#writing !!

[seizesthegay]

this discord is a prison

@theloverislost @dandelion-cryptid @snurphlee

[cdroloisms]

Sixteenth Day Event Prompt:

Anticipation & Survival

woo :D was able to participate this time with a little fic, hopefully this means i'll have the time to try and write more consistently again :') hope you guys enjoy 2.8k words of c!Dream being Normal and Fine and c!Sam being absolutely miserable.

---

The prison is working out well. 

Dream spins the clock. The background is mostly a sunny blue sky, with the slightest creep of dark blue rotating in along the right. The sun is a bright dandelion yellow. It’s afternoon. Maybe two, three o’clock. He’s been tracking the days by sunset, when the clock is split in equal halves of blue and navy. Ranboo visits too, to corroborate the time, but it’s a good habit to keep track while he can. It’s been seven days. A whole week. 

Besides Ranboo, there’s been one visit. Tommy. He’s seen three people, since being put in here. Tommy, Ranboo, and Sam. He’s eaten twenty potatoes. Counting is mundane, but so is everything now. There isn’t much to do in prison. Just sweat, and stare at lava, and stare at obsidian when that makes his eyes hurt, and wait for Sam to come in and check that he’s not been doing anything stupid, and wait for visitors, and eat and drink and sleep. It’s not a big room. He wouldn’t say it’s a particularly small one, either. The ceiling’s a little low, and there’s not anywhere to run, of course, but there’s plenty of room to pace and sit and lie down straight and he can sit down on the chest fine without hitting his head on stone. It’s not like he’ll need much space to carry out any plans in the foreseeable future. The cell is absent of certain comforts—a cot, for one, for obvious reasons—but once you get used to that, and the food, and the heat, it’s really not that bad. It’s not like he’s any stranger to roughing it. 

From a certain point of view, it’s almost relaxing. Sam is predictable. Almost more of a clock than the clock he’s given him, which is half the reason Dream throws it in the lava at all; Sam is reliable. His reactions are reliable. He gets food delivered twice a day, once in the morning, once at night. The nightly visit is accompanied by questioning, and occasionally Sam comes into the cell around midday to interrogate him too. Dream cooperates. Why shouldn’t he? He’s already spilled his whole plan to everyone on the mountain, gloated to Tommy, who has surely run his mouth to everyone within earshot by now. There’s no point to him being cagey at this point; no, better to rave and rant about Tommy and exile and his plan in the mountain, better to let Sam get all the information he wants and watch his eyebrows knit in disgust. Sam raises his voice, Dream answers his questions, Sam storms off. He’s even started watching the clock, just out of curiosity, and Sam leaves his cell pretty much the same time every day. Clockwork. 

There was one day when Sam didn’t come at all and Dream had—a moment, admittedly, embarrassing enough, just a string of disconnected thoughts about what would happen if the Warden of the prison suddenly dropped dead and died—but Sam had been right there the next day, looking more miserable than Dream has ever seen him. He made a quip about skipping work that made Sam snap at him; Dream takes it as a good sign, that the man guarding him seems to be more pained about the fact that he left him alone for a day than Dream was bothered about the disappearance of the single person responsible for every aspect of his life for the foreseeable future. That’s Sam, though. Dependable. Dedicated. Never one to not take his job seriously. If Dream put Sapnap in charge of the prison, he’d probably starve to death before the first month was up, but Sam looks like he’d rather fall on his own sword than leave Dream alone for a full twenty-four hours again; Dream has it in him to feel bad that he’s putting the guy to work for the sake of his own vacation. Just, a little bit. 

