#jmah!dream has all the problems guys

[cdroloisms]

j!Dream and freedom. What does it taste like. How does he sleep. He knows where Sam’s island is.

just remembered that i had this ask ive been saving since before i went on my trip HALLELUJA H

j!Dream and freedom :(( he meets up with Punz and tells him nothing. Been a while, huh? Sorry, sorry, things went a little--yeah. Thanks. His new armor doesn't fit very well, and one of his first tasks is just roughly grinding it down to fit better. Netherite is heavy. He is...not.

Daedalus in JMAH comes and goes. It lasts a little longer than canon, until j!Dream realizes that he can't fucking think about Sam as long as he's in the prison, as long as they're under the same roof, and kills him with an axe to the heart. It should keep him from thinking about Sam so much. (It works some. Just not as much as he'd hoped.) He sleeps worse, though, with Sam out there. With nothing to anchor himself to. The inside of the prison leaves his heart hammering, sometimes, the adrenaline making it impossible to get any rest--a few times, he collapses outside when Pandora is too much to bear, only to wake up to mobs at all sides. He's lucky that no one else finds him, he supposes. (He wishes--)

The problem with killing Sam to put him out of his mind is that he knows where he is. Always. He keeps a boat in his inventory justincase, finds his feet carrying himself towards beaches leading towards it when his mind wanders. (His mind wanders a lot. He feels like he can't keep his damn head on straight anymore.) Some stupid, sick part of his head is always keeping track, a compass pointed north, a goddamn rope around his neck no matter how far he flees. He's not sure what he would do, if he found Sam for real. He's not sure what the Warden would do with a new scar over his chest. Better to not know, really.

He keeps a notebook on him, fantasies and nightmares and memories all overlapping. He hates looking at it, and sometimes it feels like the only thing keeping him sane. (He keeps a collection of potion bottles on him as well, despite the demand on inventory space. If anyone asks, well, sometimes, the only thing that can clear his head is a sip of harming, but hey. Who's asking? Not Sam, anymore.) He'd never been one to pride himself on his handwriting, but between broken fingers and the wither damage and the way that his hands won't stop shaking, it's gotten quite a bit worse. Half of the words are scratched out anyway, so it's not like that matters. It's not like anyone else will be reading this. (Sam...would sometimes give him books to write. A stupid punishment, obviously, but Dream learned to look forward to them--something to do other than sitting and staring at a wall. Even if the thing to do was just writing down his crimes a hundred times, or whatever.) There's a page that's just the word eat written a couple dozen times in an effort to reproduce the sound of the Warden's voice in his head. And so it goes.

Dream is free, his own prison falling into disrepair around him. Sometimes, he can almost pretend that he's not still waiting for Sam to come back.

[theminecraftbox]

no idea if ur still doing the top 5 thing and feel free to ignore this bc we haven't actually talked about four square like at all on our blogs asdlfjs but bc im genuinely curious - top 5 four square AU dynamic duos? 👀

:D

For those not in the know (which tbh is probably most everybody), the Foursquare AU is a thought experiment (and eventual fic? Someday) by me and Dr3 premised on… what if we DreamXD took JMAH!Dream and c!Dream, and forced them to sit in a box and ✨bond✨? Because, as we’ve established, they’d kinda hate each other.

But Kat, I hear you say, that’s only two people, and it’s called foursquare! An excellent point, which is why the Dreams receive sets of periodic visitors! So far, they’ve enjoyed the company of j!Techno and c!Techno, then j!Sam and c!Sam, then j!Quackity and c!Quackity, then combinations thereof… you get the picture.

Naturally some of these pairs are better disposed towards each other than others. This ranking was so hard because I LOVE THEM ALL, UGH. There is literally something fascinating about every duo.

