Seeking Fire

Mixing a bit of canon and headcanons (based off canon) here. It was never really explored how the stone felt other than that his memories of it aren’t the best. But his statue is crying in almost every comic it appears in. This can really only mean one thing, to me at least.

He was not by any means completely unconscious. And why would he be? He’s the apple, not the vessel. Only his body was turned to stone, by one final act to save his life.

And Dream’s age is 502 immediately after breaking free of stone, I just chose 515 for the story because it feels right and gives you a sense of the timeline I imagine. We don’t have a strict one in canon.

i genuinely don’t think I’ve seen another person talk about Dream’s aura. Not really. It is one of the most interesting and kind of scary parts of his powers. It is canon that he can effectively overdose people on positivity and they can become obsessed. It doesn’t happen all the time because he is constantly on the move, but it can happen. It can make them fall in love normally too. We also see Nightmare do very similar things in the opposite direction, only his aura, much stronger, turns people in mindless killing things rather than people. Dream’s aura is much more subtle. Maybe you wouldn’t even notice it while he was there, his presence is always a calming sensation. A mood lifter from any stage of mood. But when he leaves, all that disappears in an instant. Love for him can never be guaranteed as “true” or just a hallucination of his soul. All of this weighs on him.

Color is not immune to its effects, though, I don’t think every person necessarily would act crazy because of it. I think it depends on how well a person can manage their reactions to their emotions, and how they process them mentally. I think Color doubts himself a little though, because he doesn’t like to be alone, and Dream’s departure is the most poignant loneliness one could ever feel.

The first thing you’d need to know about their interactions would be that Killer’s primary knowledge of Dream is entirely filtered through Nightmare. While he may find Dream curious or interesting at times, there is initially an underlying adversarial nature between them. I’m going to be talking about that. Killer is, in this scenario, the only person Nightmare ever takes (going off of canon Nightmare), making Killer an exception for Dream, and a very bad one at that.

Dream spends most of his time early days fleeing from Nightmare, who is substantially stronger than he is especially in the universes he tends to travel to (more negative ones to help and try to spread positivity.) Now he has a second, emotionless, incredibly violent, and incredibly devastating companion who he brings around, who I am sure Dream has had unfortunately sicked on him multiple times. And for Dream, facing the both of them is genuinely terrifying, because while he might be able to fend off Nightmare, Killer takes his attention away enough that Nightmare could land a blow to kill him. Plus, Dream is by no means immune to Killer’s attacks. Their only interactions are fundamentally a life or death scenario for Dream and an eternal battle for Killer, of his ‘ruler’s’ final goal and only real enemy.

Dream has no ability to figure out what Killer’s feeling, the whole emotionless thing and all, which is incredibly disconcerting for him. He feels everyone’s feelings after all, the only people that don’t feel are dead. Killer is like a ghost in his world. He would still feel sympathy for him. He wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to help.

Maybe he manages to find Killer alone sometimes, but here’s the thing about Killer, he requires very strong stimuli of potential emotion to break through stages, and the strongest of those is negativity. Dream doesn’t understand making someone feel horrifically worse to make them feel emotions which will eventually make them feel better, nor would he know, and I doubt he would stumble accidentally into causing enough positivity to make him change stages. He also, if somehow managed to start making him feel something (bad), would probably stop what he’s doing because he thinks he’s doing something wrong. This leads him to a dead end, where the time required to figure that out takes significantly longer than he’s able to. If he tries to take Killer somewhere, it doesn’t go well for either of them and Nightmare will be hot on his tail, so he’s practically out of options. Hence why I think Color is a significantly better person to do it, given his ability to be somewhat negative, lack of empathy powers, and have the capacity to stay for much longer periods of time. Dream has to move universes, he can’t stay in the same place for long periods of time, if you didn’t know.

Once Killer has regained emotions, this is where our complications start to arise.