Back to his point. The prison is relaxing. Really. It’s boring, sure, but obviously he expected that; he’s never had so little to do before. He wakes up at night (he’s been attempting to sleep at nighttime, just because the light apparently is supposed to mess with you, but his sleep schedule has been shot for months so it’s not like it really matters to him all that much) with his brain racing, grasping for a list of tasks to do, only to come up empty. It’s a bit of a marvel. He thinks it’s funny. Yeah, brain, he’s in his—vacation arc. They’re doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just like they planned. Nobody’s getting into this place to kill him, not without smacking face-first into, like, a billion security protocols, not without dealing with Sam’s workaholic Warden schtick on their ass. He’s even getting food hand-delivered to him. Full service! Or something. 

He spins the clock again. Tommy gave him books to write. Sam flipped through them, asked questions, Dream answered. He’s not writing answers for them. He might throw them in the lava, if Sam doesn’t just confiscate the damn things; Dream knows he wants Tommy nowhere near him. Fair enough. Maybe he can write some long-ass manifesto about how much he wanted Tommy’s discs for Sam to chew on, if he gets bored enough. He laughs a little at the thought as he thinks it—okay, yeah, nah. He’s not at that point yet. 

He lies down. Horizontal. The ground is hot, but everything’s hot, and he’s getting used to it at this point; better hot than cold, honestly. He’d rather sleep here than out in the snow. The ceiling is a plane of unbroken black stone. Dream raises his hand, splays out his fingers. His nails are starting to get long. Nothing to file them down with in here…teeth it is. Whatever. He lets his hand fall back to the ground, sighing. His eyes glance over at the clock. 

Barely any time has passed. Still hours before Sam comes back. Dream bites back a low groan. Fine, fine, the boredom is getting to him. A little bit. He’s not surprised—it’s not like he’s ever done well with sitting still—but it’s still, annoying. He waves his arms and legs like he’s making a snow angel in the obsidian. Or doing jumping jacks. He should do jumping jacks, maybe. He’s got a basic workout routine to do daily—or several times a day, when there’s nothing else to do (there’s always nothing else to do, but whatever), but he’s not in the mood for it right now. 

He clicks his tongue, just to hear himself. He talks to himself, sometimes, but he has to be careful what he says. Not that it’s not a good thing to keep up, though, for the madman routine. It’s much better to talk to himself when he knows he has an audience, muttering Tommy, Tommy, Tommy in those minutes before Sam enters his cell. Fun, even. Sometimes he writes out evil speeches to give in his notebooks, burning the pages in the lava before Sam arrives. He shouldn’t get reckless with it or anything, pushing the things too far past the point of absurdity, but at this point he could probably get away with saying—just about anything. He could blather on about how he wanted to keep Tommy in a cage and play his dumb little discs to him all day until he goes insane, and Sam would write all of that down in his—book with his face twisted up under his helm while Dream tries not to break down laughing and give away the whole ruse. Not that laughing doesn’t work out for him either, to be fair. He’s gotten pretty good at the villain laugh. 

Dream stands up. He looks at the clock mounted in the item frame; the sliver of night sky on the right side has grown just slightly wider, enough to expose the slightest edge of one white-dotted star. Still hours before sunset. He pulls it off the wall, watching the background tick ever slowly forward. The gold gleams, polished to a mirror finish. 

Sam’s craftsmanship is unmistakable, even with something as small as this. He almost feels bad for what he’s about to do. 

He holds the clock up to the lava, keeping it in his hand for as long as he can handle it before the heat against his palm makes him shove it entirely under the flow, watching it disappear through strings of smoke. The crackling noise fades back into the normal hisses and pops after a few seconds; the smoke will linger for longer. Dream stands there, the lava’s heat at his face. It hurts his eyes to look at.

…whatever. 