Honorable Mention: c!Techno and j!Dream

j!Dream has spent ages without any sort of lighthearted company whatsoever. c!Techno is used to bringing a hostile and wounded Dream out of his shell. I’m soft about them; I’m soft about the ways in which the Technos, and c!Techno in particular due to his experience, are the only people here both willing and prepared to go to bat for either Dream. j!Dream is getting so damn invalidated by everyone and c!Techno stands up to that.

5. j!Sam and c!Quackity

This one kind of edges a lot into the c!Quackity and j!Dream dynamic, too, because it’s all about c!Quackity coming to terms with the idea of j!Sam as a calculated torturer. Not just an overseer of torture, not just someone violent—but someone who, for much longer than even c!Quackity had the patience and stomach for, tried to systematically destroy a man’s will using pain. c!Quackity is annoyed, and angry, and disturbed, and outraged by the hypocrisy (and he absolutely makes all of this the Dreams’ problem). And for j!Sam, c!Quackity is the specter of one of his greatest failures, someone he blames for the prison’s collapse and someone he holds up as a comforting standard to compare himself against: as long as he’s not c!Quackity, he’s not a torturer. It’s a delicious conflict.

4. c!Quackity and j!Quackity

COMEDY DUO! Everyone clap!! These guys are insta-bffsies, instant drinking buddies, and instantly make each other worse. They’re willing to egg each other on, they’re willing to encourage each other, and they’re ready to make everything into a game they’re both winning. They’re each other’s sympathetic audience, and they’re a reminder of their own humanity—not in a wholesome way, but in a grimy, laughing, down-to-earth way. They look at each other and they’re mildly afraid of what they see—and that’s a good thing, isn’t it? That’s a great fucking thing, isn’t it! Also they spend hours gossiping about whatever the fuck is UP with Sam and Dream, so fucking weird right? So they get instant rights for that.

3. c!Dream and j!Sam

j!Dream buckles under the awful weight of j!Sam’s conditioning, and c!Dream sees the horrifying, inescapable extension of what he—and Sam—could have become. Consequently, he resists as strenuously as possible, even—and especially—when the smart move would be to give in. For j!Sam, c!Dream is his white whale, the one that got away. Drawing the differences between the two Dreams makes it more clear than ever to j!Sam that c!Dream was never actually his, not truly… and even j!Dream escaped him too, didn’t he? So much of what j!Sam did and does to j!Dream is actually aimed at or in payment for what c!Dream did or is. They have some Shit To Prove to each other.

2. c!Sam and j!Sam

Oh god there’s two of them. If you thought the Quackitys exacerbated each other’s worst tendencies, hoo boy, they’ve got NOTHING on these two. Sam is a people pleaser at heart; his rationale for whether or not a thing is Right is in large part whether or not he thinks that someone else in possession of the full facts and his perspective would agree with him. He martyrs himself to a lonely idea of justice because he’s quietly and terrifyingly afraid that he WON’T ever get this validation, and that no one will ever tell him “I understand what you’re doing and you’re right to do it.” Well. Guess who’s validating him now? His other self, who he confusingly regards as both literally, tangibly him (and unlike any of the other pairs, it’s true that j!Sam actually is just a future version of c!Sam), and as another sane and trustworthy perspective on this whole mess. Every time one of the Sams hesitates, he glances at his compatriot and feels heartened. They’re in the right. Plus there’s the strange sense of proprietary protection they feel over their respective Dreams. It makes for a nauseous, heady brew.

1. c!Dream and j!Dream

Oh. Oh. Them. They hate each other. And the awful poisonous terrible cruel thing is, self-hatred isn’t something particularly innate to Dream. (In fact, it’s not a major demon of any of the prison trio). The festering loathing he directs at his counterpart is a direct response to seeing his own trauma reflected in another (weaker? Stronger?) version of himself. He’s gone through fucking HELL and he’s still there, and the only target he’s free to rail against is this other self. This self whose flaws he can pick at in the same way his abusers do, and who he can viciously mock for being unable to stand up under the weight of that abuse. They each have a taste now of EXACTLY what each other has been through, and this weight of shared trauma has only made them more awful to each other, because what’s the damn alternative? What’s the alternative, is it to admit that they aren’t coping?

