Work Text:
It starts, as most things in George’s life do, with a bleary, late-night call and a building migraine.
"George," Sapnap presses, force tight with fear and edging towards breathless. Looking back on it, George will recognize that he knew at that very moment. That there's only one thing that would make Sapnap sound like that. "It's Dream, I -- I didn't know, I swear, I--"
"Sapnap," George snaps, harsh where the panic balloons up his throat. He pushes away from his desk sharply, suddenly grateful he’d stayed up. “What happened?”
A strangled breath. Then: “He ran off hours ago. Didn’t say where. And then he showed up on Bad’s doorstep, just -- fucked up, talking about a raid gone wrong--”
“We didn’t have a raid for tonight--”
“I know , George, but that’s what he said, so I guess he got caught up on something. You know how he is.” And George does, knows Dream from his lies to his impulses to his fidgets, knows the jagged roundness of his knuckles to the hanged slice of his sharpest canine, knows the blood of his skinned knees to the spiral of freckles where his collar blends into shoulder. Dream can be reckless; George just didn’t expect something like this . In a strange way, George always thought he was untouchable.
“And what did Bad say?” A sourness that he doesn’t intend trickles through, a petulant jealousy rising jerkily to the surface. The rational part of George knows that going to Bad first was smart for a number of factors; he is by far the most experienced with first-aid among them and lives closer to the edge of the city lines, but George wonders despite himself if Dream would have gone to George first if the circumstances had been different. If all the fault lines George created between them had anything to do with it.
“He thinks he’ll be okay,” Sapnap breathes with a level of relief, fresh like the news is reaching the both of them simultaneously. “Apparently he didn’t call until things were less… y’know. Chaotic. But I don’t know… I don’t know.” He pauses, voice growing quieter. “He’s not waking up.”
“It hasn’t been long,” he responds absently, faintly. He grabs a coat, barely seeing anything at all, sensation monopolized by the earpiece Sapnap rattles through. “Probably normal.” The door hisses where it slides shut behind him.
“Maybe,” Sapnap mutters, but he sounds unconvinced. The stairs blur beneath George, there and gone in twos. “Bad’ll want your input.” Some part of George’s brain startles with laughter. Why? To help, to counsel? He hasn’t been fixing much of anything lately. He can’t imagine he’s suited for the task.
A long moment passes, and George stands on a street corner. Quietly, into the starless, black-jam sky, standing like a shade in a city glowing golds, George whispers, “Can you come pick me up?” Fragile-hearted in this singular moment, where the world seems wide enough to force him to fall through.
The call hums with silence. “Yeah, man,” Sapnap says gently. “I’m already on my way.”
-
George is hardly a doctor -- that title falls more solidly to Bad, while George spends his time sequestered to his little workshop inside an infinitely ascending skyscraper of bits, bolts, and various side businesses. There is nothing mendable in skin, incomprehensible in its wear to tear and reds too bright for his eyes to process; his fluency lies solely in CMOS RAM chips to cache memory to CPU, clutters of strings and functions, something utterly boolean in code: it works or it doesn’t, acceptance or rejection. There’s no stasis, no waiting game, no Schrodinger’s enigma as the pulse beats apathetically from the vital monitor.
George sighs.
But he had a sister once -- back before things were bad. Before he took on side gigs and dropped off the grid, before the world glitzed itself into a dazzling shatter of artificial light and LED screens, before his phone call with Sapnap: he used to be a brother.
Frail and fierce and doll-limbed, she had begged for entertainment from her four-postered bed, betraying a child emperor in the defiant tilt of her head. And helpless to appease, he acquiesced; clumsily, tirelessly, he labored until he had something functional: a glass floor and a flickering projector and refurbished speakers from decades prior.
(“It’s good,” he presents weeks later, rolling his shoulders as he screws in the last of the sound system. “Or -- it’s okay. I mean, I think. Try it?”
Eyes impossibly wide, bright, wishing fountain pennies reflecting the glow of the screen below and around her bed, she taps at the program George had installed with uncharacteristic vigor. In response, the projector stutters to life, Tchaikovsky's Serenade for String Orchestra in C major, Op. 48 filtering delicately through the surround speakers.
And, as if specters, false bodies gasp into view: victorian skirts and coiled sprigs of hair, intricate embroidery spinning through dizzying step-patterns beyond George’s understanding. A passing pair of partners whiz by, and he watches his sister’s face glow with enamoured delight through their translucent veneer.
“Oh,” she marvels, an understated dandelion puff-breath carrying her delivered wish through the air. “They’re beautiful.”)
It’s not a story he shares often. But when George asks, “Can I do anything?” without much expectation, Bad grasps his hand emphatically, eyes flickering with the fire of a captured memory.
“Actually,” Bad says, “Maybe you can.”
-
“Hi,” Dream says. There’s a fizzling out of pixels, a corrosion where his hairline fluffs and spikes; the transparency along his silhouette blurs the outline into a soft shadow of burned out color. George eyes the boundary where the hologram meets the background of wires, where the computer meets real.
“Hi,” George responds cautiously, shuffling with the tools still cluttering his fingers before belatedly placing them back in his belt. With the heel of his hand, he shoves up his goggles and impatiently blinks away pulsating refractions of light. “Do you know who I am?” Because it’s not the first time he’s done this, not by a longshot.