He backs away. Then claps, brushing his palms against each other. Clock’s been burned. Another item of his daily itinerary handled—not that he does this daily. Has to keep Sam on his toes, right? The crazy prisoner isn’t supposed to be the predictable one, not like the ever-punctual Warden. This is—important, he’s decided, for his image. Well, not important, maybe, but it’s calculated. Beneficial. Nobody sane takes the one thing they have in their cell and destroys it repeatedly for literally no reason. Sam’s prisoner, the crazy guy that was trying to take over the server, isn’t sane. No one questions why an insane guy tries to control everyone with a bunch of shit he doesn’t even have, why he thinks he can keep someone locked up in a two-by-one box with a couple of iron bars, why he listens to a guy threatening to kill himself when he can literally raise the dead. It’s all set dressing. Method acting. One or the other, or both; it’s not like he’s ever watched a real play in his life. All that matters is that everyone thinks he’s crazy because no one asks a crazy guy why he’s acting crazy, and crazy people do stuff like obsess over stupid pieces of vinyl and talk to themselves and destroy their own shit for no reason. 

(Which probably makes Tommyinnit a crazy person, ha.) 

Sam will come back. Soon. He will bring potatoes with him, and investigate the cell, and see the missing clock. He will complain. He will threaten Dream, rave about the destruction of prison property, telling him that he won’t replace it. He will question him about Tommy. And tomorrow morning, a new clock will be put in its place. Honestly, Sam would probably give himself an aneurysm if he had to look at the cell with one of its components missing. It seems like the kind of thing to bother him too much not to set straight. And tomorrow, maybe Dream will throw the clock into the lava again, and maybe he won’t. He’ll see. 

He’s the one that decides, in the end.

— 

Sam checks his comm again as he waits for the lava to fall, head already pounding. He’s had an on-and-off migraine ever since his night with the Egg, and the current wave shows no sign of abating any time soon. If he could have it his way, he’d be back in his bed, Fran curled up beside him, where it’s dark and quiet and comfortably cool instead of sweating half to death in a suffocating suit of full armor. Instead, he’s nursing a headache that only gets worse with every notification he reads off the log pulled up on his screen; he doesn’t even bother counting the string of [Dream tried to swm in lava] that appears under today’s date. The fact that it’s a seemingly longer list than the days previous does little to help his already bad mood. 

He still has no idea what Dream hopes to achieve by doing this, besides attention. Not that Sam has even been trying to give him that, these days; he visits twice a day, once at 9 the morning and once at 6 in the afternoon, and then leaves the prisoner to himself. Sam doesn’t answer to him. He’s not going to get the same reaction he got the first time he pulled this stunt, when Sam had rushed into the cell in the middle of the night, heart in his throat after running halfway across the server, only to find Dream waiting for him in the middle of his cell with his mask smiling back mockingly. If he’s hoping to stir Sam into a panic again, he’s sorely mistaken. But still Dream continues. He’s probably just doing it to get a reaction out of him. He probably thinks that’s funny. 

Dream is standing, waiting for him. Muttering to himself, he thinks he can hear. Sam pulls the lever for the bridge and steps on it, his sword in hand, wanting to get this visit over and done with as quickly as possible. He might sleep in the Warden’s quarters here, tonight, just to avoid the commute back to his base. Yeah, that sounds good. All he has to do is survive one conversation with Dream. 

The prisoner has stopped talking to himself by the time Sam steps into the cell, lifting his chin as he looks at him. 

“Hi, Sam.” 

Sam makes a vague noise of acknowledgement, not more than a low grunt. His eyes scan the room from left to right, stopped prematurely by the sight of the empty item frame mounted on the wall. His headache grows exponentially worse in an instant, a stabbing pain hammering itself into the back of his skull. He grits his teeth. 

He should’ve expected this. He knows he should’ve expected this. 

“Prisoner.” 

“Sam,” Dream replies, his smile audible in his voice. Sam closes his eyes, a prayer flitting across his overtaxed mind. God help him.

“Where’s your clock.” What’s the point of asking, even. Dream sways from foot to foot. 

“I burned it?”

“Why did you do it. Again.” Dream shrugs. Sam steps forward, shoves him back. “Don’t be so dumb, Dream.” 

The prisoner barely seems to react, his back hitting the wall. His voice is nearly sing-song. “Ohhh. I got you though.” 

