I'm mad and it's 3 AM so here's something angsty =m=

In this AU, Sabre actually never really leaves his original world (which is normal Earth here), and rather experiences the events of RQ as a sort of dream.

In the normal world, Sabre had been in a terrible accident, which resulted in him becoming comatose and being kept in the hospital. He has very short periods of time where he's sort of awake, but it's like sleep paralysis and he's unable to move, and after just a few minutes he falls asleep again. Friends visit him while he's in the hospital, of course, but they never see him awake.

While he's comatose, Sabre is transported to the world of RQ in his mind, it being a very different universe from their own and for some reason able to be accessed within dreams. Sabre is the only case of it happening, though. The Steves and the world of RQ could look different from normal, since the world is like that of a dream and can ignore normal rules of reality (the Steves not looking entirely like people, things in the world being weird colors, physics being weird, etc).

When he first enters the world, Sabre barely remembers anything about the accident he was in, only knowing something extremely dangerous happened to him and this is not the world he's supposed to be in. At first, he's worried that he's dead and it's some sort of afterlife, but the moments of the sleep-paralysis-like state (which Sabre in the dream just blanks for a minute during) disproves that pretty soon.

Over time throughout the story, Sabre very slowly remembers things about the accident he was in. I'll leave what the accident was up to whoever claims this (maybe a car crash or explosion or something), but he could remember things like what he was doing before it happened, or who was there if someone was with him, or anything strange he saw before it happened. The memories could be caused by something similar in the RQ world happening and triggering it. Void could have possibly found a way to go to the normal world somehow and caused the accident, since he's the reason why Sabre found the tomb in the main series.

During the sleep paralysis thing, Sabre can hear and see the Steves he's close with and trusts in the hospital room if they were in physical contact with him when his dream-world-self blanks, or they know that they can just touch him while his dream-world-self blanks and it'll be the same outcome. Orange/Rainbow, Time, Dark, and Therapist Green could be the ones that are able to do this. The sleep-paralysis-like thing doesn't happen while Sabre is controlled by Shadow.

Speaking of, during really intense moments of the story such as Nightmare killing Sabre or Shadow controlling him, Sabre in the normal world is struggling to stay alive. When Nightmare kills him, Sabre could actually 'die' for a bit while he's in the World Beyond, and Sabre getting revived is him successfully being revived by doctors in the normal world.

The Steves do have a prophecy with Sabre being involved, it saying that a catalyst from another world would be trapped in theirs, and that catalyst would be only the mind of him since his body is extremely damaged and needs to heal. The Steves kind of tend to treat Sabre as if he's fragile because of that last part.

Das it, might make more stuff with this later but like I said it's 3 AM lol