(Find the chrono tag for Drunz Skyblock AU here!)
1. It’s not that they’ve got nothing, it’s that they’ve got seemingly nothing useful. Punz doesn’t feel very hopeful about the random assortment of items in the chest.
Dream seems to feel very differently, though.
“We have saplings,” he says, as though that explains everything, “and grass.” He gestures around at the floating island they’re stuck on. “Those are the two most important things. And the lava - but we could have survived without that, if needs must.”
“And how about, y’know, water?” Punz asks, because that’s the big problem right now, as far as they’re concerned. “The snowballs won’t make a source block even if we melt them all, and if we rely on rain entirely then we might just get very unlucky and dehydrate to death if there’s a dry spell.” To say nothing of getting more food, but water’s the first priority.
Dream grimaces. “It’s possible,” he decrees. “But not easy. It does have to do with rain, though.”
“What is it?” Punz can’t think of whatever Dream is trying to get at - they’re by no means unknowledgeable about the world and its many mechanics, but if there’s a solution to creating a water source block then they just don’t see it. The bucket won’t do it, even if they leave it out in the rain that hasn’t yet appeared; it’ll fill, sure, and buckets can be used to move source blocks, but they can’t create one.
“Did you know,” Dream says, slowly, “that zombies have a very, very low chance to drop an iron ingot if they’re killed by a player? Something like zero point eight something without any looting enchants. What I’m saying is - a cauldron. Rain filling a cauldron makes a water source block. We can then move it out with the bucket, or with bottles made from the glass. Two of those and we make an infinite water source.”
Punz opens their mouth slightly, closes it, opens it again. Strained, they say, “That’s going to be a lot of luck. We have, like, three days. To get seven iron ingots. And then it’s got to rain in time as well.” Well, longer with the snowballs if they melt them, but it’s still not a long time. They’re doubtful, and they can’t hide it. Luck is - they hate to rely on luck, on unknown factors. On factors they thought they knew but had misjudged.
“Any plan,” Dream says, quietly, his gaze going distant for a moment, “is better than no plan at all.”
2. As Dream is very right, they set to work - sort of. Punz tells Dream to sit down as they carefully walk around the island and take stock of the limited ground below. The island doesn’t go down very far - two or three in some places, but a lot of the ground is nothing but a scary single block layer between them and an endless drop. There are also floating blocks, and places where there is a gap in the floor to the nothingness below.
“We need to make this island as big as possible, so no saplings fall off the edge,” Dream says from where’s he’s sat on a block of grass next to the red flowers. “But we can’t lose the grass.” He went rather quietly to his seat, which rather alarmed Punz; Dream must be in a lot of pain, and worried about muscles spasms teetering him over the edge of the island, to not push his way through and argue that he can contribute as well. Punz knows better than to draw attention to it, though.
Punz very carefully lies down on the edge, and, gripping the grass with their fingers, leans over to poke their head underneath, trying to see how deep the blocks go in this section. Couple of double blocks, most single. Yikes. “If we fall off, what happens?” they ask, trying to keep the apprehension from their tone, though they know that Dream’ll pick up on it anyway.
Dream doesn’t answer for a second. “Don’t fall off,” he says, flat. “This world has been stabilised by my admin core, it won’t continue to degrade, but - I have no idea as to the condition of the respawn anchor, and this doesn’t look like the remnants of its old zero-zero.” True enough: servers don’t tend to allow for houses where newcomers spawn or where blocked beds place you, and most wouldn’t want to build there anyway. “And… this isn’t controlled void, like in the End. There’s a pretty high chance that if you fell…” You’d just keep on falling.
Punz is not eager to go back to the void any time soon. “Noted,” they say, carefully shuffling back away from the edge. They sit up and look to the ruins of the house. “Let me secure the floor,” Punz says, slowly, “and then you can build us a small shelter.”
