Chapter Text
It all begins because of Prince. Go figure. They’re all having one of their little meetings—they being Prince, Morality, and Logic—while Anxiety curls up in his bedroom and does his best to leave them alone. It’s better that he doesn’t start criticizing Prince’s ideas until after he’s had a few, or else they’ll be too busy arguing to get anywhere, and he wants Thomas to have an idea. He really does.
Because if they don’t have an idea, they don’t have a video. And if they don’t have a video, they don’t have people to watch the video. And if they don’t have people to watch the video, they don’t have a job. And if they don’t have a job, they don’t have money. And if they don’t have money, they don’t have a house, or a car, or food, or anything. And if they don’t have anything, they die. So basically, if Prince can’t come up with an idea, they die.
Seems legit.
But even through his bedroom wall, he can hear them talking, and he can hear Prince’s ridiculous ideas and all of the abhorrent flaws in all of them. He wants to go and point out all of those flaws. Logic’s doing an okay job of keeping Prince in check, but Anxiety could do better. Then again, he could also give Prince creator’s block, and that would be hell for all of them.
Groaning, Anxiety rolls over and slides his headphones on, blasting Fallout Boy at full volume. It drowns out the others’ voices, and slowly but surely relief sinks into his chest. He doesn’t have to deal with their flaws right now. Not yet. He only has to deal with his own, and even that seems easier with music.
And then at last he’s called into the commons and Prince, puffed up and strutting, begins to lay out his ideas. “We’ve narrowed it down to three choices, and Logic insists that we should run them by you before we choose, although I don’t know what good it’s going to do.”
Anxiety bristles, opening his mouth to say something scathing, but Prince barrels on without a single pause to breathe.
“Nevertheless,” he says, straightening his sash, “I appreciate the fact that you’ve stayed away for this long, and I could never deny one of my—my, er, people—”
Anxiety arches an eyebrow.
“Okay, my subjects—”
Anxiety scowls.
“Whatever. I figure you should hear my ideas too, because they’re awesome. Now, our first option is a challenge video. We could—”
“No,” Anxiety says.
Prince whirls around, indignant. “No, no, no, rude. You can’t say that before you’ve heard what I’m going to say.”
“It’s already a bad idea. Challenge videos are cliché. There’s, like, a million of them. Everybody does them. Do you want to just hop on the bandwagon? Is that who we are now?”
“They’re cliché because they’re good, they’re entertaining, unlike some people—”
“Tell him the other ideas before you start arguing,” Logic says. “Maybe this can take less than nine years to figure out if you do.”
Prince huffs. “Fine. The second choice is a day in my life kinda thing—”
“Nope.”
“Are you serious?” Prince straightens his shoulders, scowling. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, for starters, it’s cliché, too. It’s also going to be difficult to make. We’ll have to walk around with a camera all day, and if we want it to be interesting, we’ll have to actually leave the house. That’s terrible on its own, but think about what people would think if they saw you walking around vlogging. They’d think we were narcissistic, and weird, and—”
“And the last idea is a dream analysis,” Prince says, interrupting him.
“A what.”
“A dream analysis.”
“It’s where we record some of our dreams and go back over them to figure out what they mean,” Logic says. “I’ve been researching some of the most common symbols in dreams, and it’s actually fairly interesting.”
Anxiety pauses, mulling it over. Maybe it would be a good idea? Hm—“No.”
“What?” Prince demands. “What? Are you kidding? What could possibly be wrong with that?”
“It’s clic—”
“It is not cliché.”
“It’s been done before.”
“That doesn’t make it cliché.”
“He actually has a point,” Logic says. “Cliché generally means overused, and statistically there aren’t that many dream analysis videos on YouTube. Not from large channels, anyhow. So I think it’s a reasonable idea.”
“It would be cute, too,” Morality says. “And our viewers could get to know us better!”
The three of them pause, glancing at Prince for his next defense—but Prince is staring hard at the wall, a rare expression of intense focus on his face.
“Uh, Princey?” Anxiety says. “That’s a pretty interesting wall there, but—”
“That’s it!” Prince says, spinning and throwing his arms wide. Anxiety jumps at the sudden movement and Prince draws back into himself—consciously or unconsciously, Anxiety isn’t sure. He’s willing to bet on unconsciously, though. Prince doesn’t typically give a shit about how he feels.
