Archive of Our Own ^beta

    Dream ran

    Despite the weight around his throat and the taste of metal on his tongue. He ran as fast and far as his body would take him. Feet pounding into the dirt as he lunged and broken lungs fighting for their purchase of the air. Sweat ran down his back and his hands trembled. 

    He had no weapons, no armor, no supplies. Nothing but the collar wrapped around his throat for the hunters to track him. 

    His gift, from the prison, from Sam. 

    Dream was used to being hunted. In the past it had been the favorite game between him and his friends. They would gather with each other and they would push and fight and hunt. Runs that were made with entertainment in mind and laughter that burned through the world as they won and lost. It used to be their pass time that put all of them into good spirits. It used to be friendly. 

    Dream never used to feel fear when he was running from his friends like this. He used to laugh with them and joke with them and everything had been fine. He’d see them running and his heart would pump with adrenaline and he would run and scream and cry out with fear that echoed along the lines of laughter. 

    It wasn’t like that now. 

    Now it was Dream running as fast as he could and as hard as he could because his friends behind him were no longer his friends and the cost of losing this hunt was the loss of his life. No one was going to know he was even dead. It wasn’t like Punz would be able to bring him back if he didn’t have access to anything that was there for his tether to come back to. If Punz couldn’t find his body or any object used in his final moments and Dream didn’t come back as a ghost then he was never going to come back to life and the thought of that scared him. 

    The finality of it all. That this could well and truly be it if he didn’t do things the right way. 

    Sam had come to him in the cell. He remembered still how afraid he had felt in those moments. Waiting for the potions to come out and the interrogation session to begin. For Sam to drug him out of his mind again and try to pry the revival book from his lips like Dream was just going to give them the one and only thing that was keeping him alive. He knew that they used to cal him an idiot all of the time but he wasn’t truly that stupid. He wasn’t going to throw his life away for the sake of a trick. 

    But this?

    He would take the chance to run. 

    Sam hadn’t come for him with the idea of interrogation, he’d come with a deal. A new manhunt with the reward being Dream’s freedom. The torture hard worn him down over the months and they both knew how weak he’d turned. That moving from one end of the cell to the other was too exhausting most days for him to be able to achieve. It wasn’t going to be a pretty hunt or a long one but it was a chance. That if Dream won the hunt then he would win his freedom away from the prison. 

    If the hunters won then he would lose his final life. 

    Dream agreed to it. Agreed to the chance that might be able to save him because if he didn’t take it then he was just going to be in the cell being tortured daily for the rest of his life and none of his friends were ever going to come and see him or they would have done it by now. He knew that none of them truly cared about him anymore and he knew that it was rumors that were to thank for all of that but he couldn’t help the sick feeling that settled in his gut at the idea that no one would look or care or notice if he died one day. That he could just vanish away and no one would ever even need to know. He was so insignificant to them all that they wouldn’t care. 

    Not until they needed him. Until they needed to bring someone back to life that was meant to be well and truly dead. Until they needed something from Creative Mode and they were going to beg him for the access. 

    Dream himself had even put a lock on things for the house that it would lock everyone out. Not even the eldest of the set was meant to use it. They were meant to work for everything they got here and that was the end of the story. 

    Normally on hunts Dream kept a tiny loadstone on the end of a chain that he wore like a necklace under his clothes. All of the hunters had their compasses attached to it to track him and follow him and his only reprieve was in the Nether where none of the directions mattered.

    This time, before Sam staged his escape from the cell, he had clamped a metal collar around his throat. Telling him he was nothing more than a pet to the rest of them and explaining that the loadstone inside was going to make sure he could never get away. Sam had given him healing potion and regen potion to make a good enough show of his escape that they wouldn’t immediately be caught in their ruse. 

    It wasn’t enough to heal him for real. It wasn’t enough to actually save him or protect him. It was barely enough to make him functional. The point was still for him to lose this fight. Dream knew that the only reason Sam was even giving him this chance to begin with was because he thought that it might be the only other way to get the book out of him. Since the torture day in and day out had been failing in what they wanted out of him, Sam was going to put it to another test. If Dream had to face his life and the end of it, would he give up the book to save himself. 

    The answer was no. 

    It scared him. 

    Dream did not want to die but he also knew that the book was too powerful to be in the hands of anyone else and it would destroy what little was left of his server. He could see it already. If any of his friends knew about the book and how to bring someone back from the dead they would become the most hated in the server. They would become nothing but a tool for them. No one would care if they lived or died because the one could just brin them back again and again. They would become a tool, not a person. 

    Dream knew how that felt. He couldn’t allow for nay of his friends to know the feeling of it as well. 

    The heat and burn of lava was something he was familiar with now. The ache that settled deep inside of him that told him he was in the cell again. The sight of obsidian as he tried to build himself a portal to get to the nether so he could think and find a way to remove the collar. 

    He could run to Technoblade. He could run to his rival and he was sure that the man would save him but if Techno wasn’t there then he was going to die so much faster. If the others of the server expected him to go there and had moved Techno out of it then Dream was going to die faster. 

    It was safer for him to be alone even though it hurt. 

