Switcheroo, Who? - A Dream SMP Fanfiction

Ch. 20: The Night Before ...

DSMP!Dream POV:

"....Hello there."

Dream looked up, startled out of his thoughts. Currently positioned in front of the roaring fireplace in George's living room, he had previously resorted to brooding over his fate. George had exited the basement bunker some time ago, and when Dream left the guest room, the brunette hadn't been anywhere in sight. The masked man's body moved on its own to start a fire as night overtook the world, just taking a seat on the carpet and mindlessly staring into the flames. With the big event tomorrow, and virtually no real method of escape, Dream was forced to spend what might very well be his last night in a foreign world.

It was pathetic, and laughably so.

He should be better than this.

He should be telling himself that he could do this, like he had been doing this entire time. He should be preparing, getting rest, doing SOMETHING. He knew he should be better than this.

But, as he had already discovered, a part of himself.... had given up long ago.

After everything, the ending would never change.

Nothing seemed to matter.

Dream's efforts in anything would forever be futile.

Yet, as George stood in the doorway, a fat flask in his right hand and two small glasses in his left, he realized that he'd never have the heart to admit it aloud.

He could never accept his own failure.

Maybe Wilbur, long ago, had been onto something, in orchestrating his own tragedy. The music that had gripped the separatist nation of L'Manburg and had given it strength came originally from him. Music followed his every step and word, bleeding into his life as if it were a vital part of his story. And now, only his ghost and the faded remnants of his song survived his memory.

It had worked out well enough for him, to at least be remembered and have his name cemented into the hearts of many.

Was there no revered song that Dream would be remembered by, as the once-President Wilbur Soot had?

Dream could never speak his thoughts of his own finished symphony into existence. It would be a strange cataclysmic song, cut too short by the flaws on instruments and eventually going unheard of, anyway. He was going to leave his Magnum Opus hanging on a dissonant and lonely chord, never to be resolved.

This George would never understand how much it pained him to do so.

The George would never understand what he was talking about or why it mattered.

He might as well pretend a little while longer.

What else was there to do?

"...Hey," Dream grunted in answer.

".....Are we cool here?" George gestured to Dream warily. "I know we didn't end on....the best of notes today."

Ah....Right.

In his moment of wallowing in self-pity, Dream had nearly forgotten why he had even begun to wallow. George using a slowness potion on him and triggering some minor PTSD was the cause of his pity party. George was always prying, always doing something that would remind Dream of dark times he'd like to forget.

Dream felt angry almost, at how he felt he'd be better off forgetting. He should be celebrating his plans, rejoicing how everything had supposedly come to fruition. He had been put into the prison, like he had wanted, as a backup plan, but what happened next was something he had never predicted. The torture, the anxious waiting for contingencies that would never be set in motion, the isolation that always followed whatever terrible pain the few people that would even bother to see him horrifically inflicted, the slow loss of everything he had thought he held in the palm of his hand....It was brutal.