Hide, he says to himself.
Hide in his room until his murderous intent goes away.
Hide until he can forget Hannah.
The token of his jealousy, the one thing Dream has which he can never get. Someone who loves him from the bottom of their heart. Loves him unconditionally. Something George should have been to Dream but could never quite manage.
He carries the burden of hundreds of years of hatred on his own two shoulders, pulls the weight of jealousy along with him on his spiral to long overdue insanity, dragging his glory and his title with him. Why was it that he was given this title in the first place, was it his power, his age, his history? It doesn't matter when the crowned emperor cannot raise a scepter to rule the men he was entitled to. The gods respected him and saw him as above them, but it was all a mute point when he didn't have the power to even leave his observatory.
He burns up from the inside as the phoenix of resentment he had long harbored in his intestines began to reach its peak, and all he did for it was fan it's roaring flames and let it eat his insides, because in his head, all he needs to do is wait until it burns up into ash, while knowing full well the phoenix is as immortal as him.
So what does he do with it? Nothing.
Guilt. What an odd feeling.
It's a wish to make your mistakes right, but it's like a jellyfish in how it works. It's a beautiful concept. A natural response to wronging someone, being to help them, but get any closer to that idea and it stings you, because in reality, guilt is nothing if not a parasite that eats at your sanity with every day it festers, it's a wish to right your wrongs not by helping the one you hurt, but by hurting yourself enough you feel self righteous, you feel correct enough. It was never about helping, it was about making sure you could go to bed feeling like you've helped when you've done nothing but hurt yourself. In the oddest way there is, it's selfish.
It's selfish in how the person you wronged was never helped, all you care about is that you feel like you haven't done anything wrong by hurting yourself. It's selflessly selfish. An oxymoron. It doesn't make sense.
The concept of guilt is a terrifying one in concept. Much like a jellyfish. People paint it as the poetically beautiful nature of humans' helping hand, not different to how people praise the graceful colours of the jellyfish and mimic it the best they can with paintings of splendid craftsmanship. But if you look into it, it's an ugly ugly portrait of how humans just want to feel correct and like a hero in every situation, with no regard to the substance of what they are doing. It's vain, and it's selfish, and it's nothing if not a parasite harming your mind, but the foolish humans will only realize when it's already attached itself to the depths of their conscience, no different to how anyone who's been stung by a jellyfish finally see past it's beautiful mirage.
And yet, it's so crucial to human nature, it's fundamental to how they operate. Why is that?
It's because humans are vain, disgusting things, aren't they?
But he should be careful with how he sees them. After all, it would be hypocritical to think so of them yet still love gods, because at their core, despite the differences in how they process grief and how god's lack the callouses humans develop against pain, they are still made of the same base, strip a god of his powers and you are left with a human with a particularly weak heart, so he should never think such disgusting things of the things he shares a soul with, shouldn't he?
It's not hypocritical if he thinks the same of himself, is it?
Gods were vain. That was no secret. Their very existence is abusing humanity's ability to give their wholehearted devotion for the most superficial of reasons, so why were they still trying to pretend they were above them?
He stops thinking over every moral dilemma the world has ever had. He's one of the elder gods, the first of so many to roam the world as a god. He's carrying the weight of every mistake every god makes on his own shoulders, he's not a man with the time to worry about something as insignificant as his own heart.
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Saccharine Sweets.
FanfictionA god of an era forgone awaits his final death, his soul slumbering in a tree guarding his final pavilion, the last standing remnant of his existence. He was a god who had accomplished many in his seven thousand years of existence, watching civiliz...
