Chapter Text
Dream wakes up tasting ash, and his first thought is that he must be in the Nether. Which doesn’t make sense- everyone knows you don’t sleep in the Nether.
He’s usually not a slow riser, but for some reason, today waking up feels like hauling his mind through hot tar. It’s a good minute or so before he manages to drag his eyes open, glad that the mask shields them from the brightness of the midmorning sun, and look.
Before him is absolute devastation.
The earth is a hollowed-out crater, bombed down to bedrock, blasted-out ruins of buildings scattered among the wreckage. There are waterfalls trickling down over the broken rock, here and there, from where ponds and lakes and farms were caught up in whatever blast consumed this place. The air is full of smoke and ash, diffusing the sunlight into a golden haze.
He’s lying sprawled right by the lip of the chasm, and he scrambles back a few paces as soon as it registers, away from the steep drop. His heart is beating fast in his chest.
This is-
This is Dream’s world. He knows it like he knows his heartbeat, his head, his hands, could sense it around him long before he opened his eyes. His world, made for his friends to play in.
What happened here?
Something was built here, that much is obvious by the multitude of ruins, the few intact buildings still visible in the distance past the crater’s lip. Something grand, and something someone wanted gone. He checks the coordinates in his head, but it doesn’t help. He doesn’t remember anything being here. Certainly nothing on this scale.
Movement in the pit catches his eye, and he leans forward, still cautious of the drop. Someone is picking their way delicately around the sides of the pit, jumping from one broken foothold to the next, sifting through half-buried chests. They’re tall, the sharp whites and blacks of their clothes and hair muted by the ash settling out of the air.
Dream doesn’t know them, when he should know everyone on the server, and the unfamiliarity sinks uncomfortably in his stomach. But more importantly, they’re here scavenging, which means they must have at least an idea of what’s happened here.
“Hey!” he calls, waving down at the person to get their attention. “What-“
He doesn’t even get to finish his sentence.
As soon as the person glances up and sees him, eyes blowing wide with recognition and what looks uncomfortably like it might be fear, they’re gone. Dream blinks at the spot where they were for a moment, and then glances up just in time to catch a tail disappearing over the opposite lip of the crater. In the ashy silence, he can hear the sound of fleeing footsteps clearly.
…What?
“What?” he asks aloud, and the crater echoes his question back at him.
He has so many questions, and no idea where to find answers. Except-
He checks the online list, and lets out a sigh of relief for the first time today.
/ Dream whispered to Georgenotfound: hey
/ Dream whispered to Georgenotfound: where are you?
“What the hell,” George says, frowning down at his phone.
“What?” Sapnap asks, glancing up from across the room.
“Dream’s messaging me.”
“What,” Sapnap says, all at once on alert and on his feet and hurrying across the room to see the screen. “What does he want?”
“He didn’t say,” George shrugs, turning the phone so Sapnap can see the pair of messages, unanswered and waiting. “Just asked where I am.”
“What, doesn’t he know?”
“I thought he did.”
“Well, if he doesn’t, don’t tell him.”
“I won’t.” George frowns down at the screen.
“Ask what he wants.”
“Yeah.”
/ Georgenotfound: what do you want
/ Dream: ???
/ Dream: what the hell is WITH everyone today
/ Dream: i just want to know what’s going on
/ Dream: what happened?
Sapnap scowls. “What does he think he’s playing at? Gimme that,” he says, swiping the phone out of George’s hand and starting to type furiously.
“Or you could just use your own- okay.”
/ Georgenotfound: this is sapnap
/ Georgenotfound: dream i don’t know what the fuck youre playing at but fuck off
/ Georgenotfound: you got what you wanted, right?
/ Georgenotfound: you got tommy’s stupid fucking discs and lmanburg is gone
/ Georgenotfound: and thats all you care about, right
/ Georgenotfound: go have your god complex somewhere else dude we’re done
/ Dream: WAIT
/ Dream: sapnap wait
/ Dream: please
/ Dream: i honestly truly don’t know what you’re talking about
/ Dream: can we call?
“Say yes,” George says.
“Why?”
“I mean, it can’t hurt, can it? And… I don’t know.” He shifts in place, frowning. “Why would he lie?”
“I mean, who fucking knows what’s going on in his head these days,” Sapnap mutters, but types out a ‘fine’ and sends it anyways.
Barely a moment later, the phone rings. George and Sapnap share an uncertain look before George takes the phone back and answers the call, putting it on speaker.
“Dream?”
“George!” Dream’s voice comes down the line, and the desperation in that one word alone is enough to make them both hesitate. “Thank god. Listen-”
Dream sounds uncertain. Dream sounds scared.
Dream never sounds scared. Not anymore.
“I woke up,” Dream says, speaking quickly, an edge of what might actually be panic in his voice. “Next to this huge crater. And I know this is my world but I haven’t seen anyone I recognize and I don’t know why you’re mad at me and I don’t know what happened.”
Neither of them answer, for a moment.
“Dream…” George says carefully. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
There’s a brief pause. “Uh… Tommy stole my sword for like, a day. Sam started building some new project. And we talked about how much bigger the server was gonna get.”
“Oh, shit,” Sapnap says, hushed.
George remembers that day. He remembers that conversation. That hadn’t been too long after Tommy and Tubbo joined, and they’d been wondering if the influx of new members might end up leading to drama.
