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“Here,” Dream says, holding out a pill and a glass of water for George. George props himself up on the bed and opens his mouth. Dream places the pill on his tongue, and brings the water to his lips.
George grimaces at the taste, and swallows.
“Thanks,” he rasps. Dream tries not to cringe.
“Sure.” Dream sets the glass of water on George’s bedside table. “I’ll bring breakfast in soon.”
George starts to cough, violent and wracking, and Dream shuts the door.
...
George was diagnosed with tuberculosis four months ago.
Dream was vaccinated when he was younger, which was both very lucky and very convenient, because they were already living together, and that meant that George could avoid all the weird live-in nurse business and just have Dream stay home and take care of him.
It isn’t that bad, really, Dream thinks. Sure, it’s a little inconvenient, having to wait on George hand and foot at almost all hours of the day, but he loves George, right? It really isn’t a big deal, when you put it into perspective.
The pills rattle in their lavender container.
Everything is going to be okay.
...
“How long is this going to take?” Sapnap asks. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, shirt crumpled in the corner of his bedroom, the sliver of light from the cracked open door making his skin glow rust-colored.
“I told you we had to be patient,” Dream says from the other side of the bed, but he’s facing Sapnap’s back. “We can’t rush this. The circumstances lined up perfectly for this to happen. I’m not gonna waste this opportunity by letting us get caught.”
Sapnap sighs. “I know. It just feels like this has been going on forever. I just want it all to be over, you know?”
“Yeah,” Dream says. “It’s only a few more months. It’ll all be worth it in the end.”
Sapnap turns to look at him, a smile crawling along his cheeks. “I know it will.”
Dream swallows.
...
“I don’t think I’m getting better,” George says, just as Dream screws the bottle shut.
“Don’t say that,” Dream says, looking up at him. “It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.” He reaches out a hand to caress George’s face, and George closes his eyes and sighs, leaning into his touch.
“We both know that isn’t true,” George says, and his words are sorrow-laced, but they make Dream freeze, if only for a second. He strokes his thumb across George’s cheekbone, hoping it distracts him from his momentary hesitation.
“It is,” Dream says, and he tries to sound like he really believes it. He tries to sound like he thinks George is going to be okay. “Just keep fighting. Don’t give up, George. I need you to stay with me.” Dream feels tears welling in his eyes, and he lets them fall. Dream thinks they might even mean something.
George turns away, and the room feels colder. His hand feels cold without George’s skin beneath it, and dread lines Dream’s stomach.
“Just give me some space, Dream,” George says.
He leaves without a word.
..
“This is harder than I thought it would be,” Dream says. They’re sitting on Sapnap’s deck, and Dream scrubs at his neck. It’s hot out here, too hot for Dream’s tastes, but Sapnap likes the heat. He’s willing to put up with it for him.
Sapnap looks at him, eyebrows knit tightly together. “Are you changing your mind? Because I feel like we’re a little too deep into this to change our minds, now.”
“I’m not changing my mind,” Dream says, but he isn’t too sure. George’s awareness of his own death, fast approaching, was jarring, to say the least. “It’s just…” he trails off. Just what?
It’s just that it’s all happening too quickly. George is coughing blood, pressing scarlet speckled tissues into his hands. His eyes are starting to look hollow, lifeless. George’s breath is a foul, putrid thing, and Dream struggles to stop himself from wrinkling his nose when George speaks too close to his face. His voice is rough, and he speaks short sentences, often dissolving into loud, convulsing coughs following.
It’s like living with a corpse.
“It’s nothing,” Sapnap says firmly. “You can’t start having second thoughts now, Dream. Just remember that this is the best thing for everyone. I mean, wouldn’t you rather die thinking you’re loved than live knowing you aren’t? Everything is going to be easier for us after this. Eyes on the prize.”
“Eyes on the prize,” Dream echoes.
He can feel his shirt clinging to his skin. “I’m going inside,” he mutters, and stands up from his chair.
Sapnap doesn’t protest.
..
