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When Tommy woke up that day, he had no idea how much his life would change from there.
It started when he opened his door, wanting to tend to his flowers, only to come face to face with XD, the infamous all-knowing god of the server.
It was strange, the way the massive deity floated there, staring down at him, its mask so similar yet so different from Dream’s iconic mask. The god bobbed up and down in the air, menacingly. Its four white wings were spread out wide, and its large cloak was a sickening lime green. Two golden halos floated above its head, and the shadows in the cloak were the colour of the Void. Without warning, the deity pushed its way into Tommy’s home. Because it was so cramped, and the area was kind of cluttered, XD’s wings quickly knocked several things over.
“Whoa, whoa!” Tommy cried, leaving his door open in favour of trying to stop the god from ruining more of his house. “What the fuck? What are you doing in my house?”
XD, who had been inspecting something on Tommy’s desk and ignoring him – rude! – suddenly spun around, and it shot forward to invade his personal space. Its face mask was scarily close to Tommy’s face. It was all so quick that Tommy scrambled backwards in fear, tripping over some loose bits and bobs on the floor.
“Are you happy here?”
It took Tommy a solid few seconds to decipher what the god had said. Its voice was impossibly deep and had a static quality to it. It almost sounded like it was glitching. It was hard to understand. It unsettled Tommy.
Tommy gulped. “What?”
XD tilted its head creepily. “The server. Are you happy?”
Tommy laughed nervously, not knowing what the god was talking about. “Look, you motherfucker, I just want you out of my house.”
XD hums. It’s a very off-putting sound.
“You’re just like Him,” XD remarks, but doesn’t tell Tommy who it is referring to. “You’ll do just fine, then.”
“What –”
XD speaks over him. “The server is weakening, mortal. Can’t you feel it? I’m dying. The server hasn’t had an active admin in years. Everything is falling apart. Not only are there technical issues – chunks are missing, there is lag, and animals are acting weird – but the company has far past soured by now. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“Um, I don’t actually –”
“That is why you are going to fix it!”
“What?!”
“I had a brilliant idea. There is far too much conflict on this server. My admin has abandoned me. With the state things are in right now, there is no way peace is ever going to be attainable, no matter who forgives who. But what if one could go back in time and prevent it all from happening? What if we could go back to how it used to be?”
Tommy didn’t say anything.
XD towered over him and looked down on Tommy condescendingly. “You owe it to the server, you know – you’re the reason everything is wrong. You only have one chance to fix what you broke. I cannot send you back in time twice – the timeline is delicate.”
XD raised one of its disembodied hands and snapped, and before Tommy could even let go of his held breath, everything went dark.
*
When Tommy woke up, he was in a field he didn’t recognize. The DSMP server wasn’t small, by any means, but most of it had been explored and discovered by now. There were bits and pieces of people all over the server – random builds, craters from exploded creepers, and floating trees everywhere. You would be hard pressed to find a piece of the server untouched. And yet, as Tommy sat up, head spinning, the landscape surrounding him was completely natural. Untouched and new.
Something in his peripheral vision caught his attention, and Tommy turned around, finding a pile of clothes with a note attached to it.
Crawling over to the pile, Tommy snatched up the note. He read it.
Time magic is tricky. I couldn’t pinpoint a specific time to send you back to. You may have ended up in a new server. You goal is to find the DSMP and save it. You only have one chance. I have no control over what happens from here on out. Don’t fuck it up.
P.S. I left you some things from an old friend to help cover up your identity. We wouldn’t want to create an anomaly in the time space continuem, would we?
– XD
Tommy crumpled up the note in his hands. He wanted to scream, or yell. He wanted to throw something. He didn’t ask for this. He didn’t deserve this, did he? Surely, after everything that has happened, he has repented for all the crimes he committed. All the wars, the fighting, and the bloodshed. He and his friends got Dream locked away for good, and he was finally safe, and he was supposed to live the rest of his life in retirement. Apparently, that was too much to ask.
