Chapter 6

Tim smiled and turned around. There he was. The dreamer.

It was himself without eyes. Eyes see the world, take in reality and he didn't have that. Tim knew that he would have to deal with that. Fantasy didn't have reality to temper the...the monsters. He had no eyes.

As horrific as the image of himself without eyes was, Tim forced himself to focus on it. If this really was some aspect of himself, then he should be able to anticipate. Even if it wasn't, there was no reason that they shouldn't be evenly matched.

...if he could force some reality in here.

"Mine!"

"Not anymore," Tim said. "If you're going to keep trying, you'll have to face me head-on. No more sneaking around. No more hiding in the shadows. I can dream, too."

The dreamer raised his hands over his head and tipped his face into the sky. As he did so, the world began to shift and change. Tim could see the change coming and he braced himself for impact.

The wind hit him and knocked him backward.

x.x.x.x.x.x.x

Tony winced as he saw the strangely colored wind beat Tim back. The dreamer laughed and came on with the wind whipping around him, his eyeless face never turning from his goal. Tim pushed back suddenly, waving his arms and producing a bright green light that somehow drove the dreamer back. Tim had never really done that before...but then, this was apparently a dream. So...it was possibly logical that Tim could do things he shouldn't be able to do.

Maybe.

Suddenly, there was a ripple...of the entire area and it became a desert wasteland. The dreamer screamed in anger. Another ripple and he and Tim were falling into the ocean. They hit the water and the waves began to churn madly. Before Tony could do more than inhale, there was another rippling of the world and it became a mountain valley with sharp spires stretching toward the heavens, shooting stars lighting up the sky and, somehow, lightning flashing over and over again. In each flash, he could see Tim and the dreamer circling ever closer to each other. Neither had physically attacked the other yet.

...but could that even happen? They were in a dream...only not.

Then, the dreamer swung his arm and there was a whirlwind of fire that sprang out of nowhere, enveloping Tim in it. Tony could hear Tim start to scream and the walls of his sanctuary shook.

I can't stand here and watch this, Tim!

To his surprise, there was a reply, faint and shaky.

You can control your dreams, Tony...

What? What did that mean? This wasn't Tony's dream. What could Tony do about it?

Then, he had a thought. Dreams. Tim had made his own dream fight off that of the dreamer. Maybe Tony could do the same thing.

But I'm not a knower, Tim! I'm not a dreamer! I'm just a plain old normal guy.

Try...

Tony tried to think of something that would change things...and he had a thought cross his mind. It was utterly and completely ridiculous, but it was something he could imagine in perfect detail. Well, what did he have to lose besides his life or the world? Nothing.

Tony smiled and closed his eyes.

...and then, opened his eyes and laughed.

The dreamscape had turned into a cartoon. A big bucket of water appeared out of thin air and poured over the fire, dousing it completely.

Tim and the dreamer both stopped and looked around in surprise. Tony saw a little smile on Tim's face as he realized what had just happened.

"Who did that?"

Tim took the opportunity presented and launched himself at the dreamer. He wasn't ready for the physical attack and Tim made contact. In fact, he barreled into the dreamer and knocked him to the ground. As soon as he did, the sanctuary vanished...but the world didn't. Tony turned around and saw it rolling away. Wondering if this was what he needed to do, Tony dove for the world and picked it up. He stared at it for a moment. It was strangely heavy and when he looked at it, he seemed to zoom in and he thought he could see...movement. The waves on the ocean...

I'm holding the world in my hands.

Tony was completed distracted for a moment by the fact that it appeared that he was really holding the world.

Why can't I feel myself shaking the world? Tony thought wildly for a moment.

...and then, another ripple of reality shook him out of his shock.

The cartoon world was gone, but what replaced it was nothing Tony could comprehend. It was changing every second as the dreamer screamed long and loud and Tim refused to let him go. Tony didn't know what would happen if Tim won, but he guessed that it would be very obvious.

...and what would happen to the world if Tim lost?

He didn't know...but right now, he could see that there was nothing he could do. It was all about Tim confronting the dreamer.

x.x.x.x.x.x.x

Tim held on as the dreamer struggled to get away. He hadn't been able to preserve the sanctuary once he'd managed to get a hold of the dreamer. Too many things going on in his mind at once and he'd drop all of them. So he dropped one, knowing that Tony could likely deal with the loss of a hiding place.

Then, he struggled to get his hand onto the dreamer's chest. He needed to stop him from fighting. He could feel the power the dreamer was exerting. It was like a constant wind beating him back. He had stopped looking at the landscape. Nothing of it mattered to what he was trying to do.

He pushed the dreamer flat on his back and then managed to get his tattooed palm on the center of his chest...over where the heart of a real person would be.

