Chapter Text
Dream opens his eyes again.
He opens his eyes again and he's breathing, he's solid, he's not a ghost he's alive; against all odds, despite everything, he's alive.
He blinks awake and for a long, protracted moment he stares blearily at the inexplicably wooden ceiling, a low burn of confusion simmering in his gut. His mind feels...slow and sluggish, placid even, as if he has all the time in the world to revel in the miraculous rise and fall of his chest, the expansion of his lungs, the heartbeat nestled within the cradle of his ribs. It distantly registers that he has no idea where he is—why is he alive? Better yet, how is he alive? He swears he's supposed to be dead, he swears he should be—when he clumsily misjudges the distance between his resting place and the wall during a lazy stretch his knuckles sting from an unintentional graze against solid wood.
...Is this not limbo, or a dream, then?
Belatedly, Dream hisses a quiet ow, slowly blinking as he makes the herculean effort to half-turn, half-rise. He spots a flash of white on the table next to the—his?—bed and realizes that oh his face is bare, absently reaching up with non-aching fingers to touch his own sleep-warmed skin. Whatever room he's in is rather dimly lit from its singular window pane but there's more than enough light to discover that he's occupying a very basic room crafted primarily with oak planks and a smattering of cobblestone corners.
So very basic as to inspire a curl of nostalgia as he eyes it.
All told, it's a relatively small room by a player's standards, closer to the size of an average villager house and only large enough to hold a few survival staples. From where he occupies the single red-cover bed he can plainly see a single-wide chest and a dark furnace, beside which is a half-dozen oak logs and a spot just big enough for something about the size of a crafting table...without the crafting table. A lone unlit candle sits in the window frame and an equally unlit torch hangs over the room's closed door. A second, open doorway leads to the house's bathroom, judging by what he can glimpse of a sink in the space beyond, the small mirror above the tap reflecting a bit of light from the bedroom window even at this unfavorable angle.
This is all...jarring.
Dream is honestly not even sure he's still in the server (and why would he be? Why would he be alive again after losing all his canon lives? If he's alive surely he's somehow just been shunted to a different server without going through the main hub first?) and he dreads to check the answer.
Nothing about this feels real, Dream doesn't feel real, even as he gingerly slides his legs from beneath the bed covers and stands to explore the space. He grimaces at the familiar sleeves of the comfortingly green hoodie he hasn't seen since he was put into prison and traded green for orange, plucking a bit listlessly at it. There's a painful lump in his throat at the sight of it, at the normality of it, at the soothing softness he'd started to forget as the months without it went by.
As the toll of Pandora came calling, calling, calling and began to ruin him in earnest.
His feet are bare beneath the hems of his black pants but he can spot his boots—not a similar pair, no, but his boots, as well-worn as he remembers, albeit the scuff marks are cleaned-up a little—neatly tucked by the door. Wood is...not new material, not really, but it is a welcome sensation all the same. Anything is better than yet more accursed obsidian, he'll admit, busy peeking cautiously through the window glass, hands easily—and, strangely, without shaking—bearing his weight against the table as he leans toward the dim spill of sunlight.
"Nothing but blue sky and trees," he murmurs, his voice briefly, startlingly, sleep-raspy.
So many trees, in fact, that at whatever hour this is the sun struggles to fully brighten the room. Dream's gaze falls from the outside world to the pristine white mask smiling up at him from the table, as glossy and uncracked as the day he first made it. He ghosts a hand over it, both bemused and befuddled at its surprising state of repair; his mask had long since cracked under the stress and strain of battle. And it had also long become a popular target when people found they couldn't simply strip it from him as they pleased (meticulously crafted and long-standing enchantments wouldn't allow it and he certainly would not bare his face to his enemies, willingly or otherwise).
How curious, then, to find it whole.
