Work Text:
The fucking song.
You’ve had too much of the digital love,
It mocked him.
you want everything live, you want things you can touch.
Dream wished he could describe his own emotions. Or lack thereof. He felt heavy, like a lead anchor was tied to his ankle and he was being pulled to the bottom of a swelling sea of problems, far away and forever stuck so close, yet so far from everyone he loved. Everything hurt, yet he felt nothing at all. He could feel the tears, bubbling and forming a lump in the back of his throat; burning and stinging the backs of his eyes until they involuntarily watered.
But he did not cry.
Dream’s fingers fiddled with the string of his headphones, listening to the song playing that seemed to be written for his current state of being.
Make it feel like a movie you saw in your youth,
make it feel like that song that just unopened you.
Dream swallowed, desperately trying to rid his throat of the painful lump. He blinked back his tears, taking a shuddering breath in, and out. His phone dinged again, and he startled. He forgot, he was meant to be replying to someone.
Hypocritical.
He felt so alone, yet he was avoiding the only people that were close to him, in some fucked sense of the word.
Proximity. A dual-edged sword.
Sticky-sweet as honey on all the good days, the sugary glue that seemed to fill in the cracks. Most days, he loved it. It was the skip in his step, it was the wind that pushed you along when your legs ached on a run, it was all of the perfect, little things in life. And it was constant, for the most part.
But it also felt like a plunge into the deepest depths of his soul. Online relationships, friendships, they were always being tested, more so than physical ones. Trust was harder, yet essential. If you didn’t trust them, a long distance relationship would never work. Trust was essential. And the problem did not lie with the fact that he didn’t trust the people around him--he did, with his life.
But sometimes it was just hard.
Trust wasn’t even the main issue, 90% of the time; it was the fact that proximity seemed fake. It felt like a lie. Felt like a slap in the face.
The sentence, “I’m closest with the people that are farthest from me” was one that rang true in all the wrong ways. How cruel, how unfair was it that the only people he felt secure and safe with were the ones that lived countries away?
Sometimes, going on drives helped him. It forced his mind to focus, most times. But other times everything just became more of a blur than it already was. He remembers getting into the car, and then he remembers stopping.
He remembers sitting in the abandoned parking lot, staring up at the night sky. The full moon washed over the park, and he switched off his headlights to take in the full effect. He sat there for a while, letting his mind catch up with where he was now versus the last time it had checked in.
The gentle thrumming of the bass from the car drew him out like a siren call. Open the windows, it purred, lay down, stay a while. He obeyed.
He cracked the windows so the melody could flow from interior to exterior, and he opened the car door. The crunching sound of the sole of his shoe hitting the pebble-ridden sand was the only knowledge he had that his foot had even hit the ground. He stood himself up, closing the door as quietly as he could. He moved over to the running car, sitting against the hood.
His gaze trailed up to the night sky, and he felt that familiar insignificance again. Smaller than any one of the countless stars in the sky littered before him; an ant, a spec, nothing but a particle of dust in the vastness of space. He didn’t matter. Not really.
So how is it that he’s physically taller and larger than the people he cares for most, yet they seem larger than life, and he feels like a mistake?
Seems tonight, a drive wasn’t helping anything. But he made it here, at least. Why leave so soon?
He slowly eased himself down, laying against the hood. The delicate rumble of the engine felt like a gentle purr, as if he were laying in the lap of the biggest cat in the world. Oddly enough, the thought was comforting.
He closed his eyes, letting his hair dust over his face as a gentle breeze swept it to the side, like a loving, gentle touch. It was enough to bring back the lump and burning behind his eyes if he thought about it long enough, maybe he could convince himself it was George.
George.
The name made him smile, despite himself. The name was like a key. A single whisper hidden somewhere in the wind was enough to turn it, unlocking a safe full of memories.
The whispers, the giggles, the playful banter. He thinks about playing chess, he thinks about beating him in chess, at his own game. He thinks about listening to his soft voice that spilled out tired whispers, and had Dream holding his breath just to hear George’s next.
Sometimes, he got to see George’s face. He’d be streaming, forget to turn it off. Dream could see his smiles, the way his eyelids fluttered when he got tired, the flush on his cheeks when Dream teased him. He felt so real. Cameras, bringing pictures to life in ways that he swore, he could just roll over, and--
The smile on his face faded as his eyelids opened, only to be met with empty space, and the dull red of the hood of his car. He noted the way his heart was racing, the way his cheeks hurt from smiling, the way George was the image burned behind his eyelids.
And it hurt.
Dream’s eyes stared into the rusted red metal beneath him, and a shaky hand moved to place where he could have promised himself George was, seconds ago. When met with cold, he drew his hand back, like it burned him.
He sat up.
He took a breath.
He got into the car.
He drove away.
How do you tell when a man’s gone mad?
You check his search history. And what does Dream’s search history look like?
“can you survive swimming across an ocean”
“what is the most dangerous thing in the ocean”
“has anyone ever swam from the east coast to england and lived”
“why the fuck aren’t you here”
“all i want is you”
Oh, he’d gone mad, alright.
Dream smashed his fist against the keyboard.
“bnvbnbh”
Well, that was a more interesting search. He sighed, smacking his forehead against the keys next.
Shakily lifting his head, he began to type one last final plea:
“one day, you’ll be with me. right? right? you promise?”
He stared at Google like he expected an answer. After a moment, he sighed, putting his face in his hands. What was he doing? Without further thought, he stood up, and he sat on the bed. He turned his head back to the sky, staring again at the full moon.
What if George was looking at the sky, too?
That’s the thing about being so small in such a big universe--everyone’s small, and the universe wraps around you all. It connects you. It is the one thing that never changes: no matter where you are in the world, there will always be the same sky.