Dream’s hand is twisting the door knob when he hears George say, “Dream.” His name sounds foreign from George’s mouth.
He swallows the apprehension creeping into his throat and turns around. “What is it, George?”
“Can you just - can you just keep me company, for a little while? It’s getting lonely in here,” George says, and his voice sounds desperate, hollow.
Guilt sears his skin.
“Sure,” Dream says, and he feels nauseous, but he walks over to the chair next to George’s bed and sits down. He can hear the blue bottle of pills rattling in his pocket.
He takes George’s hand in his, and his skin is dry, brittle. He can feel his bones through the paper-thin flesh, and he holds it like it might crumble away if he holds it too tightly. It feels fragile, lifeless - like a forgotten doll.
George’s hand is limp in Dream’s, and then, just for a moment, Dream can feel it gently squeeze his.
Dream looks down at their entwined hands, tangled yarn, and then he looks up at George, who’s staring right back at him, so intensely Dream’s breath snags and doesn’t quite make its way out of his chest.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Dream whispers.
“I’m thinking about you,” George whispers. It’s the clearest he’s heard his voice sound in months.
“What about me?” Dream asks.
“About what you’re going to do without me,” George says, and his voice is soft but it sounds like he’s forcing the words out, like they hurt to say.
They hurt Dream to hear.
“Cry, probably,” Dream says, and he’s trying to smile and make it lighthearted, but there’s a hole in his chest and he knows that putting a shirt over it won’t make it go away.
George grins weakly at him. “Probably?” he says, mock-outraged, and Dream squeezes his hand back.
“No, but seriously,” George says, sobering, “Don’t cry too much, okay? It doesn’t need to be that bad. You can just pretend I’m in here, waiting for you to come and give me food or my pills. And you can sit in this chair and say anything you want and just pretend you’re talking to me, but maybe not too often because that would be weird. And I just want you to be okay after this, Dream, do you get that?”
Dream swallows, and he feels tears race hot against his cheeks. “I get that. I’ll be okay, George, I promise,” he says, but the words are hollow because promises mean nothing when they come from a liar.
“Good,” George says, and he smiles and his cheeks are damp and blotchy, and Dream squeezes his hand as hard as he can without feeling like he’ll break it.
He won’t be okay at all.
..
The doorbell rings in the evening. Dream is laying on his bed, staring out of his skylight, tangerine clouds moving gently across the sky, and the shrill ringing snaps him out of his melancholy daze.
He doesn’t know who would show up at their house so out of the blue, but when he opens the door and sees Sapnap on the other side of it, he really doesn’t know why he hadn’t expected this.
Dream stares at him. Sapnap looks at the doormat.
“Hey,” Sapnap says to his shoes.
“What are you doing here?” Dream asks, and he almost feels nervous, but he finds he doesn’t have the energy to.
“You haven’t stopped by in a few days,” Sapnap mumbles. “And you haven’t been responding to my texts. I just wanted to see if everything was okay.”
“Everything’s fine,” Dream lies. “I’ve just been tired.” This is closer to the truth.
But not close enough.
“Okay.” Sapnap scrubs his foot against the C on the doormat. “Can I come in?”
Dream opens the door wider in response. He hadn’t particularly wanted to see Sapnap right now, but there’s a familiar sort of warmth spilling in his chest, even if the guilt crashing against his lungs threatens to leech it all away.
Sapnap slips off his shoes by the door, and while they walk down the hall to Dream’s room, he says, “You should probably say hi to George while you’re here,” and Sapnap pales. “He probably heard the doorbell ring and he’s gonna be wondering who it was. Besides, he hasn’t seen you in weeks. I can tell he’s desperate for company that isn’t me.” Dream forces a grin, but he doesn’t look Sapnap in the eye.
Sapnap looks uncertain. “I don’t know if I—”
Dream cuts him off. “Just go say hi, Sapnap. You’re vaccinated, and it’s been six months. This could be the last time you see him.”
Dream opens the door to his room, and Sapnap collapses against the navy duvet with a sigh.