Sam wishes, not for the first time, that he didn’t have the work ethic that keeps him from coming into the cell drunk. Surely the prisoner cannot be any more infuriating to handle with the help of some alcohol. He holds the prisoner by his jaw and knocks his head back against the wall, gauntlet digging into the pale skin under the bottom edge of his mask. 

“What is wrong with you!” Dream struggles, slightly. Sam kicks at his legs. “Don’t move. Answer my question.” 

“Let go.” 

“How many times have I told you not to burn the clock, Dream!” He knocks the back of his head against the wall, harder this time. The struggling stops. “Do you think it’s funny? I don’t have to replace your clock!” 

Dream sounds a little dazed when he replies, arms crossed at his chest. “I just wanted to burn it. So I did.” 

“That’s ridiculous. What is your problem.” He shakes his head by his jaw, once, then lets go, giving himself enough distance to swing a fist into Dream’s side, making him double over. He scoffs at the sight, anger white-hot. He knows he shouldn’t be letting the prisoner get to him. Knows that Dream is only doing this to mess with him, mess with him the same way he messes with everyone, trying to get into his head. His skull feels like it’s being split apart. 

Dream stands up straight again. All Sam can see is the flat, smooth plane of his mask, that smile, unchanged. His hands, knotted into tight fists at his sides, shake. The heat pulsing behind his eyes feels like rage, and also almost feels like he’s going to cry.

He can’t do this. The realization is abrupt, but sure. Not tonight, not with this headache, not with Dream. He can’t go through the same song and dance, can’t sit here and examine the cell and give the prisoner his potatoes and go through questioning for an hour, can’t spend the rest of his night going over his words with a fine-toothed comb looking for the nuggets of truth hidden in the midst of the prisoner’s crazed ramblings. Hasn’t he done enough? For the whole server, for everyone, day after day he stands and faces the monster before him and day after day he stands strong; retreating now feels like weakness, but he can’t. He honestly, truly, can’t. He ignores the weight of the potatoes in his inventory and turns. 

“Sam?” Dream speaks again when he’s reached the edge of the cell, sounding slightly winded. “What are you—?” 

Sam pearls across the gap, slamming the lever to lower the lava wall as soon as his vision clears. Tomorrow, he will be the Warden of Pandora’s Vault. Tomorrow, he will stand toe-to-toe against the one he has been entrusted to keep and stand firm. Tomorrow, he will do as he must, as the one responsible for the survival of everyone and everything he holds dear. 

Today, it’s just too much. He looks back to a wall of unbroken lava, only able to stare at it for a few seconds before turning away. 

[occasionally-disco]

another three chapters down, which means i'm officially over halfway through writing my @1didofest fic... another snippet!!

But as he learned pretty quickly, Jeremy hates talking about Louis. And Harry gets it; he gave Louis years and years of his life, and Louis’ an A-list celebrity; or he was, before he mostly dropped off the face of the earth, and then entirely dropped off the face of the industry. Harry can understand why Jeremy might be jealous of Louis; he’s always understood. From the outside, Louis’ the perfect boyfriend; from the inside, too, until he left. And Harry gets why Jeremy doesn’t like Harry talking about him. It just makes those conversations so hard; those conversations that he needs to have turn into fights he wants to avoid, and if there’s anything, anything Harry hates, it’s when Jeremy gets angry. He hates the fights, the screaming, the silent treatment afterward. He hates sitting alone at the dining table and he hates watching the meals he cooks go cold. He hates sleeping on the couch, he hates the sore back in the morning and the way Jeremy doesn’t apologise, he just moves on.

[samuel-de-champagne-problems]

Hello gorgeous 📝

here go dude!!!

[butterflies-and-glitter]

so I'm working on something, and I wanted to share an excerpt cause I'm impatient with myself.

-

Julie laughed, “I mean it’s not too hard for me to tell, I know how you act when you’ve got a crush.”