( “Dream,” George calls distractedly, fingers snapping impatiently in front of his face as he bites against the hard metal of his pen. The screen of his holopad flickers innocently, displaying ‘ Attempt 42’ in aggravating sharp text, a condescension implied in the staccato cross of each ‘t.’ George wrinkles his nose, ready to report another failure to his logs -- ever since he finally got the imaging right on Attempt 33, progress has been stagnant, Dream unresponsive and blank despite the distracting bending curve to his cheek, the stubborn line of his nose.
But before the pen tip finds contact to glass, Dream offers: “Um… hi?” As if hookset, George’s head snaps up, neck strained with the force of his attention.
Feeling strangely breathless, George grins, bright and inescapable. “Dream!” Lacking purchase, his hands flutter around aimlessly, hesitant to reach out but uncharacteristically aching to do so. He reigns himself in, smothering the evidence of his spiking elation in the fabric of his jacket sleeve and miming a cough.
“Sorry,” Dream scratches the back of his head bashfully, looking around and beyond George as he surveys the room. There’s a canyon of relief in seeing even idle movement; everything in his stance, the slight tension riding his shoulders, the overwhelmed reflexive smile pulling at his mouth -- it’s all so Dream that it sends spooling threads of fluttering heart-sighs down through George’s sternum.
“Sorry,” Dream repeats, catching George’s eye. And beyond the glint of artificial light, curling between the rippling perforations of pixels gliding like ocean foam, an emptiness stains his gaze, sharp and embarrassed. “Do I know you?”
His pen clatters against the floor, a knife in the humming room. Thoughtlessly and harsh, a hand slams against the keyboard, a straining clatter of plexi-light that cuts off the hologram’s image -- after a moment, George recognizes it as his own.
He stares at the empty space until the lingering imprint disappears from behind his eyes. He stares until his hands stop shaking.)
As if unable to stop himself, Dream’s mouth splits into a bright beam -- George, stupidly, feels as though he should blink away that, too. “Duh,” he scoffs, as if George is the idiot. He bites back the urge to remind him the reason they’re in this whole mess. “You’re George .” There’s something to the way he says it -- a half-sigh, cloying with unrealized affection and ridiculously obstinate -- that knocks over a tower in George’s chest, scattering it across his ribs.
Knees jellied in a sort of relief, he presses back against his desk for support and stutters out a disbelieving laugh, fondness blossoming like bouquets between his jaw. “Right,” George agrees, mind whirling with ten times the usual invigoration of a successful coding project. My name , he notes deliriously, aching with nostalgia, a miniature grief. A part of him stitches back together with the sound of it, dismissing a paranoid fear about never hearing it said that way again; Dream brings a uniqueness to the singular syllable, hiding a richness in the crevices of each vowel like a secret just for the two of them -- he says his name like a locket.
“Uh,” George says after a pregnant pause, scrambling coolly over his current logs; sometime ago he lost his pen to the abyss of machine parts at the foot of his desk, so he tweaked a few settings to make the holopad more touch-responsive. If Dream were here -- the real Dream, not his best attempt at imitation -- he would tease him for his ridiculous loophole-solutions, and George would airily rebuke with some comment about Dream just lacking talent. For now, he asks, “Do you know who you are?”
A moment of hesitation passes. George bites the inside of his cheek nervously, but Dream finally responds: “I’m… Dream.” A hand creates spirals in his temple, miming pain that George certainly didn’t program him with; but the motion is comfortingly characteristic, a tick he’s seen on Dream a number of times, and relaxation tugs back down his spine as response. “Did something happen?” He blinks at the workshop, confused and growing steadier, usual demanding presence returning with startling vengeance. “You’re being… weird.”
“Weird? Dream, that’s rude ,” George chides gently, snark dissolving like bubbled foam as his eyes trail the coast of Dream’s spread arms, expressive and emphatic. He’s never seen the ocean, but Dream spent his early years caught jarred in the corner of an unoccupied beach-side town along America’s southeastern border; there were late nights where he delivered intimate confessions in the form of fragile promises, hiding them in the delicate lines of George’s conch shell palm: I’ll show you, someday .
The memory bobs to the surface, the way all his memories of Dream have been in this last week of self-isolation; absently, he wonders if Dream would lie to him.
“I mean, you literally look like you haven’t slept in days, but okay.” Dream rolls his eyes, but the derision melts away into a delayed concern, eyebrows scrunching and drawing fault lines of worry into his face. He reaches forward, footsteps soundless, fingers splayed. “Hey… you okay?”
Jolting, George withdraws, close enough to a flinch to have Dream’s head tilting in confusion. “I’m -- yeah,” he chokes, emotions tangled in circuit boards, thoughts still a mindless mesh of indiscernible code; the words are lost in translation, and George is left unable to read himself -- a foreign number system, unhelpfully pockmarked in greens and reds. He’s suddenly struck with the feeling of being less organic than the projection in front of him; like if Dream reached out, George’s shoulder would shatter into hard light.
“Dream,” he says with unusual severity, earnestness discomforting where it sits heavy on his tongue. Vulnerability feels noxious even now, even when he’s pressed his fingers along branches of Dream’s blood, fresh and hot from the ventricles of his heart -- even when he’s alone with himself and a program made from the flat planes of his hands, the whorl of his thumbpad. “You should know that -- there’s something you should know.”