“What’s it?” Morality looks around as though expecting something to have suddenly appeared.
“What’s one of the most popular videos we do when we want the viewers to know us better?” Prince says, eyes sparkling, and even Anxiety can admit that he’s kinda sorta stunning when he looks like this, bright and elated and enthusiastic. “The videos with us! So what if we did a dream analysis, but with our dreams?”
Anxiety hesitates, confused, and glances at Logic and Morality. They glance back at him, and to his relief, they both look equally baffled. Prince is watching them expectantly, but his broad smile is fading as their silence stretches.
“Well, Roman, that sounds like a fantastic idea,” Morality says finally, beaming at him. “Only, only, um—well, kiddo, I don’t have dreams.”
“Neither do I,” Anxiety says.
“Nor I,” says Logic.
Prince stares at them, and now he looks as confused as they were moments prior. “I—you don’t have dreams? At all?”
Morality shakes his head. “Nope. Sorry, bucko. That’s your thing. But hey—Thomas still has dreams, right? Your original idea was really good.”
“But—but you guys don’t have dreams? You’ve never, ever had one in your entire lives?” Prince asks. When all three of them respond in the negative, he rests the back of his hand against his head. Anxiety thinks he might be about to swoon. “How do you—how can you not—I don’t understand.”
“We don’t either, Mr. Melodramatic. Chill. Let’s just get back to arguing,” Anxiety says.
“Do you even know what dreams are?” Prince asks.
“Of course,” Logic says. “They’re experiences generated by the unconscious mind, most commonly during an REM cycle. Theories vary as to why, but most researchers concur that dreams may help to integrate emotions and memories into our subconscious. Of course, there is also speculation that dreams are symbolic—which is what we should be discussing now, actually, if we want to get anywhere with a dream analysis video.”
“Yeah, but—” Prince drags a hand down his face. “Dreams.”
“It’s not that big of a deal,” Anxiety says, sighing. “Listen, I guess the dream analysis idea is fine. It sucks, but at least it’s better than the other two. Call me when you’re done having a crisis and you want me to nitpick the video script.”
With that, he slinks back to his bedroom. There he gets a solid two hours of peace before there’s a loud, demanding knock on his door. Oh, he wonders who that could be.
“What do you want, Princey?” he calls, not looking away from his phone.
“I have an idea,” Prince says, his voice mercifully muffled by the door. “Come listen to my idea.”
Anxiety frowns. “You never want me to listen to your ideas.”
“Anxiety,” Prince says, his voice a whine. “Come on. This one’s really good. Even better than most of my other ones, which is saying something, because all of my ideas are the best.”
Rolling his eyes—Prince is such a toddler sometimes, honestly—Anxiety rolls off of his bed and opens the door. “What?” he asks, putting on his best scowl.
“So I was thinking—”
“That’s never good,” Anxiety says, voice laced with sarcasm.
“—that if I touched you guys while you were sleeping you could dream.” Prince actually smiles at him, as though he genuinely thinks that’s a great idea.
“You’re kidding, right?”
And there goes the smile, falling away into Prince’s familiar why do I bother with these peasants expression. “No, I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t do it with you, of course, because you’d just have nightmares, but—”
Anxiety doesn’t flinch at that. (But he might wince a little.)
“—you’re the one who knows the most about what’s dangerous and what’s not, so I thought I would run the idea by you before I tried it with Logic and Morality,” Prince says. “I’d be sleeping in their beds, I think, so I wanted to know if you thought it would mix us all up too much.”
“You know what I’m going to say,” Anxiety says grimly.
Prince’s eyes jump away from his, but not before Anxiety sees the disappointment in them. “Yes,” he says, after a pause. “Of course I do. Forget I asked. It won’t be affecting you, anyhow, and I doubt it will do any real harm to Thomas, if he’s sleeping.”
“There’s nothing I can do to stop you?” Anxiety asks.
“Not unless you tell me you think I’ll be killing us.”
Anxiety hunches his shoulders and keeps his mouth shut.
“As I thought. Well, thank you anyway, I suppose. Goodbye.”
