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It’s a strange predicament. And Techno could never place why exactly his sleep schedule had gone so terribly off kilter. But it is what it is. And it’s worse than however he used to live in college. But also it’s fine. Everything, it really is.
As the train departs from the city, he’s confident in his own ability to sleep through the upcoming four hours. Until his phone goes off and he wakes up to find himself amidst stout countryside buildings, and soon enough his farm. That’s the plan. And it would’ve worked fine a year ago, before all this mess.
Techno’s hands feel uncertain and uncooperative around the sword’s hilt, and in some fourth wall sense he knows he’s dreaming. Knowing doesn’t help, because the part of him that knows isn’t the part of him that’s deflecting blow after blow from enemy steel, weakly and shakily even though he’s got the power, he’s got the experience, he’s got the will to live, god is everything so loud, the screech of metal echoes too far- the sword’s knocked out of his hands, he’s swung at again and even if he’s never experienced what it’s like to get carved into by sharp edges, down to the bone, somehow his sleeping brain replicates the feeling too well.
Blood spills, pain does too, someone’s screaming at him, another, another, there are people everywhere, and his head hurts the way it does during a bad stuffy fever, and the dream doesn’t render words at all, it’s just the idea of being screamed at as he bleeds and the ground twists and tries to transition to a new sequence, vertigo of a moving floor, screeching, he has to get out.
So he runs, and that part of him that knows he’s dreaming is so used to it all, that it doesn’t register he’s awake either. Not until he’s standing on a train platform, panting, and no longer on a battle field-
Techno twists around, suddenly lucid to a tee, backpack smacking his side, and watches the train doors hiss shut.
Oh that’s just great, that’s just fantastic- he makes an aborted half-step in the direction of the now departing train and the idiocy of it all finishes catching up. Sleepwalking’s been a minor issue since it all started. He doesn’t remember running off the train in some nightmare-yanked panic, but he can imagine it all too well.
Techno blinks, rubs at his eyes, and starts to repress the preliminary fear of a rude awakening and an upset schedule… It's fine. He can just catch the next train. Make a list. Always easier with a list. Check your belongings, find out where you are, get on the next train. Easy. No one saw, this stays between you and god.
Techno breathes in, out, turns, and sees a guy staring at him.
The first thing that’s painfully apparent, is that the guy’d been making some kind of screwed up, ridiculing facial expression. The moment their stares lock, it snaps clean off into blankness.
“What?” Techno calls across the – he now realizes – dead empty train station.
It’s the middle of spring. The world out here smells like wet bark, mud, and life. The guy looks somewhere in his mid twenties, much like Techno, and it’s not often you see people under forty chasing their gardening dreams out along the expanse of rural nowhere.
The guy, leaning against a railing frowns. “What.”
That’s a good question, if it even is one. Techno could start a fight right here right now, he thinks in some bout of self-preservation. Sizes the guy up. A bit taller, moderately strong the way city folk aren’t. Yeah Techno could probably take him.
He notices the guy’s sizing him up too. Great. How’d they even end up here.
They lock stares again, now incredibly more hostile and equal measures apprehensive.
Neither move.
The train station is but a simple tiled platform with railings, a set of steps leading down onto a dirt path that vanishes into dense pines, and one shitty metal overhang. There isn’t even a clock.
Right, his list. Techno slowly tears his gaze away from the weirdo on the other side of the station. His backpack is in place, having fallen asleep with it still on out of train-passenger paranoia. Good. Nothing he can place seems to have fallen out. Wallet, city keys, farm keys, flip knife- he slips that into his jean pocket-
“I’ll kill you if you try,” comes semi-shouted from across the platform.
Techno snaps his head up to look at the blank-faced asshole.
“Dude, what’s your problem,” he calls back.
“I saw the knife.” The guy calls, crossing his arms over a faded washed-out hoodie. Clothes downgraded from city wear and exiled to a farmhouse closet.
“This guy…” Techno grumbles, slipping his second arm back into the backpack loop, and then shouts: “Maybe it’s a card holder. Are you looking to get stabbed with a Burger King coupon?”
And...
It makes the guy laugh. Clearly involuntary, it knocks an inaudible wheeze into existence, and Techno watches in awkward no longer threatening silence as the guy’s face screws up and he puts a fist up to his mouth in an attempt to smother it. They both seem surprised by it. The guy doesn't smile right, but the shaky sharpness of his smirk reminds Techno of brittle spring sunshine more than most grins.