“Okay?” Dream’s fidgeting grows more pronounced, nerves evident in the drumming of his fingers into his thigh. Even now, George watches as he scans for something to fumble with, eyes lingering longingly on the collection of circuitry cluttering George’s desk.
Clearing his throat, George starts, “There was…” He trails off. Starts again: “You were…” A frustrated groan tears its way into the air, verbal blockage panning for sands instead of gold in the column of his throat. And although he didn’t want to have Dream realize like this, he recognizes it’s the only way to dislodge the words crammed firmly behind his teeth.
“Give me your hand,” he manages, firm. Like he hadn’t been scrambling for words seconds prior, like he hadn’t just shied away from his touch. Startled, Dream blinks at him before slowly offering his palm, fingers long and beseeching. George eyes the divot in the crests of muscle above his wrist, trailing down the bone to the branches of veins and delicate skin of his forearm. So real , he thinks when the tendons flex, when he hovers his own hand in reciprocation and feels imaginary heat emanating between them.
All versions of Dream, he notes, burst forward viciously with life -- synthetic or not. A memory fizzles forth vindictively: his own knuckles, painted stark white as his fingers create fetters along Dream’s limp bicep, a soliloquy written in the desperation of his clutching. And right in the depression of his arm, where the heart thrums hardest, a needle forces life into the power grid of his blood while George whispers pleas against deaf ears.
Suddenly nauseous, George’s hand falls; fingertips like river-rocks, he parts prismed pixels into waves of spraying artificial blue -- he creates empty wounds in rows, like tilled soil or clawed flesh, leaving nothing in his wake where he pierces Dream through his palm.
Dream stutters out a gasp, flinching backwards. George swallows metallic guilt, looks away sheepishly. “You were in an accident,” he says far too late. “You’re… sleeping.” Every other word too strong, he offers a half-truth burdened with memories for the both of them: George’s penchant for napping through long afternoons, Dream laughing and skirting touches along his nape when he thinks George isn’t awake to feel them.
“Oh,” Dream whispers, mouth soundlessly stumbling through shapes that offer no volume. He inspects his body with newfound vigor, tracing fabric folds and pushing at his bangs. George wonders if he can feel all the textures, where one edge of programming meets another. If everything is dulled and numbing like limbs losing circulation, or if it’s intense with sensation like a dream.
He doesn’t ask. Instead, he continues, falling comfortingly into the methodic rhythm of shop-talk. “Bad stabilized you. But he was worried, I guess. Your brain -- if it’s left too long without intense stimulation, your functions could decline while you’re… recovering. He suggested I make something to help, like a machine that might simulate lucid dreaming. I went… a little overboard maybe.” Embarrassed, George ducks his head, reflexively wearing his best disarming smile.
Dream's jaw sets, suddenly looking a million miles away. “It’s real though? Everything except the… well.” He tilts his head, wriggles his fingers through a discarded wrench on the countertop.
Confusion makes convection currents in the gallows of George’s chest. A near death experience , he marvels, exasperation and a hint of something else clawing through his sides. And this is what he asks first .
“Um… no,” George starts absently -- before his brain catches back up, and he stumbles to explain. “I mean, sort of. You’re missing a few days of memories -- was worried about the trauma of the whole thing affecting the process. And I can’t promise the coding is a perfect replication. Don’t do anything you might regret normally, I guess.” The half-truth is slippery, a minnow making a riverstream out of his ramble, a wriggling mess on the floor. Guilt turns in his stomach, spin-cycling.
“Aw, George .” Dream steps closer, boyish where his mouth splits into an orange slice. There’s an unbreachable distance between them; somehow, it’s only a handful of inches. “You’re worried about me?” Like it’s any other day, and George is working on upgrades for their team’s communication equipment while Dream pesters and preens and prods. George finds it just as distracting now, having to incline his head to meet Dream’s eyes.
“I worry about you complaining later,” he dismisses loftily. He mimes pushing against Dream’s chest; there’s no contact, not a tingling sensation on his fingertips, not a metallic ozone-shift. But his heart shoots blanks through his nerves, flustering him. He turns on his heel sharply. "Honestly, Dream. You're so annoying."
Dream scoffs, following beside him. Even now, his long legs create a distinctly unfair advantage; George is left regretting not having the foresight to make Dream's hologram miniaturized. "Yeah, right. You can pretend like you didn't spend days toiling over my body. It's okay, George. I know the truth, even if you won't admit it."
"' Toiling', " George repeats incredulously, sliding into his desk chair. "Oh no. There's something wrong with the programming. You know grown-up words."
Seemingly realizing he won't be able to sit on any furniture, Dream slides to the ground, a ceremonious deconstruction into crisscross-applesauce. "Yeah, actually. Your mom taught it to me. She's been giving me lessons."
"Ooh," George marvels sarcastically. He dons a look of pity. "Very funny , Dream."
Unable to help himself, Dream's smirk spills into snickers, and George's own laughter tugs out of him in instantaneous response, bright and without restraint.
With the monitors creating a blurry lacquer of light against the metals, George allows -- for a moment -- the feeling that nothing has changed. And although he has never seen them beyond projections, he imagines the pinpricks of illumination scattered throughout the room to be something like what stars once were.