Let’s consider Dream friends with Color and knowledgeable in his endeavours. Maybe he even had a hand in helping it come to fruition. He does everything in his power to help Color when he needs it and when he’s around. He wants to help Killer, he wants to see him change, and he’s incredibly happy Color has managed to make a break through with him. He also is 100% his biggest hype-man for their romance. The biggest supporter. This is a good start. Killer appreciates this.

However, I believe there are many things at play with how Killer treats/sees Dream:

1. The mortal enemy of the person he worked for, of whom, he already has a complicated love/hate relationship with. Those incredibly negative views of Dream, though maybe not fully believed by him, are always in the back of his head. Like a first impression he can never shake.

2. Dream is the brother of Nightmare. Killer fundamentally cannot reckon the idea that Dream is not the inverse of Nightmare. If Nightmare’s goal is to spread negativity, to make him and everyone around him have the most negative thoughts possible, then Dream MUST do the opposite. He must try to get rid of negativity, of bad things, of bad thoughts, and push them aside. He is, afterall, trying to kill Nightmare too. This is a wrong perception of him, but it is continually reinforced by things he misinterprets about him. Once the idea embeds itself, everything seems proof to his belief.

3. And this is my favourite - Killer, a real good man at reading faces, knows Dream is a liar. Nightmare is not a liar. Dream is a LIAR. And I want you to understand this point very very carefully. Dream does not lie in a negative fashion, he is a very sincere person, he likes a great deal of things, he is very positive about people BUT he is a liar about himself. When he says his day was good, that nothing’s on his mind, that he’s fine, he’s lying and the smile he gives to prove that he is happy is a lie. And Killer knows it. And he doesn’t like people that do that. He wants Dream to tell him exactly how he feels. He much prefers a hard hand for himself and his emotions and his actions. He prefers someone who doesn’t mince words. Dream does not want to tell anyone how he feels, it is a bad experience for him. Dream does not speak harshly, he does not perceive the world in such a fashion. To speak any other way would be insincere for him. They are at a cross roads for their communication styles.

I think point 3 actually contradicts Killer’s logic in point 2 a little bit. And I think it’s a reasonable contradiction for him to hold. From his side, he believes Dream tries to make negativity go away, and he lies about his own negativity. These two things reinforce each other. No contradiction.

Dream would see it a different way: Killer believes he is only positivity! But actually, he can’t help but feel negativity a great deal of the time. And Killer has been able to catch onto this! Something most people don’t do. But for whatever reason, he can’t seem to understand that’s why he’s NOT like Nightmare. Because he UNDERSTANDS negativity is essential to people and their perception of themselves and their journey and their life. While he may try to help people feel better, he is by no means trying to be dismissive of the negativity they feel, and this is something Killer has yet to understand about him, because of the perceptions he holds. Any attempt at Dream to help him feels dismissive of his negativity because Dream’s end goal must be to make all his negativity go away.

When Dream tries to help him, he is much more adversarial than anyone else even saying the exact same thing because of it. Killer wants Dream to be meaner because he thinks he’s pretending to be nicer than he is. He’s not. Killer wants Dream to stop smiling when he’s not happy. He can rarely do that either.

Dream, on the other hand just can’t figure out how to approach Killer properly about helping him and is really just an awkward mess in trying to do so because Killer seems to get upset at any attempts to talk about his emotions.

I think this could become a very interesting conversation for the two of them. One where Dream recognizes Killer treats him a little differently than others, and considers him to be like Nightmare, that being positive and only positive is in his nature. So he talks to him about it, and Killer tells him what he thinks. Dream tells him he’s right about his smile and he’s wrong about who he is. Dream apologizes for trying too quickly to help him change his self image. He apologizes for even being the one to try, as he recognizes that if Killer doesn’t trust him, his words come out hollow. But in truth, he doesn’t want Killer to just give up his negativity and suddenly feel all better about what he’s done. He wants him, when he is ready and only when he is ready, to reconcile his self hatred, even just a little bit. He doesn’t have to forgive himself. By no means does he have to think he did good. But with someone he trusts, like Color, Dream just wants him to like himself again. To find joy in his ability to change, even if that means hating who he used to be. If Killer dislikes him for that, then that’s all right.

