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“What were you thinking?!”
The shout rang loudly in his ears but Dream barely paid any attention to it. It mixed in with everything else that was threatening to swallow him whole. All of the other thoughts that were trying to drown him in his mind. All of the memories and voices from his past.
They were all his.
Everything he was thinking was his. No outside sources. Nothing to push against him. Nothing that was swallowing out his will.
“Do you hear me?!”
Dream didn’t move. He could feel everything in his body. Each beat of his heart. How his blood was moving in his veins. The nervous twitch that kept running through his calf. He could feel how his hair sat against his neck. His eyelashes tapping his cheek when he blinked. How the air stretched in his lungs. All of it was his.
All of it was his. Nothing else. He didn’t feel anything beyond his body. It was just him.
“Listen to me!”
The shove at his shoulder shouldn’t have surprised him. It didn’t surprise him.
It brought a smile to his face. He hadn’t sensed it coming. He hadn’t thought about it ahead of time. It was expected but it wasn’t known.
“How could you be so careless?!”
Sapnap was in front of him. Red in the face and shoulders shaking from the force of his own restraint. They’d been best friends for years. Able to read each other in any and all situations and he knew that they would always be there for one another. It was the way they worked. It was how they had always worked. They protected each other until their dying days.
Right now Dream had put all of that in danger.
They were both still half in their uniforms. Fit from their duty to their city outside the walls of the safehouse but both of them without their masks.
“George is out there right now cleaning up the mess you just made. I need to know you were planning for something and that you’re not actually this stupid!”
It was a new villain. Someone that none of them knew about other than vague stories they’d caught on the news from other heroes in other cities losing their powers seemingly at random. People had theorized that there was a connection between the robbery strings and the heroes who lost their powers for periods at a time but they had no real evidence.
Today they had evidence.
They’d been working on their lead to hunt these people for the entire last week. All of them working off of one another and trying their best to find where they were hiding and any kind of connection they might be able to use to save more people and more heroes in the future. It had been discussed, between them, what they would need to do if the rumors were true. If there was reality that was backing the claims that there was a connection between the thefts and the heroes who were losing their powers.
Some of them got them back within a day. Others went close to weeks.
It was devastating for someone to lose their powers. It was lethal for them to be stolen without a way to balance themselves in the wake of the loss. Depending on the power there was nothing that anyone could do to save them.
They talked about who was in the most danger if they were struck. That Sapnap ran the risk of dying swiftly without help. He had fire coursing through his veins and without a way to keep himself warm like that the he would turn hypothermic even in the middle of a summer day. He would turn too cold too fast and it would kill him.
Dream knew that he was next on the list for danger. He knew that he was at risk from how the world fed him information and how blinding it felt to be without it as his guide. A voice that was always in his head to tell him where he needed to go or how he needed to move. It was always there for him and he was grateful for its guidance. He was glad that he could have it as his wings, that the world would guide him and protect him if he ever needed it.
George had the code at his aid to be able to read and use. He wasn’t as attached to it as Dream was. He could be cut from seeing it and feeling it and he would be mostly alright. Unstable and distressed and it would make him sick but he would survive.
In the middle of the fight, Dream had made the call.
“Listen to me, dammit! What the hell was that, Dream?!”
He could see Sapnap’s fear but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel the intense heat that normally swallowed around him when he had this much attention focused on him. He couldn’t feel any of it. There was just a quiet peace in his head. It was just him in his head.
“I couldn’t let them get either of you. If it was dangerous—”
“If?!”
His friend moved for him. Gripping him by the collar and pulling him closer. Dream let his vision blur on the edges. Stumbling ever so slightly and Sapnap changed his grip on him immediately. Hurrying to stabilize him and he knew he was in danger the moment Sapnap’s skin felt cold against his own. That flesh heated by fire itself was cooler than he was in the moment.
“They ripped the world away from you and stole it. George has to hack them to stop them from destroying the world with your powers and when they did it your heart almost stopped. If George wasn't there to shock you back then you would—”
“If they’d stolen from George we wouldn’t have been able to save him. If they’d taken from you then you would have died too.”
His throat was hoarse but now wasn’t the time for him to be asking for something when he could see the fear in his friend. Sapnap was half holding him up right now as he felt his strength fading again. He’d been struggling to stay up since they got him off the fighting zone. Since George portaled the two of them home and Sapnap got to work on cleaning him off and helping him change.
“I’ve been without the world before so I—”
“Not like this. This is different from a power dampener. Having them muted and locked away from you and having them ripped out of you are two completely different things.”
He didn’t care. It was worth it. The exhaustion pouring through his limbs was worth it. He could barely keep his eyes open. He was struggling with himself and he knew that the moment he could lay down he was going to bed.
A fever through his skin. A sickness that was corrupting through his veins. He wondered how long his removal would last. If it would be days or if it would be hours. He wondered if he would be lucky enough to have a break for so long. If he—
“Tell me the real reason. Now, Dream.”
He met his eyes. He saw the thoughts running through his eyes. He knew that Sapnap could still read him the same way he did when they were both children. He knew that his friend could still see what was on his face.
Sapnap knew he wasn’t upset. He knew he wasn’t scared.
“What the hell happened out there, Dream. Why did you do this?”
His heart twisted a bit in his chest. Rebelling at the fact that the world wasn’t there to brace it and help it stay steady. The full force of his own functions bearing down on him in a way that was so truly human that he had never properly experienced before.
He didn’t understand how people lived like this. How they could survive and endure if this was the pain and suffering they went their lives with.
“I wasn’t trying to die.”
“Wanna give me another reason why you’d do something we were pretty sure would kill you then? Tell me why you would do something so stupid when you—”
“I wanted it to stop.”
Sapnap froze. His eyes going wide and Dream swallowed the sickness that tried to come up at the thoughts he was sure his brother in all but blood was having.
“They wont’ stop sending me out. They won’t let me rest if I can fight then they make me fight and I can’t— I can’t do this anymore. I need to sleep. I’m so tired, I just—”
“You gave up your powers for a break?!”
His frustration snapped.
“I gave up my powers so I could sleep!”
“Killing yourself is not the answer.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Look at yourself.”
Sapnap moved him. Dragging him along until they were standing in front of the bathroom mirror. Until Dream was looking at himself leaned back against his friend and how pale his skin had turned. How flushed his face was. How dull his eyes had already turned.
“What do you see?”
“I’m sick.”
“You’re dying. And if George can’t figure out how to fix this in the next day, you can die, Dream. You’re dying. They’re killing you. And you don’t care.”
He just wanted a night of sleep.
“I’ll be alright.”
If he wouldn’t then the world would have been more distressed when it knew about his plan. He was going to be okay. He wasn’t going to die. He was starting to feel worse by the moment. One step and then he was swaying and his heart was stuttering in his chest. Sapnap grabbing him immediately. Between one blink and the other he was laying in his bed with his brother beside him.
“You better be okay, Dream. You better. I can’t—”
“You won’t lose me.”
He just needed to sleep. He just needed to rest. The voices in his head. The work. He needed it to stop. It was finally stopped.
“Get some sleep.”
He would.