But when the moment passes, Dream shooing George off to shower and finally sleep , a marble of grief makes a hole in his stomach. Tomorrow , he insists. I'll tell him tomorrow.
-
Dream, much to George’s chagrin, learns to manipulate his axis of manifestation sometime around day three. That is to say, Dream learns to levitate.
George is not amused.
“Wow,” Dream laughs, lounging in the air like a teenage girl in a high school drama, hands framing his chin and feet kicking lightly behind him. “I didn’t know you could get even smaller , George.”
“Wow,” George mocks without looking up from his screen, eyebrows pushing up dramatically. “I didn’t know you could get even more annoying, Dream. Amazing.”
Dream just wheezes a little in response, falling backwards to rest lightly on the balls of his feet. He rocks repetitively, impatient and buzzing with unused energy. “I think you should call me something else.”
Startled, George jerks to face him, focus momentarily forgotten. “What? Why?” Then, belatedly, he blinks away the surprise, firmly turning back around. “I’m working , Dream.” He attempts to make it accusatory enough for Dream to retract, distractions filing away. Should have programmed him with Xanax.
Of course, Dream holds no reservations. “Come on, George,” he sighs, resting centimeters above the desk to mime sitting loftily upon it. One of his thighs clips through George’s hand, and he waggles his eyebrows a little in response. He’s met with an unimpressed eye roll. “That’s not even your real work. That’s, like -- your side hoe.”
“Why,” George starts, affronted. “Would you say it like that?” Laughter skitters annoyingly from Dream’s mouth, organic and lively and loud, and George flusters. He rolls away from his desk abruptly. “My real job is put on hold because some idiot got injured during an unplanned solo raid. This one is officially the only thing paying me.” In ways, the busy work is more difficult: done without passion, done without focus. Trying to be good enough to give him consistent commission work, but not so good as to draw unwanted attention to himself. He’s had to take on more since Dream’s accident, and it’s driving him a little bit crazy.
“What?” Dream drags his attention back with astonished outrage, loud and light with mirth and pleasant defiance. His fingers drag through his hair roughly, and George briefly finds himself mesmerized. “You’re actually blaming me? I can’t even remember what happened -- it’s probably actually your fault.”
Like matchstick flame to finger-pinch, the amusement snuffs out of George, sizzled instantly to deafening silence. His mouth slackens, cheeks aching with the memory of his smile.
( “I don’t understand why you’re being such an idiot about this,” Dream hisses, fingers rolling into a fist, a turbulent storm, a crashing wave. Caught in the echo of his jaw, snagged on the river of tension between his eyebrows, his emotions roar through him -- passionate, unbridled, dangerous .
“I’m not,” George insists, voice tight and low. “What you’re suggesting is -- it’s laughable, Dream. Just think about what you’re saying for a second. Just listen to yourself!”
“This isn’t,” Dream grits, visibly holding back an outburst in the grit of his teeth. “A joke, George. I wouldn’t joke about this.”
“Oh, really?” George barks with disbelief, drawing back with a frustrated throw of his arms. “I feel like that’s all you ever do!”
Dream settles back a little, uncertain. “You could have told me,” he says quietly. “If it bothered you.”)
“George?” Dream waves a hand in front of his face, closer than before. A ripple of blue slides across him when his palm accidentally meets the tip of George’s nose -- the only sign that his form is artificial. George eyes the cluster of freckles on his nose blankly. “You okay?” He says it so tenderly, like George had been wailing and panicking openly instead of staring off into space vacantly. Briefly, he realizes, conflicted with feelings of fondness, embarrassment, and -- ultimately -- guilt: He knows me.
When George hesitates to respond, Dream continues, “I’m sure it wasn’t, y’know. Your fault, I mean.”
“Right,” George concedes emptily, desperately attempting to mask his disagreement. “You are the impulsive idiot.”
Dream hums in acknowledgment, face heavy with confusion, distracted with concern. Tension curls deep in George’s gut, constantly turning in idle knots; he remembers, despite his best efforts, Dream’s back as he stormed out the door. He spots an old oil stain by his shoe that he had glared at when he couldn’t meet Dream’s eyes.
With difficulty, he attempts to wrangle the conversation back into safe territory. “What did you mean,” he starts awkwardly, clearing his throat. “Um, earlier. When you said I shouldn’t call you Dream.”
Disbelief evident on Dream’s face, he eyes George for a long moment, searching for an explanation George prays he won’t find. Drop it , he urges silently, desperate. “Uh,” Dream blinks, clearly off-kilter. “Just -- I’m kind of a cool computer program-type thing right now. So I should have a cool AI name.”
Relief shatters the tightness in his spine, shoulders sinking back into gentle slopes; George laughs a little, only slightly forced. “Right. And what are you thinking?”
“Well,” Dream hedges, fingers scritching along the back of his neck. “I dunno. Maybe like -- DreamXD, or something.”
George stares at him. He repeats, more uncertain: “I dunno.” A beat of silence passes.
“That’s all you could come up with?” George croons with sudden delight, seriousness forgotten as he titters obnoxiously. “Really, Dream?” His feet carry him forward, skirting close to Dream and then dodging around him impishly.
“I hadn’t gotten that far!” Dream defends, but relieved laughter trickles through. He twists, following George’s movement as he ducks around him.