[cdroloisms]

a quick fic for c!dream hybrid day !! involving creeper hybrids c!dream and c!sam (what will they do) 

tws: abuse, torture and death mentions, lots of Weirdness about hybrid traits bc c!sam has Issues (tm)

The cell is hot. 

It cuts through even the coolant running through the insides of Sam’s armor, the residual effects of the fire resistance he downed before pearling through the lava. The air shimmers and warps next to the lava, and he turns away from the overwhelming brightness with a tight frown, fist tightening over Warden’s Will as he surveys the cell. It’s relatively clean for one of Quackity’s visits, not that that means very much. Dream has managed to pull himself upright against the back wall, eyes blank. 

“Dream,” Sam rolls his eyes, rapping his sword against the floor until his gaze swivels over to focus on him. His pupils are pinpricks, shining gold. 

“Sam,” Dream mutters, his voice hoarse. He blinks, shakes his head, blinks again. “Sorry.” 

The apology is tacked on like an afterthought, and Sam sighs again. 

“Get up.” He surveys the damage as Dream struggles up to his feet; there’s another series of bleeding gashes carved into his back, some sort of large, amorphous burn that’s ruined one pant leg and covers most of his shin, his hair stringy and wet - if Sam were to guess, from being dunked in the cauldron again. Manageable enough, even without potions, but he’ll use one anyway for his back just to ensure he won’t bleed out. Dream’s legs wobble underneath him, his ear flicking back and forth, and Sam pushes him away from the back wall of the cell with the flat of his sword, handing over a change of clothes and a health potion as he does.

“Don’t take too long,” he warns, watching carefully as Dream cradles the glass bottle with two hands. “And don’t drop the potion. You’re not getting a second one.” 

“Okay.” 

Sam turns away from him, looking at the blood and grime on the ground and internally lamenting the mess; no matter how many times he tells Quackity to be more careful, he never manages to listen quite as well as Sam would like. This is supposed to be better than the last few days, which - if Sam is to be fair - it is. But better doesn’t mean he’s not going to be here for the next thirty minutes mopping the obsidian, nor does it mean that Quackity hasn’t ruined yet another prison uniform that Sam will inevitably end up having to find the materials to replace. He lets his sword fall back into his inventory, pulling out a bucket of water and a mop with a frustrated sigh that barely skirts around becoming a low hiss, starting at the leftmost wall of the cell in silence. 

It’s barely five minutes later when the hissing begins: an almost inaudible low hum of noise at his back that he stubbornly ignores. The mop splashes loudly as he dunks it in the water, scrubbing grit and grime from the cracks in the stone and staining the head of it red-brown, and the hissing grows in volume like it’s trying to drown it out. His fists tighten on the mop handle. There’s a puddle of dried blood and vomit in the corner he has to scrub at for a solid minute and a half. He adjusts how his mask sits on his face with one hand, a spark of a rising headache pulsing brighter against the front of his skull-

“Will you stop that?” 

The hissing cuts off. Dream stares back at him, wide-eyed, the points of his eyes impossibly small and bright. Smoke curls from the corner of his lips, mouth barely open. Sam notes, with no small measure of irritation, that he has yet to put on his new shirt. 

Dream looks away first. “Sorry.” 

“Hurry up. And stay quiet.” 

Sam turns back, mop clutched tightly in his hands until the joints of his gauntlets creak against each other, headache worsening despite the silence from the man behind him. With new vigor, he scrubs at the floor along the back of the cell, determined to leave as soon as possible. 

“Sam-”

“What, Dream.” 

“I- my shirt.” Sam looks back at him; with how sickly pale he’s become, the embarrassed flush that settles over his face and neck is impossible to ignore, the darker, blocky patches of green over his cheeks and shoulders much like Sam’s own fading into the rest of his skin. “I can’t-” 

Sam bites back a flash of burning anger, startled momentarily at the ferocity of it even in his own head. “Figure it out, Dream. I’m not your butler.” 