“Fine,” Sapnap grumbles, and Dream feels a twinge of annoyance. “But you have to come with me.”
“Sapnap—” Dream starts to protest, because that’s not a good idea, not at all, but this time Sapnap is the one to cut him off.
“It’ll be fine, Dream. You don’t even have to say anything. Just stand there next to me. I just need moral support,” Sapnap pleads.
“Don’t think I have much in terms of morals to support you with,” Dream mutters.
Sapnap rolls his eyes. “Yeah, me and you both, buddy. Are you coming with me or not?”
“Fine,” Dream says, and he sinks into the beanbag in the corner of the room. “Just give me a couple minutes. My head is killing me.”
..
“Sapnap?” George asks when they walk into the room.
“Yeah,” Sapnap says, and there’s a smile on his face, but Dream can tell it’s more guilt-ridden than warm. “How’s it going?”
“Fantastic,” George says drily. “I really am living my dream life, laying in a bed all day and getting fed pills from Dream.”
Dream feels Sapnap tense beside him, but he forces himself to act unfazed.
“Yeah?” Sapnap laughs, and Dream can sense the edge of nervousness in his voice, but he’s hoping George is too exhausted to notice.
“Yeah,” George says, a tired grin stretching across his face. “I bet you wish you were me.”
Dream feels Sapnap shift uncomfortably beside him, and he can tell he’s searching for some sort of half-decent response.
He doesn’t find one. Instead, George opens his mouth again. “Sapnap, when I’m - after this is all over, you’ll keep Dream company, right? Just to make sure neither of you get lonely,” George says, and his voice is a little bit thick and Dream stares at the cold tile floor. There’s a crack beneath his feet. He covers it with his shoe.
“‘Course, George,” Sapnap mumbles. “But you’re gonna be fine. You don’t need to talk like that.”
Sapnap is an even worse liar than he is.
George still has the strength to roll his eyes and say, “Okay, Sappitus,” and that makes Dream feel just a little bit hopeful.
But really, he knows it’s far too late.
..
“I hated that,” Sapnap says once Dream shuts the door to his bedroom.
“I could tell,” Dream says. “You’re an awful liar, Sapnap.”
“That’s why you’re doing all the work,” Sapnap says, and this time he’s the one that collapses into Dream’s beanbag.
Dream climbs into his bed with a sigh. “It’s kind of hard, being around him all the time. Or like, knowing he’s near. It, I don’t know. It just takes a toll on you.”
“I know it does,” Sapnap says, and Dream lets the sound of his voice float over him. It’s rich and warm, coating his skin and filling his lungs. This is what he’d done it all for, he thinks.
It might have even been worth it.
“It’s so close to being over. Things are gonna get so much better for us soon,” Sapnap says, his voice like syrup.
His ribs start to ache. “Do you ever feel guilty?”
Sapnap doesn’t say anything for a moment. “I mean, I guess a little bit, sometimes. But mostly I just think about the fact that he might have died anyway, and I think that we’re just speeding up the process a little bit, and making it less painful for him. And I think about how we’re gonna have everything once he’s gone. And then after I think about that for a while, I don’t feel guilty at all.”
Dream thinks about this. He fingers the blue cotton of his duvet, stripes beneath his palms, and he lets Sapnap’s words pour over his mind, seep into the holes and fill the cracks with a poisonous sort of honey.
For a few moments he basks in this. In the achingly familiar sugar, in the glow of how much Sapnap wants a happy ending for them.
But Dream knows it’ll be nothing if not bittersweet.
“Why?” Sapnap asks, and he pushes himself up off of the beanbag and crawls onto the bed next to Dream, positioning it so that their faces are close, close enough that Dream can’t help but stare at the delicate curl of Sapnap’s eyelashes, the freckles splashed faintly across his cheeks. His heart starts to fold in on itself. “Do you feel guilty?”