“ Sure , Dream,” George giggles, slipping back into his desk chair gracelessly and pulling his knees up. And although a low level tension tugs through him, unrelenting and rough, some of the pressure is alleviated from his lungs. He rolls his shoulders once, craning back his neck to see Dream’s gentle grin.
“Now shoo,” he bites, hand waving dismissively. “I’m busy.”
Strangely, Dream listens.
-
“You know,” George posits on day six, aiming for diplomatic. “I think giving you internet access was a mistake.”
“This guy actually thinks our destruction of that incoming shipment from New York was a publicity stunt,” Dream scoffs darkly, fingers flying across his keypad with vigor. A sheer projection of the forums he’s scrolling through washes his face starkly pale. “I mean, what the hell? Why would I -- why would we do that? I’m… I’m writing a comment. That’s it. I’m writing a comment.”
“You could do that,” George says passively, busy combing through the old parts scattered around his workshop floor. “Our identities are a secret, but you could do that.”
“I will,” Dream blusters, even though George knows he won’t. He’s careful when it concerns all of them; George knows that he thinks himself responsible for their little team, sinking naturally into a leaderlike role without all the formalities. In the right setting, burnishing gold has blurred the line of his shoulders into that of an ancient king -- soaked in the ichor of dawnlight, George imagines a fluttering cape making licks of flame in the space behind him.
In the present setting, he insists childishy: “I’m writing it right now.” Aggressive taps crowd out the quiet, musical in their lack of hesitation.
“I miss yesterday. Yesterday, your fixation was turtles.” George inspects a loose screw, chucking it into his sorting pile. He sighs, put-upon and world-weary.
Briefly, Dream perks from his glowering. “Oh, man. I can’t believe I’d almost forgotten about them -- how do you forget about a whole species? Our education system is such shit.” Laughing frustratedly, he runs a hand raggedly through his hair, and George mouth tugs into a fond smile. “But this is important! This is our reputation, George!”
George chucks a loose bolt through Dream’s image, causing shockwaves to ripple from the epicenter of impact on his shoulder. Dream’s face twists with clear offense. “Here’s your reputation: you’re dogwater .” He wiggles in self-congratulatory victory while Dream splutters on behind him.
“Yeah -- Okay , I,” he stammers derisively. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“It does! It does!” George gloats with great satisfaction. “You’re actually bad. It’s not even funny, Dream; you’re just bad.”
“Whatever,” Dream says, swiping away the browser in front of him. Internally, George cheers. “That’s it. I’m leaving. I’m sick of you.” Huffing indignantly, he flutters to the ground and storms towards the door, hoodie billowing dramatically with unseen wind. Huh , George notes. New trick.
Inches from the frame, his figure dissolves, reappearing on the far side of the room. “Oh, come on.”
“You’re boxed,” George notes blankly, struggling to smother a smile as Dream glares flatly back in response.
Ducking his head back around, he bites his lip as if to tug it forcefully back over his grin. A rising sense of happiness and -- something else pleats his pulse to river streams.
For a long moment, the silence washes back in, low-tide to boat stern. Clicks of metal create a lulling background percussion as George files meticulously through his diminishing piles -- until curiosity tugs at him. “You could,” George tries nonchalantly, voice stumbling a little in its sudden use. “If you wanted to leave you could. We could move you.” He’s cool about it, unaffected -- casual to a fault.
His ears prick, straining to hear Dream’s answer better.
“Wow, George,” Dream drawls, quieter than his usual teasing. He drifts back into view, but his eyes flit beyond George’s shoulder, not making contact. “Sick of me already?”
George snorts. In sharp contrast to Dream, he can’t stop looking; processing every inch of him, the drag of his jacket hem to his jagged nail beds, the natural flush of his neck falsifying the lack of blood beneath it. He watches his wrist roll, the twisting mechanisms of it barely visible in the disruption of the skin, and he remembers with dizzy satisfaction that he stitched this image together from pixels, that he anointed particles of light.
After a moment that drags on for far too long, George swallows. “Obviously,” he murmurs, and finally tears his gaze away.
“I guess I could go to Sapnap,” Dream continues, thoughtful. “But he probably wouldn’t like entertaining me. And he goes out a lot more than you.”
“I go out,” George protests -- before realizing that in the last two weeks, he’s left only a handful of times, and usually at Dream’s insistence. Stupidly, he comes to the belated conclusion that he used to ‘go out’ often only when it meant seeing Dream. “Okay. Fine. Then I guess you’re stuck with me.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed, asshole,” Dream laughs, orbiting around George lazily as he tumbles onto his side. He hesitates. “It’s cool to see you work.”
“What?” Incredulous, George giggles back, forever creating an echo chamber to Dream’s breathy amusement.
Suddenly insistent, Dream stops tracing ripples into the air with unprecedented urgency. “Well, I mean. Yeah .” Like it’s obvious. “I didn’t know you could do something like this. I mean, you do a lot of cool stuff for me -- for the team, but this is... it’s unbelievable.”
George bites back another smile, struggling to push down his rising blush, fingertips and jaw warming with the praise. He turns a screw around in his hand, watching the spirals descend and ascend with each roll of his fingers, dazed. “I guess you’ve just never asked.”
He flicks his eyes back up to meet Dream’s, and finds them already watching, already dark with intensity. Thick and unyielding, a honeytrap. With a defiant tilt of his head, Dream says, “Okay. I’m asking, George. What else can you do?”
