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Good things don’t happen to heroes. Worse things happen to villains.
And it doesn’t matter if it was the hero that invaded the dragon’s lair first, stole his jewels and smashed his eggs, because a hero is a hero and a dragon is a villain. Dream is the dragon, and so Dream is going to die. This is a fact that he knows. But goddammit he’s taking Tommy with him.
Tommy, the yin to his yang, the hero to his dragon. They’re destined for each other, you see. Dream’s read soulmate aus before. There’s red barbed wire wrapped around his remaining fingers, pretending to be string, and the other end leads to his demise. He and Tommy will go down chained together in an explosion like no one’s ever seen, one as glorious and wild as the Ender Goddess’s death in tales of old, one that-
A drop of crying obsidian lands on his nose and rolls down, leaving a lukewarm, greasy purple trail behind. Dream abruptly and painfully remembers where he is: curled up in a corner of his old cell because he doesn’t feel safe enough to sleep anywhere else.
It’s pathetic and it makes his stomach hurt to admit it, but Dream is a villain past his prime. There are newer, shinier things for Tommy to fight than him. He looks in the mirror and doesn’t know who would consider the shaking, ragged figure he sees worthy of a grand death.
Bow and take a nosedive, dragon.
A day later, standing in a clearing in the forest and hating how well-rested he feels, Dream discovers another point to add to the “fucking broken” category.
He can’t fight.
Without the adrenaline of the prison break overriding everything else, Dream goes to pick up his new axe to practice with and the light flashes off the blade and he freezes. The scars covering his body burn with phantom pain. Under his shirt, the remains of a pair of dragon wings twitch. Don’t think about those.
He can still smell the blood. Goddammit, he can still smell it.
Around him the deep woods are screaming with noise and color and texture. To an intact mind it might seem peaceful. To Dream, once at home in the wilderness and now all-too-used to the artificial nothing of his solitary cell, it is destructive in its life.
Life.
As an admin, chosen by Exdee-God-of-Code, life is his very essence. It is in an admin’s nature and their duty and their very code to create life (the server), invite life in (the players), and protect and nurture that life (the code he controls). Everything Dream has ever done has been to uphold that sacred duty, though his players in their cursed immaturity cannot see it yet. Like a good parent making their child eat veggies instead of sweets, Dream has excised the ability of his players to cause chaos, to take his beautiful perfect life-filled server and break it. Or, well. He tried to. It doesn’t matter now.
Dream is not a creature of life anymore.
The funny thing is that Quackity never could have used the Revival Book. He isn’t (and will never be) a god admin like Dream. He can’t
[/data get entity TommyInnit]
[ TommyInnit: Saturation_Levels 0 Health_Levels 0 Lives 0]
[/data modify entity TommyInnit[type=player, Saturation_Levels 10 Health_Levels 10 Lives 3]
[Modified entity data of TommyInnit]
[/gamemode survival TommyInnit]
[Set TommyInnit’s game mode to survival]
In some twisted way, Dream admires Quackity. Oh, he doesn’t like him, not at all. Quackity tortured him for months. But he admires Quackity. See, the thing about Quackity is that he sets a goal and he never, ever, gives up on it. It’s both a strength and a flaw. Even when the cost outweighs the benefits by a million to one, even when he’s been blinded and thrown into lava and kicked out of the country, Quackity keeps going. And Dream does too, but in a different way. Not because he still believes he can achieve his goal like Quackity. No. He’s tired. Tired of running, tired of fighting, tired. But he can’t stop now, can’t go back, because if he tries they will kill him.
And there is the dragon’s greatest and final secret: he is scared to die.