Dream leans back from the table, hesitant to put on his mask even as he yearns for the safety of it. It has been...he can't actually remember the last time he had it off for longer than a minute or two. Instead he steps away in the direction of the single-wide chest, popping it open to snoop through its contents. In it, neat-as-you-please, are a handful of food stacks—none of which are potatoes, thank prime—basic items such as coal, torches, an iron tool set, and then two sets of clothes including his missing gloves and socks.
Maybe it's not a windfall of diamond gear, a complement of combat potions, a full gapple stack, and several dozen emeralds, and it's nothing on the stashes he left back in the Greater SMP, but it's workable for his needs...whatever those end up being. He's done far more with far less.
Leaning over the chest he wavers for a moment, hand hovering over a stack of bread, both his empty stomach and a deep-seated longing to taste something, to eat and be full, warring in his head. Does he eat? Does he risk making himself sick on rich, non-potato food? He may not feel weak right now but that doesn't mean he isn't. Logic, coupled with months of starving and poor food, begs him not to. Begs him to hold out, to wait, to abstain, just in case this is nothing but a cruel mirage and he finds himself beholden to yet more starving and potatoes (he shouldn't get his hopes up, he shouldn't believe he's free, he shouldn't let himself relax—what if this is just a trick?) in the near future.
A pitiful, semi-prideful desire to feel normal again wins out over that logic, kicking it straight off the highest metaphorical cliff as he plucks a single bread and steak from their stacks. His mess of a brain tells him to use the knife he keeps in his boot but there's a clean, food-safe knife he yoinks from the chest instead for the time it takes him to slice the bread in half, dizzyingly gleeful to slap together the most basic of sandwiches if for no other reason than he can. Mentally flipping Sam off, he holds his creation in his hands, distracted for a second by his own fingers looking not-quite-right (he could have sworn his fingers were permanently crooked), and then shakes off that thought to take a bite.
Oh.
Dream blinks to discover he's no longer standing. Rather, he's gone quite abruptly from upright to on his knees, awkwardly curled over the sandwich in his hands. This simple, basic, two-ingredient sandwich; this beautiful, holy offering. He swallows that first delicious bite and breathes slowly, deliberately, forehead resting against the chest lid. It's so good. He'd been dying a slow, poisoned death of an empty, gnawing stomach only rarely filled by bland, ashen taste. He'd forgotten that food should taste like something, should be enjoyable, and here, now, he pushes down the swiftly building urge to cry about it.
How pathetic, he halfheartedly sneers at himself, scarfing down the rest just slow enough to savor each bite for a handful of seconds.
Somehow, someway, he still doesn't feel sick even after speed-eating the whole sandwich, more food than he's had at once since...a lot longer than Pandora, which counts this impulsive venture as a win, he thinks. On the off chance he does have a delayed reaction he stays kneeling on the floor for a while yet, staring absently at the wood grain beneath him. Finally, though, stomach pleasantly full and bodily reaction seemingly as normal as it can get, he levers himself upright again and drifts into the small attached bathroom with the intention of cleaning his hands of crumbs and steak juice.
Dream clicks on the bathroom's glowstone switch, glances up, and freezes to stare at his own face in the mirror. He hadn't...noticed, in the moment, in the dim main room lighting, but it's so much clearer in the stark light of the bathroom that his torture-given scars are gone. In fact...Dream quickly shucks his hoodie to check. All of his scars appear to be gone, his skin a strangely healthy tan considering his recent months-long incarceration and his only marks are the freckles across his cheeks, arms, and shoulders. If that wasn't enough on its own, his hair—now falling above his shoulders, not below—is such a light blond it's almost more accurate to call it white and he's fairly certain his eyes weren't this neon-bright green before.
He looks...new, fresh, different. It's still him, in the mirror, but....
Shaken, he washes his hands on autopilot and pulls his hoodie back on over his undershirt, resisting the urge to tug the hood on over his face to hide (from what, his own reflection?) by the skin of his teeth.