George swallows, considering. Remembers glass floors and victorian skirts and an afternoon spent tucked between columns in the image of ancient Greece, sampling marmalade he brought from his kitchen to eat beside the Aegean sea.
“If you could go anywhere,” George asks, low and animated. “Where would you go?”
Dream’s grin swallows miles. His eyes burn with something Byzantine.
-
It takes him awhile; he’s improved a lot since the last time he made something like this, has better equipment and tools and a reserved pocket of money, has the fresh experience of crafting Dream’s holographic projection. But that doesn’t change the fact that his workshop is more spacious, requiring infinitely more manual labor, and that environment work is an entirely different set of textures, audio files, and requires research .
And, well. George might be going just a little overboard in his attempts for realism. He’s showing off -- sue him.
Dream helps where he can. After much badgering, weedling, and threatening, George finally gives in and lets him fiddle with the program files (after making three back-ups, just to be sure). Ultimately, though he doesn’t like to admit it, the decision is a good one; having an extra pair of eyes and hands that don’t need to sleep expedites the process exponentially, even if he still thinks Dream is a bit of a brute with his coding.
(“This is a mess, Dream,” he complains, trying to parse through the jumbled functions crowding his screen. No coding notes. Who doesn’t leave coding notes ? “You’d honestly be so lost without me. You lack that delicate touch.”
“What the hell,” Dream seethes quietly, more muttering than anything expecting response. “I’ll show you ‘delicate touch.’”
“What?”)
Eventually, they manage it. It takes weeks, and George is endlessly waiting for Dream to wake up, half-praying and half-expecting that when this is finally complete he’ll be standing next to the real Dream, a physical body to push at and lean on. Sapnap and Bad stop by often, making sure they aren’t about to kill each other and checking in on Dream’s form in stasis, respectively. (George doesn’t look at it often, happy to leave Bad to the maintenance, knowing the pod he’s inside will do its job in keeping everything running smoothly. He doesn’t like to see the slack expression, the eyelids shuttered closed, the limp falling crest of his neck --
Privately, he thinks Dream doesn’t like to see it either.)
But when the day finally comes, it’s Dream’s tangential form cheering victoriously beside him, and an indiscernible cocktail of relief and disappointment clouds through George’s delight at their success.
“Okay, okay,” George laughs, distracted by Dream blasting We are the Champions from the loudspeaker. “Oh my god, what are you, ancient? Stop, or I’ll take your audio rights away.”
“You can’t stop me now, George,” Dream says gravely -- an image that contrasts sharply with the party hat he managed to manifest firmly onto his crown. “I’m in the system. I’m in.”
“You’re such an idiot.” With a manual clatter of keys, the silence cuts back in, sharp with anticipation. “Are you ready to see it?” Suddenly nervous, George hesitates, fingers hovering above the launch command; in a way, he feels exposed -- his heart, bleeding without reservation in the palm of his hand, an honest showing when he offers it toward Dream. How embarrassing it is , he thinks, to be alive.
Wondrously, Dream stills, cheeks colored high with flush and hair caught in a whirlwind stasis. He looks like he’s standing in a hurricane -- he looks like the eye of a storm. One of his hands comes up to play absently at the border of his smile, a lightning shiver; George finds he cannot look away.
Finally, Dream nods. “Please?” And George runs the command.
He’s blinded for a minute, lights slamming on mercilessly and throwing the dim corners into sharp contrast -- and then the corners are gone altogether, giving way to an expansive horizon, a plane of wheatfield yellows pressed to cornflower blue like a sealed envelope.
He squints, difficult to see anything when the sun is so… bright -- impossibly, unbelievably bright, oppressive and painterly and unforgiving where it crashes into the landscape. “You’re lying,” George says breathlessly. “It couldn’t have looked like this.”
Dream just laughs, unbridled and boyish. “It did. It used to.” A panel appears below Dream’s hand, and George watches with disbelief as he adjusts a slider. In response, the sun charts a harried course across the sky, streaking like a shooting star until it bobs like a bloated tangerine in the ocean, sky blurring and bleeding into pomegranate reds, mellowed oranges.
The waters are stilled, a drifting plane of cresting mirrors that crash to buttered foam on the nearby jutting walkway of weathered wood. And although the sea harbors nothing but itself, no boats or islands breaching the surface, George feels overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, rendered to overstimulation by an unending expanse of glittered gold and shadowed blue.
“I feel…” he trails off, uncertain. His foot presses to the ground and meets the hard screen of the floor with certainty, but the granules of sand shift gently in response. Real and fake.
“Small?” Dream suggests, startling him. In the light of the setting sun, his eyelashes catch flecks of golden lacquer, his profile awash with warmth. Midas curls a hand down his face, enriching the lines around his smile.
George shakes his head, transfixed. “Alive,” he says quietly. He stares at the distance, feeling as though he’s peeking down the barrel of the Earth’s core.
“I wanted to take you here,” Dream says, rough and sudden, fingertips fiddling without purpose. George resists the urge to say, I know. I remember. How could I forget?
Instead, he tilts his head in confusion. “Past tense?”