He looks down at the pile of clothes. It’s a white hoodie, some black cargo pants, and … as Tommy lifts the hoodie, something falls out of the wrapped cloth. It lands in the grass with a clump, and Tommy reaches out for it blindly, stupidly. As soon as his fingers touch the white porcelain, turns it over so he can see it better, he recoils in a panic. Because it’s a mask. It’s a white porcelain face mask, just like the one Dream uses. And it may not have anything on it, it may be pure and white and innocent, but he still feels his stomach drop at how similar it is.
And yet Tommy still finds himself putting on the pants, wearing the hoodie over his iconic red and white tee, and his hands shake as they bring the mask up to his face. It feels monumental, almost. He clips the mask around his head and finds the porcelain to be enchanted. It’s see-through from the inside.
Tommy lets go of the breath he was holding.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad? Maybe the white porcelain can mean a new start?
There’s no going back now, regardless.
*
Now, obviously, if XD was really as crazy as Tommy thinks it is – and XD is crazy, the craziest motherfucker Tommy has ever met, and Tommy has met his own brothers, one of which blew up an entire nation he built with his own hands, and the other which hears voices in his head and likes to bathe in blood – then he really is lost in the past. Or rather, now the present. Ugh, that was going to get old, fast. He’s already confused.
And as much as he hates the mask, Tommy is grateful. He doesn’t know how far back XD sent him, but he doesn’t want anyone recognizing him.
Well … not that he looks like he did when he was a kid. He’s no longer the child that joined the DSMP, bright eyed and bushy tailed. He has too many scars on his face to accomplish the same baby-face look he used to have. And his hair – there’s a large white section, now, from his brush with death and necromancy magic. And the rest of his body, it’s stick-thin and covered in scars. And – well, Tommy is all grown-up now. He’s eighteen – an adult. He grew up fast – he had to, or he would have easily been swallowed by the wars and conflicts. And though there was little chance someone would recognize him now; Tommy still took to wearing his new hoodie and face mask religiously.
*
Okay, so obviously, no one can know he’s from the future. If he introduces himself as Tommy, and then his past – well, now present – self shows up, things will get awkward, and quick.
But the thing is, XD must have sent Tommy way back in time, because he doesn’t recognize anything. He’s on a randomly generated seed, and it’s there that he meets George and Sapnap. Except, they don’t look quite like themselves. Sapnap’s hair is short and lighter in colour, and George is actually awake and doesn’t have red mushrooms growing off him. And wow, it’s weird meeting younger versions of his enemy’s friends. They both look so young, so innocent, so unburdened – so happy. Tommy has never seen them like this before. Tentatively, Tommy gets to know them.
The younger George, who was wearing his clout goggles – not cracked, like they were in Tommy’s timeline, still white and pristine – asks for his name. Tommy panics. He knows he’s a shit liar when he’s panicking. He looks around himself for anything that could give him a name. Then, his eyes land on the nearby pond, and the wet clay that rests beneath the water.
Tommy introduces himself as Clay.
Thankfully, neither George nor Sapnap suspect anything. They don’t ask where he came from or why he doesn’t seem to have any tools or resources on him. They don’t question why he wears a large hoodie in hot as fuck summer heat, or why he refuses to take off his mask, and even avoids eating in front of them to avoid taking it off.
Through subtle talk with his new friends – and it’s still weird, because they had never bothered to spare him a glance on the DSMP, and now they’re his friends? – he discovers that they haven’t met Dream yet. It’s weird, because Tommy could have sworn, with what little he knows of the Dream Team from his original timeline, that they should have met him by now. Sapnap is sixteen and George is twenty, and Tommy – now Clay – scratches his head at the anomaly. Oh well.
At first, Clay tries to distance himself from George and Sapnap. After all, they’re supposed to be Dream’s friends, not his. They’re to become his enemies. But time passes, and things get too personal, and he can’t help himself. Sapnap becomes like a brother to him, and the three have an inside joke about how obsessed Clay has become with George. Soon, George and Sapnap, no matter how bad they were to him in the past – or future, technically, he guesses – become his best friends.
And it almost doesn’t feel fair. George and Sapnap aren’t even his real friends, not really, and yet they’ve become better friends to Clay in such a short amount of time, than Tubbo ever was to Tommy.
Clay tries not to think about it.
