

The Warden steps forward, and ingrained instincts automatically train all your attention on him, because he’s got his trident in his hand and shut up keep breathing—"You will go back to the prison, Dream, and you will be punished for this. If you behave we won’t kill you here.”

Ah. The age-old threat.

“Just KILL HIM!” Tommy shrieks. “You remember what he did to me in the prison? He killed me!” he screams over other people trying to speak.

Q raises a hand—“I get it, Tommy, I get it, but remember—he’s got information that can be useful—”

“He got out of the f— prison already, if you don’t do it, I will!” Tommy moves forward.

This was never going to work. Why bother talking.

“Fine,” you say, and Tommy finally freezes and shuts up. “Here’s what’s going to happen.” You’re outside your body; you’re possessed and burning and you’re shaking. “You’re going to try to kill me. You’ll fail. Then I’m going to kill Sam and Q and anyone who tries to stop me. And then, if you want to live, you’ll leave my world.” More energy flows out under your claws into your veins, sending a burst of light through your eyes.

The threat sparks some fear, some defensiveness.

“Yeah, right, you—"

“You’re not killing anyone here!”

“Just ‘cause you discovered a world doesn’t make it yours, you lunatic!”

It does, actually. There’s a whole legal process. “Creating it does,” you say instead. 

“You’re delusional.”

“You’re f— crazy!”

“Uh, god-complex?”

 “Is this the god-complex? You think you’re some kind of god?”

Amid the vicious words, the Warden draws back his trident and lets it fly. He was trying to catch you by surprise, but prison taught you to always keep track of the Warden’s trident, and you jump upright as the trident embeds in the tree, quivering.

That shuts people up. He summons it back to his hand, the enchantments glowing.

Your heart is trying to run.

Q laughs. “Nice one, Sam! Look at him jump. Look at his eyes.” He tilts his head, the showman, the psychopath. “Look at his eyes, though. What the hell kind of powers you got in you? I’m sure we can get him to behave in prison. Huh, Dream? We’ll make sure you behave this time.”

Q smiles. He can see your eyes, they all can, and your eyes are wide.

“He won’t get out again,” the Warden says, voice glacially hard.

“Wait wait wait, maybe we should talk a minute. Like why’s he missing fingers?” Puffy jumps in.

“Sam can tell you, he deserved it,” Q says smoothly. “Trying to escape or whatever.”

And it’s working, damn it all, and you want to cry and cut out his tongue and cut off his fingers one by one—they believe him; they’ll accept that and move on without thinking about it too hard; they think you deserve torture—

“He will not escape again. He will be punished.” The Warden’s voice is law.

Time is running out. They’ll beat you to the brink and they’ll take you back.

Sapnap’s shield has lowered throughout the conversation. His neck is open. Your crossbow is loaded.

One arrow.

You said you’d only need one.

The bolt buries in his throat. He’s barely gasping when you’ve jumped down and stabbed your knife through his cervical vertebrae. His golden eyes stare in shock into yours for the fraction of a second before his body dematerializes, leaving a bundle of items including—

The compass.

Snatching it, you pearl away from the weapons leaping at you. Someone nearly immediately pearls to you, and you’re knocked to the ground just as you crush the compass against the ground-stone.

There’s shouting. A trident pierces your thigh, whiting out your vision. Pinning your legs. You won’t be able to run.

But that’s fine. It’s fine.

You take the knife dripping in Sapnap’s blood and plunge it into your carotid, your neck. And out, so the blood can flow, and in case they think fast enough to splash a healing on it, into your chest.

Your heart seizes around it, and in the aborted beat is a long moment as you look at the group gathered in front of you.

Shock. Wide eyes trained on either the knife you’re gripping to your chest or the free-flow of red down your neck. Their weapons, once pointed at you, now have a grip so loose you could knock them from their owner’s hands.

Sam, expression a mixture of furious and fearful, fumbles for a potion as he grabs your neck. It’s pointless at this point—too much red down your chest. He’s close enough now that you can make out the teeth marks on his neck.

Your smile matches the red one under your jaw.

“Ha,” you cough with obscene wetness, and this is one of the few times where you smile as you die.