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Every night, he dreams the same dream. It's a simple one, usually: he closes his eyes to sleep, and opens them to the sight of the void stretching around him. The first time he hadn't thought much of it. Everyone dreams of common fears sometimes, of falling, drowning, succumbing to the void. His second time entering the dream, he’d felt confused; the third, concerned. By now, though, he barely gives the dreams a passing thought. If anything he finds them comforting. No more nightmares; just the blanket of the void, pressing in until he nearly forgets that anything else could exist.
The dreams had started with the onset of the sixth season. Initially Doc had worried that something in his player data had been corrupted during the transfer between worlds and went to ask Xisuma for help, but the admin had found nothing wrong with him. Xisuma had asked him to describe his dreams. When he did, the other went very quiet for a long moment.
“Have you ever heard of the Watchers?” Xisuma had asked. Doc had shaken his head, frowning. Xisuma sounded almost reverent when saying the name, voice lowered as if there was something dangerous about speaking it too loudly.
“That doesn't surprise me. Not many people do, these days. It's probably for the best.”
Sometimes he sees them from afar: winged figures in pale white masks and rippling cloaks drifting through the nothing. They never come closer, but he can feel the weight of their dispassionate gazes on him. He wakes from those dreams unable to shake the paranoia from his skin, spends the day isolated in his base constructing weapons.
“They're the observers of the universe,” Xisuma had told him. “The last remnants of the gods, fragments of their dying ashes. All-knowing, omnipresent; the religious would say all-powerful, but they keep away from humanity too much to be sure. Some call them our protectors. I don't think they're doing it out of any sort of altruism, though.”
One night he opens his eyes expecting the void and instead sees Grian. He thinks he should be startled, but his emotions have never worked quite right in dreams. “Hello,” Doc says. “You shouldn't be here.”
Grian, for his part, looks all the spitting image of a disheveled bird. “I shouldn't be here?” he splutters. His feathers are a dark velvety purple, Doc notices, not at all like the bright reds and blues he associates with the man. “How are you even alive? This place isn't meant for mortals!”
“You look different,” Doc observes. “Is it really you, or just a dream? I've never met someone here.” Grian's infinite eyes widen twice on his face. “Is that why they wear those masks?” Doc muses.
“You need to leave,” Grian says, and grabs Doc by his arm.
Pain. Overwhelming, blinding pain; the void is everywhere, dissolving his being until he doesn't know where he starts and the void ends. Here is where the gods were born and died, where someday the last pieces of creation will fall into its hungry gaping jaws; in a flash he understands why the Watchers feed it all the knowledge of the universe, it's a desperate attempt to sate its hunger, to stave off the inevitable moment that its gluttony grows too much to be appeased and they too will be consumed–
“–sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to– Doc, can you hear me? Please, I swear–”
The avian is standing in front of him, hands hovering like he wants to help but doesn't know what will happen if he touches again.
“...This is real,” Doc says. He hadn't been sure until now if the dreams were just a figment of his imagination, the details of the distant gods he saw filled in by Xisuma’s stories. He wonders what would happen if he died here, if his soul would be fated to wander forever while his body slept far away.
The difference between thought and speech isn't so clear in a dream; Grian must have caught some or all of that because he says frantically, “You're not going to die!”
“Why am I here, Grian?” Doc asks.
“I’m sorry,” Grian says. “It's all my fault, I don't know how any of this happened.”
His vision starts to go blurry in the way he knows means he's waking up. The last thing he hears is Grian’s voice saying, “I'll fix this, I promise.”
Doc’s eyes slam open, heart pounding as he shoves away the sheets in his bed. It's barely morning–he can just see the first rays of dawn pouring in through his window–but he knows he won't be able to fall back asleep.
Just as suddenly as they came, the dreams are gone. If he didn't know better, he could almost believe he had imagined the whole thing.
When he next sees Grian, the avian averts his eyes and says, “It's taken care of.”
He thinks that Grian would answer his questions, out of guilt if nothing else. He sees the tense line of Grian’s shoulders, hears the strained tones of his voice, and says:
“Thank you.”
Grian looks up, expecting more; when he realizes nothing is coming, he visibly relaxes. “Tell me if something’s wrong,” he says. Doc nods in response, and that's that.
Except.
Sometimes, when Doc is alone, he feels them watching him. When he flies through the End to capture its guardian as a pet, he feels the void below calling to him. Not in words, but in knowledge, knowledge of the futility of resistance, knowledge of wings and power and the workings of the world his own to wield.
The idea is tempting, he must admit. Someday he'll ask Grian the questions he knows the other man doesn't want to hear, and have to make a decision. For now, though, he's content with what he has, and so he turns his back on the darkness and returns to his friends.