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The sun is setting.
Wet sand grates on Tommy’s skin, but he can’t bring himself to sit up. It was a bit more bearable when the waves would roll in over his legs, but with the receding tide, he hasn’t felt the water in about half an hour, leaving the sand to crust and dry on his legs and arms. His own chest rises and falls with the sound of the waves. Although he can’t see the sun from where he stares up at the sky, he can see its colors change from blue to yellow to dark pinks and purples, gently mixing among the clouds.
Sand crunches by his ear, underneath a boot. Tommy’s willing to bet it’s a netherite boot, Dream’s netherite boot, because only one person showed up today, and it certainly wasn’t Tubbo, wasn’t Fundy, wasn’t Ranboo, wasn’t Phil. It wasn’t anyone from L’Manberg at all.
“You’re still laying here?”
It’s Dream’s voice.
“Well, what the fuck else am I s’posed to be doing?” Tommy mumbles. “Here to take my armor after all?”
Dream snorts. “No. Here to make sure a zombie didn’t eat you.”
Tommy rolls his eyes. His head lolls to the side, and he finally sees Dream’s mask as he looms over him.
“It’s been four hours, Tommy. You seriously haven’t moved?”
“Don’t want to,” Tommy huffs, a little louder than before. “I’m enjoying the sand. The beach. The sunset. The sand is bending to my will. You’ll see this when I get up, you know, there’ll be a Tommy-shaped imprint in the sand and not even the water can change it.”
Dream sighs, lifting his head to stare out at the ocean. “It’s going to get dark soon. You don’t plan on sleeping on the beach, do you?”
“The sand’s pretty comfortable,” Tommy lies.
Dream turns his head back towards Tommy. “Oh, is it now?” he says. He squats down next to Tommy, beyond the point where Tommy can see. Tommy cranes his neck, but doesn’t manage to catch a glimpse of anything until he feels the awful texture of wet sand on his bare ankle.
“H-hey, hey!” Tommy exclaims, moving to sit up, but he gets a firm hand planted on his chest, knocking a bit of the air out of him and shoving him back down into the sand. “Dream, what the fuck- ”
“I’m tucking you in for the night,” Dream says with a snicker.
“With sand?!?”
“You said it was comfortable. Now hold still, and don’t move your legs.”
Tommy sputters for a moment, trying to sit up again, but Dream’s hand on his sternum is unyielding. “Dream!”
“Chill out, Tommy, have you never been buried in sand before?” Dream says. He doesn’t wait for an answer before he continues, patting sand onto Tommy’s calf and ignoring his protests. “You know, I was expecting something like that to happen the moment Tubbo got here. Or maybe Fundy, you know, he’s the one more inclined to do pranks. But since they didn’t come, I guess I’ve got to make sure you don’t miss out.”
Tommy jerks his leg, breaking the packed layer of sand and throwing it in the air. Some of it smacks against Dream’s mask.
“Are you trying to rub it in?” Tommy says.
In reply, he gets a light smack to his leg, and the hand on his chest pushes a little harder. Tommy wheezes.
“Come on, Tommy, just go with it for a bit.”
Tommy gets more sand patted over his leg. He kicks it off again.
Dream sighs. “I can keep you here until you stop kicking it off, you know.”
And it’s true - there’s no way Tommy could fight Dream’s iron strength, especially not with his armor on him and everything. That’d just be a bad idea. He tilts his head backwards until the back of his skull thunks against the sand, and he lets out an exasperated groan. “Fucking - fine, just get it over with. You’re a fucking weirdo, you know that?”
“So you’ve said,” Dream mutters, once more covering Tommy’s leg in sand. It’s cold and moist, dug from the ground around his feet where the water touched most recently. Tommy tries not to shiver as it touches his thighs, just under the hem of his shorts - then it starts getting piled on top of his clothes as Dream works his way up.
“What’s the point of this?” Tommy groans again. “You’re gonna get sand in my everything. ”
“Oh, come on, it’s not that bad,” Dream says. Tommy’s hips are now covered in sand. He pauses for a moment, then says, “Hey. Wanna know something? A secret?”
Tommy instantly quiets, but he also furrows his brows. A secret? Why would Dream be telling him secrets? “There’s not a catch, is there?”
Dream laughs. “No.”
“...Alright, what’s your secret?”
Dream lifts his hand from Tommy’s chest and instead takes Tommy’s wrists, placing his arms at his sides and beginning to cover his hands with sand. “Whenever I would go to the beach with Sapnap, he would find every excuse to do this to me. At first I fought it, but then I realized it’d be better to just get it over with. He’d chase me down, throw sand in my face, tackle me in the water - no way I was going to keep putting up with that, so I just let him bury me.”