    Into the Nether and through the red rocks and sand. Listening to the shrieks and snorts of the beasts that resided down here and Dream didn’t dare allow himself to stop running. He could run for as long as he wanted but so long as this collar sat around his throat, he was at their mercy. The hunt was never going to be empty until there was a clear victor. If Dream tried to run and never slay the dragon then his friends would trap the portal and he would die. 

    If he wasn’t smart about this, he was going to really die. 

    His legs were turning numb. His arms ached. He’d stolen a golden sword enchanted with looting from a chest in the fortress. It surely wasn’t the best weapon he’d ever had to work with but it was better than fighting off the blazes with his bare hands. 

    None of the hunters had caught up to him yet but Dream still flinched at every sound he heard. He still tensed and readied himself for what was coming. For the pain that they would bring down on him. He would lose hunts when they were all in peak condition and he was very well aware of the fact that if he had to fight against them now that he would lose. It wouldn’t even truly be a competition between them. 

    It would just be a slaughter. 

    Sam had given him enough first aid to be able to operate on a base capacity so that it would be believable that he was able to escape out of the prison. Dream still knew the damage that was hidden beneath his prisoner uniform. 

    The collar was strangling him the longer he ran with it on. His skin turning hot and sticky as he got covered in a layer of grime from the soot and ash and sand dust of the Nether. He ran faster and faster to try to make it to the overworld again. Enough Obsidian saved up for himself to find a hiding place in the nether and build a portal back when he knew he was far enough that hew asn’t going to be caught. 

    The compasses would work again. With any luck all of his hunters would be in the Nether hunting for him and he would have the time to come and catch his breath. 

    He didn’t take it. 

    Instead, Dream pushed himself faster. He couldn’t take the risk that the hunters were trapping and tracking him in another way. Or that Sam might have found a way to make a loadstone trackable even through the Nether and they would be waiting for him or right behind him at any and all steps of this fight. He couldn’t trust that he ever had time when he knew his life was on the line. 

    He ran. Pushing himself until he was finally reaching into a stronghold that looked like it hadn’t been touched before. His chest aching, his eyes burning and blurring. He could have cried, he thought he might be. He was so close and yet he knew how bad of a fight he was going to have to endure. 

    Sam was right to rig the fight against him but Dream didn’t know if he could survive like this. It was clever, for his old friend, clever because he knew that doing things like this would force Dream’s hand into a losing position to make him make another plea and deal. Since he would be the one making it he would be more likely to follow it. 

    It was clever, Dream would give him that. But he was forgetting a very key notion about Dream when he’d made up that plan. 

    Dream did not like to lose. 

    He slotted the eyes into their rightful locations and dove himself into the portal. The sickening swirl of the stars around him as he landed on the obsidian platform on the other side nearly brought all of his stolen food and potions coming back up out of his body. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t function like this. Not when he knew that the cell was exactly the same size as this platform and in an instant the thought was in his mind that Sam had somehow trapped this as well. 

    It wasn’t possible to break a portal once it had been made. If Sam had been here then it would have shown that fact to him already. He didn’t want to die today. He refused to let himself die today. 

    Dream ran until his legs felt like they were going to fall from his body. Taking the bow he’d stolen in a mineshaft and aiming it up the the crystals. His arm was shaking. Worse the longer he tried to make his eyes clear so he could see. 

    He wasted three hours before he finally made his shot. Working himself down the ring of them until he was running out and then he heard the calls of his hunters. 

    They’d found him. 

    His heart lurched hard in his throat. He didn’t allow himself to stop. Not when he was so close. The dragon wasn’t going to last much longer and it couldn’t heal anymore. Dream could dodge for long enough to do that. 

    He heard confusion in Bad and Ant when they got close enough to see the collar. He heard George comment on the way he was running with a limp. He hadn’t even noticed that. He wondered when that had started. He couldn’t remember if it was because of how long he’d been running for the sake of this hunt or if it was after Quackity had removed his leg and reattached it with poor stitching and potions poured over the wound. 

    Yells around him. Demands. Orders. He heard the Warden come out in Sam’s voice as he drove his sword up to the dragon’s throat. As the light burst away from it and he felt the magic rush out across the End. 

    He’d won. He’d done it. He’d won. In front of all of them and they knew that he’d made it. He’d won his freedom. Sam would have to explain. He would have to—

    Blood clogged his throat. Sending Dream down to his knees with a force that made black dance across his vision as he choked and heaved. His body rejecting the nonstop movement now that he was finally still enough to register it. He couldn’t stop shaking. A violence through his body that was making his head swim and the collar felt like it was burning around his neck. 

    There were voices all around him. Hands came to guide him. He panicked at first. Looking up and seeing Bad and Ant’s worried faces as they checked him over. It wasn’t until then that he realized they were speaking to him and he couldn’t properly hear them. Like his ears were stuffed full of cotton and he couldn’t process anything at all. He was trapped and he couldn’t make it out. 

    He saw George and Sapnap turned on Sam. He saw their blades out. 

    He realized his bandages were exposed. His wounds. The marks of his torture. 

    It took him too long to realize they were defending him. It took the collar snapping away from him and Ant’s hands cupping his face while Bad prodded carefully along his body. 

    They weren’t going to kill him. He’d run and he’d won and he was free and they weren’t going to kill him. 

    He was safe again. He had his friends again. He was human again. 

    He was safe.