At one point, George jokingly draws an eerily familiar smiley face on his mask. It’s just a prank. A harmless prank. George’s hands are stained with the squid ink, and he’s laughing at the now silly-looking face mask. Even Sapnap finds it funny. Clay has to swallow back his fear at seeing his mask look so similar to Dream’s mask, but he nervously laughs at George’s poor attempt at a joke. Clay can’t get mad at George, not really, no matter what he does. But every attempt at wiping the ink off the mask is a failure, as if the ink itself was enchanted, and Clay can’t get himself a new mask like the one XD created, so he learns to live with it. He decides to just avoid mirrors now.
Then Sapnap is doing their laundry in the nearby river, but there are sea pickles at the bottom of the water, and they accidently turn Clay’s hoodie a lime green. Clay nearly falls into a panic attack at seeing that particular colour of green again, but he accepts the hoodie from Sapnap with clenched teeth. He tells his brother it’s okay. The white was bound to get stained anyway. Clay doesn’t have any other hoodies, but he never lets anyone else do his laundry ever again.
At this point, Clay isn’t stupid. He knows he looks like Dream, with his identical green hoodie and smiley face mask. But maybe this is a coincidence? Maybe XD is playing with him and had these things happen on purpose, to taunt him, to push him to find a way to save the DSMP quicker.
If only he could find the DSMP.
In all his panic and spiralling, Clay forgets to worry about the fact that George and Sapnap still haven’t met Dream yet.
The trio move to the popular Hypixel server, where PVP tournaments are being held. The three start entering the tournaments for fun, and Clay finds himself a little rusty with his skills. He was never as good as Technoblade – or Dream, he reminds himself bitterly – but he could get by. But these tournaments push him to be better, and for once, he lets himself forget about saving the DSMP, and he becomes drowned in PVP, and surprisingly, parkour. Parkour doesn’t seem to be as popular as the other events and minigames, but it holds a special place in Clay’s heart. After all, this is something that Dream will never touch or take away from him.
The trouble starts in a small PVP tournament when Clay loses to an opponent, badly. “Like you could ever win against me,” his opponent says, snide and pompous. They look down on him as if he is dirt on their shoe. They look down on him as if they are Dream, and this is exile again, and Clay feels a burning rage within himself. He’s never felt so angry – he’s never felt such familiar panic. He wants to snap this guy’s neck – and whoa, where did those murderous thoughts come from? His opponent scoffs. “Dream on.”
Clay snaps. Maybe it was hearing the name of his past – technically future – enemy – or maybe it was just the taunt itself. Clay gets up and lops the guy’s head straight off his shoulders.
Quickly after that, it’s like a dam has broken. Clay becomes more violent with his opponents, starts playing dirty, doing anything to win. And it works.
His friends tell Clay that he’s scaring them, that he isn’t acting like himself. But what do they know? George and Sapnap have never met the real him – they haven’t met Tommy; they’ve only met Clay – and Clay knows that they have barely scratched the surface of what makes up his self. They haven’t gone through the wars, through the starvation and violence, they haven’t acquired the unique flavour of trauma that the DSMP seemed to eager to hand out to its players. They know nothing about him and just how much violence makes up his identity and has built who he is. This is simply the first time he has been able to express it so openly without fear of retribution, and he intends to seize this opportunity with both hands. He revels in his new freedom, in his new power and control.
Clay quickly reaches the top of the leader boards, known for his ruthlessness.
In response to his volatile reaction, it quickly becomes a saying. “Dream on,” his opponents will taunt, just to see him lose his shit. They only do it to recapture his initial reaction because they want to bother him. But it catches on so quickly that his friends, George and Sapnap, take to calling him Dream On, and then just Dream. Clay – now Dream – quickly locks himself in a closet and has the mother of all mental breakdowns. Even after he tells them not to call him that, it’s still a common taunt among his opponents, and his friends keep slipping up. Eventually, Dream is forced to accept his new nickname.
But it gets to him. He starts to crack. Everything – the lime green hoodie, the smiley porcelain face mask, and now even his new name! These are all just coincidences, right? It doesn’t make any sense, otherwise. Dream feels so lost.
Eventually, Dream has had enough.