Dream’s - not content, but amenable to sitting still right now, but he won’t stay that way for long. And feeling as though he’s in debt, or that someone is creating such a dynamic where he’s indebted to them - that they have power over him - is a huge thing with him. It was that way before Pandora, though to a lesser degree, but now it’s become… more of an issue. Again, Punz doesn’t draw attention to it, not openly, so as not to stamp on the seeping wound that Dream is so sensitive to, but they silently accommodate where possible.
Dream leans back to look up at the ruin behind him. “We’ll keep the cobblestone to make a furnace with,” he says. “I’ll need more wood, though.” He hesitates a moment before handing Punz the saplings. Five of them, to be exact, and Punz doesn’t mention that they’re sure there were seven of them in the chest. Let Dream keep his paranoid insurance; Punz would rather throw themselves from the edge they’re retreating from than strip yet another thing from Dream.
“I’ve always loved the oak plank box chic style,” Punz quips instead, and is pleased when Dream barks out a hoarse wheeze. “Very traditional.”
3. The island isn’t easy to enlarge. Punz starts slow and then is forced to slow down even more. They both agree that they want there to be at least two blocks between them and the blue sky that is really void below. Dream takes down the ruins - wooden planks broken by hand, and with the sticks in the chest turned into a pair of wooden axes and wooden pickaxes - and Punz sees him, in the corner of their eye, pluck up the two red flowers and place them in his inventory, despite the way they’ll do nothing for them but take up space. They say nothing.
It’s… an arduous process, layering up the island. Punz plants a sapling once Dream has cleared the ruins, and then watches Dream consider the three pieces of coal for a moment before turning them all into torches, placing a couple down. It’s not night yet, but - it will be soon. The sun is already past its noon high above them.
The tree grows. Punz punches it down and waits for the saplings to drop from the leaves; they get two. The logs they turn into planks for the bottom layer, carefully placing them on the level of the lowest blocks the island came with - some smooth stone. Dream turns the cobblestone from the house into a furnace and gives Punz the rest for the bottom layer.
It’s gruelling work, having to be so careful. Punz loses a couple of blocks to the void, cursing themselves every time, but after a couple of hours, their island is safely two blocks thick with the top level being mostly grass and dirt.
4. Dream sits down against the moved chest as Punz stares at the saplings and wills them to grow faster. The sky is turning dark with evening, and even if the trees will grow due to the light from the torches next to them…
They’re not going to have a shelter tonight.
“Here,” Dream says as he hands Punz two apples and one of the loaves of bread. He then takes the same amount of food from the small stock, making sure that Punz can see, before putting the rest back in the chest.
“Thanks,” Punz says. One of the trees suddenly grows, sprouting up with a creak of wood and violent rustle of leaves sprouting into existence. They start to chop away at it with their wooden axe, now at roughly a quarter of its durability. They shiver in the cooling air, the sweat they’ve worked up under their white hoodie making them clammy.
“We need bonemeal from skeletons,” Dream says behind them. Punz can feel his eyes on their back, even behind the mask. “Then we could get seeds from the grass. Zombies also drop carrots and - potatoes. But it’s rare.”
Punz imagines getting a potato from a zombie and having to live off them. They’re sure that Dream has already imagined it, and to his detriment, no matter how much he would absolutely force himself to eat them just to prove he’s not affected or some shit like that. As though Punz hasn’t seen him throw up potatoes when they made the mistake of giving him some mashed ones weeks ago, hoping for them to be soft on his stomach and instead nearly driving him out of their tower completely. “Wheat sounds good,” they say. “But… there’s not that much room for a farm.” Or water.
“A single plot can be bonemealed into growing without water,” Dream answers. “The seed being planted quickly there stops the farmland from turning back into dirt; it’ll grow without bonemeal, but very slowly. We can get a little line of three or four - we’ve got that much to spare, at least.”
Punz didn’t know that; they thought that you had to have water to keep farmland. They don’t ask where Dream learnt that little piece of knowledge, or if he’s ever had to use it to survive prior to this.