But they’re allies! Without thought and without question, they’re allies. They work together well. They nearly managed to win a fight against steep, steep odds with nothing but grit and desperation.

When they shared that one soft moment (you know the one, right when they surrendered, when j!Dream squeezed c!Dream’s wrist because they knew what was about to happen) I wanted to fucking cry.

[cdroloisms]

can I have a refresher on the plot of the just him and me au? I got super brainrotty over it when y'all first made it but then i forgot my tumblr password for like ages

hello hello again anon! don't worry talking about jmah is like my bread and butter i can do it literally all day every day it's SO bad this AU changed my brain chemistry forever i stg 😭

here's a link to my tag on the AU, and if you go to @theminecraftbox kat also has her tag linked for you to look through a lot of JMAH rambling XD. For a general outline on the concept and timeline, JMAH (or just me and him AU) is a concept that starts with c!Sam, freshly killed at the end of the Daedalus arc, getting tp-ed back into his old body right as c!Tommy is about to enter for his first prison visit on January 21st, 2021. He comes to terms with what's going on pretty fast and decides that this time around, he's going to take things more seriously. This time, he's going to do it right.

That leads into the JMAH prison arc, which--true to the name of the AU--consists of just j!Sam and j!Dream for as long as j!Sam can manage it. Here's a quick rundown of major events:

January 21st, 2021 - j!Sam first gets tp-ed into the prison again. He prevents Tommy from actually ever visiting Dream, marching him out of the prison and immediately banning visitors to Pandora's Vault entirely. He goes back to the cell, freaks out at a very confused j!Dream, confiscating most of the items in the cell (taking the clock, blowing up the chest and lectern and cauldron to collect them), j!Dream's potatoes, and his mask. j!Dream fights when j!Sam tries to take his mask--it doesn't go very well. He gets pretty badly beaten and j!Sam himself doesn't come out unscathed either.

January 22nd, 2021 - j!Sam modifies the cell entirely--adds a lot more dispensers along the back, adding the crying obsidian, and most importantly adding a row of glass with a piston door to keep j!Dream locked in the back of the cell with only about two or three blocks of space from the glass to the back wall. A return system very similar to the one in c!Ponk's cell is installed. j!Dream is reeling and injured and kinda in shock about what the hell is going on with Sam, what - and as j!Sam starts putting harming potions in the dispensers above his head, he starts to realize that. Oh. He might be a little bit fucked.

January 24th, 2021 - j!Quackity tries propositioning j!Sam for Las Nevadas. j!Sam emphatically refuses, makes some weird implications about j!Quackity wanting to torture j!Dream (??? what ??? like not that the thought didn't cross his mind but what the FUCK??) and is ultimately pretty cagey and aggressive in ways that pretty thoroughly sour j!Quackity to the guy, especially when he learns about the weirdness that happened with j!Tommy's prison visit. The two of them start hanging out more, and in the process start theorizing that maybe j!Sam is in with the enemy--maybe j!Dream has played them all. (Around this time, j!Sam also seals up the Egg Room. Okay, problem boxed fixed, not his problem now!)

~March, 2021 - Lacking any updates from inside the prison, j!Ranboo sets off the TNT in a last ditch attempt to try and communicate with the man inside. j!Dream is heartened by the reminder that he's not been forgotten, but also faces Consequences for this. He's slowly coming to terms with j!Sam's deal and trying to figure out what the hell he's going to have to do to survive it and get out of here. On the other hand, the TNT freaks out j!Sam badly--even now, even after everything he's done, j!Dream is still hiding things from him. Still getting things past him. It's a pretty rough day for them both.