The dreamer became stiff, momentarily stunned by the contact. Tim was breathing heavily as he forced the dreamer to his feet, all the while keeping that contact steady. Then, he forced himself to look into those bottomless depths. He had to be willing to surrender himself to the endless depths of dreams if he was going to master them.

He kept the dreamer's holes in his gaze. As he stared, the holes seemed to get larger and larger and Tim knew he was liable to fall right into them. He had to surrender without giving himself up. As he stared and stared, he could almost swear that the world was getting smaller. It was boiling down to Tim and the dreamer and nothing else.

x.x.x.x.x.x.x

The swirling wind began to curl around Tim and the dreamer, and Tony wasn't sure what it meant. Did it mean that Tim was winning? Was he losing? Was it neither one?

He took a step forward, still holding the world tightly.

The wind was now just around them. The air was spinning so quickly that Tony couldn't see through it...but he noticed that Tim's eyes were starting to glow green, even as the dreamer's eyes were still those empty holes.

He took another step toward the pair.

Tim's tattooed hand appeared to be stuck to the dreamer's chest. They were as frozen as Gibbs had been.

"Tim..." Tony whispered and reached out toward them.

Wait...

Okay. Tony stood there, waiting to see what would come of this, hoping that it would be okay.

x.x.x.x.x.x.x

Tim felt himself being lost in the world of dreams. He had always hated having nightmares as a child. Every time one had come at him, he had been unable to deal with it and had taken hours to fall asleep again. He didn't like the dreams...and the dreamer had horrific ones.

...but he had to avoid fighting them. He had to be able to harness them and change them, not fight them.

I am the dreamer! It is mine!

Tim heard the declaration in his head. The dreamer was inside him...or was he inside the dreamer?

"No. We cannot have the one without the other. We're both needed...together. In one. You can't see. I can't dream...not like you. We need each other."

No! Mine! My dreams! My world!

The dreamer tried to pull away, but Tim wouldn't allow it. Now was the time. He had to take the step that frightened him. He had to take the step that would lead to something he didn't know and couldn't understand until it happened.

Taking a deep breath, he gathered the power he held and called it to him in a shout that pierced the dreams.

"Three into one!"

Instantly, Tim felt himself pulled apart...into three aspects of himself. His three selves surrounded the dreamer, each with a tattooed hand that was no longer just touching the dreamer but was penetrating the chest...meeting in the middle.

"Mind...body...heart..."

Tim paused...and there was a timeless moment when he looked at himself, looked at the dreamer...and he understood.

"Dreams..." he whispered.

He might as well have screamed it out. The dreamer spasmed and then split...into three dreamers. Each one was absorbed into one of the three Tims.

The joining of the dreamer into himself was a shock. More than a shock, Tim felt as though his mind was on fire with the force of the dreams unloaded as his three selves came back into one...with the dreamer inside them...inside him.

Tim stiffened and fell backwards, his tattooed hand now pointing at the sky. A surge of power that was like the worst agony he'd ever felt surged through him and he screamed.

His dragons burst out of his palm and writhed, the colors changing and and glowing and ebbing. They became first larger and then smaller. Then, they were one with three heads...then, three bodies and one head...and then, three dragons again. They swirled around each other as if they were a pile of snakes.

Their chaos was merely a reflection of Tim's own torment as he felt himself being changed and taken over and then not and then buried beneath insane visions and then alone in an abyss. There was no one moment of clarity. The understanding he'd found was gone. All he had left was the madness of what he had done. He felt himself being lost under the force of the onslaught.

...and then...

...not suddenly...

...gradually...

He felt a hand on his arm. A hand on his wrist. A hand reaching through the madness and grounding him in something else.

Reality.

A voice.

"Tim...can you hear me?"

Reality.

His dragons began to swirl around each other, the colors were the same and yet different. They had a more...metallic quality to them. They were harder, perhaps more powerful than they'd been before. Maybe.

"Please...I don't know what to do."

The dragons returned to his palm, taking up their place as the tattoo that had done more than mark him as a knower.

The hand was still there.

Reality began to spread.

There was more than a hand. More than a voice.

Tim blinked...and there was a sky.

He blinked again and he felt the ground beneath him.

Another blink and there was...

"Tony."

A relieved smile.

"Please...can you do something with this world? It's making me really nervous."

Another blink and Tim could feel himself again. The surge of dreams and visions was ebbing away...to a place within him. He wasn't sure he liked having it there, but it was and he couldn't change that now.

Tim looked at Tony.

"Can you hold it for a little while longer?"

"I guess so. It's kind of...freaky, you know."

Tim nodded.

"You're telling me."

"What just happened?" Tony asked.

"The dreamer...is a part of me...now."

"Why?"

"Because I need that...when I have to put the world back together again...because I broke it."

"Can you sit up? I don't like seeing you lying around like that. It's too close to you being dead."

