Chapter Text
Weightlessness.
This part was kind of fun, if you could just ignore the pit in your stomach located where your organs used to be - they surely must be all in your chest, forced there by a mixture of fear and the very obvious rapid loss of altitude the aircraft was facing.
You know the little oxygen masks that drop from the ceiling in these situations? They just make you feel silly when your plane is nosediving into what seems like endless water. I mean, sure, the oxygen is a nice touch, but we’re still all gonna die, you know?
And about death, it’s a weird thing. They say when it’s about to happen, you get a full best-moments recap, the whole “life flashing before your eyes” thing. But to be completely honest, it all happened so fast that you’re sure not even the 2x speed function would have been able to give you the full compilation.
There wouldn’t be enough time to recount all the coffee dates, the hugs from your mom, the feeling of the first cool afternoon of autumn after a long, scalding summer.
Warmth. Your hand feels suddenly warm.
Oh. Right. Dream’s here. He’s been here the whole time, you were just too busy dying to remember his presence. He surely would have been in the recap though - the “date” part to the “coffee date” of it all. The immovable force that has kept you going for years, there to comment on your tiny, almost unnoticeable dimples when you smile and dry your very noticeable tears when they drip.
His hand seems glued to yours, gripping it so tightly you wonder if the sweat being produced by fear has any space to escape your palms where his skin touches yours. Maybe you’re holding each other so close, it has to be reabsorbed into your skin. These are weird things to ponder on the way to death, don’t you think?
Oh well. The mind goes where it goes I guess. Like I said, it was all too fast. Maybe every neuron in your head wanted its last chance to fire a connection before impact, creating this strange cacophony of thoughts to distract the conscious parts of you from impending doom.
And speaking of doom, let’s reassess our situation. Plane full of streamers and youtubers (and you, though you feel like that might be an afterthought) goes down, everyone dies - sounds like a good day to be a reporter and the worst day to be a fan. You can smell the headlines from here: “Internet personalities die in horrible plane crash”.
Okay, that headline sucks. There's a reason you’re not a journalist.
Thinking about dead celebrities, especially internet ones, is strange. All the Twitter feeds that will never be updated (except for the one morbid, final tweet made by a manager or, hopefully, a family member); the YouTube channels that will inevitably be memorialized, never receiving new content as time keeps increasing the number of years on the “uploaded x years ago” text lines.
It’s strange, but kind of beautiful in its own way, after all, if you stumbled onto these spaces without the grim knowledge of the creator’s passing, you could easily be entertained by a very dead person, smiling and laughing in times gone by, eternalized by the power of technology, I guess. It’s as if graves in cemeteries played a movie of the deceased’s best moments, allowing you to see right through their death and into their life once more.
Oh, we’re talking about death recaps again. Sorry about that.
Anyways, have you ever seen the person you love be so scared that they can’t seem to pull a full breath of air into their lungs? Yeah, me neither. You heard it though, the short, labored breaths of someone who was trying – and failing - to get their own body to obey.
Dream was all about control, so this must be driving him crazy. You could almost hear his thoughts: “okay, just take one deep breath, come on”. In his defense, it might be working, because at least he’s breathing, and you just realized you’ve been holding on to the same breath for what feels like hours. The release of pressure from the exhale felt good, but the lack of ability to fill your lungs again chipped away at the relief, and suddenly you understood your partner’s short breaths.
You were glad to have his presence in touch and in breathing, but bringing yourself to look at his face was an impossible task. Feeling, touching and hearing the pure fear and adrenaline was one thing, but seeing this level of it stamped on someone else’s face would lead you to have nightmares for years. So you just don’t look, opting instead to forcefully close your eyes and focus on the pressure from the hand interlaced with yours.
The fall was far from graceful, the combination of shaking and falling was not one you were a fan of or ever expected to experience. It’s okay though, it all happened very fast.