Anxiety shuts the door behind him and leans against it, glaring at his bedroom floor. What a stupid idea. He’d bumped hands with Morality last week, reaching for the salt shaker on the kitchen table, and it had taken him ten minutes to shrug off the absurdly optimistic feelings that pervaded him. Just brushing up against each other gets them all mixed up, so he can’t imagine what it would be like to sleep together. Not that he wants to imagine that. Not that he wants that. At all. Ever.
(Only he kind of does, a little bit.)
(A lot.)
At least Thomas will be asleep for Prince’s experiment, Anxiety supposes. And it’s only Logic and Morality and Prince who’ll be screwed over, so it’s not like it matters to him. What does he care? They can do whatever they want in their spare time, and if that involves mingling their separate aspects, then hell, why not?
He doesn’t care.
(He really, really does.)
He goes to sleep that night brooding on Prince’s idea—did Logic and Morality agree? Are they sleeping together tonight? Are they dreaming together tonight?
If he’s honest, he is interested in dreams. They’re fascinating. He’s been privy to a few of Thomas’, when he’s been stressed out, but he’s never had any of his own. And, if Prince’s vehement denial was anything to go by, he never will. Whatever. If they’re something Prince controls, they can’t be that cool.
Morality’s exuberant chatter the next morning does very little to support that idea, though.
“It was so cool,” Morality says, chewing enthusiastically on a waffle. His eyes are bright and sparkling, and something unfamiliar curls and coils in Anxiety’s chest as he talks. He thinks it might be envy. “I went to sleep with Prince, and then all of a sudden I was in this house. It was kind of like a mix between Thomas’ house and the mindscape, but it was all orange and yellow.”
“That sounds nonsensical,” Logic says.
“It was,” Morality says, swinging his legs and beaming. “It was totally ridiculous. And then we went into the kitchen—Prince was there, too—and made waffles with powdered sugar and sprinkles, which is why I really wanted waffles this morning! But when we went back out of the kitchen, the rest of the house had become a castle.”
“My fault,” Prince says, through a mouthful of cereal. He swallows, then adds, “But it was pretty awesome.”
Morality nods earnestly. “It was. There was gold everywhere, and bowls of fruit, and lots and lots of tables—”
“I thought you’d left the kitchen?” Logic asks, looking bewildered.
“We had. I guess this was a dining room or something. And there was this big fireplace and this big chair, so me and Prince sat in it and cuddled. It was wonderful!”
Anxiety scoffs. “Sounds boring.”
“It wasn’t. It was like being awake but anything could happen,” Morality says. “It was so cool. Dreams are so cool.”
Prince lifts his chin and preens. “It was pretty cool, wasn’t it? Logic, do you want to try tonight? For science?”
Anxiety leaves before he hears Logic’s answer. Something is boiling low in his chest, and he thinks that if he doesn’t get away and stop listening to their utter delight with each other he’s going to explode. He hides away in his bedroom again, breathes into his sheets until he feels safe and closes his eyes.
He sleeps again, but he doesn’t dream.
He doesn’t fucking dream.
He wakes up more frustrated than he was when he fell asleep. Energy hums through his body, and he knows he’s got to do something with it before it turns into anything more destructive—like, say, a panic attack.
He takes a walk through his realm of the mindscape. The path forms itself under his feet, and he lets it lead him where it will. He walks for an indeterminate amount of time—he thinks it might be two or three hours before he finally feels settled and hops back to his bedroom. Once there, he finds himself able to relax, if only for a short while.
Then it’s nighttime, and he can hear the other sides going through their evening routines—showering and brushing teeth and Prince’s singing and their low voices overlapping each others’. For a brief second, he wonders what it would be like to be with them.
Well, that’s a distant dream, anyway.
He sleeps, and he tries not to think about whether or not Logic is dreaming tonight.
The next morning, however, it’s all the others can talk about.
“It was a fascinating experience,” Logic says, and even his eyes are twinkling. “It was like a game. Prince and I were in a room and we had to figure out to escape. There was a puzzle, but it was a word puzzle—which I could have solved easily, mind you—but we couldn’t read it. Did you know you can’t read well in dreams?”
“Really?” Morality asks, leaning forward. “That’s so cool. What did you do to get out?”
“Well, we actually did something quite advanced,” Logic says. “We manipulated the dream to make a door.”
“Dream control,” Prince says. “Logan can do it. Congratulations, Logan. It took me years to learn.”
