this world we have built is burning down around us | Dream SMP Time Travel Fic

i dream of history and its flames that burned me (here i go)

Tommy saw the button on the floor first, so why wouldn't he press it? It had to be something cool! This was Eret's room, after all! It must be the secret weapon!

He pressed it and had never regretted anything more. He never dared tell anyone later that it'd been him who'd hit the button out of excitement and curiosity rather than Eret.

It would have happened anyway, but it had been Tommy to press the button; it had been Eret who'd doomed them but Tommy who'd sealed their fates.

"Down with the revolution, boys!" Tommy heard as Dream leapt at him. Around him, his friends cried out, his brother yelled his name. "It was never meant to be!"

Tommy felt the blade slice through the flesh of his throat, felt the cool blackstone beneath his hands, slick with the spilled blood of his people and soldiers, even as he reached up to try and stop the flow stemming from his neck, a futile effort.

He coughed on his own blood, a soldier choking and sobbing like a child in a room full of his enemies and surrounded by his allies' bodies, and slumped to the side, watching through hazy eyes as Dream stood above him triumphantly, his cursed smile mask glaring down at him mockingly.

Tommy was a child who'd lost his first life to war; he was a soldier who'd died for his country on the front lines; he was a boy betrayed by someone he once called a friend.

He closed his eyes to greet the void and woke to fire and the smell of gunpowder.

"My L'manberg, Phil! My unfinished symphony, forever unfinished!"

Tommy tore his eyes from the crater his country had become to watch as his own father slaughtered his brother, manic and a stranger, before him, the sword slipping through his gut swiftly, ruthlessly. He felt sick.

Tommy was a child who'd watched his brother die; he was a soldier who'd witnessed a fallen comrade crumble and the destruction of his nation; he was a boy who'd lost his hope before he could grasp it.

He turned around to run and was met with his eldest sibling standing there with blackened eyes and bloody fingers. Tommy stumbled back.

"You want to be a hero, Tommy? Then die like one!"

The Withers razed what was left of L'manberg, burning his people, tear-streaked and worn, killing citizens left and right. And his big brother stood above them, threatening bloodshed and death to them all.

Tommy was a child who'd watched his older brother burn up from the inside out until he let the fire consume him; he was a soldier who'd once more been betrayed by an ally; he was a boy who'd stepped into life hoping and had left angry and hurt.

Tommy is a child, they all said, and he complained, but what he did not say was that Tommy had not been a child for a long, long time, and he wished he was.

"Theseus! Theseus!" His people's corpses and battered forms began to chant, like puppets on strings. Tommy stumbled back as his country turned on him, faces melting until they were nothing but blank slates.

Dotted eyes and a simple smile flashed on all of them.

"You are hereby exiled..."

"They exiled him!"

"Theseus! Wake up!"

Theseus was torn violently from his nightmare, heart racing as he whipped his gaze around; they settled on empty white eyes, and all the blond could see was Eret's grin and bloodied face the first time he'd ever experienced the icy grip of death and its shards, the cold of the snow that blanketed him during his stay in exile, when he'd run and run as far as he could, a white mask with lies so sweetly cooed to take and tame.