“Please, Sam.” Behind the words, the hissing builds, then stops. “I-”

The cell is sweltering; heat gathers at Sam’s collar, the fire resistance long having worn off. He sets his jaw and looks over at Dream, who - admittedly - looks a little pathetic. He’s tangled up in his shirt, one sleeve dangling loosely, beads of sweat gathering at his hairline from the heat or exertion. His eyes have brightened to a piercing orange, pinpricks of brilliant light in his dark eyes, and Sam feels the hairs of his neck stand on end. 

“Watch it, Dream,” he mutters, waving away a curling fog of smoke and gunpowder. Dream hesitates, then nods, shoulders tight as Sam reaches for his shirt, careful not to touch him. The lava glitters at the edges of his vision, hair sticking to the skin of his neck. It’s awkward, maneuvering his arm into the sleeve, and Sam backs away immediately after with a roll of his shoulders. 

“Thank you,” Dream says, voice almost a whisper. He pulls at the shirt awkwardly, wincing every so often from the strain at his back, and Sam turns his gaze back to the cell after he starts fumbling with the buttons. There’s a dull ache in his head that he tamps down, clearing his throat awkwardly as he returns to the mop. 

He finishes cleaning the rest of the cell without any more interruptions, finally looking back at Dream clutching the bloody rags of his old uniform and an empty potion bottle. Sam picks up the bucket of water from the ground and returns it and the mop to his inventory.

“Sam,” Dream says, voice pitched hesitantly, and Sam feels his jaw jump. 

“What now, Dream!” 

Dream stares back at him, silent. His expression is unreadable, eyes an even darker orange, a dull, inconsistent buzzing making Sam’s ears ring. Inside his own ribcage, there’s something hot and bright and sharp, begging to tear loose. To swell into light and aching heat, to set the world aflame, and Sam swallows a gulp of air that’s not cool enough to do anything more than fan the flames. 

“It’s hot in here, Sam,” Dream says, looking away. His eyebrows are furrowed in inscrutable thought. “It’s too hot. You know that.” 

“You should’ve thought of that earlier then,” Sam says, clipped. “This cell was your design-”

“I know, I know-” Dream mutters, dismissive, and Sam forces down the hiss building in his own lungs. “But- with Quackity-” 

“I don’t see how this has to do with Quackity.” 

“The- the gunpowder, Sam! And the lava!” Sam’s ear flicks irritably, and he runs his hand through his hair beside it, remembering Dream’s doing the same. “It’s not- you know it’s not-” 

“Quackity has been supplied a mask and appropriate precautionary equipment.” Sam’s voice comes out more guttural than he intends, and he forces himself to take a deep breath. He has to leave. The searing brightness at his sternum presses against the cool metal of his chestplate. 

“You mean- a bucket of ice water and a shield? Yeah, because that’s going to do so much when I literally explode and kill us both, Sam! Don’t you remember-” 

“He’s been informed with what to do in case-” 

“-what happened to Tommy!” 

Sam whirls around. Dream’s eyes are wide, eyes glittering in the lava’s light, lips still slightly parted as Sam stares down at him. There’s a seething rattle to the air, steam in a kettle, rising to a fever pitch as Sam feels himself move forward towards where Dream is still standing in the middle of the cell. 

“Tommy? You killed Tommy, Dream! You ruined his life! You wanted to put him in here!” The mask digs into his face, knocking against his chin as his mouth moves. 

“Sam-” 

“You’re the reason why the cell is like this. You’re the reason why Quackity has to visit. Stop trying to- use all of these things to convince me- you know what? You’re right! You’re right, I do know what’s necessary for the cell. I know better than anyone, and you know that. So don’t try and threaten me, Dream!” 

“Sam, please-” 

“You deserve this, Dream-” 

“SAM!” 

