Actions and Consequences

the insane

(a/n this chapter is kind of filler but it has the background of Dream in the story and sort of his side before he came into contact with George so I suggest reading)

Clay had never really been one to express love or even know what it is.

 He never really had a name until he was about 7 and was just randomly called "Clay" because his so called parents would talk about how "moldable" he is and how he would break under any kind of pressure. 

Well times have obviously changed. Clay is not easily molded at all, he is the one giving orders, not taking them;  and is 100% not breaking under anyone's pressure anytime soon. 

Now, Clay had always been neglected, like George. But Clay's parents were very manipulative towards him and showed signs of both physical and mental abuse. 

Eventually Clay picked up on these tactics and vowed he wouldn't fall for anyone's tricks. Originally he was just gonna start sticking up for himself and showing people who's boss when needed but once Clay had gotten into his first physical fight, his desire to do much more was clearly there. 

Long story short, Clay was a now a killer. A masked killer if you will. Now his mask consisted of a single smiley face, hiding all his emotions behind it. 

You see, Clay didn't want his murders to just go along like any other case. In fact whenever he saw a murder report on the news as a kid, he was fascinated by the action and always wondered what it felt like. 

Well he made his mind up eventually: he wanted people to be scared and he wanted to be able to commit more and more crimes right under these people's noses. 

That's exactly what happened. Clay's murders seemed like a game to him, one that only he could win. All of them had some type of theme, each one of them was special. Honestly to Clay it was all a big art show, but in this case, people saw his art whether they liked it or not.  After his first kill he recognized the thrill it gave him. It was like a blood lust that made him want more and more, without stopping. 

As his murder cases were playing on his TV screen, Clay would sit and watch, holding in the urge to laugh on how stupid the detectives were. The news had descried his killings as daydreams and he was marked as the nightmares killer. The didn't make top much sense to Clay so he decided he would go by the opposite, Dream. 

After he took up that name he took a pocket knife and carved the letters d-r-e-a-m into every person's right forearm that he killed. 

But Dream's victims were a certain kind of people. He didn't like the people who would plead at his knees for mercy and for their lives to be spared, they died anyway. He enjoyed going after the confident people, the ones who thought they would never be in that type of situation. 

That leads us to how he "met" George. Clay was getting sick and tried of his old killing spot outside the bar so he decided to move onto rooftops, and specifically ones that dropped down to look over alleyways.