"Help me?" Tim asked.

Tony nodded, shuffled the world to his other hand and then pulled Tim into a sitting position. Tim looked around and saw a clearing in the woods. No lake. No cliff. No fire. Just trees, a clear sky overhead.

...with nothing moving.

"How long can you keep it like this?"

"As long as I need to," Tim said.

Tony settled down beside him.

"Explain...please."

"I told you before that I broke the boundary between the real world and the supernatural world when I destroyed Mongothsberd. That's why I could have the personification of Darkness hovering over me."

"We saw it, too."

"That shouldn't exist, Tony. It's not real, but Mongothsberd shouldn't have been real, either. ...but I made it real and then I destroyed it. By doing that, I mixed up the line between reality and fantasy, if you want to call it that. I had to do it because the world couldn't have tolerated Mongothsberd forever, either. ...but I also made it worse. I can't fix it until it breaks, but I have to fix it, and I'm not ready to do that, not on my own, but it has to be me because I'm the one who had the power to break it. So I have to use that same power to fix it. I don't how much of all of this is due to Greta pulling the strings, but I'm sure she's involved in it somehow."

Tony looked mistrustful for a moment and he stared at the world he was holding in his hands.

"We're not fully in dreams anymore, Tony, but as soon as I set the world moving again, we'll be out, back in the real world."

"What about Gibbs?"

"I don't know who makes the Watchers. I didn't even know anything about them...but they're doing their part to keep these places separated, to keep things that shouldn't be existing in the real world from...breaking reality by being here. Darkness...Death...Sleep...even Dreams. These are things that are just concepts, but they've been given life...existence...and reality can't take that."

Tony looked at the world for a few more seconds and then looked at Tim.

"And what about you?"

"What about me?"

"When you fix this...problem...you've taken the dreamer inside yourself, you said. You have those dragons on your hand. You have all this power, Tim. What will happen to you if you separate reality and...and fantasy again? You're in both, aren't you?"

"I am...but I don't know what will happen. I just know that, no matter what happens, it's not bad enough to sacrifice all of reality for one person."

Tim smiled a little and then held out his hands. Tony gave the world back to him, looking more than a little relieved not to be holding it. Tim looked at the world, closed his eyes and imagined it moving once again. The world vanished.

Tim felt the soft breeze and heard the trees moving gently. He smiled.

"I can't believe you can do that," Tony said.

"I shouldn't be able to."

"But you do it."

"Because I have to."

Tony got to his feet and then held out his hand. Tim hesitated and then let Tony pull him to his feet. Slowly, the two men started back toward the road.

"Why?" Tony asked.

"Because I'm just trying to keep things moving along for as long as I can. Do you remember when I told you that I hoped that my one interaction with that other world was my last, that I could wait and pass it off to some other knower?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I can't do that. It's going to happen. Soon. When it does, I just hope that I can protect the world from the things I'll have to do to save it. If I can't, then, the world will be conscious of supernatural world and I don't know what will happen."

"I guess we'll have to make sure it doesn't, then."

"Yeah."

"Tony! McGee!"

They looked over and saw Gibbs walking toward them.

"Tony?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm...really glad that I picked you to be part of this."

"Really? I figured you just worked with what you had at hand."

"I did...at first, but not now."

"Thanks, McGee."

Tim grinned. "I don't know of any other person whose dream would have been a Looney Tunes cartoon."

Tony laughed. "It worked, didn't it?"

"Definitely got our attention."

"What happened?" Gibbs demanded.

Tony smiled.

"Some Watcher you are, Boss. You missed the whole thing!"

Thwack!

"That's what's supposed to happen," Gibbs said, although he seemed rather unhappy with that fact. "You all right, McGee?"

"Yeah. More or less."

"More...or less?"

"Less right now. I'll be fine tomorrow."

"Okay. We'll tell Ziva that you were sick...if she even remembers to ask."

"I don't think she will."

"Good," Tony said, fervently. "I don't want to have to explain what happened to her."

"She wouldn't believe it anyway. Boss?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm feeling kind of shaky right now. Would you mind if Tony drove my car back to my place?"

"You'll be okay there?"

"Yeah. I will. I just need to sleep...and dream."

"Dream?"

"Yeah. I can't tell you more than that."

"Yeah, I know."

He gestured and they walked back to the road...where Tim's car and Gibbs' car were both sitting, completely unaffected by the events that had occurred.

"So..." Tony said. "...all of it was just a dream?"

"Not just," Tim said. "But yes, it was a dream."

"Then, if that's the kind of thing we have to face, I'm glad you've got the dreamer working for you."

Tim nodded slightly, but it wasn't that simple...as Tony would discover the first time Tim tapped into the dreamer's power. For now, however, it was okay to have it be over. They went back to DC and found that the world had missed everything that had happened.

As it should have.