As an admin, he was never properly taught how to use his abilities. He never went to a fancy academy like the other admins, and he always just joined other admin’s servers, where his abilities were basically moot, because an admin only had power in their own servers. So, with the little he knows, he creates a new server. It’s not perfect, it’s not special, and it’s not made from scratch. It’s several random seeds cobbled together with duct tape and elbow grease, with a barely functioning whitelist feature, but it’s his new home all the same.
Dream welcomes his friends, George and Sapnap, onto the server, saying they can relax and finally settle down. Dream only ever meant for it to be temporary – because after all, he was eventually meant to find the DSMP, and change the future – but a year went by, and suddenly new people were joining his server. First it was only Dream, George, and Sapnap – but then there was Callahan, Sam, Alyssa, Ponk, and Bad. They started to build a community. And Dream thought that maybe he didn’t need to hunt after the DSMP just yet.
*
The server is still new when Dream finally collects the resources to create an ender chest. He goes into the Community House – which he finds funny because it reminds him a lot of the Community House on the DSMP, but looks completely different – and places it down, ready to start putting some basic tools inside. Imagine his surprise when he opens it and finds everything from his past – or rather, future ender chest – still in there. He has Mellohi and Cat, his two special discs. There’s the allium Ranboo gave him, the “Your Tubbo” compass Ghostbur made him, the friendship emerald from Philza, and the original L’Manberg flag. Apparently, ender chests connected even through alternate timelines … good to know.
It’s been roughly three years since he was sent back in time by XD, and going through his old ender chest brings back memories – not all of them good, but the nostalgia hits Dream hard. When he looks at the compass, it has “Your Tubbo” scratched onto the backside, most likely done with Ghostbur’s knife, and it even still has a smear of blue on it. To Dream’s disappointment, it doesn’t work, the needle spinning wildly, but he isn’t surprised – the lodestone that the compass is connected to doesn’t even exist yet in this timeline. He puts the compass back and lifts part of the L’Manberg flag, a rush of emotion filling him, though he can’t place whether it’s positive or not. The flag feels thinned and rough, and the colours are faded, but it was an important keepsake. And lastly, Dream pulls out the friendship emerald, fingering the uncut edges of the gem. It lets him reminisce about the good old days, when he actually had a caring father figure and family, and the world wasn’t crumbling around him.
“Dream?”
Dream startles, having not heard George enter the Community House. He quickly shoves the emerald in the nearest chest, not realizing it isn’t his ender chest.
George stands in the doorway. “Where’d you get that emerald?” George asks, looking confused. “I didn’t know you found a village.”
Dream purses his lips. “Uh, I didn’t find a village.”
“What?” George says. “But emeralds don’t spawn naturally. Where else could you have gotten an emerald?”
Dream knows he hesitates for too long. He’s always been a shit liar, especially when he panics, and even more so when lying to a friend. “… in an abandoned mineshaft. I found it in a loot chest.”
“But emeralds can’t …” George sighs. “Never mind.”
George doesn’t look like he believes Dream, but he doesn’t call Dream out on his lie, either.
*
George knew that Dream was lying – emeralds didn’t spawn in loot chests outside of villages – but he didn’t say anything about it. What was the point? He didn’t understand why Dream felt the need to lie, but it wasn’t like Dream could be doing anything sinister with a singular emerald. George figured it didn’t matter and wasn’t worth arguing about.
It isn’t until later, when George is sifting through Dream’s random chests to find some extra wood that he runs across the emerald. He feels guilty as he takes it into his inventory, but he tells himself that if Dream didn’t want others to touch it, he wouldn’t have left it in a communal chest. He puts it into his hotbar to look at, only to notice that it’s specially named. He turns it over in his hands, the name “Friendship Emeralds” flashing. It confuses George even though he knows it shouldn’t. Dream and Sapnap liked to name their tools and armour different things, sometimes pun based names, other times just silly names, or even just something they think sounds cool. But “Friendship Emeralds”? The name isn’t anything Dream has ever mentioned before. It also implies that there should be more than one emerald. He doesn’t know why, because there isn’t anything special about the emerald besides the name, but George feels like the gem is important somehow.
But then he hears Dream calling out for him, and George puts the emerald back where it belongs, and he walks out of the Community House to help his friend.
The next time he checks, the emerald is gone.
George forgets about the emerald.