They imagine him for a moment, thin as bones the way he is now, probably young, crouched over a single wheat seed with bonemeal in his hand, green sparkles fluttering around as he plants and harvests and replants quickly, crafting bread and trying not to starve. Punz never did learn exactly where Dream was before the SMP, what life he had prior to meeting George and Sapnap and founding the server with them. Then they shake the thought from their mind; it has no place, here and now. Dream would chide them for it, too, letting their attachment distract them from the work at hand: their very survival.
Punz replants the sapling, stepping only a few blocks to sit down next to Dream, leaning against the crafting table, watching the leaves fall from the air as they disintegrate. A couple of saplings drop down, but they can get those in a second. “We don’t have the resources to build a mob-spawning - platform? Right now.”
“Tomorrow,” Dream says, “after we build a shelter. It needs to be secure. I’ve… never built a mob farm. But I know how the spawning criteria works. We’ll need a lot of wood; trapdoors and ladders and planks and stuff.”
Punz doesn’t have the knowledge an admin does for minutiae like mob spawning criteria - outside of if it’s dark enough they’ll appear - so they nod instead. “I’ll work late tonight,” they say.
Dream looks at them. His hand twitch in his lap, wrists weak with repeated breaks, his muscles mostly wasted from his body. He’s more of a hinderance than a help, and the thought is like poison, curdling in his gut. The work he did chopping and mining the old ruin into nothingness, smashing the glass blocks and watching as their shards fell into the void, disappearing as they went, has fully tired him out already.
He nods sharply at Punz instead of expressing any sentiment of his helpless frustration, and then turns to the furnace between them. Oak logs ignited with oak planks turn into charcoal, and the warmth of the furnace is a balm in the chilly evening air.
Punz sighs in relief next to him as heat starts pumping out of the furnace. Dream himself is shivering harder than earlier - everywhere seems cold after the relentless heat of Pandora, and light shivers are common now, though sometimes they’re leftover nerve damage than coldness, but whatever, don’t think about it - and he stiffens in place so as not to lean closer to Punz, to not give into the frail beast in his chest that aches for the touch of another body against him, something kind, something that won’t hurt.
He won’t show weakness, longing, desire - he can’t. Punz is one of the few that still respect him; Dream can’t lose that.
5. They sleep in front of the furnace that night.
Punz lies on the outside, crowding Dream closer to the heat of the furnace - several pieces of charcoal smelting exactly nothing, burning for warmth and light only - knowing he’s thinner, knowing that his body’s thermoregulation has been fucked beyond recognition, knowing that he’ll never claim it for himself without Punz silently claiming it for him.
Dream is tense where he lies on the ground, thin fronds of grass flattened beneath their bodies, but still softer than planks of wood, softer than obsidian. He flinches as a tree grows behind them, creaking as it stretches for the sky, the light growing a tiny bit dimmer as the trunk blocks the torch placed behind it.
The sky is full of stars, clear and chill. Not cold, thankfully, but definitely not warm. Earlier, Punz and Dream had watched the moon rise from below their feet, and right now the sun is down there, able to be seen on the other side of its orbit. It’s as breath-taking as it is disturbing.
Punz hums in their sleep behind him, and then - Dream freezes as their arm is flung over him, Punz pressing into his back and holding him close in their sleep. Their breath is warm as it puffs on the back of his neck, and it feels…
It feels nothing like Sir Quackity. Or like the Warden Sam. Neither of them ever held him like this.
There’s a buzz underneath Dream’s skin, something that aches so much it’s like pain, only it’s nothing like pain at all. He breathes out shakily as he untenses in Punz’s hold, bringing his hands up to tuck his fingers around the edge of Punz’s arm, pressing them into the gap between their arm and his own chest. Punz doesn’t wake; instead, their grip tightens and they shift closer, a line of heat along Dream’s back, their legs brushing his legs, not yet enough to entangle.
Dream closes his eyes behind the mask still strapped on, long since used to the edge of it pressing against his face as he sleeps. He licks his dry lips, shudders, and focuses his gaze on the dancing flames inside the furnace, so unlike the lava wall he stared at for so long, and yet familiar enough to drift into that distant state where the world didn’t really touch him.
Even there, he can still feel Punz’s arms.
