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Nightmare teleported to Dreamtale. Home. Or had this only once been his home?
The sunlight, barely piercing the veil of clouds, caressed grass that was once green but now a dry, gray-brown, the almost-rotted remains, the dilapidated houses. The trees stood withered, some gradually losing branches, too weakened to hold their own weight. Too dead. Like everything here. That inferno of negativity had struck the universe so profoundly that nothing survived; even the concrete of the houses looked unsound.
Once, life had thrived in Dreamtale. Now it had abandoned this place, lingering only in the memories of the one who had taken that life away.
Nightmare looked at this grass, at these village ruins, and could not recognize them. Yes, once this place had been his Home. Once, it had gifted Nightmare happy memories of a childhood spent with his brother. Once.
Now, only memories remained. The past had long gone, and Nightmare was no longer tied to this place.
Only one thing brought a small light of joy. The only thing that hadn't changed after all these years. The weather was overcast; rain was coming.
In their childhood, Dream and Nightmare had loved the rain. They would run through puddles, ruining their shoes without a twinge of regret, sit under the Tree watching the wind catch the streams and bend them, fall asleep to the steady drumming of droplets on the earth and leaves. And when a thunderstorm began, they would run to Neil and spend the whole night watching lightings piercing the night, standing before the window.
Nightmare turned his head to the left, still remembering after hundreds of years where their 'uncle's' house had stood. It, too, was in ruins. Over here had been the wall, from whose window his brother and he had the best view of the sky. Nearby was the garden they sometimes tended together.
And over there, much further to the right, the dead Tree of Feelings stood barely upright. Bare, several large branches already laying on the ground. Nightmare used to love climbing onto one of them, lulled by the Tree's sway and the soft rustle of leaves. And onto another he and his brother would always race to scramble up.
Nightmare absently noticed he had begun walking slowly towards the Tree. And there it was.
The gray stone statue was easy to miss from afar against the backdrop of almost equally gray branches. The first thing that struck Nightmare was the statue's height.
Dream was achingly small and too thin. Nightmare was four heads taller than him, though even if he hadn't grown so enormous under the influence of negativity, he would still be at least a head and a half taller than his twin now.
Dream's childish face now truly looked *childish*. Being an adult now, being no longer the same age as his twin, Nightmare realized just how young they both had been.
Gazing at the face they had shared, Nightmare no longer recognized his own reflection in Dream. That reflection, too, had remained there, in the past.
Dream was still a child, just as he was in Nightmare's memories. And Nightmare himself had grown. Despite this, he simply couldn't imagine Dream as an adult, couldn't mentally copy his own face and overlay it onto his twin.
"So many years have passed…" Nightmare whispered in a voice that seemed on the edge of tears. He wasn't. Unlike in childhood, it was hard for him to cry now, even when he wanted to very much.
Instead, Nightmare sat down on his knees before Dream, who held his arms forward as if wanting to hug someone, as he often did to offer comfort. Nightmare was now at eye level with his twin.
Once, 317 years ago, this had happened before. He had stood before Dream when his twin was still alive, with bright, flickering lights in his eye sockets. Back then, Nightmare was already almost completely consumed by the giant amount of negativity, yet the memory of how he looked at Dream remained clear and sharp.
"Remember who I was," he had said then, and Dream had reached out to hug Nightmare. He likely hadn't fully realized then that this hug might be the last. In the end, Dream only managed to touch his twin. His frightened expression, full of fear for Nightmare, had remained frozen for these 317 years.
Covered in moss and two spiderwebs, Dream stood as a monument to their ruined childhood. Or rather, not theirs, but only Nightmare's.
Perhaps Dream remained there, in those distant times. Perhaps he was still ten years old, frozen, thinking that he'll hug his twin and then they'll go together to Neil to read some book, to help Nightmare calm down and feel better. Nightmare's eye stung with the tears that threatened to rise.
Dream had always loved him most in the world and cared for him as best as could a kid in his age.
Unlike himself 317 years ago, Nightmare hugged Dream, resting his head on a shoulder that was now too narrow for him as an adult, and gently placed his hands on his twin's back, noticing that if he wished, he could easily encircle Dream with one arm. Tears from this realization slowly rolled from Nightmare's eye. For a moment, it seemed to him that the statue had felt something.
After all, Dream hadn't lived happily either. The villagers were using him, and he had helped everyone until he was exhausted, often returning with arms too tired to lift. He just didn't understand; he was a child.
Being not himself under the influence of the destructive negativity, Nightmare, upon remembering Dream, felt hatred, injustice, and resentment. As if his twin had lived happily while Nightmare was tormented, and in the end, hadn't even tried to help. Of course, that wasn't true.
Nightmare didn't truly think like that. And he was terribly ashamed of these thoughts, of all the insults he had allowed himself to hurl at Dream when under the negativity's control.
If only he could really hug his twin now, if only he could ask his forgiveness for everything, if only he could surround him with the care he deserved, if only he could give him a normal childhood, which both of them had been denied.
Nightmare knew it might be possible. Dream hadn't died, unlike all of Dreamtale. His soul was still alive, though petrified, in stasis. Dream was frozen in the distant past, but he could be brought into the present. So Sci had theorized, so Nightmare hoped.
And so it happened, many years later. 500 years after the incident, on a snowy, sunny day nine days before the New Year, the stone rippled and crumbled, and the freed Dream fell weakly to the ground.