Dream hums, sliding down to meet the coastline. He presses his feet into the very edge of the highest waters. “Dunno if it would be the same now. Everything is -- different.” Sighing, an old ache makes itself known in the air, a neglected wound that never scars right. George joins him on the surf, letting the tide press up to his ankles and feeling nothing for it.
“Besides,” Dream continues, shoulders hunching up to his ears. “There are other things. I mean… there are other things that make me feel like this now.” His eyes reconnect with George’s. George tilts his head to better see him in the setting shadows.
“Small?” George whispers, voice failing him.
Achingly slow, Dream shakes his head. “Alive,” he murmurs, voice cutting on the ridges of his throat. Low, intense. George watches him fall forward and lets him, eyelashes fluttering.
With barely a breath between them, Dream stops. “George,” he says gently. “I can’t touch you.” His lips brush against George’s as he speaks, creating shockwaves of blue that travel up to his temple. George feels nothing, no pressure or warmed breath, no presence when his eyes drift shut, and a hole splits through his stomach, wide as the synthetic horizon.
“There’s something,” George starts thickly, hesitant. “There’s something I should tell you.”
Dream withdraws with clear effort but remains close. His palm flattens in the air above George’s knuckles, the implication of a comforting touch. “Okay.”
George wonders idly what Dream is expecting him to say -- maybe a flustered confession at best, a flattered but insistent rejection at worst. Maybe a request for more time, nervousness and confusion clear in his budding laughter.
Instead, George says, “We had an argument before you left.”
A pause of stunned silence. “What?”
With a heavy exhale, he shifts away, drawing his knees up to his chest. Lets the feeling of the scratchy fabric ground him as he touches it to his chin. Quietly, as if hoping Dream won’t hear him, he continues, “I was scared.”
Another long pause follows. When it becomes clear George needs further coaxing, Dream shifts too, withdrawing his hand but angling his body towards him attentively. “Why?” he presses, undeservedly gentle.
“You… I don’t know. I don’t remember exactly,” he sighs, mostly honest; everything from then is a confusing mix of snippets, a blur of jagged remarks in a puddle of murky emotion. “I think you were confessing?”
The silence this time feels fragile. When Dream finally speaks, he sounds shattered, vulnerable: “George… what?”
George closes his eyes, the sunset burned into the back of his eyelids. “I think… I thought you were joking. Or, I was just overwhelmed. I couldn’t believe what you were saying -- I needed space to think but didn’t know how to ask for it. You’re--” magnetic, overwhelming, incomprehensible , “--distracting. I can’t make decisions around you.”
He sighs, pretending the air tastes like salt instead of iron. “We fought. You stormed off. You got hurt.” The truth is a heavy, tumbling weight, hitting the ground without ceremony. His gut, although queasy, feels lighter for it.
“I don’t remember this.” There’s an emotion there George doesn’t want to unpack. He presses his forehead to his knees.
“I didn’t want you to,” he confesses. Even now the sun is too bright -- he can’t escape from it, even as his spine curls to make a shadowed shelter behind his thighs, arms caging his head.
“You lied to me,” Dream says, hurt. Real and fake. George, overwhelmed by his authenticity, and Dream caught victim in George’s defensive push for fabrication.
“I know,” he says, because he does know. “I’m sorry.” Simple but honest, his heart thrumming shakily between them.
Dream grows quiet again, the repetitive sound of the ocean tides blanketing the silence. “What would you say now,” he asks finally, rough. “If you could change it?” Now that you know this is real.
George peeks back up, eyes skimming above his arm and tracing the intense furrow of Dream’s brow. “Isn’t it obvious by now?”
Frustrated, Dream tugs at a strand of hair curling down his forehead. “I want to hear you say it. George . Please.”
Contemplative, George drags his hands through the sand, collecting a seashell the size of his fingernail. With a hard pinch, it splinters into fractures of hard light.
“I guess,” he says, pulse fluttering harshly against his wrist. “I would say… that you make me feel alive, too.” Unbearably, inescapably. Alive whenever his stare glints off him, chest thrumming painfully, palms slippery with heat. “Does that answer your question, Dream?”
Humming, a hesitant smile tugs at Dream’s mouth. “I guess it’s good enough. For now.” He pokes his fingertip into the sand twice, then drags a wide curve, a beachside sculpture of a pleased “:)”.
“But,” Dream starts suddenly. “I want to remember.”
“Right. Okay. I can do that.” George stands, pushing off with palm to smooth tile and stretching, fingers looping around his wrist and spine arching. He catches Dream staring and grins a little smugly to himself.
Startled, Dream scrambles to rise, an unceremonious struggle with his limbs made more charming by the fact that gravity doesn’t need to have an effect on him at all. “It doesn’t have to be now ,” he stammers, hands waving. “I just. I dunno. Later.”
George squints at him, wary. “...Shouldn’t it be now?”
“Well,” Dream says, biting his lip. “It’s… this is nice.”
Blinking, George circles his mouth into a miniature ‘o’, eyebrows raising. “So you want me to put off something that will make or break our relationship... because the moment is ‘nice.’”
“Well,” Dream says again, looking away shyly. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the ocean.” It’s nostalgic, sentimental -- so ridiculously Dream that George’s heart taffies into a veritable mess, ribs dripping with sugar.
Quietly, George slides his fingers loosely between Dream’s, hovering in the gaps and miming touch. He flicks his eyes toward the junction of sky and sea, anchored like a model ship in their bottle of falsified glass.
