I'm too tired to sleep

300 Years - Dream

By now, Dream was fully practiced in controlling his consciousness, but he still could not manage to see or hear outside of the stone. It seemed he has doomed to eternal blind silence. And even with the mastery of his mind, Dream still lowed himself to slip under sometimes, it was too painful to spend weeks and weeks on end awake and alone. 300 years is a long time.

These days, Dream thought a lot about the apple incident. He thought about who's fault it was, what could have been done to stop it, and what were the signs he had missed? Dream knew hindsight was 2020 but it didn't stop him from running through the possibilities in his mind. There wasn't much else to do.
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Ink jumped through his portal, eyelights red and anger etched into every bone in his body (well it wasn't real, but it felt real to him). Error was so annoying! He picked the specific day that Blue was out exploring multiverse and Ink was really busy helping some new creators and managed to destroy three AU's entirely and left a couple more badly damaged. Ink pulled up his sleeve and examined the marks on his arm - a new one appearing for every AU he'd failed. They didn't hurt so much anymore, but they were still itchy as hell.

With his vision still clouded by rage, Ink wandered aimlessly through the antivoid. Typically he would go to the doodlesphere after a fight but he needed somewhere he could pace, not just float around. It was kind of risky being here so fresh off his fight with Error, who made his home in the antivoid, so Ink decided to visit Dreamtale. After all - it had been so different between his first and second visits - what's to say it hadn't changed dramatically again?

Anger replaced by hopeful curiosity, Ink jumped into Dreamtale through a splash of paint. Unfortunately, not much seemed different at first, so Ink went over to the statue he had seen before, expecting it to be the same as well. Oh. Ink definitely didn't except to see the statue... Crying? Statues couldn't cry, could they? Pouring over the scribbled notes on his scarf, Ink came across a very interesting notion; what if the statue wasn't a statue... But Dream himself? Of course, Ink had no clue why he had thought this in the first place, but it was an interesting thought. How else could Dream's disappearance be explained while his brother was out and about in the multiverse as an out code?

Willing to humour his interesting idea, Ink decided to talk to the statue. Maybe Dream could hear him, maybe he wasn't even in there at all, but it was nice to have someone to vent to.
Ink told Dream about the multiverse, how every single version of the original world could exist, and even his own universe was an extension of the first. He told Dream about the creators and how they could be so mean so times but they were the ones who kept the multiverse alive - guardians like him and Nightmare and Error were just there to balance it.
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There it was again. After another 200 years Dream though he had imagined the encounter with the soulless presence. Where had it come from? Was it eve  real? Begging for more information, Dream tried to see what was going on around him, but to no avail. His stone prison would not let him see the sun rise and set, the stars twinkle in the sky, and would not let him hear the songs in the wind.

Resigning himself to the fact that he couldn't do much, Dream settled for waiting. Maybe it would just go away again like last time. But then he felt something. Well it was more the absence of a feeling that he had had for a long time. He didn't feel quite so lonely. He also knew something, maybe it would not be so bad for this soulless presence to stick around a bit longer.
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(And over the course of the year, Ink made his visits to Dreamtale a regular thing - as much as he could - and when Dream was conscious in his stone prison, he grew familiar to the feeling of this being without a soul. And while Dream couldn't really hear Ink in the traditional sense, he knew that Ink was talking with him. It gave Dream the closest thing to friendship he could have. For the first time in 300 years, Dream wasn't alone, and he spent every second of his time thanking fate for that.)
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Oooooooo plot development, I wonder what will happen in another 100 years? I can't wait to find out, can you?

Sincerely, the monster in the closet