*
With eight people on his server, Dream was already feeling in over his head, but then a god shows up. Of course, a god shows up. That makes perfect sense, Dream thinks sarcastically. A server anomaly.
It should have been expected, with how the server is cobbled together, and there are tones of rogue, useless code. The cracks in the server soon turn into something more. They morph and glitch into a cute little white blob, which quickly gains sentience.
Dream finds this blob, and enamoured, takes it under his wing. The little blob, it turns out, has admin-like abilities, and Dream teaches it what he can. As a type of compliment, Dream doesn’t quite understand, the blob morphs and takes on a form very similar to Dream. It could be a body double of Dream, except for one thing – it’s face. It didn’t have one. Where facial features should sit, it was a gaping hole into the Void. It also had no clothes. Dream makes some clothes for it, gifting the once-blob a white hoodie made from white sheep’s wool, black cargo pants, and a plain porcelain face mask, strengthened with quartz and netherite so that it won’t break, to cover up its empty face. The mask isn’t enchanted like Dream’s, though, somehow, Dream doesn’t feel like that will be a problem for a god with no eyes.
As if taking on a form identical to Dream wasn’t enough of a show of admiration, it also takes on his name, with its own twist. It calls itself DreamXD – XD for short, lest everyone discover their connection to one another. It even takes on Dream’s god complex, though this time, it actually is a type of god.
XD likes to think itself all-knowing, but really, its intelligence is limited to the server it was born in. XD could never leave. It can go nowhere else and knows nowhere else and cannot comprehend a world beyond its origin server. Dream is far more knowledgeable than XD will ever be. He has far more power than this so-called god will ever possess. After all, this XD is a god that has no recollection of sending Dream back in time to save the DSMP, and yet seems to be a younger version of the XD in Dream’s original timeline.
It kind of hurts to wrap his head around this one, and XD starts to believe itself bigger than Dream, so Dream decides to ignore XD past this. Clearly, this is not the same XD that sent him on his mission.
*
But then he joins the server. He isn’t technically whitelisted, but because he is basically Dream, he bypasses the whitelist feature easily. If you don’t know who Dream is talking about, he’s talking about himself. Well, he’s talking about his past self – or well, technically in this timeline, present self. It’s all very confusing. To make something complicated simple, he’s talking about Tommy.
Seeing him for the first time actually takes his breath away. He was so young, then. Fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. His hair is still blonde, no white patches. His face is unmarred by scars. He looks happy, almost. He wears the classic red and white tee that Dream knows is hidden under his own lime green hoodie. And damn, was Dream really that annoying when he was younger? No wonder he was banned from the DSMP, and then constantly called a child by the DSMP inhabitants, and – holy shit.
Dream is struck with horror when he realizes that this is the DSMP. He created the DSMP. And he’s playing the part of Dream, not Tommy. Because Tommy is right in front of him, and his past self doesn’t even realize who he is talking to. And why would he suspect anything? To Tommy, Dream is a completely different person.
No, no.
He isn’t Dream. He isn’t. Dream is some – some far off, untouchable, evil villain. Dream – Clay – Tommy – UGH! – whoever he is, he can be better. He can fix this. He can do things differently.
*
Things get complicated. Conflicts start and a war happens despite Dream’s best efforts to smother the rebellions. No one seems to want to listen to him. They don’t realize that what they’re doing is tearing the server apart. They don’t need separate nations, they don’t need governments – but they’re all delusional, dreaming up unneeded freedom. And the power, the control, that Dream used to have is waning. It’s scary after living a childhood so trauma riddled and out of his control, finally securing some semblance of control, and then suddenly having it ripped from his hands.
But then the Book of Revival falls into Dream’s lap.
Dream knew about the Book of Revival. After all, it was used on him. Dream’s Dream used it to kill him, back when he was still Tommy, and to bring him back to life. The necromancy magic is the reason he has a streak of hair as white as a soul, is the reason his body feels disconnected from real life, and is the reason his skin is always cold to the touch. Dream was human, once, before he was touched by the dark magic of the Book of Revival. He still is human, depending on who you ask – just, a little less. But Dream never knew where the Book of Revival came from, how to use it, or how to get his hands on it.