And maybe he will for quite some time.

Another thing they could talk about is the nature of their souls. Killer believes Dream is a reflection of Nightmare. He even has the opposite kind of soul, supposedly. But Dream laments his soul is very burdensome for him. A soul, that directly affects your emotions, thrust upon you by some horrible sequence of events. Killer’s made him feel emotionless. Dream’s makes him feel everything. Killer was given the ability to stay alive through almost anything, and Dream was given the ultimate death to die. Not so different, perhaps.

He puts on a smile, he says, because he believes that if his smile causes one other person to smile, then it will have been worth it.

And, that a lot of people see him like Killer does. That he is positivity, and positivity is him. It’s partially true. He doesn’t feel like that inside, but, that’s what he is. And that’s what everyone sees. So, if that’s what everyone sees, then what would they feel if the embodiment of positivity showed how often he felt awful, if the embodiment of positivity cried in front of them. They would feel worse, hopeless maybe, and as consequence, he would feel worse too!

Killer tells him he doesn’t have to do that around him. Maybe they have a small bit of understanding.

I think Killer is a quite unfair to Dream, but I think that’s extra interesting because a. It doesn’t affect Dream’s opinion of him, and b. If I were to write out interactions for it, it would likely come off much more like Killer was the one being wronged. Because no matter what Dream would say to try to help, Killer would most likely interpret it as pushy, and since he can get in the last word over Dream’s relative passivity and plays into his fear of being misunderstood, Dream would be left overly apologetic from accidentally making him upset, but would never challenge him for treating him unfairly. And because he hides a lot of his internal emotions, Killer’s point of view comes across much clearer! He can state his position more succinctly and confidently!

If you look at it from Dream’s perspective he has done nothing but attempt to rehabilitate a mass murderer, mortal enemy, who has severely wounded him repeatedly, who is the one person he was never able to feel the emotions of and connect to on a person level, who he still believes in the humanity of to his very last breath, who he struggles very very much to help without making him upset and feeling bad. He truly wants to see Killer happy. When he comes to the conclusion he’s bad at talking to Killer properly, he’ll ask Color to help instead. He never even asked for an apology.

I think Killer would apologize to Dream for what he did for Nightmare eventually, but it would take a long time. Killer doesn’t hate Dream, even if have a bit of a like/dislike relationship. But even despite all the distrust he feels towards him, Dream has been very kind to him in the past, he believes he can change, he’s friends with Color, and he is interesting in nature partially because he’s hiding things and Killer knows he is. Even after he tells him something from his heart, it’s always like he’s still hiding things about himself.

His aura is interesting too.

Killer finds Dream’s aura more sinister than Nightmare’s. Nightmare’s is incredibly apparent. It is unmistakable. It suffocates and burns. And the second he leaves, it feels better. But Dream’s is subtle. It is unnoticeable until it’s gone. It makes you believe you aren’t feeling it at all then forces you to reconcile with the fact you were. That your day was not in fact as good as you thought it was two minutes before he left. And every time he’s around it seems to work its way in deeper. It’s hard to even form correct feelings around him, but you think you are, you believe you are. You’re not. Color tells him Dream is afraid of his aura. It changes no feelings on it for Killer. It is an inherent distrust of his own feelings, something he already struggles with greatly.

I think inevitably Dream and Killer would become friends, but only after some time. Killer needs to be in a much better place to accept Dream’s help is genuine and he doesn’t want to control him like Nightmare. Dream needs to study the way Killer reacts to things longer than the average person he meets before he understands how to talk to him on a level Killer respects and understands.

I focused more on the conflict than friendship, don’t take it as the whole picture, the conflict is just more interesting

Perhaps I’ll add more if I think about it, but those are my thoughts for now.