“Yeah,” Dream breathes, because he can’t ever lie to Sapnap, even if he can lie terrifyingly well to George. “Like, a lot.” Sapnap doesn’t say anything, just blinks in the deepening blue light, and Dream feels a strange urge to keep talking, to seal the hole in his chest with cling wrap. Just so that it doesn’t start rotting.
“I stopped giving him the pills,” he confesses, and Sapnap looks at him, not sharply like Dream had expected, but like he was disappointed. He swallows. “I’m sorry. It just didn’t seem as real when we planned it out, when we bought them, it just seemed like a… like a way to speedrun getting to be with you, for real. But then he started getting worse, like actually worse, and he could tell, too. And I think that was the worst part - seeing him be like, aware of the fact that he was dying. I’m sorry, Sapnap. I just couldn’t keep doing it.”
He cracks his knuckles and stares out of his skylight. There’s a breath trapped in his chest.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Sapnap says coolly. Dream releases the breath.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I thought I could handle it, but it’s too much. It’s too late, anyway. We both know he’s gonna…”
“Yeah,” Sapnap says. “It’s whatever. I should have known this would happen."
“I’m sorry,” Dream says, and he’s sorry, sorry for disappointing Sapnap, but he isn’t sorry for not giving George the pills.
“I know,” Sapnap says, and his voice is softer, now. “It’s okay. We’ll get our happy ending, anyway.”
No, he won’t.
.
Dream spends his last days with George in a strange haze of denial.
And despite himself, despite his worst fears, he finds that there is still love there. He holds George’s hand and stares at the shadows stretching across his face, and despite the tidal wave of love and lust and everything in between for Sapnap, there’s something familiar and lonely stirring at the bottom of his lungs.
He thinks it might be the dredges of love, left over from the beginning. Sticky in his lungs, almost completely washed away. He’d thought it had all faded, become consumed by the growing distance between them, the irritation, the slow, sickly build of resentment.
But it’s still there, cotton candy thin, and it hurts.
George knows he’s getting close to the end. And what Dream really, really wasn’t ready for was the flood of honesty. It makes sense, he supposes, the desire to say everything he’d ever wanted to before he dies, but Dream almost collapses whenever he does.
George says, “I love you,” but he also says, “but I don’t know what happened to us,” and it knocks the wind out of Dream’s lungs. “Did you stop loving me, Dream? Because I don’t think I ever did, and it felt like you were getting farther away. It - it sounds sick, I know, but honestly I was almost happy when they diagnosed me, when I realised you would be here to take care of me. I thought - I thought it might bring us closer together again. But it only got worse. You only came when you needed to. What happened to us, Dream?”
Dream doesn’t know how to respond. His stomach churns. He decides that for everything, he owes George honesty. “I still love you,” he says, “but it’s not the same. It faded, almost completely. I don’t know what happened, George. I just felt like there was a distance, and it just grew and grew. And then there was something stopping me from getting back to you.” A little more honesty than he was expecting.
“Sapnap,” George whispers, and his heart stops.
“Sapnap,” Dream echoes, and he squeezes George’s hand and tries not to cry. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” George says, and he pulls his hand out of Dream’s and turns away.
Dream starts to cry.
.
So in the end, it was all for nothing. Sapnap’s justifications meant nothing anymore, because George had died knowing he wasn’t as loved as he wanted to be, he had died knowing everything.
Dream almost chokes on the guilt. He doesn’t tell Sapnap any of this.
The funeral passes in a blur of tears, soft whispers of, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” crawling hands on his arm that are meant to be comforting, and Sapnap’s hand brushing his. Dream barely registers the bouquet of flowers he places on George’s casket. They’re blue.
When it’s over, they go to Sapnap’s apartment. Sapnap kisses him there, slow and long, and Dream wraps his arms around his neck like he’s afraid if he lets go, he’ll fall apart. He thinks he might.
“I love you,” Sapnap says, and he’s smiling wide and Dream feels sick. “This is our happy ending, now.”
“Yeah,” Dream says, and he smiles weakly. Sapnap kisses him again - reassurance, maybe.
He misses George.