Chapter Text
Sometimes, Dream can't talk.
He can never really explain why, but there will be times, every couple months in a good year, where he simply can't get words out. It's not a word finding problem— although he does struggle with that on occasion— but he'll simply open his mouth, and no words come out. His thoughts will race, and he'll form complete paragraphs that we wants to say, but he simply... can't.
It's confusing. It's painful too. When he can't talk, minutes stretch into hours. Sometimes he can type, but it's usually in broken grammar and riddled with spelling errors. Any proper reactions that Dream would have normally, he cannot process. All he can do is sit staring at a wall, a hand on patches the only thing that grounds him.
He hates it.
~
When he woke up this morning, he did not expect to spend the entire day staring at the wall, unable to speak. He woke up with plans to hop on the SMP to mine for gold to trade with Piglins, and possibly bother Tommy. He needed mass amounts of gold so that he could trade for obsidian for... personal reasons. After all, as the hegemonic power of the server, he needed some form on threat and he thought that placing obsidian walls around L'manberg, if needed, would be funny.
After waking up to bits of sunlights streaming through his blinds, he rolled over and immediately opened twitter.
Aster checking the usual tweets from his friends, Dream went to check his mentions to interact with his fans.
And that's where things went downhill.
The immediate tweets that came up were about his manhunt videos. Someone had claimed that it was impossible for him to get enough iron to entity cram in enough minecarts to kill George. But it was possible! He knew, because he had done it. He had never cheated or scripted anything for the plot, and although he'd never admit it, he couldn't handle it that people thought he would.
He was an honest man! It had taken his friends a long time to get full diamond, and thus he had plenty of time to mine for iron. Additionally, he was able to find a ravine and a good cave system, so that iron was abundant and he'd crafted enough furnaces to smelt everything quickly. There was absolutely no reason to doubt him. It wasn't his fault that other people weren't good at the game. It was like the horse thing all over again; he was simply good at the game, and practice allowed him to pull off the stunts that everyone saw in the videos.
He realized he was about a thousand characters over the tweet limit in an explanation, and slowly taped on the "save as draft" function. His drafts were completely full of rants such as today's about how he would never fake anything, but he rarely ever sent them. Every one of those drafts was written in a varying state of distress, sometimes in numbing rage, others while he was having a complete breakdown, the status of which could usually be assumed by his typos.
In many of these breakdowns, Dream would call George— that was why he had his number, and George would always respond if it was out of the blue. When Dream had announced that he would stop streaming manhunt videos, it was after a four hour while call with George that both started and ended with Dream sobbing. He simply couldn't take the people constantly attacking his every move, and after a point it had gotten to be too much.
In the back of his mind, Dream knew why he was like this. As someone with ADHD, he also had rejection-sensitive-dysphoria, or RSD, as a symptom of it, meaning that he took mild criticisms way harder and way more personally than the average person. While most content creators could just brush off a few unfounded allegations of scripting a Minecraft video, Dream took every single tweet as a personal attack to both his work and his entire sense of self-worth. This lead to him going in-depth on stream to prove that his manhunt videos were legit, going on a 30 minute rant full of barley contained rage at a person who had complied bullshit "allegations" into a short youtube video for views. Afterwards, he often felt bad for going so hard on someone who likley had good intentions, but dream couldn't stop himself. Occasionally George could get him to stop, but for the most part the twitter character limit did it for him, as all his justifications were made entirely on impulse and adrenaline.
His unpublished twitter rant left his hands shaking and breathing slightly labored, as he tapped open discord to check on the server news for today.
Hey guys, Tommy had written. Wilbur and I have a bit we want to do on stream today, so Dream could you not bother me a lot about L'manburg? Thanks
It was a perfectly reasonable request. Dream was perfectly fine respecting that, but it still sent a pang through his chest. He knew it was roleplay. He knew that Tommy was perfectly fine with getting stabbed.
Still, it felt as though his breath was gone— as if the outside world was only arbitrary, as if it was not built for him, it was too loud and too scary.
As was typical, he could hear the electricity moving through the wires in his house. He had an outlet on the wall that his bed was against, which he hated. The electricity was so loud. The buzz was always present, but whenever he went into his stages where he couldn't talk it always became louder.
To anyone else, his house would've been silent. Patches was curled up at the edge of his bed, and his computer was shut off so that not even the fan ran.
But to him. To him it was loud. Too loud. And because it was so loud, so intense, he could not talk. He could not add to the noise— his lips felt glued shut, his throat only capable of swallowing and shallow breathing.
He brought his knees to his chest and sat on his bed, facing the wall where the outlet was buzzing.
At some point, after either minutes or hours had gone by, patches had some up to rest next to him, and he'd put a hand on her back, the other hand still wrapped around his legs.
He'd always thought, that if he hadn't been able to buy a house, he would've registered Patches as an ESA. He knew that ESA's couldn't be brought everywhere, but having a cat at home for when he had these episodes was beyond helpful. Her warm fur pressed up against his leg, grounding him in reality. Her soft breaths in and out were another sound to focus on besides the electricity, and he soft fur provided a better texture, something soft and warm on his otherwise harsh household.
What she could not do, was stop others from accusing Dream of "faking" his manhunt videos. He knew she couldn't, and he also knew that she was who he cared about more than his videos, but it didn't stop the pain.
He wished someone would tell him it was okay. He wished someone would confirm for him that he wasn't making it up, that he was just good at the game. He wanted George to tell him it was going to be okay.
But he had no idea how to do that.
After another indeterminate amount of time, he reached across his night stand to text George the only thing he could think to type:
payches pofgers