Sam’s hand clamps around Dream’s wrist only to wrench away - the cell is hot, and Dream’s skin burns. Dream’s eyes are wide as saucers, the smoke spilling from his mouth blurring the image of his face with a hazy sheet of translucent grey, and Sam only barely registers himself pulling out a pearl and launching himself into the lava, forcing himself through over to the opposite side with his heart pounding in his chest. 

He waits; one second passes, then two. His breathing is harsh and heavy and loud through the mask, hissing ringing in his ears. From Dream’s cell, there’s no sudden swell of sound, no harsh crack of an explosion tempered through the lava curtain. He forces his breathing to steady with his shoulders pressed against the atrium wall, waiting for a detonation that never comes. 

Finally, relatively confident that the danger zone has passed, Sam peels himself from the wall, feeling strangely heavy on his feet, almost disoriented. He ignores the levers on the wall - Dream is fine, surely, he didn’t hear anything from the cell - and heads for the bathroom. Some cold water on his face sounds amazing right now. 

(A few minutes later, he hesitates as he leans over the sink, focusing on his reflection.)

(The eyes in the mirror glow bright orange as they stare back.) 

[cdroloisms]

UNO REVERSE! top five foursquare duos!!

i can't believe you would do this to me >:( i didn't do it to you or anything nope (<- lying)

um um um four square my beloved .... choosing this is so hard

For Kat's post on the same subject: look here for some context on the AU as well as her top 5! The basic premise of the AU is simple: c!dream and j!dream get put In The Box for bonding purposes and receive a small selection of Visitors !! (The Technos, the Sams, and the Quackitys). This goes ... well. I'd say it's fun times for all, but that's not strictly accurate. Very fun for us XD though, and isn't that what really matters?

Anyway, onto the top five (note: I tried to keep from too much overlap w/ Kat's, bc all the duos in this are honestly really really fun):

5. j!Dream + c!Quackity

c!Quackity has been the specter over j!Dream's head for so long - this implacable weight that lingered over his head, that he couldn't put a name to, that resided in the threats the Warden would hiss at him when he got too testy (I could skin you alive, I could cut off your hands, I could nail you to the wall and leave you that way. Don't test me, Dream. This isn't torture. You don't know what that is.)

He's been told, again and again, that he's had it good. That it wasn't that bad, that he doesn't know what torture is, really - what Sam did was nothing. He's just weak. And hell, he's got something to prove, doesn't he? Something to throw in the face of c!Dream's snide remarks, the Sams' hypocrisy. (To prove to himself that he isn't exactly as pathetic as they all think he is.)

And as for c!Quackity - j!Dream is strange, uncomfortable. This one doesn't flinch at him the same way; this one doesn't bear the same marks of his influence, how he built himself into something through blood and sweat and every drop of fear he'd worked for. In a way, his existence is discomfiting because it - takes the singularity of his achievements from him. He's no longer the only one that was willing to go to these lengths, the only one that didn't shy away from getting his hands dirty. This Dream doesn't fear him nearly in the same way as the ghost of the Warden that follows his every step - and of course, c!Quackity aims to do something about that.

4. j!Quackity + j!Sam

My God. These two. Everything about them had already been so delightfully complex in the original AU - with the context of their counterparts and their situation, it only becomes all that much more complicated. They have all the rough memories of the JMAH timeline; they're forced to cooperate to keep the Dreams under control. There is so much tension (in more than one way- [gunshots]) and they're just. So fucking fun as a duo.

j!Quackity thinks that j!Sam is a creep, period, you get no bitches + please die alone in a ditch + L + ratio. Every time they're forced to interact is only reinforcing this idea in his mind. j!Quackity is the least possessive over the Dreams, strictly, and is the most convinced of the idea that he can still get the revive book - not having had nearly as long of an opportunity to try and torture it out of him. His goal is to make the Dreams miserable and get the book and put them six feet under - and honestly, more than that, his goal is to kill j!Sam As Soon As Possible, Please And Thank You.

j!Sam has Regrets over the whole Quackity thing, in both timelines, and even though he's making more of a concerted effort to Work Together than j!Quackity he's also - not got the highest opinion on working together with anyone except for himself when it comes to the Dreams (just me and him and all that). Everything j!Quackity says and does (emphasis on says, good lord) only seems to emphasize this point in his head. Surrendering Dream to Quackity had been bad enough in the first timeline - to do it now? Is a whole different beast entirely - and one that he's going to continue to struggle with, for better or for worse.