Tommy raises a brow. “So now you’re taking it out on me, is that it?”
“No,” Dream says. “I got used to it. Eventually, I was the one looking forward to it. It felt nice. And it was pretty funny. I think Sapnap still has some photos of me with just my head uncovered.”
Tommy snorts as his brain conjures an image of nothing but Dream’s masked head poking out of the sand. “You’re not taking fucking photos of me like that, are you?”
“I don’t have a camera on me. Maybe next time.”
“Next time?!?” Tommy exclaims, shrill, but he’s laughing a little anyway. “You bitch, don’t you dare!”
Dream continues to snicker as he packs sand onto Tommy’s chest, atop his shirt. “Could add this to your routine! A healthy dose of getting buried in the sand.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Tommy huffs. “I could break all this sand right now! I’ll do it!”
“But then you’ll have to do it allllllllll over again,” Dream says. He pats a clump of sand onto Tommy’s shoulder. “And look, you’re almost done!”
Tommy sighs. Whatever. It’s not the worst thing Dream’s done to him - far from it, in fact. And, opposite of how he’d been feeling about the sand earlier, the light pressure of the sand on top of him isn’t… all bad. It feels like a weighted blanket. Like a gentle hug. It’s so incongruent with the rest of his shit day that it surprises him. He clicks his jaw shut and lets Dream pack the final bits of sand around his collarbone.
“All tucked in,” Dream says.
“This is so fucking stupid,” Tommy mutters, but it turns into a fit of giggling as he tilts his head downwards and sees his entire body covered in sand.
“You don’t sound too miserable.”
“Fuck you!”
“You’re laughing.”
Tommy lets his head fall back again as the movement from his laughter starts to crack the sand on top of him. He feels tears prick at the corners of his eyes, and realizes with a start that he missed this kind of fooling around. He missed it, and he missed it bad. He wishes he would look up and see Tubbo’s face smiling down at him, laughing at him for staying in the sand long enough for him to get completely buried.
Instead, it’s Dream. And a part of him thinks - well, Dream’s the only one that bothered to show up. Does he really want Tubbo here, instead?
That feeling sits, ugly, in the pit of his stomach.
“Alright, you can get up now,” Dream says, dusting his hands off and letting granules of sand fall to the ground. “I have to go soon, and I’m not leaving you on the beach.”
Go? Tommy doesn’t want him to go yet. Even if the sun’s already dipped below the horizon, and the last dregs of light are bouncing across the water, Tommy isn’t ready for the day to be over. He was supposed to have a party. And a party without Tommy causing trouble isn’t a party at all.
“Dream, wait,” he blurts. “Dream, I’m stuck.”
Dream looks at him quizzically. “I did not bury you that deep.”
“No, I’m serious! Come here, get it off of me!”
Skeptically, Dream kneels down a little closer and reaches forward to brush some of the sand away. In that moment, Tommy throws his entire body at Dream, limbs flailing, sand flying. He knocks him over, covering him in sand, and mashes soggy granules into his hood.
Revenge is sweet.
“Tommy, what the fuck,” Dream wheezes. In another moment, Tommy feels himself being turned over, pinned to the ground once again, and all he feels is sand. Sand on his skin, sand in his hair, sand digging into his wrists where Dream’s sand-covered hands are gripping him, sand, sand, sand. He’s fucking sick of sand, slipping everywhere, impossible to catch. He looks up at Dream’s mask, closer than he’s ever seen it before, and he wonders if any sand slipped behind it.
Softly, he hears a pleh sound.
“You got it in my mouth. ”
Tommy barks a loud laugh, voice cracking as he does. And this time, Dream laughs with him. Tommy feels the pressure on his wrists letting up, and then he feels a soft pressure on his face, grains of sand on his chin, and he stops to look down.
It’s Dream’s hand. Tommy’s cheeks turn bright red, unbidden, and he knows it because he can feel his skin get hot across the span of just a couple of seconds. His laughter turns to stammering.
“D-Dream, what the fuck-?”
There’s a rough swipe against his skin and then Dream’s hand pulls away. “There was frosting on your face from earlier,” he says.
Tommy blinks. “What?”
“The cake you made? For your party? You had some, right?”
Tommy thinks he remembers that. That was hours ago, though, and to think he’d been so distraught he hadn’t even noticed…?
“Oh. Thanks, then, I guess,” Tommy mumbles.
A moment passes, then Dream stands up. He holds out a hand to Tommy. “Come on, get up. Let’s go wash all that sand off.” He jerks a thumb towards the ocean at his back.
Tommy takes it.