He lifts his hands to consider them more closely, realizing with no small amount of fascination that he hadn't imagined the lack of aching, the lack of shakiness, the way it no longer hurt to breathe from the abhorrent state of his ribs. Although he'd been force-fed potions (until the last—) there had been no true recovery awaiting him on the horizon. Potions could only do so much on their own. His body had been far too battered far too quickly and far too often to have any chance at well and truly recovering without the kinds of intensive healing regimens unavailable to the server's current resources and knowledge base.
Dream had...well, not come to terms, per se, but he'd accepted that if he ever were to be free of Pandora it would lead to a life carrying the marks of Quackity and Sam both until the day he died. Diminished, scarred, body sensitive to food and light and heat. More than a little ruined.
He meets his own neon-bright eyes in the mirror and musters a weak, fleeting smile.
"Until the day I died indeed," he whispers, watching the stranger-not-stranger do the same.
Desperate, burning curiosity has him duck back into the main room to stand in front of the door where he hesitates with a hand on the wood, glances back at his mask on the table, weighs the necessity for his boots. Should he kit himself out? Should he play harmless? He's wearing his own clothes but has only the basic iron set of weapons, no shield, no armor. Merely a pseudo-anonymity from baring his face. He is, to put it bluntly, vulnerable. And there are dozens of unfriendly faces he would rather not run into. He pauses more firmly after a quick false-start, teeth worrying his lip and calculations flitting through his mind, before he smooths out his expression and gently, carefully opens the door to head off attention both hostile and non.
His caution is somewhat overblown, given that outside proves to be a small, quiet, empty clearing surrounded by a thick layer of trees that isolates this little house from the world. As he steps onto sun-warmed grass the softness of it beneath his bare feet, so gentle, so vibrant, so full of life after months and months of nothing but obsidian and lava and pain, causes him to choke back a wretched sob, palm clapped over his mouth out of reflex to stifle the noise lest Quackity hear him and return—
—no, no, Quackity can't be here...if he's alive there's no way Quackity is here—Dream exhales shakily through his fingers, blinking away stubborn, unwanted tears and straightening, hand falling to grasp at his wrist as he casts his eyes around the clearing.
The view immediately outside the door already suggested as much but it truly is surrounded on all sides by dense forest, the tree canopy high enough to hide the entire roof, tiny as it is; he's half convinced if he climbed the nearest, tallest tree he wouldn't be able to spot a single hill or mountain on the horizon. He turns in a slow, methodical circle, eyes darting from trunk to treetop, still suspicious that he may find a glimpse of something familiar, but...there's nothing. Nothing except nature and an undergrowth—unnaturally, dubiously—both thick enough and thin enough to prevent unwanted mob spawns in daytime and hamper the ability of mobs to approach the clearing at nighttime.
Which is all well and good, he supposes, as far as ensuring the area is both secret and safe.
And the prospect of secrecy, of safety, is an admittedly rather heady one.
Dream is thus almost helpless against the relaxing of his shoulders, bared face tilted up toward the sun as his eyes slip closed. The lava in Pandora's Vault was a burning, choking heat-death that he couldn't escape. But this? This kind, life-giving warmth suffusing him with energy? He wants to do nothing but sprawl in the grass and bask in it until it becomes too much and he then seeks shelter in shade or the splash of cool water.
Wrestling that urge down takes a minute, considering he's busy breathing clean air and enjoying the sun and the wind (and after months and months and months of stifling darkness does he not deserve peace?) rather than maintaining some measure of vigilance.
He does manage to drag himself back mostly on track. Eventually. Enough, at least, to start thinking.
The real question then, is where he is...and how he got here...and why he's here. Okay, the real questions are where, how, and why.
A soft vwoop-adjacent noise startles him out of his daze, snapping his attention forward as his heart skips a fearful beat. There, in a space where only a shadow had been now exists DreamXD, the god's regalia gently billowing in the breeze and casting a visible corona of light beneath the dense canopy leaves.