~ May 2021 - j!Quackity and j!Tommy's efforts to break into the prison to figure out what the hell is going on finally bears fruit in a convoluted, definitely-should-not-work-in-the-slightest-by-any-stretch-of-the-imagination kind of plan that. Miraculously. Somehow. Does manage to work, through a combination of j!Sam being a little too careless and distracted and hey like after you try different things like a hundred different times maybe you'll come up with something a little less bound to fail on step one and sheer, plain, dumb luck - they manage to break in while dragging Ghostbur with them, wanting information on what's going on (and j!Quackity, of course, looking for information on the revive book.) Once they get to the cell, all hell breaks loose - in the chaos, as j!Sam makes harming rain down from the dispensers to try and gain control, j!Dream ends up reviving j!Wilbur before j!Sam arrives in the cell. j!Sam maims and kills j!Quackity, taking two fingers and a life, and then once again throws j!Tommy out of the prison. IT's the first major deviance from the old timeline, and it is. a Huge blow to j!Sam, who has otherwise been convincing himself that everything has been running smoothly thus far. It's a awful cocktail of some of the moments from the old timeline where he felt the most out of control (taking Ponk's arm, watching Tommy die, being unable to stop Dream from reviving Wilbur, Quackity's visits) and it shakes him up badly. His relationships have been slowly burning as this timeline has proceeded - despite managing to not torture and maim j!Ponk this time around (woo great job for that one j!Sam) they had a very messy + very public breakup, j!Tommy's complaining hasn't really done his reputations any favors, cutting off the rest of the Badlands and not keeping j!Bad and j!Ant as guards hasn't helped their relationships at all, and he's also just . Been holing himself in the prison. This incident gets pretty publicized and only ends up making his reputation worse - and j!Sam ends up spending even more time within the prison.

~ November, 2021 - Tired of j!Sam's bullshit, j!Quackity's planning goes from 'trying to figure out what's going on' to full on Butcher Army, time to plan a coup. Enlisting j!Techno for the cause (hey, they've got to have a shared grudge against j!Sam, right?) he starts planning a takeover of the prison. He's going to take out j!Sam, trap him, j!Dream, and j!Techno inside the prison, and get the keycards for himself. Time for him to be top dog, whatever. His plan goes off pretty well...except for how j!Techno had a stasis pearl and manages to leave before he gets to him. Whoops. Still, he's got j!Dream and j!Sam and an axe he's been grinding for months--time to get the keycard and get the Revive Book and get his fucking revenge for good.

~ end of November, 2021 - j!Techno returns not too long after gathering some supplies necessary to break in and break out of the prison again, the weak points being. Much, much more shoddily patched together, given that they were fixed by j!Quackity. At this point, j!Quackity has been visiting the cell daily for about two weeks, mostly focusing on j!Sam because he's really fucking angry about the whole "oh yeah i maimed and killed you lol" thing and because...honestly j!Dream isn't even as fun or as satisfying, mans has a pretty high pain tolerance and isn't nearly as scared of him as he is of disappointing his Warden >:/. j!Techno arrives, j!Quackity books it the hell out of there, and he's left with j!Sam and j!Dream in the prison. He's here to break j!Dream out, obviously...but what to do with Sam? Dream tells him he'll handle it.

about a week later - j!Dream returns. j!Sam had told Quackity about the time travel, j!Dream wants the keycards (and with the threat of j!Quackity coming back, j!Sam is definitely pretty willing to give them over, relatively speaking) and...j!Dream wants answers. JMAH Daedalus goes on for a stretch of time that I don't think we firmly decided on before j!Dream kills j!Sam with an axe to the heart, and...j!Sam is left back at where he started. One life down and wondering how it all went so wrong.

Of course, these are just most of the main ~events~ in the timeline and honestly, these don't really touch on how things develop within the prison at all. That's covered more in other posts about JMAH--which, definitely check em out if you're interested :D Or ask more questions, of course. I'm always down to brainrot about themb.