But then, in this new DSMP, Dream hears a rumor of the Book – and then he finally gets his hands on it, bless Schlatt’s corpse – and he realizes how much power it holds. Admins were powerful, but not bypass a person’s respawn life cycle powerful.
Dream knows how much bad this book can bring. He has seen it in action, in the hands of a wrong individual. He knows how much pain and suffering it can bring.
But Dream looks at this book, which has only brought him misery, and he sees the power – the good this book can bring. Dream’s Dream may have used it for wrong, but Dream wasn’t like Dream.
This time around, with the Book of Revival in Dream’s hands, no one will ever need to fear death again. The DSMP can finally be one big, happy family!
*
It’s hard, Dream realizes, early on. It’s hard because no one sees that what they’re doing will lead to an empty future, and that only Dream knows what is truly best for them. No one listens, but he persists. He doesn’t care if they think him a tyrant, or a villain. After all, it’s called the Dream SMP, not the Tommy SMP, or Wilbur SMP. What he’s doing – no one will like him, after. But it’s for the greater good. He’s trying to help. He’s come to realize what the real problem is – it’s the factions, the countries, the divide between the players and the server. Everything that he used to think was good, that he fought for – none of it matters anymore. None of it matters more than the goal: one united server, where everybody follows the same rules. Dream tries to stop it so that nothing that happened in his timeline will happen here. He won’t let history repeat itself. He can make a better future – he knows he can.
*
But history repeats itself, as it was bound to do. And now Dream finds himself on the opposite side. And no matter what he does, he can’t seem to get it through everyone’s thick skulls that he’s trying to help them. He’s doing it for the good of the server. They’re all meant to be one big, happy family. But everything keeps slipping through his fingers like quicksand. Dream finds himself doing things his morals had never allowed before, repeating things that his Dream had done in his timeline, growing more and more desperate with each relationship ruined. And with each passing day, the line between him and the future Dream blurs.
Dream keeps telling himself that he’s different. He tells himself he’s doing the right thing, and it’s different because he’s the one that’s doing it.
He’s not sure he can believe himself much longer.
*
Dream grows frustrated with how everyone babies Tommy. Dream isn’t careful with Tommy – he isn’t careful with himself. For some reason, even laying eyes on his past self ignites a burning hatred within Dream. After all, this Tommy hasn’t gone through what he has. This Tommy doesn’t understand what Dream understands. And some small part of Dream wishes that Tommy could understand. He wishes the hurt he experienced upon his past – now present – self. It’s only fair, after all. Because, after all, why shouldn’t Tommy have to learn the same lessons he did? Why should he be spared, the way Dream never was? Why should Tommy get a pass on the mistakes – the crimes – he committed?
Sure, Dream made the same mistakes when he was Tommy. But Dream isn’t Tommy anymore. He knows better now. He paid the price. He was punished. He turned out fine, didn’t he? And now it’s Tommy’s turn to get punished. Tommy needs to learn better, like him; he needs to be better.
So, no, Dream is not kind to his past self. Dream’s Dream was never kind to him. No one was ever kind to him when he was Tommy. No one ever spared him a second glance. So, why should this Tommy receive that courtesy?
*
The years pass, though Dream doesn’t know how many. He struggles to keep track. Time no longer matters when you’ve died more than you’ve lived. Dream kneels in front of the pond, staring at his reflection. It’s one of the few and only times that he has ever taken off his mask since the first day he donned it. Even when eating, he only partially raised it above his mouth, before shifting it back to its proper position. As he carefully, oh-so-delicately places the slightly cracked porcelain mask on the ground, he realizes the face staring back at him from the water isn’t his.
Dream squints at the stranger’s reflection and wonders. There isn’t much that is familiar. Had his hair ever really been blonde, or had he always had completely bone-white hair? His hair is so long it reaches past his shoulders, and despite his best efforts at hacking away at it with his axe, it remains. He can’t even remember where the scars on his face came from – the most prominent being an X shaped scar across the bridge of his nose – or when his freckles became a glaring galaxy of red marks on his sickly pale complexion. His cheeks also no longer held any baby fat, his expression gaunt. And his eyes – they looked more green than blue. His eyes were supposed to be blue, right? Instead, one moment they are a dripping, toxic green, just like his necromancy magic, and then he blinks and they’re back to normal. Or, at least, what he thinks is normal. He hasn’t looked at his own face in years. To the best of his recollection, he no longer looks like Tommy – he no longer looks like how he remembers himself – because now he looks like Dream … whoever “Dream” is.