3. j!Quackity + c!Quackity

I couldn't resist these two - oh, the girlies the girlies. They are everything to me. Hand in hand against a world of Weird Ass Sam And Dream Bullshit (What the FUCK, am i right ???) They are subjected to the Rituals and they are Not Happy about it. In some ways, they look at each other and see the difference in timelines most keenly - j!Sam and c!Sam share memories, j!Dream and c!Dream have the commonality of a year of Hell, and the Quackitys - some things are very similar. Some things are very, very different. In some ways, it makes them treat each other more like good friends or drinking buddies than the Sams, who are more inclined to see each other as extensions of themselves.

Where the Sams see each other and use each others' existence to reinforce their ideas of themselves as paragons of Justice and Law, and the Dreams can't quite stomach looking at each other without seeing all the ways their Issues reflect on each other and shine a spotlight on their newly gained liabilities, the Quackitys have a slightly more well-rounded perception of each other. They embolden each other and enable each other because of their shared humanity, find common ground in crude jokes and laughing jibes and time to gossip, in the filth and grime of holding someone down to cut into them and the ensuing intimacy it demands, the heat of skin against skin. They look at each other and there's not really anything to hide, is there? In some ways, this is frightening. In others - it's almost a relief.

(Also, the ways that the Sams are more comfortable with each other when the Dreams are around, while the Quackitys come out of their shells with each other when they're alone? Fun. Fun.)

2. j!Sam + j!Dream

These two. These two. There's no one quite like them - the heady mix of fear and relief and possessiveness that can make the entire rest of the world fade away, sometimes - the two-sided knowing that really isn't matched by any other duo. It had been just them, only them, for nearly a year. No other interference. No other visitors. Nothing. Just me and him.

Neither of them quite know how to function with a witness, never mind several - and no one around quite knows either of them like the two of them know each other. There had been no Quackity to play off of, no Techno to keep Dream company - no one had been present, except for them, in the aftermath of where their timelines had diverged so greatly. Even now, even with so much revealed, there's still so much that resides in mystery. That the others don't know.

It's hard not to look at the two of them and- wonder.

j!Dream + c!Dream

To literally no one's surprise, these two take first place. They're the two that started it all, the two that are featured throughout, the two that it all circles back to, in the end. It's about the ways they hate each other - for not being strong enough, for being able to fight back when the other couldn't. It's about the ways they scream at each other and hit each other where it hurts and what does it matter, really, if they're quoting Sam or Quackity or whoever as they're doing so - what does it matter, as long as it gets their counterpart to fucking shut up?

But it's also about how the Sams arrive and they immediately come up with a plan, bracing against the potions slamming down on their backs and chained against the wall and biting back screams of pain. It's about how they fought, half-delirious from exhaustion and barely able to stand and facing impossible odds. It's about how they keep watch for each other when they manage to get a few moments of sleep. How in the end, even though they hate each other, even though they can't look at their counterpart without seeing the hell they endured and the hell they're not sure they can survive (and the hell they'll have to live through, anyway, because what other option is there?) and at least they have each other.

They fight together; they surrender together. c!Dream snaps at j!Dream to drink the fucking milk, holy shit, it's not fucking drugged (I was watching, I know, I know) and j!Dream forces c!Dream to eat a gapple before their next visitors (heal, eat, I only have you.) It's not quite care, it's nothing like love. There's so much fear and trauma they have to work past before they can imagine confronting what the other lived through (what they themselves lived through).

But they have each other.

(In the end, they're not facing it all alone.)