we can all learn things(just maybe in different ways.)

time to write fanfiction with morally grey dream even though i feel like stabbing his smp character in the fucking eye nipples lmao

     Techno jerked upwards, breathing hard. It had been easier to wake up the second time, easier to fight through the raging, angry river and forage upstream enough to force himself to awaken. He took a moment to get his bearings, blinking to clear his tired, blurry vision. His head was still spinning but he was awake enough to realize that he wasn't gagged anymore and his arms and legs were free from any bonds, though there were still red marks from where the ropes had chafed against his skin.

     His vision focused and he rose to a sitting position, his fingers flexing against a nonexistent axe handle. He had nothing on him except for an empty sheath at his belt where his dagger was supposed to be. His cloak was gone and he was rendered to just his empty belt, grimy white shirt, and mouse-brown trousers. His surroundings consisted of three blank gilded blackstone walls and one nearly blank gilded blackstone wall with just a locked iron door and a small window, barred with smooth metal.

     And he wasn't alone.

     Across the room sat a familiar frame, facing away from him and curled in on himself. His mask was gone and instead he hid his face inside his cloak, his breathing raspy and shallow.

      Dream. It was the man who had killed his brothers, had murdered them in cold blood and left them to freeze in the deadly mid-December chill, had terrorized him for almost a week and had tracked him halfway across the world just to obey his king, had stolen his father's compass just to find him and take him down.

     He realized with a start that it hadn't been a nightmare. No, it was all real. Tommy and Tubbo were dead because of him, gone forever. He would never hear Tubbo's laughter at Tommy's loud, chaotic swears or ruffle the brown curls of his hair again. They were gone forever.

     And yet, he didn't feel grief. He couldn't feel anything, really. He was numb, like his one driving force for doing what he did had failed. The day he had fled, the day everything changed, the main reason he had snapped and tried to sneak into the castle had been the way the guards ridiculed his family. The way they sneered and spat as his father walked by with his wings tucked inconspicuously behind his back, even though he was the one who had forged all those weapons they tossed around carelessly. The way they nearly arrested two ten-year-old kids for playing a game of tag just because they were hybrids. The way that Wilbur was afraid to perform his music in public because when he did he had been ridiculed for his wings. The fact that this was normalized in the kingdom, and that the small group of hybrids that had settled there feared for their lives every single fucking day.

     But now that Tommy and Tubbo were gone, what did he have to fight for? Sure, Wilbur and Phil were still alive(actually, maybe not, maybe he had failed even more and now he was the only surviving member of his family. Maybe he had been so weak, so shortsighted, such an awful brother and son that every single one of his brothers and his father were dead.), but there was no fixing their family now. At least half of them were dead, gone because Techno hadn't been strong enough to finish the job.

      But it wasn't entirely his fault, wasn't it? No, it was the so-called knight who had actually struck the final blow, had shattered any and every hope that Techno had of success and thrown the shards into the ocean, letting them wash away in the riptide, never to be seen again.

     But though he tried to be angry, he couldn't. He couldn't feel anything, do anything. He was cold, as if he had lost a piece of himself to the freezing snow that he had tumbled into when Dream had pulled out the sleeping potions. It was numbing, almost. He couldn't feel anything. And honestly, he didn't want to.