These changes scare him. They scare him because he wasn’t even aware that he was changing. It’s like one moment, he was Tommy; then he blinked, and he was Dream. Every day that passes by, he’s slowly distancing himself from the boy he used to be, to the man he is now. He is a completely different person, with different memories, and a different background, and new trauma. There’s a huge disconnect because, as he looks into what are supposed to be his eyes, he isn’t so sure who he’s supposed to be anymore.
Some days, Dream wishes everything could go back to the way it was before. Some days, Dream wishes he could go back in time and start all over again. And most days, Dream doesn’t even recognize himself.
He wonders if anyone else notices the changes.
Probably not, because these days, no one cares about Dream. They only care about Tommy.
Secretly, Dream wishes he could be Tommy again. But that’s not an option anymore, not for him, not after what he has done.
His eyes sting as they glow a toxic neon, tears burning his scarred cheeks.
*
It feels so good to kill Tommy. It’s cathartic, almost. All those years of hate, fear, and grief – it all comes to a sudden stop when Tommy takes his last breath. Dream feels like he can finally breathe. His body is bruised and battered, and everything is covered in blood – and somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice tells him that this is wrong, that he should regret this – but he has never felt freer. Because he has finally gotten rid of the cause of every single problem in his entire life – Tommy.
He almost doesn’t revive Tommy. He can’t think of a reason why he would. He doesn’t care what the consequences are when the others on the server find out. What could possibly happen that hasn’t already been done? Was Sam going to starve him? Was Quackity going to torture him? Was the only thing he cared about – an innocent kitten – going to be murdered in front of him? There is nothing anyone can do to him that hasn’t already been done.
Dream bares his teeth at his bloody corpse, triumphant.
He doesn’t care what it cost, because now he finally has control. No one can hurt him because he has nothing left to lose. Game over, he’s won.
Several days pass before Dream finally revives Tommy. He doesn’t know why he does it. All he knows is that he can’t look at Tommy after the revival; he looks too much like how he remembers himself. The new white streak in Tommy’s hair haunts Dream. He doesn’t say anything when Tommy is released by Sam. He doesn’t say anything when Sam cuts back on food rations, again. He doesn’t say anything when Quackity tortures him, again and again, because he wants power. He doesn’t say anything when no one removes the cat’s corpse, and he sleeps with it, curled around the tiny kitten, uselessly trying to protect the only thing that had showed him kindness in years.
But it’s fine, he tells himself. No one can hurt him because no one has any power over him. He has everything under control. Nothing can hurt him anymore. He’s more powerful than ever.
He pretends the tears don’t hurt.
*
In the end, when Dream is rotting in prison, alone, it hits him that he has nothing left. And maybe that means that no one can hurt him anymore, but that also means that he has no reason to live. He realizes with horror that this was always bound to happen. He may have started out as Tommy – but he was always meant to become Dream. They were always the same person. And now Dream is just a bitter shell of his past self. He holds no power, no control – he has nothing that made Dream important. But he also has no friends, no family – nothing that made him Tommy. He will never be, and never can be, Tommy ever again. He’s nothing.
A week later, Sam comes into his cell looking furious. The warden demands to know what Dream did. Dream, for once, is completely lost, and admits that he has no idea what Sam is talking about. Sam seems to take a moment to decide if he believes Dream, then he shares what happened. Tommy disappeared over a week ago, and now no one can find XD.
With a start, Dream realizes what must have happened.
“Only one chance” his ass.
Dream can’t stop himself. He laughs, maniacally, until his throat hurts and he’s wheezing. Sam stares at him like he’s crazy. He flinches when Dream starts to cry, the tears burning down his cheeks. The warden backs away in fear, thinking the prisoner has finally lost their mind. But Dream ignores Sam, too caught up in his realization. What a self-fulfilling prophecy, Dream thinks. It’s too perfect. This is just going to keep happening over, and over, and over again … until, eventually, Tommy gets it right. Or Dream. Whichever one of them survives.
*