It breaks the tension like an axe and now the idea of getting into a genuine blood-and-bruises altercation out here in the middle of some nameless stop becomes less and less realistic. Techno’s just a guy. The other’s just a guy too. And yeah serial killers exist, but what are the odds of two ending up alone at the same train station.
Techno starts walking over.
“So uhhh…” He starts at a casual five or so meters away, “Where is this?”
Up close the guy is mildly sunburnt and a dead kind of impassive.
“DSMP.” He answers, boring into Techno with de-saturated bog-green eyes. “I’m guessing this isn't your stop at all.”
“I feel like that’s applicable to most people…” Techno looks across the very empty platform, vaguely remembering seeing DSMP as a stop name about three fourths into his projected journey. “Do you know when the next train to Hypixel is?”
The guy grins something terrible: “Hour and a half.”
Techno involuntarily thins his lips and sighs. The forest shuffles its branches. Somewhere birds call back and forth. It really is unusual to see people your age out here, Techno thinks again and asks, “Do you live here?”
“Yeah.”
And the retort comes flying into Techno’s mind so easily he can’t help but snort, “Man, right on this platform? That sucks.” And before he can even get a response he’s already fighting an onslaught of mean laughter.
The guy blanks even more than his previous guarded expression, mouth slightly ajar.
The second he starts passionately insisting he does not, in fact, live here at the barren train station, is the second a lot of things about Techno’s future are sealed.
This is how he meets Dream, somewhere in that lazy, sunny March that crawls along the countryside in bouts of cold wind, intercepted by burning sunshine. That first argument locks them into a strange banter and an even stranger understanding, that sometimes happy accidents happen and you meet strangers who click with you against good odds.
Dream turns out to be waiting for his sister, a young chronic city dweller who takes the train out here every few weeks. Why he's here this early goes without clarification. Techno finds himself glad for the fact, even if he'd been just as fine waiting for the next train alone and in silence.
But now they talk, watching the woods and the painfully blue sky. Dream himself had once been yet another urban survivor, but had over time fully rooted himself out here, weeding the gardens and chopping wood. It takes a moment for him to recognize a fellow farmer in Techno too. The jeans, earbuds, and thin white button-up don’t make it easy.
“I don’t work the gardens in this,” Techno promises Dream then, as they lean against the railing, waiting for an alleged Drista.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Dream eggs him on. It's a joke, but a reassuring one. Because it’s terribly lonely being 26 when you hadn’t kept any of your high school and college friends. And meeting people like this under wild, nightmarish circumstances… Well, keeping contact with them turns similarly wild and similarly nightmarish.
So it’s an offhand joke, but maybe Dream’s lonely in his mid-twenties too. Young people don’t move into the countryside for no reason. Techno’s phone doesn’t even pick up data here.
Drista hops off a slightly shittier train than the model Techno’d hastily disembarked from an hour ago. “She’s adopted,” Dream whispers to him as the teen runs over, and Techno's certain it's a lie. They looked near identical.
And with Dream's livelier, younger, yet similarly offputting sister, Techno’s fate is sealed. She proclaims him great and that he's also obligated to come visit. In the span of ten minutes, she’d bullied them into exchanging numbers. How fast things move. How easy it is to fall into the open arms of some grand coincidence. Techno pretends he's far less invested than he is.
And six days after that, he’ll find himself on a train. Back to the crappy, deserted station of DSMP.
Dream again, leaning against the same rusty railing, Techno wearing broken-in overalls over a t-shirt.
He’ll grinned, stepping off the train and blinking against the sun: “What?”
And Dream’ll grin back, second time ever seeing him, with a few awkward calls sprinkled in since they’d first met. “What.”
DSMP will be barely a spit on the map, and Drista will be waiting for them in a beat up olive-green car from a good two decades ago. It will cross Techno’s mind, that this is how people go missing, getting into cars with practical strangers, out in an isolated town where the woods sprawl and where phones don’t always have service.
His red flip knife – not the type you check mushroom caps with, but the type you work into a deer’s guts – will rest nicely in his pocket. A second, thinner and less deadly yet proficient-enough blade will hide in his sock. Just in case. His heart won't race, because he will be confident in his ability to survive. Confident in that he won't need to worry about it at all. Techno will ride shotgun on an old carseat made with genuine springs as they'll bump along a sand road, windows down, late-March air, grinning.
It’ll be worth it. Everything, it really will be.