He could almost see Schlatt in those eyes, if he really looked. Same shades of brown, the distant curl of smoke brought on by Dream's imagination but which seemed to choke in the same way it would have if it was real. These eyes were younger though, a sparkle of familiar naivety sitting in their iris, but also of wisdom, of an odd sort of wisdom that maybe eyes this young shouldn't have.
Then again, Tubbo was leading quite a different life.
Dream was leaning against the half-built obsidian walls when they approached. Tubbo was at the front, a steely look constricting his expression, and Fundy, Quackity and Tommy followed close behind. Dream watched as they got closer, watched, the tiniest of smiles pulling at the corner of his lip, as Tubbo began to speak.
Of course he ended up doing it. In the end, Dream supposed, it was himself who ruled in this country. They could have their presidents, their revolutionaries, their madnesses or their anarchists, but there was only one way things would really get done.
He'd told Schlatt who truly had the power around here, and even through all Schlatt's little mind games and mockeries, when the bombs began to fall who was the one who ended up convulsing on the floor of a caravan?
Dream hated the silence.
He hated the understanding.
"What do you care about, Dream?"
Eyes, not brown anymore but a dull blue, the edge of a blade glinting within. Tommy held his sword to George's throat, and Dream could feel two pairs of blue eyes watching him far too closely. His breath growing a little sharper.
"I don't care about anything," is what he mumbled, and he didn't manage to draw his eyes away in time to miss the slowest tear running down George's cheek, but just in time to miss the cause for the awful scream which rang through the air seconds later. Dream didn't look back.
When George's body fell limp to the ground and Tommy's sword was wiped clean of the blood, Dream hadn't flinched. When he began to walk away, it was the brown eyes which flashed through his mind which almost made him shudder, familiar words roughened by steady puffs of a cigar.
"I've got what you care about. I know you, Dream, despi-"
Caring was what brought Dream to his knees. Caring dug a knife deeper and deeper into his chest with George's blood spilled on dying autumn grass. Caring strangled his resolve every time he tried to get what he wanted. So Dream refused to care, even as George flickered back to life on the ground beside him. Dream hurried away before his eyes could open.
If he cared about nothing, no one could hurt him anymore.
Brown eyes lay glassy now at the bottom of a tomb. They didn't see as much as they used to, but no one was around to close them, so they simply watched as cobwebs veiled the corners of a crudely made coffin.
Brown eyes held no power anymore. They barely got to watch the world go by.
Two pairs of blue eyes were reflected in lapping water. One watched the sea, curled up on an empty beach with hands clutching the sand, wondering questions of why. The other watched gold-scaled fishes run upstream and ran his fingers through dying blades of grass, a dull pain in his throat and a throbbing pain in his chest.
Blue eyes were weighed down by hopelessness that had never seemed this heavy before. The world was falling through their fingers like the sand, and they had never been so helpless to stop it.
Dream didn't know what colour his eyes were anymore. They had blended in with a mix of details about himself which swirled around his head too quickly to recall, but such details were useless to him anyway, weren't they? He couldn't quite remember what he looked like anymore. But who cared? In the end, who really cared?
In the silence, the ghosts would wonder. But he could avoid the silence a while longer.