Kindly, he agrees: “It is nice.”
-
Dream is insistent that it’s water under the bridge -- to the point that he forgives him before his memories are even back.
(“I can get worked up in the moment,” Dream admits begrudgingly, rubbing at his jaw. “So I’m just going to say it now -- just to prove how okay it is.” He takes a deep, momentous breath. “I forgive you, George.”
George stares contemplatively, forehead tense with focus. He bites his lip, fighting the jumble of words ballooning up his throat, struggling for coherency as his thoughts fire in sharp bouts.
“Are you… speechless?” Concerned and puppy-eyed, Dream hovers closer, head curiously tilted and hands splayed.
“I’m trying so hard,” George blurts, “To not call you a simp.”)
And despite George’s nagging doubt, the conclusion doesn’t change when Dream receives a system update, old memories dragged out of the attic of his hard drive and uploaded back to where they belong, nesting firmly between Dream’s intangible ears.
“So now we move forward,” George breathes, stark with the relief of it, a tidal current of unrealized exhaustion sluicing from collar to hip.
“Yeah,” Dream agrees, arms curling in Corinthian flourish to rest on the pillar of his hips. “I guess so.”
With the clutter dealt with sometime during the entire holodeck project, his workshop reads as far more spacious and empty than he ever intended, glowing vindictively with fresh polish and subtle illumination. Which in some ways is a positive change -- he’s not tripping anymore on his way to the bathroom, not scrambling for forty minutes to find the exact part he needs, not having to push at masses on his desk to make space for his delivery pizzas --, but in other ways the newfound cleanliness is cloying.
Old parts and abandoned monitors discarded, nothing sits between him and Dream’s body anymore.
Coffin-like, the pod runs sleek like marbled iron, accusatory as it sits heavy and unperturbed in the corner of the room, glass shuttered to keep the outside of it opaque. There’s something terrifyingly final about it; something about cats, something about steel chambers, something about quantum superposition. He traces along its edge for the first time since Dream burst into holographic arrival, finds the surface to be cold and unyielding.
Somewhere behind him, always present, Dream watches him silently. With a labored inhale, George enters a command into its keypad, allowing the frost to fade into transparency.
In a way, there’s little to be startled by; he’s been seeing Dream for weeks now, used to the sight and the sound of him, used to his annoying untamable hair and airy laugh and smile lines. But the pod frames his still form with apathy: shoulders smaller, long legs uniformly lined to fit instead of splaying with reckless abandon. Face painfully blank, lashes lacking movement. He drapes extensively within, coveted and lifeless -- a pearl necklace inside a velvet box.
George stares, unable to help himself. He thinks he must have programmed too many freckles in his replication, that his lips are a shade too coral. There’s a scarred over helix piercing in his left ear that he never noticed, pale and all but invisible if not for the fluorescence flooding through the chamber. Dazed, George presses a long palm to the space above Dream’s wrist, meeting the unyielding barrier.
“Hey,” Dream finally says from behind him, voice forcibly light. “Don’t tap the glass.” Soundless, he presses forward, coming to rest at George’s side.
George manages a smile but doesn’t respond -- just watches quietly, letting himself take in the steady rise and fall of the ribs beneath him.
“You know,” he says after a long moment. “I don’t want any trash-talking about my sleeping habits after this.”
Dream snorts. “We’ll see.”
With a careful finger, George traces along the lines of Dream’s knuckles, up to the elbow and curling back down along the gentle slope of his forearm. “I think I’ve let you sleep in long enough, actually. Don’t you think it’s time you wake up?”
When his eyes slide back to meet artificial green, Dream smiles: tender, nostalgic, secretive. He flattens his own hand next to George’s on the glass with finality. “I’ve been having,” he admits, quiet in the humming room. “A really good dream.”
-
Sometime around day twenty-nine, the pod hisses open with a momentous click, and George stumbles to call Bad instantly; he’s nigh-incomprehensible, blurting out strings of “oh my god” and other words that gets him scolded half-heartedly, too busy making sure Dream isn’t fully awake yet to deliver clear news but anxious to have an actual doctor on-hand. When Dream stirs, George rushes out: “ Okay, see you, get here fast, bye! Fuck!” before he stumbles forward, pressing hard against the machine as Dream’s eyelashes start to flutter.
When they finally open, a dam shatters in George’s chest, elation and relief and adoration making a tsunami in the pit of his ribs. Dream, bleary-eyed and groggy, squints back with clear effort.
“Hi, George,” he greets roughly, jagged with disuse. “Good morning.” A stupidly fond smile pulls at his mouth, and George wants to kiss him more than he’s ever wanted to do anything.
“You overslept, idiot,” he chides, jerkily pushing his lips forward to meet him.
Dream is warm, tangible, and George nearly cries with the relief of his hand cupping his jaw and meeting skin, a starvation finally abated as Dream rubs a thumb to his hip and slides his mouth firmly against him.
Real , George thinks, textures crowding beneath his fingertips, muscles and bones shifting palpably under the surface.
Crammed into the corner of George’s workshop, lights blurring into an observatory of prophetic constellations, the ocean reaches the sky in a magnitude of ways -- and George feels achingly, inescapably alive .
("Um," Bad blushes, already backtracking slowly through the open door. "Should I come back later?")