Flashing Lights

1: The Difference In Crossroads

Quiet footsteps padded around the house. The room he was in was dark, the curtains drawn in the black of night, all the lights were off. The footsteps were padded, the person probably wearing socks against the hardwood floor. The person was in the kitchen. The hinges of the refrigerated chest creaked, indicating that it was opened for a moment before closing again.

Sapnap did always have a habit of getting up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water.

Dream took a deep breath. Shivers wracked through his body as he lay listlessly in bed. The phantom pain of Quackity's pickaxe piercing his skull remained no matter how much he tried to ignore it. His crazed laughter sounded on loop in his ears, all his taunts and insults replaying like a broken record.

There was pressure on Dream's chest where the man had sat while he hacked away at what little sanity he had left. Quackity had used his chest as a throne while he'd stolen Dream's last life, a resurrection book in his hand - one given to him by the newly revived Schlatt.

"I'm going to do to you what you threatened to do to Tommy, Dreamie. That'll be fun, won't it?"

Dream gritted his teeth as his full body flinched at the words. He wrenched his eyes open to prove that he wasn't lying on hard dirt, that he wasn't underneath the man that ruined him, wasn't choking on his own blood while everybody watched.

He saw the roof. He saw the walls. They were pitch black in the low light and if he stared at them long enough, they started to drip purple liquid.

The mattress under him felt way too comfortable for his liking. It made him want to sleep and never wake up. He wanted to lie there forever, enveloped in the soft warmth that he didn't deserve.

Exhaustion weighed heavy on his mind, seeping into his body with every bit of adrenaline that left him. Dream sank back into the mattress and his grip on the blankets lessened.

Sleep dragged him down until he could no longer register the prickly feeling under his own skin.

-

He felt surprisingly clear headed when he woke up ten hours later.

The circumstances surrounding his death and the action of a server reset tired him out a lot, so he should by all means still be suffering from his previous exhaustion.

He heard Sapnap walking around outside again. It was the one clue that he had that something wasn't exactly right. He knew logically that the server would reset once he died but he didn't really know what that entailed. Admin training had been cut short years ago after all. Dream, realistically, should be in the prison if he was revived by Quackity, or at least on the ground where he died. Or maybe even a ghost.

So being in a comfortable bed with no guards or cameras or weapons was disorientating to say the least.

He sat up and reached over to grasp his communicator, his fingers fumbling with it before he got a proper grip on it. He turned it on and checked the time. It was 12PM, meaning Sapnap would be suspicious since Dream was usually up way before then. He would have to come up with some kind of convincing lie to tell him to cover it up. Maybe he could act sick for a day?

The next thing Dream noticed was the date. He stared unblinking at the screen, trying to comprehend the numbers that he saw. Apparently the server decided to reset him to three days before Tommy's Beach party; three years in the past.

With a shaky breath, he put in his passcode and opened up the messaging app. There was one message from the Warden-- Sam. He was Sam now. Awesam Dude. Not Warden. The message was an update on the construction of the prison. Dream had to force himself not to physically recoil at the mention. Only the outside had been nearly completed, the inside and the redstone had yet to be started as far as Dream knew.