A Rift Through Worlds (A Dream SMP x Hermitcraft AU)

Prowling wolf

//TW: Talk of death (no one dies, just words), talk of injury (a healed one), breaking of bones (just a description! No one really breaks their bones)

The next day, Tommy was grounded; quite literally grounded. Why? Because he swore too much and his luck was running too low and now he was forced to walk through the jungle with a broken elytra on his back. Seriously, out of all places his gear could break at, it just had to be over the jungle! In the dense part of it no less! At least, he had been low enough to the ground to only receive some minor knee and elbow scrapes. He swore that was a bad omen, even though he had not been checking the durability on the elytra frequently enough to prevent such a tragedy.

Fate was so damn cruel.

And he had stuff to do! Like giving Stress half the shulkers he had stolen from her back and finally starting to build his new home on the server. Secret bases in big bases just don't cut it, y'know? He wanted to return to the stables and do more horse riding, ask Stress about knitting, go to the Nether and explore the various tunnels of the Nether Hub, find his own diamonds, etcetera.

Killing phantoms and hoping to salvage enough of their membrane to fix his wings just had to be added on his to-do list.

So he trudged through the humid jungle, dragged his leather boots (courtesy of Grian's closet) over the muddy ground, having nothing better to do other than read the texts on his communicator and laugh when someone said an awful pun. That 'someone' being mostly Grian.

Tommy was learning more and more about the hermits by the day, he realized; their personalities and reactions to disasters and all that. Like how Stress would replace letters in some words with "f"s and "v"s and freak out over zombies and skeletons alike, how Keralis called others "pretty" or referred to them (affectionately) as "princess" (he had tried to stifle many startled laughs when he was at the stables with him and Bdubs and Keralis was being all sappy), or how Grian threw puns left and right from out of nowhere. It was really interesting and very funny.

It was fun to see shenanigans unfold as well. Chat shenanigans, because he was still in the mess of greenery and vines and chirping parrots. Wait-! no, nevermind. He shook his head; he could tame one of the birds after he sorted out his stuff. Then, in that small moment of weakness of debating over taming a bird, he bumped face-first into a tree, recoiling and falling on his butt.

For once in his life, Tommy did not cuss the tree out for being in his way, or reprimanded it to watch where it's going, because, I will punt you straight to the fucking moon, as he'd normally say. He was... surprisingly calm, only giving the tree the stink eye and rubbing at his face before groaning, getting up, dusting off his pants and continuing on his merry way.

That was a thing he had noticed while living on Hermitcraft. He swore less, got angry less, worried somewhat less. Especially when he was around others, he stuck to the small words like "hell" and "damn" (the exception being that outburst with Iskall). Whether it was the safety of the world doing this or the disappointed faces the hermits gave him, he didn't know.

The subconscious really is a mystery.

Then again, the server wasn't safe anymore, was it? Someone was trying to break in and there was nothing they could do to stop it. Dream could burst in at any given moment; at a slip of awareness; in a moment of weak guard. He could bring forth the aurora of the North and the South over the sky of the server and laugh like the maniac he was, he could spread fire in the wooden houses of Scar's village, he could bomb the shopping district down to bedrock. And he would bring death with him, not just destroyed buildings; the axe of netherite with the blood of the poor, innocent hermits swinging to cause it. It would be Tommy's fault if the server barrier was torn in half. No. Not if, but when, because Dream was that stubborn and if he needed to, the admin would not hesitate to pull strings to have others help him out.