(Ha. Even when you’re colorblind, hindsight is twenty-twenty.)
But that, that was-
“Dream,” Sapnap says slowly. “That was ages ago.”
Dream doesn’t answer. George doesn’t blame him.
“We should- um.” George has to take a moment, close his eyes, because what. “We’ll… we’ll come find you. Are you still by L- by the crater?”
It takes a moment for Dream to reply. “I… yeah.”
“Okay,” George says. Sapnap is already moving to grab their swords. “Okay. Just… stay there. We’ll be right there.”
When they find Dream, sitting on the ledge and staring down at the wreckage that used to be a country, George’s first thought is that he looks young.
Which- doesn’t make sense, really. Even if this Dream is somehow from the past, it can’t be more than a year of difference. He’s probably still the same age, even.
And yet, and yet, and yet, the contrast between this Dream and the one George doesn’t know anymore is striking.
This Dream has his mask shoved up onto his forehead, rather than covering his face completely as had become a constant at some point in the last few months. When had that happened? George thinks it was probably around the time Wilbur and the rest of the revolutionaries declared their independence, but he’s not sure; maybe it was when he shot Tommy, or maybe it was later.
He can’t pinpoint exactly, and it bothers him, the realization that he can’t remember when the last time he saw his best friend’s eyes was. The shift was so gradual that he didn’t even think about it until now, faced with Dream again, unmasked and young and smiling, a little pained and small but real, when he sees them.
All at once, any doubts George might have had are gone.
“Hi, guys,” Dream says. He sounds so relieved to see them that it hurts, and Sapnap makes a noise like he’s been punched.
“Oh, Dream,” George says, and he’s not entirely sure if it’s him or Sapnap who moves first, but all at once they’re all hugging, graceless and clumsy on the debris-strewn rock, and it’s possibly the least comfortable place on the entire server for this but George really could not care less.
He might be crying, but he can’t bring himself to care about that, either. Because here’s something he’s really not ashamed to admit: he missed Dream.
And he doesn’t even know exactly when he lost him.
It’s some time before they break apart, but they do eventually, George settling on one side of Dream and Sapnap on the other, just like it always was and always should be.
The ravaged pit that used to be L’Manburg stretches out before them, absolute in its devastation, and George knows the question is inevitable but he still flinches, just a little, when Dream asks quietly, “What happened here?”
George hesitates. Sapnap doesn’t. “You did.”
The color drains out of Dream’s face. “I… what?”
George sighs, takes over the explanation. “This place is- was- called L’Manburg. Wilbur and Tommy and some other people declared independence from the SMP, and we fought a war against them, and- a lot of things happened, and most of them don’t really matter. But in the end you wanted L’Manburg gone, and…” he trails off, waves a hand towards the wreckage.
“There were TNT dupers up there,” Sapnap says, pointing up at the obsidian framework still hanging in the sky like an ugly constellation. “And I think like… nine or ten withers, total. Plus Technoblade just murdering people left and right. We tried, but… we never stood a chance.”
Dream looks stricken. “You two were-?”
“Sapnap was there,” George says. “I wasn’t.”
He hadn’t seen the point. Hasn’t seen a point to much of anything, lately, if he’s honest. The whole server disintegrating into war and destruction and death, and he’d only ever wanted to just have fun with his friends.
“Oh,” Dream says, and then, the information clearly hitting him a few seconds late, “Wait, Technoblade?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s here,” Sapnap says. “Tommy and Wilbur recruited him for the second war. He helped you with the… you know.”
“The second war?” Dream echoes. “How many were there?”
“Three?” George guesses. “Four?”
“Who even knows at this point, honestly,” Sapnap says, frustration or bitterness or both in his voice. “You could ask everybody on the server and everyone would probably have a different count.”
“Too many,” George says.
“Yeah.”
Dream is quiet for a long moment.
“Is this why you didn’t want to hear from me?” he asks eventually. “Because…”
George frowns. “Not really,” he says, sees Sapnap nod in agreement in his peripheral vision. “We…”
He doesn’t even know how to start. We fell apart, you broke it, you broke us, you left us behind, because at some point you started being a god and stopped being our friend.
“You made a choice,” he says, eventually. “You decided what was important to you, and it wasn’t us.”
This whole conversation feels surreal, in a way. It’s like he’s talking to his best friend’s ghost, saying all the things he hasn’t been able to say to the real Dream- the present Dream- whoever, for months and months. He half wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him, say, look, this is what happens, look, this is what you did.
Fix it.
But that’s not fair, is it? Because this Dream hasn’t done any of that, not yet. He’s the version that’s still their friend, and still smiles and means it, and still just wants a world where his friends are free to explore and live and play, who hasn’t yet gone to horrifying lengths to keep it that way.
But, and this is important, because it’s something George has forgotten:
This is also the version of Dream that has yet to ever let him down.
“I don’t want this,” Dream says finally, and there’s a note in his voice that George recognizes. It’s the iron sort of resolution that shows when Dream has decided to do something impossible and see it through to the end, no matter how it hurts, and George never thought he’d be so happy to hear it.
He meets Sapnap’s eyes; Sapnap smiles, just a little, sharp and hopeful.
Dream says, “Let’s fix it.”
Like it’s easy.
And when Dream says it with such confidence, with that look in his eyes, George can almost believe it will be.