“Ahh, that’s awesome!” Morality says. “I wanna do that. Can I do that, Roman?”
“I don’t see why not. We could practice some more tonight,” Prince says, and goddamn fucking shit he winks.
Anxiety stops eating breakfast with them after that, but it doesn’t let him escape completely from their stupid talking—I dreamed this and I dreamed that and tonight I’m going to try to dream this and yada yada yada. He loathes it. Dreams are stupid. They don’t matter. They’re unnecessary.
(Like him.)
“And then, Anxiety, you were there in our dream,” Morality says, one day, when he’s managed to cross Anxiety’s path despite Anxiety’s efforts to avoid that exact thing. “We were arguing about something—I don’t even remember what—but we were having so much fun. And then you and Prince got into a pillow fight and you tore open one of the pillows and there were feathers everywhere— do we even have feather pillows?—and Logic made us clean them all up, which sucked, but then we all got to cuddle so that was great.”
“Really great,” Anxiety says, unamused, glancing over Morality’s shoulder to the kitchen and wondering how easily he can get there without bumping Morality. “Can you…?”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry, bud.” Morality hops out of the way, light-footed and earnest, and Anxiety slips past him without another word.
Prince catches him a few days later when they have the misfortune to make lunch at the same time. “You and Logic solved a puzzle together last night,” he says.
“No. We didn’t,” Anxiety says, slathering peanut butter onto a piece of toast.
“Well, you didn’t. It was more like Logic and his perception of you—I must admit, of the various Anxietys that have appeared in our dreams, his is the most accurate. Mine is the cutest, of course.”
“Keep it in your pants, Prince Pervert. I don’t want to hear about your wet dreams.”
“‘course not,” Prince says, and he doesn’t look the slightest bit flustered. Dammit.
But that brings a burning question up to the forefront of Anxiety’s mind, and it gnaws at the edges of his thoughts as he slips out of the kitchen and leaves Prince behind. Do—do they share dreams like that? Are they—are they fucking each other now? Just in their dreams, or…?
As though to rub salt in that particular wound, and to confirm his pathetic fears, all three of them begin sleeping together in Prince’s room. He can hear them there, bickering and laughing before they sleep, and that horrible, awful well of envy surges up in him again. He swallows it down—it’s a bitter, cold taste—and refuses to acknowledge why he feels it.
He doesn’t want what they have.
He would only cause nightmares, after all.
Although, it is some consolation that, evidently, they have nightmares without him, too. “We were trapped in the same room as we were during my first dream,” Logic tells him once. “Only this time I couldn’t figure out how to make a door, and none of us could read the puzzle. We were all terrified that we were going to be stuck there forever, and the walls began constricting, but then you appeared.”
Anxiety snorts. “Your fear summons me, ye cowards.”
A smile flickers around the corners of Logic’s mouth. “So it would seem. You pointed out a back door that none of us had noticed—you are very good at finding ways out of difficult situations, you know, although it would have been much nicer if you had actually been there, rather than merely a figment of our imaginations.”
Anxiety feels a flinch bite at the muscles in his shoulders and arms and suppresses it. There’s no need to let Logic see how much his stupid comment hurt. He can’t dream with them, he knows that, so why does Logic’s taunting still sting? “Yeah,” Anxiety says. “Sure.”
“No, I’m serious. If you would like to dream with—”
God, why doesn’t he just rub it in a little more? Anxiety shakes his head, and Logic, mercifully, snaps his mouth shut. Their conversation drifts to safer, more meaningless topics, until they can make their awkward goodbyes and go their separate ways.
Anxiety wants that to be the end of it. He can swallow the fact that they’re, to all appearances, in a relationship. He can swallow the fact that they’re all dreaming together. He can swallow the fact that he’s not.
At least—at least he thought he could.
But he sees them getting closer over the next few months. He sees them snuggling on the couch. He sees the kisses Prince presses to their cheeks. He sees the gentle, curious way Logic holds their hands. He sees the warm hugs Morality bundles them up in. He sees them making doe eyes at each other, wide and wondering and unbearably fond.
He sees them falling in love, and he hates it.
(It, not them. He could never hate them. Never in a million years.)
And then, one day, his hate and his envy and his (miseryterrorlonliness) isolation catch up to him.
Of course they do. They always do.